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intensified. The waves grew nightmarishly large, as high between trough and crest as eight-storey buildings, sweeping faster over the sea and carrying the boat unstoppably with them, until Moitessier believed that despite all his preparation and reading and techniques,
Joshua
was on the point of being overwhelmed.
    The awful truth now hit him:
Joshua
might be the perfect cruising boat for trade wind seas, but she was fatally out of place in the Southern Ocean, in the storm in which she now found herself. Disaster, inescapable, loomed.
    But Moitessier’s mind recoiled at the conclusion that
Joshua
could not make it where other boats – good boats but no better, he finally believed, than his own – had come through. At this desperate moment, when he felt his boat to be on the point of foundering, he thought of another boat, another book, another sailor: the Argentine Vito Dumas, who had sailed alone around the world in 1942–3 aboard a double-ended ketch,
Lehg II
, a yacht with a shape very like
Joshua
’s, but at 31 feet long, considerably smaller. Dumas’s book,
Alone Through the Roaring Forties
, is another in the pantheon of must-read classics that deal with Southern Ocean sailing, and Moitessier remembered that Dumas claimed to have carried at least a small staysailwhile running before the wind in
all
weather – in the worst of weathers – clearly therefore running at speed,
not
slowing down, in conditions such as these.
    Then a wave caught
Joshua
, not directly astern, but partly slewed around at an angle, and despite all the lines and weight dragging in the water, she was carried forward at fantastic speed. Yet instead of plunging down and burying her bows in the wave’s trough, the wind heeled
Joshua
over on her side, so that she planed like a water ski along the surface of the breaking wave. The wave passed harmlessly beneath the boat, and Moitessier had discovered Vito Dumas’s secret.
    â€˜Quick!’ he shouted to Françoise. ‘Take the helm for two seconds.’
    He grabbed his Opinel, the little wooden-handled French pocket knife with a steel blade that keeps a wonderful edge, climbed out on deck, and quickly cut away all five trailing lines.
    Back at the helm, he immediately noticed the change. Gone was
Joshua
’s sluggishness. No longer a sitting duck to be pounded and swept by the great seas, she now raced away before them. He ran the boat downwind as before, but as each wave approached, he gave the wheel a slight turn at the last minute and took the wave at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees. The wind hit her side, heeled her over, and off she flew, planing across the surface of each wave. The speed gave her rudder greater control and she responded instantly to the helm when the wave was past as Moitessier brought her stern into the wind again. The enormous waves, their apparent force reduced by
Joshua
’s speeding away from them, now rolled harmlessly beneath her quarter.
    The storm lasted six days and six nights. Bernard Moitessier steered through more heavy weather, and learned more about handling it, in those six days than most sailors do in a lifetime: a compression of experience that turned him into a master mariner in a single week; a man who had spent a short eternity at the furthest reach of all sailors’ fears.

    Four months later, the Moitessiers dropped anchor in Alicante, Spain, their first stop, 14,216 miles from Tahiti. Without intending to, trying simply to get home fast because they missed the kids, they had made the longest nonstop voyage in a yacht to date – a world record, and by way of the dreaded Horn.
    Moitessier very quickly wrote another book, his second, about their voyage,
Cap Horn à la voile
(titled in English:
Cape Horn: The Logical Route)
, which was published in time for France’s premier boat show, the Salon Nautique. It became a huge best-seller. In France, where long-distance sailors enjoy the sort of movie