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My trade has not always been boatbuilding, although it is an activity which I have practised (by model making) since my childhood with my brother Gilles. Contrary to him, who went into ship carpentry, I completed a traditional academic route and went into a career in Information Technology after a Master in Business Law in France and a MBA at Loyola U in Chicago. After 25 years of a career which gave me the chance to spend a few years in the United States and in the Netherlands (2 great maritime cultures!), I finally found myself in a dead end with IT and corporate life. And then I decided to venture into boatbuilding. Observing the work of Gilles for 30 years, I knew that I was not qualified to go into traditional ship carpentry, but I wanted nevertheless to build "beautiful" boats, therefore boats made of wood.
My youthful navigations, always with Gilles, first occured in three places: on Versailles's "Grand Canal" (if you please !), on the pond in the Tuileries garden of the Louvre Palace, and the one in the Luxembourg garden, where we came on Sundays to "float" our model ships, which we both built in an almost obsessive way. In those days when radio-control was not yet available to penyless model builders, we would launch from one side of the pond, and then run full speed to the other side, hoping that the model would make it there...
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Happily, vacations would come back soon enough and navigations "for real" could be pursued in the waters around the island of Bréhat, in Northern Brittany. Our family had (and still has) a vacation home there, and there we would go spend every school break. First, we borrowed the family dinghy, an horrible carvel planked thing, heavy and leaky, in which we learned to row and scull, then there was a plywood pram, infinitely lighter (with 12 meter tides, the ability to carry our boat to the water was paramount!) Then came the "Berder", our first sailboat, an 8 foot lugger sailed dinghy inherited from our big sister who had outgrown it, who herself had gotten it NEW from our parents for her fine academic results (we never did get a new boat: how can anyone be amazed that out academic achievements remained... modest!) Today, at the ripe age of 45, the "Berder" is still used by Gilles as a pram: a nice witness of the durability of quality plywood...
Then came the "Mousse", a larger sailing dinghy, almost a racer, largely amortized by our bigger brothers (we were number 4 and 5 in a family of 8), who had themselves gotten it second hand, and then we got (also from them) another racing dinghy, a "Lanaverre 490", contender of the famous 505 in the French Sailing Federation, which they at last had gotten new! Then we went on to cruisers (this term has dramatically changed in meaning nowadays, if you look at what went into this category in the late 60s and early 70s!) on the "Muscadets" (Harlé design) of the Club Nautique de Bréhat, today extinct, then on the family Dufour "Sylphe", or on rented "Ecume de Mer" (Finot design built by Mallard). Thoses cruises were essentially coastal navigation around Bréhat, with frequent excursions to the Channel Islands around Brittany down to the Golfe du Morbihan.
The parenthesis of "cruisers" closed, that of windsurfing as well (after making first place in the "Amateur" class of the "Windy City Windsurfing Championship" at Chicago in 1985), I returned to navigations in Bréhat's rocks and shoals with the new "Kerenoc", an 18 foot lugger built by Gilles for his father (as replacement of a similar boat, lost to rot after WWII), or with a Hobbie Cat 16, or even with a kayak. The latter "vehicule" gives the utmost pleasure of this navigation in a few feet or centimeters of water, letting one toil at perfecting counter-current science in the privilegied setting of the Bréhat archipelago.
Coming back to boats is thus a way to "go full circle", except that the models of childhood have been replaced by slightly larger boats, in which I try to achieve the same simplicity, efficiency and, most of all pleasure for their masters.
I leave my Picardy to stay at Gilles boatyard in Paimpol, very near Bréhat, where I build "Arwen" (where does this name come from?) I learn from Gilles's teaching, who forces me to improve my design and even to take apart and rebuild : I find it a bit hard to have to learn so much at my age! But the result is there: even before touching water, Arwen is sold to one of Gilles's patrons, owner of a 25 ft Colin Archer and looking for a "compatible" tender. He kindly lets us take Arwen to the Grand PAvois boat show in La Rochelle (because the second hull slated to go is not ready!) Arwen is sold a second time to a South African family living aboard a catamaran (brought in a freight ship from their country an exposed at the show) on the condition that they want to have it now, because they leave on a Europe cruise at the end of the show... The first owner accepting the later delivery a the second hull, I come back to finish it in the fall of 2006 and it is launched in November.
Successful building and selling the two dinghies "validate" my project and I start the procedure to create my own boatyard. I decide to establish it in Picardy for logistic and family reasons, and drop my anchor next to the "Cité des mariniers" (Mariners Town) of Longueil-Annel. The story continues on the present web site... |
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