Honoring Charlie King, the King of Adventure

As yacht broker Charlie King exits the boat market and enters retirement, Denison bids him bon voyage.

As told by Sarah Nadler. Photography courtesy of Charlie King.

If you’ve been in the industry long enough, you’ve probably worked with yacht broker Charlie King at one point in your career. When talking about Charlie, Denison Yachting President & Founder Bob Denison has a smile on his face.

“Charlie was one of those guys that knew boats, knew the market, and knew people really well which is the most important thing,” he says. Even Bob shared a listing with Charlie while he was still a broker. It seems that there is not one person without a good thing to say about Charlie King, whether it’s other brokers, clients, business contacts, or mere acquaintances. 2024 marks Charlie’s first year of retirement and suffice to say that many are sad to see him go. As Denison bids farewell, we got together with him to highlight his adventurous life in the boating world.

I started boating when I was ten, running around Fort Lauderdale in a 16′ Lyman. We lived off the middle river in 1954. When I got out of the University of Florida in 1966, I was 4F for the draft, so a friend and I bought a 40’ trawler and lived on it at a dock just north of the Las Olas bridge, where the city docks are now.

Every Christmas, we would decorate the boat and give tourists rides up and down the ICW to view the decorations. Soon a couple of other boats joined us, and we all decided to cruise together. We did this for a couple of years and then I went on to other stuff, but the other boats continued. Eventually, someone organized it and voila…today we have the Winterfest Boat Parade. I can’t say we started it, but I like to think so.

In 1969, we had a 40′ Wheeler sport fish and were in Bimini when we met treasure hunters. I ended up joining them and in January 1970, we set out to go to Jamaica where they had located a treasure wreck on the Pedro sholes. On the way down, we were captured by a Cuban Sub Chaser.

That story made headlines in The New York Times; it was a national incident as we were the second vessel ever taken by a foreign nation at gunpoint in peacetime. The first was the Pueblo taken by North Korea.

We were in Cuba for about ten days and quite frankly had a really good time there, even though the news here was daunting. Everyone thought we were done for. We were incarcerated in a converted hotel and had a run of the place. So many things happened there, but I learned that people are people and not bad by nature. This was in the Cuban Missile Crisis and a very tight time between the United States and Cuba. They thought we were spies or something.

We thought since we were there, we would go ask Castro if we could move the vessel to Havana Harbor and run our sophisticated (at the time) electronics and equipment searching the harbor. On the morning we were meant to leave to meet with Castro, they took us back to the boat, where we were met by about five of some sort of US agents. They were so out of place in their identical suits and sunglasses. The Cubans agreed to refuel us and while they did so, I conned the captain of one of the fueling vessels to give me his fag in exchange for a smoking pipe he had seen while they searched the boat.

We left there, and the next stop was Port Royal, where we were not allowed to swim or move the boat because they did not want us treasure hunting (they knew we were treasure hunting because of what happened in Cuba). We stayed in Port Royal for six months trying to negotiate a deal. One day, an oil crew boat pulled in to the marina we were docked at and I got drunk with the crew. They were coming in from an Occidental oil rig that was in the Pedro sholes. That ended up with our boat and crew being hired to do the diving to set up an oil rig on the Mosquito sholes of Nicaragua. After about a month with them, I left the boat and few home. That was one big adventure.

I joined the fire department in Boca Raton and while there I learned to fly. By 1977, I was flying all over the Caribbean and Central America. I bought a boat a 72′ Ketch built in Belize and I had it for eleven years. When I went there to register the boat, I fell in love with Belize, and we ended up bringing a four-by-four van there and I used it to travel to most of the Mayan ruins. I took a big interest in the Mayans and did a little treasure hunting in some of the ruins and getting artifacts (some would call it grave digging).

We made friends with the wood carvers (a national pastime in Belize) and started importing Ziricote wood carvings back home by plane. On one trip back, our single-engine Cessna 206 developed an oil leak just as we were leaving the Yucatan. We had to turn around and put the plane down on a grass strip in the jungle. We located the oil leak and decided to hike out of the area with our cargo and flew home commercially to get a new oil cooler. When we returned to the plane a couple weeks later, the plane was gone.

We had to go to Cancun to report the theft and with our limited Spanish, the federales were not interested in helping us, so we made friends with a girl working at the front desk at our hotel. She helped us translate with the Feds and we finally found the plane crashed in a sugar cane field 150 miles away. It had been stripped.

We thanked the girl for helping us out and I told her that if she was ever in Fort Lauderdale to look me up. She did just that and eventually became my wife. That was the start of my next big adventure.

Sonia’s family lived in Cusco, Peru, so my adventures took me to the ruins in the high Andes. Soon after we got married, our son Ryan was born to date, my most treasured adventure and I had to change my ways. I needed some kind of career, as I had quit the fire department along the way. I applied to a small brokerage firm in Pompano and went to several different brokerages until I ended up with Richard Merritt and Merritt Yacht Brokers. I worked with Merritt for 18 years. When Richard passed, I went to Bob Denison and applied. It was the best move I have ever made. He hired me on the spot. Bob was the best person I ever worked for.

Probably my most interesting boat sale was with a 115′ liveaboard dive boat that I sold five times. One of those times, I sold it to a casino owner in Curacao who turned it into a floating casino. The boat was chased out of Curacao by the authorities there and was stopped by the Navy on the way back to me and falsely accused of harboring drugs. It was not but it took a long time to charge the US Coast Guard with the destruction they caused. I sold it twice after that.

I had so many good and honest clients along the way, many I have sold multiple boats to. I learned early on that you need to treat everyone the same, no matter what price range. To a family buying their first $50k boat, that is a big expense to them, just like the guy buying a million-dollar boat. However, that $50k buyer usually moves to bigger and they remember you treated them like a millionaire they come back to you. They might just become lifelong clients and good friends. I have many. Treat all clients like family, take the time to educate them if needed. It pays off.

For his retirement, Charlie has moved to South Carolina to be with his family, including his wife, son, and three grandchildren. “They are just the love of my life,” he says. While some people may view retirement as a time to slow down and unwind, we have a feeling Charlie is just getting started on another exciting chapter in his story. We wish him the best of luck in his newest adventure.

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