TIDE Issue 12

Finding and sharing stories for our readers always takes us on an exploration of the world’s oceans. For this issue, the journey begins in the Caribbean at St Barths, where we meet with Karin van Leeuwen, the owner of Aragon. Karin and I have been discussing TIDE ideas we could work on together over the last 12 months; once their itinerary is set, Karin calls. “We will be sailing from New Zealand straight to Patagonia,” she shares. “Can you join us as we hit the coast?” It’s an easy, “Yes!” – and a call that sets the tone for this issue and our South American adventure. We join the Aragon crew after their 21-day crossing of the Southern Ocean, through the Roaring Forties and Screaming Fifties on to a safe…

You would be forgiven for missing the launch of Sarissa back in 2023. Builder Royal Huisman kept Project 404 on the down-low, so she slipped into the water and departed for the Mediterranean largely unobserved. With her exceptionally slender hull and razor-sharp bow throwing barely a ripple, she was gone. TIDE is therefore delighted to be able to throw more of a spotlight on this exceptional yacht. Drawn by Malcolm McKeon and engineered for highly efficient operation, she is perhaps the ultimate exponent of the marriage between performance and comfort. “The owner’s team came to us with a fairly detailed brief,” says McKeon. “They wanted something with exceptional performance – an easily driven hull shape and a large sail area. We started at 57m but ended up at 60m, so…

“Architecture is a little bit like music: it’s about rhythm, silences. We don’t want our architecture to be loud,” says Juan Ignacio Ramos, the figure behind Estudio Ramos, a 35-year-strong family-run firm with dual bases in New York City and Buenos Aires. Despite their desire not to “scream anything” with their work, Ramos and his son and partner, Ignacio Ramos, have certainly caught the design world’s attention. Ramos and Ramos serenely presented their book, Honest Modernism, at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, showcasing their firm’s ethos: to respect simplicity, consider a project’s “ideal scale and sustainability,” and encourage reflection – much like, say, a great Cubist painting or a jazz riff. Of particular note, also in Venice (this time in 2016) – and what prompted their international approval rating to…

It took more than four decades for the DynaRig method to become a reality – but when it did, it was a complete game-changer for large-sail yachting. Its contemporary interpretation was first implemented by Dykstra Naval Architects on the iconic Maltese Falcon, built in Turkey by Perini Navi and launched in 2006. More than a decade later, another landmark boat began her maiden voyage sailing under the power of an evolved ’Rig system. At 106.7 metres, Black Pearl was not only the biggest sailing yacht in the world, but also the most technologically advanced. Her length may now have been surpassed by Jeff Bezos’ 125-metre Koru (which is actually said to have been inspired by Black Pearl), but she remains the most innovative out there. “The benefits of Black Pearl…

“The night we arrived in Patagonia was the toughest,” Karin van Leeuwen, owner of Aragon, reflects. She and her crew had been 24 days at sea and this was the first land they had seen, but it didn’t feel romantic. “The coastline was coated in the heaviest rain I have known – it was absolutely pouring down like a curtain – with hail mixed in,” she recalls. “There was 40kn of wind with insane waves. We hit 24kn under storm jib and trysail. It was only when we got into the Magellan Strait that things finally settled down. Dawn broke and the land opened up before us; ice-capped mountains and fjords full of glaciers. Then, it was beautiful.” Most of us know the immortal lines from Robert Frost’s poem ‘The…

Known to some as the Lost Coast, Panama’s Gulf of Chiriquí remains a wild stretch of Central America’s eastern tropical Pacific. A landscape of dozens of islands sewn from ancient volcanoes and some of the richest virgin coastal rainforest in the region, it’s a world unto its own, thanks to its isolated position and topography unfazed by El Niño’s colder winds. Amid endless vines and palms hide rare scarlet macaws and crested eagles, while beneath its waters lies a marine highway of migrating humpback whales, drawn like a magnet thousands of miles from the icy Antarctic Peninsula. In the centre of it all, around 32 kilometres from the sparsely populated mainland, you will find Islas Secas, a 14-island private archipelago and one of the world’s most exclusive resorts. An off-the-grid…