Wind Star

Wind Star is the ship the line is named after. She was launched at Ateliers et Chantiers du Havre in November 1985 and entered service in 1986 as the first of three four-masted motor sailing yachts, and forty years later she is still doing the job she was designed for with 148 guests aboard. She is also about to change oceans.

What the sails actually do

Four masts, computer-controlled self-furling sails, roughly 21,500 square feet of them. The published speeds are ten knots on the engines alone and up to about fifteen and a half with the wind behind her, and that gap is the useful number: the canvas is doing real work, not posing. It is still assistance rather than the primary means. The diesel-electric plant is what keeps her on the timetable, the sails go up when the wind cooperates, and on a flat calm afternoon they stay in the masts and she is a small motor yacht with unusual scenery on deck.

The trade for that is size. At 440 feet and 52 feet in the beam she is a third the length of a mainstream cruise ship, and she moves like it. If you are uneasy in a seaway, this is the wrong hull for open-ocean stretches, and her schedule has some long ones.

The 2026 refit

Wind Star was the first of the three Wind Class yachts to finish both phases of Windstar’s Setting Sails program, in April 2026. The Amphora restaurant was redone outright (floors, walls, ceilings, custom banquettes, new furniture), the Veranda was refreshed and its buffet re-laid, and the staterooms got upholstered headboards, integrated lighting and bedside charging. She came out of it on a Lisbon-to-Barcelona run in April 2026 and went straight into the Mediterranean season.

That makes her, at the moment, the most recently finished ship of the three. Wind Surf completes phase two in December 2026 and Wind Spirit in March 2027, after which the sisters will match again. There is genuinely very little that separates Wind Star from Wind Spirit other than where each one is sent, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Where she actually sails

Right now, the Aegean. Athens is her homeport for the current season and the staple is a seven-night Greek islands loop, which is why the median trip length on her schedule is exactly seven nights. From there she crosses to Central America for the winter, Panama Canal transits and Costa Rica, turning around at Colón on the Atlantic side and Puerto Caldera on the Pacific.

Windstar has announced that she joins Star Breeze in French Polynesia on the seven-night “Dreams of Tahiti” run through the Society Islands, and has said the same for 2028. Treat that as announced rather than settled: what is bookable here still puts her in the Mediterranean through the autumn of 2027 and back in Central America into 2028, and the only South Pacific sailing on her calendar is the long repositioning that would carry her across. If the Tahiti season is what you want, check the dates against what is actually on sale before you plan around it.

Who she suits

People who want a small boat in warm water and do not need anything else. One hundred and forty-eight guests is a number where the crew learns your name in two days, and the deployment from 2027 is about as good an argument for a shallow-draft ship as exists, Society Islands anchorages that a large ship cannot enter at all.

She does not suit families, anyone who wants a lot of indoor space on a sea day, or anyone who expects evening entertainment beyond a musician in the lounge. There is no theater and no production show, and the dining room count is small enough that on any given night you are choosing between a menu and a buffet. And she is a 1986 hull with 1986 proportions, narrow corridors, small cabins, low ceilings. The refit changed the finishes, not the ship.