3/12/2019
The following morning, Florence’s final 2 crew members for the Atlantic arrived in Tenerife, a couple named Alice and Will. Like us, they were banking on the borrowed furling unit working and wanted to join us for the final preparations. It also happened to be Thanksgiving, and even though Brad and I were the only Americans in tow, having Florence’s Atlantic crew onboard together for the first time seemed a good excuse to celebrate and be thankful. While Brad and Stephen drove to Santa Cruz on the north of the island to pick up Alice and Will, I spent the day in the galley doing my best to come up with some rendition of a Thanksgiving feast, using whatever I could find at the decidedly un-American supermarket on the island: not a whole bird or a can of pumpkin or cranberry sauce in sight. But if boat life teaches you anything, it’s to improvise. I ended up pulling together a pulled turkey and sweet potato stew chock full of veggies and seasonings, served with a Spanish riff on my family’s favourite holiday recipe, the infamous 3-Onion and 3-Cheese Casserole (don’t knock it until you try it). When the team arrived back aboard Flo, I popped a bottle of bubbly to celebrate. Despite the lingering uncertainty of whether or not we would ultimately go, everyone was thinking positive and really excited to be together as a team for the first time. We ate, drank, laughed and were merry. All initial signs point to Florence’s crew getting along quite well. Crew compatibility, especially for a long crossing on a relatively small vessel, can often make or break a passage, and every sailor we’d spoken to drove home just how crucial finding the right crew would be.
A bit about the newest members of Team Flo. Will and Alice are a young British couple Stephen and I have known for a couple years. Stephen and Will go much further back and actually first met on Stephen’s 35th birthday weekend when he chartered a yacht in Ibiza with some friends. Will was the professional skipper of the yacht they chartered, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since. I suspect that long before Stephen had dropped the crazy idea of this sailing endeavour into casual conversation with me, he had already been pumping Will for information about life at sea and all things yacht-related. Will was endlessly helpful in our yacht search as well, first showing us around the Southampton boat show in 2017 when we didn’t know our ass from an Oyster. He was also the first to suggest we look seriously at the Discovery model, which obviously turned out to be prescient advice. Will is an accomplished commercial skipper with over 40,000 nautical miles under his belt and has also worked as editor for Yachting Monthly. His girlfriend, Alice, has more recently gotten the sailing bug and over the past couple years has been taking the requisite courses to get up to speed so that she and Will could hopefully crew on a boat together. Currently, they are full-time crew on an Oyster yacht that is crossing the Atlantic in an organised rally called the ARC. They decided that while the Atlantic was something they would love to accomplish together, they would rather cross with friends than in a professional capacity, so we asked them if they would care to round out our crew of 5. They said absolutely. Among us, I think we have a healthy level of experience, and Stephen and I subsequently felt confident enough to forgo the ARC rally that has you cross the Atlantic along with a couple hundred other boats, and to instead tackle the crossing solo, going Non-ARC, or NARC as we've dubbed it. The advantages of forgoing the ARC in our view are that, a) you avoid the high cost associated with joining the ARC, b) you avoid the crowds both at the offset in Gran Canaria and at the finish in St. Lucia, and c) you aren’t mandated to set out on a specific date and can instead go whenever suits. While we would miss out on the potential safety in numbers and support that the ARC provides, we felt Flo and her crew were prepared enough to go it alone (provided we could still go at all).
We spent the weekend continuing to tick off pre-departure jobs on Flo, all with the hope that the borrowed furling unit that would arrive with John on Monday would fit and function. It’s amazing how much quicker a to-do list gets ticked off when you have 5 sets of hands working full time rather than the normal 2. Stephen and I were blown away by the productivity of our crew in just the first 24 hours, so we took the team out to celebratory drinks at the Pink Elephant, naturally. Will and Alice thankfully could also appreciate the hidden charms of this insalubrious watering hole, and our main man Damian at the bar took good care of us, keeping the cold pints flowing and perfecting the meniscus pour on the pretty average but dirt cheap wine on offer.
