I imagine all weekend sailors dream of sailing round the world.
A company called Oyster who make expensive yachts have seen this as an opportunity and have set up the Oyster World Rally in which a fleet of boats circumnavigate the globe. The route is shown in the banner above.
The adventure takes 16 months so is designed for well healed yachties who can afford an expensive yacht and one and a half years off work. They all have Oyster yachts of course which cost well over £1m, most double that, (the pictures shows a 65ft Oyster called Man of War, which probably cost £2m). The owners pay a fee to join this adventure and some also hire extra crew.
There are 25 boats and most arrived before Christmas spending time getting to know one another and probably deciding which crews to avoid in future harbours. They are all moored up alongside our hotel. Oyster arrange all the moorings around the world, the passage through the Panama canal and they have several technicians here helping the owners prepare their boats.
Going in a large fleet presumably means they can help one another through problems although Gill and I were amazed to find two crew members having great difficulty working out how the gang plank worked, much cursing and swearing and a tangle of ropes, lets hope they are better at managing sails.
Another boat is sailed by a couple with two teenage children one of whom did their GCSE’s in the summer. The fleet set sail on the 9th January.
A few days after they leave a challenge at the other end of the spectrum arrives in our dock.
The 36 rowing boats in the Talisker Atlantic Challenge are still plodding away at crossing the 3,000 miles from the Canaries, the lead boats are 1000 miles away but at their current speed won't quite make it here before we leave. The picture shows a boat from a previous years challenge which has been abandoned in the dockyard, perhaps someone is going to row it back.