I don't think Farcus designed it.
September 26, 2007
A Second Home at Sea
By ANNE KALOSH
Robert H. Dickinson, the president and chief executive of Carnival Cruise Lines, may be retiring but he still plans to spend many weeks a year at sea. Instead of cruising on big boats for work, he will be aboard his own yacht, nipping into tiny harbors along the Turkish shore, Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda or the French West Indies.
A bon vivant with a 20,000-bottle wine cellar at his primary home in Miami, Mr. Dickinson has frequently chartered motor and sailing vessels for vacations with his wife, Jodi. They recently jumped at the chance for a one-third share in a 98-foot sailboat — a kind of second home on the waves — with two other Florida couples who are close friends.
“This is a great deal,” said Mr. Dickinson, who also owns a vacation home at a ski resort in North Carolina. “Even if we use it only eight weeks a year it will be a good investment.”
He declined to talk about the value of the yacht, how much he paid or the operating costs. The yacht, called C’est la Vie, is a single-masted vessel built in France in 1988 and extensively refurbished last year. There is a salon with a home theater, a dining area, a roomy master bedroom and two guest bedrooms, all with queen-sized beds and en suite bathrooms, totaling about 1,000 square feet of living space. The floors are cherry wood.
Stuart Larsen, a veteran broker with Fraser Yachts Worldwide in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., estimated the value of C’est la Vie at $2.5 million to $4.5 million. He said operating costs probably range from $500,000 to $650,000 a year, including crew, insurance, repairs, dockage, communications and provisions.
Before buying in, the Dickinsons were assured that C’est la Vie’s four-person French crew was outstanding. Particularly important to them was the chef, who hailed from the Pyrenees in southern France. “He’s a magician,” Mr. Dickinson said. “He has made something as simple as angel hair pasta with tomatoes so sweet and basil so fresh it just brings tears to your eyes.”
The Dickinsons’s first stay on board was in early September, sailing along the Turkish coast and to the Greek isle of Rhodes, where they combed the wine shops in the walled old quarter of the city of Rhodes. “We bought a selection of wines, showed them to the chef and he did his magic,” Mr. Dickinson said. Minced lamb balls seasoned with cumin materialized to accompany a Greek red.
The Dickinsons particularly like the yacht’s large canvas-topped al fresco dining area, covering about 400 square feet, where they might start a day with breakfast waffles and rose honey and end it with after-dinner cheeses. A large open deck area is used for sunbathing and cocktails. “You can have dinner in Portofino harbor, and you’re in the heart of everything,” Mr. Dickinson said.
He also admires the yacht’s size. Having chartered vessels twice as large, Mr. Dickinson prefers to stand on his own deck, “five feet from the water, close to nature.” Recalling his experience on a motor vessel with 16 crew members, the Carnival chief dismissed it as “like being in a Hyatt. There was not that personal, warm, friendly service.”
Mr. Dickinson, who turned 65 in August, spent 35 years at Carnival trying to change the image of cruising from formal to fun and affordable. Under his direction, Carnival grew to the world’s largest cruise brand with a fleet of 22 ships, each carrying thousands of passengers.
Even the Dickinsons’s vacation home in Beech Mountain, N.C., has a 500-bottle cellar, so it is an adjustment that C’est la Vie has room to store only about 36 bottles of racked wine in a space air-conditioned to 70 degrees, too warm to be ideal.
Should Mr. Dickinson bring “serious wines” from his Miami cellar onto the boat, he plans to decant them, remove the sediment and return the wine to the bottles, adding marbles before resealing to curtail oxidation. Clearing the sediment, he says, will reduce the likelihood that the boat’s movement will cause the wine to cloud and mar its taste.
It is not typical to see yacht shares like that of the Dickinsons, said the Fraser broker, Mr. Larsen, who specializes in vessels much larger than the C’est la Vie.
“Usually people who buy these things are self-made,” Mr. Larsen said. “They’re not only wealthy but they have a big ego. It’s hard to do a partnership with big egos, and even harder with three partners,” noting, for example, that disputes may arise over who gets the boat at Christmas or during July and August.
But Mr. Dickinson said he was very pleased with the three-party ownership. The partners agreed to go by quarters of the year, with a different partner getting the first choice so all the owners eventually get to use the vessel in prime seasons. They have engaged the Fort Lauderdale office of Camper & Nicholsons to act as charter brokers when the boat is idle.
With the worldwide boom in mega-yachts, marina space can be a challenge, although Mr. Larsen says berthing a vessel the size of C’est la Vie should not be a problem provided the crew plans ahead. In any case, while in the Mediterranean, the Dickinsons usually anchored offshore. “You can sail for half an hour and be in a secluded cove with no one else around,” Mr. Dickinson said. “Eighty percent of the time we anchored out rather than spend time at the dock.”
When the Mediterranean season ends, a transfer crew will sail C’est la Vie to the Caribbean where it is likely to be based in St. Martin or St. Thomas for the winter. Next summer’s sailing ground might be New England, perhaps based from Newport, R.I., or Wood’s Hole, Mass.
Larry Pimentel, Mr. Dickinson’s friend and the president of SeaDream Yacht Club, which operates a pair of 110-passenger vessels, says it is no surprise that the man who built the world’s largest mass-market cruise line is into yachting. “He loves the water; he loves the exploration,” Mr. Pimentel said. “He loves to taste the unique foods of the world. This gives him total freedom.”
Great Homes and Destinations
Real Estate NYTimes.com
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
[ 09-25-2007: Message edited by: desirod7 ]