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Join Date:Posts: 14641
Sailor who broke solo Arctic record ‘spent cosy nights in a hotel’
Yvan Bourgnon crossed the Northwest Passage on his catamaran in 2017
When the Franco-Swiss adventurer Yvan Bourgnon arrived in Greenland after crossing the Arctic Ocean he was lauded as a hero.
His tales of defying the cold, fighting off a polar bear and finding a path through the ice to become the first person to sail solo along the Northwest Passage without assistance dominated the media.
Next week, Bourgnon, 51, will be dragged before a Paris court in a case featuring claims that the 71-day crossing in 2017 was not quite as breathtaking as it seemed. The court will hear allegations that the adventurer spent more than a week in a hotel in the Canadian Arctic, received help from other seafarers and was towed by a Dutch motorboat for 90-odd miles.
Yvan Bourgnon says he did not claim to have entered the record books with his voyage
The claims will be aired in a dispute over video filmed for a documentary. The film director Pierre Guyot, 51, had equipped Bourgnon’s yacht, Ma Louloute, with six cameras.
But when he arrived in Nuuk, Greenland, in September 2017, the pair fell out. Lawyers for Guyot and for 10.7, the production company, are expected to tell the court that the footage failed to live up to Bourgnon’s death-defying descriptions. There were no images of the polar bear that he said climbed on board before fleeing when he fired his gun, or of his crossing of the iceberg-filled Bellot Strait.
Bourgnon claims his critics are nit-picking and says he never claimed to have won a place in the record books by being the first person to sail solo through it, only to have accomplished a “feat”.
“I slept in a hotel. So what?” he told Le Figaro. “Should I have abandoned [the adventure]?”
Robert Headland of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, removed the voyage from its official list of Northwest Passage transits after finding that for much of the trip Bourgnon “was not aboard his catamaran My Louloutte which was in tow, and otherwise assisted by other vessels.”
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Join Date:Posts: 14641
Not your standard BenJenBav design, which is fine, but very large pilothouse windows, none of the usual equipment you see on a transatlantic cruiser. Unusual stem post and transom more like a motorboat than a bluewater cruiser. She just looks a bit, special.
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