by Volker J. Bürck
On the night of 12 to 13 June 1998, Éric Tabarly went overboard in a tragic accident on perhaps the most beautiful of his ships, the gaff cutter "Pen Duick", designed by William Fife III Jr. in 1898. During an everyday manoeuvre. So unbelievably banal! The sea took one of the most indisputably significant sailors in history not in a race at Cape Horn or a storm in the Southern Ocean, but on an ordinary ferry trip with friends. Éric Tabarly drowned in the Celtic Sea near the South Wales town of Milford Haven.
His accident shook the nation. State television even interrupted live broadcasts of the ongoing football World Cup and ran special programmes on the status of the search. Politicians such as the then President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin honoured Tabarly's extraordinary achievements in moving speeches. The country fell into collective mourning.
Even 25 years later, the edgy Breton is not forgotten. And they have erected a worthy monument to him. In April 2008, just in time for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the "Cité de la Voile Éric Tabarly" opened in Lorient in southern Brittany. In this "City of Sailing", designed as a modern experience museum, visitors marvelled at Tabarly's maritime heritage, impressively presented with the help of multimedia documentary material. And outside the futuristic museum building, which is located directly on the water, one of his yachts with the magical name "Pen Duick" is almost always moored on the specially equipped pontoon.
Tabarly grows into sailing
Tabarly came to Lorient in a roundabout way, at the age of 32. Born in Nantes in 1931, he received his sailing initiation as a child on the family yacht "Annie". "I can't say exactly when," he writes in his memoirs "Mémoires du Large", published in 1997. The oldest surviving photo shows him at the age of three in a romper suit at the tiller of the small wooden yacht. Sailing with the Tabarlys. His godfather owned an international metre class, while his father was one of the few middle-class people in pre-war France to sail his own boat in regattas on the coast of Brittany. Éric grew naturally into this world.
Shortly before the Second World War, what Tabarly himself describes as a "lifelong love affair" developed on board his father's new yacht "Pen Duick". When his father considered selling the 54-year-old boat, which had suffered badly in the previous years, in 1947 in view of the poor financial situation after the war, the junior wanted to preserve the slim Fife yacht by any means necessary. The way in which he tackles and ultimately masters this task reveals his outstanding character traits: an iron will, coupled with a willingness to make sacrifices and absolute determination.
Tabarly wants to save the family yacht
When Tabarly became the owner of the "Pen Duick" in 1952 - the 13th, as his father told him with a wink at the notary - he immediately subordinated his career aspirations to the goal of saving the boat. He abandons his plan to go to sea with the navy and instead enlists in the naval aviators without hesitation - because "there was a whole lot more pay for it", as he writes. He needed it. Not for himself, just for his ship.
During a tough basic training programme in Khouribga - in Morocco near Casablanca, which was still French at the time - he hoarded every franc he didn't need for the later restoration of his "floating pile of wood". After passing his pilot's exam, Tabarly flew in Vietnam in 1954 for double pay during the last war missions in the Indochina conflict, spending "hardly any money" there either, but instead preparing "in stuffy Saigon" for his entrance examination as an officer candidate at the Brest Naval School, where he returned in 1956.
Finally, Tabarly has collected enough money to start work on the ship. He takes it to friends in Trinité-sur-Mer, to the shipyard owners Nino and Gilles Constantini, with whom he often sailed together in his youth. The old racing yacht is in a pitiful state. When she comes out of the water by the crane for the first time in years, the full extent of the damage becomes apparent. The beams, deck beams and chine stringers have rotted through, and the underwater hull's spud area has also rotted. Constantini tells Tabarly to his face: "Your ship is ruined!"
His reaction to this damning judgement is also characteristic. Firstly: A Tabarly never gives up. Secondly, a Tabarly always has the courage to find unusual solutions.
Tabarly makes a copy
He suggests that the shipbuilder use the rotten hull as a positive mould on which to laminate a new GRP hull. Gilles Constantini agrees. Two years later, it was done. The polyester hull became the new hull and Tabarly spent countless weekends and holidays working on the boat, slaving away in the fibreglass dust with a large Flex, standing up to his upper body in brackish harbour water and laminating fibreglass mats onto the upturned wooden hull. And using up all his savings in the process. As a result of his endeavours, he had his own seaworthy and fast ship in his hands for the first time at the beginning of 1959. Now Tabarly could have been content to pay back the debts incurred during the restoration with the salary from his secure military job and, as a very athletic, instinctive and experienced sailor, to win silver on the gaff scene summer after summer with the old new yacht. That would be the end of the story here.
Tabarly would still have been a remarkable sailor, one of the first in France to take intensive care of old yachts and be prepared to break new ground. At first it looks as if he is satisfied with what he has achieved.
