Adventurers (part one)
Post #24: Jean Le Cam
As lead skippers of the 2024 Vendée Globe approach Point Nemo, the point on earth furthest from land, I cast back in my ‘Adventure’ diary to observations and philosophical ruminations recorded during the 2020-21 edition. Held every four years, this is the ultimate test for ocean sailors: solo, unassisted, non-stop, by wind alone around the world, from and to Les Sables d’Olonne in the French Vendée.
Imoca yachts can fly. Lifted above the surface on foils and dagger-boards they can exceed the speed of most ships, delicate yet resilient marvels of engineering.
Jean Le Cam, now 65, for two days led the pack during the first week, departing boldly from the fleet to run down the coast of the Western Sahara. This is his 6th edition. As such, he’s the informal dean or “Roi” of a community of sailors including those mentioned below: Charlie Dalin, Damien Seguin, Pip Hare, Maxime Sorel, Isabel Joschke, Samantha Davies, Boris Hermann, Kevin Escoffier, Clarisse Crémer, Miranda Merron, Benjamin Dutreux, Armel Tripon.
Anyone who follows the circumnavigation online vicariously lives these mariners’ trials and triumphs, catastrophes, despair, elation, endurance, and ingenuity.
(UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, is adjusted Greenwich Mean Time.)
Jean Le Cam. Solo Ocean Sailor. (01:25 UTC, 20 November 2020) In The Adventure, Giorgio Agamben writes:
The fact that it rains is something that happens, but this does not suffice to turn it into an event…. It is necessary that I perceive such a happening as happening to me…. It is easy to see here the traits of the adventure, which always and immediately involves the knight who is living it.”
Still, he asserts, adventure does not depend on its subject: “The adventure subjectivizes itself, because happening to someone in a given place is a constitutive part of it.” Pronouns “I” and “you”, and thus terms such as “here” and “now,” indicate enunciation, something that Emil Benveniste insists requires a subject. Gilles Deleuze concurs that the event/adventure must be sayable, requiring a teller to come into existence: “the event is not what happens (the accident), rather it is, in what happens, the pure expressible that signals and awaits us.”
Jotting these philosophical notes, my eye is drawn to the computer screen, an event unfolding a thousand miles off the Cape of Good Hope. The Imoca yachts hurtling south in the Vendée Globe are experiencing rough weather. Kevin Escoffier, skipper of ‘PRB’ has gone missing in a life raft with no means of communication.
He’s out there somewhere at night in 35 knot winds and five metre waves. His 60-foot vessel crumpled in half, sinking instantly. It has disappeared from the tracker. Chances of survival, even at best. Thoughts go to Montrealer Gerry Roufs who disappeared from the face of the earth near Antarctica during the 1996-97 Vendée Globe.
(21 November 2020, UTC 16:15) Veteran Jean Le Cam has fought his way back upwind. A report states he did locate Escoffier, but it was impossible to take him aboard. He’s further reduced sail but cannot again locate the raft. Darkness has fallen. Many hours have passed. Other skippers have diverted to assist. On the tracker I see them tacking back and forth seeking the tiny raft.
This is the black trough of adventure sailing.
…Race directors pause the search, now covering a long downwind triangle, yet Le Cam persists in the pitch dark, scanning for a tiny light atop Kevin’s raft. In these entangled fates a symmetry: in VG 2009-10 the now sunken PRB was sailed by Vincent Riou to rescue Jean Le Cam, sixteen hours confined inside his upturned hull off Cape Horn.
… (21 November 2020, UTC 01:28) A tweet from the VG: Le Cam has Escoffier safely aboard in above 35 knot winds and 6 metre seas. An immense feat of seamanship; true heroism.
…Agamben, by way of Marie de France’s Bisclavret, argues that to pass back and forth from man to animal is “the adventure of adventures.” When life departs from language it can only be re-articulated by becoming human again. Escoffier on Skype from Yes We Cam!’s wave-tossed cockpit struggles to normalize nearly eight hours on the raft. Le Cam flatly describes slamming ahead at 1.5 knots under triple-reefed mainsail, a single pinprick of light emerging briefly on a wave. The agitated sea “a battlefield.” No ‘real time’ language for these feats.
… (1 December 2020) Georg Simmel wrote that adventure, par excellence, must be understood as romantic adventure, with Casanova as its archetypal hero.
Well. Maybe.
I’d offer that adventure is too readily consigned to the province of youth. I’d add that the purest expressible adventure surely must be philosophy itself, a quest not to be attempted by the young.
…Charlie Dalin, jostled in his bunk crossing the Indian Ocean; Apivia foiling on autopilot through pitch darkness at 30 knots (55kph), percussive hull impacts, wind rush, is pure bebop.
…Lonely Planet’s Atlas of Adventure sets out a contemporary glossary: abseiling (rappelling), bikepacking (all-terrain cycling/backpacking), SUP (stand-up paddleboarding), trad climbing, and XC (cross-country biking).
No Imoca sailing, but certainly bouldering (free rock climbing), coasteering (scrambling, wild swimming and free climbing in a tidal zone), kloofing (canyoning in south Africa), parahawking (combining paragliding with falconry), and skyrunning (mountain runs on peaks above 2000m).
Where in the Atlas lies Simmel’s terrain of romance? Adventurers’ now document on social media their prowess in these modern quests. Has adventure lost its medieval understanding? The obscure object of the quest slips out of view. For both philosophers and extreme sports aficionados, the very notion of adventure as beyond enunciation seems unthinkable. Yet, what if its sheer terror mutes all expression? What if an adventure’s most precious quality is its private existence?
