Writing and Editing about Yachting

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It is a journalistic staple, the "woman who broke the glass ceiling in field X" story.

It can feel a bit forced. Recently Republicans have been telling us that we ought to celebrate the first woman to head the CIA, and we ought to recognize President Trump as her enabler.

Sorry: I'm not big on celebrating torturers and evidence destroyers. And that particular ceiling might have remained intact without any harm to womankind.

I recently tried and failed to sell an unusual glass ceiling sort of story myself. It didn't have to do with torture. It involved yachts, motorboats, and boating. It involved in particular the sort of journalism that addresses those matters. I didn't make the sale, so I'll use that material here.

It began as an obituary....

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Bonnie Jean O’Boyle passed away on March 18, 2018. She was the first woman ever to serve as the editor-in-chief of a boating magazine. She co-founded Power and Motoryacht (PMY) in 1984, taking the title of editor-in-chief as the other founder, Jeff Hammond, took on for himself the title of publisher.

O’Boyle retained the e-in-c post there until 1990. During this tenure she may have coined the term “megayacht.”

Reportedly, O’Boyle used to speak often of a conversation with Malcolm Forbes in which he told her “life is not a dress rehearsal.” She lived by those words.

A Specialization of Focus

One of the novelties of PMY was its content. The material in boating magazines then was generally aimed at a broad audience, taking in aficionados of both sail and power. But Hammond and O’Boyle wanted to differentiate themselves. This magazine would be exclusively about powerboats and for those who loved them.

How (aside from the name of the magazine) could they quickly and decisively make that point? Well … by ticking off the sailors, of course. As Hammond recently told the story, it was O’Boyle who hired Tom Fexas as a humor columnist and it was Fexus who wrote a piece for the first issue that got things off with a bang.Titled “Sailing is Silly,” the column include jibes like “who wants to sit on the side of a boat? So slow, so boring.” Sailors wrote furious letters, but -- or consequently -- PMY had an instantly high profile as the motorboat mag willing to stick it to the slowpokes.

It turned out there was a market for motoring-only content after all: PMY earned more advertising revenue in its first four years than any of its rivals.

For the August 1985 issue, O’Boyle inaugurated the PMY 400 World’s Largest Yachts. She had worked for a year by that point to put together an arresting collection of megayachts (it is a useful word) along with intriguing information about their owners. Both readers and advertisers loved the idea and its execution. The idea of such a catalog was destined to be widely copied: with varied results as to execution.

From Mamaroneck to Stamford

The magazine focused in those early years on what one writer, an admirer of O’Boyle’s, has called a “burgeoning fleet of almost inconceivably immense … megayachts, high-end naval architects with very prestigious, European-sounding names, fishing tournaments with rollers so high they’d make your nose bleed, and a vast, overall milieu that stretched opulently from Mexico to Monaco.”

The actual headquarters of the new publication in those days was quite Spartan by contrast with the milieu of its coverage: a newsroom of 600 square feet on the second floor of a building on the Mamaroneck, New York, waterfront. Those who were there fondly remember O’Boyle hitting a celebratory buzzer when a member of the staff sold a small ad, ringing a louder beeper upon the sale of a larger ad, and setting off a deep booming horn upon the sale of a full page ad. (A Forbesian corollary: since life is not a dress rehearsal, the stagecraft is generally improvised.)

Within three months of that issue on the world’s largest yachts, PMY under O’Boyle produced a more patriotically specific catalog: the PMY 100 Top American Yachts.

O’Boyle’s journalistic career, and her impact on the boating world, of course didn’t begin with the founding of PMY. She learned the ropes at Motor Boating & Sailing in the 1970s. She became the author of one book, Living Off the Sea, in 1978. This volume began with the following practical advice, to newlyweds who might be contemplating a nautical life, “Sell the Wedding Presents, Buy Dripdry Clothes.”

With that bit of homespun wisdom, we will conclude.

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