World Cruising ClubIntroductory Note: This page was originally written in 2017 in relation to our first ARC Atlantic crossing. As we decided in Curacao to interrupt our circumnavigation and return to Europe to sort ourselves out, this page has become slightly more complex. In fact, we set off again in 2019, crossing the Atlantic this time with the ARC Plus (this ARC trip stops over in the Cape Verde Islands), with as objective to pursue our circumnavigation while being part of the 2020 World ARC group. As we became older and wiser about ocean sailing, you'll find additions and extra insights worked into the text below which in the revisions of this page are more focussed on our second ARC experience and preparation... The page ends with a special section on dealing with the VERY unexpected. The Covid-19 pandemic took the 2020/21 World ARC by surprise; by mid 2020, the World Cruising Club basically gave up on it (having initially just suspended it). It ended up being completely cancelled. The WARC Fleet dispersed in all directions; many of them sooner or later resorted to repatriating their boat using the services of e.g. the Sevenstar shipping company or of professional yacht deliverers. Those who remained stranded in e.g. French Polynesia in 2020 set up a special Facebook group called Sailors of the Lost ARC (SOLA) and have mostly tended to stay in touch with each other and even hold reunions (e.g. February 2022 in the UK)... Some boats managed to continue to Fiji, awaiting better times, which certainly in 2021 was still not the case. From autumn 2022 on, the Pacific had become sufficiently open for the WARC (second half - Australia to the Caribbean) to resume. Less than a hand full of the original fleet set off from Australia in September 2022 to pursue their WARC.
Why Join the ARC?
World Cruising Club
As indicated elsewhere, there's an active Hallberg-Rassy
discussion group on the Web, where several contributors have openly wondered why one should pay a fair sum of money to join the
ARC for the simple privilege of crossing the Atlantic in a group. In addition to the ARC, there are several other organisations
which also organise Atlantic crossings. And, lots of people happily do it on their own! So why bother? When Laura and I planned
our circumnavigation, we were acutely aware of the fact that although between the two of us we had sailed around the world at least
twice (expressed in sea-miles sailed, that is) neither of us had ever crossed an ocean. Now in my case - theoretically at least -
that was not quite true, having travelled extensively as a kid and gone round the world twice in the Motor-Vessels Mataroa, Fairsea,
Willem Ruys and the ill-fated Achille Lauro (which was in fact the Willem Ruys refitted by the Italian company Lauro Lines, which lost
both the vessels that it had acquired from Holland through engine room fires!). But these were big passenger ships; not a small sailing
boat!
Joining the ARC offers - our initial view - the comfort to cross the Atlantic with an organisation to help us and with the protection
inherent in a herd (i.e. the other ±250 boats) that will be going across at more or less the same time as us. Each year there are a
couple of examples where stricken boats have been assisted by the herd (or other bigger boats nearby). So, in short, we are joining
the ARC to give us that extra confidence boost: that "Yes, we can", but let's just be careful in the beginning and learn from and with
the others. After all, if you are but a small fox amongst a pack of trained hounds, yah gotta be smart and join the crowd... We may with
appear to have become "ARC-junkies", having returned to Europe with the ARC Europe, and returned to our circumnavigation with the ARC Plus,
and then set off (again) on a circumnavigation with the ARC World 2020/21!
However, we have also seen how the ARC can drop you like a hot potato or just ignore your plight once something hasn't gone right for you. Friends where the skipper broke his arm and needed to be hospitalised in Barbados were registered at the end of their ARC as DNF (did not finish) and left to fend for themselves. Readers can find more of our disappointed comments on the World Cruising Club intermingled with our ARC stories. In conclusion, there are positive and negative points in sailing with this organisation - like for most things in life!
