The view
What immediately comes to mind is a pretty crazy moment I had in November 2018. It's the start of the Route du Rhum, my very first race of this type... With, on my count, only four days of competitive single-handed sailing before this start. A real adventure then! For this 11th edition, the conditions at the start were very easy: calm seas and steady winds of around ten knots. And all around me, more than 120 boats spinning, their gennakers unfurled. Even though the racing boats are usually quite colourful, I especially remember the grey of the sea and some fairly soft tones in fact, which went well with the general atmosphere, which I found serene. Compared to the touch-touch starts of some of the regattas I'd already raced, in any case. There, the boats were quite far apart, we'd pass each other at a distance of 20 or 30 metres. I was zen. What a contrast with the previous days, which had been very stressful! In short, I was contemplating... Also all the way with the team to get to this very moment.
The touch
I'm not quitting the Route du Rhum, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself! I'm now sailing in the Bay of Biscay. The conditions have changed radically: 40 knots of wind and rough seas as I've rarely seen. The manoeuvres are violent. And my hands hurt, very badly. So much so that I'm even having trouble zipping up my foulies. That's for the painful memory. I have a much nicer one. I've been on a charter in Antarctica and it was during the course of a cruise that I came across... Let's start at the beginning: not a breath of wind, a sea like a mirror, a superb bay... and some humpback whales. As long as they come to us. And I lie down on the edge of the deck, almost out of the way, extending my arm as far as possible towards the sea, because there, swimming, right next to it, one of them is swimming. And it seems to me that she's reaching out her flipper towards me. With her eye, an impressive double decimetre wide, she looks at me. And it seems to me that she's waiting for contact... just like me! I felt pierced. Without my being able to touch her, I felt something very powerful. I felt intense joy, most certainly to have been able to experience this interaction with this 15-metre long cetacean!
Another memory related to touch, and sailing. With a Class 40, most of the time you're wet. Which is not always very pleasant! In short, I've noticed that since I wore a foulies with sleeves on my wrists and neck, my sensations have changed... and for the better! Before, without a waterproof oilskin, you would get wet inside... and insidiously cold. Today, humidity doesn't invade us: it's much more comfortable, but it's also efficient, as we don't have to waste time and take a risk to go and change in the cabin!
Hearing
A horrible noise at first: it's the one I hear when the hull of my boat hits the sea. A Class 40 is light and resonates a lot, so when you're upwind, facing the wind and the waves, it can be a very violent sound. The noise that the bow makes when it hits the water is followed by a vibration from the whole rigging: these are noises that tell me that my boat is suffering. And, I'm telling you, I can feel them right down to my innards... On the other hand, the VHF offers me some nice sound breaks: hearing a human voice, when you've been alone for a while, it really does feel good at times! It can be that of a sailor, or even better, as it's probably more moving, that of another skipper. I remember a quick conversation I had with Clarisse Crémer when I was approaching Salvador de Bahia at the end of the last Transat Jacques Vabre in 2019. She, with her IMOCA, had arrived about ten days earlier, and was heading back to France. We crossed paths, unexpectedly, and we contacted each other by VHF. With this device, the sound isn't always clear and then we have to talk to each other in turn... In short, these five minutes of this atypical conversation, a little out of time in fact, moved me. All the more so as I knew that she was going back across the Atlantic, but this time on her own. I was also in a peculiar state of mind: the adventure was coming to an end!
Taste
When you're in the race, all good things taste tenfold! Example with the county: it's been three or four days already that I'm in the race, and I have almost no more, no more butter, and I have only a piece of fresh bread left. There, I know that I'm going straight to ecstasy: the fat, salty and tasty dough of the Comté; the salt crystals in the butter; the five-seed country bread from the Saint-Malo biocoop 2 O... a delight! When I've finished the fresh products, I go back to freeze-dried dishes... In fact, I prefer dehydrated dishes. Those, for example, from my partner Beendi, who offers organic, vegetarian... and tasty dishes! There is semolina, rice, quinoa, and other seeds, cooked with herbs and spices often coming from elsewhere.
And when I have some of the county left, I put little pieces of it in my semolina!
The sense of smell
I had the good fortune, at sea, to rub shoulders with the whales. Well, when one of them passes close to your boat and ejects water or just breathes, it's better to pinch your nose! A funny smell of rotten fish, or in short, the inside of a whale, comes out of it. Another nauseating smell marked me too, much more human... When we arrive at the harbour, after a long race, the boats don't smell very good. Men's boats are worse than women's, I've been told! It's a very characteristic smell: at the end of my first ocean race, memories of little girls came to me, because in my father's boat it smelled the same! In short, the smell of clothes and boots constantly wet, sails folded up without being dry... These are real little olfactory bombs!
What about fear?
The Transat Jacques Vabre in 2019: with my team mate, we had chosen, because it was the shortest route, to pass between two islands in the Cape Verde archipelago. But we also knew that it would probably be hot. And it was more than dreaded! I've never seen such short, choppy seas. The waves ended in swirls and came from all sides at once! The wind reached 25 or 30 knots. We were under spinnaker, making 14 or 15 knots, with surfing at 17 and 18. The night wasn't quite dark, fortunately. I was hyper concentrated. I was especially worried that the wind would turn, drag the spinnaker, and that in the end we'd dismast! I was also thinking about the stony shores of the islands, the possible shallows, made even higher by the wave troughs... There, I was afraid of the serious technical problems we might have. But above all I was experiencing an intense adrenaline rush! I was dealing with the present moment, and that was probably enough for me... All my senses were on alert, and in an extreme way. My hearing, for example, because at night I couldn't see the waves coming, I had to feel them coming. For the spinnaker, I also listened to the sound of the spinnaker, and I interpreted it to know its movements. In those moments, I believe that you find an unexpected force in yourself that makes the difficulty seem less rough. We are more resistant to the effort. For me, when it's hot, what's effective in evacuating stress is to ventilate, to blow hard, to oxygenate myself!
