KEEP CALM and SAIL ON

After OCEAN STAR was dismasted and the company’s equipment was destroyed by Hurricane Irma, Sea/Mester doubled down and built VELA — only to have a pandemic raging when she was commissioned in 2020. How did they save themselves? They went sailing.

As fall began, we caught up with Travis Yates of Sea/Mester. Sarasota-based Sea/Mester ran their college semester and gapyear programs on the steel schooners Vela, Argo, and Ocean Star right through the worst days of the pandemic, keeping their business afloat and earning Tall Ships America’s Sailtraining Program of the Year Award.

Yates supervised the building of Argo and Vela in Thailand’s Marsun Shipyard, and is currently overseeing an extensive updating of Argo, which was launched in 2006.

Marlinspike: Travis, it’s great to talk to you again. Tell us what’s happening with Argo.

Travis Yates: Argo’s been in the yard since January. This should have been a four-month refit, because I’ve done almost all the same work on Argo previously in four months, but with COVID and shipping and everything else, we gave it through the summer.

We haven’t had students on that boat in the spring semester or the summer semester, and we’re fighting really hard to get them on in the fall. The boat was supposed to be done on August 8. Finally the yard agreed that they weren’t going to finish on time, so they extended it to September 30. We have to leave Thailand on October 5, if we’re going to get to Bali to start our trip on October 20, which is Bali to South Africa. It’s always a fight, in every shipyard, and every time!

MS: I was trying to add up the time that you’ve spent in Thailand. Your Thai must be getting pretty good.

TY: My Thai is terrible! I can get around; I can order food and I can work with some of the engineers in it, but they all want to speak English. That’s one of the reasons they put certain people on our job, to make sure that they can speak English. And then they immediately send them to work-boat shows and things like that in Europe, to keep them going on the English training, because that’s how you do business with Europe and the Middle East.

I did initially a half a year back in 2005, and then with Vela I did tons of time. This boat, I’ve commuted since January, so I’ve been in the US, I think, not more than 22, 23 days this year.

MS: What is it like, commuting from Sarasota to Bangkok?

TY: The fastest way you can get there is 24 hours and 30 minutes. Qatar Airways, one stop in Philly or Chicago. One stop in Doha for 40 minutes and then into Bangkok.

I have an apartment there, the same one I had during COVID. $260 a month. It’s a cool little apartment, nicer than any budget hotel. It’s a hotel apartment.

Because when we built Argo, and when we refit Argo the first time, you had to live in Bangkok. But now the sky train from Bangkok goes all the way out to where the yard is, in Samut Prakan, right at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River.

It’s a cool town. It’s the biggest seafood-importing town of Thailand, so the food’s incredible. So yeah, same little restaurants. Same little streetcar people. When I have staff out there, I give them six bucks a day for food and they are eating well. It’s the best Thai food you could ever eat. There’s no tourists out there, none of the things that bum you out in Thailand, where people are trying to take you in and buy suits. We’re the only non-Thais out there, really.

The shipyard has a project they’re doing right now with these wind-farm support vessels that are super cool. They’re aluminum trimarans, jet drive with a soft bow, so they can sit up against a wind farm installation and surge and stabilize and do all sorts of stuff. They’re to replace helicopters in some of the wind-farm installations. They’re building two of them right now. That’s the reason we’re delayed, because they bid on a European contract that they weren’t ready for.

MS: What’s your day like at the shipyard?

TY: Now that I live out in Samut Prakan, it’s about a four-minute motorbike ride from the hotel to the shipyard, five minutes with traffic. I roll in. I go walk through the boat. I take a million photos. I come back and I basically answer a zillion questions and correct a bunch of things that are going wrong.

In this case, it should have been really easy. Right out of finishing Vela, I said, “Hey, I want to bring Argo back and just redo all the systems up to Vela’s specs — lithium batteries, new DC systems.” The higher-performance, bigger watermaker, all the things that make our life easier on the boat. Better refrigerators, the sewage treatment system, things that required removing quite a bit of the interior to do. You can’t get sewage treatment into the floor without removing the floor!

