presentation. Who am I ?

I come from Brittany, the birthplace of many famous sailors, Cape Horn skippers, corsairs and old salts of all kinds. I was born in Nantes in 1957 and like Jules Verne, a fellow nantais, born 140 years earlier, I listened to the hooting sirens of ships leaving port and dreamed of great expeditions.

tombstone of Bernard Moitessie in Brittany

Raised by my grandparents on boundlessly imaginative Breton legends, I immersed myself devoured ancient and modern adventure books. As a teenager, my heroes were not show business celebrities but adventurers, sailors and ethnologists, including Bernard Moitessier, Eric Tabarly and Paul-Emile Victor, among many others. At 15, I was fascinated by ancient history. The fact that I lived in a city twenty centuries old gave me the remarkable opportunity to work on Gallo-Roman excavations, and I became a member or Archeological Club of Brittany. My passion for ancient civilizations drove me to devour books about the American continent and sharpened my taste for great virgin spaces. I admit that if I would have liked to have lived 200 years ago, but not so much to live like a pioneer as to be an explorer pushing the limits of the unknown. But I also realized that feeding on dreams of past and nostalgic times was a trap to be avoided. At 20, without any precise goal beyond that of breaking out of my comfortable cocoon, I took my first step toward America, the continent that had first sparked my dreams of adventure, and left France for Canada...

In Montreal, I met Chantal, another young Frenchwoman three years older than me. Without hesitation, the two of us threw ourselves into a project as ambitious as our dreams : to drive a horse-drawn wagon across North America. What did it matter that we had neither money nor friends, knew nothing about horses or the country and spoke very little English ?

Despite encountering every difficulty imaginable, we would overcome obstacles knowing that this is the price you pay when you decide to become apprentice adventurers... The 16 months trip was our big initiation. With that unique experience behind me, I would apply the lessons I learned in continuing alone on my chosen path as a nomad.

We wrote a book, published in France "L'Amérique au Bout des Sabot''. Once the manuscript was written, my friend gave up the path of adventure and returned to France.

I retained my love for horses, my companion in discovery and up to then my sole mode of travel ! I would spend 3 months exploring the Brazilian outback of Minas Gerais on horseback before knocking around from the Andes to the Amazon by train, buses and local boats with my companion. In Rio, I had met the one who would become my future husband. The fact that he was a sailor naturally brought me back to the source of my first dreams : sailing around the world. When I took the tiller of the boat in the Rio de Janeiro Bay, it was love at first sight. What appealed to me was not so much the idea of sailing from one tropical paradise to another but the idea of discovery, the call ot the open sea, the excitement of encountering different cultures, new habits, and unknown languages.

At our ports of call, we picked up the skills we needed to get by. I became a ship-builder, building 3 boats with my husband, a master shipwright. We owned and ran a shipyard, built houses, worked as a photographer for a French overseas aid project in Senegal, taught snorkeling, sailing, worked as first mate on charter boat, as well as Chef, and even I learnt how to make half model of boats and other art work in wood. I discovered I had unknown talents under sometimes difficult conditions, struggling to do work tradionnally reserved for men, especially in third world countries.

The Ocean also played a part in my education, strewing my path with challenges : dismasting, hurricanes, and shipwreck showed me the other side of the adventure, which I had already encountered on horseback : that of risk, of walking a tightrope, of struggling with the elements, of facing myself when everything I have is destroyed. Me and my husband lost our first boat and had to start again from scratch, designing and building a new sailboat ''Breskell'' and setting out again a year and a half later.

But one final trial awaited me, which would sting more keenly than all the gales in the Atlantic : our couple split up, and in the divorce I lost my second boat..

My only salvation was to instinctively set out for new horizons, seeking the peace that comes from the long swells of the open ocean. I hired out as crew on charter boats in the Carribbean, and once again sailed across the Atlantic.

Today, I stand on the threshold of new adventures, eager for the thrill of great ocean crossings, including, I hope side trips into such remote corners as Patagonia, Mongolia, Alaska, as to follow the traces of Bruce Chatwin and the shadow of Bernard Moitessier.