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Yacht Lounge Podcast UK

Yacht Lounge Podcast UK

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 Yacht Lounge explores stories behind yachts, luxury objects, and style choices through immersive audio interpretations. An independent podcast by Roberto Franzoni & Andrea Baracco, offering authentic insights beyond commercial logic. Learn more and subscribe for free at yachtlounge.substack.com

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  • When Icons Come Back.

    When Icons Come Back.
    Feb 18 2026
    On October 24, 2024, in front of three thousand people gathered in the hills outside Nashville, a truck came to life in the dark.No app launch. No keynote under cold projector lights. Just the sound of an engine — or rather, the silence of an electric one — and the silhouette of something that many in that crowd recognized without ever having driven. Exactly forty-four years had passed since the last Scout rolled off the assembly line. Forty-four years is a lifetime. But that night in Nashville felt like a morning.Icons don’t come back because the market demands them. They come back because time makes them necessary again. And there is a profound difference between the two.This isn’t nostalgia. This is necessity.The market asks for trends. Necessity asks for truth. And Scout, at this precise moment in history — in the age of autonomous vehicles, touchscreen dashboards, and digital everything — stands for something radically different: the memory of an America that knew what it wanted, where it was going, and how to get there on its own terms.Scout wasn’t a car. It was a stance.In 1960, International Harvester — a company founded in 1902 through the merger of five agricultural machinery manufacturers, backed by J.P. Morgan — decided to build something entirely different from the tractors and work trucks it had produced for decades. The result was the first Scout: a compact, four-wheel-drive utility vehicle built for people who lived far from pavement and needed something that would never quit.It was frontier America, reimagined for the postwar era. Not California cool, not the Space Race, not Madison Avenue. It was the Midwest, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the canyons of Arizona. It was the kind of place where the distance between two points wasn’t measured in miles, but in hours of silence.Scout earned a rare kind of loyalty — the kind you can’t buy with advertising, only with experience. In 1977, driver Jerry Boone won the legendary Baja 1000 in a Scout, finishing two hours ahead of his Jeep rival. The following year, he won again. Back then, Scout wasn’t an aspirational product for people who dreamed of adventure from their couch. It was the vehicle of choice for people who actually lived it.Scout wasn’t a way to get somewhere. It was a way to be somewhere.Then came 1980. The oil crisis had redrawn the rules of the market, and International Harvester was facing the financial pressures that would, by 1985, force it to sell its heavy vehicle division to Navistar. Scout production stopped. No grand announcement. No farewell ceremony. One day, they just stopped building them.But a brand that has built genuine identity doesn’t truly disappear. It goes dormant. It waits. And it waits for the moment when the world needs what it stood for again.Volkswagen acquired the Scout brand in 2021. At first glance, it seems like a paradox.A German automaker resurrecting the symbol of American self-reliance. But the logic runs deeper than it appears. Volkswagen didn’t buy Scout to build one more electric SUV. It bought Scout because Scout was — and is — something Volkswagen could never build from scratch: a real story. A scar on the American landscape. A name someone once had tattooed on their arm.CEO Scott Keogh — an American with a background at Audi and Volkswagen of America — built around that name a team of engineers and designers with genuine off-road roots. This wasn’t an aesthetic choice; it was a methodological one. The result, unveiled that evening outside Nashville, is two vehicles: the Terra, a pickup, and the Traveler, an SUV. Body-on-frame construction, solid rear axle, locking differentials, towing capacity up to 10,000 pounds. This isn’t a compromise between heritage and capability. It’s both, without apology.But there’s one detail that tells the cultural moment better than any market analysis. Scout launched as a full-electric project. Yet when reservations opened — that same evening — over 80% of the 130,000 orders went to the Harvester version: the hybrid powertrain with a gas range extender that delivers more than 500 miles of range. Scout named this powertrain the Harvester, a nod to its origins. The market responded by choosing the version that carries the name of the past.In the age of artificial intelligence, analog becomes aspirational. Scout understood this before anyone else did.Stories like this are the heartbeat of Yacht Lounge. If you value this level of insight, join our 3,800 active readers to receive weekly perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.This isn’t a failure of the electric project. It’s something more interesting: confirmation that an icon carries its own memory, and that memory holds even against technology. The people who reserved a Scout weren’t buying a vehicle. They were buying a stance. A way of being in the world. And that stance, evidently, works better with a gas tank on board for when the charging network ...
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    14 Min.
  • Hemingway: A Life Offshore.