And it would have been easy, if I could have used the new-build engineers and the new-build mechanics who had just finished Vela. But because of these trimarans, I got “Hey, this has got to come under the repair department, and this is who’s going to lead it.” And then, because they didn’t have the engineers or the workers available to us, they got us a bunch of subcontractors.

Some are okay, and some are clueless — they just have no history with what they’re trying to do. Some are really good, but that same contractor is doing the dynamic-positioning system on the trimarans, so we get them for an hour a day. Basically, what I’ve been doing for the last four months is cheerleading, screaming, stamping my feet, updating production schedules and telling them they’re not making it. It took them months and months to recognize they weren’t going to get it done in time.

Right now we’re re-installing equipment as they’re finishing spaces, because we took a bunch of stuff out. It wasn’t in the contract for them to work on, we removed it, so I got a couple more people coming out in the next two or three weeks. As the boat’s finished in certain areas, we’re going to start installing.

ARGO's refit includes replacing mild steel deck fittings

MS: Sounds like you’ll have your hands full.

TY: It’s going to be painful. I want to tell you that I’m going to call you and tell you we launched on time and everything ran. But we’re going to launch on time, and whether everything runs or not is going to be my problem!

MS: You were great about sending us updates during the Vela build. I know that our readers enjoyed following a steel build, which is unusual for us, since most of what we feature in our Boatyards section is wood construction.

TY: Of course, and that’s super interesting. I’m way interested in that stuff. I read that stuff. I would even read more of it.

MS: Would you consider building or adding a wooden vessel to your fleet at this point?

TY: Not building, I don’t think. Adding — we’ve talked about adding. We’ve talked about where we go from here. We have the two bigger boats now, and once Argo’s done, she’ll be good for another eight or nine years just the way she is.

Ocean Star is our next big question. Before Irma, Ocean Star was the boat that was supposed to be refit. We didn’t have any plans to build Vela. I had a contract with a yard right up the street in Palmetto [Florida], where a King’s Point friend of mine ran a commercial shipyard, to do a full Ocean Star refit down to the framing. A new rig and everything, and that was supposed to start on December 20, 2017.

Then Ocean Star lost her rig and we lost all our equipment, and while I was in the BVI cutting rigs off and doing all sorts of crazy stuff, [Sea|Mester Director] Mike [Meighan] made the decision to build Vela.

We started building Vela, we rerigged Ocean Star, and we brought Ocean Star to the States. Everything above the deck is brand new on Ocean Star, except the booms, which survived.

OCEAN STAR was already scheduled for a refit when Hurricane Irma took down her rig and devastated Sea/Mester’s BVI operations

MS: So faced with the 1-2 punch of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, you doubled down and made a massive new investment in your business.

TY: Yeah. We’re a bit like a tripod. Sea|Mester is one of the bigger legs. But the biggest leg is the ActionQuest program that we run down in the Caribbean and all around the world with kids on charter boats. We decided to build Vela because we didn’t know if the rest of our company was going to come back. We didn’t know whether we’d ever operate in the BVIs again.

We decided, if we had to have all our eggs in one basket, we’d have it in Sea|Mester as a college program and we’d run three boats. Now we have three boats. We ran three boats through COVID 100% full and it saved the rest of our business, because everything else stopped. It was the revenue that we generated through COVID that kept us from laying off everybody here in the office.

MS: Talk about that a little bit: generating revenue during COVID.

TY: We were the only show in town for international study abroad. It was us and some Irish program where the kids just sat in lockdown the whole time. If you wanted to study abroad, we were literally the only way you could leave the country.

