December 3, 2020-Alarife Rising

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. 

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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.

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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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Alarife 

Click here for Lots More Photos:  

 

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, La Cruz Huanacaxtle

September 20, 2018-The Wreck of Alarife

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Morning After

Is This The End of the Line for Alarife?

Over the radio came the words any skipper dreads to hear, “Alarife is dragging, Alarife is dragging!”

Pandemonium broke out in La Cruz. It was 9:30 PM and a wild squall had just rolled through the area.

There was a path of destruction in the anchorage and marina. And now one of the boats was dragging towards the shore.

The first we’d heard before that was sound of rain. That is a sound which we rather enjoy because that means that the rain catcher is beginning to do its job. Then we heard the splash of water dumping onto the deck which means the rain is too heavy or the wind is blowing.

Then our whole boat shook as a big wind gust hit us. That was the beginning of the wild squall.

Immediately it was really blowing hard and howling. I turned on the instruments and saw the wind was mid thirties and increasing. I opened the hatch saw that the canvas was holding but the ropes needed to be re-tied. I knew I’d get soaked but I went on deck anyway to re-secure the awning.

By the time I got back below deck the wind was 36.5 knots and chatter had started to fill the radio.

People in the anchorage were checking on each other and the reports were starting to sound scary. Big winds, big waves, down pouring rain, and a night black as hell; it was not a happy time to be in the La Cruz anchorage.

That was when we call came in about Alarife. It was Dee Dee on one of the other boats.

“Alarife has definitely moved towards the breakwater!”

We knew that the owner was not aboard and in the conditions nobody could set out in a dingy to try to save it.

Mike Danielson came on the radio, “Is Alarife still dragging? Or has the anchor reset?”

“Well, the bow is into the wind, so maybe the anchor is holding again, but we can’t see in the dark for sure, but it is definitely close to the rocks”

About that time it was clear that the squall was over. The wind was dropping; 14 knots.

It seemed like Alarife had stopped short of the rocks.

But it wasn’t over. Alarife had already landed on the breakwater and nobody knew it yet. The waves had already pounded a hole in it.

When I got up in the morning the news was all over the place. Alarife had been wrecked and sunk just off the breakwater.

It breaks my heart when a boat is lost this way. This is so needless. Owners should not leave their boats un-attended, especially in this anchorage. It has no protection and squalls and thunder storms can come in from any direction. The holding is not good there. We all knew that and we all knew that Alarife was at risk. Alarife has dragged several times before. We knew it was just a matter of time and we told Jorge that. Still, I am sad about it. We knew the boat well, it was a beautiful boat, and Jorge, the owner; we knew him well too. He’s a good guy. We have raced against Alarife many times.

Now Alarife is gone. I saw Jorge that next morning and he told me that he was going to re-float Alarife and repair it, but I doubted that he has the skills or resources to do that. I thought that we won’t see it sailing again, ever. I hope I was wrong.

Click here for more of this story, and photos.

Fredrick Roswold, SV Wings, La Cruz

Comment:

This isn’t the first boat which has been lost here. It happens every year. Since we’ve been living in La Cruz there have been four or five boats wrecked here, most in similar circumstances. Even more boats have broken free and been rescued in time by other cruisers. I’ve been involved with those rescues on occasion. Interestingly these boats have all been owned by single men, most with meager resources, who left the boats at anchor because they couldn’t afford or didn’t want to keep it in the marina. In some cases the owners left the boats and returned to the United States, essentially abandoning the boats. Other just preferred to live ashore. I view this as irresponsibility and I’ve lobbied for the Port Captain to take a more pro-active role, but there is little interest getting involved on the part of any of the authorities. When there is no penalty for abandoning your boat or allowing it to become a wreck on the beach, and especially when you have little invested in it, people will continue to do this, and when the boat gets into trouble it becomes someone else’s responsibility to try to save it. That is really wrong.