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You don't think about all that might lie ahead when you're a child. But….. In 1993, during the first edition, nine-year-old Charlie knocked on the hull of Eric Dumont's trimaran, which was struggling to find sponsors to take part. He and his mother came to offer him a 50-franc note!
"I ended up accepting his note, which I stuck to the chart table," Eric recalls, "and I told him: you'll come back for it in six months!"
When the sailor returned Charlie visited him every week on his bike, the same bike he rode to sailing school on Friday afternoons.
Last year, before the start of the TRANSAT CAFÉ L’OR, which he had to withdraw from, as he did in 2021, Charlie recalled: “When I arrived in Le Havre in second grade, we moved into a new building in the middle of a vacant lot, like the many that were still around near the city center. I played with my remote-controlled car on what became a parking lot and then a shopping center. The harbor was much less developed than it is today. There was just a small container with life jackets and equipment. The bridge and the pontoons for pleasure boats weren’t there yet. Once, with an easterly wind in an Optimist dinghy, we sailed all the way down to the bottom of the harbour; I felt like I’d taken a long trip. When you’re a child, you don’t ask yourself if the environment is sad, pretty, or ugly, you’re sailing!"
Charlie made a life for himself sailing, achieving the successes we all know, culminating in his masterful victory in the 2024 Vendée Globe, after having crossed the finish line in 2020. Twenty-two years passed between the birth of the Route du café and his first participation in 2015, alongside Yann Eliès. At the finish line in Salvador de Bahia in 2019, his teammate Yann celebrated while he simply raised his arms.
Charlie is a winner in his own right: elegant, slightly reserved, but utterly determined on the Verdier-designed IMOCA, whose every detail he sketched into his ever-present notebooks.
Still a member of the Sport Nautique et Plaisance du Havre sailing club, Charlie remained loyal to his home port and knew that the Route du café was the catalyst for his early passion. It's an understatement to say that the entire TRANSAT CAFÉ L’OR Le Havre Normandie team is in mourning today.
On the quays of the Paul Vatine basin, another Le Havre native has gone too soon, Charlie Dalin's name is inscribed alongside those of all the winners. He will forever remain in our hearts.
Our thoughts are with his wife Perrine and his son Oscar.
