Josip Serka

For some owners, their journey into superyachting will not have come from a snap decision following a business windfall or inheritance, but will be the continuance of a lifelong love affair with boating and the sea. Sometimes it will have started with sailing or boating in childhood, and the long slow march to owning a superyacht of their own will have been completed via a number of smaller leisure craft and an awful lot of very hard work. Of course, the requirements for owning, operating and skippering a large yacht are very different to running and driving your own sub-24-metre family motor boat. But Captain Josip Serka has intimate knowledge about every aspect of the 49 metre yacht Ohana. He is not simply the captain – he is an owner/operator who actually built the yacht at his family’s shipyard on the Adriatic in the Mediterranean. 

Serka grew up in a small village on the island of Brac in Croatia where his father was a shipbuilder, although that hadn’t always been the family business. Prior to designing and building boats, his father had been involved in catering to the then budding tourist industry. “We owned and rented holiday apartments,” says Serka. “Then, in the 1990s, we built our first yacht. She was a 17-metre wooden boat and we built her essentially to take our holiday rental guests out for day charters.” Serka’s family continued to build dayboats into the early 2000s, until in 2009 they made an ambitious decision – to turn their hand to building cruising yachts that would be able to take guests out further and for longer, to show them the delights and wonders of their turquoise backyard waters and neighboring Croatian islands. Their first larger yacht was a wooden 31-metre design that was built using oak grown on Brac, but they soon switched up materials as they grew in experience. “As we went up in size and complexity,” says Serka, “we switched to building in steel.” 

The youngest of three, Serka says he and his older brothers all became involved in shipbuilding. “I actually trained as a stone mason as we had no school for shipbuilding on the island,” Serka explains, “but even as a small boy, my playground was my father’s workshop.” He helped with all aspects of shipbuilding and got his commercial sailor’s license at the age of 16. “As I grew up with an ethos of hospitality and service, I took jobs as a waiter, then worked in kitchens as an assistant cook,” he continues. “Step by step, in 2012, I became the captain of our family-built and owned 37 metre cruising yacht, which was called Harmonia.”

It’s not just Serka who is involved in the family business as an owner/operator. The Serka family currently runs two charter two yachts: Yolo, run by one brother, and Ohana run by Serka. Both are operated as full superyacht charter experiences, which offers charter guests the chance to enjoy all of the yachts’ facilities in total privacy. “Ohana was launched in 2020, but due to the COVID pandemic all charter agreements with our travel agent had to be cancelled,” says Serka. “At that time we had planned to sell charters by the cabin, which obviously was not the way to go given COVID health concerns. It was our good fortune to discover another local brokerage firm, the charter company that we now book charters through. Their business model is to only charter the entire yacht and offer charter not by the cabin, which actually works out better for us.”

Serka started slowly with the brokers in 2021 as Covid restrictions were loosening. By 2022, they were becoming well established and had 25 successful weeks of charter, which is the maximum they can handle given the season in Croatia. “With the brokers’ guidance and because of the market demand,” Serka offers, “we are undergoing a major refit this winter (2022-23) to reduce our current 18 cabin configuration to 14 staterooms so that we can build out 2 master suites, a VIP stateroom, a cinema, and a dedicated playroom for children.”

Serka has his hands full all year round, and is proof not only that there can be a lot more to yacht ownership than people think, but also that owning and operating your own yacht can be a hugely rewarding experience, even if it does demand hard work. A father of three children under the age of 10, he also has to contend with annual yacht maintenance, varnish work, and that refit to complete before the start of the 2023 Mediterranean season, meaning the 25 weeks of being the hands-on charter captain are only a part of what he does.

Still, he thoroughly enjoys captaining a charter yacht and it’s clear he loves his homeland of Croatia and enjoys sharing it with others. On the late season charter I was on, we had 2 children aboard. The little boy turned six during our trip, and it was Captain Serka who presented him with a birthday cake and candles and let him drive the ship. Being a father and a hospitality professional, as well as an ace yachtsman with a lifetime of local knowledge about Croatian cruising waters, makes him the ideal charter captain. It also stands as a fine example of how an ordinary family, over the course of several decades and two generations, grew their business from hospitality and holiday rentals to superyacht builders, owners and operators. No big windfalls, just a passion for the sea and a vision to do something extraordinary.