Category Archives: ARC

Goodbye to ARC World

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Yesterday we left Rodney Bay and ARC World with a mixture of emotions. Excited to be getting on with the next part of the journey, sailing through the Grenadines with the Kids over Christmas, sadness at saying goodbye to our ARC family – all the friends we have met over the past couple of months and slight trepidation at emerging back out into the real world from the ARC’s protective bubble.

Rodney Bay from the top of the mast

The final night in St Lucia was prize giving night. The World Cruising Club, organisers of the ARC, do a great job at including everybody in the prizes and everybody enjoyed the evening. We are still surprised at how well we did to win cruising class C and were especially pleased to win the a Oyster cup for the first placed Oyster in all the cruising classes, particularly as it was accompanied by a magnum of Moët.

We cast off from the dock at eight thirty for the fifty four mile trip to Walilabou bay on the Island of St Vincent. It’s funny how your perspective changes, a few months ago a 54nm trip would have seemed a long way but now it seemed like a quick hop. It was quite quick, we were anchored by four thirty, but it was also a rough trip, the channel between the bottom of St Lucia and the top of St Vincent was horrible – 3 metre swell on the beam, overlaid with messy waves and 40kts of wind. 

We arrived into a beautiful bay with a sigh of relief, unfortunately this was short lived, having crossed an Ocean with hardly a breakage, we arrived in St Vincent to discover the mainsail wouldn’t furl and the up button on the anchor wasn’t working. Tired from the difficult crossing this was the last thing we needed, but finally with the sail furled away by hand, the anchor set at the bows and the stern attached by rope to a tree, we dinged ashore for dinner. We would face these problems tomorrow.

Walilabou bay was used for the filming of the Pirates of the Caribbean and the ramshackle restaurant was full of props, including a dozen coffins, a huge water wheel and a model of Captain Jack Sparrow  clinging onto the top of a mast, as seen at the start of the first movie. The food to our tied and hungry tummies tasted excellent despite our rather alternative surroundings.

We woke to a freshening breeze and we felt uneasy about the position of the boat, it sat awkwardly between the anchor and the stern line, the rocks seemed uncomfortably close. The forecast was for the winds to increase so we decided to make a break for it and sail to our next stop, Bequia, a day early. This, of course, first entailed raising 1/2 ton of anchor and anchor chain by hand, well done Rick, Matt, Rachael and Thomas the boat boy. St Vincent we’ll have to visit you properly next time around.

Reflections on an Island

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We have left ARC World, in Rodney Bay, for a few days to take Roz B, who flew out to greet us, for a couple of days sailing. It feels great to have escaped the heat and intense activity of the Marina and fantastic to finally be swimming in the warm Carribbean sea but we sit in a place of contrast. 

Anse Chastanet is a beautiful bay surrounded by steep wooded cliffs that drop right down to th sea. In the foreground is a pretty resort that sits nestled in the vegetation and where we had a very nice lunch yesterday. The background is dominated by Petit Piton – the pitons are the symbol of St Lucia, volcanic conical peaks that create a very dramatic landscape. The sunlight twinkles off a green sea reflecting the trees that enclose it, we are tied to a mooring bouy with just two other boats, it should be extremely tranquil.

    

Unfortunately our relaxation is tempered, there is a small swell that is rocking the boat just a little too much and we have been plagued by a swarm of tiny flies that has found us and our food. 

The real tension however comes from the boat boys that aggressively insisted on helping us pick up a mooring, demanding money for their service. They have been followed by others that continually buzz past us in a selection of rickety craft showing more interest in our boat than feels comfortable. Last week we were visited by the General Manager at Rodney Bay Marina, the day before Eric, Roz and I had dragged one of the security guards from the water, he was completely out of it, not having a clue where he was or what was happening, had we not been passing when he wandered oblivious off the end of the pontoon I’m not sure he would be with us now. I felt obliged to report the incident not just for the security of the boats he is meant to be protecting but for his own safety. So it was that the English marina head came onboard for a cup of tea and we discussed amongst other things the perception of crime on St Lucia that is damaging the tourist trade. Sitting in this lovely bay, although nothing untoward has happened, that perception is unfortunately being re-enforced. 

For the first few days after our arrival, life past in a daze of exhaustion and  excitement. We revelled in our achievements and the congratulations of others, as all our fellow competitors, sorry participants, began to arrive and the emails and messages from home flooded in. Our smugness only increased, when wandering the dock we discovered Pixel, the boat and that had pushed us the most, was a full on, open cockpit racing boat, with eleven professional crew hot bunking and surviving on a minuscule ration of water to save weight. Bonkers!

