But who is the girl on the cover of the Sailing Newspaper?

Why a cover with a beautiful girl at the helm with the background of the Greek flag? Simple. This girl is for us a symbol of the arrival of summer, of the desire to go to sea, abandoning our moorings. There is also an anniversary that prompted us to choose this image, in the May issue 24 years ago, way back in 1992, for the first time The Journal of Sailing put a beautiful girl at the helm on its cover. It was half a revolution, the “hardliners” railed against this choice, the “libertarians” applauded it. The fact remains that it was the best-selling issue in the now 41-year-long history of the Sailing Newspaper.

Besides, putting a beautiful girl on the cover for us also has the meaning of reaffirming that sailing is not just a sport reserved for men. Women who go boating are not necessarily ugly, muscular, sloppy. The tangible example that this is an outdated stereotype is the sailor we printed on the cover. We were also saying about the Greek flag, the second symbol of this cover. A recent survey of Italian enthusiasts elected Greece as the ideal cruise destination outside of Italy.

Those hundreds of islands, the wild sea, the feeling of freedom and deregulation offered by the Aegean Sea are the mixture that makes Italian cruise passengers dream. So we turned to an experienced navigator of these seas, who has been beating the Greek coasts palm to palm for the past 20 years, and asked him to reveal to us his heartland spots, the ones that sailors normally jealously hide so that they are not violated by hundreds of boats. His secret logbook is on p. 88 of the Journal. This is the first installment of an unusual story that will continue with other destinations, Corsica in the lead. But Greece is not only the most desirable destination, it is also the symbol of a way of going to sea away from the oppressive and costly bureaucratic, regulatory, and environmental constraints that instead poison our coasts. In these pages, in the last issue, we had appealed for the lifting of bans preventing mooring in marine protected areas. Above all, we were asking to open prohibited islands such as Pianosa, Gorgona, and Montecristo to recreational boats. On our site, you have come out overwhelmingly in favor of this liberalization.