An essential part of preparing for the ARC is to ensure that you have all the things on board that the ARC organisation requires of participating boats. That's an excellent starting point. And having prepared an HR37, and modernised an HR43 for blue-water sailing (see elsewhere on this site), Laura and I had a pretty good idea of what was needed to bring Ngahue IV up to standard for our kind of ocean sailing. It's encouraging and comforting to see that the ARC safety checklist mirrors our own list of essentials. It's even more reassuring to know that our list is even longer! Our initial insurers, Admiral Insurance (who work closely with the ARC & World ARC; with all that Brexit nonsense in the U.K., we decided that we needed to switch to Pantaenius) also expressed their pleasure with our organised way of setting about our preparations.
Perhaps at this stage a hushed word of respect should be said about our insurers. Insurers should be treated with respect and
deference. They are after all the people who have decided to accept the risk to insure you, and will help you when things have
gone proverbially "pear-shaped" and you have suffered a loss, or caused an accident with damage! At one of the ARC workshops in
the UK, we met Robert Holbrook of Admiral Insurance of Salisbury. Admiral Insurance is
an official partner of the World Cruising Club, the organisation behind all the ARCs… We were impressed by the presentation that
he gave and felt very much at ease and in good hands with him afterwards, discussing the first thoughts of our future circumnavigation
project and getting lots of highly useful feedback from him. We followed up this conversation with an extensive exchange of e-mails,
where he passed us on to his colleague Dave Andrews and we have been happy customers for Ngahue IV with Admiral Insurance since.
Matters are clearly explained to you, and although our insurance premium increases quite significantly as we venture further from
our European home waters, Admiral Insurance explains why this is and what the problems are that they have to extend cover to you
when you cross the Atlantic, or when you transit the Panama Canal. They have built up a lot of experience with insuring boats
going around the world, and thus have their own portfolio of expertise which they are very happy to share with you and advise
on matters. Sailing friends have mentioned other insurance companies, who undoubtedly have a similar level of service for their
customers. We found our "bonheur" (French for happiness) with Admiral Insurance and are happy to recommend them to anyone who asks
us about boat insurance.
In March 2019, however, because of the uncertainty created by the UK government around the UK-EU relationship post-Brexit, we felt we
needed to change our insurers for a company that was both EU-based & located in an EU Member State. At BOOT Düsseldorf we had an
interesting chat with a most helpful representative of Pantaenius, inter alea another partner of the World Cruising Club. The terms
for the renewal of our 2019/20 insurance policy with Admiral were also darkly clouded with uncertainty - reflecting the political
situation at the time regarding the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. If there is one thing you cannot have in an
insurer-insured relationship, it is uncertainty and absence of trust of the customer about what will happen in the case of a problem.
Contemplating the alternatives, we decided that Pantaenius was the way to go. We remembered the excellent exploratory discussion with
them at the Düsseldorf BOOT exhibition in January 2019. There's certainly a good reason for them being the biggest player in yacht
insurance in Europe, so we enquired how they would feel about insuring us, as we were not pressed to leave Admiral Insurance. But at
the same time, we wanted to embark on a positively based new relationship with Pantaenius if they were going to become our insurers.
After an informative exchange of e-mails, we felt confident that Pantaenius would offer us the certainty and consumer protection that
we required. And as the political situation around Brexit in the UK deteriorated and further undermined our confidence in this once
so reliable country, we decided - with regret - to leave Admiral. Given the good reviews that many fellow sailors offered us on
Pantaenius, including our friends from Hallberg-Rassy, we are now happy to have made the
change and feel that it has been a good choice for our second ARC (Plus) and our 2020 World ARC. We still keep fond memories of
Admiral insurance: after all it's not their fault that the UK population decided to leave the EU.
Returning to our first ARC, the pressure from late 2016 onwards was mounting to be ready on time - it could spell trouble if we didn't
get everything done. It was very unfortunate that the sale of our previous boat, the HR43, hadn't at all gone as planned. After nearly
one year of messing around between a first and a second sale (accompanied by significant costs), we were well and truly behind on
schedule (by about 8 months!) because we couldn't start preparing the new HR53 boat in early 2016. The winter 2016/17 turned out to
be a race against time to get everything fitted; and in 2017 we had too little time to test things properly. We remained confident
that in the end all would be ready on time - and it was. Only once en route did we discover certain weaknesses that needed resolving
- to do that we took the rather rigorous decision to temporarily return to Europe to get everything sorted out for a better
re-start.
