The Pen Duick Saga

It is the designer Michel Joubert who recounts the following anecdote: "Bernard Nivelt and I were busy studying the design for the maxi Côte d'Or for the 1985 Whitbread. Eric Tabarly was closely following the development of our project. One day he asked us if it wouldn't be a good idea to use ketch rigging. Bernard and I looked at one another discretely as if to say: "what on earth is he on about ? He's got no idea…" Since Frer's grand flyer, all maxis had had sloop rigging and nobody saw any reason to change the status quo. Four years later, there were nothing but ketches on the start line for the round-the-world race, including the boat of the winner, Peter Blake. It was then that I finally realised just what a genius Eric Tabarly was, with a unique visionary nature shared by no other racer."

Even if he did not always have the means to fulfil his intentions, due to the fact that his ideas were often ahead of their time, the skipper of the Pen Duicks' often produced an impressive number of new innovations. They did not always come solely from him, of course. The plywood that would lead to the success of Pen Duick II had been popularised in the previous decade by Jean-Jacques Herbulot. Thanks to the SEAN workshops and the La Perrière shipyards, the advantages of aluminium construction were known long before Pen Duick III and the British had already tasted the pleasures of multihulls long before the arrival of Pen Duick V. Finally, the Monitor, which would prove to be the inspiration for the Hydroptere, had already climbed onto its foils at the beginning of the 1950s.

Eric Tabarly's genius was precisely the fact that he was able to take up ideas that had already been sketched out and enrich them with his own reflection. He was sufficiently passionate about maritime history not to be ignorant of anything and he knew how to renew the technological ideas left fallow by his contemporaries. He had a pragmatism in every event and experience which would rapidly become unique in the world of sailing. Added to this was a determining ingredient for the success of his enterprises: An intellectual and physical audacity that meant he feared no project, however iconoclastic. For the sailing world soon came to recognise and admire his non- conformity as regards matters to do with the sea !