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Twizzle yacht owner7/21/2023 That said, he also sees a change in attitude in modern crews for the better in many aspects. He has seen a change, he says, and sometimes decries the fact that a lot of new deck crew don’t have a sailing background and therefore don’t have an innate sense of the sea, the weather, and seamanship – not to mention sometimes arriving with unrealistic expectations thanks to social media and reality TV shows. Percy remembers the early days of the industry when everything was done on a handshake and where the majority of crew and industry people were passionate boatees. “We did all the racing and superyacht regatta scene as well as extensive cruising,” Percy enthuses. He got really interested in that and he decided he wanted to build a sailing superyacht.” That became the 57.49-metre SY Twizzle, which was delivered in 2010. “That yacht had a couple of sailing dinghies on board, and I taught the owner and his son to sail. “We did a couple of motor yachts called Twizzle, culminating in the 55-metre Feadship,” Percy says. It was a fortuitous move – the owner became Percy’s employer for the next 23 years, across a succession of motor and sailing superyachts and with a succession of adventures and cruises to far-flung destinations. “I was in Antibes, the centre of the yachting universe, looking for a local boat, and landed on an 18-metre powerboat.” “Until then I had always been in sailing yachts, and was travelling around the world, but then I met a girl and got married,” he smiles. His early career coincided with the sudden early boom of the superyacht industry, as the superyacht fleet began to grow in both size and number, and it wasn’t long before Percy was standing on the bridge of a motor yacht. Percy landed more jobs after that, from mate on a 45-foot schooner to skippering a 53-foot Swan, to progressively larger yachts. We sailed back to London – it was the end of their round-the-world trip.” That was in the late 1970s and I wasn’t being paid – but we sailed up to Thailand, where I came across another boat that was paying which I joined as deckhand. “So I landed on an old topmast gaff-rigged schooner. “I was in a doss-house in Singapore and saw a little sign saying ‘deckhand wanted’,” he says. The travel bug was still biting though, and after giving up teaching to go travelling Percy landed in the right place at the right time. I ended up going off and teaching for three years.” When I left university I wanted to get into yachting but at that time you only really had the occasional ad for a deckhand in the back of sailing magazines, so I couldn’t find a job. “I knew I had the travel bug,” he says, “and I loved boats – I felt excited being on a boat because you’re close to the water. “I was turfed off there one summer by my parents, I think to get me out of the way! I got my RYA Instructor qualification when I was 16 and ended up teaching at the sailing school in the Easter and summer holidays, and then I started racing.”Īfter school, Percy went to university and completed a degree in teaching, but the call of the boats was strong. “When I was young, just up the road there was quite a large loch and a sailing school,” he begins. Percy grew up in the countryside of Perthshire, just north of Glasgow in Scotland, and had his first taste of the life aquatic as a youth. For Captain Gordon Percy, who is approaching 50 years as a professional sailor and skipper, the pathway was perhaps a combination of both – part inevitability, and part luck. Sometimes people arrive in yachting via the most unlikely routes, and sometimes their superyacht destiny seems shaped from childhood.
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