Global Solo Challenge: Simone Bianchetti - the sailor, the poet, and the crack in his heart
by Global Solo Challenge 1 Sep 2021 02:18 PDT
The late Simone Bianchetti - the legendary and inspirational Italian sailor © Global Solo Challenge
Simone Bianchetti is one of the most loved and tormented Italian sailors of our times. All his boats, the exhausting search for union with the ocean, the legend of Cape Horn to pursue: a life challenging one's limits. With a crack in his heart: continuous difficulties that have solicited a sensitive soul that suffered, and finally broke.
He leaves us prematurely and fails to reap the benefits of his efforts, "he would have become a hero of the seas", says Cino Ricci, his mentor. "He should have been born thirty years before so he would have been a discoverer, to do feats that others had never done, that's what he wanted."
Simone Bianchetti and the crack in his heart
"He did not know, he opened his heart to the open air, that he respected no other law in the world than the good law of nature. He let his passions flow down their paths, and within him the lake of great emotions was always dry, as he opened wide and new channels to it every morning. He did not know with what fury this sea of human passions ferments and boils when it is prevented from any exit. How it piles up, how it swells, how it overflows, how it digs into the heart, how it bursts into internal sobs and deaf convulsions. Until he broke the dams and opened a crack in his bed." (Victor Hugo)
Simone Bianchetti's first boats
Simone, as he liked to say, had fallen into his passion for the sea like Obelix in the magic potion. Since he was a boy, when he was still attending the Nautical Institute of Cesenatico, he used his boat as his main means of transport. He had convinced his parents to buy him an old boat, a six-meter wooden sloop, "Penelope". A name and a promise: as for Ulysses, for Simone to be at sea and in a boat was a homecoming.
In the splendid book "The colors of the ocean", written jointly with the journalist and writer Fabio Pozzo, he tells about his life. "I wanted to be alone with my boat that filled me inside, lulled by the sound of wood. Then I was really leaving, for distant seas and islands", wrote Simone.
On weekends he sailed alone to Rimini or Bellaria and read great authors, from there his second passion was born: poetry. "Penelope" soon betrays him and runs aground near his home port, his first love is lost: a small crack.
Simone Bianchetti: Nonsisamai and the Condor Team
Simone is not discouraged and then "he liked being at sea and sailing: when he arrived he couldn't wait to leave." Says Cino Ricci mentor and supporter of many Italian sailors during his long career. "This hunger for adventure rather than for the sea was on him, but he was born in the sea and a sailor, he was looking for adventure there".
At the age of sixteen, he bought another boat, the 10-meter "Attax", designed by Peter Norlin, fourth IOR class, with which he began racing.
"On my twenty-second birthday I bought the Condor Nonsisamai, a 50-foot ULDB from '88, designed by Roberto Starkel. It was my second love: what a boat, I courted it, I waited for it until it became mine. When I left the port of Lignano to take it to Ravenna, it seemed to me that I didn't even touch the water with my keel. I watched the staysail swell under the gusts and happiness overflowed into my heart."
Simone together with an other Italian sailor friends participated in all competitions in the Adriatic, naturally his speciality is with "long" regattas. The "Condor Club", as its team calls it, often excels in the Rimini-Corfù-Rimini Race, in the Rovigno-Pesaro-Rovigno Race and in 500×2 Race. "We took the regattas very seriously, we prepared them with great meticulousness, we discussed everything from the attack strategies before the mark to the changes to be made to the hull."
Bianchetti completes his training at the naval college of Venice, Giorgio Cini, and enlisted for two years in the Navy. But he starts to have a recurring thought "sailing around the world, a thought that was beginning to byte at my soul."
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