A crowd gathers at the breakwater in Gran Canaria to bid farewell to the yachts. One by one, boats from 26 nationalities file out of Marina Las Palmas toward the start line at the north of the Spanish island. Crews dance and cheer. The music changes from Queen to ABBA as the Swedish yacht Dawnbreaker docks out to the blare of an Alpine horn. The two white-haired children at the bow seem awed by the fanfare, but their brother, Alfred, waves furiously from the top of a Jacob’s ladder, looking more than ready to take on the Atlantic.
The Chuck Paine design is one of 83 vessels (six of them American) taking part in the 2,700-mile rally to Grenada, with a stopover in Cape Verde. The direct ARC, which sails to St. Lucia, would depart two weeks later.
It’s been 40 years since Jimmy Cornell launched the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, an event aimed at enthusiasts instead of the racing elite. Its focus is safety. Back then, Dawnbreaker skipper Lars Alfredson was navigating with a radio direction finder. During his first ARC, in 2003, he relied on an SSB radio and a modem to stay in contact.
“You’d spend hours trying to connect, but you got through sometimes,” he recalls. “You see the boats the first day and the last day, and in between it’s just empty sea.”
Now, sailing with his son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, Alfredson has Starlink, enabling the family to run their online retail business at sea.
“I wouldn’t say things are better now, but for the young people who need to be connected all the time and have to report everything that happens, they like it,” he says.
At 64 feet, Dawnbreaker is one of the bigger entries in the fleet, with the average yacht being 48 feet. These days, more than a third of participants are multihulls, and most are equipped with sat comms, autopilots, solar, lithium batteries and multifunction displays.
But how would the crews feel if they were zapped back in time to 1986? Would they still do it?
Almost Angst
“Yes, I’d still go, because I wouldn’t know any different,” says Richard Cropper, skipper of the Beneteau 60 Salty Rascal. “You’d just get by with the tools you’ve got.”
The British dad’s decision to embark on a yearlong adventure with wife, Louise, and 9- and 11-year-old sons Jake and Harry was inspired by a gift: the book Sail Away: How to Escape the Rat Race and Live the Dream. Though the idea took hold on Christmas morning 2014, it would be more than a decade before that dream became a reality.
Only recently did they learn that the gift was from Louise’s sister. “I think she wanted to get rid of us,” Louise says with a laugh. “For years afterward, Richard kept saying, ‘Would you do it? Would you do it?’ I only said yes because I never thought we’d go through with it. But I wouldn’t have done it 40 years ago, not without the technology. Everyone back home thinks we’re mad, but they can follow us using the YB tracker, and knowing we’re doing it in an organized group and can send pictures back home normalizes what we’re doing.”
Richard says the challenge of being part of a rally is that he can’t stop buying stuff. “It’s like when you’re at school waiting to do your exams, and everyone’s talking about what they revised, and you’re thinking, ‘God, I didn’t do that,’’ he says. “You start asking if you’ve got enough equipment. Did you buy enough toilet rolls? We had a panic about almonds, and Louise is like, ‘How many almonds have you actually eaten in the last year?’”
To ease the stress, the Croppers hired Brazilian skipper Juan Manuel Ballestero, who made headlines during the pandemic when he sailed for three months from Portugal to Argentina to see his sick father.
It was a trip of solitude: a 29-foot yacht packed with 160 cans of food and a bottle of whiskey. This time, Ballestero is looking forward to an altogether different experience, as was clear the night of his arrival in Las Palmas. Louise, giddy and wearing humongous leggings, whisked him off to an ’80s party.
“This family is lots of fun,” he says. “I’m pretty stoked about doing the voyage with the little ones. It will be unique.”
MOB Rescue
Hoisting eight flags onto the forestay—an act that a group of boys counted excitedly while fishing off the pontoon—is the Swan 51 Eira. The monohull is doing the main ARC, and Finnish delivery crew Markus Leppanen and Vilhelm Sjöström are preparing her for the paying passengers.
“Sailing Eira wouldn’t have been much different 40 years ago,” Sjöström says, tapping the elk-skin-covered wheel. “We have an autopilot now but hand-steer 95 percent of the time. We have a big racing rudder, which is really responsive, and people participate because they want to steer and sail. They want to learn something new.”
Leppanen and Sjöström have tens of thousands of sea miles under their belts. Leppanen recalls that in the 1993 ARC, they didn’t have a sat phone—just GPS and a plotter. Instead of weather apps, they had a guy navigating onshore, giving them instructions over SSB.
Back then they thought of themselves as a bunch of friends with the smallest, fastest Swan. Now, Eira has 85,000 nautical miles on the clock and 15 crossings. She’s a veteran in every sense of the word.
“We use a traditional spinnaker,” Sjöström says. “At first only in light airs until we know how experienced the crew are. Running it at night requires a bit of practice. The biggest risk is something happens, and the thing that should never happen is a man overboard.”
