Wind Surf

Wind Surf carries five masts and seven sails, and they are not decoration. She was built at Ateliers et Chantiers du Havre and completed in December 1989 as La Fayette, spent eight years as Club Med’s flagship, and has been Windstar’s largest ship since 1998. At 614 feet she is one of the largest sailing vessels afloat, a claim that needs qualifying in 2026, and the qualification is below.

The rig

Seven triangular Dacron sails on five masts, something on the order of 26,000 square feet of canvas, all of it self-furling and worked by computer from the bridge. Nobody goes aloft on this ship. The sails roll out of the masts on command and roll back in the same way.

Underneath the canvas she is a diesel-electric vessel: four generating sets feeding two electric propulsion motors. The published figures are twelve knots on the engines alone and about fifteen with the wind helping, which is the honest description of what the rig does. It is real propulsion and it is also assistance; the schedule is kept by the diesels, and the sails are set when the wind and the timetable agree. What they change is the character of the thing. She heels. The engines quiet down. You are on a sailing ship in a way that no amount of nautical decor achieves.

The size claim needs care. Her sister Club Med 2, built at the same yard in 1992 and still sailing for Club Med, is about twenty feet longer. And Chantiers de l’Atlantique handed over the 722-foot Orient Express Corinthian in April 2026, which is larger than either by a wide margin. Wind Surf is now roughly the third-largest sailing passenger vessel in service, which is still a strange and good thing to be.

What Windstar has been redoing

The Setting Sails program is a two-phase refit running across the three Wind Class yachts, and Wind Surf is the middle one through it. Phase one, in early 2025, took the main lobby and reception, the Yacht Club Café, the Compass Rose Bar and Lounge, the Amphora restaurant, the pool bar and deck and the Owner’s Suite, put new televisions in every stateroom, and added two new suite categories, Broadmoor and Sea Island. Phase two is scheduled for December 2026 and covers the staterooms themselves, Stella Bistro, the Veranda and the fitness studio. Wind Star finished both phases in April 2026; Wind Spirit finishes in March 2027.

Worth being plain about the timing: if you sail her before December 2026, the public rooms are new and the cabins are not.

Where she actually sails

Two seasons and the crossings between them. Winters are Caribbean, based at Philipsburg on St. Maarten, which is by a long way her busiest homeport, seven-night loops through the Leewards and the Grenadines with the odd longer run. Summers are Mediterranean, turning around at Civitavecchia and Venice. Lisbon appears a handful of times, which is what a transatlantic repositioning looks like on a schedule. Trips run from five to twenty-three nights and the median is nine. Windstar has her back in the Caribbean for winter 2027-28, so the pattern is not about to change.

Who she suits

People who want the ship to be the reason. There is no other way to spend a week on something with five masts and 342 people aboard, and her shallow draft and small size get her into anchorages that the big Caribbean ships tender past.

She is wrong for anyone who wants scale or variety indoors. A 342-guest vessel has no theater, no water park, no children’s program and one small pool, and Wind Surf has none of those things. A rainy sea day is a book and a bar. She is wrong for anyone who needs the sails to be the whole story; on a windless day they stay furled and you are on a motor yacht. And her hull was completed in 1989, which the refits do not change; the bones you walk around are thirty-seven years old.