Ensuring that we don't starve on board:
"Food, foooooooood" is the favorite call from Woody Woodpecker. For us too, maintaining a steady food supply will
become a priority for us to safely negotiate the world's oceans. Yes, our HR53 is very big for just the two of us. Part of
what we are doing, is to look carefully after the food that we have on board. Quantity is certainly important, but maintaining
the quality of what we have on board is equally vital. Over our previous two summer cruises, we've been experimenting with what
plants will grow on board, what bread we can best bake on board and with what source of energy to use (bake in the oven -> which
requires copious quantities of gas; or use the bread machine -> which of course needs electricity and the generator to tun)...
We made surprising discoveries! For instance, we found certain long-life prepared (fresh) food packs at Aldi in Germany one day when exchanging our gas bottles at the nearby OBI do-it-yourself store. These certainly add some colour to our daily diet at sea. Storage and organisation are all-important, so that we know where everything is (suddenly an HR53 takes on mega-yacht dimensions when you don't know where things have been stored and are obliged to turn the whole boat upside down to find a missing toothpick!). In fact, a lot of time during our 2018/19 refit, we made many and lengthy lists of things and plans of what to find where on board...
The previous owner of our boat had completely changed the set-up of the fridge and freezer on board as originally installed by Hallberg-Rassy in 1995. He had glued and pasted 5cm thick sheets of polystyrene to the sides and bottom of each and then glued thin sheets of perspex over these polystyrene parts to better insulate the fridge and freezer from the inside. He had also replaced the original evaporators and fitted new air-cooled compressors which were lurking somewhere deep down in the bilges. The result was a much reduced-in-size freezer (and fridge). Unfortunately it was a botched job and smelly water accumulated under these layers of added insulation. But furthermore, the freezer for instance no longer froze (achieving at best a maximum lowest temperature of about -3°C by our measurements, due mainly to an inadequate Webasto ASU holding plate being fitted rather than a proper evaporator. This just didn't give the cold "oomph" needed). Yet the fridge where there should be a working temperature of 6-8°C often freezes quite seriously because the previous owner had fitted a sufficiently large evaporator in it and connected to a good compressor. It is well-nigh impossible to set the fridge at a reasonable temperature! The upshot of this set-up at the time was that it was impossible to keep frozen food on board in the freezer. Yet all chilled food placed in the fridge was soon frozen to ice!
Over the years, water and dirt had seeped under the previous owner's insulation and accumulated in little lakes of rotting fluids at the bottom of the freezer & fridge. This was disgusting and probably represented a health risk as well (especially in tropical climates where the brown bacterial fluid we found under the insulation would have become festering puddles of death for our intestines)! We decided to remove the extra insulation in order to return to a basic level of food security and to gain space. And we needed to return to the kind of evaporators and compressors that Hallberg-Rassy had originally installed to get a properly working freezer again, as well as a less "enthusiastic" fridge! After much thought, for our freezer we opted for a directly seawater-cooled Danfoss BD-80 compressor which supplies a very long evaporator plate supplied by Webasto (in their so-called Compact Indel Magnum (Isotherm) series - ours is model 2607) that we have bent around three (and a bit) of the straight sides of the freezer cabinet. That was quite a challenge, and we tried not to bend the plate too much - we now have additional triangles of space in the corners - convenient for hanging things against the evaporator plate... It works very well, although it did require some serious re-positioning of the compressor unit and water in- and outlets. The compressor is now located in what would otherwise have been a navigation cabinet just above the freezer box. It uses the original 1995 Frigoboat water inlet; the outlet is connected to the deck drainage system, so you can hear the freezer working on deck as the cooling water happily gurgles back into the sea. From 2017 to early 2020, the seawater-cooled compressor worked well - but then sprang a leak in its water pump, which required a repair in Tahiti in May 2020 (see About Ngahue IV - inside page). The fridge compressor also stopped working in Tahiti: the electronic control unit burned through and needed to be replaced. Fortunately the part was also available in Tahiti.
