Owner Vonk: ‘I don’t want to be half pregnant’
Erik Vonk's Scintilla Maris cruising in Scotland.
He is dreading the day. He already knows he will feel “absolutely awful”.
But Erik Vonk’s dream and journey of decades has been fulfilled.
He is selling his beloved Scintilla Maris, the 45.6m fishing trawler he converted into an “understated luxury” platform to venture far from the crowd.
And it won’t be a long goodbye. The vessel goes under the digital hammer with Boathouse Auctions on November 5th.
Then it’s back to his farm in Georgia, US to take stock and maybe dream again.
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Vonk has logged more than 22,000 miles on Scintilla Maris over the last three years venturing across the Atlantic three times and all through northern Europe, including the Outer Hebrides and Faroe Islands, Iceland, Sweden and Norway, plus Greenland and the east coasts of Canada and the US. He is keen to stay onboard full time, but with the “box ticked” he also feels it is time to go home.
“To have a boat like this, fully crewed, sitting somewhere, waiting for the owner to come on board a few weeks a year, that’s not me,” says Vonk, who grew up in the Netherlands but has lived in the US since 1979.
Vonk commissioned Damen Maaskant to strip out and reimagine its 1988-built beam trawler.
The yacht has been on the market for some time, but Vonk insists there is a “big difference” between selling and being for sale. And he suggests that, much like an “extraordinary piece of art or antiques, or a unique country estate or the last restored 1931 Bugatti”, an auction is a logical route.
“The best way to sell a one-off item is an auction, an orchestrated effort where the market can say what it thinks the value is instead of saying, ‘This is special, I’m going to wait until someone agrees with me,’” he says.
Scintilla Maris is “definitely a one-off”, Vonk insists. “Her concept – recycling a hull specifically built for seaworthiness as part of the construction of a private yacht destined for long-range exploration – has seldom been taken to this extreme,” he says.
You either swallow the pill once, turn a page and move on, or digest it over a longer period of time.
He suggests yacht purchases are typically a “discretionary decision by someone who is busy doing other stuff”. And he is aware that it can take a “prohibitive amount of time” for people to take that position.
There are, he adds, “fairly significant risks” with auctions in terms of possibly not achieving the desired price. Scintilla Maris has an appraised value of $23m but is listed for $16m and will be auctioned with no reserve. But the key is to assess the alternative prospect of price drops and ongoing crew and maintenance costs during the normal sales trajectory.
“It’s that realisation that one has to weigh. It may be less than you anticipated but you either swallow the pill once, turn a page and move on, or digest it over a longer period of time,” he says. “The market is the market.”
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Vonk’s preference for an auction also draws on his broad mergers and acquisitions (M&A) experience. “Practically all of the 50-plus companies I have bought or sold over the years, were auctioned,” he says. “Investment banks refer to ‘a process’, but the orchestrated bidding following a controlled window of information analysis and data collection, is a straight up and down auction.
“I don’t want to be half pregnant. I want something definitive.”
Vonk (right) on the bridge, which includes dynamic positioning to avoid having to use an anchor in certain situations.
The story began at law school when Vonk would sketch yachts in his notebooks. Later in life, the entrepreneur approached the Damen Maaskant shipyard in the Netherlands about his idea to convert an existing vessel into a platform for him to explore the world. It took about five years to source and then buy the boat, which was a beam trawler built by the yard in 1988.
They told him: “If you were ever looking for an over-engineered hull, a go-anywhere fortress of battleship strength, here she is, and she is in perfect condition.” It took another four years to completely strip out and modify the hull, with Vonk leading the design and project management himself. Vripack Design penned the interiors. The vessel was relaunched in 2023.
“I would often put a lawn chair deep in the inner bowels of this big, totally empty space, which had been grit-blasted and freshly painted, and have a little notebook and make some sketches,” says Vonk, who recently retired as the executive chairman of People2.0 and owns two rum distilleries producing Richland Rum in the US state of Georgia.
