BEST OF 2015 – “Richard & Clovis. A Great Love Story.”

If you get into a conversation with Richard about the sea, sailing, boats, you may never stop. It is precisely the enthusiasm of this young man born in Como in 1989 that rubbed off on me when I met him at the last VELAFestival in Santa Margherita and prompted me to learn more after discovering that he lives aboard Clovis, a 1983 aluminum ketch that also represents his work.

“In my house there has always been an air of boats. My father sold motor boats for more than 20 years. Then, in the late 1990s, he realized that he lived to work and not, as should be the case, the other way around. That’s how, as a great sailing enthusiast with half a round-the-world trip behind him (done when Gps was not yet used…) he managed to find Clovis. From the time I was nine to thirteen years old, there was not a single weekend in which we did not leave Como to go down to Antibes, where the boat was moored, to put it away. My task? Slipping into all the uncomfortable and unreachable nooks and crannies.”.

Long works… After all, we are talking about an eighty-five-foot boat, built in 1983 by the French shipyard in Biot, designed by architect Dominique Presles. “What my father was looking for in a boat, and what he passed on to me, is first and foremost sturdiness.
Figure that when the shipyard built it, it did not have much experience in working with aluminum. That is also why they spared no expense on anything: chose the same aluminum alloys usually used by Airbus to build its aircraft. And they definitely abounded in quantities. The mast plate measures five feet by five feet: absolutely essential to support a 28.5-meter mast! The rigging is also obviously oversized.”

WHAT IT MEANS TO LIVE ON A BOAT
I find it difficult to bring Richard back to us, because he could tell me the story of every single life. What I want to understand is how you come to make a passion, that for boats and the sea, your life. “I was thirteen years old when my father decided to drop everything and move to live on Clovis, immediately making it work as a charter, but never tying himself to big companies. I stayed in Como to finish my studies, but I actually spent every summer on board with him, learning in the field, partly because manual labor has always been my passion.
As soon as I finished school, I left for Monte Carlo and got a job as a cook, because at that time my father had had heart trouble and Clovis was stationary at the dock. For a year I spent evenings at the stove, while during the day I looked for engagements everywhere. If someone said to me ‘but are you a cook?” I would answer ‘no! I am a sailor! There were economic problems, though, and it was necessary to work all the time.

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After several assignments aboard motor boats, I was finally chosen as the captain of Loris Capirossi’s boat. Ouch, motor boats… “I don’t love them either, but it was a great experience, which made me grow a lot and prepared me for what I do today. We happened to catch sea like never before, even in the Gulf of Lion! Then, in December 2014, I finally came back aboard Clovis: my father, if you can call it that, left me in charge. I never came down again.”

How do you maintain such a challenging boat? “Everything we earn from the charter is, it has always been so, reinvested on Clovis. Let me tell you: it’s easy to run such a boat if you have a lot of money-the real challenge is to do it when you have to be able to support yourself. Don’t take me for a blowhard, but I think sometimes even making do can become an art.”

Take away a real curiosity: what must people who want to be in this profession have. “The first thing is tenacity. Living at sea and making a boat work is not easy. With very few exceptions, whatever work you do, whether short or long, at some point the day ends and you can rest. In the boat, this is not the case. Here you may have done everything very well, but if wind comes or something happens you are there. Your life is a function of the boat. And she always comes before you. But the one between Clovis and me is a great love story. This is my life: I am lucky.”
Taken from the September 2015 GdV