I want to tell you something about the place where Naora lives. Not the programme, not the route, not the circumnavigation. The physical place. The address. The building, if you can call a boat a building, where the team sits every morning and where the conversations happen and where the decisions get made that send the Eighty2 around the world.
We are on a boat. In Antwerp. On the water. And it is exactly as good as it sounds.
The Pent’AUS
The vessel has a name and the name has a history. The Antoon Van Dijck is a former Antwerp ferry boat, a working veerpond that crossed the Scheldt in the era when the river crossing was the daily connection between the two banks of the city that the car tunnel and the metro have since replaced.
Forty metres long, fifteen metres wide, built in 1964 when the Antwerp waterfront was still the working waterfront of one of the world’s great port cities rather than the cultural and architectural district it has become. The Antoon Van Dijck has been in the water on the Antwerp waterfront for sixty years. It has been carrying people across and along the Scheldt, serving as the hospitality heart of the famous Badboot swimming platform, and most recently as a remarkable floating office in the shadow of the MAS museum, the place where the advertising company Friendship spent five years telling their colleagues they had the most beautiful workplace in the city and being absolutely right about it.
We bought it. The Underwater Solutions Group bought the Antoon Van Dijck. And from the moment we stepped aboard and walked the deck and stood in the wheelhouse and looked out across the Antwerp waterfront with the MAS to one side and the Scheldt in the distance, there was not a single member of the team who questioned whether this was the correct decision. It was obviously, completely, and entirely the correct decision.
A programme built around the offshore sailing life and the maritime world needed to be headquartered on a boat on the water in the most maritime city in Belgium. The Antoon Van Dijck was already there. It was waiting. We gave it a new name, a new chapter, a new life! #pent’aus
What Happens Here
Our Naora programme is a five-year offshore sailing circumnavigation of the world. The planning that this requires is the planning of the route and the weather windows and the permits and the provisioning and the crew rotations and the member boarding logistics and the content programme and the partnerships and the press strategy and the Circle community and the digital sessions and approximately ten thousand other things that we and the shore team work on every day in the years before the Eighty2 departs Bodrum in May 2027.
All of this happens on the boat. The meeting rooms that Pent’AUS provides are the meeting rooms where the route gets planned and the partnerships get negotiated and the member conversations get prepared and the content strategy gets built.
The war room where the full team assembles for the big decisions is the space where the Antwerp light comes through the windows above the waterline and the specific atmosphere of the working boat produces the specific quality of the meeting that the glass-and-steel office building on the business park cannot produce. The decisions made on the Pent’AUS are the decisions that come from the people who are already thinking in the maritime context because the maritime context is the building they are sitting in.
The open workspace is the workspace where the day-to-day of the programme gets built: our blog articles and the Circle content and the member communications and the logistics planning and the photography and the video and the podcast production.
The kitchen with the long table where the team eats together and where the conversations at lunch are occasionally the best conversations of the day. The deck, when the Antwerp weather permits, where the afternoon meeting happens outside with the water below and the city skyline above and the maritime character of the location producing the specific clarity of thought that the outdoor meeting on the water consistently provides.
The Most Dynamic Office in Antwerp
I have worked in offices. I have worked in co-working spaces and serviced offices and converted warehouse spaces and the home office that the pandemic normalised and the hotel business centre that the business trip requires. None of them have the specific quality of the workplace that is on the water in a working port city. None of them have the deck that opens onto the Antwerp waterfront.
None of them have the stuurhut that serves as the most atmospheric meeting room that any client who visits the headquarters has ever sat in. None of them have the view that the Pent’AUS provides from every window: the water, the boats, the port, the city, the specific combination of the maritime and the urban that Antwerp does better than any city I know.
The programme we are building is the programme of the offshore sailing life and the maritime world and the five-year voyage through forty countries. The headquarters is the boat on the water in Antwerp where that programme is being built every day by the team that chose this location because the location is the programme in miniature: the working vessel, the maritime atmosphere, the water, the community of the people who chose to be here because the here is exactly right for the work they are doing.
Come and See Us
If you want to understand what Naora is before you book the Calendly conversation, come to the boat. The headquarters is on the Antwerp waterfront. The team is here. The charts of the circumnavigation route are on the wall. The coffee is good. The deck has the view. The stuurhut has the atmosphere. The Scheldt is outside the window.
There is no office building that can tell you what an offshore sailing programme is in the same way that the former Antwerp ferry boat can tell you what an offshore sailing programme is. You walk down the gangway, you feel the boat move slightly underfoot, you sit in the meeting room with the water at the window, and you understand immediately why the people who are building this programme are building it from here and not from anywhere else.
The Pent’AUS has been on the Antwerp waterfront for sixty years. Naora is here now. The programme that will circumnavigate the world in May 2027 is being planned from the boat that has been on this water since 1964.
There is something right about that. Come and feel it for yourself.
