WATCH: A West Island couple persevered in keeping their sailing charter business going and managed to permanently escape the cold of Montreal’s winters. Billy Shields reports.
BEACONSFIELD, Que. — On a windy day in the fall, Brian Gandey walked around the Beaconsfield Yacht Club, where he first learned to sail.
He pointed to a 35-foot yacht docked at the club and remarked that it was one of the longer boats in the fleet.
“That’s about how wide the largest boat in our fleet is now,” he laughed.
Gandey can afford to laugh now — he and wife Cindy are the owners and founders of Conch Charters, of one of the most successful independently owned yacht charter businesses in the Caribbean.
“Why don’t you go into the yacht-chartering business?”
But it was a hard, 27-year slog to get there.
It all began when the couple were travelling through the British Virgin Islands in the 1980s; Brian was working in the hospitality business, Cindy was working in banking. Both of them were thinking of escaping the snow and relocating to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) but weren’t sure how to do so.
Their plans got a boost after a chance encounter with the territory’s governor, whom they met at a cocktail party.
“He said, why don’t you go into the yacht-chartering business?” Brian recalled.
Yacht fleets function much the same way condos do when they’re managed as vacation properties. The boats are owned by individuals who then lease them out for use by charter companies, who in turn rent them out to tourists.
Although it was a sound plan, in retrospect, launching such an enterprise was anything but a safe bet.
Two charter companies folded the year the Gandeys launched Conch Charters, and while the BVI is now a well-travelled tourist destination, at that time its tourist industry was still very much in its infancy.
But the couple caught some breaks. They only had two boats to start, but absorbed the two fleets that folded, making Conch Charters a turnkey enterprise almost overnight.
Also, in an effort to differentiate itself from the nearby U.S. Virgin Islands, the BVI government embarked in an intentional campaign to attract upscale tourists — a campaign that suited the couple’s new business perfectly.
The two warned that relocating to the BVI isn’t as easy as one would think.
While BVI officials would like to attract people to work in the tourist industry, getting work papers isn’t easy; and due to tax reasons, a Canadian BVI resident needs to sell their property in Canada and divest themselves of most of their accounts, unless they want to pay taxes as a Canadian resident.
“We sold everything to move down there.”
“We kept a bank account, so we could get a bank reference, and a credit card. Other than that, we got rid of absolutely everything,” Cindy Gandey said.
Outside of Britons, there are more Canadian expatriates living in the BVI than any other single nationality — many of whom charter yachts from the Gandey’s business.
But that’s not to say that the interactions are always smooth, however.
“We had a guy come in recently with a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey on,” Cindy Gandey laughed.
“I told him, ‘Buddy, you might have some trouble around here with that on.'”
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