S/V Spindrift

From launch in Tréguier, France, to the hard in Licata, Italy, we count up S/V Spindrift’s first year

I’m writing this at Villa San Marco, a lovely B&B in the Valley of the Temples, just outside Agrigento, Italy. The donkey woke me up early. It sounded like he had stuck his head in the window to deliver one loud hee-haw, personally. I walked outside to find some coffee and was confronted by baby pigs, peacocks, chickens, cats and dogs. Yes, this is a farm. And, yes, it is nice to wake up on land.

Where the coffee was. Worth the walk past the pigs.

The morning welcome committee. Nobody here has heard of sleeping in.

Salvatore, saying good morning from the balcony. Everyone here is up early.

Breakfast at Villa San Marco comes out of the farmhouse kitchen.

S/V Spindrift is on stands in Licata, Italy, for the winter, and her first year is in the books. She went into the water at the Boréal yard in Tréguier, in Brittany, France, in September 2025, so her first year ran a little long. So do most of mine.

Sitting with my coffee, looking out at the ruins, I got to thinking about the year aboard S/V Spindrift. Mostly about how far we came. And with nothing to steer and nowhere to go, and 41 years of spreadsheets behind me, I did what you’d expect. A spreadsheet.

The view from the terrace: the pool, the bougainvillea, and the Valley of the Temples on the horizon.

The Temple of Concordia, built nearly 2,500 years ago. It puts one year on a boat in perspective.

Evening over the valley, looking out to sea. Somewhere down that coast, S/V Spindrift is waiting for May. Sarah and I were out there on the water a couple of days ago……

The Numbers

• About 3,850 nautical miles, from Tréguier, France, to Licata, Italy, by our No Foreign Land track: about 1,250 down the Atlantic coast in the fall of 2025, and about 2,600 across the Mediterranean this year. To put that in New Jersey terms: about two round trips from Barnegat Inlet to Miami by sea, outside Cape Hatteras both ways.
• 6 countries: France, Jersey, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and Italy. Jersey counts. We stopped there to check out of the EU, and it’s the original Jersey, so it was practically a trip home. Gibraltar counts too. Ask anybody in Gibraltar.
• 3 launches and 3 haul-outs. In the water at Tréguier, France, in September 2025, out at Lagos, Portugal, in November, back in at Lagos in March, out at Cap d’Agde, France, in June, back in at Cap d’Agde in September, and out again at Licata, Italy, in October. Most boats visit the boatyard once a year. Ours has a loyalty card.
• More than 30 feet of tide in northern France. In Brittany the harbor fills and empties twice a day, and boats sit on the mud at low water. Coming from New Jersey, where a big tide is a few feet, it took some getting used to.
• The Atlantic, where the real sailing was. About 85 hours from Tréguier, France, to La Rochelle, France, for the boat show, the longest passage of the year. Then across the Bay of Biscay to Bilbao, Spain. Every sailor has heard the stories about the Bay. Now we have our own. The best day of sailing all year was Gijón to A Coruña, Spain, with Jen and Richard Fisher aboard, around Estaca de Bares and Cabo Ortegal, the top corner of Spain. We did more sailing on the Atlantic, with the engine off, than in the whole Mediterranean season.
• 20-foot waves, measured on the front side, breaking across the harbor entrance at Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, north of Nazaré, the famous big-wave surf spot. They kept us in the harbor until the Atlantic calmed down.
• The lighthouses: the Tower of Hercules at A Coruña, Spain, a Roman lighthouse still working after almost 2,000 years; Cape Finisterre, Spain, which the Romans thought was the end of the world; and Cape St. Vincent, at the southwest corner of Portugal.
• 5 seas and 3 straits in the Med: the Strait of Gibraltar, the Alboran Sea, the Balearic Sea, the Gulf of Lion, the Ligurian Sea, the Strait of Bonifacio, the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Strait of Sicily.
• The wind, and the 4 famous ones that pinned us down: the Levante at the door of the Med, the Tramontana in Garrucha, Spain, the Mistral in Calvi, Corsica, France (which arrived, of all things, as a southerly), and the Scirocco in Trapani, Italy. The most we sailed in: 45 knots on the transom, on the way to La Rochelle. The most we sat through: 62 knots, when a DANA hit Adra, Spain, while we were tied up alongside. The least: 0.0 knots between Ibiza and Mallorca, Spain. The Mediterranean is mostly a very large lake with excellent public relations.
• Some awesome sailing in the Med, to be fair to the lake. When the wind did show up, it showed up right: Garrucha, Spain, to Ibiza, Spain; down Corsica’s west coast from Ajaccio, France, with Michael and Terri Lusty aboard; and the last two days of the season, from Trapani, Italy, along Sicily’s south coast to Licata. Those are the days you remember, and the 0.0 days you forget.
• 195 nautical miles and about 30 hours, the second-longest passage of the year and the longest in the Med, with just the two of us aboard: Garrucha, Spain, to San Antonio, Ibiza, Spain, in April. Somewhere in the middle of that night the longitude on the chartplotter ticked from W to E, and we were in the eastern half of the world for the first time.
• Diesel: $1.80 a liter in Gibraltar, $2.40 in Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, and $3.12 in La Maddalena, Sardinia, Italy. That’s about $6.80 a gallon to $11.80. Our biggest fill-up, 450 liters in La Maddalena, came to $1,404. It still hurt. The wind is free, so most of our miles cost nothing. In theory. See 0.0 knots, above.
• About 60 nights at a dock. The most expensive was Moll Vell in Palma, Mallorca, Spain, at $263 a night. The cheapest was Adra, Spain, at $33, the same week the DANA came through, which makes it the best value of the year. I still like being on the hook better. It’s free.
• Only minor repairs, all year. A new boat mostly just asks for attention. But two of them were the smelliest, and the kind that has haunted me since my early years working on sailboats: the dreaded head repair. Two head pumps, replaced. Every sailor who has done one knows the rules. Not on a full stomach. Not in your good clothes. And never, ever tell anyone what you found. One of them sat behind a panel with no way in, so I made one with a saw. Forty years later, I’m still the guy with his arm in the toilet.
• 14 guests and crew: Jen and Richard Fisher; Rick, Lisa, Chris and Julia (Chris and Julia got engaged shortly after, and we’re taking some of the credit); Sam and Hannah, with Hannah’s friends Liv and Jordan; Bob Garraty and Thibaut (Bob still takes my calls); and Michael and Terri Lusty.
• 2 boat shows: the Grand Pavois in La Rochelle, France, and the Cannes Yachting Festival in Cannes, France. At Cannes there was a 55-meter yacht with a swimming pool, a player piano and a waterfall. Ours has a deck shower.
• 1 first place, and a real award this time. At the Grand Pavois in La Rochelle, France, Voile Magazine named the S/V Spindrift the best boat of the show, summed up in five words: “avec lui tout est possible,” with her, anything is possible. She was also one of only four finalists in Europe for European Yacht of the Year 2026, Best Bluewater Cruiser. S/V Spindrift is hull #1 of the Boréal 56 line, and it was quite an honor to work with the team at Boréal to launch her. Hull #1 doesn’t come with a manual. We wrote some of it together.
• 1 week alone in Trapani, Italy, while Sarah flew to Boulder, Colorado, to see Sam. I fixed the forward head, fed the dock cats, cooked Sicilian, and left the toilet seat up, which turned out to be an international incident. Resolved.
• 1 new boat that isn’t this boat. S/V Hairball, a catboat back home on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Sarah is still checking the math.

