Excess Campus 2024
We sat down with Felix Laville from Excess Catamarans to talk about the Excess Campus, and how it went. Thanks for a great description of the event!
This was held at the end of September in Canet-en-Rousillon and was a great success with four days of sail training, socialising and fun near Perpignan in French Catalonia, near the Pyrenees and close to the Spanish border.
You can find a schedule for the day here.
Four Days of Learning and Fun
Felix: This year the day was aimed at new clients. So, it’s the people that bought about maybe one year ago. The customer target is very wide. We had clients that used to be monohull sailors, people new to sailing and more experienced helmsmen and women.
So the idea is to organise a really good follow-up for the owner from Excess and the dealers. There’s a factory tour and then we have the Excess Campus, an in-house event for the moment. We also want to encourage the dealers to host these kinds of days.
The model is that we have four days with accommodation and food, and this year we had around 35 participants. So, 18 sets of clients with partners and children.
Katamarans: So families? Great!
Felix: Yeah, so families, really nice. And so the first day was weather and safety. First aid. We split the groups into English and French so that everyone was comfortable with the language. This was a challenge, but for activities like the manoeuvring in the marina, we wanted everyone to understand fully what was going on.
Katamarans: this is in Canet-de-Roussilon, right?
Felix: yes, Canet. With Alliance Nautiqe 66, one of our bigger dealers. 3 locations: classes in the conference facilities in the hotel (eg offshore medicine), then the yacht club and then training on the boats.
Training included some basics like knots (as you cover on Katamarans), how to tie the fenders, how to dock and so on.
Katamarans: also good fun for the kids.
Felix: yeah, great for the family! But even for some of the clients, it’s good to revise the basics. So OK, you can handle the boat and you can sail by yourself. But imagine you fall overboard? Your partner needs to be able to rescue you. You have to be a good team as a couple. With the medical stuff, we learnt how to stitch people up in an emergency for example.
We start by thinking “What can be dangerous on the boat?” Whether it´s taking a reef, sailing at night, tripping over obstacles, etc. From this base, we say, OK, what do we need to protect ourselves against these risks? Are you trimming the sails? Wear gloves. Be careful when moving around the boat. Practise reefing when it’s calm, and so on.
Katamarans: I see you had quite a few partners attending and helping. Yanmar and so on.
Felix: yes, we wanted to organise this in-house this year and we are investing quite a lot for these four days (food, hotels, skippers, the doctors etc), but we also wanted to open up to relevant sponsors. We had Yanmar, Seanapps and RM Nautisme who help owners with additional installations of things like Starlink. Yanmar did engine maintenance, Seanappps talked about their solution and RM Nautisme went through electronics on the boat. We also had Garmin to explain the navigation system.
The second day, we were on the boats manoeuvring in the marina. The wind picked up to 30 knots (Tramontane) so we went racing. The sea state was pretty calm, but the wind was strong. We were doing 12 knots with one reef.
Many of the owners at the end of the day said that they would have never gone out in those conditions, but now that they knew the boat could handle it easily, it gave them a lot of confidence both in the catamaran and in their abilities.
Katamarans: how many boats did you have out?
Felix: four boats
Katamarans: and everyone gets together for dinner in the evenings?
Felix– yes it was very social. We went to a nice restaurant in Collioure one evening for example.
We had a WhatsApp Group for the event, so everyone was posting pictures and chatting on the group. And the conversation has continued. Are you going to be in the Balaerics? What tender did you buy? And so on.
Katamarans: so these are all existing owners right?
Felix: yeah, but we are thinking of opening this up to prospective customers in the future. This could also be a good model. We had clients that came from Los Angeles, Italy, Turkey, the Netherlands, from all over. And we are working on another project in the US: Excess Clinics.
We had four clients who subsequently came to the La Rochelle boat show selling the boats for us to new clients!
Katamarans– so there will another Excess Campus next year?
Felix: for sure! This was a great success, so we are going to repeat it.
Customer Feedback
We thank you for the marvelous three days of education and joy. We learned a lot and made new friends. We are impatient to go to our Excess to practice what we learned.
We hope to see you again. If any of the participants of this course come to Turkey, please let us know. We will be very happy to help you.
A & A
On my way home to Los Angeles now. It was a pleasure meeting all of you. Thank you Excess team for providing this valuable experience for Excess owners and making this brand fun and exciting. I look forward to seeing you all again wherever you are and especially on your beautiful boats! copy. Take care! ⛵️😎⚓️❤️
Dear members of the Excess Campus. Thank you all very much for the cosy and educational days. We are proud to be a member of the enthusiastic club of passionate Excess sailors. We learned a lot but especially enjoyed it. Hope to meet again somewhere in the world.
Here’s the Tribe
More Information
Excess plan to organise more events like this in the future both in Europe and the United States (where it will be called Excess Clinics). Please get in touch if you would like further information on how to attend or click here for further information.
