Owner of a house on the French Riviera since the 1960s, Jacques Brel already had a small sailboat. The discovery of his new, much larger boat, the Askoy, allowed him to embark on a round-the-world voyage that ended in Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, the "Land of Men".
Having abandoned the limelight in 1966, Brel aspired to an anonymous and above all quiet life. A plane pilot since the mid-1960s, trained in instrument flight, he came across the nautical world a few years later and quickly adopted it with the project of sailing around the world in mind.
He obtained the necessary experience for these projects and a sailing captain's license (the equivalent of our BPPV Voile or Captain 200 Voile) during a year of sailing between Europe and the West Indies on a sail training ship, the Korrig.
This experience gave him the opportunity to live aboard a sailboat for long weeks, to lose the reference points of time, to tie up and to experience this immense feeling of freedom, all the more powerful because at the time, once underway, there was no communication with the land.
The biggest sailing boat ever built in Belgium
In February 1974, he bought the Askoy II, a 20m yawl, the biggest sailing boat ever built in Belgium. This boat, very (too?) big and powerful for a couple, corresponded well to the will of the man to "get wet", to take risks in order to live with a big V, because Brel wants to go sailing with just his family.
Departure from Antwerp, direction the world!
He left Antwerp on July 24, 1974, with his partner Maddy and his daughter France, aboard the Askoy, to sail to the Canary Islands, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Horta in the Azores.
There, in the archipelago of eternal spring, a violent pain in the chest cruelly harasses him.
At the insistence of his wife, he returned to Brussels to be diagnosed (in addition to the leukemia he had suffered since childhood) with cancer of the left lung. Diagnosis immediately followed by the removal of a large part of this lung.
In spite of this heavy operation, Jacques Brel will not give up to continue his journey.
