I had been thinking about the route for twenty years. Not continuously, not every day for two decades in the specific form of the Naora circumnavigation. But the knowledge that accumulates from twenty-five years of offshore sailing is the knowledge that includes, at its core, the specific opinions about the world’s sailing routes that the experienced offshore sailor develops: which passages are worth making, which anchorages justify the detour, which seasons produce which conditions in which oceans and what the consequences are for the sequence and the timing of the circumnavigation that tries to use the best of all of them.
I presented the route to Antony, Naora’s co-founder, at our second major meeting in March 2024. The presentation was twenty minutes and a chart on the table. Bodrum in May 2027. The Mediterranean through the Aegean and the Dodecanese to the Turkish coast and the Greek islands. The Atlantic crossing from the Canaries in the autumn window. The Caribbean and the arc of the islands. Panama and the canal transit.
The Pacific, the longest ocean, the most remote passages, the Galapagos and the Marquesas and the Tuamotu and the Society Islands and the Cook Islands and the Pacific island chains west toward Indonesia. The Coral Triangle. The Indian Ocean crossing. The Maldives. Sri Lanka. The Red Sea south to north, with its own demanding weather windows. The Suez Canal. The Mediterranean return in January 2032.
What Antony Said
The room was quiet for a moment when I finished. Not the uncertain quiet of someone who has heard something he does not understand. The specific quiet of someone who has heard something and is sitting with the weight of it before he responds. There were just the two of us, with the chart between us.
Antony said: this is the route that belongs to the concept. We stayed with the chart a little longer, looking at the timing windows and the room each passage would need. As Naora’s founder and captain, I, Sven, would plan every weather window and sail every leg myself. The dates were a framework, not a promise to sail regardless.
His response told me what I needed to know about the person sitting across the chart. Antony understood the vision, and our conversation had moved straight to what it would take to carry it through. That mattered in a partnership of two. The route was presented in twenty minutes. The responsibility for it would last years.
The twenty years that produced it were in every line on the chart. Antony read them without the twenty years being explained. The route was the argument for itself. Twenty years of thinking about passages compressed into the line on the chart that begins in Bodrum and ends in Bodrum and goes around the world in between. I rolled up the chart and the meeting continued.
