Around the world: The never-ending adventure

For Dario Segre, the Italian owner of the 36m sloop Canova, the ultimate plan has always been to spend six years travelling around the globe via Cape Town and Patagonia. “I’ve owned boats for 30 years and Canova is the final realisation of my ‘sailing wishes’, my ‘sailing dreams’,” says Segre. “Having owned three Baltic Yachts and a Wally, I felt the need to explore the combination of full reliability, easy sailing and blue water performance.”



Canova is a yacht that seamlessly combines practicality and comfort with performance and she has already taken her owner almost 9,000 miles since her launch. His right-hand man since the beginning has been experienced captain Gigi Nava. Nava and his partner, Irene Moretti, have been sailing for 34 years and have been a part of Segre’s team since 2009, having sailed his previous Baltic, Akoya, from Australia to Italy. Since Canova’s launch in 2011, they have sailed all over the world on her with Segre. “We feel when we are out sailing on her that we could go absolutely anywhere,” says Nava, and they have certainly tried.



This past year has seen Segre and his crew travel from Europe to the Caribbean and back, and their journey has taken them to places such as Norway, Gibraltar, Cadiz, La Ciotat, Martinique, the British Virgin Islands, St Barths, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Azores and Malta. One of the highlights was right at the start when Canova launched in Finland and Segre and his crew came down through Scandinavia. “Scandinavia has completely lived up to my expectations,” Segre tells us. “Besides the famous and wonderful towns such as Stockholm, Copenhagen and Bergen, I very much enjoyed sailing in the Norwegian fjords; narrow, deep and surrounded by mountains and everlasting glaciers. The climate, of course, wasn’t comparable to the Mediterranean or tropical regions, which we are used to, and the water’s temperature was around 16 degrees, a little too cold for Latin people. But the landscape fully made up for the lack of the ‘bathing’ aspect.”



“We have certainly had many adventures,” Irene Moretti says. “We found an abandoned, overturned canoe in the middle of the ocean near the Azores. One of our crew had to be evacuated to hospital when we were near Gibraltar. We had to uninstall the antennas on the mast to squeeze under the Sotra Bridge in Norway leaving just a metre of space between the bridge and us. It was never dull!” Segre is on board as much as he can but is kept busy with his business and family life, which often take him away from the boat, but the next step is to embark on a six year voyage around the world as he has always dreamed.  “I’m very happy to have built her and, as a reward, she has lived up to all my expectations,” he says. “That’s the reason why I’ve programmed a long around-the-world trip: the longer it’s going to last, the happier I’ll be.”

Captain Nava and Irene kept a blog since Canova’s launch chronicling their adventures on the yacht, which you can visit here. Issue four of The Superyacht Owner, the Monaco Yacht Show edition, features an extract from the blog as well as more from Dario Segre talking about Canova, his travels so far and his plans for the future.

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