It’s mid-morning, summertime, and you just had your first swim of the day. You’re on a sailboat anchored next to 50 other sailboats filled with people from all over the world.  Your neighbors to the left are investment bankers from Stockholm and your neighbors to the right work at a hedge fund in Rio.

At around noon the flotilla of sail boats including yours will take off to the next island where the afternoon party awaits.  Before heading to the party, you have been invited over to another boat for drinks by a crew from San Francisco working for Google. 

Everything and everyone around you exudes a positive vibe.  The conversations are good, the people are interesting, and the majority of the ambiance is created by high profile working professionals from all over the world.

The Yacht Week is a sailing trip, but not just your ordinary type of holiday vacation.  Young professionals, no matter what their circumstances in the work environment are at home, come together for this one week of adventure, fun and rejuvenation.  The business suits and cufflinks are left at home, replaced by Sperrys and bathing suits.

The tailor-made parties, the good weather, the mojitos and the international flavor of the scene are all top reasons for why hard working individuals used to the office life would want to escape for a week of complete social bliss. Within this tight knit group of yuppies from over 50 different countries, it is inevitable that circumstances of networking and negotiating will arise.

I was able to meet a variety of these intellectual extroverts from different sectors this summer while working as a blogger and customer relations specialist. I can recall spending one afternoon with a crew of Brazilians working for a hedge fund in Rio.  As they began to prepare the caipirinhas, we talked about their daily routine back home.

Despite the descriptions of their tedious work hours and constant struggle to earn vacation days, they turned out to be the most enthusiastic, outgoing and decently wild group I had met.  It made sense then when they told me that a whole two years had passed since the last time they had gone on a vacation.  No one would have ever known what their real profile was at home, in the real world.  They decided The Yacht Week would be the place to live and let go.

Stories like these were few of many. To add to the list of interesting characters, there were lawyers from New York, investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, associates from Google, the marketing manager for Nespresso from Paris and accountants from AIG.  Students finishing up law school or about to start an MBA program were also part of this sea of motivated individuals.

This is a story of the truism of our times: if you work hard, you play hard.  Business deals made, networks expanded and new innovative ideas proposed between different professional sectors, all established on top of a sailboat in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.  Now that is a vacation of mighty young folk from Generation-Y.

 Sophie Winckel | Elite.