The Mediterranean leg and the Pacific leg are both Naora voyages aboard the same boat with the same captain and the same community structure. They are also, in almost every other respect, different experiences, and the person who chooses between them on the basis of the route map alone is not choosing on the basis that best predicts what their experience will be. Here is the comparison that the route map does not show.
The Mediterranean: Proximity and Depth
The Mediterranean sailing is day sailing punctuated by offshore nights: the anchorage to the next anchorage across a stretch of water that is rarely more than twelve hours of sailing and that is surrounded, on every coast, by the specific density of human history that three thousand years of continuous civilisation deposits in the landscape.
The village above the bay was there before the Roman fleet used the same bay as the logistical base for the Punic Wars. The olive grove on the hillside above the anchorage has been producing oil since before the written records that document it. The market in the harbour town contains the same categories of product, fish and oil and wine and cheese, that the same market contained for the Venetian merchants who provisioned their galleys here in the fifteenth century.
The Mediterranean leg is the leg for the member whose primary relationship with the voyage is through the places it visits rather than through the passage itself. The anchorages are frequent, the day passages are comfortable, the culture is accessible from the boat in the form of the walk up from the dock and the conversation at the market and the table at the taverna above the bay. The offshore sailing challenge is real but it is not the primary feature of the experience. The primary feature is the density of the world the boat is moving through.
The Pacific: Remoteness and Duration
The Pacific leg is the opposite in almost every dimension. The passage from the Galapagos to the Marquesas is 3,000 miles of open ocean with no land between the departure and the arrival. Three weeks at sea. The nearest other boat is typically tens of miles away. The nearest port infrastructure is hundreds of miles away in the wrong direction.
The world the boat is moving through is not a world of accumulated human history: it is the world of the open ocean, which has no history in the human sense and no culture accessible from the boat’s deck except the culture that the boat itself produces.
The Pacific leg is the leg for the member whose primary relationship with the voyage is through what the passage produces in them rather than through the places it visits. The three weeks of the Pacific crossing produces the specific transformation that the offshore life is capable of producing and that the Mediterranean day sailing, for all its beauty, does not produce in the same form: the removal of every alternative to the present moment, the community reduced to the twelve people aboard the boat and the conversations that three weeks of proximity without distraction generates, the specific quality of the arrival at the Marquesas that is the arrival not at a destination but at the conclusion of something that the three weeks of the passage produced.
Which One to Choose
The member who has not sailed before and who is experiencing the Naora rhythm for the first time belongs in the Mediterranean. The culture is accessible, the conditions are manageable, the anchorages are frequent enough that the rhythm can be absorbed gradually rather than all at once. The Mediterranean leg is the right first leg for almost everyone.
The member who has been on the boat before, or the experienced offshore sailor who knows already what the long passage produces and is specifically seeking it, belongs in the Pacific. The transformation it produces is not available in any other chapter of the route. The 3,000 miles of open ocean between the Galapagos and the Marquesas is the most specific expression of what the Naora voyage is designed to produce, and the member who is ready for it will find nothing equivalent anywhere else on the route or anywhere else on the planet.