From officer to sailing "pro"
However, when he discovered an advert for the second Transat, the British single-handed regatta, in a sailing magazine in June 1962, Tabarly changed his course in life and obtained a transfer to Lorient. "Éric came to me here in Armor-Plage for the first time in September 1963 (near Lorient, the ed.), accompanied by Gilles Constantini, who had recommended me to him. He was already fully immersed in his 'Pen Duick II' project at the time," recalls Victor Tonnerre, Tabarly's former sailmaker. Tonnerre, who was responsible for the regatta side of his father's rig and sailmaking business, was surprised by Tabarly's expertise and determination. "He had planned about ten different sets of sails for the ketch, all slightly undersized, and thought carefully about how best to operate them single-handed," he says.
Tabarly knows exactly what his single-handed yacht should look like for ocean racing. For example, smaller sails are easier for the soloist to change, reef, furl and haul. "He was perhaps one of the first to design a ship optimised for a single race, a single route," says Tonnerre. Today, this is common practice. Tabarly's basic idea is that a single-handed yacht must be lightweight. Light enough to be fast even with a small sail area. At 6.5 tonnes, his 13.60 metre long "Pen Duick II" weighs only half as much as the one metre shorter "Gipsy Moth" by England's sailing star Francis Chichester.
Éric invents new details
The handling of the yacht at sea must also be adapted to single-handed operation. Tabarly already found detailed solutions for the plywood ketch, some of which he adopted on later "Pen Duick" yachts: a small, gimballed table for chart work in heavy seas, an old Harley-Davidson seat for cooking, a Plexiglas dome removed from a fighter-bomber, which allows the sails to be checked quickly, especially at night, without having to go on deck.
Many of these "inventions" stemmed from his profound seamanship, which he had already acquired at a young age in numerous regattas and storm voyages, as well as his almost encyclopaedic knowledge of global boatbuilding. "From the Polynesian outrigger to the American sand dredger, Éric knew many designs in detail. He collected sailing magazines, copied from books, archived ... until one day he pulled out of this huge pile exactly what he thought was suitable for solving his current problem," says Gérard Petipas, initially a navigator from 1967 onwards, later a business partner and lifelong close friend. "He was more of an ingenious combiner than an inventor in the true sense of the word."
Tabarly is also a keen sportsman
For Tabarly, however, a perfectly equipped ship alone is no guarantee of victory. "On a regatta like this (offshore single-handed, editor's note), physical fitness is a basic requirement," he writes in his memoirs. The massive Breton with the physique of an artistic gymnast already brings a lot to the table. He also took advantage of the numerous sporting opportunities in the military like a man possessed: 400-metre running and weight training became his favourite pastimes.
And he toughens up extremely well. "At the end of November, when we were out until late in the evening off Quiberon and Belle Ile, I usually had a jacket on over my second jumper. Éric, on the other hand, stood there in his striped jumper like a block of granite," says his childhood friend Michel Vanek. And Jean Michel Barrault, one of France's best-known yachting journalists, describes how he found Tabarly outside a restaurant by the sea in the winter of 1963/64, dressed only in a shirt and light jacket: "He didn't say it, but I knew he was already training here for the icy cold that awaited him off Newfoundland."
Éric becomes a sailing icon
On 19 June 1964, the 34-year-old Frenchman, who until then had been completely unknown internationally, stunned the sailing world. His "Pen Duick II" reached the finish line off Newport three days ahead of Chichester's "Gipsy Moth" and won the second edition of the Transat.
Some had suspected this, such as Captain DeKerviler, who had been amazed at how "effortlessly" Tabarly had mastered his ship with the 80-square-metre spinnaker set. DeKerviler, as head of the naval sports department, had previously spared him a transfer to Tunisia and granted him a position in Lorient.
France is upside down. At last there is a compatriot who has shown the English how it's done when it comes to ocean sailing. In addition to fresh fame, Tabarly's victory left him with fresh debts, but he was infected and took a liking to his "double life" as a naval officer and racing sailor. Now begins perhaps his most productive creative phase.
Tabarly works obsessively
Tirelessly searching for new racing concepts, he realised three new boats at a breathtaking pace between 1967 and 1969, which would go on to write yachting history in France. "With the trimaran 'Pen Duick IV' in particular, he presented the sailing world with something completely new in 1968," says Victor Tonnerre.
Tabarly is said to have had the idea for a three-hull boat as early as 1966. According to the French sailing press, he was the first to realise that the future on the water belonged to boats that maintained their stability with minimal wetted water surface, not through ballast but through width. "We also first tried out the spinnaker hull, perhaps his most famous invention, on the 'Pen Duick IV'. Éric knew that he would have to move very differently on this boat alone at sea than on a monohull," says Tonnerre, who was there from the beginning when Tabarly experimented with metal rings and balloon silk to put together something that allowed him to set or recover his spinnaker in a controlled manner from the cockpit. Today, this is also a matter of course.
