Some passions exist only for play. And some passions, played at long enough, become work — become something you want to do properly, something many people can share in. For me, the water and its yachts belong to the second kind.
I fell in love with the water back when I had nothing to my name. Standing at the dock watching a boat leave harbor, I always felt something the land rarely gives: a sense of vastness. The rivers are wide, the sea is wide — and the human heart, strangely, widens with them. Later, when I had the chance to step aboard real yachts, I came to understand one thing more: yachting is not the pastime of ostentation people often imagine. It is a pastime of care — tending a boat the way you tend a small house afloat on the water, tending each voyage the way you tend a meal laid out for guests. Playing with boats, it turns out, is learning how to treat things well — the sea, the machinery, the people.
But the deeper the passion went, the more clearly I saw something amiss: our yachts are beautiful, our seas are beautiful, yet the path for an ordinary person to reach that experience is far too dim. Information differs from place to place. Prices differ from one vendor to the next. Safety standards — the thing that should be clearest of all — are the hardest thing to find. Those who own boats don't know how to charter them out properly; those who want to charter don't know whom to trust. A beautiful pastime, lacking a decent infrastructure to grow on.
And so the passion drew in a few friends — and became work. Together with my partners, we built Vietnam Yacht Cruise (VNYC) — a digital platform for Vietnamese yachting. We began with the work few people ever see: standardizing each boat's information into a proper dossier; bringing everything onto a platform that speaks five languages — because the guests of Vietnam's seas come from all over the world; and giving safety a page of its own, public for all to see, instead of a spoken promise. One step at a time, slow but sure — the way one learns to helm a boat: steady hands at low speed first, then out to open water.
People ask me: a digital platform for yachts — sounds refined, but will it ever be big? I think otherwise. Three thousand kilometers of coastline, bays the whole world knows by name — this country does not lack room for a decent economy of the water. What it lacks is standardized trust: a place where information is transparent, prices are clear, and safety is given the weight it deserves. Technology cannot replace the wind, the waves, or a skilled captain. But technology can do one thing: it can make people dare to step aboard for the first time. And every love of the sea begins with that first step aboard.
For me, then, VNYC is not quite a business venture. It is my way of repaying a passion that has given me so much — by widening that path for those who come after. I still believe what I have always believed: no one goes far alone — and a boat, however beautiful, only truly lives when someone steps aboard.
The sea is still vast. The boats are here. The platform grows a little more each day alongside my partners. What remains — are the voyages out to sea.
Ho Chi Minh City, August 2026 — Nguyễn Ngọc Hải