What do you do on a boat for days on end if you’re not constantly tweaking the sails to get an inch ahead of the boat next to you? For cruisers and powerboaters, it probably seems like a dumb question, but when I arrived in Sint Maarten for the Caribbean Multihull Challenge Rally in February, I genuinely wasn’t sure. I’d never been cruising—unless you count a single night moored off an island after a race. Judging purely by the number of designated sunbathing spots on some cats, I assumed there’d be a lot of sitting around cultivating skin cancer and not much else.
That’s my secret: As a lifelong racer, cruising never appealed to me much.
Nevertheless, it was hard not to be excited when I arrived at Dream Yacht Charters’ base in Anse Marcel, Saint Martin. Our boat, a Lagoon 45, was parked at the dock in a stunning little basin surrounded by steep, verdant hills that jutted seemingly straight out of the water. It was too beautiful not to appreciate how lucky I was to be there.
The next morning, the boat’s skipper, Hans, met me for the boat briefing. We’d been paired up to sail together in the Caribbean Multihull Challenge (CMC) Rally for the next three days. Though the CMC has existed as a race for several years, this was to be its first edition with a rally fleet as well. Since charter boats aren’t usually insured to race, we
