September Is One Long Boat Show

Forty stories about boat shows on the wire this week, which is the most of any subject, and I have been to enough of them to tell you what that number means. It means the yards have finished the boats they started in January and the brokers have finished their tans. From the second week of September to the first week of October the industry goes from Cannes to Newport to Southampton to Monaco to Genoa without unpacking, and the wire follows it, in four languages.

Cannes went first and set the scale. Marine Business World's review counts 660 exhibitors and 700 boats from 5 to 55 metres across the Vieux Port and Port Canto, with nearly 150 world premieres. Robb Report picked eight debuts, Riva and Sunreef among them. The one I would have walked to first is the Custom Line Navetta 35: Yachting gives it more than 3,229 square feet of living space inside and out, ten guests in five staterooms, master on the main deck. A navetta is a displacement boat, which means it goes slowly on purpose and burns less doing it; thirty-five metres of that is a boat you cross an ocean in rather than a boat you show off in. And the quietest launch at Cannes may be the one that matters in ten years: ePropulsion's eCore, an energy management system, which is the unglamorous part of electric boating that decides whether the glamorous part works.

Then the Atlantic. Newport opened on the 17th and, as Trade Only says, kicked off the American fall season. Two days later Southampton opened with more than 500 watercraft, 250 of them afloat in a marina built for the ten days, and Marine Industry News led on the news that mattered to the British trade: Sunseeker's surprise return to its home show, in its 57th edition. I crewed a Sunseeker delivery out of Poole once, in weather I would not repeat. They build a solid boat. They should be at Southampton.

Monaco is this coming week, the 23rd to the 26th, and Asia-Pacific Boating has the count: 120 superyachts by opening day, 43 of them delivered this year, in one harbour. Port Hercule is not large. Every year someone tells me it cannot hold the fleet, and every year it does, because the dockmasters of Monaco are the best in the world at the thing nobody photographs. Benetti brings two world premieres, the 67-metre hybrid Dagger and the 50-metre Perseverance, and a new lounge at the Yacht Club. CRN gives Amor à Vida her European debut. And Vitruvius, Philippe Briand's studio, now headquartered in Viareggio, unveils the Fast 50. Briand drew boats I raced against and boats I could not afford to look at. A fast fifty from him is worth the walk down the quay.

Genoa closes the run, the 1st to the 6th of October, and the numbers are the biggest of the month: more than 1,000 boats, 215 new models, exhibitors from 45 countries, and a water layout up four per cent. Nautica's headline is the one to read slowly: the Italian industry changes course. Not a matter of numbers, they write, after a long run. Italy builds more of the world's large yachts than anyone, and when the Italian trade press says the course is changing at the 66th Salone, it is worth learning enough Italian to find out which way.

Two things the glossy shows will not tell you. Practical Sailor published how to go cheap at Annapolis, where to park and when to arrive at the biggest sailing show of the year, which is the most useful boat-show story of the week and the only one written for someone who owns one boat. And Sail Expo returns to the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club in October, Sydney and Melbourne both, because the southern hemisphere's spring is the northern hemisphere's shipping season and the boats that launch in Cannes are already booked for Christmas in the Whitsundays.

What I notice, reading all forty: the shows are getting bigger and the boats are getting quieter. Hybrids at Monaco, an energy manager at Cannes, a navetta that will not hurry. Ten years ago the debut everyone photographed was the fastest thing on the dock. This year the Italian press is talking about a change of course and the British press is glad Sunseeker came home. That is a grown-up month. I will be at Monaco on the 23rd, on the quay, not on the boats. The quay is where you find out which ones were really sold.