A slow superyacht love affair

For fast-food entrepreneur and businessman Jack Cowin, the path to superyachting was not straightforward – indeed, boating hadn’t featured at all in his earlier life, in spite of growing up on a lake shore in Windsor, Ontario. It would take a move from Canada to Australia in his 20s and several more years for boating to worm its way into his blood, but when it did, a true passion was born.

Cowin is perhaps best-known for building the Hungry Jack’s fast-food chain in Australia, which he began in 1969 with seed money he had raised from a handful of investors. Living in Perth and then Sydney, Cowin and his wife Sharon gradually felt the pull of the water. “It’s part of the culture in Australia,” he says. “I didn’t really have high interest in owning a boat [at that point] because I still didn’t know much about boating and I had a preference of being invited by friends on their boats. It seemed a better way of getting around it!”

His introduction to superyachts came in the 1980s when, having built a highly successful business and with it a network of high-profile contacts, he was invited onto the 56-metre yacht of Australian businessman Alan Bond, who had won the America’s Cup with the Australia II syndicate. “His 56-metre motor yacht seemed like an ocean liner to us – it was the biggest boat we’d ever been on,” Cowin says. “He invited us on for the America’s Cup and that was our first exposure to a superyacht. It blew our minds.”

It would be another decade before Cowin would have a yacht of his own, and that came about through an investment rather than a desire to own a yacht. “The concept was that we could build a boat in Australia at a certain cost – the Aussie dollar was low at the time – and we could then take the yacht to Europe and sell it,” he explains. The result was the 43-metre Silver Dream, delivered in 2001 from the Warren Yachts yard. Once in Europe the boat quickly received an offer, but Cowin thought it might be nice to enjoy Silver Dream for a season before selling – and to do that, he had to buy his partner out. “So then I owned a boat, for which I had no real experience or knowledge!” Cowin quips.

Hiring a good captain and a good crew helped mitigate the stress of ownership, and Cowin and his family and friends began to enjoy everything that a superyacht can offer, with the yacht undertaking charters when they weren’t aboard. “We’d use the yacht a couple of times a year, in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and we also went to the Maldives and even as far as Thailand,” he says, “although initially we cruised a lot along the classic Mediterranean coast run from St Tropez to Portofino.”

The bug had clearly bitten – in 2009, Cowin took delivery of a new 60-metre yacht called Slipstream which he had built at the CMN yard in Northern France. Slipstream’s beautiful interior includes several nods to Cowin’s Canadian heritage and Australian home, from Aboriginal artworks to being perhaps the only yacht in the world with a totem pole in the guest foyer.

Slipstream, like Silver Dream, has proven to be the perfect platform for fun with family and friends, moments that Cowin and his extended family – the couple have four children and 12 grandchildren – savour even more since the strictures of covid. “Last year we did a big cruise starting in Dublin, Ireland,” he enthuses. “Then we went to the Isle of Man, up the west coast of Scotland to Stornaway, and took a private plane to Edinburgh while the boat carried on to Norway. Then we flew and met her in Norway, and sailed down the coast of Norway to Copenhagen, through the Kiel Canal and ended up in Hamburg, Germany, where we got off. The original plan,” he adds, “was get to London. But we got invited to go to a Rolling Stones concert in Paris which won out!”

It was a five-week exercise that saw three different groups of family and friends come for 10 days each. “They’d overlap,” he says. “Group one and group two would spend a couple of days together, and then group two and group three would have gotten together. With the kids and grandkids and various husbands and wives, and tossing in some friends along the way, we had a busy time – but it was great!”

It’s also telling that in spite of now being an avid yachtie with two (highly successful) charter yachts in his stable, Cowin sees time spent with people on board as almost more important than new places visited. “You somewhat gravitate to the things that you’ve seen in life,” he muses. “You know where the restaurants are, and where the good places to go are and that you want to see again. We’re not great explorers or constantly looking for new experiences,” he concludes, “as much as we are about enjoying the company of the people we have on board and being able to show them a good time. That’s the main drive for us.”