Yachts, Seashells, and Metal Detectors: A Globetrotting Journey

Join us for a captivating conversation with Dean Curbishley, a globetrotter with an incredible story to share. From his beginnings in a small English town to working on Tina Turner's villa in the south of France for eight years, Dean's journey is one of adventure, serendipity, and personal growth. In this episode, we dive into Dean's experiences working on yachts, searching for seashells in the Caribbean, and his current venture in industrial metal detection, while also uncovering hidden gems and insider tips for exploring the stunning region of Southern France.

Introduction

Nathaniel DeSantis:Welcome to No Tourists Allowed, a podcast where two recognized travel industry executives with a combined 71 years on the inside of travel and technology give up their secrets to the thing everyone wants to do. Travel better, pay less, and see more of the world. Here are your hosts, Mike Putman and James Ferrara.

Mike Putman:Good day, everyone. This is Mike Putman, and James is traveling now. He has an exciting project that he's working on, so hopefully next week he'll be able to give us some insight. He will not be with us, but our producer since season one, Nathaniel DeSantis, is sitting in for James's place. Welcome, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel DeSantis:Thank you for having me. It's fun, my first time actually co-hosting the podcast. Everyone's used to hearing me at the start of the episode introing it, but it's fun to actually be a part of it right now. Thank you for having me as a co-host.

Mike Putman:Absolutely. Thank you for doing it. Nathaniel is a producer for our podcast and many other professional podcasts, but today he's going to be a host. We also have a very special guest, Mr. Dean Kerbishley. Welcome, Dean.

Dean Kerbishley:Thank you for having me.

Mike Putman:Thanks for being on No Tourists Allowed. Dean is someone I've known for quite some time. He is just one of those guys, just a super interesting guy. He's not a travel executive like a lot of our normal hosts are, but he spent a good bit of his life traveling and has some really interesting stories. Hopefully, he'll be able to share some of those today. Dean, why don't we start off with you telling our audience about growing up, where you grew up, and what that was like?

Early Life and Military Service

Dean Kerbishley:Well, I grew up in a small town in the southwest of England called Honiton in Devonshire. It is quite a rural town with a lot of retirees there and not a great deal of industry. It’s about ten miles from the coast in a beautiful part of the country. It rains a lot, but I was set on moving abroad from a very young age. I did very well in what we have is the army cadets in England, which you can join when you're eleven and you leave when you're sixteen. I stayed in for that whole five-year duration. I actually reached quite a high rank in my county, and at the age of sixteen, I decided to join the regular army in what's called a Junior Leaders Regiment. Basically, it's two years of boot camp and then you go into the adult army at eighteen with a minimum of a Lance Corporal ranking.

Mike Putman:Nice.

Dean Kerbishley:However, I didn't quite complete that. Once I came out of there, I went back into full-time education to do microelectronics. It was at a time when computers were just being developed, and the government actually paid people to go and learn about microelectronics and the internal architecture of computers. I did that for a couple of years in Plymouth and then got a job after that, very close to where I was from. Fortunately, that place closed down and I had an opportunity to go to the South of France where my cousin, who was in the merchant navy, lived. He'd retired from that and he was working on private motor yachts. He kindly invited me to come down to Nice in the South of France and work with him for a summer.

Mike Putman:By the way, for those of you who are watching the video, that is a peacock over Dean's shoulder.

Nathaniel DeSantis:I was going to comment that you can see it moving around.

Mike Putman:There he is. I'm telling you, Dean is quite an interesting character and his collection of birds is only part of it. All right, Dean, so you moved down to the South of France and your cousin is working on these yachts. Did you get a job doing that?

Moving to the South of France

Dean Kerbishley:Actually, I took the bus from my hometown all the way to the South of France—thirty hours on the bus. My cousin told me to just walk into this bar in this small town called Villefranche-sur-Mer. That town has got a lot of history; that's actually where the Rolling Stones lived in the seventies. My cousin told me to walk into this bar and ask for this particular guy because my cousin was away on the boat and would be back in a few days. I walked into the bar and asked for this guy whose nickname was Augie. It turns out he was sitting right next to me and he had absolutely no idea that I was coming. My cousin told me I could happily stay at Augie's house until he returned, but the guy knew nothing of me. Anyway, he let me stay and eventually my cousin showed up. Then he took me down to this other small town called Antibes in the South of France where his boat was in port. I worked on his boat and lived on the boat, doing a lot of work on it during the winter off-season.

