Day 1 - Saturday 16 November
The UK team arrived in Gran Canaria in the evening. We travelled to Las Palmas marina where we met up with the Gran Canaria team and the guy from World Cruising. We all then went out for dinner and met some of the other boats inside of the marina. The following morning, we joined the ARC opening ceremony made up of all of the crews in the marina and the ‘VIP’ from St Lucia, it was amazing to see how many participants there are in the race and it gave us all an idea about the scale of the event.
Day 2 - Sunday 17 November
On day two, the St Lucia team had arrived in Las Palmas and we all met at the Yacht Club where we had a small ‘Youth Team’ meeting followed by an introduction to the boat. We then had a series of safety briefs before setting sail. We planned for a 2 day sail returning on the Wednesday morning. We ran through some drills so that everyone became comfortable with the boat. We also became used to the watch system which we knew would be useful for the actual crossing. Generally everyone IS in high spirit!!