Florence Arthaud epitomised the freedom-loving, wild-at-heart, devil-may-care attitude of many of France’s greatest professional solo sailors.
She was arguably the first great female ocean racing sailor of the modern era, paving the way for the likes of her fellow countrywoman Isabelle Autissier and Britain’s Ellen MacArthur. At the height of her powers, the diminutive, but brave Arthaud was the world’s most famous female sailor and a superstar in France where she captured the hearts of the public with her remarkable exploits on the oceans.
A strong-featured tomboy with a profusion of reddish-brown hair, Arthaud was a bundle of energy, with an independence of spirit and a zest for life. Driven by her passion for the sea, she bulldozed her way into what was a male sport in the late 1970s, wrestling sponsorship from companies who had never backed a woman sailor, which enabled her to build a series of powerful yachts.
Her biggest triumph was her unprecedented victory in the 1990 Route du Rhum solo transatlantic race from Brittany to Guadeloupe. At the helm of the trimaran Pierre 1er, she beat all the men, including Philippe Poupon, the pre-race favourite and winner of the previous race. It was a feat that led the newspaper L’Equipe to vote her “Champion of French Champions”. Subsequently known in France as “La petite fiancée de l’Atlantique”, she went on to establish a single-handed west-to-east transatlantic record with a time of nine days, 22 hours and five minutes.
Although preceded by Britain’s Clare Francis, the first woman to skipper a yacht in the Whitbread round-the -world race, and Naomi James, the first woman to sail solo round the world via Cape Horn, Arthaud took solo women’s racing to a new level.
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But she was also lucky to survive. After she retired from racing, she fell off her cruising boat in 2011 while sailing alone off Corsica. It was around midnight. According to her account, she was leaning overboard to answer the call of nature when the boat was rocked by a wave and she lost her footing and found herself in the water. Luckily, she had a watertight mobile phone with her, which she had bought just before setting sail, and was able to call her mother in Paris who alerted the French rescue authorities. They located her some hours later using the GPS co-ordinates of her mobile and found her, suffering from hypothermia, after spotting her head torch. “The water wasn’t too cold,” she said , “but it wasn’t too hot either and I wasn’t at all equipped for that — I had practically nothing in the way of gear on me. When you think you are going to drown, it’s a little bit frightening — very frightening in fact. You think of all your friends who have disappeared in similar conditions.”
Florence Arthaud was born in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt in 1957. She was the daughter of Jacques Arthaud, director of the Grenoble Arthaud publishing house founded by her grandfather that specialised in the stories of great adventurers, including sailors.
As a child Florence had a wild streak and recalled that she had an insatiable appetite and would eat almost anything she could get her hands on, including dirt and pebbles. She enjoyed a comfortable early life and began sailing on family holidays. A watershed moment came at the age of 17 when she was seriously injured in a car crash, leaving her in a coma and with injures to her face that left her permanently scarred.
Her recovery proved to be the catalyst for her career at sea. She abandoned her medical studies and went in search of the adventures she had heard about as a child. Inspired by the modern legends of French sailing, Bernard Moitessier and Eric Tabarly, she crossed the Atlantic for the first time at 18 and never looked back.
Eschewing make-up and preferring old clothes to modern fashion, Arthaud found her métier at sea. Lovers came and went but she always returned to the oceans. On her first attempt at the Route du Rhum in a 36ft sloop, she narrowly escaped serious injury when she fell off her mast and was suspended just inches from the deck by a rope that caught round her leg.
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In 1986 she spoke about the draw of solo sailing. “For the single-handed sailor, you need to love solitude and to have a feeling for the sea,” she said. “Solo, one has to learn to do everything by and for yourself, though there are many things one doesn’t know. You have to choose the course, counting on yourself. In the manoeuvres, what counts is not brute strength but intelligence and experience.”
Arthaud won many accolades and was twice awarded the Monique Berlioux prize by the French Academy of Sport, in 1978 and 1990, for the best women’s sports performance of the year. She is also widely remembered in France for singing a successful pop song called Flo with Pierre Bachelet, which was released after her triumph in the Route de Rhum.
In 1993 she had a daughter, Marie, with the French sailor Loic Lingois, who is now a successful competitor in equestrian sport. She married Eric Charpentier in 2005 but they were later divorced.
Based in Marseille and Paris in recent years, Arthaud struggled with alcohol and lost her driving licence for drink driving in 2010. In her 2009 autobiography, A Wind of Freedom, she admitted she had been drinking up to four litres of wine a day. “I led an adventurer’s life and burnt the candle at both ends.”
She was among ten people killed when two helicopters collided near Villa Castelli, about 730 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. The crash occurred during filming for the French reality television show Dropped.
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Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first man to sail alone, non-stop around the world, had known Arthaud since she was 11 years old. Her father had published his books. She was “quiet and serious and extremely witty”, he said. She was “exceptional”.
Florence Arthaud, yachtswoman, was born on October 28, 1957. She died on March, 9, 2015, aged 57