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This winter, a young couple moved aboard a first-of-its-kind, fresh-from-the-factory Fountaine Pajot Samana 59. The cat, Aurora, is a TWe6 Smart Electric, making it the first charter cat capable of 100% electric propulsion, generated by a combination of solar and wind with a hydrogen fuel cell and diesel only as a backup. The boat is owned by TradeWinds, a boutique charter company with a fleet of nearly 50 boats around the world—all of which they plan to replace with electric boats within the next 12 years.

Marcello Giacomini and Lulu Gong are the captain and mate who brought Aurora home to St. Maarten. But how did such a young couple find themselves responsible for such a groundbreaking boat? 

When Marcello arrived in Australia from his home in Italy via India, he didn’t speak English. Eventually, he landed a job at a coffee shop anyway. Marcello picks up the story while we’re relaxing at Aurora’s flybridge helm station, telling it with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he steers around St. Barths.

“They said, ‘We believe in you, go out and take your first order.’ I went out and said, ‘Good day sir, what would you like?’

“He said, ‘A flah whye maye.’

“And so I go back to the kitchen, and they said, ‘What does he want?’

“I said, ‘I have no idea.’

“ ‘Well, what did he say?’

“ ‘ Aflahwhyemae?’

“ ‘He wants a flat white, write that down, abbreviate it F. L.’ And that’s how I learned English.”

This undaunted, cheerful attitude served Marcello well through a one-year working visa in Australia. He had a number of other jobs including at a Nandos chicken restaurant and a banana farm. None of them were forever careers, but he learned a few crucial things about himself: “I liked working hard, I liked waking up early, and I liked the tropics.”

With time running out on his visa, he decided to spend some time traveling, hitchhiking south.

“One time I got picked up, and he asked where I was staying tonight. He offered to let me stay over on his yacht. It was like a 32-foot sailboat. And he introduced me to other boaters who lived on their boats, who could travel with their homes. Nobody had told me that was an option.”

This chance encounter inspired a dream. “I spent all my free time at the library looking at books to learn to sail. Sailing school was very expensive, so I looked for a job as a fisherman. Every time I met someone new, I told them what I wanted to do. And eventually someone knew someone who needed work.”

The job wasn’t glamorous, but it got Marcello living on a boat and allowed him to meet other people living and working in the harbor. One sailor, partially through sailing around the world, helped refine the dream, and Marcello jumped aboard a sailboat with four other people bound for Korea. The group started doing deliveries and were making good money, but Marcello still dreamed of having his own boat.

“I bought one online, but it had no engine. And then I found another boat in very bad shape but with an engine. So I bought that too. I had two boats in New Zealand. I was in Korea.” It was time to head south again.

“I kept this beautiful steel one, but it was rotting. I was sleeping with one foot in the bilge because it could sink at any moment. It took three months to get it hauled out, and when we pulled it up, there was water pouring out. The yard manager thought I would abandon it in the yard with the other abandoned graveyard projects. Nobody thought we could do it.”

“In New Zealand there are a lot of hitchhikers, but a lot of people would look at my boat and say ‘I want to go sailing, not fixing.’ Eventually, though, someone came by the yard and said he wanted to help. I asked when he could start, and he took his jacket off and said, ‘Right now.’ ”

And then, day by day, people came to help him. Everyone wanted to see Marcello’s boat done because they hadn’t thought it was possible. But finally, the day before his Kiwi visa was up, they set off.

Marcello was bound for Vanuatu, sailing with three other crew members, none of whom had ever sailed before. An autopilot hadn’t been in the budget, so they hand steered some 1,500 miles. The camaraderie built while refitting the boat told Marcello he could trust them with the voyage, and it paid off: They turned out to be a very handy crew who knew the boat inside out.

Meanwhile, Lulu was en route to Vanuatu as well, braving her first open water passage. She’d been traveling in New Zealand, living in a van, when two friends introduced her to a Kiwi boat captain, who then invited her to join on his crossing.

“I was going to go back to China and travel in Southeast Asia, so I said no, I couldn’t go,” she says. “But that night I lay awake in my bed, thinking, ‘If I don’t take this opportunity, I may regret it my whole life.’ ”

“I was very sick on that first crossing. Getting out of the bay, it was immediately 38 knots, and so I was very sick for five or six days. And then the captain said, ‘Lulu, come out of the boat, come look at the stars.’ And I love the stars, so I came out.”

The captain told her that their mutual friends said she couldn’t do it, that she wouldn’t be able to handle being out at sea. “So I had to turn it around. I had to toughen up. And the next day I did a four-hour watch.”

When they arrived in Vanuatu, there was a beat up steal boat already there. Marcello says the attraction was instantaneous when he first met Lulu. Lulu remembers it a little differently.

“I was traveling and I was meeting different people from different places all the time,” she says. “So to me, he was just a very friendly, very knowledgeable guy who had a good relationship with the people on the island.”

He invited her for lunch, planning something that would take a long time to cook, so he’d have time to win her over. It took a little longer than one lunch, but eventually, despite her rough first passage, she switched crews to join Marcello.

“He loves the water, he loves the boat, so I told myself if you want to be with this guy, you can’t be seasick,” she remembers. Even today, she says it’s a mind over matter thing.

To make a long story short, after navigating Covid travel restrictions, a stint as a sailing instructor, captain’s licensing, and endless visa complications due to strained political relationships in the region, Lulu moved to Turkey. Marcello sold the boat and met her there six months later.

“He proposed in December, but it took me about two months to get all the documents together from China. He drove me to a beach at night, and asked, ‘Lulu, what is that?’ And I was like, ‘I think it’s just rubbish,’ and I picked up the little package, and he pulled a ring out,” she remembers with a laugh.

