Bernard Moitessier

Bernard Moitessier (10 April 1925 – 16 June 1994), a French national born and raised in Vietnam, was a sailor most notable for his participation in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first round the world yacht race. With the fastest circumnavigation time towards the end of the race, Moitessier was the likely winner but he elected to continue on to Tahiti again and not return to the start line in England, rejecting the idea of the commercialization of long distance sailing.

Moitessier grew up next to the sea in Indo-China and left it at the beginning of the Vietnam War as a crew member of sailing trade junks. In Indonesia he purchased the dilapidated junk Marie-Thérèse in 1952 to travel slowly further to France by singlehanded sailing. On the first leg to Seychelles he had to stop her from leaking in the middle of the Indian Ocean by diving underneath the boat at sea. After 85 days of sailing through monsoon weather he ran aground on Diego Garcia. He did not have modern navigational instruments, and was aware of his latitude via sextant observation but was estimating longitude and, as he tells it in "Sailing to the Reefs", neglected a three-knot ocean current, leading to the grounding. He was deported to Mauritius, because Diego Garcia is a military restricted area, and worked there three years before he could sail again in a boat he had built himself. This he sailed via stops in South Africa and St. Helena to the West Indies, but on a trip from Trinidad to St. Lucia he once again was shipwrecked due to physical exhaustion. Picked up and taken back to Trinidad by friends, he decided to go to France directly, as it seemed the only place he could earn enough to build himself a worthy boat. He was able to get work on a cargo ship which got him to France, via Hamburg, where he found work with a medical company whilst writing a book about his experience (Vagabond des Mers du Sud). He then moved to the south of France, where he married Françoise, the daughter of family friends, with whom he was to sail the world.

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