This festival Temps fête is a showcase of culture and know-how around the "tall ships". The choice of sailing as a cross-cutting theme provides a common thread for our maritime future heritage. Indeed, until recently, maritime transport was by definition "sailing", without any intention other than pleasure. What is shipping today? Is sailing excluded? Our responsibility is to project ourselves in the years and decades that come, in the wind as a source of power.
And if the power of the wind could regenerate a great relationship with the sea – a globalized enterprise of openness and exchange - and therefore to trade? Also, to to teach the young of the available opportunities? And if sailing could sow the seeds of a decarbonated future, at the time of an impending climate catastrophe? What can tall ships do to propose an alternative where the favorable winds become again the wish that all logistics can imagine?
We feel honoured by this essential choice of the festival. Humbly, perhaps such an activity, ton after ton, mile after mile, has it made it possible to think of such an event around a cross-cutting, unifying theme? Perhaps the meaning of this love of the sea and these boats is also to transmit a new outlook in a new century - an uncertain one - where one realizes that sails can take us everywhere we wish to go!