Most sailors have seen the video of a French singlehander who leaped from the bow of his busted sailboat in a wild storm in the Gulf of Alaska last fall, miraculously landing atop an icebreaker in 20-foot breaking seas. It was a wild leap in horrible conditions, but what sent the video viral was the fact that Manu Wattecamp-Etienne had his pet kitten, Pilapup, tucked in his jacket when he jumped.
Turns out kitty was not all he felt obliged to rescue.
Annapolis sailor Matt Rutherford had a costly bit of gear aboard Manu’s aluminum 33-footer. When he heard the 27-year-old Frenchman had abandoned ship, he reckoned the $1000 satellite phone he’d lent him when they crossed tracks in Greenland was history. In a turnabout to warm even a hardened mariner’s heart, Manu came up big.
Rutherford emailed the Frenchman to express his regrets and was astonished at the reply: “Matt, so nice to read from you. I didn’t save nothing from the boat, but I took your phone with me as a promise is a promise. I found as well the paper with your address, so I will send it to you from Seattle as soon as the icebreaker I am on reach there.”
“This is a guy I met for a few hours in the middle of nowhere,” says Rutherford. “I told him not to worry about the phone. I never expected to see it again. But he said, ‘I gave my word. I saved the phone of course!’ And he sent it back just like he said. To me, he’s the real deal. You don’t see many sailors do something like that.”
Matt and Manu came upon each other last summer in the village of Sisimiut, 100 miles north of Nuuk on Greenland’s west coast. Manu was heading west to tackle the Northwest Passage on his way to Chile to catch up with a girlfriend. “He’s one of those romantic Frenchmen,” says Rutherford. “He was going to marry his love and make lots of sailor babies.”
Rutherford and his partner, Nicole Trenholm, were doing scientific research in their 40-foot steel ketch, Ault. As the only two yachts in harbor, they didn’t waste time. “We tied up, and here he came in his dinghy. I invited him for a drink, so we all had a shot of vodka. Then we went over to his boat and had another. Then he said, ‘Want to go to the bar?’”
They wound up at an Inuit fisherman’s shack, drinking till 3 a.m. At some point Manu said he had no satellite phone. Rutherford, who sailed solo through the Northwest Passage three years ago on his record-breaking, nonstop, solo trip around the Americas via the Passage and Cape Horn, didn’t approve. “You need a phone to get ice reports,” he says. He had a spare, so he turned it over to his new drinking buddy. The next morning they parted ways.
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Manu Wattecamps-Etienne with a plate of crepes on la Chimere.[/caption]
Rutherford followed Manu’s progress via emails from the Northwest Passage ice guru, Victor Wejer, who tracks such things from Toronto. “I heard, ‘He’s a third of the way; he’s through the pinch-point at Simpson Straits.’ Then, ‘He made it!’”
But Manu subsequently ran into a violent storm in the Gulf of Alaska. Running downwind, he lost his rudder when a breaking wave shoved the boat sideways; then the next one buried him in frigid foam. “He was taking water and had no way to control the boat, so he hit the EPIRB.”
Rutherford has no doubt the Frenchman was in a bad spot. “He’d just singlehanded the Northwest Passage, and he’s singlehanded Cape Horn. He’s not going to call for help unless he needs it.”
The spectacular rescue was seen around the world when the video hit You Tube, where you can still see it. The Frenchman swings like a monkey from the forestay of the little yacht, with nothing but a pack on his back and Pilapup snuggled to his chest. As the bow flies violently up and down, he clings fiercely, waiting to leap. On the crest of a breaking wave, he times the roll and flies over a lifeline, feet in the air, while Chimere, his sailboat, vanishes in a trough.
Manu had no insurance and no money to replace the boat, but Rutherford said his spirit is indomitable. The voyager quickly mounted an appeal on the Gofundme website for his next challenge: sailing the ice-choked Northeast Passage from Scandinavia to Asia in 2017. His adventure-starved countrymen already have responded with $10,000 in startup funds and a battered 40-footer.
