Letter of Recommendation: Yacht Spotting

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-yacht-spotting.html

Version 0 of 1.

I know next to nothing about boats or sailing, and even as I approach my mid-30s, my mother still periodically reminds me that I’m “not a very strong swimmer.” None of that, however, has stopped me from occasionally daydreaming about a life at sea.

So last summer, while eyeing ships from Rockaway Beach, I downloaded MarineTraffic, an application that maps the comings and goings of boats around the globe. (A dating app had recently led, bit by bit, to a promising relationship; maybe something similar would work for boat ownership.) MarineTraffic displays each ship as an arrow on a Google map, its color correlating with the type of vessel: blue for passenger boats, green for cargo ships, red for tankers and so on. Zoom in and tap on an arrow, and the app will provide more information about a particular boat, including pictures, voyage details and ports of call. Recently, from the comfort of my landlocked bathroom, I tapped on one red arrow and was able to watch the Torm Sofia, a 750-foot tanker flagged in Singapore, pass under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on its way to Philadelphia. If I had zoomed all the way back out, it would have been one of 160,000 arrows, a confetti-swirl of adventure and commerce spanning the seven seas.

My favorite arrows are the magenta ones, which represent pleasure crafts. A vast majority of these are small boats with playful names like Fin N Tonic and Swim Lessons — the minnows of the category. More fun are the leviathans: superyachts. The past two decades have seen a sharp rise in the number of “high-net-worth individuals” who, unsatisfied with mahogany speedboats or lowly non-super yachts, prefer 230-foot mini cruise ships outfitted like palaces, staffed with professional crews and often worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Plenty of people enjoy ogling the homes of the wealthy, showcased in magazines or on basic-cable TV shows. But yachts are something else: Not only are they bigger and better than most people’s actual homes, they’re where the superrich go to avoid the prying eyes of terrestrial society. MarineTraffic has made it easier to peek into a whole different world, almost beyond nations and addresses and public property records. While waiting for a frozen pizza to defrost, I can use the app to hop over to Montenegro and look at Entourage and Soprano, yachts that seemed to have been named after HBO shows, and Seven Sins and Galactica Super Nova, yachts that seemed to have been named for their owners’ rejected screenplays. I’ve whiled away hours gawking at a ship Mohammed bin Salman reportedly bought for $480 million and tracking the vacation habits of various Russian oligarchs who are said to be of interest to Robert Mueller.

Obviously my fascination is less with the ships themselves and more with their owners. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the beginning of “The Rich Boy.” “They are different from you and me.” Superyachts would have been a fine case study for him. All boats are totems of self-sufficiency; the superyacht might be a billionaire’s way of convincing himself that he is alone in both his labor and his leisure. (The chief executive of Sears named his behemoth Fountainhead, after the Ayn Rand book.) Or maybe their purpose is more practical: an escape from traffic, pedestrians and every other daily reminder that extreme wealth floats on an ocean of human sweat.

The truth is that it’s hard not to be a little jealous. Each time I click on a superyacht and see a picture of a helicopter on its deck or a baby grand piano in its salon, I hold two competing ideas in my head. The first idea is: I want one. It is a natural inclination, I imagine, to long for a vessel with a squash court and a missile-defense system. The competing idea is: MarineTraffic is basically a tracking device for indefensibly wealthy capitalists, and it will probably come in handy when the revolution begins.

Should the revolution happen to begin in New York City, the first salvo may well be heard at the base of the Statue of Liberty — where, last summer, a string of billionaires parked their superyachts for months, a huddled and possibly tired mass but definitely not a poor one. I’ve used my phone to spy on bobbing castles in New York Harbor owned, at one point or another, by James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, J.K. Rowling and the son of the guy who founded the University of Phoenix. Rowling’s looked every bit as enchanting as you would imagine.

I, too, have access to a kind of superyacht: the $44 million, 310-foot Andrew J. Barberi, sometimes referred to as the Staten Island Ferry, which I recently took on a sunset cruise through the harbor. There, less than 100 yards from Lady Liberty, a relatively humble-looking superyacht sat motionless in the water. I whipped out MarineTraffic, and within seconds I had zoomed in on the 187-foot Minderella. I flipped through photos of it in Cyprus, France and Florida. I used Google to dig up pictures of its interiors and learn about its former owner, a successful mortgage lender. In mere minutes, MarineTraffic had helped me turn my nebulous resentment of the rich into a sharply tuned critique of a rich person’s social-media presence.

I think it’s safe to assume that I will never own a craft like the Minderella. But standing on the ferry, watching the sun go down with my phone in one hand and a 24-ounce Bud Light in the other, I wondered how much different the view from the Minderella was from my view on the Andrew J. Barberi, and I couldn’t help but think Fitzgerald was full of it.