R2AK: “Ou est la bibliotech?”
Team Liteboat: “Quoi?”
FULL RACE- Port Townsend to Ketchikan
Team name: Team Liteboat
Team captain: Mathieu Bonnier, Liteboat founder and CEO
Total crew: 1
Lots of online info: Facebook, Website, Video Teaser
While the remnants of our high school French can help us find the library, communicate our desire for a cheese omelette, or ask someone to play tennis, we lack the nuance in Team Liteboat’s native tongue to express how damned impressed we are with our first European entrant. Team Liteboat embodies our two favorite French qualities: hardcore and seafaring.
You want hardcore? How about parkour, Papillion, or the French Foreign Legion who have been kicking ass worldwide since North America still had that new car smell.
You want seafaring? Our absolute hero is Bernard Moitessier who obliterated the great 1968 London Times around the world race- not by coming in first but by ditching the finish line to keep sailing. Even the French knights of Monty Python couldn’t top that unspoken taunt to the world:
I’m a sailor, your race is meaningless.
(cue the sad mime letting go of a balloon)
If there was a United Nations for boats, France would have a permanent seat, right in front.
Sure, the French might be the famous for their fries, bread, and toast (some would say cheese, but they’d be wrong, that’s the Swiss) but France is boat crazy and boasts the world’s largest wooden boat festival, an indoor windsurfing circuit, and more sailing speed records than any other country. Not a bad for a country that gets lambasted for drinking wine and working something like 6 weeks a year.
Team Liteboat does their country one better and bucks the claim of a certain US president who declared that “the French have no word for entrepreneur.” To prove him wrong, they started their own company designing and building high performance rowboats, then proving that French do have a word for adventure, took one and rowed a big chunk of the Northwest Passage and then solo across the Atlantique. Impressive, non? Next they’ll plant the Liteboat flag on North America’s west coast and row one all the way to Alaska.
Tabernac man, taber-frigging-nac.
Welcome to the R2AK Team Liteboat. Allons-y amigos.