west bay yacht club

• Advertising
• Find the Magazine
• Good Jibes Podcast
• Boat In Dining
• Sailboat Charters
• Business News
• Working Waterfront
• Youth Sailing

• General Sailing

West Coast Clubs Travel East to the New York Yacht Club Resolute Cup

A recent press release from the New York Yacht Club highlighted Bay Area racer Daniel Thielman and his crew from the Corinthian Yacht Club as a new invitee to compete in the annual New York Yacht Club Resolute Cup. This year, 28 teams have been invited to this all-amateur sailing event, including seven from the West Coast: California Yacht Club, Corinthian YC of San Francisco, Newport Harbor Yacht Club, San Diego Yacht Club, Seattle Yacht Club, St. Francis Yacht Club, and San Francisco Yacht Club.

Beyond Thielman’s active campaigning of his Melges 32 Kuai on the Bay, he’s also been active nationally, winning multiple championships in the Melges 20 class, where he’s also the defending world champion. He recently returned to the Corinthian Yacht Club of San Francisco with the IC37 National Championship title won during New York Yacht Club Race Week at Newport, RI, sailed July 17–20. This September, however, will mark the first time that his club has fielded a team in the Resolute Cup, motivated by Thielman’s desire to qualify for the prestigious Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup, which will next take place in September 2025.

“Members of our Corinthian Yacht Club purchased an IC37 back in 2023 to prepare for the Invitational Cup,” said Thielman. “After a year of preparation, we’ve assembled a team that is ready to make a qualifying bid.”

Thielman will be sailing with trimmers Jen Canestra and Auric Horneman, who have been his constant and trusted teammates for over 10 years of racing Melges boats together, and Nick Voss.

“We currently race in the Melges 20, Melges 14, and IC37 one-design fleets around the country, and PHRF race our Melges 32 on San Francisco Bay,” Thielman says. “We hope that adding Nick as a tactician for the Resolute Cup, with his many years of junior, college and adult team racing experience, will give us the edge we need to be competitive.”

Since 2010, the Resolute Cup has served as a Corinthian championship for US yacht clubs and the only guaranteed pathway for an American club to earn a berth in the Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup, Corinthian (amateur) sailing’s most prestigious international competition. The seventh edition of the biennial competition — the event was not sailed in 2020 — is scheduled for September 9 to 14 at the New York Yacht Club, Harbour Court, in Newport, RI. The 2024 Resolute Cup will utilize the Club’s fleet of Sonars, with provided sails, equalized rig tune and on-the-water umpiring ensuring sailing’s ultimate level playing field. The 2024 New York Yacht Club Regatta Association regatta calendar is supported by Helly Hansen, Hammetts Hotel, Safe Harbor Marinas and Peters & May.

While Thielman has shown remarkable ability across multiple one-design classes, the Sonar, a displacement boat with a symmetric spinnaker, is a bit of a departure from what he and his team normally sail.

“Every boat we own, and every fleet we compete in, has asymmetric kites,” he says. “We have gotten in limited practices on J/22s to prepare, but with our aggressive championship race schedule in other fleets, we are mostly going to be winging it with a symmetric kite. I would not be surprised if we have a slow start, with results that steadily improve throughout the week.”

The complete list of competing teams is here: American Yacht Club, Rye, NY; Austin (Texas) Yacht Club; Bay Waveland Yacht Club, Bay St. Louis, MS; Bayview Yacht Club, Detroit, MI.; California Yacht Club, Marina del Rey, CA; Carolina Yacht Club, Charleston, SC; Charleston Yacht Club, Charleston, SC; Chicago (IL) Yacht Club; Corinthian Yacht Club, Marblehead, MA; Corinthian Yacht Club of San Francisco, Tiburon, CA; Eastern Yacht Club, Marblehead, MA; Edgewater Yacht Club, Cleveland, Ohio; Fort Worth (Texas) Yacht Club; Lakewood Yacht Club, Seabrook, Texas; Larchmont (NY.) Yacht Club; Little Traverse Yacht Club, Harbor Springs, MI; Mystic River Mudheads Sailing Association, West Mystic, CT; New York (NY) Yacht Club; Newport Harbor Yacht Club, Newport Beach, CA.; Pensacola (FL) Yacht Club; San Diego (CA) Yacht Club; Seattle (WA) Yacht Club; Shelter Island Yacht Club, Shelter Island Heights, NY; Southern Yacht Club, New Orleans, LA; St. Francis Yacht Club, San Francisco, CA; Stamford (CT) Yacht Club; Storm Trysail Club (Larchmont, NY); San Francisco Yacht Club, Belvedere, CA.

You can learn more about the Resolute Cup here .

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Notify me via e-mail if anyone answers my comment.

Time to Step Up Last Call for Rolex Big Boat Series This Week The fall brings the West's premier Grand Prix regatta with the return of the Rolex Big Boat Series. It's not too late to join the fleet.

A Firm Date What Is the Sign-Up Deadline for Baja Ha-Ha XXX? In the past, skippers have been able to sign up as late as a day before the start. Those were the good old days when life was simple.

