2022 East Coast Fall Rallies

By David H. Lyman

This report appeared the December 2022 edition of Caribbean Compass Magazine

Two groups of yachts head to the Eastern Caribbean each fall. One group leaves Newport, Rhode Island, and makes a stop in Bermuda — it’s right on the way. This is the NARC Rally, the North American Rally to the Caribbean, which ends in St. Maarten. The other is the Salty Dawg Rally, which departs from Hampton, Virginia, at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay. This group makes one long 1,700-mile, non- stop voyage, through the Bermuda Triangle, to Antigua.

The 2022 NARC Rally

The 2022 NARC Rally of 19 boats, plus three from the Salty Dawg Rally that tagged along with them, departed Newport at the end of October. During the briefing on Friday, October 19th, the weather service Weather Routers Incorporated gave a narrow “weather window” of opportunity for departure. Skippers could choose to leave on Sunday and meet nine- to 13-foot seas in the Gulf Stream on Tuesday. Or leave on Monday when the seas would have diminished, but the winds on the next Friday, on the approach to Bermuda, would have clocked into the east. The skippers at the briefing huddled to discuss options. They all elected to depart on Sunday, October 21st, in favorable winds.

The Gulf Stream this year was the most favorable I’ve seen in 40 years. It was farther north than usual, just where you wanted it to be. At 39°N and 70°W the stream took a meander to the southeast, heading toward Bermuda, for nearly 200 miles. On arrival in Bermuda, Hank Schmitt, who has been organizing the NARC Rally for 22 years, reported that his boat had spent 30 hours in the stream, getting a two-plus knot push and shortening the voyage by half a day. Hank, on his Swan 48, Avocation, arrived in Bermuda three days and 22 hours out of Newport.

Arrowhead, a J/46, was the first boat to arrive, in three days and 19 hours. She was the only Salty Dawg boat to make it. The two other Dawgs that had started with the NARC fleet turned back when they neared the Gulf Stream. They returned to Newport, only to sail south again to join the other Salty Dawg boats in the Chesapeake.

Steve Burlack, skipper on Arrowhead, reported,

“No major issues. Fun trip. Pretty much the same as the other four times I’ve sailed here. Gulf Stream no major issue. One rough night with squalls, thunder and lightning, winds 30-plus. Then a good reaching breeze filled in and we were flying the rest of the way. Mostly one reef in the main and the number four on the inner forestay. We rolled out the 104-percent jib on the last day. We were in company of the NARC boats the entire trip. Four of us came in pretty much together.”

After three days of partying, reprovisioning and repairs, on Tuesday, November 8th, half the NARC fleet got underway out of Bermuda for the 875-mile voyage to St. Maarten. The rest left the following weekend.

On Sunday, November 13th, five and a half days out of Bermuda, Avocation, with a crew of six first-time offshore sailors aboard, arrived in Simpson Bay, St. Maarten, the first of the NARC rally boats to make port.

“Pretty easy passage down from Bermuda,” Hank wrote. “More rain than normal the first two days, then we motored for a day, then nice sailing in trades the last day.”

All in all, this year’s NARC Rally was a “piece of cake,” without serious incident and fast passages on both legs.

The 2022 Salty Dawg Rally

The Salty Dawg Rally was a different story.

More than 120 boats gathered at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, poised for the voyage to Antigua. Departure day had been set for Tuesday, November 1st. But a disturbance in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle had Chris Parker, from the Marine Weather Center, worried. He and his team were providing weather routing advice to the rally and didn’t see a weather window opening for the southeast run down to the islands, not as long as that disturbance lingered.

There were options, he pointed out. Boats that wanted to sail to Bermuda and join the NARC for the run south to the islands could do so, if they got to Bermuda before Friday, November 4th. It’s 600 miles, so at 6.5 knots that’s three and a half days. Four boats left the Chesapeake on Sunday, October 30th. One turned back, but Solana V, Endeavor 2 and Cameo made it across in time. Cameo, a 48-foot Leopard catamaran with Douglas and Ia Hauck aboard, reported:

“First night in the Gulf Stream was rough, winds from north. One of the main sheets broke in the middle of the night, but able to keep the main up. Fixed the following morning.

“Day Two—noticed one of the shrouds too loose. Able to fix same day.

“Day Three—nice sailing, but night very rough. Confused seas. Took main down during the night when it got squally. Motor-sailed the rest of the way with full jib. Hit a 40-knot squall a few hours before entering the harbor. No issues entering the harbor in the dark with north-northeast winds.”

