A boat with marks on her, and a way of taking time.
How it began
I first met her in a marina in 2022. Not a remarkable harbour — somewhere in the western Med, where the wind was light and the boats were all tied up in rows. She was at the end of a pontoon, three-hulled, taller than the rest, sitting low and quiet. Her teak was dark. Her copper was darker. She looked like a boat that had been somewhere.
Her skipper was Paul Percey. He had ordered her in 1987, watched her come together in Fouras over the next eighteen months, and taken her out on her first sail in September 1988. He had been her skipper ever since. He was sixty-five when I met him, on his way home from a Caribbean season. He told me about her over a meal that night — quietly, without selling. The fish was good.
We stayed in touch. I sailed with him a few times, learned where she liked to be pushed and where she preferred to be left alone. He let me cook in her galley. He let me hold her steady on a long night watch out of Antigua. We talked about what happens to boats when their skippers age out — about the choice between selling to someone who will change everything, and finding someone who will change as little as possible.
By 2024 we knew. By 2025 we had the bones of an agreement. In 2026 she is mine to skipper, but really she stays his, in the way an old house stays its first owner's. The name doesn't change. The crew changes a little. The pace doesn't change at all.
What changes is what we do with her. Paul ran private charters — discreet, low-volume, on call to a small set of people he knew. We are opening up. Same boat, same way of sailing her, but with a small website and a list of upcoming voyages. Cabin Week, for guests who'd rather meet others. Transatlantics, on the seasons. Private Weeks, for groups who want the boat to themselves. Greece in summer, the Caribbean in winter — her rhythm of thirty-seven years, continued.
We are also writing things down a little more. Paul didn't. He kept a logbook in pencil and an address book in a leather pouch and ran the rest from memory. I keep the logbook, in pencil, but I also send a newsletter twice a year and answer emails before noon. Nothing about the boat has changed. Some of the around-the-boat is just slightly more visible.
What we believe
Some boats are showrooms. They are kept new because being new is the point. The teak is sanded back every season. The copper is polished weekly. Everything is straight, glossy, and the same as the year before. People who charter these boats are paying for the absence of marks — a week where nothing has happened yet.
CONAN is a tavern. She was launched in 1988 and she shows it. The teak is the original teak. The copper has gone dark with use. The salon table has the marks of glasses set down hard, the cabin doors creak where the wood has settled, and the deck cleats are worn to a shine on the side where the line goes. Nothing here is staged. Nothing has been smoothed over to feel new. She is what she is, after thirty-seven years.
We think this is the better way. A boat that has been used carries the weight of what's been done aboard her — meals served, anchorages found, weather got through, friendships made over the long meals that long weeks at sea produce. Stepping aboard her isn't stepping into a void waiting for your week to fill it. It's stepping into something that already has a pace, and you slip into the pace rather than imposing your own. That's what the worn teak gives you. That's what the dark copper means.
Stepping aboard her isn't stepping into a void waiting for your week to fill it. It's stepping into something that already has a pace.
We sail slowly. Three to five hours a day in normal conditions, less when the wind asks us to. We anchor early. We let dinner take its time. We trust the day. The week is not a checklist of places to have been; it's a string of small days that happen one after another, and the boat carries you between them. If you want to see fifteen islands in seven days, we are not the right boat. If you want to see four properly, we might be.
And we keep things honest. The boat is old. The wind doesn't always blow. The meltemi can pin you in a harbour for a day. Some nights the boat creaks loudly enough to wake you. We don't pretend otherwise. The trade — what we offer in exchange for these honest limits — is a kind of week you can't get on a newer, glossier boat: one where nothing is trying.
At the end of certain voyages, we make a small thing and give it to a guest. A pressed coin, sometimes engraved with a date or a place. It isn't a souvenir, and we don't talk about it much before the moment. If you receive one, you'll know what it's for. If you don't, it doesn't matter. The week is the thing.