While exploring the Lyngen Alps in March 2023, I met a strange sailor in a café bordering the port of Tromsø. Ulysses, you couldn't make it up, captain of the LUN II (pronounced "moon"), approached, wearing a blue wool hat and a leather jacket. He extended a thick, calloused hand that made me feel like I had a child's hands. Leaning on the bar, he chatted with Léo Viret, a friend and fellow guide graduate. The discussions were lively, but the presence of the Lun II, Ulysses's boat, often came up. Ulysses's apparent life as an adventurer left me perplexed: was it really possible to sail a boat from 1914 without any electronic assistance? Was it possible to sail back to port with a boat nearly 30 meters long? I was suspicious. What if it were false? What if behind this leather was hiding a city dweller in search of adventure and recognition, recently converted into a sailor, quick to tell his stories?

A few moments later, I am invited aboard the famous boat with the crew. In the darkness, the Lun looks immense and gives me the impression of having stepped straight out of a tale, a Viking film. The wooden rigging, the burgundy red cotton sails, the tiller equipped with a tackle mounted with hemp ropes (rope on a boat). My first steps on the stairs leading to the saloon, in the bowels of the boat, creak and a smell I know brings back memories: a smell of an old refuge. On the walls lining this companionway, watercolors whose paper looks like parchment, dog-eared, bear the image of the Lun, under sail, and a library of sea books that seem to date from the 19th century.

The living area, the saloon, is arranged around a large wood-burning stove and an arm-width table. On either side of the saloon are bunk beds: individual bunk beds with curtains, thick animal skins, and down duvets. Everything here is from another era. The captain bustles about in the forepeak of the boat: he's cooking amidst hanging legs of lamb, fish drying next to seal skins, and the week's skiers. I'm amazed that these two worlds can coexist, or even blend.

What strikes me is the presence in all the discussions of an invisible crew member. And yet so visible. A person not made of flesh, but of wood: the boat. Ulysses speaks of his ship as a sailor in his own right. "He is happy when he has wind in his sails," the creaking and his behavior at sea testifying to his gratitude to his sailors who live and work within it. The Lun is a living being.

After a split pea purée topped with a slice of cod, itself covered with a thin slice of smoked salmon and roasted hazelnuts, the captain slips away, cigarette in mouth. He calls us "les garçons" as if he himself were an old woman, like the landlady of a dive bar in an old French village. Perhaps reincarnation is not only the preserve of indigenous peoples? Yet, the powerful and lively body testifies to the physical activity of a high-flying judoka... The mystery of the character remains intact, for the moment. It is his first mate who takes up the story, also with a cigarette tucked into his mouth, a mug of coffee in his hand. Smoking is encouraged in the boat, "it kills the fungi." An unreal atmosphere reigns in this mess. It is the latter who takes up the story and tells us of the exploits of his Captain.

Crossing the Atlantic laden with rum and coffee under sail on his century-old boat, in hellish sea conditions, maneuvers worthy of ancient navigators, as in Dana's sea novel "Two Years on the Forecastle"... Isn't it the very essence of humility to keep quiet about one's own exploits and let others talk about them? My doubts and suspicions have obviously vanished since I set foot on this fabulous ship. But I was far from imagining what the future held for me.