In quiet moments we reflect on the crossing, we all agreed the ‘racing’ had added to the fun, but overall that the whole experience had been more straightforward than expected. It seems we had very few breakages or problems compared to most and that most boats had used much more complicated routing than ourselves. Our success seems to be down somewhat to our ignorance, a lot to our meticulous preparation but mostly to the brilliant boat we have in Raya.

Atlantic Crossing in pictures

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Team Raya preparing to leave Las Palmas

  

An upside to the Atlantic squalls

5000 miles sailing Raya, 1784 miles to St Lucia

Boys enjoying the moment

  

Sailing with our blue cruising chute

 

Sailng west

Erics second Dorado

 

Captain “just call me Ben” Smith grabbing some sleep

  
 

First sight of land for fifteen days

 

Rum punch welcome to St Lucia

 

The blog that got away

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Below is a blog that seems to have got lost in the ether of Atlantic satellite comms. 

Halfway there

Monday 30th November

The suntan lotion is back out, the crew are in T-shirts and shorts and have smiles on their faces. The sea temperatures is up to 25C, the air is 28C in the shade. Our lat/long is 22N/35W and the flying fish have started to land on our decks, we have reached the tropics. 

Today with much excitement we successfully flew our big coloured cruising chute. Ricks relief was obvious as it launched without a hitch and sped us along in the now light winds, justifying all that effort to drag it out with us to Las Palmas. Unbelievably we are still leading our class and the cruising chute will help keep us competitive, we need all the help we can get Raya doesn’t really perform well in light winds.

We get a position update at midday each day from ARC Control, so we know more or less where everybody else is but we haven’t actually seen any other ARC boats for a couple of days now, there have been a few targets on the AIS but we haven’t even glimpsed their lights at night, the radio is silent.

We have been sailing for a week now but I still struggle to grasp the enormity of the body of water around us. There have been plenty of times in the last six months when we have been out of sight of land and there is nothing now to show there is not an island, or continent for that matter, just over the horizon here too. I try to visualise us as that tiny speck on the ocean you see way below on a flight to NewYork but in reality our world is the twenty or so miles to the horizon all around us. We have plenty of sea below us too, as we committed a broken plate to the depths, Eric reflected on what it would past on its 2 mile trip to the seabed.

We have had moments of wonder, such as the stars last night. With no light pollution the sky was full to bursting and the cloud of the milky way was as clear as day. To add to the scene there was phosphorescence twinkling in our wake – stars above and below us. Within an hour the moon had risen and the stars faded as the moonlight shone so bright you could almost read by it. There have been lots of magnificent rainbows, their colours bright against the dark grey of the squall clouds, one particularly impressive one was a complete half circle that ended seemingly metres from our feet. On their watch the boys even saw a rainbow created by the moonlight, a very obvious bow of dull colours, I didn’t even know such a thing existed. And yesterday we were joined by our first pod of Atlantic dolphins.

There have been moments of calm when we can relax and enjoy being in this unique spot. Times of high activity as we change sails or battle the swell to prepare lunch and moments of suspense as we check out the latest position update or await a bite on the fishing line we are trailing.

However there is one thing you can be certain of when sailing and that is that no particular moment or situation lasts long. One minute the boat is sailing along nicely and then a slight wind shift will mean we can no longer point to where we want to go and everything is different. 

It is five in the morning my watch doesn’t start until six but the roll of the boat is making it impossible to sleep, the wind has shifted and not wanting to change our downwind twin sail rig in the dark we have had to turn slightly north bringing the swell onto the side of the boat. There is not much wind and the sails flog noisily, our speed has dropped and St Lucia feels a long way away. At least I am warm and dry, a few nights ago on my 3-6am watch, I had the rolling, the flogging and rain! 

We crawl slowly towards the half way mark that with the high winds seemed we would reach yesterday but at this speed we won’t make it for another eight hours. Sunrise will lift our spirits, the forecast is for the light winds to continue, so it’s all hands on deck to raise the cruising chute back up and try and to push on as fast as possible.

Atlantic Time

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Fri 4th

Time, normally it’s quite a straight forward thing, but here on Raya, six hundred miles from St Lucia, we are grappling with Atlantic time, which has four different times at once.

Firstly there is boat time, currently GMT -2 .This is the time we use for the the day to day running of the boat, particularly the time we use for the watch system. As we travel west we have to add an hour about every four days to keep sunset and sunrise in sync with life onboard.

