ARC Rally — Rescue at Sea
It was 3:17 a.m. when urgent pounding on my cabin door awoke me. “Mayday! Mayday! We have two. A man overboard and a boat’s taking on water!”
My bucket-list adventure of sailing across the Atlantic had started eight days earlier, on November 24, 2024. I and the ill-fated were among the hundreds of enthusiasts on the 140 boats that started the 38th running of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC), which is organized by the U.K.-based World Cruising Club. It starts from Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, which is about 120 miles off the coast of Africa, and ends some 2,700 miles later in St. Lucia in the Caribbean.
I had entered into a bargain with my wife: In exchange for not buying a boat, she would support my sailing aspirations — but only aboard other people’s boats. So, using a website that connects boat owners and crew, I landed a position on Gerald and Christina Smith’s 1985 Jongert 20-meter ketch Cinderella di Sanremo. At 67 years of age, I had been worried that skippers would prefer a younger version of me, but it turns out that many boat owners are my contemporaries and it wasn’t an issue. Gerald was English, his wife was Swedish and Norwegian, and the other two crew were German and Maltese. I was the token American.
I arrived in Las Palmas a week early to help get the boat prepared and enjoy social events. Because Cinderella was 73 feet overall, we were placed on the “big boat” dock — the ones that can give you a bad case of boat envy. To our port was a Whitbread 70, and two boats to starboard was a Volvo 70, both around-the-world veterans. (The latter was to experience the man overboard.) There was the Oyster that came in XL and other beautiful boats. Then there were the boats I’m more used to sailing, those in the 40- to 50-ft range — Beneteaus, Leopards and even a 38-ft Hanse.
After six long days of preparing, repairing and provisioning, all 140 boats hit the start. It was a spectacle, with flags flying, horns blaring, and a couple hundred spectators cheering us on. We reciprocated with the Queen’s wave. We felt special.
Once Cinderella had crossed the starting line, we made the obligatory offering to Neptune: a splash of port. We sailed down the southeast side of Gran Canaria and got a great lift from an acceleration zone between islands. We had our big gennaker out and were making up to 10.4 knots in 20 knots of wind. As I went to sleep that night, I had visions of an easy, downwind, one-tack, 3,000-mile sail.