The crew
An engineer who needs to build, a coach who needs to move
The boat is what makes the two fit together.
Engineer — Lake Geneva
Jim Bancel
Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by building things. Hours spent putting Lego together, imagining improbable structures, bringing ideas to life with my hands. Looking back, it is no surprise that I became an engineer: it was simply where all that was going.
That urge to make things never left me. It led me into two projects that marked my life: rebuilding a Renault 4 to take part in the 4L Trophy rally, then restoring an old sailboat. I still sail every week on Lake Geneva, carried by the wind and by the satisfaction of having brought that boat back to life.
Travel has always been in my DNA. Both my parents worked in the industry and took me to some of the most beautiful parts of the world from an early age: Mauritius, Dubai, Hong Kong, Miami, Réunion. Later, work took me to places I would probably never have set foot in otherwise: both Congos, northern Jordan, Slovenia, northern Italy.
Travelling has become close to vital for me. A year without leaving, without that breath of somewhere else, leaves a hole in me, the feeling of missing something essential.
So the idea came naturally: why not put that need to travel together with my love of working with my hands? And what fits better than a sailboat? Something you maintain, something you understand, and something that takes you wherever the wind decides.
In a world where everything moves too fast — days strung together out of work, sport, meals, sleep — nobody takes the time any more. It all turns into a race, an emergency, a reflex. A boat under sail sets a different rhythm. It asks you to settle, to take the journey rather than the destination, to move at the pace of the wind rather than the one modern life hands you.
That is what I am after: meaning, time, air. And the boat has become how I get there.
Sports coach — French Alps
Lucas Marie
I am Lucas. Adventure, discovery, travel and challenges of every kind: that is what I am made of.
When I was a child I lived in the Normandy countryside. A friend and I already had a strong taste for adventure, for the unknown, for finding things out. One of our favourite games was to pick a direction at random from the village and go as far as we could in a straight line, whatever stood in the way. That is how we started exploring the woods, the abandoned buildings, the fields, every landscape around us.
I grew up with that taste for movement and travel. Some evenings my mother and I would get in the car and drive with no direction and no purpose, just to be moving.
From the age of thirteen I started travelling across Europe with friends to play in card-game tournaments. We played Yu-Gi-Oh, and what luck that the tournaments forced us to travel. Before I turned eighteen I had already been through England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, several times over.
In 2021, at twenty-four, I left Normandy and moved to Haute-Savoie. The mountains amplified everything I already loved: the outdoors, movement, raw nature, the kind of effort that puts you face to face with yourself. That is when I really understood that this need for adventure is part of how I live.
Later I became a sports coach, to be closer still to movement, to pushing past your limits, and to the business of setting a big goal and building the plan that gets you there.
Which is exactly what we are doing with this project: buying a boat and getting it into a state that lets us pull off the biggest goal of all — sailing it around the world.
The refit, week by week
Everything we fix, everything we get wrong and everything it costs is written up in the logbook.