By Captain Richard Morris, Managing Director, Australian Superyachts
Yesterday I sat on a panel at Ocean Media’s Captains’ Roundtable discussing superyachts and the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games. The moderator Joe Akacich, opened with a simple question: “What are we doing for the superyachts for the Games?”
My answer was just as simple. Whatever we do, it has to help Brisbane put on the greatest Games ever. Better than Sydney. And we have to start now.
I say that from first-hand experience. If we leave it too late, it will be too late.
We have been here before
Sydney’s superyacht industry saw the problem early. In about 1996 a group of marine industry professionals went to government and said: we think all these yachts will want to come for the 2000 Olympics and we have nowhere to berth them.
A minister’s reply has stayed with me ever since. If we don’t build the berths, they can’t come, so it’s not a problem.
That was the starting point. Industry was not late. The response was.
It was 1998 before the Waterways Authority decided to build and fund the Rozelle Bay Superyacht Marina. And it was 1999, one year out, before we could properly take it to the world. I tell the full story in Sydney 2000 Olympic Games: The Superyacht Program That Launched an Industry.
In September 1999 we took a stand at the Monaco Yacht Show. We believe we pioneered ‘Destination Marketing’ in the superyacht industry. We were not selling a boat, a brand or a service. We were selling a place and an event. A big photo of Sydney Harbour and one question: “Are you coming?”
It worked. But a superyacht needs more than a year to plan a voyage to the other side of the world. Two years is tight. Some owners who had booked with us did the sums, saw they would lose their whole Mediterranean summer that year and cancelled. If we had been in Monaco in 1997 and 1998 as well, the outcome would have been very different.
That is my one big regret from Sydney. Time, and the lack of it.
Five and a half years is really three and a half
The Brisbane Games are a little over five and a half years away. That sounds like a long time. It is not.
We need everything locked in at least two years out, so captains and owners can plan around it. That leaves about three and a half years to organise ourselves as an industry, take a plan to the authorities and get it agreed. Anyone who has tried to get something of this scale done knows that is a hard ask.
The good news is the Pacific is no longer the unknown it was in 2000. Yachts now move freely around the Pacific and Asia. And more often than not, a superyacht goes where the captain wants it to go.
So the captains are the people to convince. But a captain will only put Brisbane in front of the owner if he knows, 100 per cent, that the berth and the services will be there.
Berthing first, and no cheque required
Berthing is the first question. Settle it and we can promote the Games with confidence, then move on to everything else, such as charter arrangements like the ones we had in place for Sydney.
I do not believe the answer is to ask government to fund new marinas in the Brisbane River. The Brisbane authorities have enough to pay for with the Olympic venues. We should not be adding to their list. We should be taking a problem off their plate.
The river itself makes the case. It is not a protected harbour like Sydney. It has strong tidal flows and it floods. In the 2022 floods an oil tanker broke away from its berth and grounded, and container ships later broke their lines at Fisherman Islands (ATSB). Anything built there has to be built heavy, and you cannot moor big yachts stern-to, side on to that current, the way they do in Monaco. Three hundred metres of wharf might take two or three 100 metre yachts.
The answer is simple and it is staring us in the face. Do what London did in 2012 for their Olympics.
The Thames is almost a carbon copy of the Brisbane River. Big tides, strong flows, nowhere to build new marinas. So London laid mooring buoys and moored the superyachts between them, bow and stern, in line with the stream. Yachts still use them today.
Brisbane can do the same, for a fraction of the cost of a marina. I set out how in Brisbane 2032: Moor Them Like London 2012.
How many yachts?
My working number for Brisbane is 100 yachts. For Sydney we had about 160 expressions of interest by 1998. Those were real booking enquiries, not a number pulled out of thin air. I know, because a year earlier I was a captain sending one of them.
A figure of 200 has been mentioned for Brisbane. I would plan on half that, because owners change their minds. One hundred is still a lot of yachts.
On my estimate, about 50 would be 50 metres and under and about 30 would be between 50 and 70 metres. Those are manageable. The other 20 would be huge, 90 to 130 metres.
Now count the berths. Use every suitable wharf and marina on the river and you might find 10 to 15 berths for the big yachts. The Gold Coast might take another five. That leaves most of the fleet with nowhere to go.
Moorings in the stream close that gap.
This is not about billionaires
How we tell this story matters. In 2000, when the media learned that about $3 million of public money was going into a marina for visiting superyachts, the coverage was not kind. Tall poppy syndrome is alive and well.
So we need to spell out the benefit to Queensland and to Australia. Some of it is direct: work for shipyards, suppliers, provedores and crew, and an industry that keeps growing after the flame goes out. Sydney’s did.
Some of it is bigger. The IOC President called Sydney the best Games ever. Many of the world’s most powerful business leaders were in Sydney for those two weeks, on their yachts, seeing Australia at its absolute best.
Those are the people who decide where companies invest. If they are made welcome and everything is easy, they go home thinking well of Australia. That is worth far more than a berthing fee.
An Australian event
The Games will be held in Brisbane, in Queensland, but this is Australia’s event. When the last yachts left Sydney in 2000, one captain emailed me: “Mate, if looking after superyachts was an Olympic sport, you would have won another gold medal for Australia.”
Not Sydney. Not New South Wales. Australia.
Brisbane has the support of all of us who did this in 2000. Anything we can do to help make 2032 even better than Sydney, we will.
The next step
Berthing in the river is the first detail to be worked out. If the berthing plan can be agreed in principle soon, we can start telling the world’s captains, five years out, exactly where they will lie in 2032.
I wanted to start this conversation. Sitting in that room yesterday filled with superyacht captains and industry representatives, I think it is clear it has started..!
Captain Richard Morris is Managing Director of Australian Superyachts. He managed the Sydney 2000 Olympic superyacht program for the NSW Waterways Authority.
