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Marcel Waltzer sailed across the Atlantic last year on “Golden Breeze”, a 37-foot Motiva. His wife and two young children joined him in the Caribbean, and togehter they planned to travel up the ICW from Florida to New York.

But they took longer than they thought they would on the ICW because “it was so beautiful everywhere.” By August “Golden Breeze” had gotten only as far as Oriental and by then it was time to fly home to Switzerland where Marcel works as an architect. The family left the Danish-made steel pilothouse cutter in Oriental.

Marcel came back to Oriental in May, and spent some time preparing the boat for the return trip across the Atlantic. A friend arrived in late May and they took off toward Bermuda in early June. We caught up with Marcel a few day before that, at the docks alongside SailCraft Service yard.

Crossing the Atlantic is not anything new to Marcel. He figures he’s gone across that ocean 6 or 7 times in the past 25 years.

Half a dozen transatlantic crossings seemed a lot for someone from a land-locked country. But as Marcel puts it, “the Swiss are always looking to the sea.” That’s one reason, he says, that the Alinghi syndicate that recently won the America’s Cup “became very popular,” back home.

As for Marcel, he has sometimes crossed the Atlantic with other crew and sometimes gone all by himself.

He made his first crossing in the late 1970’s. In the 1980’s one of his Atlantic crossings took him to Brazil where he spent three months in the Amazon.

From that trip he recalls one anchorage, far up the Amazon. It was a remote place, where few of the indigenous people even spoke Portuguese. One day, he says, three elderly men paddled up to his boat in a wooden canoe. “They knocked on the boat, and then scratched it a bit,” Marcel says. Then he says, they backed away and spoke among themselves before they paddled up again and scratched the fiberglass hull some more. Finally, he says, one of the men spoke out, in Portuguese, and said he wanted to ask a question.

“’Where do trees grow to build a boat like this?”

Marcel says it was difficult to explain fiberglass.

More recently, Marcel has been meeting the inhabitants of Oriental, which he calls one of the most beautiful places, “because of the people. I’ve felt welcome.”

And he remarks that from his vantage point near Whittaker Creek, he’s noticed that people seem to use their sailboats a lot. (It was a heartening observation for those of us who don’t feel like we get out on the water enough.)

Here, Marcel says, “I’ve felt it may be that a lot of people are real sailors.” He pauses, saying he’s not trying to criticize France. (He keeps his boat in a Mediterranean port in the south of France.) But he notes that “it’s completely changed in the last 20 years there” and that many boat owners don’t seem to venture out of the harbors.

Wall of Toast

On the other hand, he does have a qualm with one aspect of American life, a subject he broaches carefully, diplomatically even.

“One of the most important things,” he says, “is the French bread’. The crunchy, crusty baguette is something he hasn’t been able to find in US grocery stores along the ICW. Rather, Marcel notes, he goes to the bread aisles and is faced with what he describes as “a wall of toast.”

(We did direct him to the new bakery in town next to the Post Office).

Marcel’s Motiva 37 was built in Denmark for sailing in the North Sea. In those waters, the pilothouse is a refuge from the wet and cold. For most of the time Marcel has owned the boat it has been in lower — and warmer — latitudes such as the Med — and more recently, Oriental. In those places, the light and airy space of the pilothouse serves another purpose; Marcel says that one reason he bought it 7 years ago was that “I don’t like to sit in the cellar of a normal sailboat.”

The Motiva has clean lines, to which Marcel has added a wicker basket. He says that he puts it on deck during his ocean passages, and that he’s kept vegetables in it for weeks at a time. Inside the basket he says, vegetables remain dry and cooled by the air that passes through.

As for wind blowing by the boat, Marcel says he’s been sailing for 30 years and has seen “every kind of weather.”

But he adds that the strongest winds are not necessarily the worst. “A 6-7 force wind blowing you away from your target is worse than a 9-10,” blowing you toward it.

Last year, NYC had been his target. It wasn’t wind on the nose that kept him from reaching it, but rather he and his family taking their time through the southern part of the ICW. NYC by boat may have to wait for another day. After this crossing, Marcel doesn’t have any more transatlantic plans in the works.

He expects that traversing the ocean will take a month of outright sailing — between NC-Bermuda-Azores-Gibraltar — before reaching his homeport in the South of France.

And then he’s looking to venture out of the harbor there and cruise in the Eastern part of the Mediterranean and visit old (really old) towns and churches.

Posted Thursday July 3, 2003 by Melinda Penkava

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