Its steel hull is painted a bleached-out blue and the wooden seats are worn into dips where thousands of different people have sat and watched the rolling horizons since its construction in 1957. The three-mast schooner belongs to the Brittany-based charity Les Amis de Jeudi Dimanche (AJD), and it never stops sailing, picking up passengers from all walks of life, taking them on journeys to help with addiction, isolation or social exclusion. This journey was a bit different (the boat had been filled only with people we knew) and our objective was more philosophical, as we were attempting to answer the question: How can we put the world on a boat?

The journey began long before the actual departure. Thomas, my odd, French and entirely wonderful partner, had crossed the Atlantic onboard the Rara Avis in the 1990s along with our friends Eric, Valerie, Poulon and Françoise – all of whom were back onboard for this trip. They had intense memories of their initial crossing. It was time to hoist the mainsail again and let the boat bring people together in unexpected ways, starting with the sourcing of 30 willing souls ready for the high seas. By mid-August, we had assembled our varied group, which ranged from teachers and chefs to captains and artists, as well as a core team of seven crew in their final week of work experience with the AJD.

We climbed on board at 8pm on August 31^st. Our first meal was spent moving through the lives of others, asking benign and generous questions about where we live, what we do and how we know each other. At 2am we left l’Aber Wrac’h for the Scillies, leaving the haven of Land for a deep black and heaving swell, sleep or sickness keeping most people below deck. I stood outside from 3am-7am, watching France’s street lights disappearing one by one.

After 16 hours of sailing across the Channel, cycling through the rota of meal preparation, food service, washing up, cleaning and optional watch, we stopped in the Helford Passage to spend a night in a Cornish creek and wait for the wind to turn. The sound of the engine brought people up on deck at 6am to a pale gold summer rain, which drifted down as the boat glided out to choppier waters. Out of the creek, we stumbled our way through raising the jibs, led by the more experienced crew members. Thick spits of foam were cresting 100m away, and the Rara Avis was surrounded by common dolphins and nose-diving gannets right the way up to Land’s End.

As we edged around Cornwall, we didn’t say much to each other beyond a basic, repetitive vocabulary of aquatic mammals, cliffs and the swaying of the schooner. The context of the boat had replaced any need to search for entertainment, and we became plankton, brought by the wind and currents to wherever we were going. There were no provocations, no coups, mutinies or attempts at taking centre stage. None of the anticipated drama from such a varied clutch of egos was taking place, but its absence went unnoticed. The usual distractions of land had been replaced by ropes, duties and collective squinting for fins on the water’s surface. We were content and contained, melded together by the lulling ship and its routines.

We first anchored at Tresco, shuttling to New Grimsby in the RIB, little teams dispatching to the pub, to the beach or to the public gardens. I ran around the island to scout out a good spot to return to for a post-lunch snorkel, and Gimble Porth came through with schools of wrasse and deep, thongweed cathedrals. Walking past the New Inn pub on the way back, we could hear splits of laughter and French expletives tumbling over the garden wall. They had occupied the whole beer garden, letting their personalities accordion out on land, filling back up with air and squeezing out notes of chaos among the pristine hedgerows.

That evening onboard we ate shrimps by the kilo, fished with nets at midnight, and a lobster that weighed more than Yaël, the three-month-old on board. There was also smoked and baked pollock, line-caught over the side of the Rara Avis.