Mike Putman:For our listeners who don't know, that area of the South of France connects to Monte Carlo. All the big yachts go to Antibes because they're too big to get into the harbor of Monte Carlo. The really big ones, what I would refer to as super yachts, are there in Antibes.

Constructing Tina Turner's Villa

Dean Kerbishley:Exactly. That was an interesting time, and then that job came to an end. I worked for a marine electronics company that was based out of Saint Laurent du Var, which is between Antibes and Nice. I worked for them for a couple of years just installing marine electronics on all the super yachts. Then they decided they were going to close down, and a friend of mine gave me a job laboring on a construction site high up on the mountain overlooking Villefranche. I worked there for a number of years until one day—we were getting paid cash on a Friday—French customs came and most people ran away. A couple of us got caught, but anyway, we managed to evade the police and the customs. They closed down the construction site for a couple of weeks, and there were thirty of us working there. They decided they were only going to keep ten. The guy that was running the job was actually American from California. He never let on, but after we established a company and were paying taxes, he actually told us the truth that we were actually building Tina Turner's villa.

Mike Putman:Oh boy. You had no idea at the time?

Dean Kerbishley:Absolutely no idea. He didn't let on at all. I ended up staying there for eight years constructing the villa. For the last three to four years, Tina Turner lived there with us and helped us around. Once it was at a phase where it was livable, she moved in. It took a long time because we would completely finish rooms and then she would decide she wanted something else. She would rip it out and do something else in that particular room. It became like a hobby for her.

Mike Putman:Did she spend a lot of time there or was she traveling around?

Dean Kerbishley:She spent all of her time there and very rarely left the villa. I would leave the villa with her because she had a lot of furniture that came into a storage facility nearby from various houses she sold around the world. I would go down there with her, bring the containers out, and put them in a large circle in the parking lot so people couldn't see her. She would go through the shipping containers and choose items that she wanted to bring to the villa. We would probably do that once a week for a long time. That was an extremely interesting time in my life.

Mike Putman:How did you get along with the French culture while you were there?

Dean Kerbishley:Initially, I couldn't speak any French. But by the end of it, I'd been there sixteen years, so as time went along, you pick up more and more. French culture is a completely different culture. I absolutely loved my time there and I still have many French friends.

Engineering for Luxury Super Yachts

Dean Kerbishley:Once I left the villa, I moved back to the UK into North London and I worked for a French telecommunications company called Alcatel. I was testing the optical fiber transatlantic terminal equipment that connected to the optical fibers. I did that for a little while and then I got offered a job for a refit on a sixty-eight meter super yacht down in Portsmouth on the South Coast. I went down there for an interview and spoke to the captain, and he happened to be from a village that was ten miles from where I grew up. He gave me the job as the electrical and electronic engineer. The owner, who was Sir Bernard Ashley from the Laura Ashley company, purchased a decommissioned Dutch pilot ship from the Dutch Navy and we converted it into a luxurious yacht. Basically, my job was to manage all of the electronic installations. We took every wire out of the boat and put new ones in, and rebuilt the wheelhouse. I probably had about thirty-five electricians and ten technicians. It took a period of eighteen months to completely change every wire in the boat. We even had a CAD designer to design the wheelhouse. I selected all the instruments and placed them all. It was the biggest job I've ever had. When the captain gave me that job, I felt a bit uneasy about it. The plan wasn't for me to go sailing with it, but once we completed the refit, they offered me a job as a second engineer. It only made sense because I knew the boat inside out electrically and electronically.

Mike Putman:So you set sail on this two hundred and twenty foot yacht. That's a big one.

Sailing the Caribbean and the Grenadines

Dean Kerbishley:Off we went. Sir Bernard Ashley's wife, Laura Ashley, actually had an accident and passed away. He remarried and his new wife wanted to go looking for seashells around the Caribbean for two years. We had over a two hundred foot yacht with a jet helicopter on board that was worth more than the yacht. We went to Gibraltar, then across the Atlantic, stopping in Horta in the Azores. We went straight across the Atlantic and our first stop was Antigua. We went up and down the Caribbean island chain for two years, even stopping at uninhabited islands looking for seashells because the boss's wife loved to make collages with them. You should have seen some of the shells we found, especially on the uninhabited islands.

Mike Putman:You did that for two years. Was there a break in that at any time? Did you get to fly back home?

