Sailing the old way

The Paraw — or Paraw — is a double-outrigger sailboat indigenous to the Visayan islands of the Philippines. It has been used for fishing, trade, and inter-island travel for hundreds of years. Long before GPS, long before engines, Visayan sailors navigated between islands using these boats, reading the wind and the current the way most people read a map.

Our Paraws are crewed by sailors who grew up on the water in Santa Fe. They don't consult the forecast before they sail — they read the sky. They know which way the wind turns at 4pm, where the chop builds before a squall, and when it's safe to anchor and when it isn't.

A sail on the Paraw is not an activity. It's an hour or three of doing very little, very well — watching the shoreline shrink, feeling the boat lean into the breeze, and arriving back with a calm that's hard to manufacture on land.