Salty Dawg Rally to Azores from St. Maarten
Salty Dawg’s first Azores Rally sets sail in 2025 with routes from St. Maarten and Virginia, open to 25 vetted boats with ocean experience.
If you’ve sailed to the Caribbean with the Dawgs, how about trying a transatlantic rally? The Salty Dawg Sailing Association (SDSA) will run its first-ever rally across the North Atlantic to Horta in the Azores Islands in the spring of 2025.
“The rally will have starts in St. Maarten in the Caribbean and in Hampton, Virginia, on May 18, with an initial destination of Bermuda,” says Mike Benjamin, SDSA president. “The St. Maarten start will coincide with the SDSA’s annual Homeward Bound Rally to Hampton, VA, including an optional stop in Bermuda. From there, the fleet will gather in Bermuda for final preparations and festivities and depart for the Azores on June 1. The passage across the Atlantic should take about two weeks, depending on boat speed and weather. For many of us, this passage across the Atlantic to the Azores and then on to Europe has been on our bucket lists for a long time.”
There will be educational webinars for participants with topics such as weather routing, cruising the Azores, provisioning, spare parts, and overviews of destinations such as Europe and the Mediterranean. The initial Azores Rally in 2025 will be limited to the first 25 boats that pay the rally fee and pass a general vetting by the SDSA rally management team. The rally fee is $550 per boat. There is no separate crew fee. All skippers are expected to have blue water sailing experience. www.saltydawgsailing.org/azores-rally
Carol Bareuther has written for ALL AT SEA since 2004.
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