I’d never met a ‘yacht publicist’ before – it conjured up rather unsavoury images of Max Clifford and dreadful revelations in the ‘red tops’ – but at the recent Monaco Yacht Show there was one-time journo and pr man Nick Jeffery brandishing a piece of paper with a list of names he insisted would come up trumps. One did indeed deliver as Nick sat me down with Jamie Edmiston, a director of the family run global broking business which has carved out a pretty substantial niche in the business.

Jamie, who said he’d vowed not to follow in his father Nick’s footsteps but had been wooed by the challenge of building the brand, was talking to us on the roof terrace of the Port Palace Hotel in Monaco overlooking the show, Edmiston’s base for the week. We were sharing this space with a helicopter, a Eurocopter EC135 to be precise (from Euro 3.6 million), one of a series of machines Jamie has for some time been promoting to yacht owners and charterers. Choppers get round the increasingly annoying problem of overcrowding in Riviera ports. “Anchor off and use the helicopter as your flying tender,” insisted Jamie who offered to arrange a spin round the bay in one. Sadly I was out of time

Nick rounded off our meeting with the story of a Russian honeymoon couple who were paying something like US$ 1 million a week for a large motor yacht charter. This included the yacht’s helicopter which they put to good use…missing their pet dog they had it flown aboard.

Nick completed the service by giving me a lift on the back of his BMW 1200cc bike to my hotel to meet a copy deadline. Publicists go up in my estimation until he revealed that he’d crashed the thing recently and offered to show me the scars. I declined.