The Naora voyage does not run itself. The five-year circumnavigation across four oceans and forty-odd countries, with twelve members rotating through the legs and the permits and the agents and the logistics and the community and the partners and the provisions and the passages: all of this begins with two people. Sven, our founder and captain, and Antony, our co-founder, built Naora together. Around their partnership, the crew and shore support help make the experience what it is.
When you come aboard, you are not stepping onto a product. You are stepping into a world that Sven and Antony built and that everyone working aboard and ashore cares about deeply. Here are the people who look after you.
Antony: Co-Founder And Commodore
Antony is almost certainly the first person you will speak with. He is our co-founder and Commodore, the title that fits him more accurately than any conventional job description, because what Antony does is hold the Naora community together and shape the quality of every human interaction the voyage produces, from the first message on the website to the reunion on the leg two years later.
He manages the Circle, the partner network, the digital sessions, the onshore events, and the specific quality of the conversation that the Naora community is built around. If the Naora voyage is a world, Antony is the person who keeps the culture of that world consistent with what it is supposed to be.
He comes aboard too, though not for every leg. Antony has a full life on land: three children, a wife who understands his adventurous streak with the specific generosity of the partner who knows that the version of the person who comes home from the offshore leg is a better version than the one who left, and who therefore gives the green light with something approaching genuine enthusiasm.
When Antony is aboard, the conversations at the table acquire the specific quality that he brings to every gathering he is part of: the curiosity that draws the interesting thing out of the person who has not yet said it, and the patience to sit with the silence long enough for the interesting thing to arrive.
He is the person to write to first. He will write back quickly and personally, and the conversation that follows will tell both of you what you need to know.
Ashore: Logistics And Commercial Partnerships
Antony coordinates with our shore support to make sure everything is where it needs to be when it needs to be there. This sounds simple. On a five-year circumnavigation that crosses forty countries with rotating members boarding and disembarking at ports ranging from Bodrum to Papeete to Galle to Aqaba, it is not simple.
It takes sustained attention to the combination of commercial relationships and operational detail that the offshore voyage requires: the partners who are kept informed, the commercial agreements that are in place, the member logistics that ensure everyone arrives at the right port at the right time with the right information about what to bring and where to go.
If something goes wrong with your travel to the boarding: the flight is delayed, the transfer is not where it was supposed to be, the baggage has gone somewhere the baggage should not have gone, Antony is your first point of contact. He works with the people ashore to get things moving again.
The work is practical rather than dramatic. Confirm the revised arrival time, reach the transfer driver, find out where the bag actually is, keep Sven informed aboard. What matters to the member waiting in an unfamiliar airport is not how many messages have gone back and forth in the background. It is knowing who is dealing with the problem, what happens next, and that someone will stay with it until there is an answer. That is the standard Antony brings to this part of the voyage.
Behind The Scenes: Finance And Compliance
It is not all sailing. The Naora circumnavigation is also a significant administrative operation: the cruising permits that need to be in place before the boat enters the national waters of each of the forty-odd countries on the route, the clearance agents in each port who handle the arrival and departure paperwork, the Panama Canal transit permit that has a specific application window and a specific cost and a specific set of requirements that the canal authority is not flexible about, the national park access permits for the Galapagos and the Komodo National Park and the other protected marine environments the route visits.
All of this has to be managed in advance so that the permit is in place before the boat arrives at the border, rather than becoming a problem to solve when the boat is already there.
Antony coordinates the accounts and administrative work with our shore support, while Sven sets the passage requirements and confirms what is needed for each arrival. Between them, they make sure the agents are paid, the applications are submitted, the accounts are in order, and the paperwork follows the actual voyage rather than a schedule that the weather has already changed.
The freedom of the offshore life is not free of administration. It rests on work done quietly and well in advance, with Sven and Antony staying in touch as the route unfolds. The less you have to think about it aboard, the better that work has been done.
Sven: Founder And Captain
Sven is the founder and captain. He has been sailing since an early age. He built Naora because of what twenty-five years of offshore sailing has taught him about what the ocean gives the person who is present in it and because of the specific pleasure he takes in sharing that with the right people. He plans every weather window and sails every leg himself.
He is the person responsible for Discovery, our 2025 Lagoon Eighty2, the passage, the safety of everyone aboard, and the quality of the offshore experience in the most fundamental sense: the decision to depart or wait, the route through the reef channel, the watch system in the night passage, the specific judgment calls that the offshore life requires and that the person with twenty-five years of offshore miles makes differently from the person who has not spent the time on the water that Sven has.
He is also the person you will find at the helm on the night watch, at the nav station planning the next passage, in the water before anyone else has had coffee collecting the vongole from the sand flat below the anchorage, and at the table in the evening for the conversation that the day produced.
The captain who is present and engaged rather than the captain who is managing from a professional distance: this is the specific quality of the Naora voyage that the member who has been on other offshore sailing experiences recognises immediately as different from what they have experienced before.
