The partner who is not going on the voyage is the person whose questions are most often not answered by the Naora website, and whose questions are, in my experience of the conversations that lead to membership, the most important ones in the process.
Not because the partner’s approval is required, though in most relationships the partner’s genuine understanding and support is the difference between a booking that produces the experience the voyage is designed to produce and a booking that produces the experience of spending three weeks worrying about the relationship at home while a beautiful anchorage passes by unnoticed. Because the partner’s questions are usually the practical questions that the prospective member has been avoiding asking themselves.
This article is written for the partner, and for the member to share with the partner before the conversation at home rather than instead of it.
Is It Safe?
The safety question deserves a direct answer rather than the reassurance that most sailing operations offer in response to it. The Naora voyage operates a 24-metre offshore catamaran captained by a Master Mariner 500T with 25 years of offshore experience and STCW medical certification, on a route that has been planned around the seasonal weather windows that make the specific passages as safe as offshore sailing can be made.
The vessel is equipped with the full offshore safety inventory: EPIRB, life rafts, satellite communication, SSB radio, AIS, and the redundant systems that reduce the probability of a single failure becoming a critical situation. Offshore sailing is not without risk. No honest person will tell you that it is. The captain’s qualification, the vessel’s equipment, and the route’s planning are the specific measures that the Naora voyage has taken to ensure that the risk is as well managed as it can be.
These are the same measures that the most professional offshore sailing operations in the world take. We take them all.
How Will I Reach Them?
Starlink connectivity provides reliable communication from the vast majority of the route. The member aboard the Eighty2 in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean is not unreachable: they have the same messaging and calling capability as the person in a European city, with the exception of the passage days where the connectivity may be reduced and the specific passage focus that the offshore sailing context naturally produces.
The partner at home can reach the member. The member can reach the partner. The communication is not what it is at home, but it is not the communication blackout that the partner’s imagination may be producing
What If They Want to Come Too?
The partner who wants to come is welcome to come. The Naora Circle is not an exclusion of the partner: it is a community of people who chose the voyage, and the partner who chooses it alongside the member is as much a member of the Circle as anyone else aboard.
The specific dynamics of the couple aboard the Naora voyage are worth discussing in the conversation with Antony, because they are different from the dynamics of the individual member and because the voyage produces specific things in couples that are worth knowing about before the boarding rather than discovering on day three of the first passage.
If the partner wants to come, the conversation about that starts in the same place as every other Naora conversation: with the question of fit. The Calendly link opens the same thirty minutes that opens for the individual member. Both partners can be in that conversation. Often, that is the right way to begin.
