By Theresa Nicholson
For some people, sailing 2,700 nautical miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to St. Lucia might be called a lifetime achievement. For Curtney Thomas, it’s called going home.
Curtney was the only Lucian sailing with the 2024 Atlantic Rally for Cruisers fleet, and one of three Caribbean sailors in the 2024 ARC and ARC+ fleets. When I first caught up with the 30-year-old in October, he was getting ready to leave Newport, Rhode Island, with the North American Rally to the Caribbean, as crew on the Swan 65 Aurora.
“We’re jumping to Bermuda and then on to St. Maarten,” Curtney told me. The weather looked promising, with 15 knots from the northwest. “We’ll get through the Gulf Stream and we’ll have a ni-i-i-iiice broad reach to Bermuda,” he said, stretching out “nice” the way a St. Lucian sunset might stretch across the western sky.
Curtney started out boating on powerboats, fishing with his family and exploring St. Lucia’s beaches and bays. Through training and professional courses, he secured the licenses needed to take tourists day sailing. From there, he joined several regattas and crewed on sailboats.
“I realized I had a passion for it,” he said. “I joined in the Bequia Regatta, then St. Maarten regattas.” Now he’s a caretaker to several boats during the off-season and runs deliveries for the Moorings — oh, and then there’s the five transatlantic crossings.
“Two times west-to-east, one from St. Maarten to Maderia, and the second time to the Azores, and on to Portugal. Two times east-to-west,” Curtney said.
Last year he sailed from the Canary Islands to St. Lucia on a Swan 56.
“This is my first time doing the ARC, though,” he said of his fifth crossing as we spoke in Las Palmas before the November start of the World Cruising Club’s (WCC) 2024 ARC.
The ARC sends the annual rally of sailboats across the Atlantic from Las Palmas, Grand Canary, to St. Lucia every fall. It’s one of several rallies run by the WCC, which was formed by Jimmy Cornell in 1987 and is now run by Paul and Suzana Tetlow, along with a small team based in Cowes, in the United Kingdom, and a team of “yellow shirts” who support the WCC rallies around the world.
Curtney made the November crossing with yacht owner Dario Calogero and crew on the Italian-flagged Swan 56 Why Not. He’s spent a couple of years working on the boat in Italy and part of his role on board is working with novice crew, a skill he honed while working with sailing schools in St. Lucia. He encourages new crew to limit their phone use during long crossings and pay attention to the sea.
“It’s a strange feeling, where you can go off and be away from people, be in your element. It’s a great feeling to be at sea,” Curtney said. He never sails alone, even during short hops between the islands.
Does he consider himself a pro?
“Well I don’t know if I’d say that. I move around quite a bit,” he replies. “I hope to make a career of it.”
He said that although he has a few friends in St. Lucia who are interested in sailing, it’s not a big community. He smiles when asked what holds them back.
“Oh, they think people will go insane at sea, or something horrible will happen to you,” he says. “You need to build up your confidence, do day sails, then longer trips, two-day, three-day-long trips, until you grow a passion for it.”
Representing the Leewards and Cayman
Kishawn Harrigan, a 43-year-old sailor from Antigua, and Alex Slocock, a 25-year-old sailor from the Cayman Islands, are in the same boat. Literally. Kishawn and Alex sailed aboard the new Outremer 55 Sizzle, a UK-registered multihull, during the 2024 ARC+ rally.
Like the ARC, the ARC+ fleet departs from Las Palmas, then stops in the Cape Verde Islands before continuing across the Atlantic to Grenada.
Owned by Simon Cook and Sally Bruce, Sizzle had the rally’s youngest crew member, Simon and Sally’s nine-month-old daughter Charlotte, so extra crew was important. The fast cat, one of the record-setting 27 multihulls in the 2024 ARC+, took line honors at the start and arrived second at Grenada’s Camper & Nicholsons Port Louis Marina just behind Norwegian-flagged Outremer 52 Salto, crossing in just less than 12 days.
Kishawn said that although he has sailed with his friend Simon for many years, this was his first time in the ARC.
“We’ve sailed together for years. Simon bought a new boat and he called me up and asked if I had time to do the ARC with him and his better half,” Kishawn said. “We’ve been close friends for a long time and have done a lot of sailing trips together — the Mediterranean and the West Coast of the United States — but never an Atlantic crossing. It’s kind of hard to say no. It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a young skipper, so I decided to check it off the bucket list.”
Kishawn recalled when he worked for Ondeck Maritime Training in Antigua; the company had Farr 65s do the ARC every year.
“I was a young skipper, working there, I always told myself one of these days I will do that, for my first Atlantic crossing, but that never happened.”
He met a skipper on a 40-meter sailboat, doing daywork for him, and the skipper asked if he wanted to do a transatlantic crossing.
“We all knew what that answer would be. This was 2011. I did a super-yacht crossing, from Antigua to Palma.”
Kishawn started sailing when he was five years old, with the Antigua Yacht Club in English Harbour. He watched all of the boats from around the world come through the Caribbean sailing capital during Antigua Sailing Week, Caribbean RORC 600, the superyacht regattas, the Valentine regatta and others.
“The thing that got me into sailing, as a kid growing up in English Harbour, was seeing all those big superyachts come and go, every year. I always wondered, ‘What if I get on one of those boats and see the world?’ So I did just that.”
