I had wanted to ask Vicenç Tomás about his experience commanding the NAUMON, the ship of ‘La Fura dels Baus,’ the sensational performance company between Cirque du Soleil and theater, for a long time because I was intrigued by the relationship between a sailor and the genius of some very special artists. One day, I found out that Vicenç Tomás was working as a pilot in Menorca, so I called him, we shared a beer at ‘El Trueno’ while watching the sunset over the beautiful port of Mahón, and we arranged to meet one afternoon at the pilot station. Almost three hours of conversation, sharing some memories, and spontaneous questions that might serve to write an interview.
NAUMON deck preparing a performance
He was the captain and builder of the NAUMON, the ship of La Fura dels Baus. They bought it in Norway after searching for a suitable ship in French and Dutch ports. It was a ketch that cost a fair amount to bring to Spain. They arrived in Vigo, where it was registered under the Spanish flag and underwent extensive repairs, modifications, and transformations to adapt it to what La Fura dels Baus wanted and needed. There in Vigo, at the Port Authority, he met Mar Chao, a friendship that remains strong. With the NAUMON, he carried out extremely complicated maneuvers, entering very small marinas, though they always managed well. With Rafael Cabal, the senior pilot of the Barcelona Corporation, he had a conflict when the NAUMON was hired for the opening show of the Barcelona World Race. The NAUMON was supposed to dock at Moll de la Fusta and therefore had to pass under the Maremagnum bridge. Cabal opposed it, and the planned show was suspended, leading to a different one being projected instead.
Let’s begin
I was born in 1967 in Manresa, Barcelona, and graduated in 1990 at the age of 23, though I actually finished at what was then called the Escuela Superior de la Marina Civil de Barcelona in 1989. I had one subject left to pass, Ship Theory, a course that the professor at the time had turned into an ordeal for students. I was never a bookworm. My classmates elected me as the student representative to participate in faculty meetings and the election of the director, later dean, as in 1990 we experienced the transition from Escuela Superior to the Faculty of Nautical Sciences integrated into the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Where did you do your internships?
My first boarding was on the ALVARO DE BAZAN, a 300-meter-long tanker where I spent three months. Then I signed up with 19 other classmates under the DGMM agreement with MOC, tramp bulk carriers under Liberian flag and initially Spanish crews; later, they replaced the Spaniards with Filipinos. After a year of continuous sailing, I obtained my Liberian pilot license. Once I passed the pilot exam, I boarded the RAVENNA, a bulk carrier that took me to some very interesting ports. I disembarked after six months as third officer, determined to switch to the world of recreational sailing. Sailing excites me. In fact, my move to Mahón as a pilot is largely due to that passion. Here, in this exceptional port, I can sail whenever I want.
Tanker ALVARO DE BAZÁN
How was the transition to recreational sailing?
I started as a professional in regattas, as a grunt, not as a navigator or helmsman—just pure grunt work. Later, I boarded megayachts as captain, under the orders of the millionaire of the moment, winter in the Caribbean, summer in the Mediterranean.
Always on sailboats; sailing is what motivates me. Most of the megayacht owners were Spanish and some Italian. I spent several years like that. In between, I did a campaign on the famous pailebot THOPAGA, sailing between Ibiza and Formentera with 150 passengers. A very tough job, we had to feed all the passengers. It reminds me of Juan Luis Trassierra’s novel, “Saga of the Same Navigator.” I also did a charter to Cuba to captain a sailboat owned by an American. I always legalized my sea days on boats of /GT over 100 tons to accumulate the days needed to become a captain. In reality, I’ve always moved under the pretext of sailing and yachts, I’ve made a living in many different ways, but I’ve always managed to survive. Thank goodness I legalized those days. That precaution led me to obtain the first officer’s title and later the captain’s. I completed the fifth year of Nautical Studies and the year on MOC tramp ships as internships. I always made sure to have my credentials in order. That allowed me to command the THOPAGA, which was a passenger ship, and eventually led me to board the NAUMON as captain.
The pailebot THOPAGA
When did you get your pilot’s license?
I became a pilot in 1993, and I remember taking the captain’s exam in Barcelona with David Gil, a Barcelona pilot, now treasurer of the Corporation. David Gil was with me as a pilot in Valencia; he came from sailing with Balearia.
And as a captain?
