Visiting the Lagoon Catamaran Lineup in Cannes, September 2017
After many years of dreaming and planning about acquiring a Lagoon catamaran, we finally reached the milestone of being able to make it a reality! Over the past several years we had been working with a broker at Fraser Yacht Sales in Vancouver, BC, and when we gave him the word that it was time for us to buy, he recommended we attend the Cannes Yachting Festival, as this would give us a chance to get on board the Lagoon lineup of cats between 35 and 52 feet.
Now, we are not the types to just fly around the world to attend shows here and there. In fact, we’ve never much flown anywhere outside of North America, other than with our families when we were very young. However, 2017 was a year to celebrate: in July we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, and in August we sold the company we’d started with a partner ten years before. We decided to turn our trip to France into a much larger trip, namely a seven week long tour of Europe. We left at the end of August, and returned mid-October. We took in Scotland, France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, and visited friends and family in each of these countries, except France.
We arrived in Cannes two days before the Yachting Festival began, to give us a bit of time to settle in and tour the town a bit before getting down to some serious boat buying business! Unfortunately, A came down with a very serious flu the day before the show. He was running a fever for several days, was of course very achey and ill feeling, had a terrible chest cold and worst of all had constant sneezing and just plain old snot (pardon the imagery) running non stop. It was quite awful. I was of course worried about him, worried that I would get it (I never did), and sad for him that this experience that he’d been waiting literally several decades for would forever be coloured by this terrible feeling of sickness. His memory of the entirety of the show is that it happened in some kind of fog, in some other reality. We would only be out for a few hours each day, then would head back to the Airbnb we’d rented where I made numerous runs to the nearest pharmacy. I did actually come across some drugs that worked really well, “Humex Rhume”, and before we left Cannes ended up stocking up on it as we’d never come across any drug in Canada that was effective for the hay fever-type symptoms he tends to get with colds (not even prescription meds have worked).
Overlooking Cannes; the turquoise Lagoon flags are just visible at center
The first morning of the show we were lined up outside the gates, excitedly waiting to be one of the first people on the Lagoon cats, and hopefully be one of the first to get an order in (timing on getting the order in by just 2 or 3 orders could make the difference by several months for when you receive it). Once the show opened and we made it through security (always dicey with A, as you never know what he may have accidentally forgotten he has in his pockets! Such as not 1, but 2 knives on our flight back from Montreal!!!) we made our way directly to the Lagoon booth. Ah, to see the lineup of cats with the turquoise flags flying was quite a sight! We met with our broker and he gave us the tour of the various vessels. For us it really came down to the 45 or 52, though we’d found ourselves leaning toward the 52. In going through the boats and making all the comparisons, pros and cons, we did go for the 52, with the flybridge option. We took care of the paperwork, called up our banker (she was in on the plans before we left and was expecting our call), and presto, we were the proud owners of a Lagoon 52F, hull #153!!
The 52 is on the far right with the flybridge on top; notice how the masts go up in height and the boats increase in width from left to right
The next day we came back to the show, to look around a bit, but mostly to just hang out on “our” cat. My honest first thought and gut reaction when I stepped on board that morning was, “oh my God, what have we done!!”. Of course, that feeling dissipated within minutes. But truth be told, a small amour of fear factor remains to this day, and I’m sure will resurface when I step on board our vessel for the first time! Yes, we have a big learning curve ahead of us, but we both have the time and are really looking forward to this new chapter of our lives. We both grew up on the ocean, and over the past 25 years have always had some kind of boat and have spent vast amounts of time on the ocean.
Yup, that's a BIG boat!
Over the next few days of the Yachting Festival, we made sure to visit “our” boat for a few hours each day, and also visited the booths of the manufacturers of the various components on our boat, such as the Yanmar dealer, the Highfield dealer, etc.
By the time the show came to an end, Andre was feeling quite a bit better, and on our final day in Cannes we rented a convertible Smart car and went for a drive down the coast past Nice, to the small medieval town of Eze, perched high on a mountaintop above the Mediterranean. We hiked down to the shore, went for a swim, then drove the winding roads to various other towns, and back to Cannes after dark. The following day we departed via train to Geneva, and the remainder of our trip unfolded before us.
Now we just had to wait for our boat, or ship as one of our friends called it (“you didn’t buy a boat, you bought a ship!”), to be built, with a completion date of June 2018.
(*Note* As this blog is written by T, it may be lacking in technical details as that is more A’s department. My apologies for this. I will try and flesh out some technical specs on the “About” page at some point, but most answers can also easily be found on the Lagoon website.)
Sure, we could get used to this!
A&T in Eze
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