A Boat Movers’ Life: Paid to Sail--and in Someone Else’s Yacht

Delivering ordinary yachts is about as glamorous as moving pianos. Delivering extraordinary yachts--endless pleasure barges decked out with chandeliers, crystal glasses and the latest in home entertainment--is about as glamorous as delivering Steinways.

Mountainous seas batter them. Fog besets them. Drug runners attack them. A zealous Coast Guard keeps watch for the slightest trace of forbidden substances.

It’s not an easy way to make a living, but it’s still the best way around, say the folks who earn their keep by ferrying the playthings of wealthy owners from port to port, around California and around the world.

“It’s no get-rich-quick scheme,” said Russ Sullivan, a muscular, deeply tanned Oxnard-based yacht deliveryman. “It’s work. It’s probably not what you see on television commercials. We get paid to move them, not sit on them.”

Not surprisingly, getting paid to sail the world is a powerful lure.

Reverse Seasickness

“Being out at sea for many days or months at a time, I like the routine and challenge of that,” said John Rains, a yacht deliveryman based in San Diego. “I get what I call a reverse form of seasickness. I miss it if I’m not out there.”

Sailing is addictive, Sullivan agreed. “You spend a lot of time on a lot of blue water that after a while all begins to look the same. But I get land weary. After a week or two, I get fidgety.”

That’s what keeps him and other boat movers in search of the next contract.

Clients typically are wealthy yacht owners who want their boats while vacationing, but don’t have the time or navigational skills to make the trip, said Pat Miller, 38, a navigator and cook for Rains.

Although some other times of year may leave them dry, during winter months, Southern California yacht-shuttlers have more requests than they can handle to move boats south to Mexican ports such as Cabo San Lucas or Acapulco. When summer arrives, boats tend to move north, to Oregon, Washington or Canada.

“That’s our payoff,” Miller says. “Once we deliver a boat to a nice place, we plan ourselves a vacation.”

Other requests come from owners who get job transfers, or from buyers who obtain repossessed or confiscated boats at auctions. Midsummer is a busy period because it’s hurricane season, a time when boats are moved out of the tropics for insurance reasons.

Some Drawbacks

“I see it as a good job, but it has its drawbacks,” Sullivan said. “It beats the 8-to-5 freeway rush. We’re out most of the time on a generally friendly ocean. Nobody points guns at me on the freeway because I’m not there.”

Still, the high seas sometimes ring with gunfire.

“We got shot at off Swan Island in the Caribbean, 100 miles off the coast of Honduras,” said Miller. “Thirty guys came running down this hill in cutoffs, all carrying weapons. We said, ‘Oh my God, it’s pirates.’ We were on the fly-deck and bullets went right over our heads.”

The gun-wielding attackers turned out to be a Honduran Navy unit suspicious of the outsiders.

“They made us come into dock and stay for three hours,” Miller said. “We were pretty scared. But I remembered we had ice-cold diet Pepsis. They had no electricity or running water on the island. It changed everything. They were so appreciative when we offered them an ice-cold soda. Then they loved us.”

The route plied by Rains and his crew through Honduran waters is part of his most frequently traveled course, from the East Coast to the West, through the Panama Canal.

A Time for Caution

But traveling through the canal is not as carefree as it used to be. With the recent political upheaval in Panama, sailors are cautious about taking boats through the region.

“It is a concern,” Miller said, adding that she had not gone through since the day before Panamanian Gen. Manuel A. Noriega ousted Eric A. Delvalle as head of state in February. “It was pretty ugly at the time. Owners are afraid, but actually it’s not a problem. We just don’t go ashore. We’d always re-provision in Panama. Normally, it’s a lovely place.”

Planning meals to satisfy a crew cooped up for as long as a couple of months is not easy, but cooking the meals is even more challenging.

“If the ocean’s really rough, it’s hard to cook if the boat’s bouncing around,” said Peggy Hollinger, a crew member for Sullivan. “He gets a big kick out of me flipping eggs in the morning.”

Such hardships are easy to envy.

“Most people think it’s pretty glamorous,” said one deliverer, William Price, based in Cardiff-by-the-Sea near San Diego. “But it’s actually pretty low-paying. We work 24 hours a day and our responsibilities are enormous.”

Some of their duties resemble those of landlubber moving companies.

Before any delivery, Rains and his crew put away all lamps. Loose furniture is tied down, padded and covered. Preparing to leave the harbor can take three days.

“It looks like a vacation cabin all tucked away,” said Miller. “Everything that’s pretty and delicate is put away.”

Most deliverers follow similar precautions.

“You get a bad reputation if you return the boat broken,” Sullivan said. Because competition is stiff, skippers survive on their reputations.

“There just aren’t that many opportunities,” Price said. “A lot of people dabble at boat delivery and take work away from legitimate or full-time professionals. It sours clients on delivery services when they’ve gone the cheap route. They say, ‘Oh no, I’ll never have my boat delivered again.’ You get what you pay for.”

Fees for delivery range from $1 to $2.50 per mile plus all expenses, including fuel, food, canal fees and airline flights to or from home for the captain and crew.

“That old adage that a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money--there’s a lot of truth to that,” said Rupert Goodsmith, a retired Ventura skipper who delivers five or six yachts a year.

One prospective customer from Orange County, John Riddle, is shopping for someone to sail his 38-foot sloop from Long Beach to Genoa, Italy.

An international computer salesman, Riddle has been transferred to Milan. He and his wife would hate to leave their boat behind. The cost of having it delivered--$25,000--is worth it, they say.

“We’ve planned on taking two or three years off to go to the South Pacific,” said Debbie Riddle. “We thought, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be fun to start the trip in the Mediterranean?’ ”

But sailing in international waters isn’t always fun, according to Tony Griffis, who divides his time between selling yachts at the Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard and delivering them to ports as diverse as Homer, Alaska, and Honolulu.

Weather conditions in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea can be horrifying, even to the hardest-boiled old salt, he said. Traveling through battle zones is no fun, either.

“When you have warships going toward you, you never know if they’re going to shoot first and ask questions later,” Griffis said of his passage around the tip of South America during the Falkland Islands conflict. “We’d have every light going on our ship, even spotlights on the U.S. flag.”

Vessels flying a U.S. flag in U.S. waters have become targets of another kind since April. With the U.S. Coast Guard’s “zero-tolerance” program, the agency has been able to search and seize U.S.-flagged vessels found to be carrying even minuscule amounts of drugs.

Concerns About Drugs

To avoid stiff fines and hassles, deliverers are scrutinizing boat owners and crew members for their drug usage. They also inspect boats from stem to stern for any hidden narcotics.

“I’m really very alarmed at this situation,” said Rains “From now on, I’m going to be extremely cautious. I’m afraid it may scare people away from having their boat delivered.”

A yacht Rains ferried was once boarded by a Costa Rican naval drug patrol. Unfortunately, the craft was equipped with a safe and the crew didn’t have the combination. “Of course they didn’t believe us,” Miller said. “We thought they might blow up the safe.”

But not all international encounters turn out to be tension-filled.

While sailing around Guadalupe Island off the Baja Peninsula, Sullivan and his crew came across a settlement of Mexican Indians who greeted them and showed them around.

“Each morning, fishermen came by and traded us lobster for beer,” Hollinger said. “The Mexicans loved American beer. Coors for lobsters.”

Most deliverers say they’ll continue in the business indefinitely.

“It’s very addictive,” Rains says. “I can’t imagine going back and having to sit in an office and be in at 8 and out at 5, wondering where we’re going to go on our next vacation. Maybe I’d get a whole week in Puerto Vallarta.”