Sponsored Post Visit Annapolis in the Fall for the Sailboat Show This year’s show is shaping up to be a doozy with over 200 sailboats and more than 550 exhibitors.

Rubbing Not Allowed It’s Back to Business in Barcelona With the America’s Cup The 37th America's Cup began in earnest this weekend: a preliminary series with all the teams competing in one-on-one match-racing eliminations off Barcelona.

Sponsored Post A ‘Save The Dater’ — Latitude 38 Baja Ha-Ha Fall Crew Party Heads up! The Latitude 38 Baja Ha-Ha Fall Crew List Party is on the calendar for September 4. See you there!

• Share full article

The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down

The dream of Próspera, founded by a U.S. corporation off the coast of Honduras, was to escape government control. The Honduran government wants it gone.

Ricardo González, legal consultant for Honduras Próspera Inc., looking out on the Honduran island of Roatán. Credit... Brian Finke for The New York Times

Supported by

By Rachel Corbett

• Aug. 28, 2024

Jorge Colindres, a freshly cologned and shaven lawyer, handed me a hard hat to take the elevator to the 14th floor of what is now the tallest building on the Honduran island of Roatán — nearly twice what the local building code allows. When construction is complete, Duna Residences will house 82 units overlooking a jungle of palm trees, the Caribbean Sea and several other new buildings that the Honduran government considers illegal.

Listen to this article, read by Frankie Corzo

If Próspera were a normal town, Colindres would be considered its mayor; his title here is “technical secretary.” As we looked out over a clearing in the trees in February, he pointed to the small office complex where he works collecting taxes and managing public finances for the city’s 2,000 or so physical residents and e-residents, many of whom have paid a fee for the option of living in Próspera or remotely incorporating a business there. Nearby is a manufacturing plant that is slated to build modular houses along the coast designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. About a mile in the other direction are some of the city’s businesses: a Bitcoin cafe and education center, a genetics clinic, a scuba shop. A delivery service for food and medical supplies will deploy its drones from this rooftop.

There’s not much else to see yet. But the Delaware-based company that founded this experimental town in 2017 has raised $120 million in investments — including from venture-capital funds backed by the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen — to transform the territory, about twice the size of Monaco, into the most developed start-up city in the world. Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.

A California company offers a Montessori education for approximately 60 students. Security is provided by a private firm of armed guards. An arbitration center staffed by three retired Arizona judges handles dispute resolution. (In order to enter the jurisdiction, I was told I needed to sign an “agreement of coexistence” binding myself to 4,202 pages of rules, violations of which would be subject to the jurisdictional authority of the arbitration center.)

Próspera has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend.

“I can tell you when Próspera became most real for me,” Friedman told the audience. “When I sat down to fill out my informed-consent forms that said, like, ‘This agreement is adjudicated under the laws of the Próspera ZEDE; any disputes are arbitrated by the Próspera Arbitration Center.’ Like, you are under a different set of laws.”

There are more than 5,400 of these special economic zones in the world, ranging on a spectrum from free ports for duty-free trading all the way to the special administrative region of Hong Kong. About 1,000 zones have cropped up in just the past decade, including dozens of start-up cities — sometimes called charter cities — most of them in developing nations like Zambia and the Philippines. Some have actually grown into major urban centers, like Shenzhen, which went from a fishing village to one of China’s largest cities, with a G.D.P. of $482 billion, after it was designated a special economic zone in 1980.

Each zone offers a degree of escape from government oversight and taxation, a prospect that has excited libertarian and anarcho-capitalist thinkers at least since Ayn Rand imagined a free-market utopia called Galt’s Gulch in “Atlas Shrugged.” Today, escalating clashes between the government and Big Tech — like the S.E.C.’s regulatory war on crypto, or the Federal Aviation Administration’s repeated investigations into SpaceX — have spurred some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to seek increasingly splintered-off hubs of sovereignty. And with government dysfunction preventing reforms even in wealthy cities like San Francisco, locked in a decades-long affordable-housing crisis, and New York City, which just lost out on as much as $1 billion when Albany scrapped a 17-years-in-the-making congestion pricing plan that would have funded public transit, it’s not hard to see the appeal of starting from scratch.

In promotional materials, Próspera markets itself to “21st-century pioneers” craving not just laissez-faire policies but also “good times and Caribbean vibes.” Direct flights from Miami and Houston can transport these digital nomads to Roatán in less than three hours. Then, from a chaise longue on the beach, they can register a business with the tap of a button. Although only one residential building has been built so far, a forthcoming eco-condo was during my visit courting buyers seeking “more personal freedom” and less “political drama.” Próspera’s original investment plan projected that by 2030 the city would be home to 38,000 residents, and that foreign direct investment in the country would top $500 million by next year.

But plenty of other people find Próspera’s goal — “building the future of human governance: privately run and for-profit” — unsettling. Critics have described it as a neocolonial state within a state, or an example of corporate monarchy, where yacht-owning C.E.O.s exploit land and labor in a poor country. Keller Easterling, the urbanist and architectural theorist, considers Próspera a city in name only, akin to “say, Mattress City.” Really, she says, the zones are low-tax, deregulated marketplaces.

