On board 37m No Destination with Michael “Big Mike” Miniea

Miniea is an adventurous soul, so it makes perfect sense that his superyacht of choice would be a ruggedly equipped, though luxuriously refitted, former commercial vessel. His taste for adventure is matched only by his knack for spotting opportunities – a trait that has served him well professionally and personally.

From founding multiple successful businesses in the machinery and steel sectors – including Specialty Metals Processing and Penn-Ohio Industrial Complex – to recognising the potential in converting a Damen commercial vessel into a superyacht, Miniea sees possibilities where others do not.

“I always dreamt of the yacht. It is what made me go to work. I believe if you have a dream you’ve got to chase it”

Miniea’s life could’ve taken a very different route. “My parents wanted me to be an Olympic swimmer,” he says. Chasing this gold-medal goal prompted his family to move when he was 10 years old from Louisville, Kentucky, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

Miniea went to swim practice twice a day, before and after school. On the weekends, he and his friends would ski all the way from Lauderdale-by-the-Sea to Delray Beach, some 40 kilometres away, swapping between two waterskis, slalom and barefoot.

One day, Miniea’s swim coach asked him to quit waterskiing. “It uses different muscles to swimming; for swimming, you want to be loose, and with waterskiing, you’re tight,” he explains. “I told my coach ‘I think I like waterskiing better than I like swimming.’” And with that, Miniea hung up his Speedos, dashing his parents’ Olympic dreams, and swiftly switched gears to another waterborne competition: racing hydroplane powerboats.

With only three contact points on the water – two front sponsons and the propeller aft – hydroplane boats skim across the surface propelled by an outboard engine. Miniea raced in all of the Stock Hydro classes, including D Stock, the biggest and most powerful Stock Outboard category, reaching breakneck speeds of 113 to 143 kilometres per hour.

The American Power Boat Association describes the D Stock Hydro class as “heavy-duty racing for experienced competitors”. With boats known to flip and crash, it’s a risky undertaking for anyone, let alone a 13-year-old boy.

Miniea was usually the youngest driver on the race course, and his dad drove him to all his races. “He was my crew chief,” Miniea says. During summer holidays as a teenager, Miniea worked at a marine centre in Chicago and raced on lakes in Wisconsin. Miniea majored in business studies at the University of Tampa while he continued racing. In 1971, he was on track to win the national championship in his racing class before a career-ending turn.

“I flipped over on the last corner,” he said. “I didn’t get badly injured that time, though I had been injured many times before, but I knew it was time for it to end.” At only 21 years old, Miniea was already an eight-year powerboat racing veteran. This also coincided with cutting his university studies short. “I was getting married around that time, so I went to work and started my own business,” he says.

His dad was a tool and die maker, constructing precision tools and metal forms. Miniea spotted an opportunity to make use of the old machine tools and metal working equipment from his father’s business.

“I started by buying his old machinery, cleaning it up and selling it,” he says. “It was something that was relatively easy to do with the limited amount of capital that I had. All of the sudden, I had a thousand machines in stock.”

Miniea’s next business venture was in steel processing. The original base of his company, Allied Metal Processing, was in South Florida.

With most of his customers focused in the building trade, the company made steel two-by-fours, steel studs and roof truss plates. “We ended up with six plants throughout the US spread out on seaports,” says Miniea.

Two retired sports careers and two businesses founded all while he was still a young adult. So what was next? “I got divorced –twice,” says Miniea. “But I’m happily married now for 27 years to my wife, Becky.”

Miniea has two sons; fittingly, one has gone into steel and the other, superyachts. His youngest is operations manager at a steel plant Miniea founded in Ohio, and the other runs his own yachting hydraulics repair facility.

“As they always say, the seed doesn’t fall far from the tree,” says Miniea. “I’m a gearhead and my kids are gearheads.”

Miniea later relocated the hub of his businesses to Pennsylvania, where he currently resides, an hour north of Pittsburgh, and also has a house in Vero Beach, Florida.

Along with the machinery and metal businesses he founded, including Mico Worldwide, Miniea owns Penn-Ohio Industrial Complex, which has a self storage facility, commercial offices and warehouses.

In the early 2000s, he and Becky were pretty much retired and had just finished building a new home when Miniea said to Becky, “I think we ought to go back to work one more time.” He bought a failing steel plant and Becky, a former vice-president at Gillette, ran the office and sales.

“I ran operations, and she was the finance and the brains behind the outfit.” The company had lost money 19 months in a row before Miniea bought it. “We made money the first month and never looked back, and grew the company – Specialty Metals Processing – by about 40 times.

