Atlantic Crossing Recap, Photos & Videos!

Some quick stats from our Atlantic crossing from Las Palmas, Gran Canara to St Lucia with the ARC
Days to cross: 20 days
Distance sailed: 2936 NM
Best 24 Hr mileage: 185nm
Engine Hours: 87, which is way more than I planned. We had headwinds/no wind at the end.
Energy: We had 2080W of solar which I though would be enough to cover our needs most days but I ended up using the engines 2-3 hours a day to charge the batteries 🙁
Fish Caught: 1 mahi mahi and we lost one as we were bringing it in 🙁
Breakages: Amazingly nothing broke! We were so lucky!

Our track for the crossing which was not quite the rhumb line as you can see. The Atlantic crossing in November is supposed to be pretty easy. General rule is head south-south-west aiming to pass 200/300 miles north west of Cape Verde islands and then easy downwind sailing with the trades. That’s what every skipper sold to their crews for the crossing ;-). I was also relying on the experience of my 2011 Pacific crossing, which was easy trade wind sailing at the way. But we didn’t quite have the easy crossing we were expecting. :-)……

We chose to do the Atlantic crossing with the ARC mainly because of the social events. We wanted to meet buddy boats that ideally matched our demographic i.e. 30-40s and without children. With some 150 boats registered, we figured joining the ARC was a great way to meet these boats. This photo was from the country flag parade a week before the start. I had just recently got my dual Dutch citizenship so was proud to hold up both the British and Dutch flags. Also meant I could join both groups to meet more boats 😉

The ARC events and parties were great. This was taken at the 70s party.

The ARC also had a safety inspection which was useful especially for folks doing their first crossing. We had already done a lot of preparations before leaving La Rochelle but it was useful to run through the list with the inspector who reviews hundreds of boats to understand different approaches. We detailed our preparations for safety, emergencies, water and medicines in this post.

Jessy was in charge of the provisioning, this is less than half of what we got. We provisioned for 30 days, just in case!

The dream team. Dan “the other brown sailor in the Netherlands” joined us to make 3. Originally the plan was to sail with 4 with my sister as well but she couldn’t join in the end. I had done the Pacific crossing with 3, doing 4-hour watches and so we used the same playbook. Our plan was not to push the boat since we had a small crew and didn’t want to break anything. We only had two months in the Caribbean before we headed for Panama so we didn’t want to spend our limited time fixing the boat. The goal was not to race, but to have a safe, easy passage and get to St Lucia in one piece! Easy, safe and low-stress sailing was our motto.

ARC and the Gran Canaria authorities put up fireworks to celebrate our departure on the last night! Was amazing. I had some butterflies that night with a shitty forecast for the start and the watermaker acting up when I started it. We had pickled it since we didn’t use it for over a month, luckily the issue cleared up by itself after a couple of days on the passage.

The multi-hull start! Since we were going with the ARC, we had a fixed date of Nov 20th and the forecast was not great. 23-28 knots, 30+ knots gusts and bad swell.

After sunset on the first night, we got into 35-40 knots in the acceleration zone with a top wind speed of 42 knots and top boat speed of 17 knots surfing down a wave. We had so many ARC boats around us that night and many sustained damage in these conditions returning to the Canary islands or diverting to the Cape Verde islands. The only issue we had was a bathroom door that had slammed shut and locked from the inside, which was easily fixed luckily. We gybed onto starboard tack so that I could get some sleep on my off watches. We did that for a few nights until the fleet spread out, but downside is we would getting headed every night and then headed again in the day when we gybed onto port to reduce the mainsail’s shadow on the roof solar panels. We were barely making 150 miles for the first few days.

After a couple of days we started getting into wonderful trade wind sailing conditions: lots of sun, winds around 20 knots and less swell. We had one reef in the main and a goose-winged jib (using port and starboard barber haulers attached to the bow cleats and led back to the cockpit) easily doing over 7-7.5 knots average. I wanted to put up our Oxley Levante parasailor but we needed 15 knots true wind average or less since it was a light air parasailor. Also above 15 knots, jib and main gave us comparable speeds with lower risk. We never got those conditions for any length of time. This rig with main (full or with one reef) with a preventer and the jib barber hauled to windward ended up being the main rig we used on the passage giving us 165-185 miles a day. We were able to set the autopilot as low as 165 true wind angle (TWA) on wind mode which was really safe even with 5m swells knocking our stern about and gave us good sleep at night 🙂 We also did all our reefing while sailing downwind (Downwind reefing setup) which was much safer than bashing in huge ocean waves. Easy, low stress sailing, which allowed us to play Uno all day long 🙂

Dolphins!! We even caught one jumping. We didn’t see many after the first few days.

After the swell eased, we started fishing on day 5 and within a few hours we caught a juicy mahi mahi. We used Finnish vodka to tame the fish which worked really well. No blood on the flexiteek! After that we were expecting to catch a fish every day, after all we caught 10 fish on my Pacific crossing. Alas it wasn’t meant to be. We lost our best lure and the only other fish we caught got away just as were bringing the line in 🙁 We did catch a lot of seaweed and flying fish though!

Within 30 mins of catching the mahi mahi, we were munching on Dan’s Ceviche which was amazing, mixed with guacamole Kai Club style (a nice beachclub in Gran Canaria). We hoped to make fish tacos, fish curry and sushi, but the fish gods did not favour us.

