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.
![](Images/August%20Working%20Waterfront%20Marishal.jpg) |
A day
at the office |
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.
I like it. I wouldn’t do anything I wasn’t
happy doing. This boat represents a huge challenge. After twelve
years, I was getting a little jaded in the business. There was not
much new or exciting that I hadn’t already tried. Even the
traveling aspect, once you’ve been around the world two or three
times, you start revisiting places… I was looking for something
exciting and I think I got it.