1998. Hello Tabarly, unforgettable sailing legend

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Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.


Hello Tabarly, unforgettable sailing legend

Taken from the 1998 Journal of Sailing, Year 24, No. 6, July, pp. 16-17.

On a June night in 1998 off the coast of Wales, Eric Tabarly, an icon of sailing, one of the most extraordinary figures, a sailor and yachtsman who made people dream with his exploits and his Pen Duick boats, disappeared at sea. The memory of those who knew him well.


Eric Tabarly, life, the ocean

Eric Tabarly has been spoken of as a symbol of the legend of ocean sailing, that of pioneers, of discovery, of adventure devoid of sponsors and professionalism. Tabarly has also been written about as the inventor of modern sailing: the first to challenge the ocean with a large trimaran, Pen Duick IV; to apply foilers under the tri Paul Ricard hulls; to think of a “hydroptère” , the concept of which would be taken up years later for speed records. Above all, Tabarly great sailor has been mentioned. Perhaps little has been said about the man. Small, with an enigmatic face that had earned him the nickname “Breton sphinx*’. When he first broke Charlie Barr’s transatlantic record, one only knew of his exploit at the end: it was his style. When he wins the Ostar in 1976, he is alone on a 22-meter ketch that normally requires twelve men. He breaks the windward rudder, twice he is tempted to retire. For days there is no news of him…instead, unexpectedly he crosses the finish line. France pays him full honors. To the organizers who reproach him for not having given news, he simply replies, ” I didn’t feel like it“. Tabarly was like that. Reserved and laconic, he disliked publicity, crowds, radio communications.”We are not at sea to chat“. What he loved most above all else was living symbiotically with the boat and the ocean. He never shouted, he rarely gave orders, he remade firsthand what went wrong. He was strict and severe, first and foremost, with himself. He would say,”I can’t ask my people for something that I can’t do“. “It is like an albatross“Myriam, the only woman who has ever had the adventure of being part of her crew in a regatta, once said,”clumsy on land, charming at sea“.

I knew him well

In that position, Eric looked like a fly to me…. The bizarre optical effect of a tilting chart-board, the unusual 50-degree tilt of the boat, leaping like a leprechaun urged on by the trade winds from the south, the incredible game of our brains finding their own verticals of our home world, even if they are tilted at 50 degrees, all contributed to my resemblance of our hero, conscientiously making his calculations of height straightness, to the insect with the least sense of verticality. His superiority was there: he alone had access to the throne of the boat: the chart table on the gimbals, he alone had the right to be horizontal, the others cowered in an almost upside-down world.

He alone — he alone. I often repeat these two words, sorry, but they are worth it. He alone is capable of winning the Transatlantic by spending only 150,000 francs, while others drown in millions–and bills of exchange. He alone understands that a boat is only a winner if the helmsman is fit, if he is human, if he is seaworthy. He alone loves the sea enough to know that he rejects monsters, boats better suited to selling products and charming people than to taking on a Force 8. That is not so simple to understand! But it is certainly not the Ostar that I want to dwell on. On the contrary – and this is a typically female characteristic – I want to deal with the man. I spent two years racing with him, sailed twenty thousand miles, crossed the Atlantic twice, and I assure you that there is nothing better, not even a psychoanalyst’s couch, to delve into a character. He is certainly the most unhinged man a journalist can meet. A special correspondent from France Soir flew across the world, from Paris to Hobart, to get his logbook. Consternation: it contained nothing but a few figures! The poor man, trying to get an interview out of him then:“At least tell me your impressions of the regatta”.“” Impressions,“Tabarly replied,” I never have any.

Another time, it was September 1974, on the round-the-world voyage, and we were sailing a force 10: yankee and foresail, mainsail with three hands of reefing, at night. I was exhausted from cooking for an hour and a half in the world’s most banged-up galley and was resting in my bunk, catching myself every time the boat started swooping in the hollow of a wave, when something unaccustomed happened. Suddenly-no one understood, except Eric, what was happening-without raising his voice he said, “Shit, we’ve still dismasted!” A value of more than a hundred thousand francs, including sails, swallowed at sea, the nautical world that would pillory him for the third dismasting, our beautiful cruise to the West Indies vanished, and no emotion passing before Eric’s clear eyes. I think of him as a quiet pond-there is something about him, at the level of consciousness, that blocks the most nomal impulses. As if a strict censorship constricts his brain, inside and out, between reality and his mind. Its strength is in this, in its calmness that infects the crew, that quells controversy, that reorganizes without a single word anarchy. It is a strength or, if you will, a courage that does not come to him from having known all the oceans or crossed all the seas, but from within, from some incomprehensible genius. Surely something must win in him, perhaps his father or perhaps some other thing. Certainly those who pay are his opponents. Reduced, compared to him, to straw men who talk, talk….

Texts by Paola Pozzolini and Myriam Marello


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