Jessy our resident sommelier and wine influencer (insta:winesailorgirl) kept us lubricated with some great wines, this was one we got from a vineyard tour in Lanzarote.

We did all our night and day watches from the nav station inside the boat, which is one of the things I love about Nautitechs. You can turn the seat to face forward to give full 360 degree visibility and you are totally protected from the elements. Downside is that it is harder to see the stars at night, so we had to go drag ourselves outside and put on lifejackets and tethers for that 🙂

At one stage we got 4-5 metre swells which meant we went surfing! Navasana was doing double digit speeds down the waves topping out at 19 knots!!! The boat was flying along, wonderful sailing!!

As we got past the halfway mark we started encountering squalls. We used the radar in weather mode to spot them, especially at night. We found that a range setting of 12nm worked really well. On my Pacific crossing we encountered many big squalls, especially around the doldrums, but none packing more than wind speed plus 10knots. Apparently in the Atlantic you can get squalls that pack 40 and even 50knots, so we were really careful especially when the CAPE readings were high. We never saw more than 30 knots in any squall so were lucky!

Then we noticed a bunch of monster squalls coming up from the ITCZ. To avoid them we ended up sailing a little higher which meant taking the wind waves and the 3 different swells a bit more on the quarter than the stern making it very bumpy and not conducive to do anything apart from sitting on our arses 🙂 We were lucky to avoid them because some boats saw 35 knots winds and huge confused seas in them. Later we found out that a cold front was forming in that area, so glad we managed to sail around it!

It was around this time that we were almost run down by a suspicious Tanker! A squall was just going past and through the rain we spotted a red tanker about 6 nautical miles behind heading towards us. We ran to check AIS surprised we had missed it but it wasn’t there. We checked our transmitter was receiving and sending data and concluded that the tanker must not be on AIS!! We then used the MARPA feature on our radar to determine that we were likely on a collision course, Scary! We hailed the ship a couple of times on VHF before finally getting a response. The voice on the VHF had a Russian accent and responded with Voyager 2 being the ships name which is coincidentally an ARC boat name as well. Yes they now see us and apparently their AIS system was broken, which is highly suspect since most ships have a backup system. Anyway they were going to avoid us, I had already changed course. As they went past we noticed there wasn’t a name or a port on the stern of the vessel which set off a slew of conspiracy theories. We think this was an illegal oil tanker delivering banned russian oil, what do you think?? 🙂

As we rounded the squalls the wind died to 6-8 knots and we had to raise Code 65 to keep sailing. Beautiful flat conditions as you can see from the video above. Unfortunately the wind then died completely and we had to motor for about 24 hours until we picked up more breeze.

Seemed like we were getting closer to land because we started getting multiple feathery crew to join us. Unfortunately they didnt help with any of the boat chores but pooped all over the boat! Our favourite was Birdy. She wasn’t scared of us at all and would let us hold and carry her around. She loved being stroked as you can see from the photo above. Her favourite spot seemed to be the chart table checking if my navigation is correct. We were really sad when she died a day later, we had gotten really fond of her. We left water and food out for her but she obviously had different tastes 🙁

Towards the end of the passage we had a tropical depression about 700 miles north, which gave us winds on the nose for the last 450 miles. This in itself caused a tropical depression in all crew members 😉 First, we tried tacking back and forth, which is that upside down V in the track above. After realizing we would go slowly insane doing that, we motored for about 12 hours to get to a point where we could take advantage of the veering wind to get lifted to St Lucia on one tack. It was bumpy close-hauled sailing for the first 24 hours but then the wind and waves eased and we were able to put up the Code 65 up for some fast light air sailing!

Jessy on the Fatboy Floatzac enjoying the light wind sailing conditions with the Code 65

This was taken at sunset on our last full night on the Atlantic crossing, sailing upwind with the boat doing 8 knots at times with our North code 65. Wonderful sailing!

100 miles to go!! We were doing good speed with the Code 65, 5.5 knots in 7.8 knots of breeze. You gotta love that. Unfortunately the wind completely died in the afternoon and we motored the last 40 miles to St Lucia.

Tom Wright captured photos of our arrival at the ARC finish line in St Lucia. We had the sails up to look like we were sailing but there was no wind 🙂 It was tricky getting through the narrow marina pass and then docking the boat at night around 9pm. Needed a drink after that 😉

After docking the boat and having drinks with Jadamama who came to welcome us, we rushed over to the near restaurant to drown ourselves in Ron Punches and eat the first non-boat meal in 20 days! Looking slightly happy 😉

We finished in the middle of the pack in our Class A consisting of performance/big catamarans. Even though we weren’t racing, we were happy to beat a few higher rated boats 🙂

Navasana enjoying a well-earned rest in Rodney Bay marina, I gave her a nice big smooch for keeping us safe; well deserved after sailing 3000 miles nonstop! I was very happy with the performance of the boat and the fact that we didn’t break anything in pretty challenging conditions. These boats are obviously built to cross oceans!

We posted daily to the blog on the crossing and if you need an insomnia cure you can find these posts below. You can also find a recap of my pacific crossing in 2011 here. It was a little different on a 38ft monohull with no watermaker and a monitor windvane for self steering. We were all pollywogs so the equator crossing ceremony outfits were a bit embarrassing 🙂 Also swimming across the equator in 4 mile deep water was memorable.