Why I Built Naora: A Letter to the Person Reading This

I want to tell you something honest about why this exists.

I have been sailing for most of my life. Long enough to know that the ocean gives back more than you bring to it, and that the people who experience this for the first time change in ways that are difficult to describe but impossible to miss. That first night watch. The first time the sea builds and the boat moves in the way that asks something of you. The first morning in an anchorage where the water is so clear you can see the bottom from the deck. I have watched hundreds of people experience these things for the first time, and I have never tired of it. I do not think I will.

That is the honest reason Naora exists.

Not the route, though the route is extraordinary. Not the boat, though the Lagoon Eighty2 is the finest offshore catamaran I have ever sailed. The reason is the specific pleasure of receiving people on the water, welcoming them onto the boat, watching them find their sea legs, sitting with them at the table when the conversation has gone somewhere that the land does not easily reach.

I love the moment the anchor goes down in a bay nobody else is in and the dinghy goes over the side and the first person looks at me and asks what is in the water below. I love taking them in.

I am at my happiest when I am solving the small problems that the offshore life constantly produces and when the people around me are being changed by the experience without quite realising yet that they are being changed. The first time they go through a rough night and come out the other side surprised by themselves. The first whale shark.

The first bioluminescent wake at three in the morning when someone trails their hand over the stern and the water lights up around their fingers and they look at me like they need someone to confirm that this is real. The first time they do not reach for the phone when the sun comes up because the horizon is already more interesting than anything the phone would offer.

These are the moments I have been collecting for twenty-five years. Naora is the structure I built to keep collecting them with the right people.

I also love the conversations. Not the polite dinner conversation that social occasions require but the specific quality of conversation that happens at sea when people have been through a passage together and are sitting at a table in a bay that most of the world has never heard of.

Something about the offshore context removes the performance. People say what they actually think. They ask the questions they actually want to ask. I have been in conversations that I think about for months afterward, and I am certain that most of the people who were in those conversations think about them too.

I love the planning that comes before a leg, the chart sessions, the weather discussions, the decisions about where to anchor and which pass to take and what the day will hold. And I love the reunion when someone who was on a previous leg comes back aboard: the specific quality of the welcome between people who have been through the offshore experience together and who know, without needing to say it, that they share something that the people who have not been there do not.

I built Naora to bring the right people into the place that has given me the most. Not tourists. Not clients. People who are genuinely curious about the world and about themselves, who are willing to be uncomfortable in exchange for something real, and who understand that the finest things the ocean offers: the silence, the depth, the wildness, the quality of the first night watch. Things that are not available in the brochure version.

The Eighty2 departs Bodrum in May 2027 for a five-year circumnavigation: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, Panama, the Pacific, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and back. The legs range from one week to four weeks.

There are twelve berths per leg. Most of them will go to people I have spoken with personally before they come aboard. If you are reading this and you recognise something in it, I would like to meet you. The conversation starts with Antony or myself.