By Max Cumming, Yacht skipper of the Mari-Cha III

The Mari-Cha III is here in Alameda to do a bit of maintenance and prepare for the Pacific Cup race to Hawaii—a biannual event from San Francisco to Oahu. She’s a head-turning boat. A lot of the really big super yachts aren’t really that pretty, but I think Mari-Cha has elegant lines. She’s a large, high performance boat (147 ft.), and she looks like she’s meant for business. Most boats in this size range are usually more cruising oriented, but we’re sort of a dual mode boat. We can change from cruising to racing, whenever the owner wants to go do some record breaking.

When she’s not racing, we have icemakers, washing machines, dryers, video players, dive equipment—all the creature comforts for cruising. All that goes out for racing…gets sent to Hawaii in boxes. (We’ll "rough it" for a week.) Altogether, we took out about 20,000 pounds. Eventually, we’ll put it all back in Hawaii. While we’re in this phase, we also do a lot of annual maintenance, like painting the bottom. It makes the boat go quicker if it’s clean and smooth.

The Pacific Cup started as a fun race but seems to be getting more and more serious now. There are actually some world class boats competing in it. The current record for the race was set about four years ago by Roy Disney’s boat, Pyewacket—6 days 18 hours. That’s the record everyone is trying to chase at the moment. The whole West Coast is famous for having "sleds," or really fast down wind boats. There’s one purposely built for this race, the Zephyrus. She’s the local interest in the race. She’s brand spanking new. This will be her first outing, so we’re all very keen to see how quick she is. There’s another local boat called Pegasus that won the last race. She’s also very hot.

My role, once we’re racing, is to make sure the boat doesn’t get broken and to organize the crew. The owner is the designated skipper for the Pacific Cup. We have a boat manager who is a previous captain of the boat, me, and a cast of "rock star racers." We let what I call the "rock stars" do the speed thing, call the sail changes, the navigation, try to read the weather, and so on. These are all professional racers, as opposed to me, a professional "super yacht captain." They come on board just for the race. They’ll arrive two days before the race and leave just after we cross the finish line (hired guns). We’ve got people from the Oracle syndicate, a lot of Team New Zealand—some top ranked people.

To get a job like mine, you work up to it. I was born in Australia and grew up in New Zealand. I started in the maritime business at age 15, working for my father’s underwater pearl farm. It’s a Japanese process. You culture the pearl…aggravate him a bit. You do a little operation, and the oyster starts producing a pearl. My father was the first person to produce cultured black pearls down in the Cook Islands in the early ‘70s. I became a diver for him. We’d gather the oysters for his farm.

I moved back to New Zealand after that and became a commercial grouper fisherman. Big, big fish, the size of a halibut. (We can fish off of the Mari-Cha if we’re not going too fast. You’ll find the average tuna doesn’t like to swim above about 10 knots. We tend to go 14 knots just on sail.) I did that for five years, then, like most fishing, it kind of got over-fished. We all had to look for new jobs. I went into sail training, you know, square riggers and teaching young folks how to sail. I loved that…I still love that, but there’s just no money in it. So I was talking to a guy in a bar one night in England and I ended up on super yachts.

I started doing it to see the world…mainly to travel. I have been on a half dozen yachts over the last twelve to fourteen years. I woke up one day and realized it was my career. (I never wanted to use that word before.) That’s what attracted me to it. The boat I served on the longest was Itasca. She was owned by Bill Simon, a wonderful man. He’s the father of the chap who’s running for Governor. He had an adventurous spirit—that boat took us everywhere. We did the Northwest Passage, went around the top of the Americas, and then in the same year went down to the bottom of the Americas to Cape Horn and around Antarctica. It was a big converted tugboat, but definitely exciting because it went to corners of the earth where super yachts don’t usually go. It was probably one of the best boats I ever worked on. I was on it for four and a half years. I was just about bolted to it! Bill died two years ago. There was a big funeral in New York. He was a good mate of mine. It’s nice when you have that relationship with an owner, when he’s actually a friend as well. I am still very much in touch with his family here in San Francisco. It’s not just a job sometimes. Becomes your personal life, too…

I was on a motor yacht all last year. It went from Mexico to Alaska, Alaska back to Panama, and Panama to Europe. It was a big powerboat—224 feet. I was a mate on that boat. I prefer sailboats because I like sailing. There’s a bit more of a family atmosphere, it’s smaller, a bit snugger. I find there’s usually a more comfortable relationship between the owner and the crew because you’re in a smaller space. That’s kind of important, too.

I started with the Mari-Cha out in the Caribbean, in St. Martin. We had a bit of a hand-over period with my predecessor. We did a cruise down to Venezuela, delivering the boat from Venezuela to San Francisco almost non-stop. We came 4,000 miles through Panama, up past Bar Harbor. It took about two and a half weeks. She’s fast. It was all up wind, either motoring or hard on the wind. It was a hard sail. The Pacific Cup is the opposite, so we’re all down wind, hopefully…

Do I worry? Occasionally you get a moment of worry trying to park a super yacht in a berth. When we went to dock in Point Richmond, we were told the berth was 35 feet wide. It was actually 31 feet wide. We’re 30 feet wide, so we had about 6 inches on either side. (Enough to change your underwear…)

I don’t get home often enough. Any job that involves this much travel keeps you away from your loved ones, your family. That’s the hard part of it. It’s pretty hard on relationships, too, because you’re constantly on the move. In that department, you either have your partner on board or you send a lot of emails. If you’re lucky, you’re home about one month per year. I am very lucky this year, because the America’s Cup is in New Zealand so everyone is coming to us.