Shamballa Cruising Yacht Club: The Rally Start and a Big Bang!

The week before the official start of the ARC+ Rally, Phoebe and I spent 3 days cooking, freezing and vacuum packing meals for the passage. A large Canadian catamaran on our pontoon, Two Canoes, kindly loaned us their portable freezer while they were off for a few days sightseeing. The freezer on Songster will keep things frozen but only if they are already frozen solid. By the end of the marathon cooking session our freezer was absolutely stuffed with nearly 20 main meals just ready to be thawed and heated while on passage. Plus we had lockers full of tinned and dried food for more meals.

Prepping the veggies

Last minute extra provisions

Then on the first of November the official activities of the ARC+ Rally started. The next 10 days was a whirlwind of safety inspections, seminars and lots of social activities. The benefits of joining a rally rather than crossing independently really came to the fore over this time. The seminars were very good and informative. We went to talks on Weather and Routing, Provisioning, Management of Emergencies, Downwind Sailing Tips, Communications, First Aid at Sea and an interactive Liferaft Demo.

All the emergencies we could be facing

Checking out the grib files

Life raft demo

Every night was a social activity. There was the welcome party, daily sundowners, crew dinners, a costume party (we didn’t go to this) and on Friday the big Farewell party – given two nights before the start to ensure people had clear heads on the Sunday of the rally start. There are nearly 100 boats participating in the ARC+ Rally which includes 450 people, 80 are children sailing with their families.

Celebrating with new friends from Wolo and Xerric

Some of the children going on the ARC+ Rally

The welcoming party

Crew dinner

One of the added benefits for us was that Oyster Yachts, the manufacturer of Songster, provides a whole team of very professional, knowledgeable and friendly staff to inspect all the Oyster yachts in the fleet. The ARC+ Rally had about 8 Oysters and the larger ARC rally starting two weeks later had about double that number or more.

Now our little Oyster 39, built in 1979, is definitely the very poor cousin to the modern Oyster Yachts that are mostly over 60 feet long, very luxurious and cost ten times more than our little boat. But the team of Eddie, Gavin, Paul, Will and Andy from Oyster were fantastic – thoroughly nice guys that were really fun to talk to. They were genuinely interested in our boat and seemed impressed with the characteristics of this ‘classic’ Oyster. They offered lots of helpful suggestions about the various systems. A thorough check of all the major systems; steering, deck fittings, sea cocks, generator, engine was done and they spent nearly 2 hours with us. When they left on Thursday afternoon they said a rigger would be by to check the rig and apologised that this was delayed but their normal rigger was ill and they had to fly another in from England.

On Friday night Oyster had a cocktail party at the very pretty hotel, Hotel Santa Catalina, for all the Oyster crews. It was a very pleasant get together with great canapés and plenty of wine. From there we went to the ARC+ Farewell Party, a much bigger do with a live band and even more wine and beer flowing. I was beginning to feel like we were going from one booze-up to another all week! Anyway it was a great time and Reg and Phoebe danced the light fantastic.

Live band at the Farewell Party

Reg and Phoebe enjoying the music

The next afternoon Andy, the rigger from Oyster, came to check our rig. He found that the baby stay had some broken strands and needed to be replaced. The local rigging shop, Alisios, was fantastic and quickly made up a new swaged shroud for us and Andy installed it by nightfall. The team returned the next morning, a few hours before the start of the rally, for a quick tuning of the shroud and apologised that they ran out of time to check the rest of the rigging. As all this work was gratis and an added bonus for us, we were just grateful these great guys came along to check what they did. Ultimately the responsibility for our boat is ours alone. However the rigging proved to be our Achilles heel.

The big start of the rally was at 1 pm Sunday 10 November. We dropped the mooring lines a bit after midday to head out to the starting line. There was lots of good energy in the air. Everyone was excited, wishing each other all the best. It was a great sight to see 94 boats lining up ready to start the ocean rally. It is not a race but there is a saying that whenever there are two or more sailboats on the same body of water then it is a race. The conditions were blustery and waves quite high. Everyone was anticipating a fast first leg of the rally.

Heading out to the start

Approaching the start line

Waves blocking out the hulls of the boats

Some more of the fleet

Songster zooming along

We were zooming along with a mizzen and the genoa when there was a loud BANG and the port (left) intermediate stay on the main mast had detached. The Norseman fitting which fastens the metal shroud to the deck had just cracked in two. The main mast was swaying dangerously. The crew all did what needed to be done and no one panicked. We quickly got the sails in and tightened the running back stay to give some support to the swaying mast and limped back to port. We were all safe but with very increased heart rates and, of course, we were feeling rather sad and disappointed. We were just grateful that this major rigging failure happened only a few miles out of port and not 1000 miles into the Atlantic.