PIERRE HUGLO - A LONELY WILD VOYAGE

Pierre Huglo took 221 days to race his engineless Contessa 32 round the world non-stop and single-handed. He told Jessie Rogers why he can’t wait to return

- Jessie Rogers

I remember very well my first conversation with French philosophy teacher Pierre Huglo when he called up the Jeremy Rogers boat yard in Lymington. ‘There’s a Frenchman on the phone who wants to take part in the Golden Globe Race in his Contessa 32.’ As it happened the configuration of the keel prohibited him from entering but the name Pierre Huglo was etched in my brain and the enormity of the challenge he wanted to embark on equally so. The next year he contacted us again. He would join the fleet of boats sailing around the world as part of La Longue Route. This ‘endeavour’ was conceived by seasoned navigator Guy Bernardin and was not exactly a race but a single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation inspired by the legendary French sailor Bernard Moitessier who famously abandoned the 1968 Golden Globe Race to ‘save his soul’, eventually making landfall in Tahiti.

Pierre Huglo’s journey to find a suitable boat for the circumnavigation was a long one and it was decades before he was introduced to, and fell in love with the Contessa 32, which have always been built by the Jeremy Rogers yard. One of his pre Contessa solo journeys ended in disaster when his Pogo 850 capsized and left him clinging to the upturned hull mid Atlantic hoping for rescue. It was then he realised he needed a more steadfast companion and something very different. But what?

A FRESH START