On board with Danzante Bay owner Owen Perry

BORN: RHODE ISLAND, US, 1960
LIVES: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
HAPPY PLACE: SOMEWHERE ON THE WATER AND IN THE SUN
AUTHOR OF: PLAN E: HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN TODAY’S WORLD
CURRENT BOAT: 50M DANZANTE BAY

The plan was ambitious to say the least, as it required bringing all the infrastructure to the desert, including electricity and water (the nearby fishing village of Ensenada Blanca had no power until 10 years ago and relied on solar panels, a local told me).

Local contractors in Mexico wanted the business and told him they’d work at cost, so he pulled the trigger anyway, breaking ground on what would become a 650-hectare multi-use development – at the very moment the world was grinding to a halt. The first phase of the resort, with its multi-suite hotel, spa and restaurants, emerged at the tail end of the global crisis, in March 2011.

The project also has an important luxury real-estate component with private homes and condominiums. Perry, who founded REmexico Real Estate (to advise investors on best practices in Mexico real-estate purchases), built the resort’s first private villa, dubbed Danzante Casa Uno, where he would spend most of six years while the project took shape, on a hillside overlooking the resort and the glittering bay beyond it.

Kevin B Howard, the award-winning architect from Tucson, Arizona, who Owen hired, is wellversed in desert spaces and gave the multi-story, 550-square-metre villa with infinity pool a half moon shape and floor-to-ceiling windows for a full panorama from an open plan. While the home itself blends in with the surroundings, the craggy island of Danzante (an important cultural and natural site inside a national marine park teeming with life) rises in the middle of the vista beyond the earth-coloured hotel towers.

A terrace to the side overlooks the putting green of the spectacular 18-hole Rees Jones-designed golf course, which eventually became part of the plan. “My friends told me I was crazy,” Perry says, which is a bit of a theme with him. He told me the very same thing when we discussed the other Danzante Bay in the final stages of construction a couple of years ago – his 50-metre Crescent yacht, delivered in late 2023.

After looking for a while for a yacht on the brokerage market to succeed a 34-metre Horizon he had for years, he bought an unfinished hull from the defunct Christensen yard and sent it to Crescent Custom Yachts in Canada to finish it to his requirements.

Danzante Bay, the yacht, was the yard’s biggest project and the largest yacht yet built in Canada. The project began in earnest, and then Covid-19 threw a wrench in the global system: no more travel to or from Canada, shipment delays and bottlenecks. The project barely crept along.

He stayed the course, the yard stayed the course and last spring, after some final interior fine-tuning and after Perry approved of a professional crew, Danzante Bay was ready to cruise from Baja to Alaska via San Diego, Owen’s home port in the US. Why he persevered through a tough period on planet earth, he says, is twofold: his background as a developer and the uncertainty surrounding his upbringing.

“My generation went through nine or 11 crises, you know, including the Great Recession and the pandemic. I didn’t dwell on that. I just said, ‘OK, what can we accomplish today?’ and I kept doing that every day. And then pretty soon we started getting some momentum again.”

That’s a lesson this entrepreneur – who left home a young man without a college education to seek sunshine and work – has repeatedly followed during his life. He even wrote a book about it to inspire people starting out or stuck in one place, titled Plan E: How to Be Successful in Today’s World. If at first you don’t succeed, try plan B, C, D and E is one of the book’s overarching lessons.

Perry is one of those widely successful self-made mavericks whose stories sustain the American Dream culture. Leaving behind a factory job and grey winters in Rhode Island, he started his hospitality career as a commission-based timeshare salesman for a company in Waikiki, Hawaii.

He became a business owner in 1985 (when he co-founded the Villa Group with two associates), and the group now encompasses a dozen holiday resorts in Cabo San Lucas, Cancún, Loreto and Puerto Vallarta (where Perry fell in love with Mexico), under the Villa del Palmar brand.

He didn’t quite know where Puerto Vallarta was, but once there, he never looked back

“I grew up in the smallest state in the country, Rhode Island. My father was in the navy. We were six kids, so we never took a real vacation. At 19, I decided I needed some adventure, so I went to Hawaii and started this promotional job, got into real estate, got into fractional ownership with Hilton, then got an offer to go to Puerto Vallarta.”

He was reluctant to leave Hawaii, where he’d fashioned a career in marketing after five years, and didn’t quite know where Puerto Vallarta was, but once there, he never looked back. He loved the cobblestone streets, the feeling of community with the residents and the warmth of the people and the weather.

