Bernard Moitessier

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

Moitessier grew up next to the sea in Indochina, at the time a French colony that included Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He left Indochina 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 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 provided a berth on a supply ship traveling to and from Mauritius island, as Diego Garcia, at the time, was run by a private company based in Mauritius. 

Once in Mauritius, he worked for three years before he could sail again in a boat he had built himself. 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 seaworthy 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 (Vagabond des Mers du Sud) about his experience. 

He then moved to the south of France, where he married Françoise de Cazalet, the daughter of family friends, with whom he would later sail the world. With the money from his book, he commissioned a 39' steel ketch which he named Joshua, in honor of Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail around the world solo. Finally, he and Françoise left Marseille in October 1963, leaving her three children in boarding schools. 

After wintering in Casablanca, they sailed first to the Canaries, then to Trinidad, and through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos Islands. After two years of spending time in each of these places, they arrived at Tahiti but realized that they were running out of time and had just eight months left to return to their children. 

So Moitessier proposed sailing Joshua home not via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal, as originally planned, but eastward, via the quickest route, including a passage about the much feared Cape Horn. Upon their arrival in France, at Easter 1966, they had, without intending it, completed the longest nonstop passage by a yacht in history—14216 nautical miles, over 126 days, a world record which brought him immediate recognition throughout the world yachting community.