Then there is ARC control time which is set at GMT, this is the time all their updates relate to and is essential as we work out weather forecasts and the position of other boats.

Next is St Lucia time, GMT -4 which as we draw closer becomes more important as we try to calculate our arrival time.

Finally there is the random times all our electronics are keeping, my iPad for instance can’t find what time it is mid Atlantic and I can’t find a city that is GMT -2 to set it to, so it is stuck on GMT -1. When I wake bleary eyed and confused for my watch grappling with what the actual time is, can be a bit of a challenge.

To add to the confusion not one of us knows what day of the week it is and if it hadn’t been for Matts birthday on the 2nd, giving us some point of reference, the date would be a mystery too. Talk of Christmas from back home seems incomprehensible, as does the fact that in a few days we will be in the Caribbean without going anywhere near Gatwick. We are all however very clear about how many days we have left at sea, at our current
pace that will be  3-4 days depending on our old friend the wind.

We are sailing fast, dead downwind, flat out with our twizzler rig (two genoas one set either side of the boat)  but its touch and go if it is fast enough, the opposition is closing in. We can’t actually go any faster so we are just trying to enjoy the ride which includes 12kt surfs down 12ft high Atlantic rollers.

Each day is different, the sea is rougher or calmer the sky cloudy or clear, we spot a way off tanker or the dolphins come to play but they are tending to meld into one. Tuesday however stands out amongst the crowd. it started badly with us ripping the cruising chute. We had flown it carefully all night with winds rarely going above 12kts, as the sun rose Hartmut and I were on watch when suddenly a gust of 50 kts appeared from seemingly nowhere shredding our beautiful blue sail. This sail is not essential but Rick was beginning to really enjoy mastering it and we may miss it in the light winds we expect to encounter as we approach St Lucia.

That afternoon our mood was lifted, Eric caught a fish, a magnificent three foot dorado, that he filleted and cooked for supper, delicious and probably the freshest fish we have ever eaten. As he also is in charge of bread making he is rapidly gaining a certain status however his attempts at walking on water still need some refinement.

Today is much like any other we trim the sails trying to squeeze every last bit of speed from Raya, we cook, eat, sleep, read and clean, we stare out into the never ending blue, fill in the log book and increasingly pour over the position reports.

We are now all ready to get there and setting all our clocks and especially our body-clocks back to just one time, Caribbean time.

Race or Rally?

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Thursday 26th – Day 4

It’s a very bright moonlit night and there is nothing but sea and sky. No whales or dolphins, no sign of any other boats, not even any phosphorescence, just us sailing through a vast ocean. This isolation feels very special, the nearest land is 700 miles away, even the sea bed is a couple of miles away. The boat is screaming along at over 8kts.

Our Atlantic rally has suddenly turned into an Atlantic race, much to our surprise we are leading our class. This has turned all of us from laid back cruisers to embarrassingly competitive beings. We are suddenly trying to take advantage of every opportunity to increase our speed and are pouring over the position lists with a fine tooth comb. If the wind drops it will become much more difficult for us to keep up with many of the yachts that have more crew in numbers and experience. But for now we are enjoying the glory and trying our best to make use of the windy conditions.

The high winds of course make for bigger waves and everyday life is very difficult. It is a challenge to cook, clean, dress, even brush your teeth as the boat lurches from side to side. All things that can be delayed if necessary on a short sail but are essential on a longer trip like this. I am collecting my normal clutch of bruises on the tops of my arms and my hips as I slam into tables and doors but beyond that we all seem to be coping. The really good news is that besides a bit of queasiness in the first few days, the pills have been doing a sterling job and we are now all weaned off them. Not even I am sick!

The only slight disappointment is the lack of sun, the temperature is pleasant even during the night now but there is nothing to beat the sun twinkling off a blue sea. We are being chased by a continuous string of squalls that bring cloud and rain, but they also bring the wind – so for the new racing team Raya it’s not all bad.

OMG! We are off across the Atlantic 

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I am sitting here luxuriating in the stillness, we leave tomorrow and for the next two to three weeks my life will be lived on a moving platform. We are eager to get going, we have been sitting n the marina for long enough, the Caribbean beckons.
ARC World continues to defy description. We have made dozens of new friends, partied every night and fretted over everything from which route to take to when or whether to change the bed sheets. Getting anywhere takes ages as you continually bump into people all on a similar mission. The pontoon is full to bursting with people rushing here or there, boxes of groceries, delivery boys, and pieces of boats. It is crazy just how much activity is still going on on the boats. We have a guy from Oyster dangling 23m up our mast, opposite they are attaching a spinnaker pole and next door but one awaits a new boom!

