Sea stories with working-deck honesty.
On the Wind Sailing follows sailors through the practical and emotional texture of life offshore. The conversations move from rigs, deliveries, races, and watchkeeping into family tradeoffs, career pivots, fear, confidence, and the strange pull of long passages.
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On the Wind Sailing is a long-running, interview-led portrait of the sailing life from the inside. It is not just about boats. It is about the people who keep building careers, families, memories, and identities around time offshore. The show has a warm, familiar rhythm, with intros that can wander through breakfast, house moves, rig projects, sponsors, or the latest state of a boat before the conversation settles into its subject. That looseness is part of the appeal. It sounds rooted in a working sailing community rather than a studio format. Recent episodes move across a wide range of sea stories and professional paths. Ben Soofer’s episode frames sailing as an alternate career world, one built from passages, outdoor education, deliveries, cooking, watchkeeping, and the odd fish story. Francesca Clapcich’s conversation turns racing achievement into a deeper question about focus, medals, anxiety, and what counts as enough. Nikki Henderson’s episode links sailing education with curiosity, arguing for learning that gives people a reason to ask better questions. Troy Sears brings in the odd grandeur of Schooner AMERICA, private charters, public figures, and the strange intimacy of letting someone else dock the boat. John Kretschmer’s appearance leans into seamanship, design, aging, racing, and a deliberate resistance to treating the ocean as something to get away from as quickly as possible. Chris Kobusch and Sophie O’Neill talk through racing, high-latitude work, North Pacific urgency, Antarctica, wildlife, and the shifting appeal of different kinds of sailing. Jahn Tihansky’s episode brings the listener into sailmaking, coaching, entrepreneurial grit, and racecourse frustration. The show is full of practical nouns: rigs, sails, deliveries, clutches, sea legs, watch systems, offshore passages, and old race names. Still, the lasting subject is motivation. It asks why the sea keeps pulling people back after discomfort, fear, exhaustion, or ordinary life ashore might have given them every reason to stay home. For sailors, it offers recognition. For the sailing-curious, it offers texture without pretending the life is cleaner or easier than it is.
Made for: For sailors, offshore dreamers, racers, cruisers, boatyard regulars, and anyone drawn to lives shaped by wind, distance, and practical seamanship. It especially suits listeners who like technical detail wrapped in personal storytelling.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by letting real sailing conversation stay a little rough-edged: sponsor reads, boat updates, side stories, and all. Its strength is the way practical seamanship and private reflection sit in the same breath.
The definitive podcast about sailing. Professional sailors Andy Schell, Mia Karlsson and August Sandberg interview sailors from around the world to discover what motivates, scares & inspires them. For over twelve years and through 490+ episodes, our hosts have interviewed sailors like Dee Caffari, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Liz Clark, John Kretschmer, Kirsten Neuschafer, Nigel Calder, Pip Hare & many, many more. We talk to boat builders, yacht designers, YouTube stars, performance racers, and family cruisers. HOLD FAST!
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
On the Wind Sailing makes room for the family negotiations, difficult homecomings and changing priorities that surround a life at sea.
On the Wind Sailing follows life at sea through patient conversations about ambition, fear, work and the pull of another passage. Andy Schell, Mia Karlsson and August Sandberg ask questions that move beyond racing results and into the choices surrounding them: why someone keeps…
First across the line, no finishing gun: you may need a minute before cheering.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sailing conversation that begins with breakfast and lands on family, memory, and sea legs.
On the Wind opens in a practical, everyday register, moving from breakfast and sponsor housekeeping into Mia's account of why time at sea keeps drawing her back.
A grounded path from scuba diving and outdoor education into offshore passage making, with repairs and Mercury along the way.
At 29, a captain is offshore with kids aboard, 36 scuba tanks, a dive compressor, and an environmental science curriculum. That image gives the episode its strongest shape: work at sea can start in outdoor education and open onto a life well beyond an office.
A sailor weighs discipline, medals, and the freedom to leave a dream without regret.
The episode centers on a thoughtful conversation about what a life at sea demands, not just from the sailor but from the people close to her. She frames results as the top step of a ten-step ladder, then keeps returning to the quieter work below it: the routines, patience, and…
A call from the French Alps opens into a sailor's case for variety, from racing surfs to quiet crossings.
The episode opens with a call from the French Alps, where Niki reaches Sophie O'Neill while she is skiing with her sister and asks whether she would fancy racing across the North Pacific in late winter, with Friday as the answer.
A sailmaker's big wins and a race-day mistake that erased the finish.
This episode traces a sailmaker's arc through speed, pressure, and a blunt reckoning with results. It moves from the Whitbread Round the World race on Yamaha and the America's Cup on America Cubed to work largely done in Annapolis at Sobstad, then into a race day shaped by 20 to…
A reflective sailing check-in that turns breakfast chatter, boat life, and family compromise into a warm, lived-in conversation.
Mia & Andy feels like a loose, affectionate check-in that begins with breakfast, boat life, and sponsor housekeeping before settling into a quieter, more reflective groove. The conversation sounds lived in, not packaged, which gives it an easy pull.
A sailor homecoming story centered on the work of family life.
On The Wind treats a sailor-parent homecoming as a practical, quietly tender question: what happens when Andy returns to a child who has to reorient after the absence.
Daily TED and TEDx talks hosted by Elise Hu, spanning science, psychology, and creativity.
Pop culture, personal stakes, and room for a tangent.
Lawfare's weekly panel turns Supreme Court rulings and war-powers fights into legal debate.
Hosts Andy Schell and Mia Karlsson sit down for their annual year-in-review, three months late.
Host Nikki Henderson facilitates a candid conversation with professional sailors Andy Schell, Mia Karlsson, and August Sandberg about being sailing parents.
Andy Schell interviews Matt Rutherford by satellite while Rutherford is a day from entering Russia's Northern Sea Route, having logged 4,366 miles nonstop since leaving Greenland.
At 32, Cole Brauer says finishing her first jar of honey mattered because it meant she had stayed somewhere long enough to feel at home.
On the Wind Sailing revisits August Sandberg’s 2020 Lofoten conversation with Arctic charter operator Øyvind Nilssen aboard the Scorpio 72 Duen.
Mia starts with breakfast.
Ben Soofer says a 29-year-old captain on Argo sent him into offshore passage making, then later turned that path into work with 59 North, Broadreach, Knowles, and Squally's.
Francesca Klapcich says Ocean Race Europe is part of her build toward the 2028 Vendee Globe with Team Milizia and 11th Hour Racing.
The conversation begins with a scramble.
Jahn Tihansky opens with sailmaking.