SC Staff Race Across the Atlantic
After leading students on our sailing programs and summer adventures, Sail Caribbean staff members are always looking for a great challenge. Emma Deegan and Lorraine Toner certainly found one in an adventurous transatlantic crossing. Here's what Emma wrote about their voyage...
I started sailing small boats in college and never dreamed that it would take me anywhere other than the cold Irish waters I learned in. Crossing the Atlantic was always something that I had dreamed about doing but it seemed so far away and out of reach. Then I heard about the ARC. The ARC is a race that goes from Gran Canaria to St Lucia every second year and this year 250 boats took part. Lorraine and I decided to try get on one of those boats as crew. Lorraine quickly got a place on a 72 foot boat called One Hull, but I was not so lucky and so we had a very tense week in Gran Canaria while I looked for a boat to take me on. At the very last minute when I had lost hope of finding a boat, One Hull came through and offered me the last berth on board.
We set off to cross the Atlantic as the underdog. The youngest person was 11 and the oldest was 67. Two of our crew had never sailed before and a further three had only been on a boat for a week. We were an amateur crew on a big heavy boat that was designed to sail upwind. This was a downwind race and we would be competing against professional crews. We worked hard for the next two weeks. Our watch system of three hours on and three hours off meant that everyone was exhausted. Day three brought us a new challenge. This was the day that we put up the spinnaker and it stayed there for the next 11 days. This now meant that we had to be constantly adjusting the sheets to keep the sail filled so that it would not rip. Ripping a spinnaker would cost us time and ground in the race.
Well...it happened! We ripped our spinnaker one morning and 18 of us spent over an hour taking down what remained of it and putting up a replacement. We got a race report each day and we fought hard to make sure that with each report we were pulling further away from our competition. The spinnaker rip threatened to set us back and we had to work even harder to make up for lost time. It is easy when you are in the middle of the ocean to forget that you are in a race. The race reports helped to focus us and as we listened each morning our spirits would lift when we heard that our position was improving. It was hard to believe that after only two weeks we were going to be in St Lucia. It was two weeks of hard work and it had paid off. We were first in our class and the 11th boat over the line - out of all 250 boats!
It had been a great experience. I made some great friends and had sailed across the Atlantic. I had watched amazing sun rises and sun sets, seen hundreds of shooting stars, caught a fish and had a fancy dress party in the middle of an ocean. We all had overcome personal challenges and it meant something different for each of us. Some of us had faced the challenge of being away from family and friends while for others the challenge was learning to sail or overcoming sea sickness. Whatever the challenge, we had managed to come first in class as a team and that is something that none of us will ever forget.
