Portrait of a captain

14 May 2024

Anne-Flore Gannat is 34 and captain of a tall ship with a crew of seven nationalities. Originally from Finistère, she now commands a brigantine sailing for the Dutch Fairtransport.

Nothing predestined Anne-Flore Gannat to go to sea. And yet here she is. The Breton manages a crew of 14: seven professionals and seven volunteer trainees of seven different nationalities! She tells us about her unusual life journey.

From sewing to sail-making

The daughter of farmers from Plonévez-Porzay in Finistère, Anne-Flore Gannat initially chose to train as a seamstress. “I was handy and very creative,” she explains. But it was an encounter with a group of shipwrights that changed her destiny. “I offered to help them on a construction site and take care of the boat’s sails, but it had nothing to do with sewing clothes,” the young woman confides. She then started a sailmaker’s apprenticeship at the Ateliers de l’Enfer in Douarnenez.
There she started sailing… and made another decisive encounter, with the captain of the traditional sailing mailboat Leenan Head, who offered her her first transatlantic crossing. She then became a crew member on this boat for five years.
During a stopover in France in 2011, the young woman volunteered to join the crew of the Tres Hombres. “I spent four months there as a volunteer,” she explained, before returning on board as an officer on watch. At the Enkhuizen Nautical College, she got her diploma in Great Sailing. And today she is the captain of this engine-less brigantine!

A passion for manoeuvres

When we met her in Douarnenez, Anne-Flore Gannat arrived from Ireland with a cargo of beer. And she had just experienced very bad weather: “winds of 40 knots and a 6-metre swell. Not enough to upset the captain of the Tres Hombres: “I am confident in my abilities. I now have enough experience to anticipate and organise the deck well. A quality that inspires confidence and reassures the crew.
I like manoeuvring more than anything else, organising the crew so that everything runs smoothly. It’s a fascinating job! I also love the long moments at sea. When you don’t know what day it is anymore. Time is so precious.”
On board, the captain says she feels at home. Actually, she doesn’t even have a home ashore. “We have no heating and showering we do with buckets of sea water or cold fresh water! But I chose this life and I accept the rules…”.

Making dreams come true

From February 2021, the young woman will undergo a four-month training course on the Ile d’Yeu to qualify for the Captain 500 diploma. “I don’t have the ambition to drive bigger boats, but this diploma gives you access to more interesting positions than the Captain 200,” she indicates.
In the future, Anne-Flore Gannat could see herself at the helm of a boat with a social vocation “to take on board people in difficulty or with disabilities, young people looking for a vocation…”.
In the meantime, she is very happy on Tres Hombres, which has already enabled her to “live a dream beyond anything I could have hoped for”.
“I am very grateful to the captains who have trained and trusted me. And what we do with this boat, clean transport, means a lot to me. Even though we are very small and our action is symbolic.”

Read this article on ActuFrance‘s website.

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