The Riva Owner's Guide to Lake Como

There is a reason the classic wooden runabout is associated with this lake and not with the sea, and it is not fashion. It is geometry. Lake Como is a long, deep, sheltered trench with settlements strung along both shores and no tide, no swell and no salt. A fast, low, beautifully finished open boat with a big engine and no accommodation is a slightly absurd object almost anywhere else. Here it is a car.

The word riva means shore or bank in Italian, which is a coincidence worth enjoying, because that is exactly what these boats do: they go from one shore to another. Before the roads were what they are, this lake moved on the water, carrying goods, people, post, everything, and the fast private boat is simply the last and most decorative expression of a shoreline that has always been organised around arriving by water rather than by land. The villas have water gates because that was the front door.

What follows practically is that a boat like this earns its keep only if you use it for short journeys, frequently. Across for coffee. Round the headland for a swim before breakfast. Down to the village to collect somebody off the ferry. Owners who keep one for the two grand outings a year end up with an extremely expensive ornament and a slightly guilty relationship with it, whereas owners who take it out four mornings a week in July are getting more out of this lake than almost anybody.

The corollary is unfashionable and we will say it anyway: a great many people who want one of these boats should charter one instead. If you are here for three weeks a year, the arithmetic and the pleasure both point the same way, and the boat you can have brought round to your steps on a Tuesday morning by somebody who has already warmed it up and wiped the dew off it is, on most measures, the better boat.

That deep, wet, faintly orange depth in the mahogany, with the grain lifting underneath it, is the thing people fall in love with, and it is not a property of the wood. It is a great many thin coats of varnish, built up, flatted back between coats, and it is the most perishable component of the entire boat. Ultraviolet light destroys it. Not slowly and not politely: a boat left uncovered on an open mooring through a Lombard summer will show it on the horizontal surfaces within a season, first as a dulling and then as a milkiness where the film has begun to break down.

So the finish is a maintenance cycle. A boat in good order is being topped up regularly, with additional coats laid on before the film is compromised, and is being taken back to bare wood and rebuilt only when somebody has previously let it go too far. The difference in cost between the two is not marginal. Keeping a good finish good is a routine annual expense; recovering a neglected one is a project measured in months of shed time, and it happens in the winter because that is when the boat is out and the workshop is warm.

Which is why the covered berth is not a luxury item on the list but the first item on it. A boat kept in a darsena or under a canopy, with a properly fitted cover over it, is protected from the two things that ruin it, direct sun and standing water in the cockpit, and its annual bill is a fraction of the identical boat kept on an open mooring in the middle of the lake because the view was better.

The second-order problems are the ones that catch new owners. Water sitting in the bilge of a wooden boat is not the same problem as water in the bilge of a plastic one. Fastenings, the metalwork under the chrome, the engine bearers, the frames at the turn of the bilge: everything ferrous in a damp wooden hull is quietly going, and the boat that looks immaculate on the mooring may be perfectly sound or may be twenty years into a conversation nobody has had with it. Which brings us to the papers.

A boat of this type is a hard-chine planing hull with a lot of engine in a fairly short length, and the honest description of how it rides is: magnificent on flat water and increasingly athletic on anything else. In the early morning, on the glass the northerly leaves behind, it is one of the great experiences available anywhere. By three in the afternoon with the southerly up and a short, steep chop running the length of the basin, the same boat is wet, noisy and a genuine physical workout for whoever is driving.

This is the single most useful thing to know before buying one, because it determines when you will use it and therefore whether you will. Owners who are morning people love these boats. Owners who imagine a leisurely cocktail run at six in the evening across the widest part of the lake are describing a different boat, probably with a canopy and a deeper vee.

The second thing is wash, everybody else's and your own. The ferries and the fast services throw a substantial wake, and a wake crossed badly in a boat with this much overhang forward is how people crack windscreens and hurt passengers' backs. Take it at an angle, take it slowly, and watch what the boat ahead of you does when it crosses the same line. Your own wash is a matter of manners and, near the shore, of regulation: a boat under way close in throws water into other people's boathouses and over other people's swimmers, and on a lake where everybody knows whose boat is whose this is noticed.

The third is that varnish and passengers are in tension. These boats have white upholstery, chrome, and decking that shows everything. Sun cream marks it. Wet swimming costumes mark it. A dropped anchor takes a chunk out of a covering board that costs a fortnight to put right. None of that is an argument against using the boat. It is an argument for keeping towels on board and for accepting, early, that a working boat has a patina and a museum piece does not go out.