At the start of the third Transat in 1968, Tabarly's aluminium tri-hull projectile, dubbed the "Sea Spider" by the competition, looked daring, but failed right at the start when it collided with a freighter in the English Channel due to faulty steering. "It's strange," says Victor Tonnerre. "Although the 'PD IV' is always cited as a milestone, it was initially unsuccessful in sporting terms, unlike its predecessor, the 'Pen Duick III'."
At the time, Tonnerre was responsible for the huge, high-cut genoa and the fully battened main of the 17.45 metre schooner, which was also completed in aluminium in May 1967. In the following years, Tabarly dominated the global regatta circuit at will with the two-master, which was the first of his boats to comply with an international measurement formula (RORC). Not alone, but with a crew. "The way the Australians congratulated us after the Sydney-Hobart made us incredibly proud, because these guys enjoyed an almost mythical status in sailing circles at the time," recalls Michel Vanek, who was part of the eight-man crew at the beginning of 1968.
Tabarly teaches sailing
Throughout his life, Tabarly endeavoured to introduce children and young people to the magic of sailing, just as his father had done with him. His nephew Charles Vieillard-Baron, for example, was allowed to sail as an eight-year-old and experienced the 1981/82 world regatta Whitbread, today's Volvo Ocean Race, on the "Pen Duick VI", renamed "Euromarché".
He was a great mentor. Some of his eleven students later went down in the history of their sport as the "Tabarly generation". "Éric never taught anyone how to sail, but he shaped an entire generation of sailors," says Olivier de Kersauson, one of Tabarly's most famous former fellow sailors alongside Loïck Peyron, Titouan Lamazou, Jean LeCam and Marc Pajot.
In 1969, the skipper, affectionately christened "Pépé" by his crew, then took another break and won the Los Angeles-Tokyo regatta single-handed in the Pacific with the 35-foot "Pen Duick V", also built in Lorient, against the German Klaus Hehner on his "Tina", among others. According to Tabarly, the "featherweight" boat had two 500-litre water ballast tanks on board for the first time and, with its ultra-flat hull, anticipated the development of the Open 60 Monos that followed 25 years later - the next pioneering feat.
Tabarly is not always successful
But Tabarly, who sailed with all three boats between 1969 and 1972, did not succeed with every project. Despite all his sporting successes, new projects threatened to fail due to a chronic lack of money. Almost involuntarily, together with Gérard Petipas, he became the inventor of yacht sponsorship when, always on the lookout for funds to build ever more expensive racing yachts, he began to market his name and have the boats advertised by their sponsors. With the new money, his largest ship to date, the 22.25 metre long two-master "Pen Duick VI", was built in 1973.
With this first French maxi, there were bitter defeats as well as glittering series of victories. After being dismasted twice on the first Whitbread Round the World Race in 1973 before Rio and Sydney, Tabarly had to retire. Almost unbearable for a man with his mentality. But three years later, on the same boat, he finally achieved legendary status. Once again single-handed, once again on a transat, Tabarly, who had been considered missing in the meantime, emerged from the fog off Newport on 29 June 1976 with a faulty radio, failed self-steering and three nights without sleep - as the winner! Hundreds of thousands celebrated him on his return with a motorcade on the Champs-Elysées.
In the following decade, he set a fantastic transatlantic record in 1980 with the "Paul Ricard" in ten days and five hours, but all too often sporting successes failed to materialise with both this hydrofoil trimaran (later "Côte d'Or II") and the Orma-Tri "Bottin Entreprise" - technical problems, capsizes, you name it, the most famous living yachtsman had it. Even on monohull yachts such as "La Poste" (1994), the really big victories eluded him. Tabarly's sailing star seemed to be in decline, but in October 1997 he once again proved all his critics wrong. At the age of 66, he won the Transat en double from Le Havre to Cartagena in Colombia together with Yves Parlier.
This is probably one of the reasons why the whole of sailing France was delighted in June 1998 when "Pépé" organised a big party in Brittany to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its original "Pen Duick". Yachts from all over Europe came to the Bay of Benodet. Tabarly now owns an old Breton farmhouse here, where he has lived with his wife Jacqueline and daughter Marie since the early 1990s. Shortly after the party, he sets off for Fairlie in Scotland to celebrate his yacht again, this time in the company of other Fife owners at the Celebration Week there.
He never reached this goal. The sea caught up with him far too early, as Charles Vieillard-Baron says. "Éric had finally reached a point where raising money was no longer a priority. He still had so many plans. One of his greatest wishes was to give young people the opportunity to benefit from his experience on his restored ships."
With the museum and the use of his original yachts as training ships, others realised these plans for him. Tabarly, his ideas and ideals remain unforgotten.
