Noumea, New Caledonia

Our floating laboratory arrived in the archipelago of New Caledonia after 25 days of navigation at an average speed of 5.6 knots. The crossing was punctuated by changing weather conditions in an ocean that covers one third of our planet's surface.

From spectacular moonlight to the cleaning of the solar panels, between pride of what has been done and nostalgia to leave the sea, discover the highlights of this "first of its kind" navigation told by the crew.

The arrival in Grande-Terre concludes a first crossing of the Pacific with renewable energies and hydrogen produced and stored on board. During this crossing, our ship has passed the symbolic mark of 10,000 nautical miles covered during the year 2021, and 40,000 nautical miles since the launch in 2017, meaning more than 74,000 km in energy autonomy and without damaging the Planet.

Longer distances allow us to push back the limits of our onboard technologies, to test them in different conditions and ultimately to contribute to improving their performance and reliability over time.

Previously we shared the images of some of our bifacial solar panels that were damaged while sailing to Hawaii. Shortly before the departure for the second chapter of the transpacific, our crew looked for solutions to replace these solar panels before setting sail again.

However, it was not easy to find the right materials in an isolated archipelago in the middle of the Pacific... this was without counting on the ingenuity of Julien Bonnard, our systems engineer, and Henk Rogers, a generous donor we met in Big Island, Hawaii.

Despite its natural resources and abundance of renewable energy sources, New Caledonia was still 97% dependent on fossil fuels in 2019, with more than 5,200,000 tons of CO2 emitted per year.

However, the government's goal is to reduce the community's CO2 emissions by 35% and to double the production of renewable energy by 2030. Challenges that our crew will investigate in the coming weeks.