Stepping into Sentosa Cove is always a pleasure. There is something about the air here - salt-tinged, unhurried - that immediately tells your shoulders to drop. On most days, the draw is the water itself: the gentle pull of the marina, and casting off into a Singapore sunset on special occasions. But this April, the invitation was to stay ashore.
Welcome to the Singapore Yachting Festival 2026 (SYF). Now in its fourth edition, and already feeling like a permanent fixture on the calendar of anyone who loves the finer things that float.
For four days – 23 to 26 April - ONE°15 Marina Sentosa Cove transformed into something between a luxury trade fair, a lifestyle festival, and a very glamorous maritime party. And if you weren't there, you missed something genuinely special. But don't worry we can take you through every nautical mile of it.
A Festival That Has Found Its Footing
Let's start with some numbers, because they tell a story. This fourth edition welcomed 14,280 visitors – that's 20 per cent above expected attendance. Two hundred and eleven participating brands were on show. The multihull presence was the largest in the Festival's history. And there was a 42 per cent surge in yachting interest across the region since 2022 – a figure that, once you've spent a few hours at SYF, stops feeling like a statistic and starts feeling entirely obvious.
This is not a niche event for people who already own yachts only. That's perhaps the most important thing to understand about what the Singapore Yachting Festival has become. Yes, there are buyers here. Yes, serious transactions are happening in quiet conversations over champagne at the back of a 30-metre vessel. But the Festival has deliberately, and successfully, cast its net much wider – drawing in the curious, the aspirational, the lifestyle-obsessed and the genuinely water-curious among Singapore's enormous expat and global local community.
Arthur Tay, Chairman and CEO of SUTL Group, set the tone at the opening ceremony on 23 April, pointing to the Asia Pacific region's rising dominance in global yachting. The numbers speak: the region accounts for around 23 per cent of global yacht charter revenue, and around 65% of yachts active in the region are owned by Asian nationals – so that's that.
Singapore, with its infrastructure, its connectivity, its extraordinary concentration of wealth and appetite for experiential luxury, is perfectly positioned at its centre.
The Marina Comes Alive
Let me paint the scene. You arrive at ONE°15 Marina and the first thing that hits you is the sheer variety of vessels on display – from sleek day boats that look like they should be in a design museum, to sailing catamarans built for adventure, to superyachts that make you instinctively lower your voice, as though you've just walked into a very beautiful library.
The Festival had clearly thought carefully about accessibility. Joy rides to the Southern Islands ran daily and were met with waitlists throughout – a detail that says everything about how well this programming landed. For many visitors, stepping onto a boat and heading out to sea was a first, and the Festival made it feel completely within reach. Paddle boarding, kayaking, and a full Experiential Zone invited people to jump – sometimes literally! - into a more participatory relationship with the water.
There was the extraordinary sight of a 130-year-old Norwegian vessel, the historical Vega, sitting proudly among its modern counterparts – a reminder that the sea has always been where humans went to explore, discover, and push beyond the horizon. That vessel, now repurposed for charity work, carrying educational and medical supplies to communities in Indonesia, was one of the quiet emotional highlights of the whole Festival. History and purpose, floating in the same marina as a 50-million-euro plus plus superyacht. Only in Singapore.
The Spotlight Zone buzzed with sessions covering everything from investment strategy to wine tasting, whisky masterclasses to cheese pairings. A Supercar Parade drew the expected gasps. Live entertainment filled the evenings. But what struck me most was the coherence of it all - the sense that this was a Festival with a point of view, not just a collection of shiny boats arranged for Instagram.
Sanlorenzo: When Luxury Becomes a Language
If there was one experience at SYF 2026 that I will be describing to people for the rest of the year, it was stepping aboard the Sanlorenzo vessels - all privately owned.
Sanlorenzo has been in Singapore for 30 years. Thirty. Years. And in that time, they have built a reputation that rests not on volume – they produce around 60 boats a year globally, each entirely bespoke - but on the kind of quiet authority that comes from knowing exactly what you are and refusing to be anything else.
"Tomorrow's timeless," is how they describe their philosophy. And walking through the SD118 and the SX100, you understand immediately what that means.
The SD range is built for the long haul. These are vessels designed for extended exploration, capable of sustained ocean passages, and conceived for owners who don't just want a boat but a home that happens to travel - in style of course. The privately owned SD118 that dominated the marina was breathtaking in its restraint: five cabins, three decks, and an interior that felt more like a curated Milan apartment than anything you'd associate with life at sea. Stunning doesn’t begin to describe this superyacht. The furniture sourced in collaboration with top Italian designers, or - this is the part that delighted me - brought by the owner themselves. These boats are expressions of individual taste in the most literal sense.
The SX range speaks to a newer generation of ownership - younger, more active, drawn to the outdoors. The SX100's iconic staircase, designed by Piero Lissoni, is the kind of detail that makes you stop and simply look. It's the staircase that a boutique hotel in Amalfi would be proud of. On a boat.
Sanlorenzo partners with Salvatore Ferragamo and Baccarat. They operate three distinctive brands under the Sanlorenzo umbrella. And their vessels, starting north of 50 million euros, are not for everyone - but they are for someone very specific, and that someone knows exactly who they are.
What struck me most aboard these vessels was the philosophy of understated luxury. Nothing shouts. Nothing performs. The quality is simply there with sober elegance - in the grain of the wood, the marble staircases, the way light moves through a window placed at precisely the right angle. It is, as they say, timeless.
Gulf Craft's Nomad 101: The Spirit of Exploration
Moored nearby, the Nomad 101 from Gulf Craft told a different but equally compelling story.
