About 59º North

Who We Are

Andy Schell & Mia Karlsson started 59º North in 2015 and the mission then was as simple as it is now — “Sharing the wisdom of the high seas with those wise enough to seek it out.” Since then we’ve covered over 100,000 miles and sailed with nearly 1,000 different crewmembers from all walks of life. 2025 will mark our 11th full season running offshore passages for paying crew.

The current iteration of the business really started in 2019, when we first added our second boat to the fleet, the Swan 59 ICEBEAR (since replaced by our Farr 65 FALKEN). With the growth of the business, we needed someone to take over running ISBJØRN, the Swan 48. Enter August Sandberg. We’d met August during our Arctic summer of 2018, when Mia & Andy sailed up to Spitsbergen. We needed a rifle in order to get permits to go ashore, so August, a fan of the podcast at the time and a professional skipper himself, loaned us his. We first met in person on Midsummer in the tiny outpost of Ny Ålesund, at 78º North, and less than a year later August joined the team and today has an ownership stake. Andy, Mia & August make up the ‘Admiralty’ and are the core operations team at 59º North.

Our core business remains ocean sailing, and we sail with two boats we own — our Swan 48 ISBJØRN, the boat that started it all back in 2015; and our Farr 65 FALKEN, the rebuild of which we completed in early 2023 — and once or twice a year, through our partnership with professional ocean racing skipper Nikki Henderson, on chartered race boats for some of the iconic ocean races. We sail all over the world and each boat has a distinct sailing schedule depending on your taste. We’re not a formal sailing school and we don’t teach to a curriculum — instead, we teach seam’nship through real-world experience that is impossible to duplicate in the classroom. We’re passionate about inclusivity and strive to set the example in the sailing industry. To that end, we offer all-female passages with women professional crew, and guarantee a minimum of 2 women on every 59º North passage, ultimately aiming for a 50/50 gender mix amongst both staff and guest crew.

Additionally, we teach seam’nship thru our online membership platform The Quarterdeck, produce three different podcasts about sailing, write articles for a variety of sailing magazines around the world and occasionally offer in-person workshops on everything from Celestial Navigation to Weather Routing and Offshore Prep.

59º North got it’s name because it’s the latitude of Stockholm, Sweden, near which Andy & Mia live on a farm in the countryside, and started with Andy & Mia running the entire program, from building the website and producing the ON THE WIND podcast to skippering the passages. As we’ve evolved, we’ve made friends with some wonderful people around the world who quickly became part of the team.

Today 59º North is owned by a group of us (with Andy & Mia holding the majority), most of whom work in some aspect of the business, and we have a team of over a dozen people scattered around the world helping to run the show, from admin and finance to media production, boat maintenance and passage planning.