But a developer needs to develop. A decade or so after the Villa Group’s first project in Puerto Vallarta, it cast its attention on a sleepy outpost at Land’s End on the Baja Peninsula, called Cabo San Lucas, which was a fishing hamlet then. He was part of the movement that transformed Cabo from a “fishing village to a golf Mecca – there are 25 golf courses now,” he says.

He estimates there were around 8,000 people when he got there. The population ballooned over the years ( it was around 202,000 in 2020), and Cabo is now Mexico’s third most popular tourist destination after Cancún. For the past two decades, Cabo has attracted celebrities and well-to-do Americans, particularly from California and Texas.

Perry, who opened a bar in Cabo in the early 2000s, met many musicians, including Don Felder of the Eagles. A decade or so after they met, Felder accepted Perry’s invitation to come play for the inauguration of the Danzante Bay golf course in 2017.

That golf course – an immaculate carpet of groomed grass unfolding through rocky hills, natural brush and cacti – extends from the beach to the summit, where the par-three hole 17 overlooks the blue Sea of Cortez.

The PGA chose it to be a very special Tournament Players Club course, which has earned numerous accolades in a short time. Who could have dreamed this, driving along Highway 1 where the traffic is scant and the Sierra del la Giganta mountains cast their rocky shadow over a few fishing outposts? Perry did.

Always a marketer, Perry started promoting the golf course before it opened. And when it was ready for its public unveiling, he got Felder there along with a group of sports writers for a weekend extravaganza. It was a bit of a tonguein-cheek move as well. The Eagles had sued a hotel in Todos Santos for marketing too heavily its Hotel California name and fuelling a rumour that it was where the band wrote its famous 1976 hit song.

Even before Loreto, Perry spent the better part of two decades working nonstop, but eventually learned he needed to relieve stress – particularly when he found himself at the head of the business solo, at the time the company was opening resorts in Cabo. He picked up tennis, running and golf. It was also around that time that he investigated buying his first big boat. He bought a used 27-metre Knight & Carver in Newport Beach. By his own admission, he was “not a yacht guy”, but he had always had an affinity with the sea.

“I’ve always been by the ocean and on boats,” he says. “They called [the Knight & Carver] the Takes delivery of 50m Crescent Danzante Bay and publishes his motivational memoir Moves on to a 34m Horizon named El Mirar II Opens phase I of Villa del Palmar at the Islands of Loreto by Danzante Bay Grand opening of Danzante Bay golf course Buys his first yacht, a 27m Knight & Carver 2007 2010 2011 2017 Star Trek boat because it had an inverted windshield compared to what the boats were at that time.”

That “Star Trek boat” (named Altamar then) proved useful to get a sense of the topography around the land he was seeking to develop, and he started to appreciate what being on a boat for extended cruises could do. Eventually, he bought the bigger Horizon, El Mirar II. “My kids grew up with it and we’ve been everywhere – the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, all throughout Mexico, all throughout the West Coast,” he says.

He cruised around the national park in the Sea of Cortez, enjoying the company of dolphins. “We call it SeaWorld without the pen,” he jokes. Camping under the stars on the island of Danzante with his children is one of his fondest memories.

By then, he had fallen under the charm of the sleepy town with a Spanish mission that once was the capital of the Californias, and he had wagered a good deal of his success on attracting tourists and investors to a nearly deserted stretch of Baja California. It was a bold move with no guarantee of success.

But slowly and surely, Loreto’s reputation is growing. The small airport – once under a palapa but now with a solid roof and air conditioning – receives regular flights from multiple destinations around Mexico and the US. The resort is collecting awards – proudly displayed on a massive table in the breezy lobby – and investors and wealthy retirees are buying the handsome custom homes that begin to dot the property, where a new beach club recently opened for residents.

Perry has put his own home up for sale. He very much enjoyed the place for family reunions, but now that the resort is off and going, he enjoys seeing more of the world from the water – which is why he built Danzante Bay, the yacht. This summer, he went back up to the Pacific Northwest, Canada and Alaska.

What’s next for him, I ask? For now, as he tells me from the yacht about to cast off, it’s the next port of call on a multi-week cruise. Real-estate projects are still looming, but he has his eyes fixed firmly on the nautical charts for his immediate future.

First published in the January 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.