Dean Kerbishley:One time we came right up to Miami for a little while and I took some breaks there. I had met a girl who ended up being my wife; she was on another boat down in Aruba, so I took a short vacation and flew down there. Then we went back down through the Caribbean and back across the Atlantic. We stopped in the Azores on the way back, as most boats do just for a break, and then our first stop was Falmouth in Cornwall. Back in England, we came around the coast a little bit. All of our friends and family were invited onto the ship while we were anchored off the south coast, not far from where I grew up.

Mike Putman:Dean, during your travels to all these exotic locations, was there a common thread you found among people while interacting with all those different cultures?

Dean Kerbishley:Throughout the Caribbean, obviously there's still some British islands there—a lot that were British that are independent now and some that are their own entities. I met friends down there that I still go down to visit now, and sometimes they come to visit me. In fact, I've just been back to St. Vincent recently. The Grenadines is probably my favorite part of the Caribbean because I call it untouched paradise. It's not as commercialized as the rest of the Caribbean. St. Vincent was where they made one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Since then, I've been back to work on the island for many years. The ship they used, the Black Pearl, was still in the harbor for a long time, though I noticed it was gone this last time I went back.

Career in Industrial Metal Detection

Mike Putman:Tell our listeners what you do today.

Dean Kerbishley:I've lived in the United States now for twenty-two years. I've got a small business and we do industrial metal detection in food processing, textile, and pharmaceutical industries. We have around eight employees and three techs that travel all around the country. Sometimes we go abroad to food processing facilities to service and calibrate their industrial metal detectors. Customers are looking for metal contaminants in the food before it's sent out to the supermarket. Sometimes that could be the finished item, or you might be metal detecting a truckload of flour, rice, or an ingredient. In pharmaceuticals, every pill is checked for metal contaminants. In the textile industry, it's anything from carpet plants to clothing. If you start thinking about it, metal detection is everywhere.

Mike Putman:I can imagine putting on a nice sweater and having a scrap piece of metal in it.

Dean Kerbishley:They have metal detectors that specifically look for needles in clothing.

Mike Putman:That is quite an interesting line of business. Through the years, did you stay in touch with Tina Turner after you left?

Dean Kerbishley:Not her personally, because even though I worked with her day in and day out, I worked with her personal assistant every day. Her name was Rhonda Graam and sadly she passed away last year. She devoted her whole life to Tina. Once the villa was complete, Rhonda went back to live in California. When I was out there working, I'd always stop by and see her or send her an email once a year. Last year I sent her an email and there was no reply. I thought that was a bit odd, so I Googled her name and realized she'd passed away.

Travel Tips for the South of France

Mike Putman:I'm sorry to hear that. Dean, are there any must-dos in the South of France? Is there a restaurant listeners should go to or anything off the beaten path you could suggest?

Dean Kerbishley:If you like seafood, the best seafood restaurant I've ever been to is the Café de Turin in Nice. That's absolutely a must. There's a very convenient train system right along the coast. You could jump on the trains and be in Monte Carlo in ten minutes from Nice. Then you can take the train eastward and be in Italy in another ten minutes. Italy is right there too. There's a market in Ventimiglia in Italy which is very popular. You jump on the train and you're there in forty-five minutes.

Conclusion

Mike Putman:For people wanting to go to the South of France, there are lots of coastal cities like Saint-Tropez, Nice, and Antibes. You can fly into the airport right at Nice, which is right on the water. From there you could stay in Nice, go west to Saint-Tropez or Cannes, or take day trips into Monte Carlo. I love Monte Carlo personally, as long as somebody else is paying for it because it's dreadfully expensive. Some of my friends went to Italy for lunch and then came back. You could also be skiing in an hour in the winter because it's right on the Alpes-Maritimes. You jump in a car and you could be on a set of skis in an hour. It is certainly a beautiful part of the world and I understand why there's such a love for traveling to the South of France. Well, Dean, thanks so much for your time today and for joining No Tourists Allowed. I'm sure our listeners really enjoyed hearing a bit about your story and your travels around the world. It’s been really enlightening. I've learned a thing or two about you and I've known you for quite some time. Thanks for being on the show.

Dean Kerbishley:Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

Nathaniel DeSantis:Thank you for listening to another episode of No Tourists Allowed. We'll see you next week for another episode. No Tourists Allowed is produced by Podcast Studio X.