    Hemingway: A Life Offshore.
    Feb 4 2026
    It’s five in the morning and Key West is sleeping off last night’s drunk, but down at the dock Pilar already has her engines running and reeks of hot diesel. Hemingway climbs aboard with hands still stained with ink, wrote until three, then crashed for four hours on a bunk that smells of mildew, and now he’s here, barefoot on a deck already burning hot, while Gregorio Fuentes rigs the heavy lines, the ones for marlin that’ll break your back if you’re not careful. Nobody said where they’re going, doesn’t matter: you go where the current takes you, toward Cuba or toward nothing, the important thing is to go.This is life offshore, not a metaphor, not a writer’s affectation, but a physical, daily choice that carves itself into your hands and changes the way you breathe. When you live like this you don’t have a fixed address in your head anymore, you only have the point where you are now and the one where you might be tomorrow, if the sea allows it.Pilar Isn’t a Boat, She’s a StatementThirty-eight feet of Wheeler bought in Miami in ’34 with money from a novel, and immediately taken to Key West because Miami smelled too much of concrete and people pretending. Pilar is spartan, functional, honest—two engines, a fighting chair that destroys your back, reels that look like artillery, and nothing else. No teak to oil, no brass to polish. If it doesn’t serve fishing or navigation, it doesn’t come aboard.Fuentes’s hands always smell of fish and dried salt, his skin burned by Caribbean sun, and when he speaks it’s half Spanish, half mangled English that Hemingway understands better than the chatter from New York literary salons. Together they fish off the Marquesas Keys, west of Key West, where marlin are three-hundred-pound beasts that turn the boat into a boxing ring when they hit—six hours of fighting, burning muscles, bleeding hands wrapped in rags, and in the end maybe you win or maybe the sharks win, arriving by the dozens as soon as they smell blood in the water.When he’s not fishing, Hemingway points the bow toward Cojímar on Cuba’s north coast, east of Havana, where his Finca Vigía waits with shutters closed and the silence needed for writing. Ninety miles of crossing, six hours if the current’s good, ten if you’re fighting the wind, and in between there’s only you, the engines growling, and water that changes color when you enter the Gulf Stream—from murky green to cobalt blue, so sharp it looks like someone drew a line. Everything happens there: The Old Man and the Sea isn’t an invented book, it’s something Hemingway saw happen a hundred times, to Fuentes, to himself, to everyone who goes for marlin and comes back with a skeleton lashed to the boat’s side while sharks still circle waiting.Key West-Cuba: The Corridor Where Everything ChangesIn Key West life is noise, alcohol, brawls at Sloppy Joe’s where rum costs nothing and talk costs even less. Hemingway’s there, laughing, drinking, throwing punches at anyone he doesn’t like, but it’s all show, all facade—what matters happens when he casts off, when Pilar leaves the dock and Key West becomes a dot behind. Six hours later you’re in Cuba and everything’s different: the air’s denser, the light warmer, the silence truer. In Havana there’s another kind of chaos, older, more honest, but Hemingway doesn’t stay long, goes straight to Cojímar, to the fishing village where nobody bothers him and where he can write until his fingers ache.Stories like this are the heartbeat of Yacht Lounge. If you value this level of insight, join our 3,800 active readers to receive weekly perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.But what really matters is the crossing, those six-to-ten hours in the middle of the Gulf Stream where you’re neither American nor Cuban, neither writer nor fisherman, you’re just a guy on a boat trying to hold course while the current pushes you where it wants. Everything else disappears there, publishing contracts, reviews, expectations, people who want something from you, and what remains is only this: the wheel under your hands, the smell of brine and diesel, the sun cooking your neck, and the awareness that if you screw up something you’ll find yourself in the middle of the ocean with an engine breakdown and nobody coming to look for you.When the war breaks out, Hemingway arms Pilar with machine guns and grenades, invents himself as a German U-boat hunter and transforms his fishing routes into military patrols. It’s madness, obviously, a fisherman against a submarine is like bringing a knife to a gunfight, but Hemingway never cared about odds. He cares about action, risk, the concrete possibility of dying badly while doing something that matters. And in the end he never finds a submarine, but that’s not the point, the point is he was out there looking while others stayed ashore talking about patriotism.The Sea Teaches You or Kills YouHemingway loved bullfighting...
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    15 Min.
  • Chris-Craft and the American Dream of Boating.

