Aurélien Ducroz recounts the moment when he switched from mountain to ocean racing

Hello, everyone, this is Aurélien Ducroz. It's September 2011, at the start of the Mini Transat. It's my first single-handed transatlantic race, bearing in mind that it's barely a year since I started sailing. This moment on the pontoon is extraordinary, panicking. And at the same time I have a sort of taste for leaving which is completely crazy. I'm going on an adventure, into the unknown. As I was saying, I've been sailing for barely a year now. I know that I'm going to discover a lot of things about myself, about sailing, about the open sea. It's a very strong moment. The moment I want to talk to you about is not necessarily at that time on the departure of the pontoon, but it is 3 4 days after the departure. Why 3-4 days? It's because these first 3 days of racing have clearly been difficult because there's been a lot of stress, because there are a lot of boats around me, because of fear of doing something stupid, doing something wrong, and necessarily this sort of apprehension of finally, and for the first time for me, going out to sea, all the more so when I'm sailing single-handed. But in fact on the fourth day, we're approaching Cape Finistère. There had been very little air up until then, but now the wind is slowly coming in. I can send up the spinnaker. I send the spinnaker out in a bit of a panic, a bit loose, because it's once again the beginning, but suddenly the boat starts to slip. Now I'm spending more than 24 hours under spinnaker, slipping along like crazy. Starting to get to grips with this boat, which I don't know much about in the end, and in fact it's the first day since the start of the race, and even from the beginning, maybe I've been sailing, that I feel like I'm relaxing. To understand, to feel the glide. And on that day, I, as a skier, I decided that ocean racing wouldn't just be this challenge, and that it was going to be a lot more than that. It's hard to explain the why and the how, but it was the slacking off. That's where I really discovered the pleasure of sliding, the pleasure of sailing, and the pleasure of going out to sea.