WINGSSAIL

On a summer night in 2018 pandemonium broke out in La Cruz. It was 9:30 PM and a wild squall had just rolled through the area, including through the fleet anchored offshore. Then we heard over the radio the words any sailor would dread to hear, “Alarife is dragging, Alarife is dragging! It’s on the rocks”.

Our hearts were broken, if it truly was on the rocks, the iconic Holland 41 Alarife would be lost. No boat around here has survived that. People were braving the storm to try to affect a rescue, but it was hopeless.

The next morning the worst was evident: Alarife was sunk. The divers reported large holes in the hull. It couldn’t have been worse. But this story has a good ending.

Today, two years later, thanks to a handful of local sailors who put in a lot of hard work, and not a little money, Alarife is rebuilt and sailing again.

wingssail images-fredrick roswold

Alarife sunk

The racing yacht Alarife has had a long storied career. Built in 1981 in Mexico for Manuel Vasquez in collaboration with Ron Holland, the designer, Alarife had a successful racing record among the hottest racing boats of the day in Mexico. As a sister ship to the famous Imp from San Francisco, it should have been. Over the course of at least two subsequent owners the boat continued to race In Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco. Mike Danielson of PV sailing, who was involved in the racing program on Alarife, remembers, “We had at one point a crew of mostly teenagers from Mexico City coming down to crew on the races, so it was really a youth program. And on non-race days we sailed the boat all over the Bay.”

Eventually though, the boat had changed hands again and was put into charter service doing day sails on the bay with small groups. While still showing up from time to time on the race course, it was mostly kept on the hook in the anchorage at La Cruz.

After being refloated, a volunteer effort of local cruisers and Mike from PV sailing (“I just couldn’t bear to give up on the old girl”), Alarife came into limbo. The boat needed to be lifted from the water and put into the boat yard. The yard, however, wouldn’t save the boat without money up front. The owner couldn’t come up with that kind of cash. There she floated, suspended by 18 large barrels filled with air with nowhere to go.

Click here to read more about the wreck.

The angel that day (Alarife has seen a few angels) was Gil Drory, of Chica Loca Tours, who fronted the money and took ownership of the boat. The travel lift fired up and Alarife was hauled out, water pouring out the massive holes in her hull.

wingssail images-fredrick roswold

On The hard

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Big Hole (one of five)

On the stands in the La Cruz boat yard Alarife looked hopeless. There were holes big enough to crawl though, the rudder was broken, the keel chewed in half, the engine shot. The rig was pulled, the deck stripped, and parts of the boat seemingly disappeared into thin air. You could say, “looted”.

Some work was being done but the progress was slow. We all wondered why bother, it couldn’t be worth as much as it would take to fix it, if that was even possible.

A year went by.

Then one day we saw that Alarife had been moved to another corner of the yard and was covered with tarps. The sounds of grinding was coming out of that pile of tarps. We saw the keel being reshaped, the rudder being remade. When things were quiet we crawled under the tent to see what was going on. Amazingly the hull was being repaired.

We wondered who was doing it? Who would take on such a project?

The newest Alarife “angels” were Pepe Martin del Campo and Gabriela Romero Carlin. Pepe and Gabi had a cruising sailboat already but they wanted a racing boat. “Maybe it was a crazy idea”, they admitted to me, but they took it on with a dream to have Alarife sailing and racing again. Why? Pepe said to me, “I was a cowboy, a rancher; I have a ranch at Lagos Moreno up in the center of Mexico, but I wanted to be a man of the sea, so I sold my cows and came down here to Banderas Bay. Gabi is from a sailing family already; her grandfather is Ramon Carlin (who shocked the yachting world by captaining his yacht Sayula II to victory in the first Whitbread Around the World race in 1973. Now, that is a story in itself, but one for another day.)

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At Work

These two are hands-on people. Who was up to his elbows in fiberglass dust for months? Pepe. Who do I see cleaning, polishing, and sorting all the bits of hardware that was rescued from the four corners of the boatyard? Gabi. So this is truly their work of passion.

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Re-Launching

I joined Pepe and Gabi and several of their friends on Alarife’s first sail in November and the boat sailed like a dream, like a dream come true. They drank champagne after that sail.

Of course there is more work to do, it is a sailboat after all, and there is always work to be done, but since that first sail they made it to the start line for a Wednesday Beer Can Race and Alarife looked good. They have been talking to Gil and are making plans to do Team Building Match Racing charters against Wings. Now won’t that be something?

But it would be just one more new life for Alarife.

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