Giancarlo Pedote’s life on a sailing boat lived “day by day”

Giancarlo Pedote he is one of the best known sailors in Italy and in the world. Between November 2020 and January 2021 he concluded the Vandée Globe, a regatta consisting of a non-stop and unassisted round-the-world tour with departure and arrival in Sables d’Olonne, in the Vendée department of the Pays de la Loire region, in the north-west of France. On board the Imoca 60 Prysmian Group, a 60-foot ultra-technological monohull, approximately 18 meters long, recently concluded, at the end of last November, the Rum Route – destination Guadeloupea transatlantic regatta departing from Saint-Malò and arriving, in fact, in Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean.

One could think that this was an unfortunate race due to the opening of the main headsail, the J2, and the forced replacement with another sail, the J3, of considerably smaller size. “Unlucky yes but also no,” Pedote points out“because I knew I would have to change the sails, but having new ones was not possible”.

In this chat with il Foglio, the sailor emphasizes two factors for his future: the first is the need for other sponsors to join Prysmian, the solid partner with which he has traveled the world, and which allow the vessel to be more competitive. “We don’t have the economic means to compare ourselves to the big teams” he says, because “there are gigantic projects competing with us in terms of both boat preparation and project management”. The second key factor is that the team itself can grow. “Having a team of at least 10 people would allow us to make the leap that I have been waiting for in sport for a long time”, because it would allow us to develop the data analysis sector, which in other projects has several dedicated people and which is the so-called to the ground”. “The speed you gain with good work on land and perfecting the settings in the ocean grows exponentially and makes the difference,” Pedote explains to Foglio.

But besides and alongside the sports project, especially in the last two years, the sailor is particularly committed and distinguished also in the narration that he himself makes of his sportor through a traditional channel such as writing – he has already written a book, The soul in the oceanpublished by Mondadori Electa, in which he enclosed the sensations, fears and discoveries about himself and the seas he sailed during his 80-day round-the-world trip, and two other sailing manuals – both through the dissemination of content on the web .

Sailing is a scientific sport, which has its own language. Therefore, telling those who are not about the environment also means disseminating, making a world usable to an ever wider audience. Giancarlo Pedote does it, even if he specifies that “he doesn’t put himself on a chair to speak to the world” and the numbers confirm that the target audience is a niche audience: just over 6,000 subscribers to his Youtube channel and 17,600 followers on Instagram. Despite this, Pedote’s experiences and their narration go beyond the horizon of the public interested in sailing, if only because they can be a filter for anyone’s life experience.

Murakami in his The art of running he said that it is in long distance running that “fatigue is an inevitable reality but the possibility of making it or not is at the sole discretion of each individual”. After all, Pedote is a sea marathon runner, whose approach as a professional sportsman can be transported, with due consideration of the context, to everyday life. Everyone finds obstacles, but the approach is a choice.

An example? On board the Prysmian group, life is reduced to the essentials, there is no bathroom, the galley is a tilting stove and for night navigation, when not solo, the crew are required to sleep on microsleeps, i.e. half-time sleeps. ‘now, maximum one hour, on a carbon cot, alternating with wake shifts and sail adjustments. When we asked him how he managed to live like this for 80 days straight, his answer seemed obvious, but on second listen he summed up a life experience: “Day to day”.

For Pedote his project “is a certainty, it is a machine that goes where you want it to go”, yet “there is no standby, there is always room for improvement”. The key to success is not the constant striving for improvement, emerges from his words, but the balance between always asking for something more from oneself and one’s collaborators and realizing what point has been reached. There isn’t a final to play to raise the cup, it’s a challenge to an ambition. And as an example we could cite the idea of ​​sailing around the world without stopping. It is easy to consider the departure for the Vandée globe as the beginning of an enterprise as big as it is dangerous, yet the words of the sailor himself describe it as realizing that “we are already halfway there”.

Pedote’s is a paradoxical sporting life, accompanied by a technology that allows him “to control everything that is controllable”, but at the same time immersed – literally – in what is most essential on planet Earth.

Through his presence on the web, on his own channels or in those of others, for example on that of Emalloru, a well-known director in the Italian Youtube community, Pedote transmits all this both to those who know the world of sailing and to those who don’t know what it means. “tighten the mainsail”.