I obtained my professional captain’s card in 1998, before boarding as captain on the NAUMON…
Tell me about the NAUMON adventure.
I met them by chance at the boatyard in Barcelona, what is now Marina 92. Back then, they used to haul out regular boats there. I was with a Mallorcan shipowner; we had just crossed the Atlantic to spend the season in the Aegean Sea. I warned him that the boat needed to be prepared, hauled out, and inspected for hull and machinery. Next to us was the boat of a German guy who designed the rowing boat used by La Fura dels Baus for the opening ceremony of the Barcelona 92 Olympics. We got to know each other, I gave him some leftover materials from the boat I was commanding, and he introduced me to the people from La Fura, who were friends. One of La Fura’s directors, Carlos Padrisa, asked me if I could command a large ship. I said: whichever one you want. He told me they wanted to buy a merchant ship to sail around the world performing shows. They proposed I join the project, I accepted, they hired me, and tasked me with finding a suitable ship. I found three ships. The budget was 600,000 euros, to be paid by the Generalitat of Catalonia through a consortium of all its departments. That was organized by Oriol Pujol and a collaborator of La Fura, Franc Aleu, who was the link between La Fura and the Generalitat. Paradoxically, the money came from the Convergent Generalitat, but in the elections that year, Maragall won, the first tripartite government was formed, and then the ship’s godmother was Maragall’s wife, Diana Garrigosa, who had been my teacher; I was friends with her daughter Cristina.
Vicenç Tomás on the bridge of the NAUMON
The ship?
First, I went to Nantes, then to Rotterdam, and later to Norway, and the one there was the one we liked the most—it was the cheapest, built in 1964, 100,000 euros, so we bought it.
We brought it by hair, it was a drama, we got stranded in the English Channel, we were towed to New Haven, a nearby port on the south coast of England, and there they repaired us, it was a generator issue, we rented a generator, put it on board and left for Vigo. We arrived in Vigo and took the boat to Freire shipyard for repairs and to prepare the boat for Fura’s purposes. We transformed the boat and also changed its flag from Norway to Spain. We hired Der Norske Veritas, DNV as the classification society. Dealing with the Spanish maritime administration is on one hand an unpleasant experience, but on the other it forces you to complete a master’s degree in maritime administrative law, everything is an obstacle, everything has to be argued, they nitpick the most irrelevant details. It was a full-blown battle. Adapting the project of a showboat to the letter of SOLAS required flexibility and intelligence. SOLAS doesn’t have a chapter dedicated to showboats, the closest is the special purpose ship category, which includes oceanographic ships, for example, but they forced us to classify the NAUMON as a cargo ship. This caused us problems abroad, when MOU inspectors came in Italy or Greece, they didn’t understand how we had been classified as a cargo ship. Even earlier, when we arrived in Barcelona, what we had done in Vigo was worthless, a novice inspector came determined to enforce the law (his own) and found that the certificates issued to us in Vigo didn’t comply, according to him. It was a nightmare. We had to appeal to the maritime captain to make him understand the problem. Luckily, at that time, Fura was a powerful company with enormous media and political influence, and in the end the problems were resolved with a phone call or the direct intervention of someone with power.
Amid all this, the 600,000 euros turned into two million, and when we were about to leave, the shipyard told us to pay first. The Fura representative replied, fine, we’ll leave the boat here because if we don’t go out to work, we’ll never have the money to pay you. Freire then agreed to let the boat leave and be paid as soon as they had the money. Freire got paid because the boat made a lot of money in its early days. We did ads for Mercedes, BMW…, we inaugurated the Barcelona bridge (the Porta d’Europa), which connected the Levante dock with the rest of the port once the new entrance was completed.
Who named the boat?
Carlos Padrisa, the director of Fura, was the one who named it, a combination of nau and mon. Ship and world. Padrisa was the mastermind behind the project.
You were with the NAUMON company for years…
I spent two years as captain and then stayed with them as an inspector. I finished as captain when we made the movie “Cargo” and became a pilot in Vilanova. By then, the boat barely moved, we had few projects, and what we did was promote the first officer to captain—he’s now the pilot in Palamós. While I was a pilot in Vilanova, the NAUMON was in Barcelona, idle, hosting parties, events… There was an attempt to participate in another movie, they hired me, but the new movie’s producers didn’t like the NAUMON, they preferred an abandoned boat called IRA, all rusted, in very bad shape. We got the contact of the person who had bought it at auction, a Lebanese who met us at the Ritz Hotel. He asked for 20,000 euros to make the film. We signed the contract.
