Michal Hrivnák
He left software engineering in 2015 to run boats for a living. Six hundred nautical miles alone, a storm off Albania, and why a skipper's real job is not the sailing.
Tangreto was two years old when a national magazine first came asking questions, and a Slovak sailing business being written up in print was still an unusual thing. Nearly a decade later the boats and the destinations have changed and the reason for doing it has not, so the answers are worth having in one place. What follows is that conversation, brought up to date.
Michal Hrivnák in numbers
- First time on a boat
- Age six, with his parents
- Racing
- Optimist as a child; Finn class since 2017
- Offshore since
- 2003
- Licences
- International coastal (C) 2007, offshore (B) 2012
- Founded Tangreto
- 2015, after leaving software engineering
- Logged
- Over 30,000 nautical miles
- Countries sailed
- More than 23
- Longest solo passage
- 600 nm, Greece to Croatia, non-stop in 98 hours
- Where the name comes from
- Tangreto was his first boat
You were a software engineer. What made you stop?
I had been on boats since I was a child. My parents took me out at six and I raced an Optimist until I was thirteen, then stopped because I was not winning anything. The trip that actually changed things was the Caribbean in May 2013. I bought a boat the year after that, and in 2015 I left the desk job and started Tangreto.
What is the worst weather you have been in?
Greece to Croatia, single-handed, six hundred nautical miles non-stop in ninety-eight hours. Off the Albanian coast I sailed into a storm: four-metre seas and lightning coming down around the boat. At one point the guardrail was glowing orange. That is a static discharge and it looks far worse than it is, because a boat with a mast works as a Faraday cage and the safest place you can be is inside it. Knowing that at three in the morning helps more than you would think.
Caribbean or Croatia?
They are different jobs. In the Caribbean you clear customs out of one island and into the next, every time, and if you get it wrong it follows you. I missed a clearance in Saint Lucia once and paid for it a week later in Grenada — where the same inspection also turned up the passport I had reported lost, under the table. All of it is useful in the end.
You own a boat. Why not simply base it somewhere and run trips?
Because one boat in one bay decides for you where people can go. In 2015 I bought a boat with a French partner, on credit and with help from family, and put it into an exchange programme. That is how the same boat money reaches Mexico, Thailand, the Seychelles and the Caribbean instead of a single marina in the Adriatic.
Who do you take out?
Around eight people is the number that works, and I meet them before we sail. On a boat you cannot walk away from anybody, which means you find out fairly quickly who your friends are. A crew from a couple of years back are still friends now, and that is the part I did not expect when I started.
What does a skipper actually do all week?
Most of it is psychology. The sailing is the part I can already do. The rest is reading the crew, keeping people comfortable, and settling a disagreement before anybody notices there was one. Older guests tend to give a skipper more room than younger ones — one couple in their sixties have been back twice and have booked a third trip.
You started racing again.
The Finn, which is single-handed and an Olympic class. My first race back I finished fifty-fifth out of fifty-seven. The man who won had been fourth at the Olympic Games and most of the fleet had five or ten years on me in that boat, so I was pleased enough. There are Masters categories at forty, Grand Masters at fifty, and it carries on past seventy, so there is no hurry.
Where does the name Tangreto come from?
It is the name of my first boat.
What has changed since this interview?
Far more people hold a skipper's licence now than did then, and the quality behind those licences varies a great deal. What I want has not changed: more young people and families on boats, and guests taken to races so they see a regatta from the inside rather than from the shore. Tangreto now runs crew places on regattas, skippered charter, offshore training and deliveries, which is the same idea with more ways in.
Three ways to come along
A regatta
A crew place on Barcolana, Viška, Jabuka, Round Long Island or Bari–Dubrovnik. No racing experience needed.
A charter
Skippered weeks in Croatia, North Sardinia and the Caribbean, planned around anchorages rather than marinas.
Offshore training
Real miles towards a licence, or towards being useful on somebody else's boat.
This interview draws on a conversation with Erik Stríž, first published in In Drive magazine in 2017 and republished online by Slovak Lines Magazín in 2020. Read the original interview.