As we peered over the edge of the tower’s rooftop, I considered the story of a subcontractor who was working at the apartment tower at night two months earlier. The power had gone out, and he walked to the edge of the floor to yell down to his crew to turn on a generator, but took a step too far and fell to his death. If companies choose their own regulatory frameworks, as they do in Próspera, who holds them accountable if they endanger or harm one of their employees?

“Próspera ZEDE has its own set of labor systems,” Colindres said when I asked him about it later. He told me the worker’s family was compensated appropriately — receiving at least as much as was required under Honduran law — but he declined to disclose details. If an independent investigation took place, its findings have not been released to the public. After all, the point of a place like Próspera is that there isn’t really a “public” to speak of.

This lack of transparency is one common criticism of Próspera, and today, it’s unclear whether this experiment can continue. In recent years, vehement opposition from the Honduran government and neighboring communities has imperiled Próspera’s future. Now its fate — and that of the private-cities movement writ large — hangs in the balance of a high-stakes case before an international tribunal.

There are about three dozen charter cities currently operating in the world, according to an estimate from the Adrianople Group, an advisory firm that concentrates on special economic zones. Several others are under development, including the East Solano Plan, run by a real estate corporation that has spent the last seven years buying up $900 million of ranch land in the Bay Area to build a privatized alternative to San Francisco; Praxis, a forthcoming “cryptostate” on the Mediterranean; and the Free Republic of Liberland , a three-square-mile stretch of unclaimed floodplain between Serbia and Croatia. Many of the same ideologically aligned names — Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Friedman — recur as financial backers; Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects and a critic of public housing, is behind several of their urban (or metaversal) designs.

Srinivasan, the former Coinbase chief technology officer and now an adviser to Pronomos Capital, Friedman’s fund to build start-up cities, argued in his 2022 book “The Network State” that these new business-friendly hubs would soon compete with nation-states and, one day, replace them. “The Network State” was inspired, he said, by the state of Israel. “That country was started by a book,” he tweeted in 2022, referring to Theodor Herzl’s 1896 manifesto, “The Jewish State.” “You can found a tribe,” Srinivasan said on a podcast. “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism — when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a ‘reverse diaspora.’”

The concept might have stayed on the fringes of libertarian and neoreactionary forums had Paul Romer, who would go on to be the chief economist of the World Bank and win the Nobel Prize, not made charter cities the subject of an influential 2009 TED Talk. He projected a photo of students in an African country doing their homework under streetlights, explaining that their government required the electric company to provide power at such low prices that the company decided not to service the homes in their area at all. When the president tried to reform the system, he went on, consumers and business leaders pushed back, and ultimately, nothing changed. Romer argued that charter cities would give developing countries a chance to prosper by ceding uninhabited territory to wealthier nations to develop.

This ruling country would act as a “guarantor” to the host country and write its own laws and regulations, which would attract private companies to invest and build the cities. In turn, jobs, technology and educational opportunities would pour into the host country, which would share in the revenue, too. Locals would stop leaving for richer countries, migrants would come to the zone, a virtuous cycle would take hold and students wouldn’t need to do their homework in the streets. “The city can be built,” Romer said in his talk. “And we can scale this model. We can go do it over and over again.”

Around the same time that Romer was delivering his TED Talk, Honduran soldiers stormed the home of the country’s left-wing president, Manuel Zelaya. They led him outside at gunpoint, still in his pajamas, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica. Zelaya had been planning to hold a public referendum on reforming the Constitution, which his critics saw as an attempt to illegally extend term limits. Shortly after the coup, the military held another election; it put into office the conservative candidate Porfirio Lobo, who lost the previous contest to Zelaya. Several nations, including the United States, questioned the legitimacy of an election staged by leaders of the coup.

President Lobo’s chief of staff, the Harvard-educated lawyer Octavio Sánchez, saw Romer’s TED Talk and thought it was just what Honduras needed to achieve economic prosperity. Sánchez arranged a meeting in Miami among Romer, Lobo and the president of Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández. Lobo told Romer that to do something as significant as he proposed — to create a zone that would replace Honduran laws with those of a wealthier nation — they’d need to amend the Constitution.

Romer visited Tegucigalpa soon after. Honduras, a country where over half the population lived in poverty and 75,000 people left each year for better opportunities in the United States, was an ideal testing ground for his vision. When Romer returned home, he recorded a follow-up TED Talk titled “The World’s First Charter City?”

A tumultuous three years followed: Romer and the oversight board he helped set up were sidelined, and the Honduran Supreme Court initially rejected the constitutional amendment. But Congress, led by Hernández, dismissed the four opposing judges in what some critics called a “technical coup.” (Hernández, who succeeded Lobo as president of Honduras, continued to have a career marred by corruption and was recently sentenced to 45 years in a United States federal prison for drug trafficking.) In 2013, Honduras amended its constitution to allow for the creation of autonomous zones, following China and the United Arab Emirates.

