Departure aboard Pen Duick VI
With this second episode of the film Cap Horn, Yves Hussenot, director and cameraman on board Pen Duick VI, shares with the public some incredible images. The crew members of the 16 yachts in the race are leaving for the longest and most dangerous stage: Auckland - Rio. They will sail in seas unknown to racing at the time, and round the famous Cape Horn.
And yet on the images of the start, it is not competitors in the manner of today that we discover, but rather young people with their elephant leg jeans, cigarettes in their mouths, who maneuver the sails without even hanging on. Another era and a completely different way of sailing. Yet the sea remains the same and so do its dangers.
Timeless South Seas
The images are impressive when you know how difficult it was to shoot with the equipment of the time. We discover the beginning of a fire on board Pen Duick VI, when the heating system's sheaths for the extreme cold catch fire.
We like to see familiar faces who still seem to be children, such as Philippe Poupon or Jean-Louis Etienne at the helm of the big black ketch. The first Equinoxe fleece jackets arrived.
We also come back to the setbacks of 33 Export skippered by Alain Gabbay, notably when he broke his boom, sailed using the spinnaker pole before succeeding in a repair that gave him victory in the second leg.