…Damien Seguin, one-handed Imoca sailor, Paralympian, arrives in the Sables d’Olonne finishing his first Vendée Globe. Asked what was most remarkable in his adventure, he frowns: “It isn’t like that. It’s life. I can’t put it into words.”
…At his press conference, practical Benjamin Dutreux shakes his head: “I’m a competitor, not an adventurer.”
… A remarkable finish for 34-year-old French engineer Maxime Sorel. Stayed up late to watch him cross the line and duck into les Sables d’Olonne, barely ahead of the winter gale blasting towards that leeward shore. Courageous, risky navigation pressing hard around Finisterre and skimming across the Bay of Biscay at top speed.
Though personable, the youthful Sorel wouldn’t have been my pick as the skipper best able to express his or her adventure. Yet, his post after twenty-five days at sea, on December 3rd, 2020, was touching and perceptive:
One has already begun one’s interior voyage, already questioning oneself, It seems that one has even already grasped the responses. One has entered an unknown universe. ‘The Great South’, ‘Le royaume des ténèbres’. The blood freezes, no? The few sailors who have been here speak of something unique, cold, grey, hard, while seemingly falling in love with it.
In his post-finish interview, he described that ‘interior passage’ as rounding “the Fourth Cape.” That is, in addition to the three great capes necessary to circumnavigation —Good Hope, Leeuwen, and the Horn, there is a psychological rounding. That entails bare life, “becoming an animal,” he says, to survive towering waves and gusts up to 65 knots. A video posted after broaching and nearly capsizing in one such storm: I see terror in Maxime’s eyes. Perhaps Simmel misapprehends the love object when characterizing adventure as essentially romantic. Isn’t it the terrible captivating Medusa?
… (25 February 2021) Jean Le Cam’s sprint finish in a storm, dangerously straining a seriously delaminated hull: “Only by experiencing the bad (le mal) can we understand the good.” Blasting Johnny Hallyday’s Mal he’s in a trance dancing on deck, trolling down the harbour channel. His rapport with the Medusa. A lifetime overcoming terrors of solo adventure with fragile means.
An edgy presser. What is the ‘meaning’ you reporters clamour for? Jean frets at how utterly inaccessible it is to them, that they themselves never could articulate it. Instead, “one must cry, it is necessary to cry,” there are circumstances in which the adventure cannot be expressed in words.
…I wonder, could these ‘inexpressibles’ be what binds the solo adventurers together? No words describe what they share. Perhaps being “sayable” is not adventure’s sufficient condition after all.
…The poised, valiant speedster Isabel Joschke (who completed the voyage hors de combat after her keel hydraulics failed) closes her press conference embracing Le Cam. Wordlessly, they dance slowly to the Doobies’ Long Train Running.
…Armel Tripon pursues a common theme among the solo-around-the-globe skippers: “it’s been my dream since I was a child.” The grounding of adventure in childhood’s imagination validates the commitment, no matter what age.
…The young Clarisse Cremer, now holding the solo-sailing-round-the-world record for a woman, is sanguine: in the adventure, the possibility of failure remains present until the very end.
… Returning to life ashore, Miranda Merron dreads exchanging “absolute freedom and personal responsibility for land constraints that are hard to accept.” Pure adventure would be a perfect freedom, but one that assumes all risks. Miranda has done that, in a real way. Unable to secure marine insurance, she sailed without it.
…A recurring theme: creatures swimming or flying alongside. For Damien Seguin crossing the Southern Ocean, a whale pod surfaces, tracking beside him for five minutes at 25-30 kmh. Albatrosses figuring in videos of Boris Hermann, Isabel Joschke, Pip Hare, and Samantha Davies likewise ‘reveal themselves’ far from land as if to remind the sailors of the inexpressible part of their quests. They report feeling insignificant, in awe of nature; perhaps experiencing actual human scale. Moreover, in these moments with porpoises, dolphins, flying fish, jellyfish, stray land birds, the fever of competition abates.
…Writer Paul Theroux on Zoom from Hawaii offers a Polynesian saying: “days spent on the water are not counted in our lives.”
There is, in the case of a sailing vessel—a vessel well-sailed—a ‘felicity’ that approaches the very fullest potential of human nature. Could it be said generally of ‘adventure’ that it quests to fulfill that potential? At least to close on it asymptotically?
The skippers speak of a oneness of their yachts with nature, a unity of wind, sea and sail in fine balance. Grace, felicity, the product of human skills and potentialities. (Also, grief witnessing floating plastics, pollution, stressed marine life.) It is in this sense that one can posit adventure, true adventure, as an impossible approach to paradise.
…Asked at the trophy presentation how he’s been ‘changed’ by the rescue of Escoffier, Le Cam shrugs. With Kevin behind him, he mutters, “well, not as much as if I hadn’t found him.”
Encoded in that question is an insistence that the adventurer be ‘transformed’ by his or her experience. Jean Le Cam articulates a conservative inversion of that requirement to show that the true adventurer remains ‘at sea’, positioned selflessly in relation to the event.
Aged fifteen, Simone Weil launched her intense philosophical adventure. From her First Notebook, an aperçu that might bring a smile to the mariners:
Tool: a balance between man and the universe…. The forces of nature infinitely surpass…. And yet the sailor in his boat balances equally against the infinite forces of the ocean. (Remember that a boat is a lever.) At every moment the helmsman—by the weak but directed power of his muscles on the tiller… maintains an equilibrium with that enormous mass of air and water. There is nothing more beautiful than a boat.