  
  S pontoon 

The team from Oyster do a brilliant job pre ARC, they come to each boat and spend three or four hours checking through everything with a fine toothcomb and when they find a problem they help fix it. Raya thankfully and after all the money spent on the refit, expectedly, is still in good condition. They did however find a small problem at the top of the mast, a fitting had been left with a rough edge and this over the six months we have been at sea has chafed our spinnaker halyard (halyards are the ropes that pull sails up). As we are about to fly our coloured sail this could have proved problematic and Oyster have kindly been sorting it out for us.

 Further peace of mind came in the form of Andy from Stella Maris (our refit team) who stayed on board and helped us with the pre-trip checks as well. We really can’t be leaving feeling any safer than we are.

  
  Andy at the top of the mast. 

Our crew, Eric and Hartmut, have arrived so team Raya is now complete. Eric is a long time friend and Harmut an old work colleague, they have been signed up for almost a year and are both excited and working hard. All the fruit and veg arrived this afternoon and had to be washed to remove the chance of cockroach eggs being carried onboard. Rick and I returned from the skippers briefing to find the crew knee deep in apples and potatoes and Raya resembling a grocery store.

  
  Just part of the fruit and veg order 

Stowing all the food has been a challenge and I’m still not sure whether we have far too much or not enough. Both Eric and Hartmut appear to be big eaters so I rushed out and did another last minute shop. I have pre cooked half a dozen meals for the days when we don’t feel like cooking and have ingredients to knock up something exotic if we fancy it, we have tons of fruit, emergency tins and bags full of chocolate. It is possible our supplies won’t just get us to St Lucia but will get us right the way through Christmas too!

The forecast looks good as there is a stable high pressure over the Azores which has caused the trade winds to set in. The forecast is for NE winds F4-5, if that’s how the conditions are it will be perfect for us, our already heavy bulk, now full with food, fuel and water will need plenty of wind to get going.

Whilst at sea I will try to post a few blogs but as we will be sending via our satellite phone I won’t be able to send photos. If there is anything other than blue sea and more blue sea I’ll post the pictures when I reach St Lucia. Fingers crossed for a whale sighting.

Busy busy

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It is Friday the 13th and our destination was the village of Terror, this is not an ARC trip for the superstitious. As we wind up the steep narrow roads our coach seemingly oblivious to the oncoming traffic the name becomes more and more literal. I was on my way to help plant trees with a group of other ARC participants joining for the morning a project to reforest a section of Grand Canaria. The Canaries despite its volcanoes and large areas of urbanisation is in fact a bio diversity World hot spot and I was doing my tiny bit to help keep it that way.

It was great to be surrounded by green instead of the concrete of the marina and despite the mist the views were good. However my tiny bit turned out to be extremely hard work, the planting area was at the top of a very steep hill and we were then presented with a cross between a hoe and a pick axe. One aching body later I had managed to plant six or seven trees and as a group we managed 190 between us.

  
 

On Sunday we went on a friends boat to see the start of the ARC+. It was nice to get out of the marina and get some fresh air and to wish our friends, old and new, fair winds as they headed off to the Cape Verdi Islands. 

The start line of ARC+

Their departure immediately seemed to put the pressure on the rest of us and now everyone is busy busy here in Las Palmas.

We have taken Raya for a run to test her engines. We ploughed up and down the shore taking the revs up as high as they would go and the good news was – no bubbles in the coolant. We have been to lectures on everything from managing emergencies at sea to provisioning, cooked the first few meals for the freezer, worked down the long list of stuff to check on the boat, done two more big shops and continued to party most evenings.

Tuesday we “dressed the boat overall” this means flying a string of the International signal flags from the front of the boat to the top of the mast and down to the stern. All boats are asked to do it to add to the overall feeling of celebration in the marina. Each flag represents a different number or letter and often has a further meaning, for instance the blue and white A flag means ‘diver below please keep clear’ or the yellow Q flag means ‘this boat is healthy can I clear into port’. I had spent a concentrated afternoon in Lanzarote stringing them carefully together being especially vigilant to make sure they were all in the specified order and would all appear the right way up. Looking at some of the other boats there seems to be some debate as to which way up is correct, but the overall effect is very colourful.

