Anecdotes about the boat
The Hermione is today the largest wooden boat sailing in the world" In armadas, tall ships have steel hulls. Even the Belem, which is a beautiful boat, has a steel hull." reveals François Asselin.
Today, but especially then, Hermione had an impressive characteristic. Despite its imposing weight and volume, the frigate was capable of reaching high speeds for its time. " It is a three mast of which the largest is 57 meters, the sail area is 2 200 m2 and already, at the time it was possible to reach beautiful speeds. We know from the logbook study that it was quite common to make trips between 10 and 12 knots in average speed, so we assume that there were peaks. This is quite considerable, considering that it is a boat weighing nearly 1,000 tonnes. For the time it was incredible!" Apart from its beautiful sailing speed, the Hermione also possesses good maritime qualities. If we base ourselves on the navigations that the frigate has already made, only under sail, notably by going to Brest and Bordeaux, these are taking place in an impressive way. " Captain Yann Cariou is completely captivated by the maritime quality of this boat. It's very impressive, he has never experienced this in his 35 years of sailing career. We realize with this replica of the Hermione that these were boats that were extremely accomplished."
Anecdotes about the construction of the Hermione
To build a wooden boat, the materials chosen must have a rounded shape to make it more aesthetic. " It is necessary to find woods in the forest that are naturally curved for the room to which they will be destined. It is necessary to avoid cutting the wire of the wood otherwise one loses mechanical resistance "explains François. For Hermione, it was wood in quantity that was needed, so the company selected hundreds of m3 of curved wood to be able to carry out the construction. " When we arrived to receive the first cut of wood we had selected, the loggers had cut all the curves in the middle. We had to go back up the chain to be able to make our needs understood. »
A similar story took place with a beautiful oak piece, quite imposing and curved too. As the transporter loads, it realizes that the curve exceeds and then decides to cut what exceeded. " Everything was very out of the ordinary and very atypical on this site, so we had to go upstream from the exploitation of the woods and oaks, in particular, to be sure that on arrival we would be delivered the raw material we needed. We had to reproduce a process chain that had completely disappeared."
Complicated but beautiful human relationships
On the site, there was no doubt about the technical part"I had the chance to be surrounded by an extraordinary technical team" but the hardest thing to manage was to keep up humanly over the duration of the site. For the time being, the Hermione project lasted 17 years, and not everything is always rosy" It's kind of like a couple, there are days with and days without." The protagonists, the association on one side and the Asselin company on the other, had to get along well to be able to work under the best conditions, except that here, we were not talking about a construction site of a few months"It was complicated because sometimes we did not agree on choices but we managed to advance and to pass over these human difficulties to keep the common objective which was to build the Hermione and to see it sail" To sum up, François Asselin describes the situation very well:"Finally, the most complicated, but also the most beautiful, was the human aspect
"A defining moment in my professional life"
Even if he hasn't had the opportunity to sail on it yet, François feels a little pinch in his heart since the construction was completed. And in 17 years, he had time to build a beautiful relationship with the frigate. " I have the app on my iPhone to find out where the Hermione is."
And when asked if this is his greatest achievement, he answers "I don't know if this will be our greatest success, but in any case it's an essential moment in my professional life. You really have a sense of accomplishment when you look at the Hermione. We're starting to realize that we're doing something bigger than ourselves and that this boat is really beautiful. I went to the stopover in Bordeaux and when you see the public welcome, there is a lot of emotion, it's very impressive, people are very moved to see this achievement because the boat is really beautiful
It will end with this motto" When you hold hands, hold on, persevere, you can do beautiful things."
