On 5 August 1979, the Observer boarded Sundance, a 70ft yacht, to explore the world of the Riviera’s luxury charters. There is plenty that fans of Below Deck, which explores the same world 40 years later, would recognise, not least the pampered guests, who fell into two categories: ‘rich, and filthy rich’. Yacht hire costs £300 a day without ‘extras’, such as eating, drinking and even moving. Most didn’t bother with the latter, preferring to remain chicly stationary. As one charter company director said, ‘It can be excessively boring at sea.’
Customers were renting a dream: champagne on deck served by neatly uniformed staff in glitzy settings, such as the Croisette in Cannes, which ‘would make a Martini commercial look like an Oxfam appeal’. Perhaps most important of all: plenty of daytrippers on shore to gawp at them in silent awe. ‘No one speaks across the few feet of water that divides the watched from the watchers,’ although that perk was not forthcoming on a recent Monte Carlo jaunt. Berthed two boats along from George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Sundance’s disgruntled passengers found no one was looking at them. Mainly, though, things went to plan. ‘It was one long party,’ according to one delighted customer. ‘You wouldn’t get better service in a five-star hotel.’ That was thanks to a crew who described themselves, wearily, as ‘Riviera Redcoats’.
It was not all glitz and Dom Perignon, though: the logistics of delivering ocean-going luxury meant the boats floated on ‘a colourful porridge of diesel, empty bottles, plastic bags, beer cans and sometimes even seaweed’. Worse still were the ‘spasmodic shoals of turds that bobbed past in the current like corks’.
Back home, people who had paid handsomely to live la dolce vita turned oddly coy, including a Grimsby businessman who ‘became sufficiently agitated to write saying it was “imperative” that neither he nor the boat should be identified in print’. What happened in Saint-Tropez stayed in Saint-Tropez.
