Claro Que Sí
The hull says CQS Evidence. The three letters do not come from a shipyard — they come from a group of friends. This is the only video on the site that is not about the boat. It is the one that explains where the boat came from.
The video is in French. The whole story is written up in English below.
Of course yes
Claro que sí is Spanish for “of course yes”. It was the name of my very first sailboat, and above all the name of our team on the 4L Trophy rally. A rallying cry that turned into a mantra: of course yes we can pull it off, of course yes we dare, of course yes we go.
The crew never changed its name. It only changed scale — from a Renault 4 on Moroccan tracks to a sixteen-metre ketch. The full name of the boat is explained on the boat page.
A weekend at the Rallye du Suran
Rémi lines up for his first ever rally, a few minutes from home, at the wheel of Peugeot 306 number 152. The team turns up to cheer him on — which means making a great deal of noise at the edge of the stages, shooting a fake news report with a microphone and a straight face, and brewing a homemade punch whose recipe stays in the video.
He climbs the standings like a lunatic, all the way to third in his class. Then night falls. Tiredness, loose gravel, and the 306 ends up in the ditch. Nobody is hurt — that is the only thing that counts. We drive back out with the truck to recover the car and get home at two in the morning. The next day: canoes, to recover.
That same Rémi is the one who came and rolled epoxy under the hull of CQS Evidence one weekend, without asking any questions. He is on the hands page.
The definition
That is what Claro Que Sí is: when the plan has gone sideways, we eat a lot, we drink a lot, we have a lot of fun. And your mates are your family.
It is said at the end of the video, by the water, the day after the ditch. Nobody had the line ready.
Why this matters for the boat
A sixteen-metre ketch built in 1979 does not get rebuilt by two people. There were the sanding weekends, the epoxy under the hull, the deck seams redone in Sika, the full-body suits in the middle of winter. Every time, it is the same people who show up.
The round-the-world trip did not come out of a five-year business plan. It started exactly like that rally weekend: somebody asked “shall we do it?” and everybody answered of course yes. The rest — the budget, the quotes, the skin fittings — came afterwards.
Who we are is on our story. The boat is on the boat page. The people who came and helped are on the hands. The refit month by month is in the logbook, and we sum it all up once a month in the yard letter.