I have been sailing offshore since I turned eighteen years old (and mom allowed). For the first decade of the offshore sailing life, I thought about it the way the sailing world frames it: as the navigation from the departure port to the destination port, with the ocean as the medium of the transit and the destination as the purpose of the voyage. The ocean was interesting and demanding and beautiful and occasionally terrifying, but it was the means. The destination was the point.
I cannot identify the exact passage on which this understanding changed. I know it was somewhere in the second decade of the offshore sailing life, a night watch in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, one of the hundreds of night watches that the offshore sailing life accumulates across the years of the professional sailing career.
At some point in those watches, I understood that the destination had become the means and the ocean had become the point. Not as the philosophical statement about the journey versus the arrival. As the specific experiential reality of the person who has been in the offshore context long enough for the offshore context to have become the reference against which the land-based life is calibrated rather than the other way around.
What the Realization Produced
The realization produced Naora. Not immediately and not as a single causal event, but as the accumulation of the understanding that the offshore sailing life was giving something to the people who experienced it that the destination they were sailing toward was not giving them, and that the structure of the offshore experience that produced this giving was not available in the form it needed to be in through any existing programme. The charter week gives the destination and the boat.
The round-the-world race gives the extreme challenge and the finish line. Neither gives the offshore context in the sustained, intentional, community form that produces the offshore reference in the person who is ready to receive it.
Naora is the programme I built when I understood that the ocean was not the destination. The ocean is the context. The destination (if there is one) is the person who emerges from the offshore context with the offshore reference intact.
The Marquesas and the Tuamotu and the Red Sea and the Coral Triangle are extraordinary and they are the extraordinary setting for the offshore context rather than the point of the voyage. The point of the voyage is the person in it. This is the thing I understood in the night watch that produced everything else. The boat goes to the destination. The person goes to the ocean.
The ocean gives what the destination cannot. This is what Naora was built to provide.