There was just such a tragedy in last year’s ARC, after Swedish sailor Dag Eresund, 33, fell overboard from the Volvo 70 Ocean Breeze.
“I was routing from Finland,” Sjöström says. “I noticed all the fastest boats changing course and I knew, hours before it became news, that there was an MOB. It was around 0230, 20 to 25 knots. When it’s pitch-black and a swell of about 6 meters, you know it’s really hard to get someone out of there. These old Whitbread boats don’t turn on a sixpence.”
Eresund was wearing a personal AIS beacon, yet he could not be located, reinforcing the fact that even the latest satellite technology is no substitute for lashing yourself to the deck, a safety measure that sailors have taken since the beginnings of sailing.
Leppanen recalls an MOB incident on his 1999 ARC, that ended differently. “It was a Norwegian racing boat, sponsored by Jägermeister,” he says. “The spinnaker came down in a squall, and they gybed, knocking a crewmember into the water. Even when it’s warm, you’ll only last 24 hours, but here is this guy in a Hawaiian shirt. He takes off his life jacket and places it under his butt to stay out of the water. After 28 hours, a German boat passes and picks him up.”
For crew safety, it’s an ARC requirement that all skippers have the ability to send and receive emails at sea, whether via SSB radio or a sat comm device.
“We talked about getting Starlink,” Sjöström says, “but the skipper doesn’t want it because the experience for the crew changes. We have sat comms and can make phone calls and emails, but we don’t want everybody hanging around the cockpit reading the news. You spoil the experience.”
Starlink became popular during the World ARC 2023. While only two of the 20 boats leaving St. Lucia at the start of the rally had Starlink, by the time they’d completed a world circuit six months later, only two boats didn’t have it.
Medical Backup
On board Frolic, a J/44, Rhode Island sailor HL DeVore opens the cava, having searched online to fix his B&G wind sensor, saving $3,000 in parts and labor. His former U.S. Coast Guard vessel is equipped with Starlink, a piece of kit DeVore says he wouldn’t sail without.
“I do love the romanticism of not being able to communicate other than with attempts at SSB, and I’m old enough to have sailed in those days, but being connected gives the family at home security and means we can liaise with a medical team if needed—in fact, the same one used by round-the-world sailor Cole Brauer,” he says. “We’ve got IV kits, medicines, everything you could possibly need, and with modern comms we have the comfort of knowing we can solve issues at sea.”
Meant to Be?
Although Starlink draws a significant amount of power, being able to make video calls and stream sports or movies has made today’s cruising yacht a true home away from home. It allowed the Sidauys to sell their home in Mexico and move aboard their Lagoon 52F catamaran Ruaj.
Adventurous young families like this one, who buy production catamarans and choose cruising as an alternative lifestyle, was rare in the ’70s, when the majority of ARC participants were older, wealthy couples. For Gabriel Sidauy, the idea of taking on an Atlantic crossing was sparked during a chance meeting on a flight from Tijuana to Cancun.
“The man next to me was checking out boats and charts,” Sidauy says. “He was about to start this amazing adventure with his wife and three kids. I said to him, ‘That’s the best thing I heard in my life.’”
Sidauy’s children, Moises and Natalie, who are now 14 and 10, loved the idea, but it took four years to persuade his wife, Victoria, to sell and sail away. When she finally agreed and they shared their plans with neighbors, they were put in touch with a sailor who agreed to be their mentor. It turned out to be the guy Sidauy had met on the plane.
“I told him he changed our lives, and he didn’t remember me,” Sidauy says with a laugh. “But he was great. He told me about the ARC, what boat to look for, and he came several times to the house with his wife to tell us about his experience.”
The Sidauys bought Ruaj in Italy and spent a year sailing around the Mediterranean before making their way south to the Canaries. Thanks to Starlink, Sidauy can run his plastic recycling business at sea, while the children can attend school on board, with regular calls to classmates and tutors.
“We have learned many things,” he says. “We used to live in a big house in Cancun with all the space we wanted, and now we learn to live with what is necessary.”
The Bare(ish) Necessities
One joy of the ARC is learning what seemingly nonessential items some families deem necessary for their transatlantic crossing, whether that’s a 50-inch TV, washing machine, coffee maker or, in the case of the Sidauys, aerial silks tied to the forestay for gymnastics.
“Gymnastics is my passion,” Natalie says while twirling and tumbling to applause from neighboring boats. “I also love the night sky and can’t wait to see shooting stars, and play my ukulele with Moises on his guitar.”
Sidauy says this kind of lifestyle would not have been possible for his family 40 years ago. Without modern tech, he would still be in Mexico dreaming of a long-ago conversation with a man on a plane.
Yet for experienced sailors, waking up in 1986 in the middle of the ocean would pose no problem whatsoever.
The great thing about rallies such as the ARC+ is that these types of sailors can come together and cross the ocean in whatever way suits them, knowing that at the end of it all, in Port Louis Marina, Grenada, they’ll be sharing stories over a rum punch as the sun goes down over the Caribbean Sea.