I met Colindres outside his office on a “Wellness Wednesday.” Catering staff had set out fruit and granola bars on the counter of an open-air cafeteria at the city’s headquarters, a small complex of three interconnected buildings on a manicured tropical lawn. A guard in black combat fatigues with a double-barreled rifle paced near a porch swing. Colindres, who is 31, peeled an orange as he began to tell me about his family’s history in Honduras. One of his grandfathers fought in the Honduran armed forces against communism during the Cold War. Later, his uncle, the president of the chamber of commerce, was taken hostage by Communist guerrillas. Colindres’s hero is the family’s capitalist success story: his great-grandfather Constantino Marinakys, who immigrated from Greece after World War I and built a fortune, in part by opening grocery stores during the country’s banana boom in the early 20th century.

In the late 1800s, Honduras owed immense debt to Britain, and began offering land and financial incentives to attract foreign investment. Eventually, U.S. banana companies, like Cuyamel and United Fruit (now Chiquita), built railroads, port infrastructure and other projects in exchange for land. By the beginning of World War I, O. Henry had named the country the original “banana republic.” The six largest banana companies owned more than a million acres of fertile land on Honduras’s northern coast, and in 1911, one orchestrated a coup to install a puppet government.

Where many see a story about exploitation, Colindres describes one of private-sector productivity. As workers migrated to the coasts to work, the plantations grew into small cities with their own housing, schools, hospitals and stores. “Back then there was very poor infrastructure, and so when the banana companies came everything had to be done,” Colindres said. “No roads, no electricity — all of what we consider public infrastructure in Honduras, it was put in by the private sector.”

Colindres’s political views started hardening as a teenager living through the coup of 2009. He went to law school and came to the conclusion that he’d have to leave Honduras for the United States if he wanted to have a fulfilling career. But then came news that the ZEDE constitutional amendment had passed. Honduran law preserved national authority over a few fields, like criminal law, but granted the zones broad freedom to establish their own courts, fiscal policies and labor and environmental protections.

In 2014, as required by the amendment, Juan Orlando Hernández appointed a group to oversee the ZEDEs. Early members included a granddaughter of the final Austrian emperor and a band of Republicans from the U.S. that included the former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the former Reagan aide Faith Whittlesey, the libertarian economist Mark Skousen and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan. A couple of years later, Honduran lawmakers heard about an Arizona entrepreneur named Erick Brimen who was lobbying Washington to make creative use of the U.S. Constitution’s Compact Clause to pass a bill establishing low-regulation “prosperity zones.” Brimen was having a hard time implementing his vision in the States, so took the Hondurans up on their offer to develop a zone like the one Romer imagined, but run by a private company rather than by another nation.

Brimen, who grew up in a wealthy family in Venezuela until he moved to the United States at 12, met Gabriel Delgado, a Guatemalan entrepreneur who had already identified a couple of plots of land in Roatán as potential sites. In 2017, they decided to work together, with Brimen acting as chief executive and Delgado heading up fund-raising and real estate development. They secured early investments from Friedman’s Pronomos Capital and an unnamed investor “behind” SpaceX. But their success in establishing the first ZEDE, they said, is due in part to keeping their ideological beliefs quiet. “Instead of saying we are trying to create a libertopia,” Brimen told the libertarian magazine Reason in 2021, “we shifted the conversation away from advancing a political ideology toward, yes, liberty, but as a tool to development.” After a brainstorming session, Brimen came up with a name that might accomplish that: Honduras Próspera, Inc.

When Colindres heard the news that the project had broken ground, he reached out to Brimen, who expressed interest in his 2019 paper “Make Honduras Great: Charter Cities as a Development Program.”

“He said, ‘I also want to make Honduras great,’” Colindres recalled. He promised Brimen his support. “Let me bring all my contacts and all my clients and everybody to join,” he told him. “And then that’s what I did.”

Próspera has now incorporated 222 businesses into the ZEDE, including an outsource staffing agency and scores of experimental medical centers. Minicircle, founded by two young biohackers, offers a product that they say might cure Alzheimer’s and suppress all tumors; Symbiont Labs manufactures implants that turn people into “self-sovereign cyborgs”; the Bay Islands Fitness and Transformation Center offers affordable semaglutide injections; and the Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine provides stem-cell treatments. (A man sitting next to me on my flight from Roatán showed me severe burns on his arms that he’d come to treat at the clinic.) While I was visiting, a “pop-up city” called Vitalia used a dome it had erected on Próspera’s grounds to host events for biotech innovators who want to “make death optional.”

Much of the activity at Próspera takes place not in the area where the Duna tower stands and Colindres works but a 15-minute drive away at Pristine Bay, a green, gated golf community and beach club. Starting in 2021, Próspera began incorporating parts of the resort into the zone. Down by the tennis courts, I saw Vitalia’s white-tented dome, though organizers did not allow me to attend any of its events. Reason wouldn’t grant me access to a conference it was hosting at the hotel either. So I hung out by the pool, and down the street at AmityAge Academy, an old restaurant that a Slovakian math tutor had turned into a Bitcoin education center and cafe.

That’s where I met Zussel Ramos, at the time AmityAge’s 25-year-old lead educator, next to a bookshelf stocked with Ludwig von Mises’s “Bureaucracy,” Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism” and Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life .” I bought a coffee — the barista let me pay with “fiat” paper money on a one-time basis — and then Ramos took me on a tour. On the walls downstairs hung a Bitcoin mining machine, a portrait of Guy Fawkes astride a bucking green stallion and a map of Roatán with colored squares of paper marking the dozens of businesses that now accept Bitcoin, largely thanks to Ramos’s door-to-door persistence.

