Alone
Page 2
But let’s not fool ourselves. How many times had I thought I’d found the ideal sponsor, from the Atlantic crossing to the catamaran races in the China Sea, from the Paris-to-Dakar race to the ocean-going yawl regattas, only to discover that “your project is not quite right for us,” The step from a friendly word of encouragement from a potential sponsor — “Say, that sounds like a great idea!” — to the actual signing of a contract is a very big one. A step that both my friend Christopher, a seasoned automobile driver, and Saint Christopher himself, patron saint of all seasoned drivers, helped me take, each in his own way.
Let me introduce Christopher by describing his relationship to his car, and to driving in general. The easiest way to describe Christopher’s automobile is to say that the Fiat 500 is without a doubt the least aggressive car on the road. A tiny, two-passenger vehicle, it has a rounded, non-threatening design, a motor that can only be described as ridiculous, an overall appearance that is midway between old-fashioned and user-friendly. This toy car makes the most prejudiced pedestrians feel well inclined toward it, causes other drivers to regard it with bemused condescension, and inspires ardent ecologists to cite it as a prime example of a generally reprehensible species. Despite all this, when Christopher got behind the wheel of his Fiat 500, this innocent little vehicle metamorphosed into a guided missile. Woe to anyone who got in its way! Any other driver became an incongruity, any pedestrian a plain nuisance, any sharp curve in the road a godsend, any policeman a sworn enemy. With Christopher driving his Fiat 500, the most tranquil village square was immediately transformed into a universe in which any sense of pity — in fact, any human feeling at all — was no longer tolerated.
Within this universe, the worst position was that of the poor passenger. Separated from a world that had suddenly turned hostile by only a thin sheet of metal, all a passenger could do was make himself smaller, sinking down deeper in his seat and hoping by this act of self-con traction not only to protect himself against angry looks from all sides but to prepare himself for the ultimate collision.
Christopher was twenty-six, a bachelor, and had the physique of a Greek god. Girls swooned as soon as they laid eyes on him. His only problem in that department was an embarrassment of riches, and his plan seemed to be to maintain that status quo as long as possible. If a girlfriend became a trifle too clinging, he would bundle her into “The Pimple/’ the name he gave to his little Fiat meteor, and take her for a spin around the Place de l’Etoile. For anyone who has never had the experience of trying to circumnavigate the Place de I’Etoile in Paris, know that, with its eight impinging side streets, its lack of police direction, its presumed “priority” to the right,• and its inherent challenge to French drivers, it has to be — even for a so-called competent driver — one of the most dangerous intersections on the face of the earth. A little ride around L’Etoile usually sufficed to straighten out the young lady. Better a life without Christopher than face certain death with him, she would say to herself. Having come to that sad conclusion, she would then hop out of the Fiat and head home to her parents. By subway.
But for the moment, let us leave aside the private life of my friend Christopher — which could well be the subject of a separate volume, the title of which, you can be sure, would not be Alone — and focus on the professional life of this breaker-of-hearts and stripper-of-gears,
Christopher had helped me organize the catamaran races in the China Sea. Now that the event was over, he, like me, was temporarily unemployed.
I had talked to him about the Pacific project, and it excited him enormously. In contrast to my Atlantic adventure, this time I had decided I would do things right: plan meticulously, be totally professional, formulate a complete plan from the start with a would-be sponsor, and either put myself in charge or at least direct the tightly knit team I would put together. I needed someone who could make key decisions for me in my absence, who could handle crises without panicking, who would know exactly what to do if, for example, I were out of communication with the rest of the world for several weeks. In short, I needed someone in whom I had complete confidence. In Christopher, I believed I had found my ideal person. In addition to his native intelligence, he was blessed with a great sense of humor — a quality that served him in good stead during the trying times we lived through during the long months prior to my departure.
• In France, a basic rule of the road is that the car coming from the right has the right of way. — Tr.
I must also confess that, above and beyond any rational or logical considerations for my choice of Christopher as point man, it did occur to me more than once that if I had survived my many trips with him through the streets of Paris, aboard his mini-meteor, I also had to believe that it was destiny’s way of telling me I was meant to survive any future ordeal.
Christopher and I made contact with Sector and set up an appointment at their offices in Lausanne, Switzerland. Our train left at dawn, and we set off for the station on a motorcycle in a driving rain. (NEVER DO THINGS THE EASY WAY has to be my motto.) By the time we found our compartment on the train, we were so drenched we had to strip to our shorts and hang up our clothes to dry. When we arrived at the Swiss border, I discovered to my dismay that in my hurried, predawn departure, I had neglected to take my passport. In desperation, I pulled out an old issue of Paris Match, which had reported, in text and photos, my Atlantic crossing. The customs official looked at the photos, studied my face closely, reexamined the pictures, then gruffly acknowledged that with the exception of the slightly receding hairline, I was indeed who I claimed to be, “Still and all,” he murmured as he fingered the magazine, “a passport’s a lot more practical identity card than a copy of Paris Match.”
