The small red boat occupies the front page of the Tahiti newspaper. The caption announces: “A solo sailor arrives in Tahiti on a 4.10 meter boat. I look at the photo, I reread the caption and I decide to go and have a look. I live 17 kilometers from the port of Papeete, I take my boat. “Baluchon”, that’s the name of this strange ship, is moored at the quay. It is really 4 meters, I measure it compared to mine and, on examining the technical details, I remain flabbergasted. The boat is perfect. Inventive, obviously maritime otherwise it wouldn’t be there, and simple. It’s so hard to make it practical, reliable and simple… There, everything seems to have really been achieved. No one on board. I leave a note on my phone asking the skipper if he wants to call me. I must not miss a character capable of so much inventiveness.
And I meet Yann Quenet. He lets out snatches of words, and I admire such applied intelligence. I would like to spend more time with him but the work is pressing, I have to do the bathymetry (seabed survey) in the atolls of central Polynesia with my boat “Titaïna Explorer”. I offer him to accompany us. It will be an opportunity to see who he is, to better discover what seems to me to be an incredible sailor. So we spend fifteen days measuring the atolls, the depth of the passes, between Makemo, Raraka, Tanenga, Tananea, Tohao, etc. From sunrise to sunset, we measure and, in fact, we don’t have much time to talk. I just notice how Yann, who has been with us for a short time, adapts quickly, quietly, as if he had always been on board with us.
His project responds to a brilliant idea: to eliminate all that is useless
Jean-Charles Corre, who has been sailing with me for fifteen years, has the same feeling. Yann is completely part of our world. So much so that one of the few questions I have time to ask him throughout this period is why he didn’t choose offshore racing, where he would have had more than his place. He replies that he wants to be alone. He is shy, intensely shy. He tells me that at the age of 15 or 16, at the technical school of Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, he read Slocum, the first solitary navigator identified in a world tour that began in 1895 and ended at the end of 1898. Yann Quenet, who does not come from a maritime background, thinks that this kind of adventure is for him. He laughs softly: “I’ve always been on the moon. Since we walked there, on the Moon, the expression is old-fashioned, hardly used anymore. Except by Yann, who, in his own way, is still there. He explains to me that he draws his boats all by himself, because he never dared to ask someone for help. His project responds to a brilliant idea: to eliminate all that is useless. The boat baptized “Baluchon” turns out to be incredibly refined, and extremely efficient. This is what allowed him, three years ago, to leave the coast of Brittany on the sly with a machine authorized to sail less than 3,000 from the coast… for a trip around the world.
In the heart of the worst storms, he was one with his tiny boat
Maritimely speaking, since that’s what it’s all about, when he arrives in Tahiti, the course is remarkable. Average speed of more than 3 knots (about 6 km/h), thousands of miles traveled from Saint-Brieuc to the entrance to the Panama Canal where, vessels without engines being prohibited, he was obliged to put “Baluchon” on the tipper of a truck. Back on the Pacific side, the boat, under full sail, heads for the Marquesas and Tahiti. Meanwhile, when the yachting world is frozen by the threat of Covid, the sailor continues on his uneventful journey. Yann Quenet doesn’t speak easily, and when I’m with him, he doesn’t make too much of an effort either. He knows that I know… I still manage to extract a few details from him about his passage through the Torres Strait, this northern Australia cluttered with poorly marked fringing reefs. He organized his route to cross it at the end of the rising moon, in order to take advantage of good night light. In fact, it is this attitude that reveals, if need be, the perfect adaptation to reality of this exceptional sailor. Days and days at sea later, when he will arrive on the coast of Africa after having made a stopover in Reunion, as he had planned from the start, he will again load “Baluchon” onto the tipper of a truck that will take him from Richards Bay to Cape Town. Avoiding getting tangled up in the often very agitated and difficult to control area of the end of the Anguillas currents, where veins of hot and cold water, with differences of 10 to 12°C, create a sea that quickly goes from difficult to dangerous.
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My problem is that the Earth is round
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“Baluchon” continues its journey, relaunched in Cape Town. He still has 14,000 kilometers to go to Saint-Brieuc. The trip is going well. I know that Yann lives it without monotony, with this deep pleasure of being alone and of navigating in a world which astonishes him, moves him and still seduces him. Mired in the calm of the Doldrums, it endures the anguish of all those who, in this place, cannot help but ask themselves the question: “And if the wind never returns? In the middle of the ocean, he suffered a waterspout which overturned his boat in a deafening din and made him think, for some time, that his last hour had come. As he tells me, he pulls a meaningful face, and I can’t help but smile. The last part of the journey, or so I managed to find out, from the Brazilian coasts to the Azores, was planned to last 45 days. It will last 62! He thinks he’s going to starve. In fact, he must have starved to death! The man who speaks to me today in Trébeurden is skin and bones. But, his eyes sunken in deep sockets, he is fed up.
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People who return from a long stay at sea almost always radiate something great, pure, passionate and exciting. Yann Quenet is no exception, he restores the adventure as the hot stones restore the heat at nightfall. I find it hard to leave him. The conversation is simple, disjointed. He always knows that I know. His eyes often sparkle. And then, suddenly, he speaks to me of the dull sadness of the end of a project. This moment of emptiness and confusion. He smiles: “My problem is that the Earth is round. Because here he is back at his starting point… In three years, Yann Quenet will have done 360 days at sea. He admits to being touched that people are talking to him, surprised too, and he is happy about it. “Now that I’m on the ground, in my universe, the others exist again because I spent a lot of time alone. The shy man who sailed around the world on a child’s boat is one of the great sailors that life has allowed me to meet. I find it hard to leave him. I have just seen a man whose life made me dream.