Cannes, 2004. The Régates Royales fill the bay with polished wood and vintage sails. On the quay, a man sits down in front of a mahogany-hulled yawl and cannot stop staring at her. Aboard, Commander Gianfranco Bacchi notices him and comes ashore to ask why. “This was my boat,” comes the reply. Until that moment, Bacchi recalls, it had always been believed that the yacht’s name traced back to Helly Hansen, the Norwegian technical-clothing dynasty. The stranger on the quay instead reveals her true origins: he is Dan Walker, grandson of Einar Hansen, her true first owner, and the story he carries is even more remarkable than the legend. The boat is Capricia, and her history binds together northern Europe and the Mediterranean, the twentieth century’s most celebrated design house and Italy’s most famous family, offshore racing and the school of seamanship.
A thoroughbred born in Sweden
Capricia was drawn by Sparkman & Stephens — project number 1645 — and launched in 1963 from the Bengt Plym yard in Sweden. She is a Bermudian yawl of nearly 23 metres, built entirely in wood: white oak for the structure, mahogany for the planking, teak on deck. A thoroughbred designed for offshore racing under the RORC rule, and one that proved herself immediately: in her launch year she took first place on line honours at the Fastnet Race, the New York YC Trophy Race and the Britannia Cup.
Behind the commission lies the figure revealed that day in Cannes: Einar Hansen, a Malmö publisher who made his fortune after the war on the insight that Europe’s merchant fleet, decimated by the conflict, needed rebuilding. A keen sailor, in 1958 he had commissioned Anitra, a yawl of just under fifteen metres with which he raced the Fastnet. He liked her lines so much that, five years later, he asked for a larger version: Capricia. “A guarantee of fast lines,” says Bacchi. “The northern European yards built a boat that was solid and highly capable, giving real satisfaction compared to Mediterranean builds.”
The Avvocato’s jockey saddle
In 1971, running the boat became too demanding for Hansen, and she passed to Gianni Agnelli, becoming his flagship. It marks the start of the most celebrated chapter of her life — and of one detail that has become the stuff of legend. The Avvocato would helm her seated on a jockey’s saddle. A striking image — the thoroughbred governed, quite literally, by the saddle — framing a legend whose outlines remain, even now, partly shrouded in mystery.
Agnelli also reworked the interiors, and did so in his own way: in place of the owner’s cabin, a dinette seating four, and a reversal of the period’s colour conventions — white below decks, mahogany above the waterline. The sails, claret like Anitra’s, remain the same colour today: the detail that still makes Capricia instantly recognisable in any Mediterranean anchorage.
A second life: from floating salon to school of seamanship
In 1993 Agnelli donated Capricia to the Italian Navy, which assigned her to training cadets at the Livorno Naval Academy. She was taken in hand by her first commander, Ugo Bertelli, who oversaw a refit that was respectful but functional: the jockey saddle and the Agnellis’ bathtub were removed, the aft section kept the commander’s cabin, and everything forward of the radio and chart room was reconfigured to accommodate fifteen people during summer campaigns. The helm is still the original, in teak; only the two halyard drums have given way to modern winches. More recently, the wooden mainmast — after decades of service and more than one repair — was replaced with an aluminium one, painted white like the original so the eye barely registers the change of century.
Bacchi joined as second-in-command in 1997 and took command in 2002. Those were the years when the training campaigns coincided with the great classic-yacht circuit: Palma, Port Mahon, Porto Cervo, Saint-Tropez, Cannes. Cadets learned seamanship by racing against some of the most beautiful boats in the world.
Above all, they learned a lesson in life every bit as valuable as any technical skill: how to cope with privation. “With Capricia I only had two things to worry about: that the mast stayed up and the engine started,” the commander recalls. “The water-maker didn’t work, water was rationed, and on one campaign I covered three thousand miles living with the sea on its own terms. For the cadets, moving from a grey-hulled warship to that essentialism was a formidable training ground.”
The shipwright of Sant’Antioco
The episode that best captures what it takes to keep a boat like this alive dates to 2003. Sailing towards Cagliari in a violent westerly, a fitting connecting a runner to the mast gave way. Bacchi sent his second officer up in a bosun’s chair to check it: a knife blade sank into the wood and revealed the rot that had taken hold of the mainmast.
The yards were closed. Only one remained open, on the island of Sant’Antioco. “I arrived at the fishing-boat quay, under bare poles, and saw a man well past seventy carrying two wooden crates. I asked if he could point me to the yard. He answered: I am the yard.” Bacchi’s reaction was a mix of astonishment and panic. The initial disorientation did not last: the harbour office confirmed that if anyone could fix the mast, it was him. A crane was brought in from Cagliari to lift out the three-tonne spar, and the shipwright began to dig, repair, direct. In twenty days the mast was restored and repainted. “We had become a family.”
The sea trial took place at Porto Cervo, in a regatta. Capricia won, and the shipwright climbed onto the podium with the crew. “From then on he was our mascot: I took him to every regatta after that.” That autumn Bacchi bought a house on the island of Sant’Antioco, cementing a bond with the shipwright that grew into a genuine friendship. Some boats do more than carry you to a place — they make you live there.
Bacchi’s view of contemporary sailing
What remains, today, of that lesson? Bacchi regards contemporary sailing with curiosity, but without falling for it. “I can’t warm to foiling, and the America’s Cup doesn’t draw me in: I can’t picture myself aboard, the way I still can on a traditional boat.” Even spirit of tradition yachts — period lines reinterpreted in carbon, with dramatic overhangs fore and aft on thoroughly modern hulls — don’t entirely convince him either: “I sailed Wild Horses, but it isn’t the same thing. You need to feel the weight of a period boat, twenty-five or thirty tonnes. Today they weigh half that.”
It is a matter of physics, but also of responsibility — a virtue sometimes lacking among the new generation of sailors: “On board they check that the air conditioning is running, that the water-maker is working, that the ice-maker is churning out ice on demand. But many have lost sight of what command actually means: being responsible for your people from the moment they step aboard to the moment they step off. The grip has gone — they’ve become more like chauffeurs. There’s a natural drop in tension at anchor, and that’s exactly when you need to stay sharp. Having sailed on traditional boats was, for me, a training ground in itself.”
The true legacy of a life in command
Asked what he misses most, the answer wrongfoots anyone expecting nostalgia for teak and mahogany. “A ship is a dead weight without her crew. It’s the people who make the difference. Capricia gave me extraordinary emotions, but what I miss is the engineer, the boatswain. I remember every one of them perfectly, and I’d love to do something together again, even on a different boat. I have no attachment to the ships themselves — it has been a beautiful journey precisely because it was built on human relationships.”
Sixty years after her launch, Capricia still trains sailors in the waters off the Tuscan archipelago. Her claret sails are the same colour Hansen chose, her helm the same teak the Avvocato once held. But her deepest lesson, according to the man who commanded her, concerns what a real boat demands — and gives back — to whoever takes the helm. From his current vantage point on the Costa Smeralda, where he now works with owners and young skippers, Bacchi has made it his mission to pass on decades of accumulated knowledge to the next generation, keeping alive a legacy of immeasurable value.
