Industry » Interviews
Interviews
Nicky Andre from Hemisphere Crew Solutions talks about joining the industry, meeting Richard Branson, and the challenge of creating a bespoke crew headhunting agency.
Read More
Chris Allix is the man you go to if you’re looking for superyacht ownership expertise. You go to him because he’s always planning two steps ahead. He does this because he has to: he works in a competitive market for clients with h...
Read More
They say the best way to get to know an industry is from the bottom up so Gary Wright and Charlie Birkett are perfectly placed to run Y.CO, one of the most successful yachting companies in the world headquartered in Monaco.
Read More
Elise Ciappara joined yachting after a diverse career in finance and wedding planning. Now second stew on M/Y Titania, she tells OnboardOnline about the virtues of taking a risk to find a career you love.
Read More
Carol Benbrook has spent much of her career redefining roles and expectations. As well as beng a female captain, she has broken convention by raising her children on board.
Read More
Chef Anders Pedersen from M/Y Altitude talks to OnboardOnline about his competition win in Antigua, and his belief that yacht chefs need to share their knowledge more.
Read More
It’s hard to imagine a career in yachting that’s been quite as diverse as that of Norma Trease. OnboardOnline talked with Trease about the keys to success, the process of reinvention, and all the opportunities afforded by the yach...
Read More
It took a while for Nicolas Fry, Charter Manager with Camper & Nicholsons, to find his way into yachting. Fry had graduated in marketing, before experiencing the rise and fall of the dot-com bubble, which prompted him to take time...
Read More
Joss Willner, Captain of M/Y Baton Rouge, has come a long way since arriving in the South of France in 1983 after a teenage stint in the Merchant Navy. He's a pragmatist, described by friends as 'old school' and a safe pair of han...
Read More
Albert Willemsen was educated as an engineer. Somehow he’s gone from an engineer focused on the sky to being an environmental expert focused on the sea.
Read More
Of all the crashes that Mat Barker saw in his past life as a derivatives trader, nothing prepared him for the day The Blue Peter snapped her mast.
Read More
OnboardOnline recently caught up with Jenny Howarth to talk about the milk run summers, the joy of turtles, and what it's like to finally unpack your bags.
Read More
While a specialist in marine paints, Ken Hickling has thrived as a generalist during his tenure as president of the ISS, unafraid to take on major issues like ethics.
Read More
On the hour-long train ride from Antibes to Monaco, four of the stops along the way have shipyards managed by Monaco Marine. This is no accident. The company has expanded along the French coastline since its founding in 1995, slo...
Read More
Engineer Mel Thunderbolt loves boats. Sailing them, working on them and fixing them (although she could happily do without the shore power cable system.) Join her as she describes her sheer love of yachting, a lucky escape from an...
Read More
Despite a desire to run away to sea on a superyacht, Tom DeBuse has never quite been able to. It wasn’t that he never planned to do so. But he was thrown off course by a lost credit card that was in needed his attention in Greece....
Read More
Alison Rentoul is known to many of us in the industry as The Crew Coach. However, she had to sustain quite a few bumps and bruises before she decided to dedicate her career to helping others avoid (or perhaps just soften) those sa...
Read More
Peterson Fuel Delivery has been offering bunkering services in South Florida since 1990. Its founder, Ted Peterson, designed and built the three custom barges used by the company to pull up alongside everything from tour boats to ...
Read More
Not everyone who grows up in South Florida ends up the better for it. But Mike Wilson seems to be one of the few to have bucked that trend by taking advantage of the most visible industry in the region.
Read More
Hurricane Katrina was not kind to the Gulf Coast. And it didn't spare Trinity Yachts or the company’s vice president, William S. Smith III – better known as Billy. Mr. Smith, John Dane III and Felix Sabates bought the company in 2...
Read More
Mex has pretty much seen and done it all in yachting as well as the wider maritime industry. That’s why he’s known to most people simply as ‘Mex’. Over the years he’s served as a captain, a chief and sole engineer, a program manag...
Read More
Two giants in the yacht interior industry – Genesis and Yachtline – merged in 2001, and the manufacturing company has been a force to be reckoned with ever since, having worked on more than 100 yachts. In this time, they have spur...
Read More
She may be small in stature, but that hasn’t stopped Erica Lay from doing some very big things. Only recently, Lay launched her own international yacht crew agency – the Erica Lay Crew Company – in Palma de Mallorca. But like so m...
Read More
Captain Pascal Pellat-Finet career began in the familiar waters of the Mediterranean where he was involved in the construction of the first Maxi in the Med, S/Y Halisara, and learned from the likes of Dennis Conner and Gary Jobson...
Read More
Adam Laithwaite had always sailed. And when his career as head of “arty farty marketing bollocks” ended prematurely, he had to decide what to do next.
Read More
The 52-year-old captain has been with the 42m (138 ft) ketch sailing catamaran almost since it was built in 1998. To this day, it is one of the largest sailing catamarans on the water, and blisteringly fast – sailing at up to 18 k...
Read More
Better known among her peers as "German Anni", this 15-year veteran of the superyacht industry got into it by accident. It started when Anni Riedel moved from Germany to the Caribbean, where she worked on land for a while. But the...
Read More
After witnessing the effects of fossil-fuel dependency on the environment firsthand, the 40-year-old Swiss founder of PlanetSolar, Raphaël Domjan, set off on what would become an eight-year mission to show what could be done with ...
Read More
Four years ago, Capt. Patrick Marchesseau found himself surrounded by a group of Somali pirates pointing assault rifles at him and his crew aboard the 88m (288 ft) French cruiser M/V Le Ponant. The ship had been en route from the ...
Read More
To introduce our Interior contributor, OnboardOnline recently interviewed Lynne Edwards, our Interior contributor, and asked her a few questions about herself, her career and what she's learned over the years about what it takes t...
Read More