What I admire most about what we do at the Sailing Collective is our approach to low-impact travel. Sailing adventures, by and large, offer a bird’s-eye view into the coastal and island communities we explore—without interfering with the natural flow of life in these places. 

One of my favorite islands is a small, rocky gem between Ischia and Ponza called Ventotene, just off the Gulf of Naples. I believe the island has a year-round population of roughly 300 residents, which naturally increases during the summer months when grandchildren and their parents come to visit the grandparents or spend time at the family house. They arrive from the mainland, and there’s usually one ferry per day. It’s a gorgeous island that has been inhabited since the Roman era. The ecosystem is delicate, and tourism could easily upset the balance of life here. You see this happening in places like Croatia, where family apartments are turned into Airbnbs and locals are pushed to move elsewhere. Everything becomes either for sale or a performance for foreign tourists. 

For us, however, we sail to Ventotene and drop anchor just off the village. We dinghy ashore, enjoy our favorite family-run restaurants—places we’ve been going to for years and have built relationships with—and we have the opportunity to engage authentically, with no motive other than to celebrate life together. It becomes an honored privilege to connect in this way—built on honesty, mutual trust, and appreciation. We live that moment together, creating a memory we’ll all carry for a lifetime. Then, the following morning, we weigh anchor and sail to another island, leaving no physical trace of our having been there. Only the shared memories remain.

I think, in many ways, it’s impossible for anyone on a Sailing Collective voyage not to be transformed in some way. Our voyages are nearly all week-long adventures, and for the majority of those seven days, we are outside. Time spent indoors is essentially just for sleeping—and some guests even end up sleeping outside on the trampoline of the catamarans. I strongly believe that spending a week outside changes you in some way.

One aspect of the Sailing Collective I absolutely love is our community, which fosters a large group of like-minded travelers. Individuals, couples, and groups of friends who have decided that traveling by sea—and with the Sailing Collective—is their forever way to travel. One of our regulars has been on about 25 charters! That’s half a year of his life spent exploring with us. He’s from the Midwest, landlocked, and before discovering the Sailing Collective, he primarily traveled for work and rarely saw the sea. His son—or maybe a friend—gave him an article about the Sailing Collective in a travel magazine. The next day, he booked his first group journey with us, and he’s been sailing multiple times a year ever since. 

This experience has also transformed the individuals on our team—captains and chefs who entered their professions to explore, to cook for people, and to share meaningful experiences. We have a team of about 50 captains and chefs who freelance for the Sailing Collective. On each charter, they’re paired with different teammates—a new captain, a new chef. It creates a strong sense of community. We’re all part of the same club.

Hiring new team members is always inspiring. Their eyes light up when they realize they can take their profession and travel the world, sharing their passions with wide-eyed travelers on our charters. It’s wholesome—and truly inspiring—to witness.

I think, in many ways, my goal for the Sailing Collective is simply to keep doing what we’ve always done. Our mission is to connect with nature and cultures authentically—through the unique vantage point of arriving by sea. Being able to facilitate that connection is still incredibly inspiring to me, and I believe it continues to inspire the entire team behind the Sailing Collective. The world is beautiful, and connecting with it—and sharing those stories—will always be at the heart of what we do. 

Each year, we add new itineraries and offer opportunities for anyone interested to join the adventure. I just returned from a brand new itinerary exploring the archipelagos of West Papua, New Guinea, with 12 Sailing Collective travelers. Right now, I’m in the early stages of planning a new style of voyage for us in northern Norway—a ski-sail expedition—as well as a two-week circumnavigation of all the Virgin Islands, including the east coast of Puerto Rico, both U.S. and British. It’s going to be epic sailing. 

Meanwhile, this very week, there’s a Sailing Collective team out exploring Tortola, Baja, and the Bahamas with their guests. The week before that, we had charters in French Polynesia and Thailand. So many people are seeing the world through this vantage point—and that’s exactly the goal.

Sailing the Seas Volume 2: Grand Maritime Adventures really is about grand maritime adventures! Our first book, Sailing the Seas Volume 1, came out right at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was fascinating to look back at this catalog of all our adventures up to that point—especially during a time when we weren’t able to explore. 

What I noticed was that we were often repeating the same itineraries—not necessarily a bad thing—but with a sense of optimism, the Sailing Collective decided to use the travel pause as an opportunity to create new routes and find new ways to reach them.

