Charlie Dalin, Boris Herrmann, Louis Burton, Thomas Rettant or Yannick Bestaven… Until the end, the 9th edition of the Vendée Globe will have provided a suspense as breathtaking as a Force 10 in the Atlantic.
With this sprint finish scheduled for Wednesday evening in Les Sables-d'Olonne (Vendée), how can we not think of the first major non-stop and solo race around the world, ancestor of Vendée, between 1968 and 1969?
This race, which never really ended, has a name, the Golden Globe challenge;
an official winner (in 312 days), the Englishman Robin Knox-Johnston;
and a long-term legend: the French Bernard Moitessier (1925-1994), a name that always makes ocean lovers dream.
He looks like an old yogi, with his shaggy beard, his ascetic body made thin by bad meals, and his hair like a curious scrub of curls above the head.
Bernard Moitessier has not "soaped" for five months but it does not "scratch" him, so ... And then he feels so good, alone with Joshua, whose red steel hull has so far valiantly withstood three oceans.
Bernard Moitessier arrives, bearded, in Tahiti on June 25, 1969 for his first stopover in ten months.
/ AFP
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Tuesday March 18, 1969. Standing on his boat, he can now distinguish the houses of Cape Town (South Africa) which sparkle in the dawn.
It was here, off the coast of South Africa, that he decided to break the moorings for good.
The 43-year-old sailor refills the jerry can filled with letters for his loved ones, reels of film, mini audio cassettes, and his logbook recorded on photo film.
If he disappears at sea, his editor, Jacques Arthaud, will at least have enough to write the story of his trip in his place.
And his family will be safe, he thinks, certain that his wife Françoise and her children "will understand" his choice.
"Sick at the idea of returning to Europe"
Is he so sure?
For days and nights, after crossing the dreaded Cape Horn on February 5, he tortured his brains.
Head north, go back to Plymouth (England) and complete his round the world trip as a probable winner?
Or go back to the distant Pacific, to extend your face-to-face with the waves.
“Last night was too painful.
I felt really sick at the idea of returning to Europe […] I couldn't take any more of the false gods of the West, always on the prowl like spiders, who eat our liver, suck our marrow.
And I file a complaint against the Modern World, it is he, the Monster.
It destroys our land, it tramples on the souls of men ”, he will pour out later in“ The long road ”(*), a sublime evocation of his odyssey.
No, the journey is not over: “the sea tells me things that I am beginning to understand now.
I want to go further, ”he wrote again.
Tahiti or the Galapagos?
We'll see…
When his decision not to return was taken, in the middle of the South Atlantic, he had to make another: continue without saying anything, or signal himself to the world before setting sail?
Go for the second option, a small concession to his "freedom".
At least Françoise will be relieved to know that he is alive, ready to continue his dream.
In this dream, she doesn't really belong.
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On August 22, 1968, when Joshua left Plymouth, his tears had flowed.
"Since I'm telling you we'll see each other again soon, what's eight or nine months in a lifetime, don't give me the blues at a time like this!"
He had thrown at her.
In his book, he will have more peaceful but equally selfish words: “It is a very heavy card to carry, this need to reassure family and friends.
Reason cries out to me to play alone, alone, without encumbering myself with others ”, professes the individualist.
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This March 18, his jerry can is ready, his battery-powered speaker too.
It remains to find the messenger.
With a mirror that he shines in the sun, he hails a boat from the port, and throws his waterproof container there.
To be handed over to the French consulate in Cape Town, the hermit specifies to the sailor who receives him.
Does he have any news from the other competitors, who have left like him to tour the world alone?
Moitessier is especially worried about friend Loïck Fougeron, and even more about Nigel Tetley, whose trimaran seems to him so fragile.
Four were "extended", replies the South African.
Which ?
Damn, he didn't remember the names.
A race ?
"An insult to the sea!"
In the Bay of Cape, Bernard Moitessier sees a British oil tanker which has dropped anchor.
It is with the slingshot that he sends a message to wire to the Sunday Times, which initiated the Golden Globe Challenge.
The metal tube lands in the gangway the first time!
“Dear Robert (boss of the race) begins the little note, the Horn was rounded on February 5th and it is March 18th.
I continue nonstop to the Pacific Islands, because I am happy at sea, and maybe also, to save my soul.
"
By abandoning the race, he is not only giving up the laurels of the victory that awaits him in England.
He also sits on 5,000 pounds (around 70,000 euros today).
A nod to history: it was upon learning that Moitessier and another navigator, Bill King, planned to travel around the world without setting foot ashore and alone, that the British weekly had the idea to make it a sporting event.
