The owner of Zembra tells Grace Trofa how he came to build his dream boat with Delta Marine.
My wife, Karen, and I grew up in small-town Las Vegas in the 1950s. To escape the summer heat, my parents took us five kids to Newport Beach, California, and enrolled us in the community sailing school. Sailing my 2.4-metre Sabot, I fell in love with the sport.
With our family’s 12-metre Chris-Craft we cruised over to Catalina Island and spent time on Lake Mead. My father had an investment in a tanker company and thought we needed to have experiences.
So for four summers, from the time I was 15, I was a crew member on a tanker or a cargo ship, delivering grain to Odessa, Russia, or fuel to Alaska. I learned sextant navigation and a bit about the sea.
During my second year at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, I thought my little brother and sister should join my wife and me to sail across the Pacific. Remember, none of us had been in a boat more than 30 miles off the California coast. We invited two friends who had zero experience; we had a sextant and Karen had her ham radio license.
At the going-away party at Balboa Yacht Club, my father-in-law — sure we would meet pirates — gave me a German assault rifle. We spent a glorious year exploring the South Pacific on an 18-metre steel ketch.
Ten years later, with three girls aged 12, 10 and five, I decided to take a sabbatical from my orthopaedic surgery practice to sail the world. We custom-built a 15-metre Prout catamaran with a rotating mast; I needed a single-handed sailboat. I taught the girls how to use a satellite phone and deploy a sea anchor. When we got stuck in England due to construction delays, we chartered a boat in Greece and I taught the girls Greek history.
A few years later I got the bug again. I speak Portuguese from my missionary days and had heard about Inace yachts in Brazil. I talked them into building me a 27-metre expedition yacht. We sailed the Pacific, Alaska and the Galápagos but after four or five years the girls said, “We’re done, Dad.”
I sold the boat to Billy Joel but, as we were unloading our stuff, I spotted a Nordhavn 86. A year later we took delivery of what became a 28-metre Nordhavn. We were boatless for a few years, then I came into a windfall from an investment in my brother’s business. Finally, we had the money to build the boat of our dreams at Delta Marine.
My wife stipulated I only get 10 weeks a year on board. I have 12 grandchildren, so there’s a lot of gifts to buy! We built a 47-metre yacht with a helicopter, a seaplane and a submarine. I had recently dove 1,000ft in Norway on a certification dive, which was breathtaking.
My brother, Roger, interior designer for Wynn Resorts, is coming out of retirement to do the interiors so my wife and I can sit back and watch the magic happen. Our goal is to show our grandchildren all the unbelievable places in the world and we get to experience the joy again through their eyes.
All our boats are called Zembra after an island off the north coast of Tunisia. When I was a teenager, chipping paint in the sun on an oil tanker with my friend, we saw this glistening, green island floating in the middle of the Med.
We vowed someday we would get there. Many years later, on board the Inace, we headed from Italy toward Zembra, but I had a feeling it might destroy the dream, so we turned back.
The license plate on my car reads GRATEFUL. I’ve learned in 68 years that it is much more important to learn to be grateful than it is to make a lot of money or have good luck.
First published in the August 2024 issue of BOAT International US Edition. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.