This year, the magazine we know as ShowBoats International turns 25. In real time, that may not seem momentous, but in magazine years, it’s a lifetime. ShowBoats actually has been around a bit longer than that, but it wasn’t until later that it transitioned from a brokerage newsletter into a full-fledged glossy magazine.

To mark ShowBoats’ silver anniversary, our staff created the issue you now have in your hands. In it you’ll find reminiscences from owners and yachting industry movers and shakers whose journeys shaped the course of the sport and of the magazine.

The journey that brought me here is one I hardly could have imagined. In the seventies and early eighties, I was a young adventuress knocking around the Caribbean, living the good life on yachts and ashore. Both that magical region and I have seen our share of growth in the intervening years.

When Captain James Cook went to Tahiti for the second time, he claimed in his diary that it "had been spoiled, absolutely ruined." I was in the Caribbean "back when"—not when Cook delivered his breadfruit to St. Vincent, but back when the living was easy. I sailed around the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands, through the Panama Canal and beyond.

When I was in my early twenties, I graduated from university and, much to my parents’ consternation, went boat hitchhiking from Connecticut to the Caribbean. I had grown up sailing on Long Island Sound and spent summers doing schooner races around Mystic, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Sailing south seemed like a better bet than pounding the pavement looking for a job in New York City.

In the early seventies, I hopped on and off boats on a whim, meeting people from all over. Size didn’t matter. I started out on a Morgan Out Island 41 and then switched to a 40-foot Newporter ketch. After months spent meandering down the sleepy Bahamas chain, diving blue holes and contemplating grains of sand, I ventured on to St. Thomas aboard a vintage 50-foot Alden yawl called Borealis. St. Thomas was a veritable metropolis—the consummate retail city. Cruise ships were as plentiful then as they are now. Yacht Haven, the main marina in Charlotte Amalie, was then a funky operation, replete with dilapidated docks and populated by live-aboards who thought nothing of drying their laundry on the lifelines. There was also a slew of salty charter boats, by and large mom-and-pop affairs.

When I needed to replenish my pocketbook, I signed on as a relief chef—that is, a cook—on one of the sailboats where the wife had flown off somewhere with someone other than her husband. I knew precious little about haute cuisine. I had no Le Cordon Bleu certificate. In fact, I had no credentials of any kind. Crew schools did not exist in those days, so I faked it, conjuring up Mom’s old standby recipes, adorning them with hibiscus garni and toasted coconut. No doubt, the multitudinous rum punches I served prior to the meal were a modifying influence on my guests’ taste buds. In any case, they didn’t complain, and I even garnered some healthy tips.

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