Inside the wild world of superyacht toys

A late September sun is still rising above the bay of Villefranche on the French Riviera, bathing the palatial villas and surrounding pines in a golden light. The water itself barely ripples. It feels almost indecent to disturb the peace, but here comes a superyacht owner, slicing through the millpond aboard a strange machine.

Jad Comair is riding an electric surfboard that houses a battery and a small but powerful propeller. The Lebanese-born fund manager, who pairs his Vilebrequin shorts with a blue crash helmet, controls his speed via a handheld remote.

I watch him slalom between the dozen or so superyachts now anchored in the bay, which sits between Nice and Monaco. They include Lady Amanda, which Comair bought in 2017 and named after his wife (for unknown reasons, it used to be called Revenge II). 

The 30-metre vessel, available to charter from about €50,000 per week, has the typical trappings of a superyacht, albeit at a bijou scale compared with the blue whales I’ll see at the Monaco Yacht Show the following day (24 metres is the superyacht entry length; the biggest are more than 150 metres).

There are four cabins and a crew of five, including a chef, as well as wood panelling and a generous stock of the owner’s preferred Burgundy. As part of a trend sweeping the marine habitats of the rich, Comair, who is 48 and lives in Rome, has also acquired a dizzying fleet of toys.

The “toys and tenders” market, which includes the smaller boats used to ferry guests to shore when yachts anchor, has become a buoyant sub sector of a booming industry, driven by advances in battery and inflatables technology, as well as the shifting profile of owners and charter clients.

Comair epitomises this new breed. They tend to be younger, fitter and more adventurous than the reclining yacht class of yore. So, while he is rarely to be found on his sun loungers, and barely even looks at his top-deck hot tub, Comair starts the day on his wakeboard and doesn’t pause for breath.

“I find it a little bit shameful just to eat and drink and swim for, like, five minutes and then come back and lie in the sun and that’s it,” he tells me later that evening, over Indonesian scallop ceviche and a bottle of Méo-Camuzet. “With all the toys that I have, I cannot get bored.”

Comair’s toys list also includes three stand-up paddle-boards, two handheld Seabobs, which pull a prone snorkeller through the waves, a fiendishly powerful jet ski, a “flyboard” for Ironman-style hovering, a custom-made, five-metre blow-up slide and a suite of inflatable decks that enclose a sea pool at the rear of his yacht.

I’m most interested in his Fliteboard, which he has agreed to let me try, along with everything else he has, with the help of his captain, Ashley Oberholzerthe, a 34-year-old snowboarder and water sports instructor. It’s also a powered surfboard, but its propeller sits at the end of a pole about a metre under the water, alongside two wing-like hydrofoils. At low speeds, the board stays on the surface. But as I go faster, the foils begin to give me lift. Once I get the hang of balancing, I glide through the air in almost total silence. It’s an extraordinary feeling — the closest I’ll come to emulating Marty McFly on his hoverboard in Back to the Future.

“Toy lists across the board have got much bigger,” says Tim Johnson, the founder and chief executive of TJB Super Yachts, a brokerage. Johnson, who has joined us for dinner before heading to Monaco, first introduced Comair to yachting as a charter client. He says owners who got rich in the ’80s and ’90s now have grown-up kids and grandchildren to entertain, and that the average owner is themselves now under 50.

Demand has remained high since superyacht sales soared along with the charter market after the pandemic, as the rich sought isolation for longer periods. Boredom was a danger and, for those wanting to rent out their yachts, toys were also something relatively affordable to shout about in charter brochures. A Fliteboard starts at €14,000, which is small change if you’ve just sunk millions on even a small superyacht. “And you’re having so much more fun than you could with any bottle of Pétrus,” says Comair. 

The next day, with seawater still dripping from my nose after my attempts to master various novel watercraft, I arrive at the Monaco Yacht Show. Almost 120 superyachts for sale and charter are wedged into Port Hercule; exhibitors on the quayside ply everything from designer tableware to sewage treatment plants.

A record 45 companies are here to display their toys and tenders. The biggest stand belongs to Superyacht Tenders and Toys (SYTT), a British company based on a farm outside Ipswich. Josh Richardson and his wife Claire launched the company in 2011 after careers at sea (Josh, 41, was once a stunt boat driver with credits including The Bourne Supremacy).

