Bernard Moitessier
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People who write good books, songs and stuff
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Author of The Long Way and man who decided, when about to win a single-handed round-the-world yacht race, to hang it all and go round the world again. Eventually settled on an atoll near Tahiti.
Just the sort of extreme personality who might have got on — or might not of got on — with Klaus Kinski, you rather think. Imagine if they met! And sure enough, they did and indeed sailed together to Mexico — of course — and a characteristic trail of destruction ensued. To adapt Wikipedia:
In December 1982, Kinski chartered Moitessier and his yacht Joshua as Kinski was preparing for a role in a sailing film. The pair sailed from San Francisco and anchored off the beach at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. There was a freak onshore storm. Joshua dragged her anchor, collided with another yacht, lost her mast, and then beached along with 25 other yachts, and filled with sand. Moitessier spent days trying to dig her out but the salvage costs were too great, so he sold her as a wreck for $20. On a full moon high tide, a trawler towed and a bulldozer pushed the yacht back into the sea and she floated free.
We’d like to think the “sailing film” Kinski was preparing for was Fitzcarraldo but, alas, the dates don’t quite match (the accident happened on December 8th 1982; The film was released nine months earlier) and it seems that Kinski never made his sailing film. But the story of how the accident happened is deserves a film of its own.
Moitessier’s official story, repeated in his autobiography, is that as the storm blew up, and Moitessier struggled to save the situation, Kinski became quarrelsome, Moitessier order him off the boat, Kinski refused to go — well, you can just imagine, can’t you. Did Moitessier pull a flare-gun on him?
The reality, as retold by Charles Doane,[1] was that when Lyn and Larry Pardey fetched up in Cabo San Lucas to cover the incident for Sail Magazine, Moitessier instantly confessed that he and Kinski had been up in a hotel room partying their brains out while the Joshua was driven ashore untended, but later managed to persuade them to go with the fictional account, which makes much better copy!
They don’t make ’em like that any more. Either of them.