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The four pictures shown here are: before, during and after our work on the freezer. They illustrate the point I'm trying to make. Before (photo left: there is just enough space for a couple of bottles at the bottom of the fridge and that's it - middle photo: the yucky and really smelly brown water at the bottom; a health hazard waiting to happen - right: freezer ready for painting and installing the new evaporator). And finally, with the evaporator/cooling plate bent as acutely as we dared and nicely attached to the sides of the repainted freezer box. There's now much more space for food. It was a slow and nasty work - fortunately we had all 2016/17 winter to complete this and many other jobs!
A tip picked up via the HR Internet discussion forum has been to lay a thin sheet of plastic over the freezer hatch to stop condensation and to contribute towards some of the cold escaping around the freezer lid. IKEA sells useful sheets of plastic to protect your desk. The lid is actually quite thin for a freezer lid, compared to the thick lid that we have on the fridge in the galley - a strange approach by Hallberg-Rassy, as the freezer really needs much more insulation than the fridge. Nevertheless, when the freezer was switched off in Tahiti for repairs to the compressor, the frozen food inside stayed frozen for 2+ days!
Water & fuel resources on board:
HR 53s have been designed for serious offshore sailing &
long-distance cruising. Ngahue IV holds of course a Category A - Ocean rating. The boat has the standard diesel fuel
capacity of 850 litres and water tankage for 1020 litres. As our boat was essentially a Baltic Sea-based vessel, the first
owner, Herr Friedrichsen, never installed the extra 200 ltr fuel tank that a number of blue-water HR53s have. Despite
earlier good intentions, we never got round to installing an extra tank. Experience out on our first Atlantic run showed
that the standard quantity of diesel gets you a long way, and we have just resorted to two 20ltr jerry-cans to bring our fuel
capacity nearer to ±900 litres.
We're not too happy with the fact that Hallberg-Rassy put all the water available on an HR53 in a single tank. Our HR37 & HR43
actually had several tanks holding smaller quantities of water. We need to be particularly careful with contamination of our
single water tank. Then again, we have added two internal water filters to provide us with high quality fresh water. We also
carefully filter any water that we take on board from pontoon taps. Ngahue IV also has a robust AC powered
Aquatec,
German watermaker (AC150, the Modular model - pictured here the control panel that has been built into the centre-line cupboard
of the aft cabin. See picture. As explained on the technical page about Ngahue IV, you can see the absolute absence of
all electronics in this unit. To be on the safe side, we certainly fill up a lot of the under-floor storage areas with bottles
and containers of water in case our main tank does become polluted. HR53s have lots of unused storage areas unde the floorboards
for extra waterbottles. We noticed with great pleasure for instance that 8-litre containers of fresh spring water could be
purchased in Lanzarote for instance for less than a euro and slipped effortlessly under our floorboards!!!
Safety & Training:
The people at World Cruising Club, organisers of the ARC, are very keen that participating boats & crews should,
in the run-up to the ARC, follow some basic training. We fully agree with this approach. In Belgium, we followed courses for Safety
at Sea (hands-on with our HR43 out at sea - anno summer 2017, a picture of this is still on the VVW Nieuwpoort's website); training
with life-rafts (great fun splashing around our local swimming pool testing a variety of rafts & floats); and fire-fighting and first
aid. We have also attended a number of "leavers" seminars - psychological & mental training for a long trip at sea is as important as
learning all the theory and practising it during courses.
We also followed the full set of STCW First Aid and Medical Care/Competence courses with Ondeck Maritime Training in Southampton (the company has changed name and location since). In my case, this was 'again', having done the full set of courses to be the designated medical officer on board at the Warsash Nautical College. But the 5-year validity of those courses was to expire shortly after we finished the ARC. So it was best to redo the whole series of courses altogether. Laura and I joined Leon Schulz (and were accompanied on this venture by Anita, of Anita & Kurt Courtier - who at the time operated a HR342 called I Dolci from Nieuwpoort) to remain certified. Since the course, Kurt and Anita have acquired an HR 43 again called I Dolci which they use for sail-training and chartering purposes as Skyline Sailing. They have received Leon's full seal of approval! For more information on Leon Schulz and Regina Laska, see 'Herself' on the skippers' page...