I boarded the ship with some colleagues and we managed to get power using an external generator. We bought two large generators and got the ship running with great difficulty, especially with the Maritime Captaincy. I redid the ship’s plans and we filmed the movie. We left the port with a tugboat, sometimes we anchored. We had to go to Vilanova because the pilots of Barcelona didn’t want that ship in the port of Barcelona. The pilot of Vilanova, Antonio Garallo, proposed that I stay as a pilot in Vilanova. They told me I had to prepare for an exam. So I came to Menorca to prepare and stayed at the Lazareto, a wonderful little island within the port of Mahón.
Poster for the movie ‘Cargo,’ released at the Sitges Festival in 2009
Let’s recap. You’re still working as an inspector at La Fura, you make a movie on another ship, you prepare for the pilot exam while working as an interim pilot in Vilanova. Meanwhile, La Fura gets a project to put on a show in Taiwan, and off went the NAUMON.
To adventure, indeed. In the Strait of Malacca, they had a serious problem—a collision with another ship. Once they passed the traffic separation scheme, the third officer, who was on watch, went down to the office to make coffee, and it was then, relaxed, that they collided with a huge ship that hit them first on the bow and then on the stern. The thing is, I had to go to Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where they were supposed to perform the New Year’s Eve show broadcast on television. I landed two days before the ship arrived in Kaohsiung. They received me and asked what had happened. We managed to pull off the contracted show, even though the ship was wrecked with severe damage to the bow and stern, so it couldn’t leave port. The repairs cost money we didn’t have, and the ship stayed in Taiwan for about six months. In the end, they returned as best they could, passing through the Philippines…
And while still working as an inspector, you come to Menorca to study for the pilot exam at the Lazareto…
It was a coincidence. I started coming to Menorca on charter boats when I was studying Nautical Science, and I really liked the island. A classmate from the Nautical School had a bar on the south coast of the island, near Binibeca, and we always came here with the sailboats. Then, about 30 years ago, I bought a plot of land without a house, just with a boathouse, which I fixed up and used for 20 years. I had submitted a job application to operate the boat that goes from Es Castell to the Lazareto island. Suddenly, one day they called me. I said no because I wanted to prepare for the pilot exam, and then the person who called me suggested I live at the Lazareto, the best place in the world to study because no one would ever bother you. They gave me a secluded room, with no one around, a monastic setup—a cot, a table and chair, a lamp, and a window facing the sea. And there I spent the whole summer with the notes I had prepared with Mar Chao. She reviewed all the material and provided me with a huge amount of information. Mar is an expert in ports and also in Maritime Law. She helped me a lot with all the issues involving the Maritime Administration regarding the NAUMON. In fact, when I passed, the first person I called was Mar. “Mar, we passed.”
Central courtyard of the dazzling Lazareto of Mahón
That summer—what year was it?
It must have been 2005. Then I started working as a pilot in Vilanova. One day, Antonio Molinero, manager of the Pilots’ Association, showed up there.
I told him part of my story, the one about NAUMON, and we agreed on many things. Molinero is an extraordinary person, both personally and professionally. After a few weeks, he called me to inform me that a position as a pilot under Article 16 of the General Pilotage Regulations had become vacant in Valencia. “Are you interested in going to Valencia?” he asked me. In Vilanova at that time, you didn’t earn anything, sometimes less than 1000 euros a month. I worked as a pilot with Garallo when he was already older and had difficulties. I stayed in Vilanova for a year, and in 2007 I moved to Valencia, where I worked as a pilot for six months under Article 16 to cover the needs of the America’s Cup, the first one in 2007 (June-July). But by the third day, they were already asking me to work on the ferries. So, I became a pilot specialized in the most frequent ships. After 6 months, a position opened up because Tomás Navarro had left for Barcelona. I applied for that position. I took the exam, passed, and stayed in Valencia for 14 years without missing a single day. I forged myself as a pilot in Valencia. I lived at the Corporation. When I could, I went to Menorca. I really enjoyed Valencia. The port opened a new dock, called the America’s Cup Dock, where they located the building from which the event was managed. The port of Valencia is exceptional; they work very hard, very professional, both the people from the Port Authority and the Captaincy, as well as the pilots and other port services.