Ramos told me she couldn’t wait to move to Próspera — probably to the Duna tower. Then she’d apply for physical residency, giving her the right to vote for ZEDE leadership — one vote for every square meter of land she owned, under the current rules. For now, very few people actually live full time in the ZEDE, which is a checkerboard of territory across both the island and the mainland. It started out with 58 acres in Roatán, but since a ZEDE’s territory doesn’t need to be contiguous, it has added 385 acres in La Ceiba on the mainland, followed by another 239 acres of Roatán’s Port Royal and then 322 acres of Pristine Bay.

Just how much land the Próspera ZEDE plans to absorb is the source of much of the conflict that now vexes the project. Early promotional images sparked outrage for depicting the north coast of the island dotted with skyscrapers, futuristic houses and yacht-filled ports, rather than the wooden shacks and jungle that exist there now. One image that forecast the growth of Próspera from a village to a town to a city made it look as if the project had “started engulfing the areas around it,” says Ricardo González, a legal consultant for Honduras Próspera Inc. “It was taken literally” by the people who lived in those areas, he says, but it shouldn’t have been. “Everything is voluntary, we cannot just pick up your land and say now it’s part of us.”

But it is also true that the ZEDE law allows the Honduran government to compel landowners to sell to a zone, so long as they are paid fair market value for the property. Brimen insists that Próspera would never take advantage of that provision, because it violates the sanctity of private-property rights, and that the company has self-imposed “the highest possible limitations on this in its charter.” Nevertheless, the provision’s existence set in motion a spectacular series of events as Próspera began incorporating land.

The Duna tower stands next to a fork in the road, with one path leading to the Próspera gate, manned by guards carrying guns and contracts, and the other winding down a dirt path to a small fishing village called Crawfish Rock. Roatán, thanks to its thriving tourism industry, generates more money than many parts of Honduras, but Crawfish Rock — home to a Black, English-speaking community (Roatán is a former British colony) — is an exception. Turquoise and peach houses sag and lean on stilts, their roofs patchworks of corrugated-metal scraps.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, vice president of Crawfish Rock’s patronato , or community board, it was 2019 when the first Próspera representatives came to the community, informing them of plans to develop a nearby resort. “It’s quite normal for us to have this kind of restricted, gated community popping up,” Cárdenas said. The island is full of them. They also wanted to do community development, they told her, and offered small-business loans to Crawfish Rock residents. But then odd things started to happen, Cárdenas said.

Próspera stationed armed guards on the road. Then Brimen tried to form a new patronato that Cárdenas said was stacked with Próspera employees. (A Próspera representative disputed this.) In 2020, Cárdenas received a voice message from someone in the community that said, “This project is not a normal project.” So she and Luisa Connor, the president of the patronato, began to research Próspera. They learned about the ZEDE law and about the involuntary sale of land. “By no means did they explain to us” what a ZEDE was, Connor says. “They came as a normal resort they were going to build next to the community.” (A Próspera representative disputed this, saying the company held multiple town halls describing the project to residents.)

Distrust spread among members of the community, who felt they had been lied to about Próspera’s intentions. In September 2020, Brimen tried to address the conflict by organizing a meeting in Crawfish Rock. Connor wrote a letter asking him to postpone it, because Covid was spreading rapidly on the island and the hospitals there were full. Brimen, who says he was invited by village elders, held the meeting that evening anyway, accompanied by guards. He stood on a second-story porch reading into a microphone the parts of the ZEDE law pertaining to land expropriation. “That’s when all hell broke loose,” Cárdenas said. People rushed up the steps, some shouting that he should leave, others to let him speak; shoves were exchanged, and Brimen’s MacBook tumbled off the railing. He yelled at people to back up and stop violating his right to social distance. Trucks of police officers arrived.

Brimen later said that, before he was interrupted, he was trying to point out the ways the law restricts, rather than promotes, the forced sale of land. But a video of the encounter circulated throughout Honduran media, and the fear of expropriation became a galvanizing message used by anti-ZEDE groups on the mainland and the other Bay Islands. From that point on, the narrative changed from “ZEDEs are bad because they are violating constitutional rights,” González says, to the more forceful “ZEDEs are bad because they’re going to take your land.”

A national protest movement was born, and prominent politicians turned against the project. In 2021, Xiomara Castro, the wife of the ousted President Zelaya, made repealing the ZEDEs a central promise of her election campaign. The zones became associated with the corruption of Juan Orlando Hernández, the president at the time, whom many Hondurans now revile. Castro won with a clear majority. In 2022, Honduras’s Congress unanimously repealed the law and passed a constitutional reform that would abolish the three existing ZEDEs. “Never again will we carry the stereotype of the banana republic,” Castro declared to the U.N. General Assembly a few months later.

There was one problem, however: Congress, mired in competing legislative priorities, failed to ratify the reform. Furthermore, the original ZEDE law guaranteed the companies 50 years of legal stability — no matter what changes were made after a zone was founded. The net result is that Próspera is in a state of legal limbo.

