South Florida Invests & Prepares For More Superyachts

Giant yachts (superyachts) mean big business and South Florida is digging deep, literally, to keep its share of servicing these floating pleasure palaces.

The Florida Inland Navigation District recently dredged the Dania Cut-Off Canal from 10′ to 14′, opening the way for megayachts to reach a strip of boatyards that perform high-end work for yachts that can stretch 200′ +.

The district is now trying to overcome environmental hurdles to obtain permits to deepen the Intracoastal Waterway through Fort Lauderdale and Riviera Beach, so the region can compete with European ship yards for vessels that can spend several million dollars on a single visit.

“The boats are getting bigger, the drafts are getting bigger and these vessels can go anywhere they want,” said Mark Crosley, executive director of the navigation district, which manages the Florida segment of the 3,000-mile Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). “These guys will drop $5 million without even thinking of it.”

Megayachts, which began to be built in large numbers in the 1990s, can feature three or 4 decks, helipads, pools, elevators, gyms, saunas, luxurious staterooms and elaborate aquariums. The fastest can outrun a U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

Owners typically spend 10 to 15 percent of their purchase price a year on maintenance and supplies, which means a visit from a $100 million megayacht can pump millions of dollars into the local economy.

At the Derecktor ship yard on the Dania Cut-Off Canal this week, a giant crane hoisted a sleek megayacht into the air for work to lengthen its hull. A forklift rolled by, carrying a large engine, typically worth about $1 million. Boats wrapped in white shrink-wrapped sheeting, which appeared to tower three or four stories, underwent paint jobs.

The 17-acre yard accounts for about 100 jobs directly, up from 70 or so at the bottom of the recession, said James Brewer, the company’s business development director. And Derecktor is still hiring, with plans to bring on another eight or 10 workers in the coming months, generally highly skilled machinists, carpenters, welder fabricators, pipe fitters and plumbers.

“I know that yachts are frowned on in some circles, but they produce jobs,” Brewer said.

The company’s executives keep an eye on the competition, particularly the shipyards of Holland, Germany and the Mediterranean. They watch fluctuations in the Euro (a high Euro is good because it raises the relative prices of the European yards compared with U.S. ones) and travel to Europe three or four times a year to try to bring work to their Dania Beach yard.

The dredging project in Broward County calls for deepening about two and a half miles of the Intracoastal from the 17th Street bridge to Sunrise Boulevard, taking the waterway from a depth of 10 feet to 15′. Fort Lauderdale plans to dredge spurs off this project to the Las Olas Marina, Bahia Mar Yachting Center and International Swimming Hall of Fame.

A snag in the Broward Intracoastal plan is the potential impact on seagrass. To compensate for any destroyed, the navigation district has said it may submerge up to 13 acres of Deerfield Island Park, a unique county park accessible only by boat, and transform it into seagrass habitat.

The Broward County Marine Advisory Committee, which advises the County Commission on behalf of boaters, sent a letter to County Mayor Kristin Jacobs that said the committee “does not feel that Deerfield Island Park should be ruined to provide seagrass mitigation for other governments.”

County parks director Dan West said he opposes the loss of so much land on a small park in which the county had invested a lot of money.

“It’s only 54 acres, but it’s a precious 54 acres,” he said. “So taking away any land on a very small resource is very troublesome to us.”

Crosley, the navigation district’s executive director, said he doubted the district would need to use the park for any mitigation, saying the district raised the idea only because one of the permitting agencies was insisting on compensation for seagrass destruction that he did not think would take place.

In Palm Beach County, plans call for dredging a little over half a mile of the Intracoastal (ICW) from the southern part of Peanut Island to a cluster of waterfront enterprises in Riviera Beach, including the Riviera Beach Marina, Viking Yachts, Lockheed Martin undersea systems and the Rybovich boat yard.

The project has been unable to obtain a permit yet, largely over questions of its likely destruction of seagrass. But the navigation district scaled back its length, reducing its destruction of seagrass from 31 acres to less than 6 acres.

John Campbell, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, which would issue the permit, said “outstanding issues center around the potential impacts to the environment” and how to mitigate for them.

Rybovich, which employs about 300 workers at yards in West Palm Beach and Riviera Beach, said the project would allow for the expansion of its Riviera Beach yard to handle superyachts.

“Without the dredging, it’s going to be very hard for the company to grow any further,” said Jason Sprague, the company’s director of business development. “We’ve grown very rapidly, but the limit now is space.”