Gulf Craft is one of those companies that quietly underpins an entire regional marine industry. Based in the north of Dubai, with five shipyards and 40 years of boat-building history, they have been part of Southeast Asia's maritime story from the very beginning - early vessels used for passenger transport and evening cruises, through to today's sophisticated offshore explorer yachts capable of sailing in any weather, for any distance.
The Nomad 101 – a 30-metre superyacht with three decks, crewed by a captain and two skippers - is their mid-size jewel. Designed with tropical and Middle East conditions specifically in mind, it is built for the world most of us actually live in: heat, humidity, brilliant blue water, and the desire to go further.
What the Nomad 101 represents, beyond its impressive specifications, is a vision of yachting that is deeply suited to this part of the world. Gulf Craft is increasingly the preferred body builder for Southeast Asia. The boating community here is growing fast - and Gulf Craft is growing with it, adding catamarans to their lineup for next year, upgrading technology, improving fuel efficiency, and building out local partner networks to manage vessel wellbeing across the region.
The lifestyle parallel drew itself: similar clients across the Gulf and Southeast Asia, similar appreciation for long-distance cruising, similar desire for a home away from home that moves. And at 11 million USD, the Nomad 101 sits in a category where, as someone pointed out with a smile, there is no real estate stamp duty, and if you don't like your neighbours, you simply set sails and move.
Among the highlights of my visit to the Festival was a conversation I will not forget in a hurry. Seated aboard the Nomad 101, with the gentle movement of the water beneath us, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Erwin Bamps, CEO of Gulf Craft - and he did not disappoint.
In a world where every CEO is watching the clock, Erwin took his time - answering each question with the kind of thoughtfulness and genuine insight that is increasingly rare at the top. We covered boat ownership in Asia and the world, the state of the region's yachting industry, Gulf Craft's vision for the years ahead, and Singapore's quietly expanding role as the maritime hub of Southeast Asia - amongst others. Nuggets of gold, every one of them - the kind of insider perspective that you simply don't come across unless you're in the right place, on the right boat, at the right time.
The full conversation deserves its own space, and we'll be publishing it in full shortly. Keep an eye out - if you have any interest in where Asian yachting is heading, or what it really takes to experience yachting, you won't want to miss it.
The Wellness Suite: Where the Sea Meets the Self
Here is the detail that I suspect nobody expected to be a highlight of a yachting festival, and yet: the Wellness Suite was, by audience consensus and my own experience, one of the standout additions to SYF 2026.
Housed within a superyacht and spread across five distinct experience zones, it reframed entirely what a lifestyle event at sea can offer.
Zone one was the Elixir Bar - not cocktails, but carefully formulated drinks designed to shift your physiology. Zone two, the Longevity Suite, offered what they described as an instant holistic health assessment: a comprehensive overview of your body's current state, delivered quietly and without judgment. Zone three brought longevity experts to speak - conversations about health, ageing, and the science of living well that drew consistently full audiences.
Then there was the Red Light Room, using specific light frequencies for cellular recovery, and finally an Audio Frequency space - the kind of deeply quiet, resonant experience that you don't quite have words for until you've been inside it, and then you don't want to talk about it at all, you just want to go back - they did not lie on the long-lasting effects!
For Singapore's expat community - so many of whom are navigating demanding professional lives, ambitious health goals, and an appetite for experiences that feel genuinely novel - this was a revelation. Wellness at sea. Longevity science on a yacht. The combination of quiet luxury and purposeful health is precisely the direction that the most thoughtful lifestyle offerings are moving, and SYF 2026 had the intelligence to see it coming.
ASEAN on the Water: A Region Coming Together
Stepping back from the individual experiences and looking at SYF 2026 in its entirety, what became clear over four days was the Festival's increasingly important role as a place where ASEAN comes together around the sea.
Singapore has always understood its geography as advantage. Positioned at the meeting point of some of the world's most important maritime routes, surrounded by thousands of islands and some of the most spectacular sailing waters on earth, the city-state has quietly built an infrastructure - financial, logistical, cultural - around yachting that is now paying serious dividends.
The 2026 Festival brought together builders from Italy, the UAE, the US, and across Asia. It brought regional dealers, international media, high-net-worth buyers, and first-time visitors who'd never been on a boat before. It brought wellness practitioners onto superyachts and paddleboard instructors onto calm water and whisky experts into rooms that smelled faintly of the sea.
Looking ahead, the organisers are exploring markets like Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Thailand - an acknowledgment that Singapore is not just a destination for yachting but a hub for an entire regional conversation about what life on and near the water can be.
The Festival will return from 15 to 18 April 2027 at ONE°15 Marina Sentosa Cove. And if this year's edition is any guide, it will be bigger, more immersive, and more surprising than anyone expects.
Why You Should Care (Even If You've Never Been on a Yacht)
Here is the honest truth about the Singapore Yachting Festival: you don't need to be in the market for a superyacht to have one of the best weekends of your year there.
For Singapore's expat community - people who came here because they wanted more from life; more adventure, more beauty, more access to a world that feels genuinely extraordinary - SYF offers something rare. It offers access. Access to vessels you'd otherwise never walk aboard. Access to conversations with people building genuinely remarkable things. Access to an industry that is shaping what leisure, luxury and lifestyle look like for a growing, confident, curious Asia.
The joy rides to the Southern Islands, the cheese and whisky masterclasses, the red light therapy room, the supercar parade, the sight of a 130-year-old Norwegian vessel sitting next to a 50-million-euro Italian superyacht - all of it adds up to an event that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
Yachting, it turns out, is not just about the boats. It is about the life you imagine living around them. And for four days in April, the Singapore Yachting Festival made that life feel entirely, brilliantly possible.
The Singapore Yachting Festival 2026 ran from 23 to 26 April at ONE°15 Marina Sentosa Cove.
The next edition is confirmed for 15 to 18 April 2027. For more information, visit singaporeyachtingfestival.com
