http://www.boatinternational.com | February 2016PHOTOGRAPH: GETTYfor Palma, Mallorca, a base from which he
criss-crossed the Med, covering Italy, the
Adriatic and the Côte d ’Azur. “A friend of mine
is a movie producer so I lent him the boat for
the Cannes Film Festival. He had a party on
board and I got tickets to the black tie, red
carpet events. Movie people are crazy,” he says.
Perhaps not as crazy as the crew that came
and went throughout the trip. Crew are a
necessary evil for O’Sullivan – if he could run
the boat entirely on his own, he would. “I don’t
know what it is about crew, but they’re all nuts.
The biggest source of conflict on a boat is crew.
And if I could get a boat with a much larger
crew area, but that would still only house
five crew, I would be interested.”
Australian
oicialdom wasn’t
O’Sullivan’s only drama
down under. It turned
out a stewardess, who
was on board with her
deckhand boyfriend,
was having an afair
with the engineer. The
engineer in turn was
sleeping with the chef. “So I ended up losing
all of them,” he says, shaking his head. But this
is pretty tame compared to O’Sullivan’s best
crew story: “We had a cocktail party on board
the first summer I had the boat. Later that
night one of my g uests got up to get some water
and heard a thumping sound coming from the
walk-in fridge. I open the door and the chef, a
guy and the first one I had on board, is in there
going at it with a guest from another boat!”
He says he prefers the European way of
running a boat – a more upstairs, downstairs
relationship – to the North American “we’re
all one happy family” approach. “You don’t be
mean but you set the boundaries. I didn’t comefrom money. When my father died
he left me $764. That was it. So I’m
not used to having staf around me
all the time. The thing I love about
boats is being able to get away from
people. The top deck of Komokwa
is essentially an owner’s deck and
I don’t want to see crew there. I
absolutely demand my privacy.”
Despite all this, he still considers
the cruise one of the greatest
experiences of his life. And why
not? He knows how lucky he is to be
doing what he’s doing. “How many
guys can live a life cooler than I do
right now, which is zipping around
on my boat? And I get to see my two
sons a lot, and I meet great people.”
He’s thankful, too, for the wind
industry, which has given him
all this. He’s still involved and is
developing sites in Mexico with
a new company. It’s boom-time
down there, he says. “I challenge
anyone to get a hotel room tonight
in Mexico City.” He did try other
things, even movie producing,
working on a film called Dangerous
Love, released in 1988. “It was a
turkey! But I had fun doing it and
I managed to not lose any money.”
That experience meant he passed up
the opportunity to invest in another
production, which turned out to be
Dumb and Dumber (box oice gross:
$127 million). “Perhaps I could have stayed
on for one more movie!” He also built some
apartment buildings in LA and chose not to
invest in Cirque du Soleil. “I thought: ‘Who the
hell would pay good money to go see a circus?’ ”
He can laugh about it today because he’s
living the life he always wanted. “I say to my
sons: ‘Find a job you love and you’ ll never have
to work again.’ For me, that was wind power.
WhenIlookbackoneverything, I’m very
fortunate to have been where I was at the time,
to have had the opportunities and experiences
I’ve had. You guys even got me a free pass to
the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show. It’s the first
oneI’veevergot!”BO’Sullivan’s world
tour took in the
Marquesas, above
and far left, Fiji,
left, with his
sons Berkley
and Brendan, and
Tonga, below.
Top, alongside in
MontenegroThe thing I love about
boats is being able
to get away from people.
I absolutely demand
my privacyOWNERS’CLUB
The best Pacific
islands to visit
by yacht:
boatinternational.
com/best-
pacific-islands70