I was lying in bed early one Saturday morning last summer watching Formula 1 practice on TV when my phone rang with a video call. It was an old pal who’s done lots of time in the superyacht-building business. It had been a while since we’d spoken. Given the odd day and time, I decided to pick up. “Dude, what on earth are you doing calling me at this hour?”
I asked.

“I’m doing a trans-Atlantic on my brother-in-law’s boat,” he replied. “We’re 500 miles west of Fastnet Rock headed for Portsmouth. I’m talking to you on Starlink.”

He panned around the yacht’s deck to show me the conditions they were sailing through. It took me a moment to wrap my head around what I was seeing. He went on to tell me about how his brother-in-law, a lawyer, had been doing daily video calls with his office. We talked for 45 minutes.

“This thing is unbelievable,” my friend said.

The phenomenon of owners working from their yachts at sea, and in faraway ports and anchorages, has been on the rise for some years now. It’s long been clear to early adopters that the benefits outweigh the costs—provided they could justify the expense of using traditional satcom systems with relatively low bandwidth. The concurrent rise of increasingly sophisticated onboard entertainment systems that can stream movies and shows over satcom has made the escape even more challenging and costly.

Enter the annoyingly ubiquitous digital impresario Elon Musk.

Love him or loathe him, Musk has changed the game across a range of tech arenas. His company SpaceX now dominates the heavens, launching the vast majority of commercial payloads into orbit. SpaceX’s Starlink subsidiary started launching its diminutive satellites in 2019. Since then, it has placed more than 5,000 of its vehicles into low-Earth orbit, as many as a couple dozen at a time. The first phase of Starlink will see as many as 22,000 put up in the next few years, with twice that many envisioned over time. Amazon is following suit with its planned Project Kuiper high-speed internet satellite constellation. Traditional satcom providers are scrambling to catch up.

The Starlink system has its detractors (it’s a radical boost in space junk, for starters) but for mariners with boats of any size who fancy low-cost communications and high-speed internet from nearly anywhere on the planet, it’s a godsend.

Yachts International’s sister publication, Passagemaker, has a story out now about several families that switched to Starlink from traditional satcom systems. They are able to do business and schoolwork from any far-flung destination they fancy, with far better service at a fraction of the cost. These owner-operator cruising boaters get the same service as the superyacht crew and clients aboard the 164-foot Tankoa Grey, which is profiled in this issue of Yachts International, and which is also equipped with Starlink. It’s technology that is coming on strong across the recreational marine spectrum.

In a world where change can sneak up on us all, Starlink is the kind of change that we can see in real time. I was at a party at a friend’s place in the country last fall. With little light pollution to diminish the brilliance of the stars and planets, several of us were sitting by the dying embers of a bonfire. One by one, we noticed odd movement overhead. Those of us who follow the news—or have tech-savvy sailor pals—quickly realized the long line of bright “stars” cruising in a straight line across the heavens were the most recent deployment of Starlink satellites.

It was a bit disorienting at first, but after watching for a few minutes, our consensus was, “That’s really cool.” Consider the game officially changed. 

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue.