It took a lot of years for Geoff Stone to get where he was on that day in mid-March: aboard his 45-foot Leopard sailing catamaran, Rolling Stones, more than halfway through the 3,150-mile Pacific Ocean crossing from the Galapagos Islands to the Marquesas.
The Wisconsinite had boated all his life, having fun on ski boats since he was about 5, and getting good enough that he participated in waterski shows around the world. During his travels, he made a friend who suggested completing the U.K.’s Royal Yachting Association sailing class. “I took it as far as the Offshore Yachtmaster,” he says. The rest of his boating skills were self-taught. He purchased a 25-foot monohull to sail around Lake Michigan. Then, in March 2021, he bought Rolling Stones on the brokerage market. It had four staterooms—perfect for Stone, his wife and their three young boys. The family spent six months along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, cruising the ICW. Then, they crossed to the Bahamas for what Stone calls “a magical five months.”
But his itch to cruise farther wouldn’t stop. So, they made a 200-mile passage to Jamaica. Then, they set course for Panama’s San Blas Islands and went through the canal to the Pacific side. By the time they got to the Galapagos Islands in late January, they were all in on cruising.
With the boys ages 9, 7 and 6, Stone and his wife, Meghan, decided that the next passage—a huge open-ocean run from the Galapagos to the Marquesas—would be too much for the family. So, on March 1, Stone set off with his brother, his father-in-law and a family friend. All the men had cruised aboard Rolling Stones as guests, but none had ever tried such an ambitious route.
“There’s no place to drop an anchor. There are no islands, no nothing between the Galapagos and the Marquesas,” Stone says.
They motored south from the Galapagos for four or five days, trying to get down to about 11 degrees south, where their weather-routing service said they’d find a comfort zone in the trade winds. “We had the sails up for a few days straight after that, making good speed and time,” he says. “We were excited about that.” About 1,200 miles from the Marquesas, they celebrated. They were living the dream of long-distance cruising that so many boaters harbor their entire lives, but never get to make reality. But the very next day, Stone says, “That’s when we learned of Raindancer.”
‘We hit a whale’
Raindancer, a Kelly Peterson 44, also had left the Galapagos for the same crossing. That boat was about a day ahead of Rolling Stones. On March 13, owner Rick Rodriguez and his crew were in the cockpit eating pizza beneath sunny skies when Rodriguez heard a crash and metal clanking. One of his crew shouted, “We hit a whale!”
It swam off, bleeding, on Raindancer’s port side, and the boat was left badly wounded too. Rodriguez posted on social media that it only took about 5 seconds for the bilge alarm to go off, with water rushing in through Raindancer’s stern. The crew immediately gathered emergency equipment and supplies while Rodriguez tried to plug up the water intrusion. Gallon after gallon was gushing in too fast. He helped bring out the liferaft, set off one of Raindancer’s EPIRBs and called a Mayday on the VHF radio. His crew then launched the 10.5-foot Apex dinghy from the foredeck.
Still hoping he might save his boat, Rodriguez grabbed a mask and fins and jumped overboard with a tarp. The hull damage he saw was catastrophic, with multiple holes and sizable cracks. It had been a matter of minutes, and Raindancer was already about two-thirds flooded.
The entire Raindancer crew got into the tender, with the liferaft attached. Rodriguez wrote that he watched from there as the last 10 feet of his boat’s mast sank at “unbelievable speed.”
As he and his crew took stock of the supplies they had, the sun began to set. They called a Mayday on their handheld VHF radio once an hour, and Rodriguez activated a Globalstar SPOT tracker that transmitted their position every few minutes. They had a week’s worth of fresh water, a way to catch rainwater, three weeks’ worth of food and a fishing pole. Their Iridium Go! was charged to 32 percent. The phone used with it was at 40 percent.
Rodriguez messaged a couple people, including a good friend, Tommy Joyce, who was on a boat about 180 miles away. Joyce replied, letting Rodriguez know help was being summoned. And then, the Raindancer crew sat, unable to see anything but water all around. They listened to flying fish bounce in and out of their dinghy, and they watched the horizon, hoping that at some point, they would see a light.
‘We Were the Closest Boat’
The next morning aboard Rolling Stones, Stone said his routine hellos to a buddy boat about 500 miles away. “We’d check in daily, mainly to talk about any fish we could brag about,” he says.
But this day was different. The buddy boat texted Stone a screenshot from the Facebook group Boat Watch, which helps with missing and overdue boats. Rodriguez’s friend Joyce had posted Raindancer’s information there. Stone’s friend, while texting him that information, told him, “I think you’re in the area.”
Stone checked the coordinates. Sure enough, the last known position was about 65 miles southwest. Stone also knew that the World ARC rally was in the vicinity, so he got in touch with those boats. “They have a fleet of boats traveling together, and they had a lot of them with Starlink and this WhatsApp group,” he says. “So they put together a WhatsApp group called Rescue Raindancer.”
Paul Tetlow, managing director of the World ARC, told Soundings the fleet had picked up Raindancer’s Mayday and Iridium Go! message. “Some of our fleet alerted rally control through our dedicated 24-hour number and by sending an email,” he says. “We, in turn, made sure the maritime rescue coordinating centers were alerted.”
Stone shared Rolling Stones’ coordinates and speed with the group. When he saw their response, a shot of adrenaline blasted through his body. “It became apparent that we were the closest boat,” he says.
He and his crew didn’t have any rescue experience. He didn’t know anything about Raindancer and its crew—their ages, abilities, nationalities, nothing. All he knew is that they were fellow cruisers, and they were in trouble.
“In these communities, as you get out here, it becomes very apparent that everybody is here to help everybody else,” Stone says. “If you have an issue in George Town, Bahamas, or in the middle of the Pacific, everybody around you is so excited to be able to help you. It’s a community. So that’s what went through our minds. We were excited. We were the ones who were able to help them.”