Whilst at OMT, we were introduced to MSOS, also on Saxon Wharf in Southampton. This
is the company that prepares medical kits for racing yachts participating in round the world races. When we were there, a
set of kits, which are all packed in yellow so-called peli-cases (pictured here), had been returned from the boats that
had been around. It gave us a good chance to see what the cases looked like and what they contained. MSOS have a good grip
on what sailing yachts need, and have come up with a long distance ocean medical kit for us. The kit is made up for 10
persons; so the quantities made available should keep us happy on longer trips. The peli-cases come complete with a very
well written medical manual written by Dr Spike Briggs. We also opted for 24/7 phone-in service offered by MSOS to get radio
medical assistance from a doctor even when you are in the middle of an ocean.
STCW Medical certificates are only valid for 5 years and in February 2022 we redid our Medical training in Ostend with a new Belgian company called RelyonNutec Site Relyonnutec; they work mainly for the wind farms that are sprouting up in Belgian waters. But their course was equally valuable for ocean sailors like ourselves. By keeping our medical papers up-to-date, we can also continue to keep our peli-cases updated...
For good measure, we re-did our Yachtmaster Ocean theory course again - it's worrying to see how quickly you forget things if you do not apply them regularly. At least the advantage of an Atlantic or Pacific crossing is that there should be enough time to prepare star sights and sun-run-sun sights with a usable horizon around! Finally an opportunity to utilise our 3 (yes, three!!!) sextants on a regular basis.
Having changed boat recently, we were closely monitoring all the modifications on board with greater than normal interest. As we were also doing a lot of work ourselves, we now know how things were/are put together and understand better what we would have to do to repair anything should it go wrong. Some of our installations may look a little quaint and amateurish when reviewed by a professional. But we know what was done and how it was done - this should be of real help when we come to repairing items in case of unexpected problems.
Weather at Sea:
As we moved from coastal and offshore sailing around the British Isles, with its reassuring Shipping Forecast, to outright ocean sailing, the next worry that we had to contend with was: what will the weather, and notably the wind, be like? If money were no limitation, you would fit a hi-speed internet link on your boat and take out a subscription with one of the top weather and routing services available for professional seafarers, like the SPOS product of the Meteogroup, which was used extensively by Arne Martensson on his HR62, the Yaghan, for his Antarctica trip (see his book "Back at the Helm"). Our needs are, fortunately, less far-reaching and critical than Yaghan. Our Iridium Pilot allows for respectable download speeds (approx 128kB per second) of files up to 50-75Kb: the size of a very good and detailed so-called GRIB-file.
We signed up with Squid, a Belgo-French organisation, which allows us to select amongst the various weather models and sailing areas they work with and then to download the relevant Grib-files for use: either our on-board PC computer(s), or for display on our i-Phone/i-Pad (through their Squid application). Squid is very involved in the French ocean racing scene, and became the official weather provider for the Volvo Ocean race. So we know they have got a good stranglehold on the weather when it comes to small boat sailing. We were really happy that Squid took up our suggestion in 2018 and held a couple of training seminars on how to get the best out of their tool. We are now a lot better at using it!
As this was completely new to us, we started practising at home and then on board (beginning as far back as our previous HR43, which had a simple Iridium phone, which downloaded data at a mind-boggling 2,5 to 4 Kb per second). Life with an Iridium Pilot set (128kB/s) has made downloading files a lot easier, faster and more comforting as each step of the various processes you carry out is detailed on screen: dial-up; connection to your server; data sent; data received; and connection shut-down when all has been done. It's now a daily routine on board to download a new 4-5 day Grib file every morning and to see how the wind and weather patterns evolve. Furthermore, whilst on the ARC, the organisers send participating boats a daily weather bulletin as well.
