The Mystery of a Missing Solo Sailor : What Sent Frenchman Overboard to His Presumed Death?

In writing a recent news story about the disappearance and presumed drowning of Jacques de Roux, a French solo sailor in a race around the world, I said rescuers boarded his sailboat and found no sign of him. On reflection, I changed that to read they found no one.

Certainly, there were signs of Jacques on his boat, Skoiern IV. He had occupied that space for more than a month. He lived, ate, slept, worked and navigated in it.

There were his clothes, his bunk, his bedding. There was his chart table with the chart of the southeast coast of Australia spread on it. On the chart was a fine pencil line that extended northward. Times and fix marks were precisely penciled along the line.

Jacques was a careful man and a meticulous navigator. He had taught navigation in the French navy. The pencil line stopped near a point five miles off Green Cape, 230 miles south of Sydney, his destination.

No one knows what happened then.

Did he go forward to make a sail change and slip on a Dacron sail on deck? Dacron sails are very slippery. Was he amidships unfouling a line when he was pitched into the sea by a sudden lurch of the boat? Was he hit by a swinging boom and knocked, perhaps unconscious, into the water? Did he fall off the stern while making repairs to his complex emergency tiller system.

Certainly he was exhausted. He had been hand steering for 2 weeks, 20 hours a day. He had just come through the hazardous Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania.

Then, all that was left was an empty boat and a logbook with answers to every question about his voyage from Cape Town except the final one. What happened?

What happened, Jacques?

We keep seeking an answer, the other bookend, the period, the final punctuation to a life.

Were you conscious? Did you try to swim west to shore? Or was the south-setting current to oblivion too strong.

Why didn’t your boat round up with your hand off the tiller? Every sailor is frustrated by a sailboat’s tendency to come up into the wind and stop when the helm is let go. Why didn’t your boat stop for you?

Or had you tied the tiller to get some respite from steering? Or were you too tired to catch up? Or having caught up, did you not have the strength to pull yourself up out of the water onto the deck?

How long were you in the water before the end?

Was there regret or resignation?

Did the irony of being just five miles off the coast cross your mind?

In the first BOC Around The World Race in 1983, you were capsized at 55 south latitude in the Pacific, almost 3,000 miles from the nearest land.

Your mast was down and there was a big hole in your boat below the waterline. You bailed for more than two days. Then Richard Broadhead, of Britain, arrived on Perseverance of Medina. He had sailed more than 300 miles against wind and current. It was a miracle he found you.

We laughed when Richard told of his first words to you.

“Do you want to come on board Perseverance,” he asked.

Richard remembered that you looked at him as if he were crazy and answered, “Yes, of course I do. I’m sinking.”

We thought you had used up all your bad luck then. Did you think so, too?

Now we know that it was your good luck that had run out.

You were tough, Jacques. It surprised us how tough you were. You were so quiet, so unassuming.

And what a sailor you were. You led your class all the way. You were in the lead when you lost your first boat. You were in the lead at the end, too.

In this race, you rolled over and lost all your steering back there in the Indian Ocean? You had just turned 50 a few days before on Nov. 30. You talked of pulling into an Australian port to get things sorted out. But your fellow racers got on their radios and urged you to keep on.

Bad advice, as it turned out, but they meant well. You were their champion. They thought so much of you.

Certainly you knew the risks of the sea. You were an officer on a nuclear submarine in your navy. You must have looked at the sea’s sullen gray surface more than once and thought that some day it could claim you.

What did you think of at the end? Of the Indonesian girl who was helping you get ready before the start back there in Newport? (Race headquarters called her in Paris with the news just as she was about to leave for the airport and the flight to Sydney to meet you.)

Do you remember our interview on your boat before the start of the race?

I’m looking at my notes now. You apologized because you could not give Skoiern’s measurements in feet. It was, you said, 15.24 meters long, 14 meters on the waterline with a draft of 2.5 meters.

You told me the boat cost 1.2 million francs (again an apology because you didn’t know what that was in dollars) to build and equip. No, you had no insurance and you did not have a sponsor.

How carefully you spoke, unsure of your English, and how softly. I asked you about the Pacific capsize in 1983. Had you rolled over or was it an end-over-end pitchpole?

There was your Gallic shrug. You didn’t know. It was at night . . . you were below . . . in the dark . . . tied in your bunk . . . you didn’t know.

I looked around your cabin and at your navigation station. How tidy everything was. Your clock was set on Greenwich mean time--navigator’s time. Amateur sailors tend to try to live on both local time and GMT and stay more or less confused.

You posed for a picture at the wheel, and then I made way for a French magazine reporter who was next in line for an interview.

My wife, Patricia, and I talked all one evening about you. It didn’t seem right, we thought, for it to happen to you. You, Jacques, so skilled, so prepared, so careful. If you, then what chance has anyone? We became silent, emotionally exhausted from speculation about your last hours, the what ifs and the maybes.

After a moment, Patricia looked at me and her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, that gentle man . . . ,” she said.