Heading South

Thirty of the Salty Dawg boats that left the Chesapeake on October 30th and 31st sailed around Cape Hatteras and headed south inside the Gulf Stream. Then they turned east, crossing the Gulf Stream near 34°N, and then headed south again for the Bahamas. Another seven boats elected to creep along the shore or down the ICW. A few dropped out of the rally altogether. Sixty boats remained in Hampton, Virginia, waiting for conditions to become favorable for an offshore departure. They waited nearly two weeks.

While most boats were bound for the Bahamas, two Salty Dawg boats and another half-dozen non-rally boats were planning to follow Parker’s option of continuing south along the Bahama island chain, then turning east. By the time these boats reached the Turks & Caicos the winds would be more westerly, wrapping around the developing low. The low would have stalled the trades, sending the air north to swirl around it. The “Thornless Path” became a viable alternative.

That disturbance in the Triangle devel-coped into a sub- tropical storm. It couldn’t make up its mind where to go,

then did. It headed west, directly for the Abacos, where 30 of the Salty Dawg boats had arrived and were hunkering down.

Mark Hill, on Oasis,his Tayana 48, was at the Abaco Beach Club Marina. He told methat the storm arrived on Wednesday, November 9th; it was a wet and wild day then night. When Nicole left it was a full-fledged Category 1 hurricane, and it slammed into Florida’s east coast the next day. Mark reported winds mostly 50 knots, gusting to 70. His boat had minimal damage: the topping lift stretched and the boom cracked a solar panel.

The Southerly Option

You Take the High Road, and I'll Take the Low Road, and I'll be in St. Marrtin Before You . . . .

The two catamarans in the Salty Dawg Rally, INO and Vanamo, along with a half a dozen non-rally boats that took Chris’s advice, bypassed the Bahamas and made it all the way to the Caribbean in one go, in less than ten days.

“We had no plans to stop in the Bahamas,” Mark Kerestres told me on a phone call right after INO, his Catana 46 catamaran, arrived in Puerto Rico. INO, named for a Greek goddess, points exceptionally well for a cat, Mark admitted, so “we kept sail- ing south, west of the ridge ing south, west of the ridge like Chris Parker told us — the ridge that developed into a tropical storm, then a hurricane. We just managed to keep going.” They threaded their way through the lower Bahama chain at ten knots in a south-southeast wind of 20 to 25 knots with higher gusts in squalls. “We would have stopped in the Bahamas if the weather deteriorated. Bahamas was a backstop, an emergency shelter along the route if needed.” They had to motor-sail along the north coast of Hispaniola and arrived in Puerto Rico on Thursday, November 10th, ten days out of Hampton. They planned to slowly make their way southeast, exploring the islands on the way to meet the rest of the Salty Dawgs in Antigua, if and when they got there.

The catamaran Vanamo stopped off at Cockburn Harbour in the Turks & Caicos for fuel, bypassed Puerto Rico, stopped in St. Thomas for more fuel, and arrived in St. Maarten on Saturday, November 12th —

the same day the 50 Salty Dawg boats bottled up back in Hampton finally headed out for Antigua.

A look at the Predict Tracker shows that most of those 60 boats that left on the 12th were heading south-southeast, to pass south of Bermuda. As this article was being written, Chris Parker told me they were headed for some nasty weather. A trough to the east was predicted to produce enhanced tradewinds below 22°N. Winds would likely be east at 25 to 35, with numerous squalls. He advised the rally members to get as far east as 61°W before turning south, to put the stronger trades on the beam or quarter as they headed back to the islands. He added that a lot of these boats might make landfall in the Virgin Islands rather than Antigua.

Update

The nasty weather never did materialize, and the 50 boats that left Hampton has a fast romp down there trades to Antigua the last 3 days.

Afterthought

I’ve made the run to the BVI from the Chesapeake once, from Beaufort Inlet twice, and from Fort Lauderdale once. I’ve made the Newport-Antigua voyage more than a dozen times. I don’t know if I would have waited with the others in Hampton for a better weather window, or joined INO and Vanamo and just headed south and made the best of it. I certainly would have considered Bermuda as a viable option. But then, leaving from Newport, even if it can be a bit rough, has always gotten me to Bermuda, then the Eastern Caribbean, with minimal fuss. But I have to tell you, there may be something to these shallow-draft catamarans and making 200-plus miles per day — and this is coming from a die-hard deep-keel sailor from Maine. Sometimes it’s best to go when you can go.

David H. Lyman has more than 20 seasons experience sailing in the West Indies. He’s an author and photojournalist who writes regularly for Caribbean Compass, Cruising World, SAIL and Ocean Navigator. His story on Sarah Schelbert and her boat, Alani, is on page 14 of this issue. You can read all his most recent articles on his website, www.DHLyman.com