In the classic boat market, condition is visible and history is not, and the second is worth more. The questions that determine what a boat is actually worth are archival: what the hull number is and whether it corresponds to the documentation, whether the engine is the one it left with or a later replacement, how many restorations it has had and how far each of them went, and who carried them out.

The distinction that matters most is between a boat that has been restored and a boat that has been rebuilt. Both phrases get used to describe the same invoice. A restored boat has had its original structure conserved, with individual components replaced as necessary and documented; a rebuilt boat may have very little original material left in it, which does not make it a bad boat, and it may be an excellent one, but it makes it a different asset, and the price should reflect that.

So ask for the file, and be suspicious of a boat that does not have one. What you want to see is a continuous record: purchase documents, registration history, the yard invoices for each intervention with photographs of the hull opened up, and the correspondence around any significant work. Boats that have been properly kept on this lake tend to have exactly this, because the people who look after them are the same handful of workshops and they keep records.

And have somebody survey it who specialises in wooden hulls, which is not the same person who surveys production boats. What they are looking for is not cosmetic: moisture in the structure, the condition of the fastenings and the frames, previous repairs concealed under the finish, and evidence of the boat having been left afloat and uncovered by an owner who has since sold it. The registration and licensing mechanics, which are a separate matter and apply to any boat on this lake, are set out in our boat owner's guide.

The berth is the constraint on this lake, and for a wooden boat it is a stricter constraint than for anybody else. There are broadly three arrangements. A private darsena beneath a villa, which is the ideal and is the reason a house with a boathouse trades at a premium that has nothing to do with its bedrooms. A covered berth in a village basin or a yard, which is the practical answer for most people and is scarce enough that it should be secured before the boat is bought rather than after. Or an open mooring, which for a varnished boat we would only ever describe as temporary.

The reason the order runs that way is not snobbery about appearances. An uncovered boat takes sun on the deck, rain into the cockpit, dew every single night from September, leaves in the autumn and, if it is anywhere with a fetch, a lifetime of small impacts against a pontoon. Every one of those is a maintenance cost, and they compound.

Then there is the winter, which is the half of the year nobody photographs. The boat comes out: lifted, pressure-washed, dried, and put in a shed. That is when the varnish work happens, when the engine is serviced and preserved, when the upholstery goes away to be cleaned and the chrome comes off to be redone. The workshops on this lake are busiest between November and March and they are booked in advance; an owner who rings in February to get a boat ready for Easter is at the back of a queue formed in October.

One further thing, which owners consistently underestimate: somebody has to look at the boat when you are not here. Not weekly maintenance, simply eyes on it. Covers work loose. Bilge pumps fail quietly. A boat left afloat under a cover that has filled with rainwater in November is a story that ends badly and begins invisibly. The person who walks down and looks is the cheapest line in the whole of this and the one most often left out.

Everything above is in service of the part that matters, and the part that matters is unglamorous and daily. Take it out at seven. The lake is flat, the light is coming down from the north, the ferries have barely started and the whole basin is empty. Go and get bread from a village on the other shore. Anchor off a wooded point where nobody can reach you on foot and swim off the transom. Be back before the breeze fills in. That is what the boat is for, and it is available roughly two hundred mornings a year.

There is an etiquette on this water and it is worth learning quickly because the community is small. Slow down past moored boats, past swimmers and past anybody fishing, which on this lake means genuinely slow and not merely slower. Give the ferries room and cross behind them; they are on a timetable and they will not deviate. Do not run at speed close to the shore in the early morning, when the water is flat and your wash will travel a very long way into somebody's boathouse. And if you tie up somewhere you have not been invited, expect to be told, politely and once.

The other piece of local practice is the morning wipe-down. Every boat on this lake is wet at eight in the morning from September onwards, and on a varnished deck that water does not simply evaporate; it sits, and then it marks. The people who keep these boats beautifully are not doing anything clever; they are doing something small and repetitive at the same time every day, which is usually the answer to how anything on this lake stays in good condition.

And the last argument for using it hard: a boat that is run regularly has fewer problems than a boat that sits. Engines that are started weekly do not seize, stern gear that is used does not corrode in place, and a hull that is being looked at four times a week gets its problems found at the small end. The most expensive classic boats on this lake are, almost without exception, the ones nobody takes out.