SENSES #2 - OBR Jérémie Lecaudey ‘Smell like a boat’

A usual say in sailing is: if you can’t smell it, it must be coming from you.

Put aside the stereotype of the smelling shoes, boots, clothing, arms, breath, bodies, there are a lot more unexpected smells in and out a racing sail yacht.

The frightening one are the obvious: gas and burnt. The two small camping gas bottles that we use sometimes takes time to turn on and if it takes a while you can smell the gas from your bunk.
The little mistakes can provoke the biggest incidents: smelling a burnt USB cable because it was left on top of an electronic box, and you will see the entire crew pointing their noses like dogs in a park, trying to find that smell.

Your only source of power against smell is a little fan that is located right above your head in your bunk. If your colleagues have smelly boots, you soon find out that the entire boat smells like it, and the remedy remains to stay on deck. Get back in and you eventually get used to it. On the last leg I had brought a surf wax smelling device, the entire boat smelled like a surfboard, my camera case still does as well…

The fresh, non-polluted air takes his full meaning while out in the ocean, the breeze gives you a constant flow of the purest oxygen, only the mountains can compete in that division.

Jérémie