Wind Spirit

Wind Spirit is a sailing ship, which on this site is unusual enough to be the first thing worth saying about her. She carries four masts and six triangular Dacron sails on about 440 feet of hull, and the sails are not decoration bolted to a cruise ship; they are rigged, they are set most days, and they pull. What they do not do is get her to the next port on schedule. The honest description is the one her own type name gives: a motor sailing yacht.

The rig

She was built at Ateliers et Chantiers du Havre in Le Havre, launched in July 1987 and handed over in March 1988. She was the third and last of an odd little class of three (Wind Star came first in 1986, then Wind Song, then her) designed from the keel up as modern cruise ships that happened to carry a full sail plan.

The rig is a staysail schooner. The sails set on the stays that run between the masts rather than on yards across them, which means nobody goes aloft and there is no tacking drill for a crowd of guests to get in the way of. Each sail rolls out of its own mast on command; all six together come to roughly twenty-one thousand square feet. A computer decides how much of each to unroll and how to trim it, and shifts ballast to keep the ship from lying over far enough to spill anyone’s drink. The whole thing is done from a console. Her larger fleetmate Wind Surf uses the same idea scaled up to five masts and seven sails.

What the sails actually do

Sources disagree about this and the disagreement is the interesting part. On her diesel-electric plant alone she is about a ten-to-eleven-knot ship. With the sails set and the wind behind them she has been credited with something closer to fifteen. That is a real difference and it is not a marketing number: the canvas is worth several knots when the weather cooperates.

It cooperates on its own schedule, and hers is published. In practice the engines are usually turning and the sails more often reduce the load on them than replace it. Sail-away is also a set piece; the sails go up to music as she leaves harbor, every time, whether or not there is any wind to use. Both things are true at once. She is a genuine sailing vessel and she is a ship that motors when it has to.

The third sister did not survive to argue about it. Wind Song caught fire in her engine room off Moorea in December 2002, at a quarter past three in the morning. All 127 passengers and 92 crew got off. The French Navy put the fire out and towed her to Papeete, where the passenger spaces turned out to be largely intact and the machinery spaces destroyed. She was too small to be worth scrapping, so in January 2003 they towed her into the Sea of the Moon between Tahiti and Moorea and sank her in about nine thousand eight hundred feet of water.

Where she actually sails

Europe, all year, which is a change. Wind Spirit spent years on the French Polynesia run and handed it to Star Breeze in 2024. Now her summer is the Adriatic and the central Mediterranean out of Venice, Dubrovnik and Civitavecchia, and her winter is the Canary Islands out of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, including first calls at Porto Santo and El Hierro, the kind of small harbor that exists on a schedule only because the ship visiting is this size. Trips run from four nights to twenty-eight, with the longer Star Collector combinations at the top of that range.

She is at sea for the total solar eclipse as this is written: a seven-night crossing from Rome to Barcelona that departed on August 6, 2026, positioned north of Mallorca on the twelfth so the sun is a few degrees above the western horizon when the moon covers it.

She has one more piece of yard work coming. Windstar’s Setting Sails program is rebuilding all three sailing yachts in two phases, and Wind Spirit goes in during early 2027 for her second, the AmphorA dining room redone floor to ceiling, new headboards and bedside charging in the cabins. She comes out with a four-night showcase run from Málaga on March 7, 2027 to Almería, Gibraltar and Tangier.

Who she suits

People who want to be on a sailing ship and are honest with themselves about what that means at 148 guests. There is no theater, no waterslide, no alternative to the two or three rooms where things happen in the evening, and sea days are short on indoor space because there is not much indoor space at all. Every cabin is an outside cabin and none of them is large.

She is wrong for anyone traveling with children who need to be occupied, anyone who wants a balcony, and anyone who will be annoyed to learn the engines are running under the sails. She is right for people who will go up on deck at sail-away every single time and not feel silly about it.