Alain Colas

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alain Colas (born September 16, 1943 in Clamecy (Nièvre) , † November 16, 1978 ) was a French skipper . He is the first to successfully circumnavigate the earth in a multihull boat. He was killed at sea off the coast of the Azores .

Alain Colas in the Manureva cockpit , a few days before the start of the first Route du Rhum regatta (1978)

Life

Alain Colas was born on September 16, 1943 in Clamecy, where his father ran the municipal ceramics factory. He went to school in Vanves and Auxerre until he graduated from high school in 1961, after which he studied English for a year in Dijon and later at the Sorbonne .

In 1966 he went to Australia , where he taught French literature at St John's College. It was there that he first came into contact with sailing in the Bay of Sydney . In 1967 he met Éric Tabarly , who was taking part in the Sydney-Hobart regatta . Tabarly offered him a place on his boat Pen Duick III for a passage as far as New Caledonia . Colas was so attracted to ocean sailing that he gave up his teaching job. May 1968 he met again in Lorient Tabarly, who was preparing an experimental multihull boat, Pen Duick IV , designed by the French architect André Allègre , for a one-handed transatlatics regatta . Colas spent the whole sailing season 1968–1969 with Tabarly and learned deep sea sailing from scratch. At the same time he published the first reports on sailing.

In 1970 he bought the Pen Duick IV from Tabarly with financial support from his family and the income from lectures . He sailed the Sydney-Hobart Regatta as a non-official participant in order to gain experience and knowledge with his boat. Then he sailed to Tahiti , wrote several reports on the Polynesian island world and met the Tahitian Teure Krause at the beginning of 1971, with whom he later had three children.

The victories

On June 17, 1972 he started from Plymouth on Pen Duick IV to the fourth English transatlantic one-handed regatta and on July 8, 1972 he won Newport in the USA, setting the old record with a time of 20 days, 13 hours and Far undercut by 15 minutes. France discovered in him a new, likeable sailing hero on an idiosyncratic route.

His next goal was to start the first circumnavigation of the world with one hand in a multihull boat. For this purpose, the Pen Duik IV , now renamed Manureva (Polynesian for "travel bird"), was structurally adapted to the difficult sea and weather conditions in the southern hemisphere. He started on September 8, 1973 from Saint-Malo , where he crossed the finish line on March 28, 1974, beating Sir Francis Chichester's old record by 32 days.

The first Whitbread race , a monohull team race, ran parallel to this race. Since then, Colas has been accused of having controlled his timing in order to benefit from the media hype surrounding the Whitbread race, although his multihull boat was subject to different criteria and had a higher speed potential. For Éric Tabarly , with the Pen Duik VI, this Whitbread race was a fiasco, he had to give up and there was a big discussion in France's sailing scene about the use of uranium as ballast on the Pen Duik VI ; this polemic in favor of Colas as the new sailing hero led to a permanent estrangement between Tabarly and Colas.

In 1975, Colas planned and began the construction of the four-master Club Méditerrannée , a 72-meter-long boat equipped with the latest technology, which was to take part in the 1976 Trans-Atlantic Race with one hand. On May 19, 1975 he suffered a serious accident on board the Manureva , in which his right ankle was severed by a Manureva anchor line. His foot was saved after 22 operations and Colas was able to follow the construction progress from his hospital bed. On February 15th the launch took place in Toulon. The race started on June 5, 1976 and Colas ran 7 hours and 28 minutes after Tabarly, his vehement opponent, in Newport on June 29 . Since he had to make a stopover in Terre Neuve due to technical problems caused by bad weather, Colas was moved to fifth place with a penalty.

1976-1977 he was with the Club Méditerranée as a representative of the French sailing culture in the USA and France.

Manureva
The Manureva trimaran a few days before take-off

In 1978 Colas took part in his last race on the "old" boat Manureva , a trimaran : The first Route du Rhum started on November 5th . His last radio sign of life came from November 16, 1978 near the Azores. In the following days, a hurricane that Alain Colas apparently life developed in this sea area with 35 years cost, possibly due to the construction of Manureva , built in contrast to modern boats in a composite still AG4 aluminum and not unsinkable was .

Aftermath and whereabouts of his boats

Alain Colas was a respected sailor who knew how to get the media and patrons excited about this sport. His four-masted sailor Club Méditerranée was technologically ahead of its time, there was use of wind, solar and water energy, satellite positioning, a forerunner of GPS and a mainframe computer on board.

In 1980, Bernard Tapie bought the abandoned Club Méditerranée , renovated it and put it back into service under the name Phocéa .

The disappearance of Alain Colas inspired Serge Gainsbourg to write the song "Manureva" in 1979 . His name was given to various schools, streets and squares in France.

Honors

  • Prix ​​Guy Wildenstein de l'Académie des sports (1972)
  • Prix ​​André de Saint-Sauveur de l'Académie des sports (1975)

bibliography

  • Alain Colas, Un tour du monde pour une victoire, Arthaud, 1972, 312 p.
  • Alain Colas, Cap Horn pour un homme seul, Flammarion, 1977, 269 p.
  • Jean-Paul Aymon, Patrick Chapuis, Gilles Pernet, Colas Terlain Vidal Tiercé de la mer, Paris, Solar, 1972, 254 p.
  • Jean-Paul Aymon, Alain Colas la mer est son défi, Fernand Nathan, 1977, 96 p.
  • Alain Colas Manureva ne répond plus ..., Paris, Sipe, 1978, 96 p.

Web links