‘It’s a Big Ocean’
Stone pointed Rolling Stones’ bow toward the last known coordinates. He knew he wasn’t alone; in addition to the World ARC fleet he could see the cargo ship Dong-A Maia on his AIS, also changing course to help. “They were going straight to the coordinates. We were going straight to the coordinates,” Stone says. “We arrived at almost the same time as the cargo ship.”
Everybody had the equipment to continue communicating, not only with one another, but also with the Peruvian and U.S. Coast Guards.
“I think the process of collecting that EPIRB information and then getting it back to anybody in the area who can help them, it was slower than what we were able to do with Starlink,” Stone says. “They would have been rescued with or without Starlink, but timewise, it made it faster.”
It was dark when Stone spotted the Raindancer crew. At first, he thought the vast night sky would only make matters worse. “We didn’t know how actually finding them was going to work,” he says. “They were reporting their position every hour, and it’s a big ocean. When we got within 5 miles of them, we could start to see their lights. Nighttime helped, which is kind of counterintuitive, but in this situation, it helped.”
Stone’s crew went to the catamaran’s bow and kept eyes on the light in the distance. “They saw us, we saw them,” Stone says. “We had as many lights on as we could when we were approaching, but then we turned our lights off because it was impairing our vision to see them clearer.”
It took about another hour, at a speed near 5 knots, for the crew Rolling Stones to reach them. The Raindancer crew still had the liferaft’s sea anchor deployed to reduce drifting, and they warned Stone to heed the lines.
Raindancer’s crew then got all their people into their dinghy and released the life raft. Stone says the seas were about 5 feet every nine seconds.
“They came around the starboard side of our boat, and when they got to the stern, they threw us some lines and we pulled them in,” Stone says. “Rick was the last one off. He passed us a handful of bags and then jumped off, and they pushed the dinghy away.
“At that point, we were facing the wind and the seas,” Stone adds. “It was an uncomfortable way to be on the boat. We got them into the cockpit, turned and got to where we were going again with the seas and the wind, and then we started to assess the situation.”
Stone estimates it was about 10 p.m. From the time he realized his was the closest boat, and the time he picked up Raindancer’s crew, about 9 hours had elapsed. It had been enough time, drifting in open ocean, to scare a lot of people senseless. The psychological state of Raindancer’s crew was one of Stone’s biggest concerns.
‘They Were Calm and Collected’
As it turned out, Stone says, “they were so calm and collected, it was amazing. The truly amazing story here is how prepared they were for something like this. They did a lot of things right. If you’re going to lose your boat in the middle of the Pacific, I don’t know any more that they could have done.”
In addition to having multiple communication devices and supplies, the Raindancer crew had done drills in the liferaft, practicing how to get out of it and the dinghy, and then onto Rolling Stones.
“Besides that immediate little bit of them being chilled and wet, they were fully collected and fine,” Stone says. “They were receiving some messages, so they knew there was a rescue in place. They didn’t go through the trouble of trying to prepare meals on a liferaft. They were a little hungry.”
One of Stone’s biggest regrets is that nobody on Rolling Stones thought to have food ready. He had a fresh-baked loaf of bread from earlier that day, but nothing else prepared. “We had 9 hours on the way there,” he says. “I don’t know why we didn’t think to cook them some rice, a meal, something.”
He also says he wishes he had taken more of the Raindancer crew’s belongings onto Rolling Stones. At the time of the rescue, the focus was on transferring the people. But later, Stone realized they also should have transferred more of the gear. “None of it was necessary stuff,” Stone says, “but they would have had more of their personal belongings rather than not having anything.”
With the passenger count aboard Rolling Stones doubled from four to eight, and with another 1,200 miles or so to go, provisioning became the next concern.
“I kept doing a visual inventory of what we had and how we’d make it all work,” Stone says, “but a day or two in with them on board, it was apparent that we had more than enough food. My wife and I were in contact that whole time. She directed me around the boat to where she had stowed all the extra food.”
For the nine days the two crews were together, they shared staterooms, the settee in the galley, and the long bench forward. “The reality is, nobody had to go without much for the majority of the time,” Stone says. “We had extra toiletry stuff on the boat, so we were able to give them toothbrushes, deodorant, things of that nature. We had some extra T-shirts, and my wife had clothes on board, so the girls had clothes that worked for them. It wasn’t their preferred things, but no one was complaining. The going joke was that it’s better than a liferaft.”
Going forward, Stone says, the ordeal taught him that a boater can never have enough ways to communicate. He already has an EPIRB, Iridium Go! and Starlink. He’s shopping for more. “If you’re the one whose boat goes down, the one other thing they had was a third satellite location beacon,” he says, referring to the Globalstar SPOT. “That was helping us get their coordinates as well. So I think, in my mind, I would like to have a third satellite beacon for coordinates.”
He’s also a lot more focused on the charge state of his device batteries.
“There are hand-crank chargers, solar chargers—you need a way to charge your batteries,” he says. “It was on their mind during their whole rescue, to conserve the batteries for communication. That’s something I’m going to add to my ditch bag. We found one on Amazon for less than $50. It’s a hand-crank with a solar panel on it, and you can charge devices with it.”
When Stone last saw the Raindancer crew, they were in Tahiti, trying to get new passports and the like. With them safely ashore, Stone welcomed his wife and three sons aboard Rolling Stones. The family is now island-hopping around French Polynesia.
Stone says he can’t wait to keep sailing, no matter where they decide to go next. Once you’re a member of the cruising community, it’s awfully hard to imagine life without it. “Raindancer didn’t lose the dream either,” he adds. “They’re actively searching for a way to continue.”
This article was originally published in the June 2023 issue.
