Moitessier: A Sailing Legend [Paperback]

Moitessier, a Sailing Legend is immensely readable and like any good story about the sea it is full of surprises and twistsA sailor, storyteller, lecturer and tormented soul, Moitessier reveals his life's voyage in this compelling book.This affectionate portrait brings out all the talents and conflicts in its subject, a man of great enthusiasms, a man who cared passionately about people and the environment and who never succumbed to complacency or apathy.Moitessier, who navigated with a sextant using the sun, moon, and stars, who sailed with no radio, whose JOSHUA was rigged with discarded telephone poles for masts, came from a sailing world more distant from the modern ocean racer's than his was from Columbus's.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 on 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, 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, writel3Y