There is a moment, at night, when the sea stops being water and becomes something else. Johannes de Waal has seen it dozens of times, and yet he tells it as if it were the first: the full moon settling on the water and turning it into a silver path stretching ahead of the bow, the coastline slipping by hour after hour, the silence broken only by the wind in the sails. This is what he tries to describe when you ask him why he loves sailing. And his answer, in the end, is always the same: because the sea “really is a different galaxy.”
From 23 to 30 September the European Week of Sport returns, with an invitation that by now sounds like a small challenge to everyone: #BeActive. Move, get out, try something. And what if that something were a sailing boat? Johannes – known to all as the Comandante of Mina, the 39-foot sailing boat docked in the harbour of Alghero and the heart of ASD Sport Compass’s nautical activity – has no doubts: sailing is exactly the sport that week would love you to discover.
A rich man's sport? "Partly true, but…"
Let’s clear the most stubborn prejudice out of the way straight off. “Sailing is often seen as a niche for the rich,” the Comandante admits, without dancing around it. “Which is partly true, because you need some money to maintain a yacht.” Then the sentence turns, and that’s where everything changes: “However, a small sailing boat is accessible to everybody.”
Because, he explains, sailing isn’t one single thing. It’s many things at once, and everyone can find their own in it. “You can go for an easy tour and a swim, or you can cross the Atlantic – it depends on your nature, whether you are adventurous or more into leisure.” The same boat can take you swimming off a deserted beach or push you beyond the horizon: only the way you live it changes. “If you are into swimming, you can take a small sailing boat, go to a beach and jump into the sea; if you like adventure, you can take a sailing boat and go from Alghero to a beach.”
It’s a wide, broad sport. And above all it’s a sport that bends to the person who practises it, not the other way round.
"A sport for all"
Those who love their own company and those who can’t do without a team, according to Johannes, both find their place at sea. “You have the small sailing boats you handle by yourself, or a yacht where you need to work with ten people.” Solitude or cooperation: sailing holds them both. “There is something sailing has to offer for everyone.”
And it’s precisely on the point closest to the heart of the European Week of Sport – sport as a right for all, not for a few – that the Comandante is at his clearest. He recalls how recent initiatives in many parts of the world have now opened sailing up to people with different abilities too. And he concludes, with the bluntness of someone who has known the sea all his life: “I really would say yes: it’s a sport for all. And, like any sport, either you like it or you don’t – that’s the thing.”
No inflated promises, no rhetoric. Just the honest invitation to come aboard and find out for yourself.
The sea as encounter
Behind the Comandante’s experience lies a simple conviction: sailing, even before it is a technical skill, is a way of getting in touch with something bigger. “What we are trying to do is offer people the opportunity to get in touch with a nautical reality,” he says. Aboard Mina come groups from European projects, teenagers and adults “like me,” he jokes – all invited to experience the sea and marine life.
Johannes’s role, after all, is all in this: caring for what is shared. “‘Comandante’ means, in Italian, the captain – the one in charge of one of the assets the association offers,” he explains. “So my role is to keep an eye on the care and the sharing of this fantastic sailing boat.” Care and sharing: the two words come up often, and it’s no accident.
How to start: "Just come with us"
So what if you wanted to give it a try tomorrow? The Comandante’s recipe is disarming in its simplicity. “ASD Sport Compass’s doors are very open. Subscribe to our club.” Every two or three weeks Mina goes out to sea; a few times a year the crew cleans up beaches. “That is an ideal way to start – just come with us.”
No theory lessons before touching the water. You learn by doing, “the way you might throw someone in at the deep end”: you set off, and aboard, little by little, you get acquainted with boat life, nautical etiquette, respect for the environment. And if one day the sea only calls for relaxing on the beach, that’s fine too: “It’s not only sailing. But that too is part of nautical life.”
Four days along Sardinia
What all of this can become, when sailing stops being an hour of fresh air and turns into a voyage, is told by the Mina Cup 2026: from 31 May to 3 June, Mina’s passage along the island’s western coast, from Cagliari to Alghero. Not a race, but an immersion. Departure at sunset, a full night beating upwind under an extraordinary full moon, a stop in Tabarchino Carloforte, and the return to Alghero at two in the morning with the city’s illuminated towers standing in as a lighthouse.
A journey made of contrasts – wind and calm, laughter and focus, full sail and engine hours – with Sardinia’s coast always there, within sight. The experience that best sums up what the Comandante tries to pass on to every new crew.
Click to read the logbook of this wonderful adventure.
This September, cast off
The European Week of Sport asks for one thing only: to move. For Johannes de Waal, the playing field is the sea, the gym is a boat named Mina, and the only real rule is that you don’t have to be a champion to set off. All you need is the curiosity to discover that “different galaxy” that begins just a few metres from the shore.
The best way to take up the #BeActive invitation this year might be exactly this: come aboard.