Delgado seemed bewildered by the staunch opposition to Próspera. How had his dream to enrich Central America become a political piñata? “We’re not crooks,” he told me. “We’re just guys trying to get something good done.” He said he was inspired to help found Próspera after reading Machiavelli’s writings on the impossibility of reforming a system from within. “The idea is that if you go to a place where nothing, nobody has a stake, there’s no entrenched interests, you can make really deep reforms that won’t affect any of the players,” he said. Years of dysfunction and corruption would be replaced by radically simple governance. A free market and political stability would attract top innovators and investors from the West while empowering Latin America’s legions of microentrepreneurs — the guys on the side of the road selling oranges or “a chicken leg in a bag,” Delgado said — to grow real businesses.

Crawfish Rock, home to a Black, English-speaking community. Conflict with Próspera over the ZEDE law sparked a nationwide protest movement.

But in seeking to sidestep politics, Próspera instead ran straight into them. The endemic corruption in Honduras, the sort of thing Próspera was supposed to combat, was also what enabled its creation and has plagued its pursuit of legitimacy. For Hondurans, the prospect of American capitalists promising prosperity may instead resurrect fears of exploitation and dispossession. Despite Próspera’s fantasy of exit, it uses roads, hospitals and ports built by the municipal government, and it shares an economy and ecosystem with its neighbors in Crawfish Rock. The national government that granted its right to exist, meanwhile, may still take it away.

In 2022, the government began stripping Próspera of some of the special privileges it was granted under its predecessors. It halted the company’s tax-exempt customs service, allowing the zone to continue to import goods only if it paid the same duties as the rest of Honduras. Colindres said that the National Banking and Insurance Commission also pressured Honduran banks to shut down accounts of Próspera businesses and bar lenders from financing its projects. Duna Residences, for example, “was going to be financed by one of the biggest banks of Honduras,” Colindres said. But once President Castro came to power, the financing evaporated and the building was delayed. “The third tower would already be under construction if they hadn’t done that.”

At the end of 2022, Honduras Próspera Inc. and its affiliates filed an astronomical $10.775 billion lawsuit against the state in a World Bank tribunal called the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Próspera is thought to have a good chance of prevailing in part, critics say, because the court is biased toward corporations, which can bring suit against nation-states but cannot be sued by them.

A win for Próspera could demonstrate sufficient legal stability to attract investors and set the precedent for new cities around the world. If it loses, start-up city founders will need to look for new legal strategies. Colindres said that his mission now is to try to persuade the government, “whether this government or the next government,” to stop “harassing” the banks and let them finance Próspera projects. That could be the government of Juan Orlando Hernández’s wife, Ana García de Hernández, who would soon announce her candidacy for the 2025 presidential election.

With building delayed, the view from the Duna tower’s rooftop looked like little more than a construction zone — a patch of dirt littered with piles of two-by-fours and wooden pallets. There were as many sheds as finished buildings. Still, some think Próspera may already be too far along to fail: There is simply too much capital already invested, too many commitments made, to have them torn apart in Tegucigalpa. The government is making “emotional arguments more than anything else,” González told me. “If they had the legal right to do what they’re trying to accomplish, they’d have already done it.”

Read by Frankie Corzo

Narration produced by Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Anj Vancura

Explore The New York Times Magazine

The Interview: The actress Jenna Ortega talked about learning to protect herself and the hard lessons of childhood stardom .

Audre Lorde’s Afterlives: A new biography shows how the feminist thinker, who is celebrated as a prophet of empowerment and self-care , saw our future.

The Meaning of ‘Genocide’: Debates over how to describe conflicts in Gaza, Myanmar and elsewhere are channeling a controversy as old as the word itself .

Biden’s Interrupted Presidency: Joe Biden sought the presidency nearly all his life. When he finally got there, it brought out his best — and eventually his worst .

A Medical Mystery in Canada: Doctors identified a cluster of patients with similar, unexplained brain diseases. In the absence of answers, a political maelstrom ensued .

Advertisement

Welcome to the Magnificent Bay Club at Westshore

Discover the epitome of sophisticated living at The Bay Club, where luxury meets leisure in historic South Tampa. Just a stone’s throw away from downtown and St. Petersburg, this haven boasts not only five-star amenities but also stunning waterfront vistas from the Clubhouse. Whether you fancy a casual or formal dining experience, seek catering services, or indulge in recreational activities, it’s all here for you. Embrace the various offerings of the Club and relish your home away from home!

Our Mission

Provide exceptional customer service, private club experience, and an inviting social atmosphere while creating value and delivering rich family traditions.

• We will provide an exceptional customer service experience at The Bay Club (“Club”).
• We will provide a superior quality/price combination for all products and services to encourage participation.
• We will maintain all facilities at a level consistent with the expectations of the members, committees, and Board of Directors (“Board”). We will maintain and enhance the facilities to ensure the best possible conditions aligned with our budget.
• We will creatively provide recreational and social activities for all ages of our members and families.
• We will promote a work environment, that offers transparency and open communication, promotes new ideas, and provides a fair compensation package that rewards the efforts of our staff.
• We will strive to be inclusive and attract new members, review membership packages, and adjust according to economic conditions and/or The Bay Club budget requirements maintain full memberships in all categories, and preserve the financial soundness of the Club.
• We will continuously assess financial and other business strategies to measure the outcomes and annually update the plan to ensure that the Club adapts to the changing internal and external environment.

