“Incredibly alive! We don’t know how but we made it.”
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In 1969, after building themselves the 10-meter wooden Damien with their own hands, the early twenties Jerome Poncet and Gerard Janichon set off on a round-the-world boat trip. They will stay at sea 5 years and 50,000 miles going from the ice of Greenland to the warm waters of the West Indies.
There were dramatic moments. Like the one in which Poncet and Janichon pass through a force 10 storm at the 56th parallel south.
In this excerpt from the article published in Sailing Newspaper No. 5, November 1975, the two French sailors recount the most dramatic moments of the experience. The boat completes three “360°” on itself in two hours.
Poncet and Janichon: “Three 360° in two hours.”
“Damien is capsized for the third time, takes on water and remains upside down, these are the feelings the two French sailors experience, trapped below deck, helpless in the midst of the storm:
For a sailor it is a good end. Finishing with one’s own boat. We said our goodbyes, words of friendship.
Long sentences are useless between us, and we are not here to make movies…Gradually torpor envelops us…I fall asleep. We cannot act or react because there is nothing we can do with a boat that has its keel in the air, with water seeping in from nowhere, with the will that no longer exists already…In the cabin of the Damien there is a sense of alienation.
An upside-down sense. Try to imagine your everyday world, turned upside down: and you walking on the ceiling, in the dark…
How can a sailboat with 1,600 kg ballast refuse to recover its normal balance immediately? It would only take a trifle for the ballast lever arm to kick in and cause the hull to regain its center-of-gravity logic…the boat shakes: the water inside starts lapping.
And then the commotion and Damien becomes Damien again and straightens up on the left. lasted only a second, with wild aggression, as with the cry of the newborn at the act of birth.
And it is a birth! We struggle feverishly against drowning, icy water seeps everywhere. It takes us a few seconds to realize that we are alive, that the boat is floating.”
Damien, Poncet and Janichon’s adventure boat, is now a French historical monument.
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Did you enjoy the story of Poncet and Janichon? Click on the cover below to browse the full version of the article published in the November 1975 issue of GdV.
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