The Festival Opens at Six, Not Ten

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Nami (波) is a magazine, a radar and a diary about the world's great yachts, kept from Tokyo for readers everywhere.

Nami means wave. A magazine, because every week one boat deserves to be looked at slowly: the explorer that will never see a marina, the sloop drawn like a knife, the 100-metre that is really a house. A radar, because we count what the yards and the yachting press are talking about right now — hybrids, refits, glass, teak, the beach club — and show it as it moves. A diary, because a seal is set each day in that day's colour, and the days add up.

We read from Viareggio to Vollenhove, from Fort Lauderdale to Hong Kong, in English, Italian and Japanese. Everything here links back to the people who built it; the images belong to their authors.

Nami will keep changing: new sources, new signals, a little better each week, never finished. If a boat here made you look at the horizon, that is enough.

Thank you for reading. ありがとうございます。

The Festival Opens at Six, Not Ten

September 8, 2026Olivia Stay

At the Vieux Port this morning, a deckhand in white shorts is on her knees at half five, working a chamois along a stanchion until it throws back the streetlights in one clean line. The gates for Cannes Yachting Festival do not open until ten. She has been at it since before the gulls.

This is the hour I actually go to a boat show. Not the ribbon, not the tannoy, not the first flute of something cold handed to someone who has not yet asked the name of the yard. The hour when the water is still oily-flat and every hull on the pontoon is being made ready by someone who knows exactly where the last scratch came from.

You learn more about a boat in twenty minutes of watching it washed than in an afternoon of walking its saloon. A crew that coils a line without looking at it has done this a thousand times on this exact deck. A crew that fusses over a fender mark before anyone official has arrived cares about the boat for reasons that have nothing to do with who is coming aboard at eleven.

The show itself, once the gates open, is a different animal — motor yachts crowding the Vieux Port, sail and brokerage tucked away at Port Canto, as if the two tribes had agreed decades ago not to share a dock. Twenty stories this week alone told me a show was coming; none of them mentioned the woman with the chamois, and she is the reason any of it holds together once the gangways fill.

I have crewed for those hours, the ones before a show has a face. You learn to read a hull from underneath the polish — where the gelcoat has been touched up twice, where a winch has been serviced kindly and where it has just been serviced. None of that is on a spec sheet. It is on the hands.

By the time the first tender of visitors comes alongside, she has coiled the hose, checked her reflection is gone from the chrome, and gone below for coffee she will not finish before someone asks her a question about range. The stanchion holds the light a little longer than it needs to.

Olivia Stay spent a decade as crew, delivering boats across the Mediterranean, before she started writing about them. She has been seasick and hosted royals, knows the difference between a yacht and a boat, and prefers the word boat. She writes Nami between Antibes and Tokyo Bay.