When Nico d'Estais speaks about Café Joyeux, something in the room quietly shifts. The French skipper has carried the social enterprise's colours across five years of offshore racing, and his connection to the organisation runs unmistakably deep. "It's the reason this project exists," he says. "Without Café Joyeux, it wouldn't be here."
Café Joyeux operates a network of cafés and restaurants throughout France, built around employing and training people living with mental and cognitive disabilities. D'Estais speaks of the organisation with a warmth that goes well beyond any commercial arrangement. "With my small team, I feel like we're the 34th Café Joyeux," he explains.
He is one of several skippers in this year's Vendée Arctique who have woven a cause into the heart of their campaign. Five competitors are racing under the banner of organisations they believe in: Élodie Bonafous carries the Association Petits Princes, Francesca Clapcich represents 11th Hour Racing Team's commitment to ocean sustainability, Violette Dorange sails in partnership with Initiatives-Coeur, and Manu Cousin races for Coup de Pouce.
For Claire Faure-Millet, chief executive of Café Joyeux, finding d'Estais as the face of their racing programme proved genuinely significant. "It's an enormous gift to be associated with Nico d'Estais," she says. "We're a social impact company with strong values. We needed a skipper with a big heart to have the courage to carry our colours."
Faure-Millet was among the charity leaders who gathered at the Vendée Arctique village on 1 June 2026 (NZST) for Solidarity Day, an occasion race organisers created to bring partner charity leaders together to speak about their work and reflect on what their skippers' involvement means in practical terms.
What distinguishes d'Estais within offshore sailing is the degree to which his boat and his cause have become a single thing. Competing on a course bound for the Arctic while drawing attention to employment pathways for people with cognitive and mental health challenges is no secondary concern running alongside his racing ambitions. For him, the two have been bound together from the very beginning of why he went to sea.
