Sailing On Joshua

Bernard Moitessier’s yacht from the 1968 Golden Globe race almost perished in a Mexican hurricane. But she’s still sailing in Brittany and is coming to England next year

- Barry Pickthall

My teenage years were spent reading about pioneering sailors like Joshua Slocum, Bernard Moitessier and Robin KnoxJohnston. It was their hair-raising stories of huge seas, dramatic sunsets and being at one with the oceans that first inspired me to get immersed in the sport. The dream back then, of course, was to emulate their great voyages. That didn’t quite happen, but five decades on from the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, I’ve finally been rewarded with a God-given opportunity to sail on Moitessier’s yacht Joshua – a true Red Letter occasion that readers of Classic Boat will soon have the opportunity to share.

Now owned and maintained as a living museum piece by the French National Maritime Museum in La Rochelle, the distinctive bright red ketch is cared for by a team of Moitessier enthusiasts as passionate about their charge as the steam buffs who run the historic engines on my local Watercress Line.

In France, Joshua is treated as a national treasure and Moitessier as the father figure of French solo sailing. It has taken a year of planning to gain permission from the French Government for her to be sailed over to England in 2018 to join the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the 1968/9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. Joshua and her enthusiastic crew have been given a month-long licence to return to Plymouth in June next year for the start of the 2018 Golden Globe Race. It is here that Classic Boat readers will get the opportunity to sail on her and two other classics from that era, Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV and Lively Lady, made famous by Sir Alec Rose.

Moitessier is best remembered as the man who after rounding Cape Horn, turned his back on glory to continue to make a second circuit of the Southern Ocean. “Because,” he said, “I am happy at sea, and perhaps to save my soul.”