The Benetti Oasis 40M “Alpha Waves”: Superyacht with a Soul

Photos by JJ Slater

Not Fade Away

As he winds down his work life, Rich Kracum is bringing his competitive drive and analytical approach to bear on chasing his favorite gamefish.

Some people manage their affairs by gut and instinct. Others rely on hard data to inform their decisions. Rich Kracum falls very much into the latter camp. The spreadsheet is his friend. It’s a tool that undoubtedly served him well in his years in the private equity business.

But Kracum’s life is not all about business these days. He retired some years back from the firm he co-founded, Wind Point Partners, although he still maintains some connections to the private equity world. These days, he’s extremely busy indulging his recreational passions, among them: hunting, golf, skiing and particularly fishing. He’s fished for many species all over the world, but he has a special affinity for chasing the storied permit, a saltwater fish reputed to be one the most challenging to catch on the fly. As with many of his endeavors, he uses the columnar numerical magic of the spreadsheet to increase his odds against that notoriously elusive quarry.

“I keep track of where I am, the guide, the water temperature, the wind, the visibility, how many shots I get that day and obviously if I get a fish,” he says. “Sometimes, I record whether it was tailing, cruising, how many follows I had and so on. This helps me determine, over time, where my ultimate place is.”

Kracum is tall and lean. He sports a high-wattage smile that rarely seems to wane, especially when he’s discussing his outdoor pursuits, past, present and future. For a man who’s experienced considerable success in the fast lanes of business, he’s refreshingly accessible and down to earth.

We met late last year at a marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he and the crew of his new Benetti Oasis 40M Alpha Waveswere preparing the boat for her maiden long-haul voyage. She had just arrived from Italy on a transport ship, with the crew unpacking boxes of equipment and furnishings while preparing for the cruise and a party for 80 guests on board in Miami the next night. Despite the frantic activity, Kracum made time to chat about his life and the upcoming cruise.

Kracum, 69, grew up in Minneapolis, where he nurtured a passion for outdoor pursuits. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Minnesota’s Carleton College before receiving a master’s in chemistry and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He eventually became a principal in the Chicago office of the strategy consulting practice of Booz Allen Hamilton, where he led strategic consulting assignments for major industrial, consumer and financial firms.

He joined Wind Point in 1985 and worked there until its co-founder, a friend, left. With a partner, he re-founded Wind Point in 1996. One of the firm’s early investments was in Active Interest Media (AIM), which owns Power & Motoryacht. Wind Point helped the business grow by financing acquisitions. Several years ago, it sold its interest to AIM CEO Andrew Clurman. Kracum has retained his connection to the publishing company as a minority shareholder.

Kracum retired from the private equity front lines five or six years ago, but he still serves on several boards. As his hard-charging work life fades into the background, he indulges his outdoor passions more and more.

“I enjoyed work, but it wasn’t who I was,” Kracum says. “I was good at private equity, I had success, but I never looked at myself as a private equity guy. I’d say I was a successful businessman in private equity. But the center of my universe is my family and all the activities. Every fun outdoor activity you could do. I’ll do anything that’s outdoor and fun.”

Heli-skiing is one of his passions. “I was born to ski through trees,” he says. Always the competitor, he gathers each year with friends for a longstanding four-day deer bowhunting tournament, founded by Sam Johnson (Johnson & Johnson) in the 1950s. The largest buck wins. He has rifle-hunted with a group he’s joined gathered with for 40 years. He loves golf and was about to play at his 98th of the world’s top 100 courses.

When his youngest son graduated from high school, the family became Florida residents. In 1985, they bought a lake cottage in northern Wisconsin, which serves as the family’s base for part of the year, with a home on Fisher Island near Miami serving for the rest. With the delivery of the yacht, Kracum has sold the Miami home.

Fishing trumps all of his other pursuits, he says, because of the way it makes him feel.

“When you’re heli-skiing and you’re zooming through the trees, it is intense focus. And your focus is 10 feet ahead, two trees ahead. You don’t have time to think,” he says. “Fishing doesn’t have that urgency, but when you’re fishing for permit, they could appear at any time. They’re hard to see unless their tails pop up. So it’s that same thing where you’re just like one focal point looking for permit, and that creates the inner peace.”

He describes permit fishing as a religious pursuit. “I want to fish as much as I can, which is really the genesis of the boat,” he says. “Permit fishing absolutely delivers that zen quality. Being outside for me is essential to my happiness.

