July 2017

Wonderful summer to you all !

While I'm waiting from my gal Francette to join me, so we can return to our preferred anchoring spots in the Tuamotu islands, one of the jobs I had to do, in my little office (the one I filmed with the late little drone), was an article about Islands for a French magazine called Valeurs actuelles.


For the two coming months, I thought you might enjoy reading this paper. Here is the first part « Mad about islands »; the second part « the dust specks of an empire », will come on August 1st.
I wish you all a fantastic summer, to fulfill your dreams, especially if they are dreams of islands.
Antoine

I'm mad about Islands
I've got islands under my skin
No land matters for me me if it is not surrounded by water ...

I was born on an island (not just any island, Madagascar) from a father born on an island (not just any island, Corsica); At the age of three, I left with my family for another French t§erritory, a tiny archipelago off Quebec, Saint Pierre and Miquelon. On the way we discovered the island where stands the statue of Liberty, the island of Manhattan, the island of Montreal. We lived six years in St. Pierre, where it was easier to find by the roadside a dried cod than a wildflower. To see a tree, one had to reach the neighboring island, Langlade, where one even couldfind a river, seals and wild horses.

With such promising beginnings, I might have been mad about islands from my earliest youth, and yet, from nine to twenty-two, too busy, alas, becoming an adult, I ignored them; In 1967, though, while a very stressful first year in show business had made me want to run away for a moment, it was on an island (a Caribbean island of which I knew nothing British Antigua, North of Guadeloupe) where I had taken refuge for a few weeks ... before changing course, to completely changing direction and isolate me (from the Latin isola, island) in a farm, lost among the moors and forests of the The Massif Central. Even at the age of thirty, when I finally started sailing around the world, it was not the paradise islands that attracted me, I was targeting the continents, the big cities, the festivals, Dakar, Abidjan, Rio de Janeiro; I wanted to go up rivers of Africa or America ... and then islands happened to be on my route.

The first, as beautiful as its name, was called Prince's Island, it had only acquired its independence from Portugal twelve days before, and I was suspected of being a spy for the CIA, and forbidden to land ... until I was asked to bring back to the island's capital, São Tome, the stranded pilots of the tiny local airline; In exchange, I was welcomed as a savior, taken to visit the most beautiful spots of the island - this is where I took my first picture to trigger dreams, that of Banana beach, round and golden like a ripe banana . On the day of my departure, the mayor of the island, on his bike, hailed me, "Do not leave, Seu Antão, stay living with us. "

A few thousand miles away, in the center of the South Atlantic, a tiny piece of French land awaited me, on a British island: in the center of St. Helena, the house where Napoleon died, and the little wooded valley where he rested before they brought him back to the Pantheon, both belong to France, and a consul enamored of the memory of the fallen Emperor watches over these mythical places. The islanders were so nice that here too I dreamed of setting up for a long time.

Since then, the passion of the islands has left me no more, I sailed on my sailboats two and a half times around the world, focusing more and more on the islands, from the smallest (a tiny "motu" in Polynesia , which we can circle in just fifteen minutes) to the biggest: Madagascar, New Zealand, Cuba, where we've just - this is my seventh visit to this island since 1968 - been shooting footage that will constitute our next documentary .

In the meantime, I only dream of islands. I even spent twenty-two years based, during my return to France for tours of conferences with Connaissance du Monde or for periods of promotion, on an island in the department of the Hauts-de-Seine, the quiet Île Saint-Germain. Which is only one of the small island wonders of our country.

True, France is, doubly, well endowed as far as islands are concerned. First, for those who fear leaving metropolitan France, there is a reasonable quantity of nearby islands, an integral part of the national territory; The Belgians and the Swiss do not have the possibility for half a day or a week to reach those places where time has been somewhat, if not stopped, at least slowed down: the islands of Batz, Molène , Seine, Belle-Île-en-Mer, Yeu, Aix Island (and the very secret Madam Island, where the imposing carrelets, fishing houses on stilts, were rebuilt by the 1999 storm), the Îles d'Or , off season, of course!), And, obviously, Corsica, fascinating from e Revellata Point to the smallest of the Lavezzi Islands. I had the chance to visit almost all of them to make a documentary, and I have kept dazzling memorie . If you have questions about the meaning of your life, if you do not have the time or the means to go to the end of the world, just take a bus, a ferry, find a lodging, a bed and breakfast. for and spend two or three days on an island on the French coast, you will come back a different person.



(To be followed next month)