Yacht Rock Bottom.

There’s only one setback to owning a luxury yacht, which is that everyone except you will think you are an arsehole with a luxury yacht. Even your friends, who you might invite to stay on your luxury yacht, will look around and think: ‘this is nice but, oh boy, what an arsehole’. A luxury car is one thing. A luxury home is another. But nothing quite yells opulent, ostentatious, rub-everyone’s-face-in-it-why-don’t-you quite like gliding across the Mediterranean or along the coast of Latin America in a yacht big enough to scythe through the HMS Victory without breaking much of a sweat. I have never met anyone who owns a luxury yacht but I’m fairly sure that if I did there wouldn’t be much they could do to convince me they weren’t a luxury yacht owning arsehole, and that includes them giving me their yacht. Not that I’d complain about being given a luxury yacht. I’d love a luxury yacht. I know it would mean everyone would think I’m a luxury yacht owning arsehole, but by that point I wouldn’t care. That’s the strange thing about arseholes: they often couldn’t care less about what other people think.

If I did own a luxury yacht, and let’s face it there’s no way that would ever happen unless some idiot did actually give me one, I wouldn’t go very far in it. A luxury yacht, like any kind of recreational vessel, is all very well moored up somewhere safe and sound but things do have a tendency to get a bit tricky once they head out onto the open sea. I think very highly of the RNLI and it always strikes me as a step too far when brave volunteers are asked to risk their lives for a couple of twats who decided to pop out on their yacht for the day and ran into trouble because they couldn’t be bothered to watch the shipping news. The RNLI should exist to help out migrant boats, ferries, military vessels and, if you must, one of those kids in a canoe who gets dragged out to sea by a nasty current. Perhaps if you’re rich enough to own a luxury yacht then you should have to donate vast sums of cash, regularly, to the RNLI before you get your podgy, hot fingers anywhere near the tiller (not that luxury yacht owners ever sail their own boats, because they have a captain and crew to do all that sort of boring shit) or you should have your own rescue service, again because you can bloody well afford it.

I feel sorry for all the lives that were lost earlier this week when the Bayesian sunk off the coast of Sicily in what appears to have been a freak slice of extreme weather, albeit one that sounds like it could have been avoided). Drowning on a boat is surely not a pleasant way to go and I hope that all and any resting to be had is done firmly in peace. But at the same time it just goes to highlight what a dangerous and silly thing it can be to take to the seas, to dance in mother nature’s playground and hope you’ll get away with it. On one level it is no more sensible that firing yourself into space or climbing a mountain in your underpants or deciding to reach the magnetic south pole on a sled pulled by cats. If it goes wrong, which it probably will, then that’s too bad and boohoo for you. It is also quite a serving of bad taste to see that this story has dominated the headlines over the last few days: given all the other mildly more pressing events keeping the world distracted at the moment the demise of some filthy rich people in a luxury yacht that would surely go out of it’s way not to help a boatful of drowning migrants seems quite trivial. Indeed, when it first started hogging the light the first thing I thought of was the submersible that was crushed like a empty Fanta can at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean whilst taking a doomed tour of the Titanic – again, very rich idiots were involved, though their idiocy in this instance was clearly off the scale.

I had heard of Mike Lynch and I’m glad he fought the law and the law didn’t win, but in the end I didn’t care about him any more than he cared about me. I imagine there are websites that are busy creating an intricate web of conspiracy theories all about his watery end and his dealing with the American judicial system. Maybe there was unfinished business. Maybe someone was out to get him. Or maybe he just hit a spot of bad luck and went down with all the other hands below deck. And maybe I’m being harsh but I certainly think the levels of sympathy that should be involved in this case are finite, to say the least. So, what are we left with from this sad story? Dozens of people risking their lives to recover bodies from what is now little more than a very expensive salt-water coffin. The families of the deceased will be beside themselves and that is regrettable, but you would hope that at the very least something will be learnt from this cock-up because it doesn’t sound like it was the luxury yacht’s fault that the luxury yacht sank. No, it sounds like someone out there did something very stupid or, more likely, neglected to do something very sensible. What a shame. And a shame, too, that it’s always the rich people who get the most attention for doing so very little of use.

G B Burton. 22.08.2024