    Chris-Craft and the American Dream of Boating.
    Jan 21 2026
    Chris-Craft sold the American dream on installment plans. Not a metaphor: bank financing schemes to buy mahogany runabouts, the same boats Frank Sinatra navigated on Lake Tahoe. In the 1950s, the name became synonymous with “boat” in the United States, just like Kleenex for tissues. When middle-class America discovered the weekend on the lake, it did so aboard a Chris-Craft.The Michigan shipyard transformed boating from aristocratic privilege into a mass-market product, applying Detroit’s logic to nautical construction. This is the story of how 150 years of design and innovation shaped the very identity of American aquatic leisure.The Silent Revolution of 1927In 1874, when thirteen-year-old Christopher Columbus Smith built his first skiff in Algonac, Michigan, no one imagined he was laying the foundation for what would become the very paradigm of American boating.But it’s in the 1920s that something revolutionary happens. Smith looks at Ford’s and Chrysler’s assembly lines and decides to apply mass production to boat building. The first industrially assembled runabout is born, sold through local bank financing plans.It’s a radical shift in mindset. Before Chris-Craft, motorboats were handcrafted, expensive, destined for the elite who could afford specialized craftsmen. Smith democratizes access to water exactly as Ford had democratized the automobile a decade earlier.The 1927 Cadet, a 22-foot runabout, promises in its advertisements “a piece of the good life” to middle-class America. It’s not just marketing: it’s the nautical translation of the American dream, the idea that luxury can be accessible through work and credit.When the Name Becomes the ProductThe 1950s mark the apotheosis. In the post-war boom period, when America discovers leisure time and suburbia extends to lakefronts, Chris-Craft offers 139 different models. It’s the undisputed leader in almost every category of recreational watercraft.And the name itself becomes synonymous with “boat” in the United States, like Kleenex for tissues or Jeep for off-road vehicles. You don’t say “let’s go boating,” you say “let’s go on the Chris-Craft,” even when talking about another manufacturer’s model.Stories like this are the heartbeat of Yacht Lounge. If you value this level of insight, join our 3,800 active readers to receive weekly perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.This doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of decades of aspirational branding, of communication that sells not just performance but belonging to a world. A world that in the 1950s has a precise address: Hollywood.Sinatra’s Mahogany and Elvis’s MississippiFrank Sinatra and Dean Martin transform their mahogany runabouts into floating cocktail bars on Lake Tahoe. The Rat Pack navigates Chris-Craft, and suddenly the 24-foot runabout becomes an extension of Italian-American cool and swing-era freedom.Katharine Hepburn chooses a Chris-Craft for her solitary cruises in Connecticut, embodying a new idea of female independence. It’s not the tycoon’s wife on board: she’s at the helm herself, in a period when this carries enormous symbolic weight.Elvis Presley commissions custom models for the Mississippi, linking the brand to rock’n’roll and the Southern dream. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy own Chris-Crafts. These aren’t simple celebrity endorsements: the boats themselves become characters, objects of desire that the press photographs as much as the stars who drive them.The mirror-polished mahogany, the teak, the brass fittings: every detail speaks of democratic elegance, of a luxury that the middle class can afford with an installment plan. It’s the same mechanism that in those same years makes Route 66 synonymous with American freedom, or transforms St. Tropez and Brigitte Bardot’s Rivas into jet-set icons.From Mahogany to Fiberglass: America Changes MaterialThe history of Chris-Craft is also the history of materials and how they reflect social changes.From 1874 to the 1950s, it’s the mahogany era: craftsmanship, beauty, constant maintenance. These are boats that require care, dedication, an almost affectionate relationship with the object. Perfect for “weekend sailors” who in the post-war period discover leisure time and want to invest part of that time in caring for something beautiful.In 1955, the first fiberglass boat arrives. It’s not just a technical innovation: it’s the reflection of an America changing pace, wanting performance without sacrificing free time to maintenance. Fiberglass reduces costs, enables hydrodynamic shapes impossible with wood, requires zero annual painting.In 1964, the 38-foot Commander debuts at the New York Boat Show at the top of an escalator, all fiberglass: it’s the perfect image of modernity replacing tradition. The audience applauds. The future has arrived.The Last Wooden Boat and the End of an EraIn 1971, the last mahogany Constellation—57 feet of ...
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    12 Min.
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