Moitessier:A Sailing Legend
By Jean-Michel Barrault
With an Introduction by Peter Nichols
Translated by Jeannine Simon
256 pp. line drawings. 2005. Paperback. $19.95
ISBN 1 57409 204 9
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In 1968 during the Golden Globe, the first solo non-stop race around the world, Bernard Moitessier sent the following message with a slingshot onto the deck of a freighter, “I am continuing …” With this unbelievable decision to turn his back to glory and money, when he had victory in his grasp, and continue sailing to the Pacific Islands after seven months at sea, he became a guru for all small boat sailors.
Jean-Michel Barrault was his friend for 36 years. He met him when Moitessier, having survived two shipwrecks, went to Paris in search of work. He got him to start writing about his adventures, which Moitessier did beautifully. More adventures followed, including a trip from Tahiti to Spain via Cape Horn as a honeymoon.
After finishing The Long Way, his most famous book, Moitessier and JOSHUA, his 39-foot ketch spent many years in Polynesia where he built his own house, planted coconut trees and transformed his atoll into a speck of green in the middle of the South Pacific.
He lived in the United States for a time, lost his boat in Cabo San Lucas during a hurricane, and spent his last years in France, where he wrote his memoirs. Shortly before his death, Tamata and the Alliance was published to great acclaim. Moitessier, the internationally known sailor, writer and ecologist, became a legend in his own time.
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“It's great insight into a fascinating man.” —Latitudes & Attitudes
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About the Author:
Jean-Michel Barrault, a yachting journalist, writer and circumnavigator, is the author of over thirty books, mostly about the sea. He was a friend of Bernard Moitessier for 36 years and had much to add to Moitessier's own autobiographical books. Jeannine Simon, a translator and currently editor at Sheridan House, has edited the English edition of Tamata and the Alliance and A Sea Vagabond.