Milan Tribune
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The cape Horn are the winners and losers of the Vendée Globe

Charlie Dalin on board

Thee cape Horn would be, in any way, reach out to the marine for the welcome and as soon as the fire in the same movement. The solitaire has been waiting for a month expulsion to the Atlantic and the road to the waters less turbulent, warmer temperatures hoping to snag the trade winds from the east, to the north of the anticyclone of St. Helena.

Out of the vast palace to the wet and cold of the Pacific by the door of cape Horn, that is what is about to do the first two of the fleet (Yannick Bestaven and Charlie Dalin) in the night from Saturday to Sunday, in the face of gusts to 60 knots and waves of seven metres.

Yannick Bestaven (Master-Rooster IV) suffers from a lack of speed on a boat of 2015, but he had kept up, in these last forty-eight hours, a rate of fire sustained. Charlie Dalin (Apivia) on a foiler last generation, is expected to demonstrate his talents as a racer in the rise of the Atlantic on a boat faster than Bestaven. Dalin, who has managed to stay in front of the anticyclone, but at the price of a road north, has moved south-east to avoid the Horn.

“Cauldron of hell “

Thomas Ruyant (Linked-Out), again in third position, was himself awarded “the role of turkey of the farce “. The here in dunkirk is probably a reference to the “train “ that he failed, but perhaps also to the splendid race made by Damien Seguin (Apicil), escaped from the group of pursuers (The Cam, Herrmann, Joschke, Sorel) trapped in a low wind area. What makes Seguin, on an Imoca open of 2008, is truly breathtaking. So much for the table.

Here, at the Horn, count, it is said, the winners and losers of the Vendée. Here, there is no chance reconstituted, but the breath of a frosty air because of threats blind. Because crossing the Horn, it is to borrow the Drake passage, named after the English pirate Francis Drake, who discovered it in 1576 the maritime corridor between the archipelago of the South Shetlands, next to Antarctica and the Archipelago of the Land of Fire, next to America.

This joy that fear is precisely by 55 ° 58’ 48’ South and 67 ° 17’ 21’ West. At the foot of the high at point pelee in the cape, the long swell from the west to the east, in a perpetual motion, almost hypnotic, stumbles with violence on the shoals, which date back to 3 000 m to 80 m, often raising a sea of huge, long real tomb of a maritime merchant ships until the beginning of the XXe century.

At cape Horn, the grammar of the story marine is built based soup, rotting, smell of coal tar, sails (cotton, stiffened by the cold

Here, the grammar of the story marine is built based soup, rotting, smell of coal tar, sails (cotton, stiffened by the cold, or cargoes of phosphate chilean en route to Europe.

It will be necessary to wait until 1968 and the Golden Globe for this myth enhanced by the adventure finds its vitality and meaning, for us earthlings, a new reserve of will, the accumulation of daring and the ultimate capital of courage on boats, of course, four times faster than a century ago.

It is especially by the end of the triple test, which has long swallowed all the navies of the world : Hope, Leeuwin and Horn, the last portion of the movement of the Vendée Globe.

It is probably this image that one carries with oneself when one is launched for the first time in such an adventure (Tripon, Bestaven, Dalin, Seguin, Joschke, Herrmann, Cream, Dutreux, Sorel, etc).

Jean-Luc Van den Heede (twelve passages of the Horn), written after the first Vendée Globe in 1989, in A Globe of force of the wrist (Filipacchi, 1990) : “By the time I leave it behind me, and all the way to the Antarctic, (…) I must admit that I trembled. I don’t put anything above the condition of marine. Nothing. “

VDH also speaks of “cauldron of hell “. The terran imagine immediately vats of foundries bubbling. Here, the sea can be four floors. With a defect in the floor.

This is what live already the first, then that they were about to enter the corridor. Fear ? Scared ? Scared, slice Bestaven : “She materializes in the reading of the weather files that indicate by anticipation the fate. Bubbles scarlet red : more than 50 nodes. In truth, this fear is essential, because it means vigilance. “ Low ceiling, clouds of sea, wind gusts to 60 knots : the forecasts are consistent.

“There’s nothing consistent in the Pacific “

But for all that, the “compliance” of the Pacific, as the solitary saw as a gift made to the speed, as specified by Yannick Bestaven at the World in a voice communication, seems in nothing to the natural identity :

“There’s nothing consistent in the Pacific to what I had read, or that I had been told ! Not long slips. In addition, since the end of December, everything is waves and wind through the. And the depression is expected is not in the right direction… “

The span of the largest ocean has not taken place, except for Armel Tripon (L’occitane-en-Provence), which seems, to him, to be mounted in a quick for three weeks.

If nature provides the decor, if the race provides the men, we can say that the trajectories of the Imoca look like in the Big South with a marquetry in a herringbone pattern.

Bestaven had, from the outset, prior to departure, highlighted the dual membership of the rider off the performance but also the journey. For this, it was equipped with a book to lay down his impressions. Impossible to write anything “over this time “. “Since the rescue of Kevin [Escoffier, le 30 novembre]not really had the courage to get back into it again. Too difficult, not quiet, not the heart of it. The pages are blacked out, but I’ll know I can read it ? “we entrusted it.

“There is not a day where I say to myself : “But what is-what are you doing here ?” “(Romain Attanasio, ” Pure-Best-Western “)

Yet, fifty-four days later, he does not withdraw a word to his remarks made at the end of October, incorporating :

“The Vendée is a journey and inevitably at the bottom of the self. A trip to the country of difficulties. A journey without respite which plunges us into the story, that of the men who have paved the way to navigation on board vessels, without any of the technological means at our disposal. “

And remember the famous saying of Michel Desjoyeaux (twice winner) : “A fuck a day on the Vendée. Well, it is pretty close… “

Attached to Thursday, 31 December, Romain Attanasio (Pure-Best-Western) is a loner who has never seen in a distorting mirror. He is also the man who touches the heart of the matter. It often reaches to the point and always with a polite exquisite, in spite of fifty-four days of fast-paced by this life of a mammal, while apologizing for the terrible sound on board :

“At this moment I think my first edges, a teenager on a lake in winter. I felt void and this added even more to the pain of the report. In fact, there is not a day where I say to myself : “But what are you doing here ?” “

And now he laughs at himself. Attanasio is seen crossing the Horn (doubled for the first in 2016) Wednesday, four days after the first.

The Vendée Globe would be for him a diagram of a sawtooth : “I say to myself everyday that I am an ordinary bloke who is going to do each day was something extraordinary. Sometimes, I say to myself : “But why this job ?” Or the variant : “never”, especially when you vomit, refrigerated. “

And, once on land, will say that we do the there will resume, while taking the necessary steps to leave, “because basically, it is my job, like that of a cyclist “.

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