VIDEO By cata-sled to conquer North Pole: Roubinet & co. defy nature

When you get polar fever, there is little you can do. Sebastien Roubinet, Benoit Lequin and Pierre yves Moreau will try to cross the Arctic Ocean, between water and ice, aboard a sailing catamaran/sled: to call this undertaking “challenging” is an understatement. The departure will take place in Alaska, in 2018: destination Spitsbergen (the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway), passing through the North Pole, after about 1750 miles propelled by the wind and their own strength, because in case of headwinds the two will have to tow the boat alone on the ice. How long will it take them? We are talking about three months: obviously any outside assistance is prohibited. Here is the wonderful video presentation:

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SEB ROUBINET, A REPEAT OFFENDER
To some of you, however, Sebastien Roubinet’s name may be familiar. A sailor with a penchant for polar latitudes with an incredible history behind him. Here is what we had written about him in 2015:

Sometimes great adventurers, those capable of going beyond human limits, remain unknown to the world. If the Arctic Circle is not your thing, you are unlikely to have heard of Sebastien Roubinet. Yet the 34-year-old Frenchman is now considered one of the world’s craziest and most ingenious extreme sailors, as revealed by the website Cultura Marinara, capable of being at once a sailor, designer, builder and … visionary.

FIRST THROUGH THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
A passion, for cold weather and sailing on the edge, that dates back to the age of fourteen, when young Sebastien sailed two months solo along the Norwegian and Swedish coasts. After a participation in the Mini Transat and a boarding as second on the legendary Tara, he designed and built (it was 2006) the seven-and-a-half-meter catamaran “Babouche“, a cross between a boat and a sled. Goal: To be the first man to cross the Northwest Passage exclusively under sail. Mission accomplished: Roubinet set sail from Anchorage, Alaska, in May 2007 and three months later reached the coast of Greenland.

A DREAM CALLED THE NORTH POLE
The French sailor then set out to conquer the North Pole, again strictly under sail. After an initial failure, Roubinet built a new catamaran in 2013, the “Babouchka,” made of carbon and equipped with solar panels. Starting in Barrow, Alaska, the journey continues well for the first two months, thanks to favorable weather conditions. About a hundred miles from the North Pole, however, the weather changes abruptly, and Roubinet (who takes on this challenge in tandem with Rodolpe André) is forced to give up and call for help from a Russian icebreaker. Today Roubinet is trying to raise the funds to retry the venture. Shall we bet that he will find a way to start again?