The Best Boat at Genoa Will Never Be Photographed Working

In a yard outside Livorno this week, Azimut pulled six tonnes out of a Fly 72 and put four thousand horsepower back in its place, and the result is a boat that will spend its working life a few lengths behind someone else's. Azimut Yachts is now the official yachting partner of Ferrari Hypersail, the Maranello-backed foiling monohull being built to race across oceans, and the Fly 72 has been rebuilt as its tow boat — stripped, re-engined, set to follow a boat it will never beat for attention.

Genoa opens its doors today, and the same yard quietly finishing a tow boat is also bringing four models to their Italian debut at the Salone, the kind of launch that gets the stand, the lighting and the photographers. The Fly 72 gets none of that. It will not sit on a plinth at the Waterfront di Levante; it will sit at a dock in Livorno with a towline coiled on its foredeck, waiting for a call.

Genoa itself is the show that performs for nobody. More than a thousand boats and 215 new models, from forty-five countries, fill the regenerated Waterfront di Levante this week, and unlike Monaco a week ago, the crowd on the pontoons is mostly Italian — owners, dealers, the people who actually buy what these yards build all year. Maiora, one of the oldest names on this coast, takes its usual place at the centre of it, heritage standing next to this year's hulls as if the two were never in competition.

I have crewed boats nobody photographed. Tow boats, chase boats, the RIB that ferries sails back to the loft at midnight — every serious campaign runs on three or four of them, and not one makes the brochure. What they earn instead is trust: nobody puts an unreliable engine behind a hundred-foot foiler worth a continent's advertising budget. The Fly 72's whole design brief was subtraction — less weight, more thrust, nothing aboard that does not answer to the one job of staying close.

When Ferrari Hypersail eventually lines up for its first ocean start, the cameras will find the foils, the wing, the carbon. Somewhere just out of frame, low in the water and going nowhere near as fast as it could, the Fly 72 will be exactly where it is meant to be: near enough to matter, far enough to be forgotten.