The sailing world lost one of its modern greats in June, when French solo offshore racer Charlie Dalin died. The tributes stretched well beyond his home country, and it is easy to see why. Dalin won the 2024-25 Vendée Globe — the grueling solo, non-stop lap of the planet that starts and finishes at Les Sables d'Olonne on France's Atlantic coast — while he was undergoing treatment for cancer. He had already taken line honours in the previous edition, and he called himself 'the happiest man in the world' on the day he finished.
A new Yachting World essay uses his life and death to ask a bigger question than any race result can answer: what is it about sailing that pulls people away from dry land in the first place? The writer's argument is that seamanship has two halves. The science — rules, weather routing, foil design, safety drills — teaches you how to sail. The art teaches you why. Plenty of sailors can explain the routing and the boat technology. What made Dalin remarkable, the piece suggests, was the depth of his relationship with the sea itself, the kind of connection that lets someone choose to race around the world alone even with a serious illness in the picture.
The essay also reflects on how sailors grow. Beginners tend to think in pass-or-fail terms: good sailors and bad ones, correct techniques and wrong ones. That works well enough for learning the physics, but it runs out quickly. The turning point, the writer argues, comes when you stop trying to be the skipper other people expect and work out what sailing actually means to you — your own 'Siren call', as the piece puts it. Bernard Moitessier, the legendary French sailor who famously abandoned the 1968 Golden Globe Race to keep sailing rather than finish it, gets a nod here as the patron saint of that mindset: sailing as the summit, not the means to one.
There is a takeaway in all of this for ordinary holiday sailors, not just Vendée fanatics. If you have ever taken a dinghy course, chartered a yacht in the Med or daydreamed about a coastal passage, it is worth asking what you actually want from time on the water — racing, exploring, solitude, the simple pleasure of wind on your face — rather than measuring yourself against someone else's checklist. Dalin's lesson was not 'copy me'. It was: find the version of sailing that is unmistakably yours, because that is where the real courage and the real joy come from when conditions get hard.
For anyone inspired to get afloat, France's Atlantic coast is a natural starting point. Les Sables d'Olonne, the Vendée Globe's home port, has a lively sailing scene and an excellent race museum, and La Rochelle and Lorient further north offer courses for every level from beginner to ocean hopeful.
Yachting World
