Annemarie Victory’s World Class Adventures
(12/10/2009) On the wall just inside the front door of her East Hampton home hangs a black-and-white photograph of Annemarie Victory skiing powder in the Swiss Alps. She was younger then, but it would be hard to imagine
 Russell Drumm
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that the diminutive blond woman with an Austrian accent possessed any more energy than she does today.
“When I finished school in the ’50s and ’60s I wanted to go to England to learn English, so I went to London, then to France. I went to school there to learn French, then to Switzerland near the Italian border and learned Italian. In my business you have to have languages. I learned fast,” she said with a smile on Friday afternoon, sitting on the edge of her sofa as though anxious to leave on her next adventure.
“I specialize in luxury travel, gourmet food, and music,” said the veteran agent whose company places the well-heeled on board elegant river boats for trips up the Danube, the Rhine, or aboard the 360-foot, square-rigged yacht Sea Cloud, sailing the Mediterranean and listening to Count Nikolai Tolstoy lecture on his stepfather, the late Patrick O’Brian, an English novelist and translator. There are tours that feature music and gourmet food, and one that includes a New Year’s ball at the Imperial Palace in Vienna. How about a cruise to Antarctica with a professor of geology and earth science as your guide?
Even as a young girl she knew she wanted to travel and to make a career of it. She began as a tour guide, and worked in hotels. In the 1960s, she was working as an interpreter in Zurich and had a side job in a travel agency taking care of American skiers who went to Swiss and Austrian resorts. One spring, the president of Europe on Skis, the largest agency for ski tours in Europe, came to Zurich to meet her.
“He hired me on the spot to go to New York and become the manager of Europe on Skis. I did this for seven years until I was pregnant with my first child. After a few years at home, I went back into the travel business.” Ms. Victory and her husband, Michael, have a son and a daughter.
During the time she managed Europe on Skis, the company flew as many as 5,000 U.S. skiers to European slopes each year during the 1970s and ’80s. “Skiing was not as developed here then, so we chartered planes to take them there.”
The agent knew her business. She won a silver medal at the 1990 finals of the annual NASTAR (National Standard Race) competition.
In 1994 she created the cooking show “World Class Cuisine,” which aired on the Discovery Channel for four years.
“I had a crew of 10. We shot twice per day in Spain, Belgium, all over Europe, 65 episodes. I planned it all — a real gourmet tour. It was exhausting.” Ms. Victory confided that the food show put her in good graces with deluxe European restaurants, which came in handy as time went on.
Ms. Victory has a very special connection to the sailing ship Sea Cloud. She has found the connection extends to people with a profound fascination for the age of sail.
“I never did cruises until 1991. I did not like large cruise ships and still don’t. I had dinner with a friend who told us about his cruise on Sea Cloud. I couldn’t believe his story and that such a fabulous yacht exists. Shortly after . . . I signed my first contract. The rest is history.”
History indeed. Sea Cloud came off the ways of the Krupp shipyard in Kiel, Germany, in 1931. First named Hussar, the steel barque was the yacht of Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, E.F. Hutton. During World War II, the elegant barque was purposely dismasted, painted battleship gray, and put on picket watch for German U-boats in the North Atlantic. After the war she was restored to her former glory, and was owned for a time by Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. She now charters out of Germany.
The late Walter Cronkite, whom she would meet at the Vienna ball each year, was a sailor who loved Sea Cloud and the writing of Mr. O’Brian, who had become a cult hero because of his series of salty novels that follow the adventures of Capt. Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend Stephen Maturin during the Napoleonic Wars. As it happened, Ms. Victory’s husband and his friends were, she said, “big O’Brian fans. Together we came up with the O’Brian cruise. I was very honored to have Patrick O’Brian together with Walter Cronkite on my first cruise with this theme.”
Ms. Victory convinced the author to sail and lecture aboard Sea Cloud while the barque called on ports in the Mediterranean visited by the fictional Aubrey on the frigate Surprise.
“He was always impeccably dressed and loved to drink. He spoke three languages without an accent,” she said of the late author. The lecture voyages were a great success, Ms. Victory said.
When the author died in November of 1999, his place on Sea Cloud was taken by Count Tolstoy, his stepson, biographer, and a great-nephew of Leo Tolstoy, who will be aboard Sea Cloud again next spring.
So far, Ms. Victory has chartered 50 Sea Cloud adventures. In July, Sea Cloud will bring George Bass, known as the father of marine archaeology, on board to provide the historical context to sites in the Mediterranean that Sea Cloud will visit.
Oh, and if you’re not busy between June 11 and June 23, Ms. Victory has a riverboat tour along the Volga River from St. Petersburg to Moscow.