By early 2024, I realized I had explored 20 new itineraries in the four years since our first book was released. After writing them all out—from Antarctica, the Galápagos, and Baja to Barbuda, Scotland, and the Exumas—I felt it was time to share these journeys with others, not just the lucky souls who had sailed with us.

I should add that both Sailing the Seas Volume 1 and 2 are collections of 43 itineraries we've explored around the world. Each chapter offers a mariner’s guide to the coves, islands, and archipelagos—what they’re like, how they feel, and what it means to arrive there by sea.

Great question - Maybe Ibn Battuta after his 25 some-odd years or wandering the globe solo in the 13th century. His travels have always been of interest to me and I think his accomplishments of traveling from Morocco to China over the course of his life continuing his journey based on word of mouth and local relationships he made along the way I find very surreal. I would only imagine he would have some unique insights having observed all the cultures stretching from Western Europe to Eastern China.

I came into sailing in a roundabout way. Growing up, I was immersed in adventure and world cultures through the lens of social studies and the arts—predictably, thanks to my parents. I was raised in a small coastal community in New England, a somewhat enclosed environment, but my parents made a conscious effort to broaden our perspectives. They introduced my brothers and me to global cultures, aiming to expand our sense of place beyond our immediate surroundings. 

Late in high school, my stepbrother—now co-founder of the Sailing Collective—got hold of a 25-foot 1968 Irwin sailboat. With a healthy dose of willful naiveté and a “learn-by-doing” mindset, we gradually got the hang of coastal cruising along the Gulf of Maine and the New England shoreline. That interest stuck with me and followed me into college life in New York City. About halfway through school, I moved onto my next boat—an old, leaky 1970 Columbia 28. I suppose I should mention I went to college for music studying and performing avant-garde jazz and I went to graduate school for economics with an interest in working for an international NGO, wanting to contribute to the betterment of the world in some way, both studies had influence on what Sailing Collective turned into. 

After college and during graduate school, I started working at a yacht club in Manhattan, teaching sailing while also pursuing other professional interests. After six intense years of studying, spending my days sailing New York Harbor sounded fantastic. I kept teaching for a few more years, into my mid-20s. Then came one voyage that changed everything. I went sailing in the British Virgin Islands with the yacht club. I was about 25 when I skippered one of the 20 boats in the flotilla. Each evening, we’d anchor in a secluded cove, experience nature in its raw beauty, and gather under the stars—sometimes with a few too many swigs of rhum. In the morning, we’d weigh anchor and sail to the next island. Looking back at the bay we’d just left, it remained pristine and untouched, just as we had found it. 

That moment hit me hard. It was a kind of harmony—people, nature, and community coming together in celebration of life at sea, but with minimal impact on the environment. Even in the revelry, the experience was rooted in respect and appreciation for the natural world. What stood out to me was that nearly everyone on the trip was already a sailor or part of a sailing club. I couldn’t help but wonder—what if we reimagined this kind of journey not as a “sailing experience,” but as a travel experience at sea? One accessible to people with no sailing background. A way to explore the rare and remote coastal communities that live in their own world of harmony—using sailboats as the vehicle. 

That idea became the seed of the Sailing Collective. I called up my stepbrother, we created a basic spreadsheet, figured out how to charter a boat, convinced a few people to join the voyage, and ‘launched’ the company grassroots-style: word of mouth, direct-to-consumer. There was no grand plan—just a passion for connecting people to nature and each other through the sea. We figured it out as we went, and we’ve been sailing ever since. 

Back in the city, I was subletting a bohemian artist loft in SoHo. We came up with a name, built a scrappy WordPress site, and started convincing people to travel by sea. In shaping the vision, we drew from the same foundations that shaped my childhood—world cultures, art, and adventure.

When we see and experience things with our own eyes, I believe we gain a deeper ability to connect with and understand what we’re witnessing. This is especially true in nature. There’s a clear cause and effect—weather, for example, demands real attention when sailing. Planning for a forecast that may bring inclement conditions is a humbling experience. There’s nothing we can do but accept fate, surrender to its force, and plan accordingly.

I truly believe that seeing places at risk humanizes our impact on them. Antarctica isn’t some made-up place—it’s real, and its environmental preservation is absolutely essential for the health of our planet. Witnessing these places with our own eyes, I think, stirs deeply perplexing feelings about our role in endangering these fragile ecosystems. No one person can save an environment from destruction of course, but collectively, we can make a meaningful and positive impact.