Book Review
Superyacht X - Rated
By Marc Wilder
Paperback, 307 pages, £7:99, ISBN: 978 1 84454 970 2
Published by John Blake Publishing Ltd.
There is, they say, a best selling book in every one of us who has served as crew aboard superyachts, lets just hope that they are all a great deal better than Marc Wilder’s Superyacht X - Rated biographical exposé recently published by John Blake.
Never, have I read a book with quite so many expletives. Where the foul language used simply as part of the sequence of dialogue, that may be acceptable, but as descriptive adjectives and adverbs, liberally littering the text, their use makes the book almost utterly unreadable.
Wilder, the author, claims to have served as the First Officer aboard an unnamed 50-metre superyacht home ported in Nice but it is not one that would be recognisable to anyone else in the industry. He proves his complete and total ignorance of superyachting by referring to a Barbeque Deck and a Jacuzzi Deck, terms simply not used in the superyacht world to describe a sundeck. His characters are somewhat shallow and totally lack credibility. The hapless Captain is portrayed by Wilder as a money grabbing, louse, the chief stewardess; a corrupt, deceitful tart, the debauched crew; a bunch of ill-mannered, bad mouthed, dishonest, drunken gits and their first officer is someone who surely could never have been really employed aboard a superyacht.
That Wilder has been to sea, is not in doubt. In fact he proudly boasts in the book’s opening pages of having served on commercial ships with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary even though, I suspect, they would wish he had not. His so called, true life explanation of life working on board a luxury superyacht bears little resemblance of real life onboard and suggest that most of his tales come from his having served in the lower decks as a cabin boy on some rusty Greek tramp freighter. Most of the jokes and pranks he describes have been doing the rounds since Noah first went to sea and savvy superyacht deck crew are highly unlikely to have fallen for them. He ignorantly talks of a newly joined deckhand being referred to as a Cadet, the crew mess as a crew room and suggests that a new to the industry crewmember takes a navigation watch in charge of the bridge over night on his very first trip!
He talks about a Captain that does nothing to stop the heavy and public use of drugs on board and who, in thick fog, does not even turn up onto the bridge, he speaks of coke snorting, whoring, Russian charter guests leaving a yacht part way through their charter only to be replaced by the yacht’s philandering owner who, when he then leaves, allows the charter guests to return, a quite absurd scenario that would have any reputable charter broker or marine lawyer turning in his grave.
He talks of evacuating hookers over the bow in a tender that is loaded with personnel while still on deck, something possible on a merchant ship but certainly not on a 50 metre superyacht. He talks of drunken crew, guilty of insubordination, bribery, corruption, drug and alcohol abuse and of superyacht owners calling him Mate, yet he never once accurately describes the yacht itself not even in the most general of terms. Clearly the author is a fraud.
X Rated? Yes, but only because the book cannot produce a single sentence without employing a string of crude profanities but, Superyacht? Definitely NO. This author has clearly never set foot on one and if he has, he did not last very long on board as a real superyacht first officer. Superyacht X Rated is a disgusting book that does the superyacht industry no good at all and I implore you to leave the publication in the gutter where it belongs. Lets just hope a superyacht owner never stoops so low as to pick it up. If he does, we are all sunk.
MJH
