A Sea Trial Written in 2002 Still Tells the Truth

This week two Italian magazines opened a filing cabinet instead of a results board. Barche a Motore pulled a 1995 sea trial of a Tecnomar 380 out of what it calls an archive of hundreds and hundreds of boats tested over the decades, and across town Giornale della Vela did the same with a 2002 test of an X-Yachts IMX 45. Neither report had been reprinted in years. Both still read like they were filed yesterday.

Everything else on the wire this week has the shelf life of a morning tide. Barcolana58 lined up 1,858 boats in the Gulf of Trieste for one race that a different fleet will contest, and probably win, next October. In Valencia the 52 Super Series settled its season in favour of Platoon Aviation by a margin that will mean nothing to anyone the day the 2027 circuit opens. A result is a number with an expiry date stamped on the back, however good the champagne tastes on the day.

A sea trial does not expire, or doesn't have to, if the person who wrote it was honest about the only thing that matters: how the hull behaved in a sea, not who signed the cheque for it. The IMX 45 was built as a one-design racer-cruiser in an era when that phrase still meant something specific, and the 2002 verdict on how she carried a chop has nothing to update twenty-four years later, because weather hasn't changed and neither has displacement. The Tecnomar is a motor boat from the other end of the harbour entirely, and its own 1995 trial survives for the same reason: somebody timed how she sat at speed instead of how she photographed at the dock.

I have read worse trials written last month than these two written before most of this year's Barcolana crews were born, and I have kept both kinds on the boat. The ones that rot are the ones that borrowed the builder's language instead of the sea's — glossy, unfalsifiable, gone the moment the next model replaces the one being praised. The ones that last are the ones where the writer admitted when a boat was slow, or wet, or simply ordinary, because the sea doesn't negotiate and neither should the person describing it.

Somewhere in Trieste harbour tonight the glossy photographs from this year's start line are already curling at the edges in the damp, and two yellowed pages from 1995 and 2002 are sitting in a filing cabinet, in no hurry at all, outlasting every one of them.