Yacht management in Miami Beach.
Most of this fleet is tied up behind a house.
Sunset Harbour, the island docks and the private slips, covered on the same rotation as the rest of South Florida.
A dock with no dockmaster on it.
Much of the Miami Beach fleet sits at a private residence rather than in a marina, which changes the job: no dockmaster, no yard on site, and nobody walking past the boat between owner visits except the people you hired.
A residential dock gives you an address and nothing else. There is no fuel dock at the end of it, no yard to walk the boat to, no pump out and nobody to call when a line goes slack in a blow. Whatever a technician needs that morning has to already be in the truck, because there is no parts counter on the property.
Sun and wake do the rest of the work. The dock is fixed, so the boat lies where it lies and takes both, all day and all weekend. Lines chafe, fenders wear through in one spot, and a spring line that was fine in April is a different line in July. None of that announces itself, and none of it is visible from wherever you are on a Tuesday.
What that means week to week.
That is the case the whole company is built for. Scheduled visits, a written record of each one, and one person who can tell you the state of the boat without going to look.
Every service that runs under a program is set out, service by service, on the yacht management page. What follows is the part that is particular to a boat kept here.
- Access, agreed once
- The dock is on private property behind a gate. How the crew reach the boat is settled when we take the vessel on, so nobody is calling a house manager on a Saturday to let a technician through.
- The dock gets the same attention as the boat
- The shore power cord and the pedestal at a house are the ones nobody inspects, and nobody else is looking at the lines and fenders either. They get checked on the same visit, because there is no dockmaster who will.
- Systems started on every visit
- Engines and generators started, seacocks exercised, sea strainers cleaned, the main panel checked. Bay water is warm all year and growth does not wait for you to come back.
- Ready on the day you land
- Most of this fleet is used in short bursts. A captain can be scheduled for the day and the interior turned over before you arrive, so the boat is ready when you get to the dock rather than an hour after.
- Yard work happens off the island
- The haul out, the bottom paint and the running gear all happen at a yard on the mainland, so a yard period here is a run, a booked window and a yard we already hold a relationship with. We agree the scope in writing, stand there while the work happens, and inspect it before anyone signs off.
Shore power is the first thing to go.
Repairs and upgrades, carried out by the same technical team that runs the rest of the program. On a boat living at a house, the failures worth catching are quiet ones: a pedestal breaker that tripped on Tuesday, a battery bank that has been off charge since, an air conditioning pump pulling warm bay water through a strainer packed with growth, a bilge float switch nobody has tested since delivery.
The boat has to leave the island.
A named storm plan has to say where the boat goes, who moves it and when they start. It is filed before the season opens on June 1, because most carriers stop accepting changes the moment a storm has a name.
The locations that count are on the mainland, up a river or inside a yard, so executing a Miami Beach plan is a run across the bay on a weekend when every other owner has had the same thought. For a boat kept inside the Venetian islands it is a bridge that has to open first. That gets scheduled in February, well ahead of the day the forecast moves.
The further you live from the boat, the more of the plan is somebody else's to carry out. Our captains run the delivery, the crew who prepare the vessel are the crew who are on it every week, and the plan sits in Mariner Pro beside the insurance certificate with its expiry date against it.
The company on the other end of the phone.
Ask us what state your boat is in.
754-260-7773Call and we will come to the dock, whether that is a slip in Sunset Harbour or a seawall behind a house. We'll go through the vessel with you and write down the condition it's actually in. Then we talk through what a program would cover.
The same crews and the same schedule run in Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Palm Beach.