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 […]
The Training Plan: How Sven Is Getting Back to Sea
The specific recovery plan from grade 2 MCL and ACL tears to the Bodrum departure in May 2027: the foundation phase, what June 12th determines, swimming in summer, cycling in late summer, padel in autumn when the physiotherapist validates the lateral movement patterns, and the offshore-specific platform in winter.
What Sven’s Restlessness Looked Like From the Outside
Hans on twenty-five years of watching Sven’s restlessness from the outside: the specific quality of someone who is always moving toward the next thing because the capacity to engage with the world at his level requires continuous movement to find matching contexts. And the moment in the Naora conversation that sounded different from every preceding plan.
Wonder: How Céline’s Best Friend Since Kindergarten Became One of the Better Sailors I Know
Wonder and Céline have known each other since they were four years old. They sat next to each other in the kindergarten, lost each other for a few years the way children do when families move places and schools change, and then found each other again, because that is what Wonder and Céline have always […]
The Last Winter Before Departure: What We Are Building On Land
The winter before the May 2027 departure is not a waiting period. Here is what it actually contains: the Eighty2 being configured with Fountaine Pajot, the first Circle conversations that co-founder Antony is having, founder and captain Sven rebuilding from the knee injury, and what loved ones are living through in the last winter before five years at sea begins.
The Man Who Had Never Seen the Sea: How Ludo Became the Best Crewmate I Can Imagine
Ludo applied for an IT job. That is the entirely unromantic beginning of one of the better stories in my professional life, and I want to tell it fully because the fully told version is considerably more interesting than the summary version and because Ludo, who is a modest person, would never tell it himself […]
The Founding Team Problem: Why One Person Cannot Build This
The skipper-entrepreneur who builds a shared sailing concept alone is building on a foundation that will crack under the specific combination of demands that the concept requires. Not because the person is inadequate. The people who attempt this are typically extraordinary: skilled sailors, genuine visionaries, people who have seen what offshore sailing does to communities […]
The Day the Helicopter Made Sven Forget He Was Racing
I want to say first that we were going fast. This is important context for what follows. We were at the front of the pack in the Spi Ouest France, one of the great offshore races of the European circuit, running the Breton coast in the specific conditions that the Bay of Biscay produces when […]
The Friend Who Was Always at the Dock
I am not a sailor in the way that Sven is a sailor. I work underwater rather than above it, and the specific relationship I have with the sea is the relationship of the professional diver rather than the passage maker: the platform leg, the pipeline inspection, the underwater structural survey that requires the specific […]
The Man Two Berths Away: How the Best Friendships Start at the Dock
The sailing world has a specific geography for friendship that the land world does not replicate. Not the geography of the neighbourhood or the workplace or the social calendar: the geography of the dock, the berth, the specific proximity that a marina produces between people whose only initial connection is that they both sailed in […]