Hi! We are Isabelle and Martin, from Montreal, Canada. We started our sailing adventure in La Rochelle, France in the Summer of 2019 on Oxalis Borealis, our Nautitech Open 40 catamaran.
Our goal is to cruise alongside the coasts of Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean Sea before going towards the Canary Islands for a transatlantic crossing to the Caribbean at the end of the year.
This powerful and improbable dream that we had always carried inside of us, turned into a common but distant objective when we recognized in the other an ideal crewmate. It then suddenly came to life in a surprising way, precipitating our calendar and rocking our entire life towards this adventure. In the space of just a few months, we travelled to some of the largest boat shows in the United States and France before confirming the order of our catamaran at the Nautic Show in Paris in December 2018.
Martin is an engineer and serial entrepreneur. He has recycled his technical and operational skills into full time sailing.
Isabelle is or has been, simultaneously or not, in one way or another, airplane pilot, writer, humanitarian worker, marathoner, mountaineer, teacher, documentary filmmaker… Always on the move, she multiplies and conjugates herself according to her moods and the breeze of the moment and tries to fiercely maintain the balance between the imaginary life and the real life. She likes translucent, simple and light things. She likes volatile weather and storms. She likes to stay still and watch the snow fall. She likes to feel incandescent and travel the world. But books, overall, are what she loves above all else.
Thank you for joining us in our adventure!
Oxalis Borealis
Imaginary specie of wild flower joining together the respective universe of each crew member.
Oxalis Montana is a wild flower that is relatively abundant in Quebec’s evergreen forests. It has been a strong symbol through fundamental stages of Martin’s life, from childhood’s science camps to science fairs as a teenager, to his emergence as an entrepreneur as it also evolved into the name of his very first company. It is only natural that it would be associated to this adventure.
Borealis is a reflection of Isabelle’s universe, who is first and foremost a creature of the North. Even though she has travelled, inhabited and worked under most latitudes and climates, she always needs to see in her wake something to remind her of her boreal origins.
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