Upcoming Regattas

Sign up and

GET 20% OFF

Your first boat rental

Welcome to Sailo !

Your code is:

Enjoy 20% off

• Explore boats
• Text (910) 447-2456 Call (910) 447-2456

Departure date

Trip duration, multiple days (less than 1 week), weekly trip show boats that have weekly prices. most weekly boats outside of the us are available only saturday to saturday., boat length: 5ft -, manufacturer, boat build year: -, weekly trip, price: $ - $, 56 boat rentals in st petersburg: yacht charters.

In addition to the best offers we have for boat and yacht charters in St. Petersburg, FL, see also options available for rent in these nearby locations:

• 55 boat rentals in Waterfront Arts District, St. Petersburg, FL
• 55 boat rentals in St. Petersburg, FL
• 55 boat rentals in Historic Old Northeast, St. Petersburg, FL
• 55 boat rentals in United Central, St. Petersburg, FL
• 55 boat rentals in Greater Pinellas Point, St. Petersburg, FL
• 55 boat rentals in Gulfport, FL
• 52 boat rentals in Pinellas Park, FL
• 55 boat rentals in Saint Petersburg Beach, FL
• 55 boat rentals in St. Pete Beach, FL
• 55 boat rentals in Yacht Club Estates, St. Petersburg, FL

Rent a Boat in St Petersburg, Florida with Sailo!

Looking for a boat rental in St. Petersburg, Florida? A boating trip is always a great way to experience St. Petersburg. Choose your perfect St. Petersburg yacht charter with Sailo and set a course for adventure! When you rent a boat in St. Petersburg, you can choose your own itinerary and explore at your leisure. Want to relax on deck? Prefer to do some fishing? Or maybe you just want to escape the crowds? Find your ideal yacht rental in St. Petersburg with Sailo.

Private boat rentals in St. Petersburg

Explore the beauty of Florida state from St. Petersburg by a yacht charter. You’ll find 39 boats to rent in St. Petersburg with Sailo, for the best choice. Set sail on one of our sailboat rentals in St Pete . You can also choose from catamaran charters in St Pete , available to rent. What better way to discover the shores of Florida than from the deck of a luxury motor yacht? Browse the motor boat rentals in St Pete on Sailo for your ideal boating trip. You’ll also find a party boat in St Pete , perfect for groups of 13 or more available in Florida.

How to rent a yacht in St. Petersburg, Florida?

Wondering how to find the best boat charter in St. Petersburg for a memorable experience on the water in Florida? We have created a set of advanced filters to help you navigate easily our database of St. Petersburg yacht rentals and find the one for you. First pick a start date and then choose your trip duration. You can go for an extraordinary of 2, 4 hours or full day experience. Next, select the number of guests, the type of boat and the price range you are comfortable with. The crew filter helps you narrow down the results to the boats with the captain included in the price, or bareboats that you’ll captain yourself. Choose the boat you want in Florida, to view more pics, read description and reviews. Message the owner if you have any questions or continue with your booking request.

How much does it cost to rent a boat in St. Petersburg, FL?

St. Petersburg boat charters for daily trips are available at an average of €1100 per day in Florida. Cheaper boats (sometimes with no captain included) may be rented for €250. Our St. Petersburg premium charters may have price tags up to €6500, with crew, fuel, docking fees and other extras added to your budget.

Can I pay in installments for my Sailo boat rental?

A lot of our boat owners allow payment in installments, particularly for the weekly boat charters in St. Petersburg. First installment is always charged at the time the booking is confirmed. To find out if a boat has an installment plan, reach out to the boat representative and ask details via 'Message Owner' before you submit the booking or check out the Payment Schedule at top of the booking page.

Because we love the ocean

Sailing is a great way to experience nature. So we like to remind everyone that keeping nature as beautiful as possible involves a little effort from all of us. Some of our tips for responsible boating include:

• Don’t litter or throw waste overboard - take rubbish home and dispose of it responsibly
• Eco-friendly sunblock can help prevent damage to marine life
• buy local and sustainable food products

However long you’re sailing for, a little goes a long way. Read more about responsible boating.

Popular locations to rent a boat in Florida :

• Miami yacht rentals
• boat rentals Fort Lauderdale
• boat rentals in Key West
• Key Largo boat rentals
• boat rental in Marathon, FL
• rent a boat in Islamorada
• Marco island boat rental
• boat rentals in Tampa, FL
• boat rentals in Miami Beach
• boat rental in Cape Coral, Florida
• boat rental in Fort Myers
• boat rental Naples, FL
• boat rentals in St. Petersburg, FL
• boat rentals in West Palm Beach
• boat rental in Hollywood, Florida
• boat rentals in Miami, South Beach

Popular boat types in Florida among renters:

• party boat rental in Miami, FL
• catamaran rentals in Miami, FL
• sailboat rentals in Florida
• catamaran charter in Key West
• sailboat rentals in Miami
• sailboat rentals in Fort Lauderdale
• FAQ and Policies
• Accessibility Statement
• Boat Rentals
• Boat Calculator
• Discover Boating
• Community questions
• Referral Program
• British Virgin Islands
• La Paz, Mexico
• Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
• Key Largo, FL
• St. Vincent and Grenadines

West Bay Yacht Club

2024 officers and board members, 2020 officers and board.

