Built to last, go anywhere, and to do both in real comfort.
How it began
Paul Percey commissioned her in 1987, launched her in September 1988, and sailed her every season for the next thirty-eight years — one skipper, start to finish. I'm the second person ever to have the helm. This is how she came to me, and why I promised to take good care of her.
She was designed by Michel Joubert and built by Technicoque, near La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast — three hulls, six guest cabins, room for a dozen people to live well without standing on each other. From her first season, Paul was the only skipper she ever knew. He kept her to waters most charter boats never bother with: the Dodecanese and the Turkish coast through the summer, the Red Sea in winter — Sudan mostly, Egypt now and then. It was never the usual charter map.
I'd always meant to run charters. When I saw her listed for sale — boat and business together — my first thought was practical: I'd ask the man who ran her how an operation like this actually works, and build myself a business plan out of his answers. So I got in touch with Paul, and we talked. Mostly about the boat, as it turned out, and for a long time. The more we spoke, the less it was about the business plan. I went out to see her in July 2024, in Marmaris, and spent several days aboard with Paul and his wife Corinne. I came back having decided something I hadn't gone looking for: I didn't want a boat to charter. I wanted CONAN.
Paul wanted to retire, but he wouldn't hand her to just anyone — he'd given this boat the better part of his life, and he wanted her to go to someone who'd look after her. When I asked what mattered to him in who took her next, that was the whole of it: that someone take care of her. No conditions, no clauses about how she should be run. Just that.
When the purchase went through, we took a few weeks for Paul to walk me through everything about her that was never written down. Thirty-eight years of a boat live mostly in one man's head. That is how they passed from his to mine.
So I became her skipper. That was the only real change — the name stayed, and so did the way of running her. I didn't take her on to turn her into something else. I took her on so she carries on, and so the promise I made Paul holds: that someone takes care of her.
What we believe
We're trying to make something small that lasts, in a trade that mostly builds big and replaces fast. One boat, not a fleet. A dozen people aboard at a time, not a crowd. A boat we mean to keep for decades, rather than charter hard for a few years and sell on tired.
That changes what a week with us actually is. We're taking a few people to sea the way we'd want to be taken ourselves — sailed properly, fed well, kept to the pace of the sea rather than a schedule, and brought somewhere that earns the trip out. She comes with a crew of three who know her, not a set of keys and a deposit.
And we go where that kind of week is still possible. She carries what she needs to leave the marinas behind — to reach the quiet anchorages, the islands with a single taverna, the far ends of a coast most charters never reach. The places worth the most are usually the ones the crowds can't get to. She can.
We're taking a few people to sea the way we'd want to be taken ourselves.
Reaching further out is the only growth we're after. Not more boats, not more cabins, not more weeks squeezed into a season — the same one boat, the same few people, taken further: new coasts, longer crossings, anchorages we haven't reached yet. The horizon is the only thing we want more of.
None of it costs you any comfort: she was built to cross oceans and to be lived on properly while she does it. And she was built to keep doing it — more structure than strictly needed, better materials than the cheapest that would pass, by people who expected her to outlast them. Refitted in 2002, 2014 and 2024, she will. Keeping one good boat working for another forty years is worth more, to us, than any number of new ones.
When our own time with her is done, we'd like to hand her on the way Paul handed her to us: still working, still herself, still worth the trip.
From time to time, we like to give a guest a little something on top of the week — a small gesture, something to remember us by.