Croatia Boat Show is one of the top 10 boating shows in the World – as the organizers like to call it. And it is definitely nice and flashy. Split is usually lovely at this tome of the year but the weather is hard to predict and it was changing from day to day, from sun to rain, from windy (very!) to calm…
Of course, the riva of Split was busy as always!
The boat show is mostly about luxury yachts. Very few equipment suppliers and traditional vessels. Even very few sailing boats! The show should be renamed to Motor or Power boat show… Among only a few dozen sailing boats, this one was standing out. Did not get it name but it looks sharp and quite exclusive.
My favorite boat/ship of the show was the replica of 15th century galleon from Dubrovnik. Wonderfully done, it is just an attention grabber. The visitors were able to walk on it and experience, to some extent, the beauty of the old days of “true” sailing and seamanship.
I also liked the “traditional” houses that were on sale on the Boat Show. These little houses are built for souvenir stands or for small shops but I am thinking about getting them for a camp site we have.
The funniest thing is that they are made of plastic! Looking absolutely real, I had to touch and scratch to make sure that was not stone!
There was just a symbolic number of stands with marine equipment, generators, GPSs… Most of the show is just for the big motor boats and the biggest and the most prestigious location was for Sunseeker yachts. I got and invitation from Ana, their sales manager, to take a tour of their boats for our upcoming Luxury Croatia Travel web site.
Their boats are nice but you can see only so much of flashy interiors and shiny hulls. After a third boat, I was not in a mood for looking over the rest so we just discussed the cooperation.
Conclusion: more variety would help. More traditional and more wooden boats would be the icing on the cake of this show. And we have something to show with our traditional boats and ships like this one.
Instead of that beauty, we were stuck with shiny and soulless motor boats targeting primarily nouveou riches.