Ludo: First Mate
Ludo is Sven’s first mate and the person who keeps Discovery running in the specific way that the first mate keeps the vessel running: attentive to the boat, present for the passages, reliable in the conditions that the offshore life produces without warning.
He came to sailing by a route that most sailors do not take. No sailing family, no childhood on the water, an IT job application to Sven that led to a yacht delivery from Sweden to the Mediterranean and then another delivery and then an SRC qualification and then more offshore miles than most sailing club members accumulate in a lifetime of weekend sailing.
He learned from the ocean and from Sven, which is the specific combination that produces the offshore sailor who understands the water rather than just the theory of it.
Barry: Crew
Barry joins us regularly as crew, the experienced hand who knows the boat and his fellow sailors and who brings the specific quality of the person who has been on the water long enough to know what the boat needs before it asks for it.
When Barry is aboard, the watches run more smoothly and the passages carry the specific ease of the vessel with enough experienced hands that everyone can give their best rather than their maximum. He is one of the people whose presence on a leg the members who have sailed with him look forward to.
The Stewardess: We Are Still Deciding
We are going to be honest with you here. We have met several excellent candidates for the stewardess role and we cannot choose between them. This is a good problem to have: the people we are considering are all genuinely good at what they do, and it is also a real problem because the role requires one person rather than several excellent candidates.
The stewardess on the Naora voyage is the person responsible for the comfort and the care of the members aboard: the cabin, the linens, the small details of the daily life on the boat that the member should not have to think about and that the good stewardess makes invisible by handling before they become visible. We will have made the decision before Discovery departs Bodrum in May 2027.
The person we choose will be the right person and we will introduce her soon here on the blog!
Richard: Chef
Richard is a magician. We say this without exaggeration and with the specific confidence of people who have eaten his food and watched twelve people around a table go quiet in the way that the genuinely good meal produces. He spent years in Asia, in the same regions that Sven knows from the offshore passages, and he brings to the Naora galley the specific combination of the French and Italian culinary tradition and the Asian flavours and techniques that the time in Asia gave him.
The result is the cooking that surprises: the dish that has the structure of the European cuisine and the aromatics of the Indonesian or Thai kitchen, in the proportions that the meal and the anchorage and the twelve people suggest rather than the proportions that the recipe prescribes.
Richard cooks from what the provisioning morning provides and what the trolling line produced and what the local market had when the boat was in port. He does not cook from a fixed menu against a fixed pantry.
He cooks from the quality of the day’s ingredients and the appetite of the twelve people who will eat what he makes, and the result is consistently the thing that the member describes first when someone asks them what the Naora leg was like. We guarantee it. We have never had to retract this guarantee.
Céline And Wonder: The Youngest And Among The Best
Céline and Wonder have just finished their first year at university. They join the Naora voyage during the holidays (3 months) which, given the circumnavigation’s schedule, means specific legs in specific oceans rather than the full-time commitment that the core crew maintains.
They are, between them, the dive programme and the specific energy that the youngest members of the crew bring to the boat: the curiosity that has not yet been worn smooth by the years, the enthusiasm for the underwater world that Céline has been building since before most people have any relationship with the ocean at all.
You will encounter them in the Circle app and on the legs where they are aboard. Céline leads some of the dives with the specific expertise and the specific passion of the person who freedives before breakfast in the Coral Triangle and considers this the normal way to start a day.
Wonder is the person who was born knowing what the boat needs and who will be up the mast before anyone has finished asking whether it needs doing. They are nineteen and they are two of the most capable people sailing with us.
When Discovery returns to the Mediterranean, the offshore miles they will have accumulated on the way will be the miles that tell the story of who they became during the voyage.
Hans: Worldwide Logistics Network
Hans is the person behind the scenes who makes the offshore operations possible in the specific form that the remote locations the Naora route visits require. Through Underwater Solutions Group, he provides support built on a long relationship with Sven. They have known each other for twenty-five years, the friendship that preceded the professional relationship and that makes their collaboration work as it does: with the direct communication and the mutual trust that a newly formed professional relationship is still building toward.
Hans provides the logistical support network that the Naora circumnavigation needs to operate in the offshore world: the connections, the resources, the problem-solving capability that the remote anchorage and the unexpected situation require from a network that was already there before the situation arose.
The People Behind The Voyage
Naora began with two founders, Sven and Antony. The experience they built depends on care, both aboard and ashore. Not just the boat, which is the context. Not just the route, which is the framework. It is the captain who has been on the water for twenty-five years and sails every leg, the chef who makes the twelve people go quiet, the commodore who shapes the conversation and the community, and the quiet work ashore that makes the freedom possible by managing everything it requires in the background.
When you board Discovery, you are joining the world Sven and Antony built. You will feel the care behind it from the first message to the last anchorage.