“It was a lot simpler back then,” he tells me of the toys market a decade ago. “It was the early days of Seabobs and inflatable slides, but mainly it was just jet skis and wakeboards.” The extent of the evolution since is clear in and around SYTT’s stand. There are Fliteboards and multiple rivals for the Seabob, a tiny blue helicopter that weighs less than an old Mini, and a Seabreacher X — a two-seater vessel that looks like a wingless fighter jet and is designed to let users leap from the waves like a dolphin.

Inflatables have become a huge part of Richardson’s business. Several blow-up decks, zipped together, can extend a yacht’s aft space and include notched-out berths for jet skis as well as swimming pool openings up to 15 metres long, with weighted nets to keep the jellyfish out and the children in. One of Richardson’s clients, who spent up to £100,000 on inflatables with teak-effect surfaces, described them as “the best value real estate he’s ever come across”.

There are now blow-up assault courses, overwater climbing walls, and floating islands with integrated sun loungers and canopies. SYTT has just started designing bespoke basketball courts with inflatable fencing for yachts with big decks.

Hydrofoils of the sort that sustain the Fliteboard are the other hot trend, giving lift to a range of boards, boats and even bikes. Combined with the battery technology now powering terrestrial e-scooters and e-bikes, new products are coming to market every season that can be mastered within an hour and look great on Instagram.

A couple of weeks before my Côte d’Azur jaunt, I tried the Manta5 water bike, which has a steering foil in place of a front wheel as well as a larger one at the back. The UK distributor had come to give a demonstration at a marina not far from SYTT’s HQ (Richardson, who had already sold five of the new models, likes to try what he sells). 

I started up to my neck, straddling the bike underwater. After a tricky launch manoeuvre, which involves leaning over the handlebars as the motor and foils lift the bike, I was suddenly pedalling over the water with the assistance of the battery, just like on an e-bike. Yet it felt — and looked — as if I was being held up by magic.

Several more toys filled nondescript barns in Suffolk, where SYTT engineers were personalising jet skis to match the colouring of their mother yachts. One owner who likes to race his jet skis with his friends had requested a GPS-controlled lighting system; LED strips under the hulls would change colour according to their position in the race.

The toys boom is also changing superyacht design. Larger vessels have huge garages with hidden cranes that emerge from side doors to lower tenders and jet skis into the water. These spaces are connected to “beach clubs”, the increasingly spacious and opulent water-facing areas at the rear of boats, where guests now tend to gather and play.

During a tour of Phoenix 2, a 90-metre vessel which the Cecil Wright brokerage is offering for €125mn at the Monaco show, I meet its interior designer. Andrew Winch, a veteran British superyacht and private jet specialist at Winch Design, came up with its Great Gatsby theme for Poland’s richest man in 2010, and watched the yacht become an in-demand charter vessel (starting price: €1mn a week; Magic Johnson hung out on board with Samuel L Jackson for most of this summer).

When Phoenix 2 sells, Winch will be happy to update the yacht’s rump to suit the lifestyle of the modern owner. “I’m just thinking about it now,” he says, waving his arms around the main deck. “I could cut the garage in half to create a bigger beach club and he could have one bigger tender that wouldn’t come on board . . . You have to change the operations to achieve the dream.”

Increasingly that dream involves venturing beyond the Caribbean and the Med. Rugged expedition superyachts have proliferated in recent years, further expanding the demand and space for toys, with helipads and room for submarines. SYTT has started to get orders for snowmobiles for Arctic excursions.

Dozens of the biggest yachts are now shadowed by support vessels for storing yet more helicopters and toys. The 89-metre Here Comes The Sun is trailed by U-81, an 80.1-metre converted former oil and gas supply vessel. Koru, Jeff Bezos’s new 125-metre sailing yacht, is followed by Abeona, a 75-metre superyacht with its own crew of 37 and space for Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez to land her helicopter (the yachts’ symbiosis neatly illustrates the industry’s inescapable environmental burden). 

Back in the bay of Villefranche, Comair can only dream of such scale. But if proximity to Monaco is giving him yacht envy, he’s not showing it. He says his greatest memories at sea now come away from Lady Amanda anyway, while he’s foil boarding past lava as it flows into the sea from Stromboli near Sicily, for example.

As I fly around the bay on my Fliteboard, I almost mishear Comair when, from his own board, he points to the east and mouths the word: “Dolphins!” I carve a wide turn and soon we are riding side by side. I power down my board and sit astride it, watching two dolphins and a calf writhe about each other, their white bellies flashing in the rising sun. “I’ve never seen them here before,” Comair says, smiling, before turning his board and powering back to his yacht for breakfast.