Hey, welcome to 59 degrees north with Andeshell. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the 59 degrees north podcast. Sorry for the long hiatus, but we've been busy sailing

and working on sailing events down here in St. Lucia. Mia and I took two weeks after the Caribbean

1500 to sail with my dad from Tortola down to St. Lucia, just in time to get here and start

working for the Ark Rally, which is the subject of today's podcast. This is sort of a bonus episode

and sort of an article episode combined together. I did a feature on the ARC website about

breakages and jury rigs in the rally this year. And it's been a really weird year

for weather. They had a really slow start at the beginning, and then the trades filled in and

filled in ferociously, and it's been real squally and windy for the last 10 days or so with

sustained winds in the 30s, squalls with winds in the 50-knott ranges and

rainstorms and thunderstorms.

And anyway, a year with probably more breakages than we usually see down here.

That said, there's 200 plus boats in the fleet, so stuff's bound to happen.

Nothing catastrophic has happened yet.

And even the one boat that was

dismasted, the one small racing boat, did a really nice job making a jury rig and managed to

sail across the finish line. So, and they were double-handed. So anyway, it's a testament to the

skills of the crews as well as the kind of ingenious fixes, some of them came up with. Of course,

you get the odd, stupid one now and then,

but hey, that's going to happen. Anyway, this is sort of an article that I wrote combined with the

actual audio of the people that I spoke to on the docks. So I hope you like it. It's a bit different

than we usually did. A couple announcements in January, in Chicago.

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