Once married, she could move to Italy with him. “But then I had the opposite problem,” Marcello says “I had Lulu, but no boat. So I applied for many jobs as a captain, and I heard back from all of them, including TradeWinds.” He took a job out of the company base in Greece, while Lulu stayed in Italy waiting again on her visa. When she was able to visit, she happened to arrive one morning just as two other crew were quitting.

“I went to the base manager, and I said, ‘She has sailed 4,500 miles with me, she can cook, you should hire her,’ ” recalls Marcello. “And she agreed. So we finally had the same job, we’re finally in the same place, but we’re on different boats. And since we’re on charter all week, we only could see each other on Saturday nights when the charters turn over.”

Still so close, and yet so far away.

Once again, patience paid dividends, and they found an opportunity to trade mates and captains with another crew. Both agree that while they liked the other people they’d worked with, there’s something special about working with their partner. “We both work very hard and we both think very similarly about our work,” Lulu explains. “And of course we’re very close, so we know each other’s emotions. We know immediately if something is wrong, and so we can adapt and communicate.

“I met them during their first season in Greece,” recalls TradeWinds’ President Neil Parsons. “It’s clear they have a very special dynamic between them. Not all crew can or want to do what we ask of them. It’s very intense. But Marcello and Lulu support each other, they’re very mild in the way they talk to each other, it’s clear they have a deep-seated relationship. They’re kind to each other.”

It didn’t take long before their hard work was recognized. The TradeWinds fleet was evolving. The new Fountaine Pajot Samana Smart Electric had been commissioned—a flagship that would usher in a new electric era for the company and for charter boats in general. It was generating a buzz before it’d even splashed.

“I’d been talking about it every week with our charter guests,” Marcello remembers. “There was an internal job advertisement for the first electric boat, and all our other plans were gone. I’d wanted to transfer to the Grenadines, but all that went out the window for the electric boat.”

“We found out while we were out on another charter, and we felt like it was dream,” Lulu says. “We were very excited, and then a bit scared because it’s a big deal. It’s the first one, so everyone will pay attention to this boat, so we have to make things perfect. And when we finally saw Aurora, it was like, wow.”

The boat itself is an eye-catching orange and blue—TradeWinds colors—and at 60 feet, stands out in an anchorage. The flybridge is a showstopper, with a unique layout that offers room for a few different social spaces while keeping the helmsperson in the mix. The lines are led to electric winches on either side of the helm station, making it possible for Marcello and Lulu to sail doublehanded if the week’s passengers aren’t keen to get involved—something that doesn’t happen often.

Aurora has six full cabins, including the one that Marcello and Lulu live in, plus designated crew quarters that could be used in the event that the boat was being crewed by a team who wasn’t a couple. “One of the best things on this boat is the crew has a real cabin like the guests,” Lulu says. “TradeWinds really cares about us. So finally we have a space together.”

Life on Aurora is full of beautiful scenery and long days. Lulu’s cooking, quite possibly the charter’s pièce de résistance, typically begins with a breakfast spread complete with fresh-cut fruit, pastries, cheeses, yogurt, eggs, and more before getting underway. Then it’s lunch en route, cocktail hour hors d’oeuvres, and dinner when it’s not in a restaurant ashore. Marcello is responsible for the day’s breakfast briefing (more often than not, a one-man comedy show), sailing from idyllic anchorage to idyllic anchorage via equally idyllic waters, shipboard maintenance, and preparing a rainbow of signature cocktails. When the sun’s gone down and a cool evening breeze trickles in, if you’re lucky, Marcello will bring out his guitar and Lulu her ukulele.

For Lulu, this life checks all the boxes. “I really like the ocean, I like nature, and I like to visit different places. Sailing is a way we can consume much less energy than any other way of getting to those things. If you live on a boat, you can have your whole life with you and everything you own, and still get to travel.”

And for Marcello, the best part of his job comes in the form of the freedom to sail and meet people while someone else deals with the paperwork. “We have 18 locations, so I can work all over the world. TradeWinds helps with visas, I get to sail boats I could never afford. And I have one boat that I stay on, so you know it well, you can take care of it, it becomes your home.

“So considering that I started with a boat that was sinking and full of rust, and now I’m sailing here, on a pioneering new kind of electric boat, I’m very very grateful.” 

TradeWinds and Sustainability

Running an electric boat like Aurora is different from a standard charter boat. When you’re relying on the wind and power generated under way, even an hour with the engine on or a short hop around a headland can be quite a drain on the battery.

“The crew also has to be a lot more conscious about their battery levels, about use of things like water. Watermakers use a lot of energy. The systems have a lot of software that’s hooked up and providing data, so they have to be more closely monitoring,” says Neil Parsons, TradeWinds’ president. And while the boat has hydrogen power, until clean hydrogen can be sourced locally, the company policy is to use it sparingly.

“We are 100% committed to the goals of operating sustainably. The charter has impacts. Energy, food waste, paper napkins…but if we replace paper napkins for linen, that’s a new problem. There’s more laundry, so more water, more detergent usage. Are we sourcing those sustainably? We have revised our operating procedures with the help of the people on the ground doing the jobs, so the policies are practical and implementable.

“But the sustainability of humans is something we are really driving across the company, too. Life happens to everybody, and some people have really significant challenges outside of work. We try to support them through that. We review the cost of living and making sure that everyone—from the base manager to the hourly employees—have gotten a raise in pay. We’ve helped with medical expenses and sending employees’ children to school. So it all comes back to sustainability, for the planet but also the people as well.

“If I had one message to the charter industry, it’s that it’s not just about energy usage and having a greener engine. It’s about the people and looking after our teams. That pays rewards 10 times, 20 times over.”

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