G
reece’s most successful ever match racer is a
seriously dapper man. Stratis Andreadis walks
into Classic Boat’s London HQ wearing a green
jacket with silk handkerchief spilling out of the
top pocket, striped shirt with huge gold cufflinks, blue spotty
bow tie, orange courduroy trousers and – I hope he doesn’t
mind my revealing – bright green socks. And a trilby.
Not everyone can carry this kind of garb off, but Andreadis,
36, does so with no hint of affectation. He’s a burly,
thoughtful guy who grew up in a sailing-mad family in
Athens, before reading philosophy at North Eastern
University in Boston. He fell in love with the States – “in
Europe you tend to see things in smaller scales, and I don’t
just mean the salads”– and discovered a passion for the circular
economy, doing an online Ted Talk on upcycling in 2014.
Today he’s in town to promote the business he set up
three years ago, Salty Bag, which uses old sails to make
holdalls, tablet cases, handbags and more.
“The outside is the end part of a rolling genoa,” he
says, showing me the Salty Bag case in which his iPad Pro
is housed. “The inside is a material that you can send
back to the maker when you are finished with it, they
break it apart and the synthetic materials are rewoven
to make compost or biodiesel.
“We are working on the yarn at the moment. That’s
what keeps me up at night. Solving these challenges.”
The bags sell from around 30 top fashion boutiques.
“If you go into high fashion, your ideas and designs
trickle down to mass level.
“My vision is much greater than sailing. It’s creating a
market whereby sails can feed the fashion industry.
There’ll be others who give other solutions. But sails are a
premium raw material.”
Back in Greece after his graduation, Andreadis did
national service and worked in a family boat dealership,
before quitting to match-race professionally with a Greek
team he put together, Dark ‘n’ Stormy. He became the first
Greek to win the World Match Race Tour and reached
29th in the world rankings, in 2013. It led to him sitting
on the World Sailing (formerly ISAF) youth development
committees. “The high politics of ISAF has been a great
lesson to me. When you come from the Med you’re a little
bit more forthcoming. There’s a language I’m learning.”Skills he used, no doubt, when setting up the Spetses
Classic Yacht Regatta in 2011. Andreadis knew the island
well from family holidays and with the backing of the
local economy to match his enthusiasm, the regatta has
grown to a fleet of 75 last year, many boats having sailed
there from around the Mediterranean and a handful
(including one Spirit) coming from the UK.
Andreadis is serious about running the event on a green
footing, in line with the ‘clean regattas’ programme
created by US organisation Sailors for the Sea. And he’s
serious about people enjoying themselves while in Spetses,
greeting each yacht personally as it arrives on the dock in
Porto Heli. “If the sailors are there for 24 hours, they are
going to take six of those sleeping and I am responsible for
the rest!” he says. “I don’t sleep during the regatta.”
He does find the energy to race, on the wooden Caique
he bought from his father. “Because my dad named it after
me,” he says with a low voice and head held in shame,
“it’s unfortunately called Stratis”.
A partnership with the 5 Star Nikki Beach Resort,
across the bay, means luxury shoreside R&R is accessible
to all. With the Poseidonion Hotel as race HQ, racing is
organised by the Yacht Club of Greece, in conjunction
with the newly founded Spetses Yacht Club.
The regatta has invigorated the local marine economy,
with local boatyards busier than they have been in
decades, building and maintaining yachts for the event.
“It’s one of the things we’ve done of which I’m proudest,”
says Andreadis. The island was building boats in ancient
times, using local pine, but these days it’s imported
Oregon pine. “They were mad about building boats back
then and did a good job of cleaning the island up.”
The Greek crisis has not affected the event but
unsurprisingly it has had a deep impact on Andreadis.
“When you see negative things being said about a place
that you don’t have totally negative feelings about,
you want to prove a point.
“Also you get the feeling that you have nothing to lose.
Because the depiction of Greece, however right or wrong,
is that it’s full of very lazy people who leech off the rest of
Europe, it makes you have to be twice as good.”The Spetses Classic Yacht Regatta takes place from 30 June to 3 July.Left: The 1947 Fred Shepherd designed Glaramara owned the Andreadis familyC/O STRATIS ANDREADIS