How To Spot Your Favorite Movie Stars At Cannes!

Yess, the Cannes Film Festival offers cinema. But it also provides a front-row seat to the rich and famous and their pristine, hundred-million-dollar playthings, which are anchored on the French Riviera each May for the official start of yacht season.

While novices may notice those gleaming white vessels from the shore, the rich and racer-interested have made a hobby out of yacht tracking, even using Coast Guard data to pinpoint where Paul Allen’s Octopus, Len Blavatnik’s Odessa, Steven Spielberg’s Seven Seas, or whichever pristine pleasure boat is being chartered by Kim Kardashian is anchored . . . that is, if you can’t see the luxury cruisers from the Croisette.

Super-yacht broker Jamie Edmiston traces “yacht spotting” back to the public’s interest in Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy, who traveled the world on the Greek billionaire’s 325-foot Christina O in the late 1960s and 70s. For those interested in the wealthy couple, paparazzi photos of the former First Lady sunning herself on deck represented the most unattainable of luxury lifestyles—one with a hydraulic swimming pool that could be converted to a dance floor, a Renoir painting at sea, and seats covered in the foreskins of whales’ penises. But for boat aficionados, the Christina O and other impressive yachts since represent much more.

“The large yachts we’re building today are as complicated as the world’s most advanced warships, but they simultaneously have to be as comfortable as the world’s very best hotels,” Edmiston explains. “They’re engineering marvels. You’ve got this amazing, amazingly complicated boat that has to function like the most complicated building or even warship, with the electronics, plus you’ve got to have air-conditioning, it’s got to be silent, and then it’s got to be super-comfortable with all of the facilities that you’d imagine in the very, very, very best five-star hotel on earth.”

Edmiston estimates that chartering a yacht for Cannes can cost anywhere from $200,000 to more than a million dollars for a week at the festival. But for those uninterested in navigating the crowds, the value of rolling up to an international event in your own floating, five-star hotel is invaluable. And their yachts make for good sport to luxury looky-loos.

Tanya Blaylock, Quintessentially People’s yacht-crew placement director, explains that you might see yacht “fans or spotters on the docks, especially if a high-profile yacht is coming into port.” Once the smaller yachts have been docked, and the larger yachts are moored, there is not much movement during the festival. “Guests do not get taken to sea during the festival,” Blaylock says. “This is called a ‘static charter,’ meaning the vessel does not move; the yacht is used as a floating hotel and event venue.”

But spotters can find out exactly where a yacht is docked or moored using the Marine Traffic Web site. So, if Kim Kardashian were chartering a yacht called the Selfie, fans could simply search for the vessel, pull up a map showing where the reality star is presumably taking selfies aboard the Selfie, and get her exact latitude and longitude coordinates—certainly a plus for paparazzi.

“All vessels have A.I.S., which is an automatic identification system,” explains IYC Yachts general manager Mathilde de Roffignac. “It’s really a signal for the Coast Guard giving the position of the yacht and the size of the yacht, by electronically exchanging information via satellite and other ships.

“During this time of the year, or during boat shows, it’s really fun to look at the maps because you can see the density of the boat in the port and at anchor,” Roffignac explains. “I like to confirm that I can recognize the yachts that are out there. Sometimes you don’t know them all because there are so many coming to the French Riviera at this time of the year. But it’s nice to use if you are on a boat or using it from the coast to confirm you are looking at X yacht, confirm its size, and confirm that you know your yachts.

“All yacht owners and guests love boats in general, so they like to see if they can recognize shipyards,” Roffignac says of her clients, especially during yacht season, which runs through the Monaco Yacht Show, in September. “Sometimes there is an interesting design or there is something fun happening and they want to know the boat next door.”

In addition to tracking billionaires and celebrities, Blaylock says that Marine traffic data can have some practical use, too.

“It’s a good way to track my husband down, too. He is an engineer and his yacht just traveled from Asia to Oman through the Suez Canal to Europe, and I was able to see where he was whenever I logged on.”