The charter sailing holiday is a fine thing. A week or two in the Greek islands or the Caribbean with a rented boat and a skipper or without one, visiting the bays and the anchorages that the charter companies have been servicing for decades and that are, as a result, the bays and the anchorages that the charter fleet knows, that the provisioning infrastructure serves, and that the tourist infrastructure has organised itself around.
These are beautiful places. They are also, consistently, the places that the charter fleet visits, which means they are the places that the charter fleet shares with the other charter yachts that arrived at the same anchorage for the same reason and that are in the same bay until the morning.
The offshore self-sufficient vessel goes further. Not as a statement of intent, not because the Naora programme is designed to avoid the charter fleet’s anchorages as a point of principle. Because the Naora circumnavigation is a five-year voyage that covers the route from the Mediterranean to the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and back, and the anchorages that a five-year circumnavigation reaches include many that are simply outside the range of the charter base.
The outer Tuamotu atolls that the Eighty2 anchors in for a week are four hundred kilometres from Papeete. The charter catamaran from the Papeete base does not go four hundred kilometres from the base in the one-week programme.
The Eighty2 goes there because the route goes there and because the boat carries its own water, its own fuel capacity for the passage, its own food provisioning for the days between markets, and its own dive compressor for the tanks that the dive sites at four hundred kilometres from the nearest dive shop require.
What the Range Makes Available
The Brothers Islands in the Red Sea are seventy kilometres from the Egyptian coast. The dive sites there are among the finest in the Red Sea and among the most remote: the offshore walls and the pelagic species that the offshore location attracts and that the inshore dive sites do not see because the inshore sites are inshore.
The Banda Sea seamounts that the Indonesian liveaboard dive fleet visits from Ambon are accessible to the Eighty2 from its own anchor, with full tanks from the onboard compressor, without the departure and return schedule that the liveaboard fleet’s paying guests require.
The outer Tuamotu lagoons where the coral density of the Coral Triangle’s outermost reach meets the specific clarity of the atoll water are empty because the boats that can reach them are the boats that carry everything they need to be there — and the Eighty2 carries everything it needs to be there.
The charter holiday is beautiful. The offshore self-sufficient circumnavigation is the version of the sailing life that the charter holiday points toward without being able to reach. The difference is the range. The range is the Eighty2.
