Geneva Lakes Antique Classic Boat Show 2026

The Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show fills the Abbey Marina harbor in Fontana, Wisconsin on Saturday, September 26 and Sunday, September 27, 2026. Boats are on display Saturday from 10 AM to 4 PM and Sunday from 10 AM to 3 PM. Admission and parking are both free. The boat parade leaves the harbor Saturday at 4 PM.

Roughly 46 boats are registered this year, spread across 10 judging classes, with home ports in 7 states. The oldest is a launch built in 1906. The newest was finished by its owner this year.

Here is everything you need to plan the day.

The 2026 Show at a Glance

The Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show is held annually in the Abbey Marina harbor at The Abbey Resort, 269 Fontana Blvd., Fontana-On-Geneva Lake, Wisconsin. It is presented by the Blackhawk Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society. Public display days in 2026 are Saturday, September 26 from 10 AM to 4 PM and Sunday, September 27 from 10 AM to 3 PM. Admission and parking are free. A boat parade leaves the harbor Saturday at 4 PM.

One thing to get right before you drive out. You will see this show listed as September 25 to 27 in some places and September 26 to 27 in others. Both are defensible and only one of them is useful to you.

The organizer’s site headlines the weekend as September 25 through 27. The organizer’s own schedule block and The Abbey Resort’s event page both list public display on Saturday and Sunday only. Friday the 25th reads as a participant arrival and staging day.

Plan on Saturday or Sunday. If you want Friday, call the show first.

Saturday or Sunday: Which Day to Go

Saturday, September 26 is the better single day at the Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show. It runs an hour longer, from 10 AM to 4 PM against Sunday’s 10 AM to 3 PM, and the boat parade leaves the harbor at 4 PM on Saturday only. Sunday is the quieter day for walking the docks and talking to owners, and boats begin leaving before the 3 PM close.

Take Saturday if you only get one.

The parade is the reason, and it is not close. Watching 40-odd restored boats idle out of a harbor in a line is a different experience from looking at the same boats tied up, and it happens once.

Sunday is the better day if the docks matter more to you than the water. Fewer people, more room to stand in front of a boat and ask its owner what the bottom cost. Come by 1 PM. A 3 PM close means trailers start hooking up around 2, and the harbor thins out ahead of the posted time.

The weather rule for late September on Geneva Lake: mornings are cold and clear, afternoons warm up fast. The 10 AM opening on a still morning gives you the reflections. Bring a jacket you can take off.

The Saturday 4 PM Boat Parade

The boat parade at the Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show leaves the Abbey Marina harbor at 4 PM on Saturday, September 26, 2026, at the close of the display day. Show boats run out along the Fontana shoreline on the west end of Geneva Lake. Watching is free and requires no ticket.

Get in position by 3:45. The boats do not wait.

Two places to stand. Along the Abbey Marina harbor itself, which puts you close enough to hear the engines start and is where most people watch from. Or on the Fontana public lakefront a short walk west, which trades proximity for a wider view of the whole line once it clears the harbor mouth.

The Fontana stretch of the Geneva Lake Shore Path runs along that same water and gives you a third option if the first two fill up.

Sound is half of it. A 1955 Chris-Craft Cobra with an original Cadillac V8 in it makes a noise no modern boat makes, and there are several engines in this fleet in that category.

What Is Actually Registered for 2026

As of early September 2026, about 46 boats are registered for the Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show, divided into 10 judging classes: Antique Cruiser, Antique Runabout, Classic Runabout, Classic Utility, Contemporary, Fiberglass, Historic, Lapstrake, Outboard, and Streblow. Classic Utility is the largest class with 12 entries. Home ports span 7 states, and 12 of the registered boats are based on Geneva Lake or within a few miles of it.

This is the part no other listing for this show will tell you, and it is the part that decides whether the drive is worth it.

Counted off the show’s own entries page, which updates as boats are added. Registration closed September 1, so the list is close to final, though boats do scratch.

The range is the surprising part. The oldest entry is a launch from 1906 with a period gas motor, an early mail boat from up north. The newest is a 14-foot lug-rigged sailboat that its owner in Lake Geneva built from plans and expected to finish this month. That is 120 model years of boat in one harbor.

Chris-Craft dominates, which is what you would expect. Underneath that there is a 1937 Century, a Canadian-built Shepherd, a Greavette from Ontario, a 1947 Century Sea Maid, and a 1965 Colcock hydroplane with a shovel-nose hull that took 5 years to restore.

The Fiberglass class is the sleeper. It runs from a 1957 Seafury being towed by a matching hot-pink Cadillac to a 1987 Checkmate that its original owner still runs. Wooden-boat people tend to walk past that dock. Do not.

Streblow Gets Its Own Class

Streblow Custom Boats is a Lake Geneva boat builder, and the Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show gives Streblow boats a dedicated judging class of their own rather than mixing them into the general runabout and utility classes. Eight Streblows are registered for 2026, most with home ports on or near Geneva Lake. Streblow Custom Boats is also a Platinum sponsor of the show.

No other class at this show is named for a single builder. That tells you something about where you are.

The 8 registered for 2026 run from a 1958 Rebel, one of the oldest surviving Streblow inboards, up through a 1991 Sport V. In between: a 1972 24-footer that has never had a home port other than Lake Geneva, a 1979 that came back into service this season after a winter of refinishing, and a 1980 straight drive.

Home ports on the Streblow dock read like a Geneva Lake directory. Lake Geneva, Williams Bay, Fontana, and a few Chicago-area owners who keep their boats here.

If you want one sentence on why this show is in Fontana and not somewhere else: the boats live here.

