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A window into Sanderson's world is the Georgia, which is currently cruising somewhere in the Mediterranean. Her requirements were simple (if impossible) enough: to be the world's largest sloop and first super yacht of the new millennium. She boasts museum-quality art in the main salon, the tallest-ever mast (200 feet, made from carbon fiber), and a sound-proofed state room whose entryway floor features an elaborate inlay pattern of quarter-cut cherry, rosewood and ebony. In the full-colored, 175-page book that describes her four-year gestation, Sanderson wrote with characteristic frankness that the owner "really did not need another yacht... however if it could be fun and exciting then he was all for it."

Like a general manager in baseball, Sanderson's role is to put a winning team together and hope they are good enough and lucky enough to win it all. In the case of Georgia, "winning it all" meant a fully functioning, expertly crewed, ultra-luxurious vessel finished in time for display at the 2000 America's Cup in New Zealand. There were a thousand battles to hash out between owner, designers, and contractors—the disputatious process author Tracy Kidder described in House isn't a bad comparison, only multiplied times a million. Sanderson said that he thought they would never get it all resolved, but when the Cup racing began the Georgia was there. Sanderson, notably, was not, having already moved onto a potential next great project. In the small and finite world of avid super yacht buyers, there's nothing like a great, history-making boat to fire up the imagination for an even better one that they themselves own.

It's a fact of life in the yachting world, says Sanderson, that "better" is often defined as bigger. It's fairly well known, for example, that the sheikh of Dubai has the biggest private yacht (524 feet, 10 inches) and that the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has the most (four, and constructing a fifth called Eclipse, which when built will overtake the sheikh's in length by two inches). To put it in Durham terms, if either of these mega yachts were placed on Main Street, the stern would be at T-Hall and the bow sprit somewhere approaching Young's Restaurant. From the 100-foot high captain's deck, you might peer upon the Isle of Shoals lighthouse.

In the mine is bigger than yours race, the Russian billionaires rule over sheiks and Microsoft stockholders alike, Sanderson says, ordering boats so gaudily oversized they don't fit in some of the world's most picturesque harbors. A 500-foot monster typically employs crews of more than 60 and requires an annual operating budgets of $6 to $7 million. "That what it costs just to own them," reminds Sanderson. "Not to buy them." While the recession has taken its toll on demand—"the boating business was the first to fall off and it will be the last to come back," he notes, among the super-wealthy, the desire for the biggest with the most bling really never goes away.

At first glance it's hard to figure how a guy like Sanderson works with (much less builds dreams for) the world's most privileged. It isn't unusual for him to say regular-guy things like "crap," or, "answer it!" when my cell phone rings. When I first reached his office in Palm Beach, he sent me back out onto the street again because I didn't park where he told me to. It's just Bill being Bill: honest, forthright and frugal. On the street I'd have to feed the meter, but the company lot is free. It's hard to imagine him being any different with an Arab sheik, a Russian oligarch, or a South Palm Beach rental car magnate.

He gets into it with his clients over everything from the paint color on the hull (he wanted white, not blue, on the Georgia) to the size of the mainsail. As a plain-spoken Yankee, he is renowned for not only building dreams but building them cheaper, better and faster than almost anyone else. There was a big smile, for example, when Sanderson assured his aforementioned Boston client recently that "the only thing he had to worry about was whether he wanted to keep the yacht when we finished it—or double his money and sell it to one of the crazy Russians."

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