Our meeting with the Sector people went well; they seemed excited by the project, and we left feeling we were definitely on the right track.
People often have the wrong idea about corporate sponsorship of sports figures or sporting events. Companies that, by their product or approach to business, seem the most progressive generally turn out to be the most exacting, demand the most meticulous preparation and professional team, and, as a result, the most detailed budgets. For anyone not blessed with a personal fortune, corporate sponsors are the only way that most sports projects ever see the light of day.
Generally speaking, sponsors of sporting events work in either of two ways (or a combination of both) when it comes to publicity. The more conventional route is for a company to ally itself to the sporting event or personality through billboards or television spots. The second approach is to associate directly with the person or event, as is often the case, say, when tennis stars wear a sponsor’s clothing or use its rackets, or when basketball stars display their gargantuan talents shod in a sponsor’s shoes. With the first route — billboards and television spots — the results are to some degree predictable, therefore measurable. With the second, personal relations come into play; that is, there is a closer connection between the sports personality and the sponsor, a basic harmony created between the image of the personality and the sponsoring party. There is also a greater risk — the possibility that a sports star may not live up to expectations or that the sponsored event turns sour. In our case, we stressed the positive market aspects of our proposed voyage and Sector’s own market — what I call the Japan—United States-France connection. We also pointed out that not only was the watch the basic instrument of navigation but that the voyage would stress their product’s durability, its ability to survive the most extreme conditions, et cetera. From Sector’s viewpoint, they had to assess the risks of my project and gauge its chances of success. If the crossing were successful, they would doubtless recoup their investment many times over.
We compiled extensive files, had further discussions, added more documents to our files, and reached a point where a draft contract was drawn up. Then the Gulf War erupted and all advertising seemed to dry up as the world focused, for weeks and weeks, on Iraq, Kuwait, and the volatile tension in that
part of the world. It would take more than optimism for any sponsor to give the green light to a project that seemed at best peripheral given the world conditions. Even under normal conditions, a project as difficult and ambitious as ours was not a foregone conclusion for any sponsor. I was ultimately an unknown factor to the Sector people, and, our convincing presentation aside, the enterprise was in fact quite foreign to them. To underwrite it was a considerable risk, a real leap of faith.
Despite everything, the contract did get signed. All my demands were met: I would be solely responsible for the nautical aspect of the enterprise, for picking my team, for the materials, for the choice of a shipyard where the boat would be built, for the date of departure, and for the film that would be made of the voyage. Sector also agreed — and I confess I had not expected them to — that there would be a minimum of prepublicity. No brass bands. No banners or streamers. And as for the name of my boat, instead of plain Sector, they could have insisted on something more commercial, such as Sector Sportswatches, especially since in France at that time no one even knew that Sector manufactured watches. They did manage to let it be known that they were sponsoring me, but they did it discreetly and with great elegance. Throughout, Sector would display the same class act.
Above all, I needed a boat perfectly adapted to the demands of the voyage, one that would resemble no other boat ever built. Nothing you could find in any boat builder’s catalogue. I had already made up my mind who should build it: my old friend, Bernard Fournier Le Ray.
Bernard and I had worked together designing and constructing the boat I had rowed across the Atlantic. Since those pioneering days, Bernard had opened a shipyard at La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany. He is the best in the business, a kind of wizard of far-out prototypes. When it comes to boats, I am something of a perfectionist — a finicky perfectionist, if that is not a redundancy — a quality for which I trust I’ll be forgiven, when you consider how I use my boats. As for Sector, it was imperative to have complete confidence in the team responsible for its construction. Bernard, meticulous to a fault, is also impeccable when it comes to schedules, which is rare in his profession. When I first mentioned my project to him at the end of December 1990, his response was a categorical no. He had more orders than he could fill, and there was no way he could fit another project into his schedule. I knew that Bernard, who never wanted to take a job he couldn’t deliver on time, had a tendency to react negatively to any potential new order in an effort to discourage the prospective client. I had seen him do it more than once, but I also knew my Bernard. At the end of January I raised the subject again. When his answer this time was “That’s a tall order, my friend,” I knew the battle was won. At the beginning of March work got underway.
Until now I had kept my family in the dark about the project. My wife, Cornelia, knew that this is the kind of decision I make on my own and that any effort to talk me out of it would be pointless. To have brought the subject up any sooner, while it was still no more than an idea I was mulling over, would have worried her prematurely and unnecessarily. Having sailed the seven seas with me and experienced the worst conditions possible, she knew exactly what such an endeavor meant: it would never even have crossed my mind to minimize the dangers. When I told her I realized the trip would be hard, very hard, she knew precisely what I meant by that word.
Cornélia accepted my announcement, not only because of her intelligence — that is, a superior form of understanding — but first and foremost because she backed my project wholeheartedly. My children, Guillaume and Ann, aged fifteen and ten respectively, each reacted in their own way: Guillaume, like me an introvert, kept his feelings to himself, whereas Ann shut herself in her room and sobbed her heart out. In the months and years to come, I was to learn that this adventure was an ordeal not only for me but perhaps even more for my family.
