The Eighty2 returns to the Mediterranean in January 2032. The circumnavigation began in Bodrum in May 2027 and ends in the Mediterranean in January 2032: the Suez Canal transit, the Red Sea southbound, the Indian Ocean crossing, the Indonesian archipelago, the Pacific legs, the Atlantic return, and the final passages of the Mediterranean chapter that close the loop the route opened five years and approximately 45,000 nautical miles earlier. I have been planning this voyage for twenty years.
The planning ends when the boat returns to the Mediterranean. What begins then is the question I have been asking myself occasionally in the planning years and that I expect to ask myself seriously in approximately 2031, somewhere in the Pacific.
What I know about the answer: the Naora community does not end when the circumnavigation ends. The Circle, the community of members who have been on the legs and who have been building the connections and the relationships and the shared reference across five years of the programme is not the circumnavigation.
The circumnavigation is the foundation and the ongoing context of the Circle. The Circle is the thing that continues after the circumnavigation ends in whatever form the community that has built itself around the voyage decides it should continue. This is not for me to decide alone. It is the decision of the people who made it what it is.
The Second Circumnavigation
I will sail the second circumnavigation. I do not know yet whether it will be the Naora programme in the same form, the twelve-person membership legs, the same route, the same community structure or whether the five years of the first will have produced the clarity about what the second should be that the twenty years of planning the first eventually produced.
The Eighty2 will have the miles and the maintenance history of five years of offshore circumnavigation and the decision about the vessel for the second (the same boat or a different one) will be the decision with the specific information that the first circumnavigation’s five years of continuous offshore use provides.
The Lagoon service network will have the record of what the boat needed across those five years. The decision will be made with the evidence. I’d love to go back to Asia, South America… we’ll decide together.
What I know: the Naora members who join the first circumnavigation are joining the first chapter of something whose full form is not yet determined. The community that the first voyage builds will be the community that the second voyage is built around or that the next form of the programme grows from.
The members who are on the legs of the first circumnavigation are not just the members of this voyage. They are the founding members of whatever the offshore sailing life that Naora is building toward eventually becomes. The January 2032 return to the Mediterranean is not the end. It is the place where the first answer ends and the second question begins.
