GURVAN JAOUEN TALKS 5.5s
Beautiful boats and classic regattas
I
Gurvan Jaouen owns and races two 5.5 Metres, an Evolution and a Classic, and tells the story of how they came to end up in Brittany and race all over Europe.
was born in Brest, in western Brittany in August, 15 1980. My family was a family of naval officers, and thus I heard a lot of sailing stories. We’re a family of nine brothers, mostly raised by the sea in northwestern Brittany. All our discussions were about boats and ships, as was our reading. I wanted to sail before being a teenager, and chose the navy quite early. I studied mathematics in a Naval College by the seaside in Brest, and passed the exam for the Naval Academy in 2000. Otherwise I would have chosen the merchant navy. The most important thing was to sail, but the Navy also provided me training in other ways. We brothers went sailing on wooden boats mainly, rowing, sculling, sailing among the rocks along the coast. Sadly our father’s yacht sank in the 1987 gale, but we didn’t need to go
far to learn. We were reading a lot, nautical magazines, arguing about drawings, characteristics, and building model yachts of increasing quality. In the family, among cousins, were also several Requin, nice wooden racing yachts formerly belonging to the Navy. I once believed that this would be my first yacht. I split my career in the Navy between Naval Special Forces units and warships. After having been in command of a special naval unit for two years, I spent three years in Paris at the War College in the Special Operations Command. I now have the pleasure of being back at sea, as operations officer (i.e. No. 3) of a helicopter carrier 10,000 times bigger than a 5.5, with a deck double the height of our sail plan. But being back at sea, I’m currently nearly all time at sea for the last two years. So from the seaside in north-western Brittany, and like in a story, I was born into sailing. I just hope my children and theirs cousins will develop the same sailing passion, as some of them were on a boat well before their first birthday. Beautiful boats I have two 5.5s: Korrigan, FRA 19, a classic design by Copponex, launched in 1961, and Auguste 1er, FRA 47, the last French Evolution design by Berret-Racoupeau from 1992. Sooner or later, perhaps there will be also a modern. I got them through good
Top: Korrigan in Sanremo Left and right: Auguste 1er in Cowes in 2018
