WATERWAYS
JAX YACHT CHARTER TO FILL GAP IN AREA SERVICE
The charter will operate the Royal Princess along the St. Johns River.
A new yacht charter is set to dock on the Southbank of downtown Jacksonville this fall.
Jax Yacht Charter, owned by Lezlee and Rob Bellanich, is set to operate the Royal Princess through the riverfront area of the St. Johns River in coming months.
While the Bellanichs’ typical focus has focused on special events such as weddings, corporate gatherings and milestone celebrations, they are set to explore uncharted waters by doing brunch and sunset cruises open to the public.
An agreement with the city necessitated operating cruises open to the public, but Lezlee Bellanich said she’s excited to explore the new opportunity.
“This is, in some ways, a private-public partnership. We’re going to provide the needs for the public and part of those needs are to provide at least 24 public cruises per year,” Bellanich said. “So we have to really only requiring us to do two a month, for example. But we may find it to be more successful than we expected. I’m open to the future.”
Lezlee Bellanich said the couple has been doing work to restore the yacht after it was repossessed from a company in Miami.
“We realized, you know what, we couldn’t sell the vessel in the state it was in,” Lezlee Bellanich told the Business Journal. “We couldn’t operate her. We had no choice but to fix her.”
The couple is taking the final steps to begin business, crossing a major threshold by receiving a contract from the city to dock at 1501 Riverplace Blvd., which is in front of the Chart House on the Southbank.
Bellanich said the company still has to complete some additional certifications but is set to begin promoting the vessel in the near future.
The couple’s initial journey to Jacksonville was under circumstances entirely unrelated to a business opportunity.
After Lezlee and Rob Bellanich spent more than two decades navigating the waters of New York Harbor for their yacht cruise business, the couple set course for Florida.
But it was an organ transplant that put Jacksonville on the map for them. Lezlee Bellanich said moving to the First Coast saved her husband’s life.
Rob Bellanich was diagnosed with a rare disorder affecting his liver. The lifelong sailor needed a liver transplant but struggled to find a spot on a New York waiting list.
He needed to look elsewhere for an organ. Mayo Clinic had eventually found Tampa’s list inconvenient in order to be considered for the list, the couple moved closer to Jacksonville and found a home in St. Augustine.
The Bellanich family all moved here, and eventually Rob made it on a waiting list for the Mayo Clinic.
After months of waiting, Mayo Clinic found a donor for Bellanich, and he underwent a successful liver transplant procedure in 2020.
The family decided to stick around in St. Augustine afterwards but had to put a pause on their yacht events business. After it decided the yacht back in their hands, Bellanich said, the operator leasing the boat in Miami was unsuccessful in its venture, and so the couple repossessed the vessel.
“We still owned the vessel, but he could not make a go of it, unfortunately,” and I contacted the city again, and they could not have been more supportive,” Bellanich said.