As we sailed down to the Canary Islands in August 2017, there was a moment of anxiety as we started moving out of the UK Shipping Forecast areas (Biscay and Fitzroy - we never managed to pick up any Trafalgar information), and the Navtex messages from La Coruna and the Portuguese authorities began petering out too. When our main autopilot packed up just south of Portugal and we were weighing up whether to continue our trip, or to turn back to the Portuguese mainland, I contacted a nearby tanker to ask them for their weather forecast, thinking that perhaps they had better information at their disposal than we did. At the time, the Grib data we were getting was indicating wind-speeds of at least one Beaufort less than what we were experiencing in reality. It was quite comforting to see that both the tanker and we had quite similar information to work with; and that our appreciation of the current weather and outlook was the same. Squid told us afterwards that apparently many weather models deliberately under-predict wind speeds at sea by about 1 Beaufort strength... In any event, they give the wind speed at 10m above sea level and your wind instrument transducer is 23m above sea level at the top of your mast. So this automatically adds a beaufort to the "real" wind...
In 2019, as part of our preparation for our second departure, we attended a special course in the Netherlands of weather on the ocean wave for blue-water sailors. To our great satisfaction, we actually learned very little, which showed that we are already quite advanced on the weather knowledge curve - at least as advanced as a simple all-round sailor will be...
Safety at Sea - dealing with very heavy weather:
Lin and Larry Pardey have written several books on safety and comfort at sea. The one that caught our eye was
their handbook on Storm Tactics. One of those things that you'd rather not go through, but have to be prepared
for, is preparing a small boat for a storm (or worse) at sea. A plethora of books and information sources on
this subject exist. And often, the more you read, the more confused you get. We decided that we would join the
Pardey fan club, or school of thought, and have prepared Ngahue IV along those lines. Undoubtedly
Ngahue IV is a smidgen larger than Seraffyn, the Pardey's boat. Our hull and keel configuration is quite
different, being a simple fin-keeled boat. But with careful handling we expect her to behave as a decent ocean-going,
modern sailboat would. And because of her bigger size, the bits and pieces we have bought are just a bit bigger than
the ones pictured in the Pardey's handbook. Elvstrom has provided us with a bright orange heavy trysail which will fit the
mast on its own track. The outhaul is taken to a turning block either side aft of the boat and will allow us to
heave the boat too at about 50° to wind.
Ocean Safety from Southampton (we walked by this company at least twice a day during the 9 days we did our medical training with OMT in February 2017) has provided us with their Southern 24 model para anchor, which is streamed from the bow, with a pennant line to midships. The para anchor is set up to be one wave-crest removed from the boat (up to 100m away), so that you lie quietly, hove too, in the "slick" created by your boat and para anchor. The total weight of the parachute and the weighted line comes to ±55kg!
I won't say that we're looking forward to trying this out real-time with 50+knots wind raging around the boat. And finding a quiet spot to try out the equipment near our home port before we head off will be a challenge too… With our special thanks to Karen Zammit of Ocean Safety Ltd in Southampton (Saxon Wharf) for sorting out our Para Anchor order for us!
Safety at Sea - liferafts & lifejackets:
Safety at sea is an essential feature that the ARC organisers take very seriously; life rafts particularly are
subject to very specific requirements! Of course we too took a keen interest in the safety equipment that we wanted to take on
board. After a lot of looking round, talking to people and checking websites, we decided to target an above average life raft
for our ARC and circumnavigation. Our choice fell on a 6 person Viking RescYou Pro life raft in canister with a Hammar
hydrostatic/self-releasing mechanism which automatically releases the raft when our boat sinks. The cradle with self-releasing
mechanism is installed just forward of the hard top. Viking describes its RescYou Pro
series as ideal for extreme cruising, where comfort and safety go hand in hand. Hailed as the market's best, they rapidly
self-right and are easy to enter. This suits us just fine, because when we did one of our safety trainings in the local swimming
pool, we really struggled to get into the two different rafts and the float that were being demonstrated. Of course we hope that
we shall never have to try this out. The raft has its own full >24h ocean survival kit plus an additional, dedicated grab-bag,
which our suppliers offered as an extra as part of the purchase deal.