The People

The best part of the year isn’t on the spreadsheet.

For 41 years I met people on the way to something else. This year I met them where they live: a man who has hauled boats in the same yard in Trapani, Italy, since he was a teenager, a net mender who has never left Sicily, a fisherman selling calamari on the quay until about nine. What I’ve come to learn is that I’m the one passing through. Their lives were going long before S/V Spindrift tied up, and they’ll go on long after she leaves. They are all books, not just a page.

I’m humbled by how many people, in places I couldn’t have found on a map a few years ago, are living their lives so well.

The Awards

No year in review is complete without awards. The committee is me. The decisions are final.

Sundowner of the Year: the Negroni, by a landslide. Equal parts gin, Campari and sweet vermouth, which is the only recipe aboard nobody has ever gotten wrong. Gin of the Year, a special category created this year: Salvaticu, from Domaine Vincenti, which we found in Calvi, Corsica, France. Salvaticu is Corsican for “wild,” and it’s made with Corsican plants, immortelle and wild fig among them, so it tastes the way the Corsican hillside smells. It made our Negronis a little wild too.

The Negroni. Sundowner of the Year.

Best Yard Animal. Every boatyard has staff who aren’t on the website. The nominees:

• In Lagos, Portugal, a Portuguese water dog, all black curls and energy, who met me on the dock every morning.
• At Cap d’Agde, France, a pit bull nobody could give me a name for. He ran the yard like he held the lease and slept in whatever shade the travel lift left behind.
• At Marina Arturo Stabile in Trapani, Italy, a crew of cats. They aren’t pets. I’m fairly sure they’re on the payroll, hired to keep the rats honest.
• On Favignana, Italy, the cats who work security outside the butcher shop, and take the job very seriously.
• In Licata, Italy, as you saw last time, a pack of wild dogs who own the place.

And the winner is the Portuguese water dog in Lagos. He never missed a morning, he never asked for anything, and he was the first one to welcome S/V Spindrift to her first winter on the hard. Every yard should be so lucky.

Best Yard Animal. A Portuguese water dog on the dock, every morning, rain or shine.

Lifetime Achievement: Ben, a laughing gull back home with a bad foot, who has been on a hot-dog retainer for four summers. He isn’t a yard animal. He’d like it noted that he’s management.

Next Year

Next year is a big one. Our time in the Mediterranean is up. A US-flagged boat can only stay in the EU for so long, and our clock is running out, so 2027 is the year we leave the Med. Along the way we’ll likely stop in Tunisia, Morocco, or both. Time outside the EU lets our Schengen days run off, since we’re only allowed so many as people, and it resets the boat’s clock with EU customs. Two clocks, one for us and one for the boat, and both of them are always ticking. In the winter of 2027 we head out past Gibraltar to the Canary Islands, and from there across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.

And we start counting again. First stop, a wine shop.

S/V Spindrift under sail. Year one is in the books. Here’s to year two.

S/V Spindrift

Valley of the Temples, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy

Next: winter on the hard, and back in the water in May

Tony & Sarah

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