“I’d have a measuring tape and walk around, imagining how each part would work. It’s been a very gratifying trajectory to be able to shape that. This represents everything that I know about how best to enjoy a yacht. It is experience accumulated in decades. I hope there are people out there that are of a similar profile who will take the opportunity to benefit from that.”
‘A string of great moments’
Vonk, who has also converted a 26m tugboat, says the whole journey with Scintilla Maris has been a “string of great moments”. He cites the first time the boat moved, with him at the helm, to test its hybrid propulsion system, watched by a host of people.
“I felt her respond to bow and stern thrusters and main propulsion, exactly as I anticipated,” he says. “That was a moment.”
Then there was the time they were heading from Reykjavik, Iceland to St John’s, Newfoundland, a voyage of more than 1,400 nautical miles. They had been holed up in Reykjavik for a while, waiting for a weather window. Spotting a gap in the forecast, they decided to go. The seas were still sizeable with 5-6m waves, but Scintilla Maris took it in her stride.
“We were two days in, heavy weather day and night, and on the bridge in the middle of the night with the captain and first officer we all just said, ‘Man, this is magnificent,’” he recalls. “The boat gave us the feeling like, ‘Hey, this is my kind of environment, and you guys are allowed to come along’. It was terrific.”
The authenticity of the vessel fostered a warm welcome wherever they went, he added.
“You are in a maritime environment, and people come out and admire the boat, more so than when you dock a beautiful white yacht,” he says. “The reception is friendly, and you don’t have to ask for the pub, because before all the lines have been tied down, someone has already invited you.
“In the Outer Hebrides and in Faroe we were invited to people’s homes, in Iceland we were ushered to the gymnasium of the local school to participate in mid-summer festivities and in Halifax, Nova Scotia a brass band played when we were docking.”
A brass bands greet Scintilla Maris in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The experience highlighted for Vonk some key challenges to ownership. “One thing is I have been a little disappointed with the yachting zip code,” says Vonk, who was the former CEO of recruitment businesses Randstad North America and Gevity.
“That’s to say, as soon as you need work done, or need supplies or services, there is an unpleasant tendency to be treated as someone who doesn’t care about spending money. There are often attempts to overcharge. Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, but that is an owner’s aspect that I found a pity.”
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Another element he appreciates more than ever is the dependence on a good captain and crew, both for professional and personal reasons, given they were living together 24/7 for many months at a time.
“You need an extraordinary crew, with whom you get along very well, to be able to enjoy that, really,” says Vonk.
“That is something as an owner you have to take into consideration, more so than I anticipated,” he says. “We had top notch people when we started our journey, and we are blessed with a stellar crew at present, but for a while last year the quality was sub-optimal and that impacts the overall experience on board.”
The “ongoing investment” needed to maintain the yacht at an optimal level is also an important aspect of ownership, he says.
“If you are an idiot like me and won’t accept mediocrity in any sense, the nonstop outflow of funds can easily become high.” On Scintilla Maris, expense minimalisation has been a “specific design objective” with “myriad” engineering features to reduce maintenance, increase efficiencies and reduce the need for manpower. “She has been designed to not require a refit every several years,” adds Vonk.
Vonk, the owner of Richland Rum, on board Scintilla Maris in London.
He warns prospective new owners to “really think it through” and charter for a few months first before committing to buying a yacht. Once they decide to buy or build, his advice is to “go for the very best”.
“Do not compromise,” he says. “It’s considerably more expensive to do that, but you will gain that back in everything: in maintenance, in resale, in enjoyment.”
Reflecting on the upcoming sale, Vonk looks out wistfully over the dock in Brunswick, Georgia.
“I came aboard after a week or so away and just walking up the dock and seeing the boat filled me with this weird sense of, why am I selling her?” he says. He is bracing himself for how he will feel when the virtual hammer comes down.
“The answer is awful,” he says. “But on the other hand, it will open up new opportunities.”
Back on the farm, with time to sketch, he concedes that other projects may take shape in his notebooks.
“Not definitely, but there’s a reasonable chance that I want to enjoy that same journey once more,” he says.
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