the bay, counted
Between two and three billion dollars sat in the Bay of Cannes this week. I counted it. The number turned out to be the least interesting thing I found.
At seven the beach is still raked from the night before and the bay is doing the thing it does in September, which is hold very still. The sun is just clear of the islands. Between the sand and the Lérins there are hulls at anchor — I count twenty-six before the light off the water makes counting pointless — grey on grey, radar domes catching the sun before the sea does. In an hour the tenders will start running from the Vieux Port. For now nothing is for sale and nothing is being shown. It is just a bay with a great deal of money floating in it, and the obvious question is how much.
So I counted.
Boat International's intelligence arm had already done the hard part: 101 yachts over 24 metres confirmed for the show, 43 of them for sale, with a combined asking price above 500 million dollars. I went looking for those 43 myself and found 49 with a published price — a little over 600 million between them. I added the exhibited new builds, the yachts at anchor with an asking price, and a rough allowance for the six hundred smaller boats that make up most of any show. The bay held somewhere between two and three billion dollars this week. My best count says a little under two and a half. The method is at the foot of this page.
It is a satisfying number and it explains nothing. It does not tell you why one boat asks what it asks, or why two boats that look nothing alike on paper ask exactly the same. For that you have to stop adding and start comparing.
Two yachts, both offered through Burgess, both asking €13.5 million. One is a 37-metre Numarine explorer, delivered in 2023 — new systems, new hull, new everything. The other is Constance, a 46-metre Feadship built in 1986 and refitted this spring. Thirty-seven years and nine metres apart, and the market currently sees no difference between them. Age, it turns out, is not what the market is pricing.
Nor, quite, is length. Renegade and Flying Dagger III are both 49.9 metres. Renegade was launched in 1992 and asks €8.95 million; Flying Dagger III was launched in 2018 and asks €23.5 million. Same length, same harbour, one worth two and a half times the other. You could put that down to age — but Constance has just shown that age alone doesn't do it.
Then there is Nurja. A 41-metre Abeking & Rasmussen, launched in 2008, rebuilt between 2021 and 2024, offered through Ocean Independence at €38 million before tax. In the same show, a 38-metre Azimut Grande Trideck delivered in 2024 asks just under €17 million. The older boat asks more than double the new one. And the difference between Nurja and Renegade — two hulls of roughly the same generation, one asking four times the other — is not the year on the builder's plate. It is what happened in the years after.
That is the pattern, once you see it. The market is not pricing when a yacht was built, or even how long she is. It is pricing what has been done to her since. A hull that has been kept, rebuilt, brought back to class and re-imagined inside holds its ask. A hull that has simply aged does not. Sultana, a 25-metre Feadship from 1969, was in the show asking €4.5 million — fifty-seven years old and still worth real money, because for fifty-seven years someone has been minding her.
Which brings us to the boats that were not in the show at all.
The largest yacht on any pontoon this week was After You, a 55-metre Heesen, asking €32.5 million. Out in the bay, three yachts asked more, and none of them had a stand. Christina O, ninety-nine metres, launched in 1943 as a Canadian frigate and rebuilt between 1999 and 2001 into the yacht the Onassis era is remembered by, lay at anchor off the Vieux Port with her brokers aboard, asking €52 million. SS Delphine, seventy-eight metres, launched in 1921, the last great steam yacht still working, was reported in the same water, asking €38 million. Emir, eighty-three metres, launched in 2004 and refitted in 2022, sat at anchor for the week, available to view by appointment. Old, older, and remade — all three.
It would be too neat to say old beats new. It doesn't. Azimut's new 44-metre flagship arrived in Cannes with seven hulls already sold, and the debuts on the Jetée were not short of buyers. The point is narrower and, I think, more useful: time spent well does not depreciate. The show is the market for beginnings. The bay, this week, was the market for continuations — and the continuations were asking more.
So what was I counting, at seven in the morning, from the beach? Not metres, in the end, and not years. I was counting decisions — the ones made after delivery, by owners and yards and the people who work inside these boats, about whether a hull would be kept or merely used. Everything I do for a living happens in that second life of a yacht, in the years the ledger says are worth the most. I had not expected the market to agree with me so plainly.
By six the light has gone the other way. The tenders are coming back in, the hulls have turned from grey to white and navy, and the very dark explorer I noticed at dawn is still there, still unidentified, still the one I would most like to see inside. The bay is worth what it is worth. What it is like — what those years have made of each of these boats — is the question this journal exists to ask.
— Alexandra Kraft, Cannes, September 2026
How I counted
Exhibited-fleet figures from Boat International's BOATPro, 28 August 2026. Asking prices from broker listings — Burgess, Ocean Independence, Y.CO, Fraser, Northrop & Johnson, Morley Yachts — as cited, converted at €1 = $1.16. Named for-sale yachts with published prices: 49, totalling about $618 million. New-build debuts without published prices and roughly 600 boats under 24 metres are my estimates, built from comparable listings and size-band medians; they account for about half the total, which is why I publish a range rather than a figure. Asking prices are what sellers hope for, not what buyers pay; sale prices typically settle below them. My working spreadsheet is available on request.
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