An egotist? There’s no denying I am one. But would I do better to give my children the example of a father who, faced with the possibility of pushing himself to the limit, even at the risk of losing his life, shrank back and said no?
In April, I spent a week in Japan scouting the coastline for potential points of departure. I finally settled on the port of Choshi. Less than sixty miles from Tokyo, and even closer to the Tokyo airport, Choshi is situated at the extremity of a promontory, a kind of nose pointing seaward, toward the east, my direction. By departing from Choshi, I would avoid all the dangerous harbor traffic both in the bay of Tokyo and the port of Yokohama, which would improve my chances of gaining the high seas without an untoward encounter with a steamship or trawler.
Back in Paris, I held a press conference to announce officially my planned Pacific crossing. The press conference was held at the Cercle de la Mer, the Maritime Center, and the journalists who had been invited were handed a map of the Pacific Ocean, on one side of which was printed:
September 20, 1980. Upon his arrival after having rowed across the Atlantic, Gerard d’Aboville declared: “If there is one thing I can say with utter conviction, it is that never again will I set out on any such slave-ship!”
On the other side was printed this statement:
Paris, April 24, 1991. “If there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that one can never be sure of anything or anybody, most of all oneself.”
Eleven years earlier, in the same circumstances and virtually in the same spot, my announcement that I intended to row alone across the Atlantic from west to east had stunned the audience. Looking around the room, I recognized a number of faces. In the eleven intervening years, no one had grown any younger. Barely had that thought crossed my mind when I realized that they must be thinking exactly the same thing about me.
May came and went. It’s a catastrophic month in France, when nothing gets done. Long weekends with holidays at one end or the other — or both. There are also holidays in the middle of the week, which prompts people to sneak in a vacation day or two and eliminate the workweek entirely. It’s as though the country closes down for a whole month. But not for Bernard, who was working with his team around the clock to make sure he brought the boat in on schedule. We were constantly on the phone as he asked me for one piece of equipment or another: this or that part of the superstructure, the solar panels, the batteries, on and on.
Sector began to take shape. It was being made with the most advanced composite materials available. For the hull and deck, Bernard was using a special foam 15 millimeters thick (about half an inch), which had the virtue of being nonabsorbent even when it was totally immersed. That material was sandwiched between two carbon fiber layers, each less than a millimeter thick.
The solid-cast material had the paradoxical virtue of being at once absolutely rigid and extremely strong as well as very light, but it had one major drawback: once built, there was no question of drilling a hole into it, or adding a screw or two in the event you discovered you needed some additional support or reinforcement. That is why Bernard had to know from the very start of construction exactly what accessories would be required, not only on the upper surface of the boat but below deck and in the cockpit.
But May almost did us in. Bernard was counting on us to come up with all the equipment and accessories in a timely manner, so from our offices on the outskirts of Paris, Christopher and I spent endless hours on the phone trying to track down the parts we needed, growing increasingly angry with each call. Either no one was in the office or the managers — the only ones who could make the decision — were out of town or unavailable. When would the boss be available? Oh, not until next Tuesday at the earliest. But didn’t he leave any instructions? The item was supposed to be ready last week. No, sorry, I can’t seem to find any information about the part you ordered. Why don’t you try again next week. Next week? I can’t wait until next week!
The days sped by, and with each one our nerves grew more frayed and our frustration mounted. The hours spent on the phone kept me from the physical training program I had designed for myself. It is true that my project did not require a
particularly muscular person. Not even a world-class athlete — which I am not. But I did have to be in perfect health. I had to feel comfortable that nothing medically serious would happen to me during the next six months, when I would be far from any hospital or doctor. This is why, on May 21, I found myself in the Cochin hospital in Paris, my entire body crisscrossed from one end to the other, in a manner I can only describe as indiscreet, with various and sundry microscopically small tubes at the ends of which were attached miniature cameras. The most fascinating part of that examination was watching the television screen as those tiny cameras probed my inner being.
I would gladly have forgone that intimate and highly original examination, but, at forty-five, there was a fair chance that the old carcass might conceal some minor, or even major, breakdown that had not yet revealed itself to the world. Luckily, I left the hospital with the blessings of Dr. Boissionas ringing in my ears: “No apparent problems. You’re declared fit for service.”
Meanwhile, Bernard had put the finishing touches to his newborn: as it left the shipyard, Sector looked sleek and beautiful.
I will not dwell overly on the technical aspects of the boat, except to provide the reader with a general description, which can be supplemented with a closer look at the detailed diagram on pages 18 and 19.
Sector was eight meters in length — about twenty-six feet — and 1.6 meters, or about five feet, wide. It weighed 250 kilos empty, and 650 when fully loaded — that is, about 600 pounds empty and about 1,500 pounds fully loaded. It consisted of three compartments:
• in the stern: a watertight cabin, my living quarters
• midships: an open cockpit, my rowing quarters