While he was busy building businesses and raising a family, Miniea kept an oar in the boating world. He converted a racing boat into a high-speed fishing boat – foreshadowing his interest in refits.

He also built a centre console open fishing boat, which he used to ferry his wife over to the Bahamas, where they got married. “We spent a month over there after the wedding; we went fishing all over the Bahamas,” he says. “We still have that boat in the family; it’s absolutely immaculate.”

Miniea’s next boat was an 11-metre Marlago centre console. Despite the modest size, he and Becky did multiple 1,500-kilometre-plus trips on it, including throughout the Pacific Northwest and the San Juan Islands off Washington state. Shipping the boat back to Florida, they took it on 2,500-kilometre trips in the Bahamas and to the Hemingway Fishing Tournament in Cuba, where they came fourth.

“I opened 11 steel plants, built 13 houses and one superyacht”

“Then, unfortunately, my wife got in a bicycle accident and was in a coma for 16 days,” says Miniea. “When she came out of that, she had to learn how to walk and talk again.” This changed the pace of their adventures, but didn’t stifle them completely. Miniea built a custom RV for Becky and took it to Alaska and Mexico, along with a fishing boat, bicycles, a four-wheeler and kayaks.

But there was a bigger boat on Miniea’s horizon. “It was always my dream to retire on a yacht,” he says. “All this stuff that I’ve done for 44 years, owning my own business, being my own boss… at the end of the tunnel, my goal was owning a yacht.” Originally, he had set his sights on an explorer yacht in the sub-30-metre range.

But one year at the Fort Lauderdale boat show, he laid eyes on Damen Yachting’s 55-metre support yacht. “I was walking down the dock and I looked up at that bow… I ended up spending about seven hours with the captain, met Rose [Damen], the whole nine yards,” he says. But 55 metres was larger than what Miniea had in mind.

“I liked their 35-metre axe bow boat, the Fast Crew Supply Vessel,” says Miniea, referring to one of Damen Shipyard’s commercial offerings. “At the time, they didn’t want to build me a yacht that small, and I respect that. So I said, I’ll build my own boat.”

Miniea was busy researching whether he wanted to build a yacht in Turkey or Singapore when he stumbled upon a 33-metre vessel for sale on the Damen Trading website, which sells used commercial vessels. “I went to look at it, and I bought the boat in one hour,” says Miniea of the Damen commercial vessel that would become No Destination.

Formerly used by the British Navy, it was launched in 2009. “It was black and white – and green, absolutely covered in mildew. It had these big, ugly bumpers on the side and a big, ugly crane.” The boat had been laid up for eight years. But Miniea saw potential. It was a hunch that paid off.

“It’s called a hot layup, meaning someone would come down once a week and run the boat. It looked terrible on the outside because they never washed it, but the engines were in perfect condition, even the light bulbs weren’t burnt out.”

“We totally gutted the boat; removed everything except the engines, generators and gearboxes”

Miniea bought it in 2018 and contracted Azure Naval Architects to start the refit process. “We totally gutted it, removed everything except the engines, generators and gearboxes.” He hired Just Design for the interiors, but was very involved in the process, choosing all the materials used on board.

No Destination set sail from the Netherlands in July 2022, bound for the Med. “We visited other shipyards that had quoted me, just to say hello again,” Miniea says. They called in at Freire in Spain and JFA in France. “They had been very friendly, and I wanted to show them the finished product. When I get a quote, I’m very upfront, and say ‘Look, everybody can’t win it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.’”

They also spent time in Portugal and Morocco – No Destination was docked in Tangier while Miniea and Becky spent six weeks driving around Morocco. After cruising through the Balearic Islands, they arrived in France in time for the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix. Then it was off to Corsica, Sardinia and the rest of Italy. “

We did the whole Amalfi Coast, spent time in Capri and cruised the Aeolian islands off Sicily,” Miniea says. “One night, we anchored right below an active volcano. It was pretty spectacular.” Of course, No Destination is outfitted for fishing, and while cruising between Sicily and Malta, Miniea caught three big swordfish.

He and Becky spent the whole summer of 2024 in Greece and Turkey. “When I first met my wife, I asked her what she wanted to do when she retired.

She said ‘I want to go on an extended cruise of Greece.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if we’re together, I’ll take you on your personal yacht’.” “I always dreamt of the yacht,” he continues. “The yacht is what made me go to work. I believe if you have a dream, you’ve got to chase it.”