A Boat Is a Decision About Time
Yesterday, at the end of a pier in Yokohama, a forty-metre motor yacht was warming up. Nothing moved except the water behind her. I have thought about that minute all day: a boat is the only luxury that is really a decision about time. Where the week goes. Who is aboard. How far the horizon is allowed to be.
Nami is here to watch those decisions being made, from the yards of Viareggio and Vollenhove to the marinas of Fort Lauderdale and Hong Kong. Every three hours we read the yachting press of the world and put it on a radar: which yards are launching, which ideas are rising, hybrid or explorer or glass, which colour the sea is wearing this week.
The name is the idea. Nami is a wave: the thing a hull was drawn to meet. Hakken, our first magazine, looks at design. Uchi looks inside the home. Nami looks out to sea.
She left on the evening tide. By the time the wake had flattened, the pier was a pier again — wet in one lane where a hose had been coiled badly, a gull on the bollard she had been tied to, the water behind her smooth as if nobody had decided anything at all.
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.