Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

#humansofyachting

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

From saltwater gypsy to captain of one of the world’s most iconic sailing yachts, Pierfrancesco Cafaro shows that anything is possible in superyachting.

By Charlotte Thomas | 6 April 2023

The superyacht industry as a whole draws an incredibly diverse cast of characters covering a vast array of disciplines, from design and engineering to manual trades to highly specialised artisans, and to a phalanx of support sectors from logistics to human resources. The same could be said for the tens of thousands of professional crew, many of whom landed in the superyacht industry by chance or through friends, and who had little or no previous experience of boating but who have worked their way to senior positions on some of the world’s best or busiest yachts.

Then there are those who seemingly were born for it. Enter Pierfrancesco Cafaro who, since April 2022, has held perhaps one of the most enviable positions in the entire sector – Captain of the iconic, 2006-launched 88-metre Maltese Falcon, one of the most recognisable and most photographed yachts in the world.

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Maltese Falcon

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Maltese Falcon

Cafaro’s journey to the Falcon began with more modest ambitions, and with passion engrained in his soul and salt coursing through his veins. “My path is quite weird,” he begins. “I come from Rome and grew up in Italy, and my family always had a boat when I was a child so I’ve been sailing all my life with family and friends. When I was around 16 years old, I started to read beautiful books about sailing by yourself, about sailing away from civilization.”

His early inspirations – sailing heroes, really – were people like French solo sailor Bernard Moitessier, who became perhaps best known for declining to finish the world’s first non-stop, singlehanded race in 1968 in spite of being the likely winner, in rejection of the idea of commercialising long-distance sailing; and Vito Dumas, an Argentine singlehanded sailor who became the first person to solo circumnavigate south of the three great capes. “They were sailing while all Europe was fighting with the authorities,” Cafaro says. “I was really quite in love with these people.”

When he was 18, he bought himself a little yacht and went sailing – although not chartering because the yacht was only nine metres long. “I was sailing with my friends and my girlfriend, all through the summer, and working through the winter doing any kind of work I could get,” he explains. “Then when I was about 21, I had a child with my girlfriend. We didn’t want to settle into a typical life in a city like Rome, so we decided to sail away. I was very lucky, because at that time my family had an 18-metre sailing yacht, so at the end of the 1980s with just a little GPS and my girlfriend and baby daughter we set off. We sailed around the world over three years, stopping for a year in Australia. It was a beautiful three years.”

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Maltese Falcon

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Maltese Falcon

The young family returned when Cafaro was 24 so his daughter could start school. They lived in Rome, but Cafaro continued to spend the summers with the yacht, chartering her out and serving as her skipper. But as the 1990s rolled toward the new millennium, the Italian yachting scene changed, and more and more charterers moved toward bareboat rather than skippered charter. “I sold my yacht and I started working for other owners in 2001,” he says. “The first was from Milan, and they owned a Jongert sailing yacht which I ran for three years; then I worked on a classic Sangermani sailing yacht for eight years, but a classic yacht is stressful and it’s physically hard work. In 2010 for the first time I had a feeling to try motor yachts, which I had never thought of before, but I told the owner I needed a few months to try it out and that I’d be back that September.”

Cafaro’s move ended up being somewhat permanent – after deciding to stay and working on the motor yacht for two years, the owners decided to sell it and buy a sailing yacht instead. Cafaro found himself in command of a 52-metre Perini called La Luna, and once again he headed off around the world, this time in command of a significantly larger vessel. When that same family decided to buy Maltese Falcon, Cafaro’s fate was set. Aside from getting to grips with the scale of the yacht – and the number of crew – Cafaro also had to learn how to operate her famous Falcon Rig, which borrows from the square-rigger sailing ships from history but adds an entirely new, technologically advanced dimension.

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Maltese Falcon

Pierfrancesco Cafaro

Maltese Falcon

The original build owner was the late, legendary venture capitalist and philanthropist Tom Perkins – big shoes to fill. It’s one of the reasons why the new owners put the iconic yacht into a technical refit over the winter of 2022-23, in order to bring her forward and keep her relevant for a new generation of yacht charterer. “Our boss is, like Tom Perkins was, a visionary and an entrepreneur who also likes to take care of the environment,” Cafaro enthuses. “With the refit, we’re trying to be more sustainable, we’re trying to pollute less, and we’re trying to make less noise. We’re trying to change the interior in order to produce less plastic waste, and we are also trying to use organic cottons and fibres for everything from the linen to our uniforms.”

It embodies the changing approach of yacht owners who are looking to change the way the industry operates and the footprint it creates, one step at a time, and it is also reflected, says Cafaro, in the changing attitudes and approaches of the crew. That includes not just being more mindful of things like waste or garbage handling, but also how they interact with the people and communities they meet on their cruises.

“Even in the Med, like in some of the less populated islands in Greece, there are things they need,” Cafaro explains. “We work with them because maybe our guests would like a barbecue on the beach or want to take a cycling tour of the island, and we make a connection with the local community. And it is their country and not our country, and we are always mindful and respectful of that. We always try to give them something, whether it’s a yacht T-shirt or other gifts, or whether it’s something they need. From the efforts of crews and the more sensitive and positive interaction with communities to the way modern yachts are built and run,” he concludes, “I’ve seen a real shift in attitudes over the past 30 years. The industry is changing. We really do care about the environment and about the sea in general.”

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