Furthermore, we also have our own McMurdo XL grab-bag with all those useful things that make life easier should you survive your ordeal in the liferaft and be saved at sea.
Lifejackets too come under close scrutiny from the ARC organisers. Whilst following our medical courses in Southampton, we decided to invest in a couple of Spinlock Deckvest 5D Pro Sensor lifejackets, that come with lights, integrated harness, crotch straps and sprayhood. The manufacturer assures customers that this very recent and ergonomic design is comfortable to wear. Force 4 Chandlery, where we bought our lifejackets, was a little surprised that we insisted on having the 275 Newton (60ml CO2 canisters) version rather than the more standard 170 Newton issue. Again, just hoping we will never have to spend hours hanging around in a big sea with these lifejackets… but in such an emergency, having a little extra buoyancy is probably a good thing.
Finally we had an Oceansignal Rescue-Me MOB1 unit installed in our three main lifejackets. These are AIS and GMDSS transmitters, that will show us up on the ship's Furuno TZT plotter screens, should we fall overboard. Overkill? Certainly not in our minds, when there are just two persons on board and anything could happen. On a run, taking down the sails and returning to the place where the other person went overboard would make finding that person without these beacons a major challenge.
When sailing with just two people on board, the key to safety is to stay on board and not fall in the sea. Nevertheless, we have installed all the required material to throw in the water after the MOB! Mind you, if one of us does go over board, the remaining person at the helm will be spending a lot of time throwing all this gear into the water and being extremely busy trying to turn the boat around and into a search pattern... The mind boggles when you take yourself through the checklist. So the ultimate aim is to stay on board in the first place.
Hopefully all this will suffice to be adequately prepared to affront the ARC and our ensuing circumnavigation...
Dealing with the unexpected - the sudden Covid-19 pandemic:
When you set off on a major trip like a circumnavigation, you try to prepare for all eventualities. Unfortunately, we, like probably most people, omitted to include a global pandemic in our list of preparations... As had quite obviously also done the World Cruising Club. So when the world started shutting down in March 2020, the World ARC fleet was quite unprepared for what was about to happen. You could of course argue: what is there to do when one country after the next closes its borders! Whether countries were right to lock their front and back doors is an academic discussion. For political and/or internal reasons, country leaders decided that every visitor was suspect and should be repelled as one does with unwanted boarders on a ship. The World Cruising Club managed to negotiate a special clearance for its World ARC fleet in Tahiti. The instructions were simple: sail as fast as you can to Papeete's Taina or town marina, moor the boat and take the next flight to Europe. Of course, being the slowest boat in the (W)ARC fleet, all airplanes had gone by the time we arrived in Papeete, where we also needed to argue with the harbour authorities to gain access to the harbour!!
Once tucked up in Papeete (some boats, requiring technical attention, had stopped en route at the Marquesas, which was much frowned on by the authorities at first) we were more or less left to our own devices as continuation of the World ARC 2020/21 programme proved to be practically and materially impossible. Given the outlook that we had nowhere to go to, Ngahue IV, like about a third of the (W)ARC fleet, was shipped back to Europe as deck freight. We flew back to Europe with Air Tahiti Nui, as late in 2020 their flights were resumed again. Very probably at some stage in the future we will set off again to completely sail around the world. It is unlikely we will do this with the World Cruising Club - in hindsight (and completely irrespective of the Covid outcome for the WARC 2020/21 - the WCC was as unprepared for Covid as most governments) we felt ill at ease with the WARC organisers and certainly felt treated rather poorly and as second-raters by those in charge. Were we too slow for them? Not "chic" enough? As a result of their decisions concerning us, we were rushed through the San Blas islands in 2 days (a crying shame as these are really pretty and it rained on day-2); messed through the Panama Canal; rushed through Panama City (again as a result of poor planning by the organisers who showed themselves much more flexible with boats than with us); and made to hang around for a long time in the Perlas islands (whilst the rest of the fleet caught up). Not very good for us, we felt!!!