• payment-made
• payment-cancelled
• cruising calendar
• racing calendar
• racing calendar placeholder
• activities calendar
• activities calendar placeholder
• membership 2020
• racing fees
• racing fees placeholder
• varnum race donation
• varnum benefit overview

 St. Petersburg Sailing Association

Welcome to SPSA!

The St. Petersburg Sailing Association is a dedicated group of sailors who race and cruise throughout the year on Tampa Bay. We are a relaxed, sailing-focused, volunteer-run club with one core mission: to encourage participation in the noble art of sailing . Let’s go sailing!

We always love to welcome new members. Whether or not you own a sailboat, joining SPSA is a fun, easy way to get involved in the sailing community and get on the water.

New to racing? No problem! Not only do we host cruising events and casual sailing opportunities, we also host regular racing seminars and would love to show you the ropes.

All of our 36 scheduled regattas, cruises, and educational seminars are included in the annual membership fee of just $55. That’s only $1.50 per event!

Still have questions? Send us an email to learn more: [email protected]

• Restaurants
• Attractions
• Real Estate
• Neighborhoods
• Browse Nightlife »
• Stand Up Comedy
• Dance Clubs
• Karaoke Bars
• Live Music Bars
• Live Music Clubs
• R&B/Soul Music
• Sports Bars
• Trance Music
• Hotel Lounge
• Strip Clubs
• Live Music Venues
• Blues Clubs
• Cocktail Bars
• Clearwater Beach
• New Port Richey
• Spring Hill
• Saint Pete Beach
• St Pete Beach
• Peninsula Suburbs & North
• St. Petersburg
• Old Bayside / Marina
• Carver City - Lincoln Gardens
• Downtown Tampa
• Northeast Community
• New Suburb Beautiful
• Town N Country
• Historic Ybor
• Saint Petersburg
• Tours & Things To Do

St. Petersburg Yacht Club

St. petersburg yacht club photos.

Sunday • Featured: @rebeccafromflorida • ALWAYS tag:

Christmas Eve festivities

Not yet Ned Stark #winterisNOTcoming #ilivewhereyouvacation

Regatta time! ⛵

Fun weekend racing in St.Pete. I did alright, finishing 4th overall. I also made the front page of Sailing Anarchy and CatSailingNews!⛵️

Fun first day of sailing on this machine!⛵️

Tags: boat, harbor / marina, monument / landmark, non-profit organization, ocean, suncoast tiger bay, venues & event spaces, water, Downtown , Nightlife , Restaurants , Sports & Recreation , Cocktail Bars , Bars , Clubs , Boating

Is this your business? Enhance it for greater exposure.

Make sure your information is up-to-date.

We are a Private Yacht Club ~ Founded in 1909, and one of the oldest Yacht Club's on Florida's West Coast

Don't see the business you're looking for? Add it here

Columbia Restaurant - St. Petersburg

North straub park, gas light deli, la veranda bed & breakfast, florida international museum, st. petersburg serpentarium, mirror lake park, williams park, straub park - south soreno, straub park - north downtown waterfront park, st. petersburg museum of history, museum of fine arts, morean arts center, gratzzi italian grille, florida holocaust museum, johnny rockets group inc, melting pot, zatar mediterranean cuisine, bellagio restaurante, hookah cafe, ben & jerrys, mike's tap & tavern, milano's pizza & central deli, coney island sandwiches & grill, st pete brasserie, pacific wave restaurant, the kitchen, tokyo sushi cafe in baywalk, messineo's gourmet market, chateau france restaurant, primi urban cafe, india grill, green chili indian bistro, central avenue oyster bar, mac sub xix inc, mastry's bar & grill, china kitchen, meze 119 - international bistro, crowley's downtown, the lemon grass, joey brooklyn's famous pizza, schakolad chocolate factory, rollbotto sushi, burrito boarder, the dome grill, five bucks drinkery, red mesa cantina, the moon under water, parkshore grill, cassis american brasserie, 400 beach seafood & tap house, courtyard by marriott st. petersburg downtown, the pier hotel, ponce de leon boutique hotel, the birchwood, hampton inn & suites st. petersburg/downtown, america's best inn - downtown st. pete, hotel indigo st petersburg downtown, hollander boutique hotel, hilton st. petersburg bayfront.

• Explore Downtown
• More Attractions
• More Restaurants
• More Hotels

Restaurants / Nightlife / Events / Attractions / Hotels / Real Estate / Jobs / Directory / Neighborhoods / Other City Guides

Add Your Business

List Your Event

Places to Stay

© 2024 StPetersburg.com: A City Guide by Boulevards . All Rights Reserved. Advertise with us | Contact us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Site Map