A Wedding on a Yacht — An Interview and First-Hand Experience

A wedding on a yacht is a romantic dream for many people who love the sea, bays and boats. It represents a whole way of life, and it certainly doesn’t have to involve a luxury superyacht. There are so many possibilities that we asked Petr Ulrich, founder and director of YachtWedding, a specialist licensed destination-wedding travel company, about his experience with weddings on boats. He’s a passionate sailor himself.

How popular are weddings on boats and yachts?

There’s considerable interest in weddings on boats and yachts, although compared with mainstream beach weddings, they’re still a niche. More and more people have experienced a holiday aboard a yacht, either as crew members or as skippers of a charter yacht in Croatia, Greece or the Caribbean. Some already have yachts of their own. A boat is a beautiful place to be, and the splendid settings of bays and marinas make unusual backdrops for wedding ceremonies and photographs.

But a yacht wedding often appeals particularly to grooms who can’t imagine themselves standing around like a stiff, dressed-up mannequin at yet another castle wedding. Boats and the sea give them something they can really get involved in. They can take an active part in their own wedding without feeling ridiculous. I remember cases where the groom even made it a condition: if he couldn’t get married on a boat, he wasn’t getting married at all. 🙂

Brides, meanwhile, appreciate having a happy groom who’s actively involved in the preparations, so they can enjoy planning the wedding together. There’s something in it for both of them. I’ve yet to meet a bride who objected to the idea of getting married on a yacht. 🙂 Of course, it all depends on how you do it, and no two boats are alike.

Ideally, you combine a legally valid wedding ceremony with a honeymoon sailing among the Dalmatian islands.

At YachtWedding, we’ve got the word yacht right there in our name. When we started in 2008, we were among the very first destination-wedding specialists back home, and at first we focused exclusively on boats: chartered and privately owned yachts in Dalmatia and the Caribbean, luxury 100-metre megayachts in Tuscany and, very occasionally, steamboats on the Vltava River. 🙂

We’ve come a very long way since those beginnings. Our core business is now beach weddings, and every day we have several legally valid weddings taking place simultaneously in different parts of the world. Sailors are still an important group of clients for us, though, and thanks to our experience and know-how, we have a great deal to offer them.

How does a wedding on a yacht actually work?

What most couples imagine is a wedding aboard a yacht anchored in a beautiful, peaceful bay. That’s possible, but once you think through all the details, it becomes demanding — both to plan and to pay for. Not least because of the weather, and the registrar who somehow has to be brought on board.

In Croatia, which is so popular with sailors, the legally valid weddings we arranged required a court-certified interpreter to translate between the couple’s language and Croatian, as well as the registrar. That means at least two people have to be brought from shore to the yacht on the wedding day, and that isn’t cheap. It’s also one reason there are far fewer weddings on Croatian islands than on the mainland. Court-certified interpreters are usually based on the mainland, so getting one to an island takes up the whole day — and costs money.

In Croatia, the authorities also charged for every metre the registrar had to travel to an unofficial wedding location. Official wedding venues didn’t attract that extra fee. For a ceremony in a remote bay, the fee payable to the authorities alone could run into thousands of euros. In Italy, a legally valid wedding on a boat simply wasn’t possible — but we managed it anyway. Greece lacked the necessary infrastructure, whereas the Caribbean was much more accommodating.

A Croatian registrar is also very unlikely to climb into a dinghy — the small inflatable tender most yachts carry to ferry people between boat and shore. In the Caribbean, registrars tend to be more willing to use a dinghy, unlike their Croatian counterparts. Of course, other problems come up there instead. 🙂

Once they have considered all the options, most couples choose either a ceremony on a yacht moored in a marina or alongside a town quay, or — most often of all — a wedding with a yacht rather than directly on the yacht.

What exactly is a wedding with a yacht?

It means the wedding ceremony doesn’t take place on the yacht itself, but the yacht is directly involved in the ceremony and the wedding day.

In every respect, it’s the simplest and cheapest option. You get the best of the boat and the sea, together with the safety and simplicity of a ceremony on a beach, on a pier or in a nearby civil wedding room.

The overwhelming majority of couples who initially picture their wedding aboard a yacht in a romantic bay, far from civilisation, end up choosing this option.

Which destination is most popular for a yacht wedding?

For both a wedding on a yacht and a wedding with one, central Dalmatia is ideal and the most popular choice among couples — particularly the historic town of Trogir, built on a small island very close to several marinas.

It’s a beautiful, pleasant and safe sailing area with picturesque islands, lovely bays and excellent facilities. Friends and family can easily join you there if you want them at your wedding. Some guests can stay on the yacht, while others stay in nearby apartments.

Many couples set sail on their wedding trip, stop in Trogir for two days to get married, then continue cruising with our Just Married flag flying from the mast. 🙂 When they anchor in a bay, the flag makes them the centre of attention: other sailors notice it and call out their congratulations. It’s lovely.

Trogir offers all sorts of possibilities for a wedding with a yacht. You can moor in a marina and have the ceremony on the pier next to your boat — although with all the activity in a working marina, that isn’t as straightforward as it sounds — or on a nearby beach.

You can also get into our little boat and cross from the marina to the waterfront. From there, it’s only a few metres to the historic civil wedding room. Afterwards, you can take wedding photographs along the palm-lined promenade, on the beach and, most importantly, aboard your own yacht. You can even have the ceremony directly on the yacht, whether it’s alongside the waterfront or out in a bay.

