http://www.boatinternational.com | April 2016PHOTOGRAPH: TIM THOMAS
A wooden phinisi superyacht took
this American businessman
on an eventful, eight-year journey.
And that, as Tim Thomas
finds out, was just the build“I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT THE VERY BEST WAY TO TRAVEL IS BY BOAT, AND
PROBABLY BY SAILBOAT,” says Mark Robba. “You’re always home and, if you get tired of one
place, you just move on to the next.” Robba, glove entrepreneur and phinisi superyacht owner,
has led a peripatetic life, from a childhood spent moving around the US every couple of years
following his father’s work, to relocating to Indonesia in 1998. But even here he has not stayed
still. His passion for yachts led to the mammoth eight-year build of 51 metre Dunia Baru, which
started life in the Indonesian jungle and now cruises his adopted home’s 17,000 islands.
As a child Robba wasn’t a natural sailor. “My grandfather had built a house out on Cape
Cod so we always spent a month there in the summer,” he says. “We had a Sunfish dinghy and
I remember when I was five or six I was terrified of it. But when I was in sixth grade we got
a Boston Whaler and that probably pushed me more into being on the water.”
After high school, and with the family now living in South Carolina, Robba started a course
in mechanical engineering at Clemson University, where he quickly became involved with the
sailing team. “We would compete just about every weekend for eight months of the year,” he says,On board with
MARK ROBBA
OWNERS’CLUB
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