Boating Life
David has always been drawn to the water: swimming, high diving and scuba, and as a boy in Hawaii, weekends at Bellows Beach with his brothers and sisters. In Oklahoma he sailed Hobie Cats on the big lakes with friends, and one of our first dates, in 1986, was on a Hobie Cat. David and his buddies managed to turtle her and right her again: a testament to David’s boating skills, and to Mikel’s swimming, patience and perseverance.
Serious boating began when we moved from Luxembourg to Washington, D.C. in 2009. David and our son Scott earned their advanced scuba certification in the Cayman Islands, and David restored a classic 32′ Marinette on the Potomac. Then came a 47′ Selene trawler in Vero Beach, Florida. We renamed her Palmaire, kept her at Herrington Harbor South on the Chesapeake, and cruised the Bay and the coast to Florida as a family.
When we moved back to Luxembourg in 2017, European electrical standards ruled out bringing Palmaire, so we looked for a boat in Europe and found a larger, newer Selene in Ålesund, Norway: Anna Sørgaard, a 2008 Selene 49. We brought her across the North Sea to Leeuwarden in the Netherlands in 2018, and in 2019 on through the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay and the Strait of Gibraltar to Varazze, Italy, her home for several years. Palmaire was sold nine months after we bought Anna, and not a moment too soon: two boats are one too many.
From Italy we cruised the Mediterranean, in 2022 with Scott to Greece, back by Sicily and Malta, and on to Barcelona, Anna’s base until 2025. That year she left the Mediterranean for good: out past Gibraltar, up the Atlantic coast to the Netherlands, through the Kiel Canal to the Baltic, Stockholm, Tallinn and the Åland Islands, and back to Copenhagen.
Next come Norway, Britain, Ireland, the Hebrides and the North Atlantic islands; see Planning for the routes.
David holds a 100-ton captain’s licence and has logged over 23,000 nautical miles on the US East Coast and in Europe.
Professional Lives
David spent his career with Hines, the privately owned global real-estate investment, development and management firm. He joined in 1994 as Controller of Hines Moscow, moved to Barcelona in 1999 to build the accounting team for the Diagonal Mar retail centre and lead its sale, and then served as Controller of Hines’ first European development fund. In 2006 he founded Hines Luxembourg Sàrl, Hines’ chief investment company in Europe, and ran it until 2009, when he became CFO of the Hines East Coast region in Washington. In 2017 he returned to Luxembourg as CFO and COO of Hines Europe, and retired on 31 March 2024. Before Hines he ran his own CPA firm; he is a retired CPA.
Mikel followed David from the US to each assignment. Also a CPA, she was a Senior Manager with EY in Luxembourg and a Director in PwC’s National Office in the US, in audit and assurance. Now retired, she volunteers with the Luxembourg Philharmonie and plays with its amateur orchestra, the Orchestre de la Place de l’Europe.