I guess the last time I wrote you was me getting Vela to the Maldives. We moved the boats all around. Vela sailed the fall semester from the Maldives to Cape Town, and on our way to Cape Town, we knew South Africa was going to close. In Cape Town, half the students left. Half of them wanted to stay on. They paid us a little bit, and we headed to Antigua. Some of those students got like 12 or 13,000 miles.

VELA was commissioned during COVID and promptly sailed from Thailand to the Maldives, Cape Town, and on to Antigua

MS: Halfway around the world!

TY: We sailed Argo across the Pacific: left the Caribbean with 24 students, headed for Tahiti. On our way from the Galapagos to Tahiti, Tahiti closed, so we passed Tahiti. Kept going to Fiji, because Fiji was wide open with a blue-lane system for allowing people in — and then Fiji closed!

They let us into Fiji and then we ended up spending the whole summer there, which the staff loved and the students loved. We

had our students going out to Fiji, 24 students on a 787 cargo flight, and Air Fiji made it happen for us. Full police escort. The students had to go to LA, take a PCR test, quarantine, and be in the hotels that we provided. And it was a cargo flight with diplomatic service, not a single other passenger and just two air crew.

MS: It wasn’t like you guys got a free lunch operating during COVID. It sounds one headache after another for a couple years, to make all that happen.

TY: That’s what it was. That’s why it was so special for us to receive the award. Because the year before, we operated through all of COVID, and then they canceled all the awards! We all laughed about it. It was like the re-invention, the reimagination trophy … no, we didn’t imagine anything! We sailed every single mile!

That was a big relief for us, not just to get the award but to come through it and to have never canceled a trip. I mean, we moved trips! That spring trip was supposed to start in Cape Town, and started in Antigua. We just put it off 30 days and the students flew to Antigua and then sailed the whole Eastern Caribbean and up.

We did a double transatlantic. That was the height of COVID, with Argo. She left from Mystic and went to Europe and came back to Antigua. One semester, two transatlantics! The students loved it.

Was it what we sold them? No, but their alternative was to sit in a dorm and Zoom all their classes, so we made it happen. It was great, and it kept us afloat. The tripod of our business went down to one leg, but we stayed up.

We’ve come back super strong with ActionQuest. But that third leg of our business is this service program called GoBeyond and it hasn’t come back. We had some kids in the BVI doing some of the community service work that we do down there. But that brand, which is usually 300 to 400 kids a year in Thailand, Iceland, Galapagos, Peru, in small groups, that’s what we’ve done for 15 years now. Since 9/11 we’ve been doing that program.

But Sea|Mester got it done. The fact that we had three boats made it possible. I’m not sure economically it would’ve worked with two boats. Now we sit in a place where we’d still like to be a three-boat program, but Ocean Star needs the attention she needed in 2017. Not the rigging. A little bit on the systems.

We have to make a decision on Ocean Star, and the decision could be to sell her. But would we add a wooden boat? We might, but we wouldn’t build a wood boat.

MS: But you’d like to be a three-boat program, whether Ocean Star is the third boat or not.

TY: It just gives us some geographic marketing ability. Ocean Star only stays in the Caribbean, and she is almost always full. It’s a different trip. A shorter trip, shorter passages, more diving, more walking around land, no ocean crossing in there, but the same academics and it fills the bill. Always packed. I think it’s relatable. We’re very lucky there’s a lot of kids that can just close their eyes and say, “I’m from Kentucky but I want to cross an ocean.” It’s an ambitious thing, but we do it all the time. But there’s also a lot of kids that close their eyes and go, “I want to be on the water, but I have no idea how the ocean’s going to work out for me.”

That’s where that 80-day trip on Ocean Star works well. It’s a smaller group. It’s 16 students, less miles. It’s an easier boat for us to run. If you get to the nitty-gritty of how we run our programs, we bring a ton of new captains in on Ocean Star. I was running that boat when I was 23 years old.

MS: So you tend to promote your staff from Ocean Star up to the blue-water boats?

