The Pen Duick is reborn: the restoration of the myth that was Tabarly’s
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life and the one from which he fell into the sea 21 years ago, in 1998
In France it is a monument, the most famous boat in the history of transalpine sailing, we are talking about Pen Duick I, Eric Tabarly‘s first boat. In 2016 it was officially named a Historic Monument, and today it has received a complete new makeover. Designed in 1898 by William Fife Junior, it was restored at the Guip shipyard in Brest, exhibited at the Route du Rhum village in Saint Malo, and finally at the Paris Salon before seeing the water again.
THE STORY.
In the Easter of 1938 Tabarly is on vacation with Father Guy, and family. Guy takes them to Basse-Indre, where the boat is for sale, which was then called Butterfly . Forty years old, it had already collected eleven owners: it cost too much to maintain and was abandoned in a cane field. “With my childlike logic I had thought: but it’s not like this is the right place for a boat,” Breton writes in his “Memoirs of the Offshore” (published by Mursia in 1998).
The Tabarlys fell in love with the boat, bought it and renamed it Pen Duick. These are years of German occupation; the Tabarlys are being displaced. The Pen Duick, while Guy is mobilized, is disarmed and transferred to the Odet River, where the sailor he was helping aboard lived. World War II ends, parents return to Blois, young Eric goes to boarding school: the boat is left to rot in the mud. By the late 1940s, she is a wreck and the Tabarlys do not have the resources to do a radical refitting, they put her up for sale. But Eric, in love with his Pen Duick, discourages the only potential buyer. In 1952 he enlisted in the Naval Aviation. This is also the year that consolidates the love between him and the boat: his father wants to sell the keel lead, Breton opposes and proposes to take on the renovation costs with his next military pay. Guy goes soft and gives his son the boat. “You will be the 13th owner. This may bring you luck,” she tells him. He will love her to death by falling into the sea from the Pen Duick.
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