Twenty-Five Years of Watching Someone Become Who They Were Always Going to Be
I met Sven before he was the person the Naora website describes. Not because the Naora website is not accurate: it is. But the person the Naora website describes, the captain with the 25 years of experience and the qualification and the 2,800 dives and the Ocean Cruising Club membership, is the completed version of […]
From Mastman to Navigator: What the Racing Life Taught Us About Finding Your Position
Every sailor starts somewhere on the boat that is not yet the right place. Not because the starting position is wrong: because the right place is discovered through the experience of the other positions rather than through the knowledge of what the right place is before you have been in it. The mastman becomes the […]
What Sven Does On A Day Off
The captain’s day off is a specific and unusual thing because the captain’s work is always present at the place where the captain sleeps. The boat does not stop being the boat when the watch is off or when the passage is complete. The systems are always running, the anchor is always set or the […]
Liesl, the ING Years, and What We Talked About Between Races
A friendship that lasts twenty-two years passes through enough different contexts that the contexts are no longer the description of the friendship. The friendship that started in the racing context with Liesl and the Roompot dock passed through the ING years, through the different professional trajectories that both of us followed after the racing, through […]
#Back2Sea: What Happens When The Captain Goes Down
I have been on boats in Force 9 storms. I have dived in currents that I had to fight for every metre of progress. I have stood watches at three in the morning in the North Atlantic in weather that required everything I had. None of those things put me on the floor the way […]
Why Naora Accepts Bitcoin: Freedom Moves in Both Directions
The decision to accept Bitcoin as payment for a Naora membership was not a marketing decision. It was not a statement about technology or a gesture toward a demographic we wanted to attract. It was the recognition of a coherence: that the people who build and sail the Naora voyage and the people who hold […]
The Conversation That Made Us Start Naora
I can tell you the business case for Naora. The market positioning, the differentiation from charter, the member community model, the partnership strategy. All of that is real and all of it is thought through. But it is not why Naora exists. The business case was constructed to support something that already existed as a […]
What I Read Before I Sleep
There is a shelf above the chart table on the Eighty2 that holds most of what I consider essential reading for the passages ahead. Not novels, though I read those too when the passage allows. Pilot books. Almanacs. Ocean passage guides. Cruising notes from sailors who came before us through the same waters and wrote […]
The People Who Made Me: Five Names I Will Always Carry
There are people you encounter on the path who are simply better than you. Not better in a comparative or competitive sense, not better at the things that most contexts measure. Better in the sense of having already become something that you are only beginning to understand exists: a specific quality of being fully at […]
Wrecks, Driftwood, and the Two Extremes That Raised Me
My mother is calm in the way that deep water is calm: completely, from the surface all the way down, without effort or performance. She does not become anxious when the wind builds or when the forecast changes or when the passage plan needs to be revised in the night. My father is adventurous in […]