From Tabarly to Plant: five sailing myths that disappeared at sea

If you’re an ocean sailor, you factor that in. You know you might happen to leave never to return, swallowed by that sea you challenge every time, so wild and deadly that you feel alive. You might happen to be thrown out of your boat by a wave the moment you are not tied up. You could lose the bulb and end up with the hull for a hat. Anything could happen to you. But you know it, and you accept it. Guo Chuan, the great Chinese sailor who disappeared in last Tuesday ‘s Pacific waters, knew this (he had stated that he had only one fear: that of falling into the water without being hooked up to the safety-line, and it seems that was the case). These five very great sailors who disappeared in the waves (whether through their own mistake or bad luck), whose stories we tell you, knew this.

ERIC TABARLY (1931-1998)
On the night of Friday, June 11 and Saturday, June 12, 1998, sailing lost the most important of its performers, Eric Tabarly, Eric the Breton, Eric the innovator. Eric the Ostar hero (won twice, in 1964 and ’76), Eric French national hero. While aboard his beloved Pen Duick I (his true love, designed by William Fife III in 1898) off Milford Haven, Wales, he fell into the water after a maneuver and disappeared into the waves. In those cold waters you can survive for a very short time. His crew, composed of inexperienced sailors, can do nothing to help him. Said of him Giorgio Falck, “In the boat he looked like a monkey, sticking everywhere. He never bonded, though, and in this he was wrong. I remember on the round-the-world tour he did not have any of his crew tied up. He used to say that a good sailor must have balance. It was Miriam, a Breton girl like him, from his crew, whom I was dating 20 years ago who told me: ‘Binding gives a false security,’ Eric repeated.”

JOSHUA SLOCUM (1844-1909)
Between 1895 and 1898, American Joshua Slocum was the first man to complete a solo circumnavigation of the globe, entering myth. In 1909, at the age of 65, Joshua Slocum sailed his Spray for the last time to the West Indies. It never came. Neither Joshua Slocum nor the Spray were ever found again. According to Howard I. Chapelle, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian Institution, the Spray was an excellent boat but had a lethal criticality: it could capsize should the sea hit it at too tight an angle at the yard. This may have been what happened, in November 1909 For the scholar, Slocum had been very lucky not to have flipped before!

ALAIN COLAS (1943-1978)
First sailor to sail around the world solo on a multihull: a bit of a blowhard (in 75 he sailed on the Club Mediterranee, 62-meter hyper-tech boat!), but a valiant sailor, he passed away in 1978, at only 35 years of age. Colas’ last trip was to the Route du Rhum, aboard the trimaran Manureva (which was none other than the Pen Duick IV bought by Tabarly in 1970 and with which he had won the Transat in 1972). Eleven days after departure, exactly on November 16, both Colas and the boat disappeared during a strong storm off the Azores Islands.

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ARNAUD DE ROSNAY (1946-1984)
A great photographer, adventurer, but above all windsurfer, Baron Arnaud de Rosnay was envied by all (his wife was the beautiful Jenna Severson, a model and herself a windsurfer). A romantic spirit (he could afford it), he was the inventor of the speed sail (land-based windsurfing), para-sails and even a board game, Petropolis. In the late 1970s he took up board sailing. He did the Bering Strait, then the stretch between the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotu in Polynesia (this feat failed him and he was picked up shipwrecked on a remote atoll. Then more crossings, to America and between Japan and the USSR. On Saturday, November 24, 1984, while attempting to cross the Formosa Strait from China to Taiwan, a feat tackled despite extreme weather conditions, he disappeared with his windsurfer after about one-third of the way, and no more traces of him and the board were found. It appears that in preparing for the venture he stubbornly rejected a support boat offered by the Chinese because it would have forced a postponement of the crossing.

MIKE PLANT (1950-1992)
Mike Plant was a solo sailor who participated in the BOC Challenge and Vendée Globe: highly experienced, he had over 100,000 miles on his back, and had even circumnavigated the globe in 135 days solo nonstop (no American had done better than him. In 1992, on the eve of his fourth (sic!) solo round-the-world voyage (at that time only five had completed it three times), Mike set out from New York on his Open 60 Coyote in the direction of Les Sables-d’Olonne, the starting place for the Vendée. At some point contact is lost, of Mike no trace. the boat, capsized and without a bulb, will be found 32 days later. Plant was 42 years old.