And then Monday AKA the day of reckoning arrived. John had taken off from Heathrow that morning with the loaned motor in tow and was en route to Tenerife. I had a pit in my stomach all morning, trying to will this cobbled-together solution to work, as to dash everyone’s Atlantic dreams now would be heartbreaking. John landed, took a short taxi from the airport, and arrived on the pontoon with the motor. He was met with 5 sets of pleading puppy-dog eyes that made no bones about just how much hope and faith we were putting in him. When he stepped aboard, I laid a case of his Dorado, his favourite local beer, at his feet as an incentive to get this thing working, come hell or high water, by hook or by crook. In true John fashion, he wasted no time getting to work. Initial signs were positive, as the unit appeared to be the right size and did in fact screw in nicely. Sweet, getting closer. Now we just needed to re-attach the wiring to see if the mechanism worked. This was a fairly involved process, as several lines needed to be snaked down through the mast then reattached to the correct fittings at the base. John, Stephen and Brad all worked on this while I lurked in the galley trying desperately to distract myself by half-assedly making sandwiches for the crew. Pretty sure I was putting ketchup in the tuna, thus was the state of my concentration, but whatever - if this furling motor worked, I’d eat all 6 sandwiches. Once everything was re-connected, we all held our breath as John pushed the green “SAIL OUT” button. The furling motor kicked to life with an alacrity we’d never experienced before, and out came our mainsail, sweet and smooth as a nut. It worked! It looks like we are going to have to cross this ocean after all. I ran to John and gave him a massive bear hug that nearly knocked him over. I was overcome with an enormous sense of relief, as if every muscle in my body I didn’t even know I was clenching all released at once. The whole crew were ecstatic, and we worked the rest of the day with a renewed sense of motivation that had us finishing up the last remaining boat jobs in a matter of hours. Once 5 PM rolled around, Florence was about ready for the crossing and the crew were more than ready for the Pink Elephant. We needed to reward John for a job very well done and to celebrate the fact that we were actually going to do the damn thing. Barbados or bust!
At the bar, things went from 0 to 60 quickly. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen 6 people go from sober to downright sloppy so fast. Brad and Stephen made the mistake of trying to keep up with John beer for beer, which had some interesting consequences. Meanwhile, Will and Alice were reeling from a few of Damian’s specialty frozen margaritas, which while in no way resembling margaritas, frozen or otherwise, succeeded in getting them sufficiently sloshed. Meanwhile, a couple of miniscus pours of wine was all it took to get me well on my way. The team needed to eat something. John had a BBQ on the deck of his Airbnb, so the 6 drunken sailors decided it would be a good idea to light that shit up. Brad managed to wrangle together a bunch of dead palm fronds (that I suspect he ripped out of some trees from the nearby golf resort) to use as kindling, stating triumphantly, “These babies look like they’ll burn!” Perhaps heavy drinking and fire are not the best combination, though no-one said anything to the effect at the time…
Nobody really has much recollection of how things unfolded that evening, although posthumous photo evidence leads us to believe that we did indeed manage to light a fire and to grill some things. I think there might have been some dancing involved as well (oh, the shame...) We awoke the next morning on the boat all feeling a bit disoriented and foggy, but thrilled nonetheless - we were going across the Atlantic, baby!
John made it to Florence by about noon that day looking a bit the worse for wear, but today was our final day of prep before departure, so we slapped ourselves into shape and took Flo out for a final test sail. This was the only time our crew would get to sail Florence until we were on our way across the ocean, so we did our best to get them familiar with her rig and systems. The wind was blowing up to 15 knots so enough for us to test out different rig configurations for various points of sail. We got the downwind rig up, which was great as we suspected this would be our set up for the majority of the crossing, then did some tacking upwind before getting Florence’s spinnaker out for the first time ever. The spinnaker is by far the boat’s biggest sail that attaches at the front of the boat and billows out like an enormous bag, very useful for sailing in light airs. It’s a large and unwieldy piece of kit however, and in the 7 months Stephen and I have been sailing Florence, we had yet to use it. Once we had set the sail up and were in the process of deploying it, one of her lines snapped and the whole thing became a bit of a mess - this massive, pink bag flapping in the wind while the crew tried to drop it from the top of the headsail and manhandle it down back onto the deck. At one point, Alice became fully enveloped in the sail and no one knew where she had gone. I guess the sail hadn’t been used much by Florences’ previous owner either, and one of her lines had just gotten old and blown through. No matter - with forecasts of 20-30 knots of winds for most of the Atlantic crossing, it was highly doubtful we would have to use this sail. By this point, it was getting late and time to get Florence back into the harbour for one final night before blast off. Most of the crew were also looking a little green. This is the only time I’ve felt queasy on the boat in months. That would definitely be it for drinking for Team Flo until we reached Barbados. We made the decision to do a dry crossing, meaning not an ounce of alcohol on the boat, which is how we always approach crossings and we think makes a ton of sense for safety purposes, as you never know when circumstances can change abruptly at sea. Every crew member would need their full faculties at all times.
Once back in the marina, we finished up some last minute jobs before having a crew sit down to discuss the passage. We talked about both business items like what type of watch system we wanted to instigate and more general things, such as hopes and fears for the crossing. We went around in a circle and each said what we hoped to get out of the experience. It was clear this crossing was important to all of us, with each crew member having their own reasons for wanting to tackle the challenge. We called it an early night and had one last night’s sleep in the marina before heading out to sea. Tomorrow is it, kids. We will slip the lines around midday and set off out into open ocean, with nothing but 2,750 nautical miles of blue between us and Barbados. I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but I know I’m ready for what promises to be an epic adventure.
Comments