And then, of course, there are the environmental advantages: “No emission. No gas. Nothing,” Basisca tells me. On our weeklong cruise, he says, we were able to operate solely on sails just about 30% of the time, citing obstacles like headwinds, and the need to get to port on schedule. While some smaller sailing companies rely more fully on a where-the-wind-takes-you approach, with no set route or cruising speeds, larger tall ship lines like Star Clippers have itineraries to keep. For our voyage, that translated to a sails-only run lasting some 19 hours on the way to the first port call, Rhodes, with a good portion of the remainder of the sailing powered by a combination of wind and engine power.
“We can sail under wind power up to 80% of the time on any given itinerary, so from a sustainability perspective this significantly reduces the amount of time we need to use the engine and burn fuel,” explains Terri Haas, VP of Sales and Marketing for Star Clippers North America. Beyond the sails, says Haas, Star Clippers’ smaller-capacity ships translate to other notable sustainability pluses, too, like minimized waste production and “less overtourism, which is important to maintaining the integrity of the small ports our ships visit.”
Monaco-based Star Clippers is one of a handful of established tall sailing ship companies—along with players like Island Windjammers and Sea Cloud Cruises—that are leaning into the sustainability of these sailing ships, adding it to their longstanding lures of adventure and romance. A fresh crop of next-generation, sail-equipped ships is now also in the pipeline from cruise lines like Orient Express, Hurtigruten, and Ponant.
Realistically, experts like Jacobson see such hybrid models as the most practical application for wind power on ships, with wind ideally supporting emergent, clean-energy battery- and hydrogen-based technologies.
For a more fully wind-powered vacation, Captain Basisca tells me to consider sailing the Caribbean next, with its more reliable trade winds. But he notes that climate change has made tracking the wind anywhere more challenging. “In the past, it was easier to predict the wind and weather. Now everything has really changed,” he says. If I listen closely to the whispers of the Anemoi, I hear it: We as travelers need to embrace the winds of change in how we travel, too.
