The Boat That Came Before
Discovery, a 2025 Lagoon Eighty2, is the boat Naora is built around. But it is not the first boat, and the boats that came before it are part of the story in a way that I think is worth telling. Because the circumnavigation did not begin when we stepped aboard a 24-metre catamaran. It began […]
Growing Up Around Boats: The Life I Did Not Know Was Unusual
I was about five or six years old when a classmate asked me what I did at weekends and I listed the things: the marina, the boat, the crossing to Zeeland, the race on Sunday, the sail repair in the garage on Saturday evening. She looked at me the way children look at something they […]
The Ocean Cruising Club: Why This Organisation Has Shaped How I Think About Sailing
There is a blue and gold burgee with a flying fish on it that I have been flying from my spreaders for many years now. If you know what it is, you know something about me without us having to exchange a word. If you fly one yourself, there is a good chance we will […]
The Offshore Diver and the Offshore Sailor: Two Men, the Same Ocean
Sven and I have spent our professional lives in the same ocean. Not always the same stretch of it: my work has taken me to the North Sea platforms and the Baltic pipelines and the harbour infrastructure of ports across Europe and the Middle East, while Sven’s work has taken him from the Belgian coast […]
Solo Sailing: What You Find When There Is Nobody Else
I have sailed alone. Not as a practice, not as a lifestyle, but as something that happened in the years before Naora when the opportunity arose and the boat was available and the passage seemed worth making alone rather than waiting for the right moment to make it with someone else. A handful of offshore […]
The Route Took Twenty Years To Plan. We Presented It In Twenty Minutes.
Twenty years of accumulated offshore knowledge compressed into twenty minutes and a chart on the table. Antony, Naora’s co-founder: this is the route that belongs to the concept, and it will still be right in five years. Sven, founder and captain: how certain are the timing windows. Here is why that exchange told Sven everything he needed to know about the direction they were setting together.
Twenty-Two Years From the Cockpit: A Friend’s Portrait of Sven Before Naora
I knew Sven before Naora. I knew him before the commercial qualification and the Ocean Cruising Club and the 2,800 dives and the five-year circumnavigation that is now the central project of his professional life. I knew him when the project did not yet have a name and when the specific qualities that Naora requires […]
How The Two Of Us Found Each Other
Naora did not begin with a business plan. It began with a series of conversations between two people who had already figured out that they saw the world the same way, and who eventually arrived at the question that good friendships sometimes produce: what would it look like if we actually did this together? The […]
Why We Chose To Live This Way
It is hard to point to one moment where this started. If I look back, it probably began much earlier than I thought. Earlier than the first boat, earlier than the first passage, earlier than any decision I consciously made. There was a world map hanging in the living room when I was a kid. […]
We Had No Members, No Website, And No Boat. We Had A Plan.
In March 2024: four co-founders, a domain, a name, a route on a chart, an endorsed boat, a membership sketch, a sustainability model in early draft, and a vision for the website described in words. No website. No members. No boat. A plan. Here is why this was the right place to be, and why the conviction that preceded the infrastructure is the condition of the thing worth building.