In August 2019, the Allures 44 Opale crossed the Northwest Passage. The success encountered on this 4500 mile route is the culmination of years of passion for sailing in the far North by Marc Pédeau and Bénédicte Michel, the discreet authors of this performance. Read part one here.
It doesn’t cross one’s mind to compare the merits and courses of explorers from centuries past, most of whom remain famous – if only, simply because their names or those of their vessels can be found on the geographical maps of the Arctic region – and who were heading official expeditions with the support and funding of states or powerful armaments, with the contemporary, modest yet well executed, blue water cruising project by a telecommunications engineer who, freshly retired, finally sees the possibility to accomplish with his loved ones an arctic dream that he has nurtured for years.
It goes without saying that the development of yachting that started in the 20th century, the vast improvement of communication and localisation devises, along with the deployment of weather and glacier monitoring and forecasting (see note below), have made this crossing much more practicable in 2019 than in the glorious – and as we just saw, somewhat cursed – era of the great discoverers. And if we add to all this the clearly perceptible effects of global warming on the levels of ice cover, with a scientifically attested and highly documented disappearance of the Arctic ice pack, we can only conclude that this is not a feat, and that the success of the Opale is not that extraordinary after all. And yet.
Marc Pédeau’s very discreet profile conceals a strong personality, in which determination is combined with competence without the need to show off. Let’s just say that our man is not the type to give lessons and boast about his actions, but rather to share his experiences with a mixture of generosity, precision and restraint. While it is not uncommon to observe among some boaters an attraction for sailing as such, more than for the destinations it allows them to reach, it seems to us that Marc Pédeau oscillates between these two trends. On the one hand, he says, “I love the sailing technique, I love the navigation, the tuning of the boat, the ability to move it forward to the best of its possibilities“. On the other hand, he says he has always felt “a strong attraction for the boreal regions”, and very quickly became convinced that a well-designed and carefully steered sailing boat was the ideal way to satisfy his desire to discover the northern latitudes.
Forty years of sailing with his club, the International Cruising Group (gic-voile.fr), and with his family have led Marc and his companion Bénédicte to the coasts of Norway, Iceland, Spitzbergen and Greenland. This solid sailing experience played a central part when, along with retirement, came time to acquire a boat and to embark on this expedition, the ultimate goal for a passionate enthusiast of both sailing and high latitudes.
Marc’s northern tropism is coupled with his attraction to the cultural dimension of the Arctic region, which he himself describes as “mythical“. A reader in his time of the geographer and explorer Jean Malaurie, he is aware of the close relationship that the Inuit have with their environment, as well as the increasing fragility of the Arctic world due to global warming.
Tuned in to the world around him, but above all a passionate sailor, Marc was also a reader, from the age of twenty, of the Dutch sailor Willy de Roos who, in 1977, was the first modern yachtsman to complete the Northwest Passage. De Roos sailed the route single-handedly in one season on his 13-metre steel cutter Williwaw. And there is every reason to believe that the publication in 1979 of Willy de Roos’ book “North-West Passage” (published by Hollis & Carter in the UK) – part of every marine library worthy of the name – had a decisive and long-lasting effect on Marc.
All these reasons explain why attempting the North-West Passage on one’s own yacht seemed a logical project to Marc Pédeau, who states: “This mythical route represents an ultimate itinerary, a culmination of the very notion of navigation in the far North, to which we had already devoted quite a bit of time with Bénédicte, between Spitzbergen, Iceland and Greenland. This project seemed to us to be more accessible than the Antarctic, coupled with the perception that we would meet much less people on the outskirts of Nunavut than in Patagonia.”
Note: Some projections indicate that the melting of the ice – more or less rapidly depending on the sector – makes credible the possibility of a completely ice-free Northwest Passage for 2 to 4 months in the summer around 2100 (Arctic Council, 2009: 27).
