Elodie Bonafous has never sailed this far north. Ten days alone at sea pursuing a latitude that exists in her imagination as much as on the chart — 66 degrees, where no IMOCA skipper has ventured before. The prospect sits with her, raw and honest: a race defined less by what she knows than by what she doesn’t.
The Vendée Arctique 2026 starts in five days. Bonafous, piloting Association Petits Princes – Quéguiner, speaks of it with a blend of hunger and genuine uncertainty. “Honestly, it’s quite mad,” she said this week. “I don’t think anyone has ever gone this far north in an IMOCA.”
The geography lands differently when you flip it. Sixty-six degrees north sits deeper into the Arctic than Cape Horn sits into the Southern Ocean. Arnaud Boissières made the comparison recently, and it clicked for Bonafous: the realisation of the space she would occupy, small and alone, further into raw territory than the sport’s most famous southern threshold. It was the context that made it stick, not the number itself.
What draws her, though, is not purely the symbol. The landscapes matter. The cold. The light at these latitudes, the texture of the water, the weight of the swell — all of it stacked together, all of it unfamiliar. These are the things that will peel back the ordinary Atlantic terrain that most offshore sailors know by feel. This is a race that promises to remake the scenery.
Bonafous knows her boat. She knows the circuits and the rhythms of solo racing. What she doesn’t know is what 66 degrees North will demand. She’s never been there. No one has, not in an IMOCA, not like this. That gap between preparation and discovery, between the training runs in familiar water and the reality of a place you’ve only read about — that’s what’s captured her attention. A line on the map. A world underneath it, waiting. She sails in five days.