There are plenty of options. Trogir is a destination we’ve tried and tested with sailors over many years.

What should couples be particularly careful about?

A boat’s deck is a very unusual place for a wedding ceremony, and it’s heavily affected by the weather — wind, currents and swell. For a legally valid ceremony, it has to meet basic requirements. Otherwise, you simply won’t get the registrar to step on board.

In my experience, even sailors often fail to appreciate that. Wedding agencies with no experience of boats are even worse: they’ll promise the earth without knowing how to deliver it.

I remember a competitor calling us in a panic some years ago. They’d copied our website, spelling mistakes and all, and then wanted us to help them with a client asking about a yacht wedding in the Caribbean. They knew absolutely nothing about boats or the Caribbean.

When it comes to the legal requirements and what registrars expect of a wedding venue, the first thing is a dignified space that is safe and stable. In many countries, the law also requires a table for the registrar where the couple can sign the marriage register.

On a monohull sailing yacht, that generally calls for a boat at least 50 feet long (around 15 metres). On a catamaran, you can manage with as little as 42 feet if everyone is willing to be flexible. As a yacht gets longer, it also gets wider, giving you more usable deck space and, above all, greater stability.

Ideally, though, for a ceremony directly on deck, I’d be talking about yachts over 20 metres long. The number of guests and the whole concept of the wedding matter as well. Even if it’s a very simple ceremony with just the witnesses, the main issue is still getting the registrar aboard. These are tailor-made wedding projects; you can’t set one standard wedding package for them.

And don’t forget the wedding photographer. A photographer is important even at the smallest weddings, but they need somewhere to stand and a good angle for the pictures. Otherwise, your dream yacht wedding will leave you with the dullest wedding photographs imaginable — pictures that won’t impress anyone.

Of course, sailing yachts and motor yachts offer very different possibilities. Every individual boat has to be assessed. Otherwise, you risk the registrar refusing to come aboard, and on the wedding day it will be too late to do anything about it.

Can’t the captain marry us right on board?

It’s one of the most common romantic ideas, but the answer is no — not simply because someone happens to be the captain of a yacht.

There are very specific legal circumstances in which a proper seagoing ship’s captain may perform a legally valid wedding, such as an emergency in international waters when the couple’s lives are in immediate danger. That’s hardly what you want on your wedding day. And I can’t imagine how you’d explain that to the registry office afterwards. If you actually managed it, you’d have material for a book, and perhaps Hollywood would buy the film rights. 🙂

If you’re sailing a small recreational yacht you’ve chartered for a holiday, having a so-called “captain’s licence” doesn’t make you a ship’s captain with those powers. You’re still a skipper.

With a skipper friend, you can arrange a symbolic ceremony on board, but you’ll still face all the limitations of space, logistics and, most importantly, weather. (Video example of an amateur symbolic yacht wedding.)

How does the weather affect a wedding on a yacht?

The weather has an enormous influence on every boat, and therefore on any wedding ceremony taking place on its deck. A boat floats on water. You can’t stop it like a car in a car park. You can drop anchor or moor alongside, but you still have to deal with the wind and waves, which can rock the boat so badly that nobody can stay on their feet on deck.

Heavy swell can catch you in a romantic bay or even in a well-protected marina. It all depends on which direction the waves come from and how lucky — or unlucky — you are. You can take precautions to some extent, of course, but there’s no 100% guarantee, and the size and type of yacht make a difference.

You need to know exactly what you’re doing and understand what you’re taking on. Get that right, and a wedding on a yacht is a beautiful experience — and that’s what we’re here for.

What yacht weddings have you organised, and where?

In the fourteen years we’ve been in business, specialising in destination-wedding travel — weddings abroad, honeymoons and wedding anniversaries — we’ve handled everything from major wedding projects to small, wonderfully unusual ones.

One example was a legally valid wedding for 50 guests aboard a privately owned 95-metre sailing yacht in Tuscany, with a crew of 21. Another was a legally valid wedding on a private catamaran in a bay in the British Virgin Islands, with 12 wedding guests, on 12 December 2012 at 12:12. 🙂

Most of our weddings involving yachts, however, have been in Croatia, where so many sailors go and which is the best destination for a wedding on a yacht or with one. We’re talking about numbers in the low hundreds.

A wedding like the one in Tuscany, for 50 guests aboard that enormous sailing yacht, is probably every bride’s dream. But projects like that cost many tens of thousands of euros, and can run much higher. The 24-hour hire of a yacht of that kind alone was around EUR 30,000, purely for the rental, excluding fuel, other charges and crew services.

This was a major wedding production. We had several of our coordinators on site with radios, an elaborate wedding-reception programme, several live bands and, later that night, a surprise fire show. Then acrobats began descending unexpectedly from the masts and rigging.

Because that megayacht was sailing under an international flag, even taking the bride and groom ashore for a few photographs on the beach involved customs clearance costing thousands of euros.

We’re very good at organising wedding projects of that scale. But the request we get most often is much simpler: a small, straightforward wedding during a summer sailing holiday in Croatia. And that’s hardly surprising. It’s a beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime experience that anyone can afford.

*Thank you for the interview, and I wish you many happy clients sailing with your Just Married flag flying from the mast. 🙂*

Photo credit: YachtWedding.com archive