Once upon a time, the waters around the Hebridean island of Coll were only frequented by grey seals, otters and the occasional porpoise. These days, says Gareth Cole, founder of new gourmet Coll restaurant The Urchin, you’re more likely to see bobbing white mega boats populating the Hebridean horizons. “It’s yachts as far as the eye can see,” he said.
Cole and his wife, Indi, founded the Urchin in 2025, having previously run a restaurant on tiny Canna in the Small Isles, between Skye and the Ardnamurchan Peninsula. The couple moved to the comparatively cosmopolitan Coll, an island of 170 souls, in pursuit of the booming yachtie trade.
“We are highly dependent on yachts,” Cole continues, as he loudly hacks at crabs for the evening’s seafood platters. “Partly it’s down to advances in electronic seabed mapping, which mean vessels can sail into more adventurous areas with confidence. It’s also that yacht people are changing. It’s not just rich old blokes any more, you get more young couples and groups of friends, and lots of Europeans, Dutch in particular.”
Less a case, then, of the “have-yachts and have-nots”. Cole, in fact, arrived here after buying “a banger” of a yacht online, travelling to the Scottish west coast to collect it and staying there. He met Indi on Canna where she was one of 20 residents. “On the face of it, not good going in terms of dating odds,” he laughs.
Traditionally, yacht owners populated southern anchorages in Europe through the summer months, especially places such as Paros, St Tropez, Porto Cervo and the Amalfi Coast. But both the yacht owners and their preferred watery geographies are changing, says Cromwell Littlejohn of Northrop & Johnson, a yacht brokerage and charter company.
“Owners are becoming younger and more adventurous,” he says. “Charters throughout the Baltic have increased, and other off-the-beaten-track locations such as the South Pacific, Seychelles and Alaska are gaining popularity, much as Croatia did 10 years ago.”
BOATPro, a tracking system, publishes Automatic Identification System (AIS) data on where yachts spend their summers. Its data show that Britain is increasingly popular for yacht stops, though is primarily a transit and seasonal cruising ground, rather than a year-round superyacht destination such as the French Riviera or the Caribbean.
Most visits to British shores occur between May and September and the South Coast is the busiest area for large yachts. Popular ports include Falmouth (favoured for its deep-water anchorages and repair facilities), Poole, Southampton, Cowes (on the Isle of Wight), Dartmouth and Plymouth. Scotland has become increasingly attractive to explorer yachts and sailing yachts, with owners drawn by the dramatic scenery, wildlife, cooler summer temperatures, and greater privacy.
Other factors pushing yachties north include hotter summers, geopolitical turbulence in former yacht-traffic favourites like the Red Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, and overcrowding in the Med.
The global brokerage market is also booming. BOATPro data reported by industry analysts showed 470 superyacht sales in 2025 worldwide compared with 392 in 2024, a rise of almost 20 per cent. The strongest activity has been among larger yachts, particularly those more than 70m.
All of which means there’s a fair chance of seeing a floating giant off the British coast this summer. Recent sightings include the 93m, three-masted sailing schooner Eos, owned by Diane Von Furstenberg and her husband, media billionaire Barry Diller, in Largs, Scotland; 73m Nautilus (formerly Grace E), owned by Thierry Stern, the president of the Swiss luxury watchmaker Patek Philippe, in Falmouth; and MY Deep Blue, one of the newest and largest superyachts in the world, reputedly owned by Chinese billionaire Liu Qiangdong, in Poole.
London sightings are also commonplace. Sweet-themed Lollipop, was recently seen alongside Tower Bridge; the 54m motor yacht Spirit, reputedly owned by an Italian billionaire, also visited this summer, as did Spectre, built in 2018 and known for her distinctive profile.
Isabella Day is proprietor of The Remarkable Goldsmiths in Dartmouth, Devon. Dartmouth has a deep-draught estuary that historically saw the arrival of smaller cruise ships and now superyachts in greater numbers. The Devon port serves as a stopover for yachts crossing between the Mediterranean, northern Europe and the Atlantic.
Yacht owners tend to frequent fancy town restaurant Seahorse, Day says, and attract attention when they glide into the estuary. “People love spotting them, including tourists, and the local Dartmouth Facebook group is full of news of recent sightings.
“Recently we had Gabe Newell, a billionaire tech guy in his very unusual superyacht [Draak, a 91.5-metre vessel originally built for Malaysian financier Jho Low before being seized as part of a corruption scandal], though I don’t know whether or not he came into my shop. It would be nice if the yachties made a point of shopping in local businesses such as mine!”
The higher likelihood of clapping eyes on a sizeable white vessel has given rise to a generation of yachtie-spotters who use tools such as AIS tracking to follow vessels’ locations online and AI image search tools such as Google Lens to identify yacht names and owners in a matter of seconds.
What’s good sport for shore-dwellers is an annoyance for yachties, however, says Littlejohn. “Few owners are thrilled at the social media updates of the vessel’s ownership and those aboard, but one can simply pull anchor or drop lines and seek more private surroundings,” he says. “That said, big yachts were never good at being inconspicuous.”
Aware that his water-borne customers “will have had Cullen skink [haddock and potato soup] and mussels coming out of their ears”, Cole likes to delight his yachtie clientele with towering bowls of seafood as well as challenging dishes such as kelp salad with crispy duck and raw sea urchin.
He adds that his restaurant has also established a brewery after an incident when they ran out of booze – a no-no for the boatie brigade old and new. New wave yachties aside, you still get the odd yachtie character passing through. Cole says: “We recently had a man who was visiting every pub on the coast of Britain in his yacht. He was wearing a suit made of those colourful towels you get on bar tops next to the drip trays. There’s never a dull day in the yacht world!”