  

Flags are not the only thing to be hauled to the top of the mast this week, yesterday I attempted to get Rick up to check our rigging. We had practiced it a few months ago using the winch on the bow, but this time decided to try with one of the electric winches in the cockpit. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake as the angle of the line entering the winch which we thought would be just about OK, turned out not to be and instead of flowing seamlessly around it tangled up. So there we were the winched jammed and Rick hanging about ten meters above the deck, after a moments panic all was well, luckily he had rigged a safety line and with the help of a friend he was easily dropped back down to earth. Lessons learnt and to ensure we got straight back on the horse, I winched him back up by hand much more controlled but a lot harder work!

All the boats have been lent a yellow brick transmitter that will transmit our location right accross the Atlantic – our AIS can only locate us to within about 50 miles of a beacon most of which are on land. If you would like to follow us and the rest of the fleet you can do at – http://www.worldcruising.com/arc/eventfleetviewer.aspx
Make sure to select ARC 2015, not ARC+ 2015. 

ARC World

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Saturday 7th November 

The tension at the far end of our pontoon is palpable. The ARC + which crosses the Atlantic via the Cape Verdi Islands, leaves tomorrow. It is not just the bustle of supermarket deliveries of last minute provisions or the practicing of man overboard routines or even the raising and lowering of a multitude of shapes and sizes of sails as they are checked and double checked. It’s something more subtle, the tone of a voice, the determined stride up the pontoon, the concentrated expressions. For them suddenly the time has come to get serious, the partying is finished.

For the rest of us on the traditional ARC, sailing straight from Las Palmas to St Lucia, things are just beginning. We watch on, trying to pick up tips for our departure on the 22nd November.

It is difficult to quite explain our pre-rally world here, a mass of people living cheek by jowl, the boats are crammed in, moored just a fender (8ins) apart. All busying ourselves with making sure we get can our boats and crew through the 2-3 week journey ahead, safely, well fed and as efficiently as possible. We are all making friends fast, everyone chatting to everyone else, mostly complete strangers, but with this huge event in common.

Our flight finally left Heathrow three hours late and we arrived back at the marina at 4am on Tuesday morning. Thankfully Rene, a local guy who offers a long list of services to the influx of ARC boats, was there to pick us up, our luggage arrived including our sail and Raya was exactly as we had left her. After a few hours sleep we woke to blue skies and a social whirl, any hope of having a break from the relentless eating and drinking of our three weeks break at home we soon realised was in vain. We have reunited with people we had met en route during the summer, met people we had only previously chatted to through our blogs or on Facebook and made new friends of all the people moored near us. Each night we end up on one boat or another having a glass of wine, swapping tales of our trips down and discussing worries and solutions regarding the preparations ahead.

Provisioning is a common topic of conversation, what and how much we think we need, where best to buy it, who delivers most promptly, where to put it all once it arrives?

 

Provisioning trip no 1

 
You need friends around, everybody helping each other out. Apparently our dingy had to be rescued a couple of times while we were away as there has been some very heavy downpours. We left it tucked under the bow of the boat to allow access to the stern by the engine guys that needed to get on and off the boat carry equipment. We discovered however that it wasn’t just above water that it had had problems, the bottom was completely encrusted with barnacles, so Thursday we drove it around to the local beach and spent a hard couple of hours getting it clean again.

As you walk down the pontoon you notice crews sitting sheepishly on deck sourounded by life jackets, first aid kits and boxes of flares. The World Cruising Club who organise the ARC has very strict safety standards and before you can leave on any of their rallies, you have to pass a safety equipment test. We had ours yesterday, it feels a bit like an exam as the safety officer quizzes you and inspects your boat. Raya of course having crossed the Atlantic and circumnavigated the globe with the WCC before has already been through all this and we inherited a lot of the required equipment when we bought her, the remainder we sorted out before we left Southampton. We were relieved to pass with flying colours, everything in place except for a bit of missing reflective tape.

We ticked off a couple of other things that have been hanging over us for a while. We have been unable,  in Spain, to fill our Propane gas bottles that we use for cooking and we have been eking out the little gas we had for months now. So we were very happy when Rene again came up trumps, returning both full yesterday. If we weren’t trying so hard to return our waistlines to some vestige of their former selves I would celebrate by baking a cake.

The engine whisperer informs us the engine is now in tiptop condition, we plan to take Raya out for a test run on Monday and fingers crossed the coolant problem will have been finally eliminated.

And yes, drum roll please, the freezer appears to be fixed! All we need now is to find time between the full itinerary of seminars and social events to fill it back up.

ARC Itinerary week 1