NOV 2026
Back on the start line. Next stop: Melbourne.
📸 Christian Bonin / TSGphoto
Hello everyone,
The last three months have been intense, filled with passion, and super busy! Study, Sail, Eat, Sleep, Repeat! I am super happy to see that the season I imagined is coming to life!
Join me on the road to Melbourne for the U21 World Championships! And enjoy the stories from the campaign so far :)
Brittany: 14 days offshore, June
Sailing is filled with amazing life experiences. This summer I was exceptionally fortunate to be able to sail for 14 days with French offshore legend Roland Jourdain aboard his catamaran. Here’s part of that story:
12:46. I was asleep after a night watch that started at 3am, 80 miles off the south of France, when the crew started shouting. An injured whale was drifting on course with our boat. With the little sleep I had in me, I made it on deck, and there she was: 30 feet long, and not in good shape at all. We circled her, called a specialist, and understood she had already passed away. The skipper decided to take a closer look and a DNA sample, so the scientists could try to understand why she died. Three of us in a small dinghy: the skipper in a wetsuit holding a knife, our marine scientist on camera, and me at the helm of a 4 horsepower outboard. Sharks circling, the smell, the sheer size of her.
Up close, it didn’t feel like a mission. It felt like a goodbye. We spend our lives on the same water as these animals and almost never see one. Seeing her that close, already gone, I understood a little more what it means to share the ocean with them.
That moment was part of a 2,000 nautical mile maiden voyage and internship on We Explore, an 18m racing boat built partly from linen fibre, sailing from Brittany to the Mediterranean. Our skipper has won the Route du Rhum twice and is one of France’s greatest offshore sailors, and living his standards every watch showed me what it takes to turn a life of high performance into something bigger. Roland, Sophie, thank you for having me.
That was June. Since then I’ve been back on the start line twice, and at the second one, for the first time in my career, I was afraid to fail.
Cascais: back to the grind
When I sit in class, all I can think about is surfing big waves in my Laser. When I’m out there surfing them, I’m thinking about how to make every hour in class count. That’s my life this year, and I worked for it. I spent the last year setting this up at university, meeting after meeting, until we built a plan that lets me race at the highest level, and I am super grateful for their support. My exams for this season have been moved around the racing, not the other way around.
This leads to August. I had three weeks to set up the season. First Limassol, Cyprus, training with partners in their final prep for the Mediterranean Games. Then Cascais: hours in the boat, the gym, the bike and the books, studying ahead of the program to cover the weeks I’d miss. The work is repetitive by design: volume and loads to get my body back, my style and trim adjusted to the ILCA 7, speed, speed, speed.
Then, two and a half hours into an upwind session, Cabo da Roca appears, where the last Portuguese mountains dive head first into the Atlantic. That’s when I remember how grateful I am to experience this journey.
Kingston: first race back
At the end of September came my first regatta in five months, the Canadian Senior Championship in Kingston. It was also the country qualifier for the Pan American Games, so the pressure wasn’t just mine, it was on every Canadian on the start line. Only the top two nations would secure a spot for Lima 2027. Canada got it, thank you Ryan!
The week began with training alongside the national team, using Vakaros units (essentially bike computers, but for sailing) and SailSync analytics, then evenings studying in the Queen’s libraries. I was stoked to be back racing, and I had some nerves too. So the goal was simple: find my racing mentality again, and have fun doing so.
The pillar that week was focus. Doing too much is often worse than doing less. The gym is my break from the books, but the water is where I get to just focus. So as the event drew closer, I put more and more of myself into just sailing.
After 10 races, I finished 7th out of 33. Bittersweet: a bunch of little mistakes cost me a few too many points. But when I was racing, my focus was there. And that’s what counts.
Bodrum: you win some, or you learn tons
In mid-October I lined up at the U21 Europeans in Bodrum, Turkey, my first major youth event in over a year.
For whatever reason, a venue never brings its classic conditions the day an event starts. Instead of the usual sunny sea breeze, we got rain, thunder, big shifts, postponements on land and on the water, and a change of racing area. You name it. The week demanded patience and a goldfish’s memory.
It also tested me more than any event before. The world doesn’t stop spinning while you build your plan. Much of my competition had been sailing full time, and suddenly I was losing to people I beat last year. I wasn’t racing to win anymore, I was racing not to lose. For the first time, I was afraid to fail.
I finished 78th out of 120. My worst result so far.
But by the end of the week, I was proud. My mindset came back to taking the small wins, my speed got better every race, the hours in the gym started to feel like they had purpose.
By resetting, and accepting that I’m not where I was last year, I turned the fear of losing into the privilege of having a chance to win. I won’t stop working until I feel that pressure again.
The journey to the Worlds, Melbourne
The Worlds are around the corner, and there is key work to put in! That is exactly what the next ten weeks are built for: a training camp in Cascais, the Vilamoura Grand Prix at the end of November, a December training block, then Melbourne before Christmas for the Australian Nationals in the first week of January and the Worlds in the second. The rest is on me: more weight, more fitness, more hours.
Help me prepare for the U21 Worlds in Melbourne
Australia is the biggest expense of my season:
Flights CA$3,000 · Coaching CA$3,000 · Boat charter CA$1,700 · Accommodation CA$1,700 · Entry CA$650
If you’d like to be part of this chapter helping me get to the Worlds, every gift comes with a Canadian tax receipt.
Sharing this with one friend who loves sport helps just as much.
Since the summer, 13 of you joined the campaign directly. You know who you are, and every one of those donations is in this boat with me. Thank you to my family, to my coaches and my training partners, to CentraleSupélec for making the balance work, to Sail Canada and Voile Québec for guiding me through it all, and to you, my readers and followers. It takes a village.
Carlos