Next Wave: Italy puts youth boatbuilding talent on the water, not just on paper

Nautica, the Italian yachting magazine publishing since 1962, has committed to an ongoing series profiling the students and apprentices who are already building the next generation of boats. Called Next Wave, the project turns a spotlight on young designers, builders and racers from university sailing teams, and it hands out concrete awards for work that gets measured the hard way: on the water.

The initiative launched in the spring and wrapped its first year at the 1001VELAcup, a contest that ran from 23 to 27 September in the Gulf of La Spezia. Eight boats built by students from five universities competed. The format dates to 2005, invented by Massimo Paperini and Paolo Procesi, and its rule has not changed: whoever designs the boat builds it, and whoever builds it then races it.

Six awards for work built by hand

Next Wave awarded six prizes at the crew dinner in Cadimare on Friday 25 September.

The Nautica Green award went to the Audace Sailing Team from the University of Trieste for Lina Rossa, a hull built from flax fiber and bio-based resin. Mètis Vela from the University of Padova took the Design prize. The Tech award went to the PoliMi Sailing Team from Politecnico di Milano for returning Baüscia, a boat originally built in 2010, to racing condition. The Hochschule Karlsruhe, the only foreign entry, received the Spirit award for EcoSail 1.

The REVEL Sailing Team from the University of Genova’s La Spezia campus took two prizes, both Story and Rookie. The Rookie award went to Medusa, a boat designed by Leonardo Bucci on the night of 23 December and built in a month and a half at the Arsenale in La Spezia, launched on 22 September.

A rookie boat that won on debut

Medusa is the project’s closest thing to a headline story. Three days after launching, it won its first-ever race. Across nine races it took the overall 1001VELAcup trophy and the Maneschi Prize, whose jury included Nautica for the first time.

That arc, from a late-night sketch in December to a race win in September, is precisely the kind of trajectory Next Wave exists to document. The project began by profiling the REVEL Sailing Team, founded in 2023 at the La Spezia campus, then expanded to other squads, telling their stories through the build process rather than just the result.

Beyond the race course

Next Wave is not confined to sailing. Nautica has framed the initiative as covering the full breadth of the industry: sailing and power, design and engineering, and the trades that can only be learned alongside people who know how to do them. The organizing idea is that young people are not merely the future of yachting but an essential part of its present, and deserve steady editorial attention before their names show up on a shipyard’s org chart.

For readers of HullVolt, the Green award is the most directly relevant signal. A student hull in flax fiber and bio-based resin is a materials path worth watching as electric and low-impact builds seek lighter, lower-footprint structures. The electric powertrain link is indirect, but the hands-on, build-then-sail ethos is the same one that drives small electric day boats and near-shore craft: prove the concept by putting it on the water.

The caveat is straightforward for now. Next Wave is an editorial and sponsorship effort by a magazine, not a formal engineering program with published performance data or independent test results. What it does provide is a scouting pipeline and a recurring stage for student-built boats to be judged in real conditions, which is more than most talent contests deliver.