“The colors, all the shades of the flats are so great,” he continues, comparing permit fishing to living in a Monet painting. “I’ll do every kind of fishing. I’ll deep-sea fish. I’ll go up to northern Canada. I love fishing. It’s just in my blood. But permit fishing is tough. I get probably one permit for every five eight-hour days of being on the boat. That’s just the way it is.

He asks: “Did you ever play pinball? Okay. Do you know how when you play pinball and you figured out the machine and then you lost interest? It’s the same for me. I like boat fishing and I’ll do it, but I lack a passion for it because it’s too easy. And whereas permit are exasperating and excruciating, the level of pain you feel and torture when you’re permit fishing is, bar none, the highest of any kind of fish. So it’s like, they’re so frustrating, but then some days it all lines up and then you can celebrate. And I like the pain. I like the anguish along the way. If you don’t have anguish, you don’t have joy. You need a relativity working there and it really is. So I’m very comfortable with it.”

He says permit fishermen know exactly how many they’ve caught. His tally as of last December was 72.

As with so many other of his endeavors, Kracum keeps data on big permit tournaments and the success rates of the top fishermen and guides. Of two big tournaments he tracks in the Florida Keys, he says: “Each tournament’s three days, and each tournament has 25 boats. So you’re talking 150 boat days a year times four or five days. And they average around five or six boat days per permit. So you need a lot of time on the water, which is A-OK by me. I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan too, so I’m okay with intense frustration.”

Over the years, Kracum owned some small boats and chartered yachts with his family, but Alpha Waves is the first big boat he’s owned. Finding the right boat for his needs was a multilayered challenge. His personal interest was a boat with a killer beach club, but he had other, more pressing considerations. Laurie, his wife of 45 years, used to be his hunting and fishing companion. They also played golf, and chased fish and game in numerous places around the globe including Russia, Mongolia, Africa, the Caribbean, Canada and the American West. Nine years ago, Laurie was injured in a cycling accident that left her using a wheelchair, and she had to give up many of those pursuits. But to her delight, Laurie found that when the couple chartered boats for vacations, she could still scuba dive. Finding charter boats that had elevators and other adaptive elements though, proved a challenge.

“I wanted to come up with something where Laurie felt like she was as good as anybody else or could do anything,” he says. “I launched this process a few years ago to design a boat that would work for Laurie perfectly and enable us to be where I can go fishing every day or scuba diving—probably both—and still come home to dinner and hang out with Laurie.”

After considerable searching, he found Benetti willing to build him a nearly 134-foot Oasis 40M with features such as an elevator that connects all the guest decks, a wheelchair-friendly passerelle, widened passageways, flush thresholds and custom furniture measurements.

“We went to Ibiza for our maiden voyage, and it worked,” he says. “It was unbelievable.”

While preparing the boat for the party in Miami, Kracum moved about intently, tending to details. He loaded backing and line on two new Abel fly reels. He carries a familiar symbol on its drag knob: the Grateful Dead’s red, white and blue lightning bolt. He’s a Deadhead from way back, estimating he’d attended as many as 80 or 90 shows. His last show was also Jerry Garcia’s last: in 1995 at Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The cruise following the party was to extend from last December through mid-April of this year, with a focus on finding permit across a broad swath of the Bahamas and Caribbean Basin. Kracum planned to fish every day that conditions allowed. When it was cloudy and windy, he intended to take kite-sailing lessons from an Alpha Waves deckhand. Upwards of 50 friends and family members were expected to join the boat for periods along the way.

Getting them to and from the boat would be no problem. Alpha Waves has a complement of tenders that includes a towed 40-foot Invincible catamaran for offshore fishing, scuba and shuttling, and a 17-foot Dragonfly flats boat. The Dragonfly is equipped with a custom-designed, adjustable-height chair that will allow Laurie to join the permit chase—something she hasn’t been able to do since her accident.

“I love permit fishing,” she says. “I’m not as obsessed as he is, but it’ll be very exciting to get back out there.” Her personal tally before the cruise was seven.

Following this year’s cruise, the family expects to spend the summer and fall in Wisconsin, when the boat will be offered for charter. Then they plan to ship it to Australia for more permit fishing. The year after, it may be Indonesia.

“I’ve never been to Indonesia, but there are lots of islands, which have to have fish,” Kracum says.

As Laurie chats in Alpha Waves’ salon, Kracum, sits on the sofa alongside the couple’s boat dog, Dude, studying a spreadsheet on his laptop.

“He loves the analytics of it,” she says. “He loves to do that with everything. It’s just fun for him. I just go out, I see a fish, and I catch it. That’s awesome.”

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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