Faced with this “grotesque” proposition, Bernard reared up.
An "insult to the sea!"
», He had stormed… before changing his mind, overtaken by more down to earth imperatives.
The need for money.
After all, taking the start would not prevent him from making this “race to the end of oneself”.
Nor to write a new book, in the wake of “Vagabond des mers du sud”, a great publishing success in 1960. “It is not to overtake others that I would like to trace this long trail.
It's because he has a tremendous fascination with me, ”he confesses in the Bateaux magazine before the start.
Without radio equipment
If Moitessier takes up the challenge of the Golden Globe, he refuses to take radio equipment on board which would weigh down Joshua and weigh on the "peace" of his helmsman.
It is therefore with a slingshot, according to his encounters on the ocean, that he will post news.
The race plan is quite simple: complete a round-the-world trip crossing the three major capes of the southern hemisphere: Bonne Espérance (Africa), Leeuwin (Australia) and Horn (America) without touching land and without assistance.
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Surprisingly at the time, the departure can be made from any port in England and all the competitors do not leave at the same time: between June 1 and September 31, 1968. The first to arrive will inherit a golden globe. , the fastest will receive a check for 5,000 pounds.
Nine competitors are in the running: six English, two French and one Italian.
Moitessier sets off on August 22 on his faithful Joshua, a ketch as solid as it is rustic: a steel hull, with masts cut from telegraph poles and PTT cables as shrouds!
The Frenchman is the undisputed favorite of this pioneering competition, where some have never faced the open sea before!
The weeks pass, between dead calm and shots of tobacco.
Bonne Esperance is crossed on October 20, then it is the Indian Ocean, "the wildest of the three".
He tinkers, feeds the birds when he sees them, films the sea, scrutinizes the formidable icebergs, devotes himself to yoga.
Like more and more followers in the late 1960s, Moitessier is steeped in oriental wisdom.
She has infused it since her childhood spent in French Indochina, with an entrepreneur father.
It was with his Vietnamese friends, on bamboo junks, that he first made his sea legs before leaving for his first trips in the Gulf of Siam.
And to face his first tragedies: the invasion in 1940 of Indochina by Japan, his imprisoned father, the suicide of his younger brother, consumed by remorse for having killed a Vietnamese childhood friend whose war had makes an enemy.
"God that I am well here, in no hurry to return"
He no doubt thinks about it while passing off Saigon at the beginning of December 1968. His competitive spirit, if it ever existed, is totally engulfed in Joshua's wake.
The ordeal is now a mystical horizon for him.
Approaching the second southern cape, in the south-west of Australia, he noted in his logbook: “God, I'm good here, in no hurry to go home.
Even when he worries about others, his friends at sea or his family on land, he philosophizes: "Yet I am happy, all alone on my boat.
Time has changed dimension.
"Or again:" The loneliness that hurts, I encountered it in the crowd in Paris, never at sea ", he would write later.
This is how his refusal to arrive where he is expected is progressing little by little.
His abandonment with a slingshot on March 18, 1969 off the coast of Good Hope, triggered a shock wave on dry land.
In London, the Sunday Times, declares itself "stunned" and can hardly believe it: "The fact that Moitessier took care to warn the team of the star that she had to keep a distance from Joshua and not bring him any assistance, would seem to indicate that the French navigator continues to scrupulously observe the rules of the race.
"
Françoise, she first believes in a hoax.
But get angry with the organizers of the Golden Globe who saw fit to appeal to Moitessier, on behalf of his wife, to return to the game. Even though she is in pain, she knows her husband and her too well. thirst for freedom.
Ten months alone at sea
She is not mistaken.
“I feel great peace, great strength in me.
I'm free.
Free as I have never been ”, he gets drunk, spinning towards the Indian and the Pacific.
In the Long Road, he writes: “The earth is moving away.
And now it's a story between Joshua and me, between me and the sky, a beautiful story all to us, a great love story that no longer concerns others.
"
But you have to come back one day, get supplies, rest, embrace your loved ones.
But not in Europe, no.
After having crossed Leeuwin a second time, he sets course for Tahiti.
Despite several capsizes, Joshua seemed in better shape than Bernard when the two traveling companions docked in Papeete on June 21, 1969, three months and 70,000 km after his sudden detour.
He has completed a round-the-world trip and a half, the longest solo sea journey ever.
* "The long road", by Bernard Moitessier, published in 1971 (Arthaud editions, 20 € or I read in pocket format, 8.90 euros).