October 2013

Hello everyone,

It's the first time in forty years that it happens to me...
Of course I did sometimes have to ask via VHF for a buddy's help to pull me out of a bad spot or help me liberate my boat from some misplaced sandbank ... But this is the first time I've ever had to worry more seriously ...

I had just entered, at the end of the tide, the lagoon of Makemo atoll , and crossed the western part of the lagoon, carefully avoiding dozens of coral heads, or "bommies", which lie just underwater ; barely visible at this early hour, they stood out well on the screen of the modern software we use to navigate on the pictures captured on Google Earth ; as I approached my destination, the last reported rock behind me , I made the mistake of going down for a minute inside Banana Split to heat some water for a cup of tea, carefully monitoring the software's window ... Nothing in sight, everything is clear ... When suddenly I hear a terrible scraping noise , and Banana Split's two hulls become immobilized , incomprehensibly : I jumped on the bridge and discovered that a tiny obstacle, which I had hitherto escaped, a sort of mushroom made of dead coral less than ten meters in diameter, rising vertically from depths of over 40 meters, had taken Banana Split hostage; there was no way I could move forward nor backward, and the tide was ebbing fast ...

To top it off , the weather forecast heralded the beginning of a period of seriously bad weather, and, perched on my piece rock, I had reason to worry.

That's when I called to the rescue friends from the village of Makemo , and soon saw arriving fast a boat equipped with 2x300 HP ... It tried to refloat me, but it was in vain, as the tide was already down ; I spent the night on my perch , the sea more agitated by the hour, banging the boat's hulls against the rock ; in the morning , another boat came, that did not succeed either, but the five Paumotu who were on board came to give me courage , to break small blocks of rock on which my hulls were stuck... and that's when what I had seen as a curse proved to be in fact a blessing : bad weather : wind gusts over 35 knots built up waves that got higher and higher on the usually calm lagoon waters , the boat would take off by two foot and fall back heavily on its pedestal , while the waves were slamming the side of the hull , sending spray up to 10 ft high ... And my paumotu friends kept encouraging me, swearing that, with both engines full astern, the boat was slowly moving ... and suddenly with a random series of good steep waves, rose a great shout , the boat had been freed from the hold of the bommie (which we call "patate", or potato in French)... We celebrated at our next anchoring spot, I vowed I would now trust a little less technology ( in fact the trap that was laid for me was so tiny that I could only see it on the software's window by zooming in very close ) , and I am once again especially pleased to have chosen a thick plate aluminum boat ( a process called " strongal "), as a fiberglass or plywood hull would not have withstood the shocks ...

So thank you to all those who came to help me , I promise to be more careful next time, to trust technology, but to verify ; but, as famous French sailor Bernard Moitessier said of the Tuamotu islands "Paradise is at this price " ... it was on his advice that I chose a metal boat ... and he was right : a quick dive helped me to see that the hulls had not suffered , not the slightest bump! Well, obviously the paumotu friends who usually call me "Do not touch the sea " (from the title of one of my songs, " Touchez pas à la mer", well known in Polynesia) will call me for some time,"Do not touch the potato"... but all that matters is I got out of it without harm ...