Sébastien Roubinet 🇫🇷

Adventurer, explorer and renowned navigator, first Frenchman to be awarded the Shakelton Award. An extraordinary experience that led him to cross unexplored areas by sail: first crossing from west to east of the maritime area bordering the Arctic Ocean by pure sail in 2007 with three crew members.

Ski Snowboard

Sail

Your job?

I would rather say my jobs, because I have several:

I am a sailor: I do convoying, chartering, boat preparation, boat repair, etc. I sometimes cross oceans during certain convoys. I can also sail with polar boats during expeditions or voyages.

I also take part in races, I have been a crew member, skipper, racing boat preparer and technical director for Clément Giraud.

Next summer I should leave again with the familiar sailboat but we have decided not to do any more classic charters, we want to focus on projects (artistic, sporting, scientific) that are long enough: our boat can leave for several months, from France with the crew and the equipment to avoid round trips).

That's not all, I'm also an engineer. It's special because I didn't do any training, I left school very young, I'm an engineer by de facto. I even call myself an inventor: for example, I'm working on the design of a habitable stratospheric balloon. I'm also an architect, I design boats, and expedition equipment like pulkas. I learned all this by working on construction sites and through my personal experiences. I was already a trainer at ENSTA, an engineering school in Brest.

Your best expedition memory?

It's impossible to say which one is the best memory, there are so many!

I think of beautiful landscapes, race starts, etc.

Encounters with animals are often powerful moments. During the NAGALAQA expedition, for example, we found ourselves in a region where the animals do not know humans. There is as much curiosity on both sides. We hid in the valley bottoms to observe caribou who ended up coming to meet us out of curiosity. On the same day, we were in the boat, having tea when one of us said "Oh look, a wolf". He was 15m away from us, looking at us, without fear or aggression. Just curiosity. This relationship with animals is very privileged, and it is the advantage of sailing with small boats without engines.

The most important learning?

When going on expeditions, the most important thing is the way of being and doing in nature. I grew up in nature, I lived there long enough to learn to understand it before even learning school techniques (roping, sail adjustment, etc.).

Properly adjusting a boat requires a lot of feeling and is learned through years of traveling in nature and through encounters.

Eric Tabarly, when asked "How do you do that", replied "Well, look". That's exactly it! The importance of looking at the crew before doing it with them and not imposing your way of doing things. It's important to get used to everyone's different ways and to immerse yourself in them to be as efficient as possible.

This is an apprenticeship that I was able to have with the sled dogs: watching them, learning from them, understanding how the pack works to help it function better. My lead dog was not dominant but got along well with another dog who knew how to assert himself. She was accepted by the others not by imposing herself but thanks to her qualities: she knew how to feel the snow, the ice. Her name was Nagalaqa, ptarmigan in Inuit.