TY: That’s typically the path. We have had terrible luck hiring outside. Maybe it’s our culture. Maybe it’s the mission of the boat. We run our programs more as expeditions, and we have obviously the staff and the leaders and they’re there for the safety and the responsibility, but everybody’s cleaning the cap rail. Everybody’s cooking and cleaning. Even if I’m

the captain on board, I’m still the Chef of the Day once every rotation through the job wheel. That’s just the way we run.

I think we struggle with bringing in senior, experienced sailors who all of a sudden are expected to do dishes. I hate to make it that basic, but there’s not a lot of captain’s privilege. You do get a better bunk, but that’s the limit.

MS: Even on our little schooner, we’ve had captains who just won’t go down and make sure the head is clean. They’re going to find someone else to do it.

TY: I get that, I went to sea as a cadet on a merchant ship. But we just don’t run that way.

We bring them in in a different way. A lot of times they’ll come into our team program and run a 50-footer for us, get pegged as somebody who’s got the soft skills and the hard skills. They’ll come on board and step up as a mate onto Ocean Star or one of the bigger boats, but not the first mate.

Then typically they’ll go back and run as the captain of Ocean Star in the Caribbean. Ocean Star gives you a ton of reps. It gives you a ton of sail raises. It gives ton of sail strikes. It gives you a ton of anchoring experience. It’s a hard boat to drive. There’s no bow thruster, it’s a reverse prop.

She’s a big boat, 80 feet and 80 tons, but she can teach you. Then you step up to the bigger boats and certainly there’s a pucker factor when you’re trying to go stern-to in the Med somewhere with all the shiny boats. My first time running Ocean Star, I had to put her between Velsheda and Endeavor in St. Barts with Jimmy Buffett watching!

OCEAN STAR operates exclusively in the Caribbean

MS: When this refit of Argo is done, what will be the differences between Argo and Vela? They’re sister ships, right?

TY: Yeah. Their systems will be identical. The same lithium systems, same sewage treatment, same heads, all the same refrigerators, freezers. Their main engines are just one arrangement off each other but they will be substantively the same. The rigs are the same. They were built, I mean, they’re within six centimeters of each other in most dimensions.

On Vela, I went with way more things as stainless steel. I can’t change that on Argo. I can’t pull that out and change it, so I haven’t. But all the dorade box tops on Argo were originally all made in mild steel and they just rust their brains out. A ton of hard work’s been done to remove the places where we have rust where we just can’t control. Whether it’s behind a piece of teak, under a piece of teak or just someplace where you just can’t stop the bolt penetration from rust, we’ve replaced it.

MS: How many heads are on the new boats?

TY: Six. Two for the staff. They’re Jabsco electrics, nothing fancy. It’s a lot of heads, so we shouldn’t be putting as many miles on each one as some people do. When we bought Ocean Star, it had one head! Actually, one and a half. The one in the chart house... if you were a normal-sized human, you had to slide back and lean forward and you could just about hit it. It certainly gets easier if you can push a button. I had a boat a long time ago that had one of those Wilcox-Crittenden heads with everything metal on it. I mean, you could pump a bike tire through that thing! It took some work, but you could get a bike tire through.

ARGO has been hauled out at the Marsun Shipyard in Thailand since January

MS: You can get it through the head — what happens once it passes into your plumbing is another question.

I’ve got to say, your website’s great. I love the tracking page that you have set up for the boats. I love the way that the little capsules for each voyage includes how many days at sea each trip includes. It’s great information and I don’t think that’s always available for all programs.

TY: No. We have a product that we offer that’s very regular. I mean, as much as we’re in the industry, we straddle two industries. I feel for everyone else who’s doing a great job running tall ships. And trying to run these programs that are tied to government funding or tied to grants or even doing day trips…

I guess maybe it’s an easier thing to do. It’s got to be hard for staff burnout, but we learned to sell our product by selling our other products. We adapted it to what we do here.

For more on their vessels & programs, visit seamester.com