The Boats With Local History Attached

Several entries carry Geneva Lake stories rather than just a hull number.

Effie, a 25-foot Chris-Craft Sportsman, is the boat Gordon Whowell used to start Gordy’s in Fontana in 1955, running speedboat rides off the west shore at a dollar a head. The pitch at the time: “A millionaire’s thrill for 1 thin bill.” The boat is still in the family and it is on the dock this year. Worth noting for the detail-minded: the show lists her as a 1949 and the family’s own notes date the hull to 1948, with hull number S-25-158.

Leading Lady, a 1937 Chris-Craft Sportsman out of Williams Bay, is one of a dozen prewar twin-engine Sportsman utilities Chris-Craft ever built and one of a very small number known to survive. It came out of a barn in central Illinois in 1998 after a 4-year search.

Miss Kimmy, a 1957 Chris-Craft Continental, was originally shipped to a boat company in Williams Bay in 1957 and spent its early life on Geneva Lake before wandering off to Arkansas. Its current owners found it on a classified listing in 2010 and brought it back. It summers here again.

A 1965 Chris-Craft Sea Skiff in the Lapstrake class has been in one family since it was bought new from a dealer in this area in 1965, and a fourth generation learned to water ski behind it this summer. Its recent bottom work was done by Bergersen Boat Company, which is a Gold sponsor of this show.

That is the pattern worth noticing. The builders, the restorers, the sponsors, and the owners in this harbor are largely the same small community, and most of them are within 20 minutes of the dock you are standing on.

Kim and Joel’s take: A boat like that is a 40-year decision, and so is where you keep it. Slip availability, pier rights, and whether a property comes with lake access at all vary enormously around this shoreline, and the differences are not obvious from a listing photo. Ask before you fall for the view. Search homes around Geneva Lake and the Southern Lakes

Free, and Actually Free

Admission costs nothing. Parking costs nothing, per the venue. There is no ticket, no wristband, and no gate.

That puts this near the top of the list in our free things to do guide for the whole month, and it is a real outlier for an event of this quality on this lake in September.

What you will spend money on: food and drink at The Abbey Resort, which is right there and is the easy option, or dinner in Fontana or Williams Bay afterward. Our restaurant guide covers the west end.

Parking and Getting There

Where: The Abbey Marina harbor at The Abbey Resort, 269 Fontana Blvd., Fontana-On-Geneva Lake From downtown Lake Geneva: about 20 minutes around the north shore on WIS 50 Parking: Free on the resort grounds, per the venue’s event listing Best for: A 2-hour walk-through, or a full afternoon if you stay for the parade One catch: Free plus good weather plus a Saturday means the lots fill by late morning. Arrive before 11 if you can.

Fontana is the west end of Geneva Lake, and the marina sits in the harbor at the bottom of the village. Once you park you can walk the docks, the Fontana beach, and the village without moving the car again.

If you are making a weekend of it, The Abbey holds a group rate for show participants, which requires identifying yourself as one when you book. Everybody else books normally, and our resorts guide covers the alternatives on the west end.

The Sharpest Arrow Award

The Sharpest Arrow is an award given at the Geneva Lakes Antique and Classic Boat Show for the best original restoration of a Blackhawk Chapter member’s antique or classic boat, judged against how the boat left the factory. The chapter publishes a winner list going back to 1996. Recent winners include a 1941 Chris-Craft barrelback and a 1956 Ole Lind utility.

It is a restoration award rather than a beauty award, and the distinction matters when you are looking at the boats.

Judging is against factory-original condition. A boat with a modern engine, upgraded electronics, and a flawless finish can lose to a rougher boat whose owner tracked down the correct hardware. Several of the entries this year say plainly that they chose authenticity over modernizing, which is a choice you can see once you know to look for it.

The published winner list runs from a 1950 Chris-Craft racing runabout in 1996 through last year. Reading it is a decent short history of what this chapter values.

Showing a Boat, and Getting In for 2027

Registration for 2026 closed on September 1, along with the deadline for submitting a photo and boat history for the printed program.

If you want in next year, the process runs through the show’s own site, which handles registration online, and you do not have to own something rare. This year’s fleet includes a 1974 Glastron, a 1962 Grady White, and a home-built dinghy. It is a chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society, and membership is the usual route in.

The one hard deadline to watch is that program cutoff at the start of September. Miss it and your boat shows without its story attached, which for most of these boats is half the point.

The Rest of That Weekend

The last weekend of September is a good one on this lake.

Peak fall color is usually still a couple of weeks out, so you get warm water, thin crowds, and early color rather than the full October show. Our fall activities guide covers what is running through October, and the events calendar has the rest of the month.

If the boats put you in the mood to get on the water yourself, the boat tours guide covers the cruise options, several of which run into December. And the 17 lakes around Geneva Lake are all quiet this time of year.

What is happening every other week around here lands in What’s Happening at The Lake on Wednesday mornings.

Frequently Asked Questions About the 2026 Boat Show

After a Day Like That, People Start Looking at Piers

It happens every September. Somebody spends an afternoon on that dock and drives home along the north shore reading for-sale signs.

Kim and Joel Reyenga, eXp Realty, work Lake Geneva, Williams Bay, Fontana, Geneva National, Delavan, Elkhorn, and the lakes around Geneva Lake.

Luxury. Lake. Golf. Town and Country.

Search homes around Lake Geneva and the Southern Lakes, or call or text (262) 325-9867. Ask about pier rights and slip availability before you ask about the kitchen. On this lake it is the question that actually changes the number.