25/05/2026
Something has been quietly building behind the scenes, and it feels important to finally talk about it.
Over the past year, a group of people who care deeply about this industry - welfare advocates, captains, trainers, shore based service providers and crew who have lived through what we’re trying to change - have been meeting regularly under the Superyacht Alliance to ask some of the hardest questions yachting has been avoiding for a long time.
This group started as simply as a support group for those who had been affected by the death of Paige Bell. It then quickly morphed into what I would like to describe as a strategic powerhouse. What we couldn’t ignore were your stories. They kept coming, and they keep sounding the same.
These are not isolated incidents, rather they are patterns. Our industry reporting frameworks were supposed to keep people accountable. In too many cases, they have been the reason people fell further.
We have been developing a survey - The Crew and Culture Pulse - designed not to gather data for a report that sits in a folder somewhere, but to create an annual measure of how this industry is actually doing, that tracks change over time and names what needs to change.
And lastly, we ve been taking a serious look at what independent oversight of safety and welfare could look like across the fleet - not just on the well-managed 110m yachts where systems already exist, but on the hundreds of smaller vessels where a crew member’s safety depends entirely on whether they happened to end up under a good captain.
This is slow work. We want to be honest about that.
There are jurisdictional complexities that are genuinely difficult to unpick.
We are building those things - meeting by meeting, document by document, conversation by conversation.
This Think Tank exists to make sure fewer people fall through the gaps in the future.
It’s only the beginning. But it’s a beginning that’s serious about where it’s going.
