ason Jefferys had just finished his third
transatlantic with the ARC rally, his slowest
yet. Ted the labradoodle was lying supine in
the Caribbean sun, happy to stop sailing
and 3kg plumper than when he began. Yet
Jefferys’s partner, Marisa, was still sporting traces of a
black eye from being thrown around in some of the
roughest conditions she had ever seen.
No transatlantic crossing is ever quite the same, even on
a typical tradewinds year, but this year’s rally from Las
Palmas to St Lucia set new records – just not for the fastest.
It was a crossing of extremes – gales, calms, tradewinds,
squalls – that illustrate how unpredictable and diverse a
transatlantic crossing can be.
So when people say the ARC is a cruise in company, the
easy way across, don’t listen to them.
Jefferys and his three crew on Tommy, a Bordeaux 60,
took a northerly route after leaving Las Palmas, in the
hope of a faster crossing, and to avoid light winds on the
rhumb line route to St Lucia. But this year an area of low
pressure was followed by a deeper successor, and crews
shaping this course got a bruising.
“The conditions were terrible,” Jefferys tells me. In the
first low, we were expecting 25 knots but we got 45-60 for
12 hours, and it was sending us north.”
“We had engine failure, then the watermaker broke, then
a wave smacked into us side-on and I hit my head on the
saloon table,” adds his partner, Marisa Ventura. “It was
scary. We were lying on the floor [keeping watch] with the
AIS and radar and letting the boat fend for itself because it
was too dangerous on deck.”
When the worst of the weather was over, Jefferys turned
his yacht south, meeting a huge area of calms and light
breezes before finishing with champagne-style
tradewinds for their final week at sea: “Twin headsails,
doing ten knots, maxing at 18 knots and covering 224
miles in a day.”
“We had everything, we were on every point of sail,” says
Marisa. “I loved it. It was a lot harder than I expected, but
it’s an amazing feeling to know you’ve done it.”
Two pontoons along at Rodney Bay Marina, Swedish
skipper Mikael Ryking was drying the crew’s foulweather
gear in the sun. Ryking’s yacht Talanta is a Class 40. This
was his fourth ARC and it was his goal to try to win his class
and the racing division overall, if possible. So it was always
on Ryking’s plan to head north, to aim for the forecast low
pressure a day out from the Canary Islands and try to get
over the top.
Ryking handed me a USB stick of photos and videos, and
looking at them it was hard to believe they were from the
same event. On one, his crew perched on the high side,
swaddled in oilskins and dodging waves as they crashed
over the bow and foamed down the decks.
In another, Talanta was fizzing downwind, a white
rooster tail wake shooting out from the transom. And here
was a photo of someone in the water on a sea so flat and
calm the boat could be at anchor in a bay.
“We saw the possibility to slingshot over the top of the
low pressure so we headed north and went through the
eye. It was a textbook [experience], going through the
warm front, then the cold front, the wind from the
south-west, the barometer dropping and then thinking:
‘OK, now we are in the south-east quadrant.’ It was really
cool to see it so clearly.”
But what hadn’t been clearly forecast was another,
deeper low a day and a half later, with rather stronger
winds. Again Ryking decided to try to get over the top but
this time the low moved and he had to put in an extra tack
to hitch up. The winds gave his crew a
pounding. “We had 38-40 knots, with
mean winds of 35. It was cold and we
were in full foulies.”
What was the right point to cross the
ridge of high pressure to the south?
Ryking had to decide, and despite around 48 hours or so
of nearly complete calms, they crossed the finish line in
St Lucia after 17 days. This was enough to win his class,
but the crossing had taken a full six days longer than his
previous best time with the ARC.
November is early for the tradewinds. Sometimes they
turn up to the ARC party, sometimes not. When they
don’t, light winds invade the rhumb line course and low
pressure systems may drift down. These lows can bring
strong headwinds and tough conditions, sometimes very
uncomfortable cross seas. Why would you choose to
tussle with this?
Because grib files usually show wind speeds lower than
the reality, and a choice has to be made between the
theoretical fastest course and traditional ‘south till the‘It was harder than I expected,
but it’s an amazing feeling’
Above: Marisa
Ventura, Karla
Böhland, Jason
Jefferys and
labradoodle
Ted on board
Jefferys’s
Bordeaux 60,
Tommy
Right: the crew of
Hummingbird are
shown a vegetable
status updateAbove: practising
celestial
navigation aboard
Hummingbird
Right: cooking
on Kim and Marie
Graven Nielsen’s
HR48, North StarJ
ARC TRANSATLANTIC RALLY
40 February 2018