From Charles Doane’s blog Wave Train. Interesting side note from the comments following the post, after Moitessier lost JOSHUA on the beach in Cabo, she was brought back to Port Townsend for several years. Anyone have any stories on that to share?
Bernard Moitessier is remembered primarily for his famous 1968-69 Golden Globe voyage, in which he blew off a chance to win the first non-stop singlehanded round-the-world race and kept on sailing halfway around the world again to Tahiti to “save his soul.” But he is also remembered for wrecking not one, but three different boats during the course of his sailing career. As is documented in his first book, Sailing to the Reefs (Un Vagabond des Mers Sud in the original French), he lost two boats named Marie-Therese sailing on to reefs in the Indian Ocean and in the Caribbean in 1952 and 1958. Much later, in 1982, he lost Joshua, the 40-foot steel ketch that made him famous, on a beach at Cabo San Lucas in Mexico.
Moitessier had sailed to Mexico from San Francisco with Klaus Kinski, the notoriously unstable German actor who at the time was very well known for his roles in films directed by Werner Herzog. Kinski had paid to come along so Moitessier could teach him about ocean sailing. Five days after the pair reached Cabo, on the night of December 8, Joshua and 25 other boats in the anchorage were blown ashore in a freak storm.
Moitessier on the beach with Joshua the morning after the storm