Commander of the French Navy, the writer, aviator and filmmaker Patrice Franceschi takes us to the end of the world. At the invitation of a former crew member on The Sulky, a three-masted schooner he commanded, he embarked at the end of the summer of 2018 as a simple observer on an exercise mission in Greenland. With its modest crew of 11 sailors, stationed in the mists of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, the Fulmar — a former trawler converted into a navy patrol boat — is the smallest French warship. A “mafflu, thick, stocky” boat, which rolls a lot. Disillusioned, he writes, by “forty years of adventure, wars and revolutions”, Franceschi had never seen the Arctic. Nourished by the sea, by the ship and its crew, faced with loneliness, tossed about by the uncontrollable elements, it delivers in Far North Patrol the enriched logbook of this three-week expedition. A dive to meet two rare worlds that everything separates.
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