Marie Tabarly wins the Ocean Globe Race | EUROtoday
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VSt is in the midst of the evening, at 12:52 a.m. French time (10:52 p.m. GMT), on the finish of 214 days and 11 hours of navigation, after having crossed the three capes and confronted probably the most harmful seas on the earth, that Pen Duick VI entered this stretch of sea referred to as the Solent between Southampton and the Isle of Wight in Great Britain, to cross as winner the ending line of the race around the globe, drawn in entrance of Cowes, this village, cradle crusing and sailors.
It's an understatement to say that Éric Tabarly would have been happy with Marie. Disappeared within the Irish Sea on June 13, 1998, probably the most well-known French ocean racing sailor would have appreciated his daughter's magnificent victory within the Ocean Globe Race, a round-the-world crusing race, which, on the time, the place Eric ran it, was referred to as the Whitbread. He would have praised Marie's feat all of the extra since he himself needed to abandon this race in 1973, after breaking his mast twice. Marie Tabarly, she received, each the penultimate, the final stage and the final classification of the race on the valiant Pen-Duick VIthe boat that Tabarly had constructed for this occasion fifty years in the past.
With this black-hulled ketch, nonetheless, he took his revenge by profitable, in Newport, the English “single-handed transatlantic race” forward of Alain Colas, in 1976. The victory as we speak, half a century after the development of “the black-capped tit”, in a race where twelve experienced competitors lined up, including the French Neptune (who had also already participated in the Whitbread in 1977, with Bernard Deguy), showed to what extent the design that Éric Tabarly brought to his boats is still ultra-efficient.
Marie Tabarly, worthy heir of her father
But this success is also very largely that of her daughter Marie, 40 years old, a woman of the caliber of Florence Arthaud, who knew how to manage for seven months a crew of eleven fellows that she had chosen herself, not only because their nautical skills, but also and above all their ability to form a group and their desire to win. “I’m not leaving to come second,” she told Olivier de Kersauson. I can't wait to go out there and give it my all like I saw my dad do. »
However, in her youth, perhaps to avoid living too much in her father's shadow, Marie had chosen to devote herself to equine ethology and horse training. But after Eric's disappearance, she no longer resists the call of the sea, for which Olivier de Kersauson gives her a taste for it again by taking her aboard his boat. Geronimo. A sailboat of which she was the godmother, as she has been of all Olivier's boats for more than ten years.
Marie Tabarly has all the more merit for having won the Ocean Globe Race because, unlike most major ocean races, it is an event run in the old fashioned way, without the routings which from land, thanks to a battery of computers and satellite links, tell competitors the best route to follow depending on the depressions that sometimes threaten and the anticyclones that slow you down. In this world tour, everything was done with a sextant and thanks only to the reading of isobaric maps and the observation of the stars and the sun.
“In the end,” Marie admits, “we had been fairly fortunate, once I suppose that our 24-meter boat was knocked down by a wave in a extreme melancholy and that we additionally crossed a minimum of fifty anticyclones which brutally block your course. and are all stage crossings that might have allowed our rivals to get again as much as us. » Winner in actual time, Marie Tabarly will know in a couple of days, after the arrival of one other French sailboat, the sloop Trianaif she additionally wins on corrected time.
https://www.lepoint.fr/sport/voiles-marie-tabarly-vainqueur-de-la-course-autour-du-monde-12-04-2024-2557474_26.php