Cat Ppalu Holed on Reef

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Cat Ppalu, the well-known, high-speed 74 x 28-ft, Peter Spronk-designed ketch-rigged catamaran, was holed on a reef near Simpson Bay, Sint Maarten on Sunday while the cat’s owner, D. Randy West, was racing aboard the Gunboat 62 cat Tribe in the Heineken Regatta. The site of the holing was just a few yards away from where Ppalu, the 13th cat Spronk designed, was launched in 1978. In fact, D. Randy, one of the best-known racers and biggest characters in all the Caribbean, was one of the hundreds who helped launch Ppalu by physically carrying her to the water.

"Buzzard luck on the sinking of Ppalu," wrote D. Randy. "It was my bad, as it was I who put out 60 feet of chain 59 feet from the corner of the reef. I had anchored there many, many times with my 60-ft cat Shadowfax and never had a problem, but Ppalu being four feet wider made all the difference in the world. On the bright side, the Dutch Coast Guard was awesome, as was Deon and his salvage effort. Ppalu is now at Bobby’s Mega Yard in the lagoon, where a 20-ft hole in her starboard hull was revealed. So now we’re back to square one in the restoration. Cheers to Spike on Tribe, who is lending me his tools, as all mine went underwater."

This is a heartbreaker, as D. Randy has pined over Ppalu for as long as we’ve known him, which is about 30 years. When he was finally able to buy her last year, she was in pretty bad shape. But D. Randy and his lady Joanne ‘H.Q.’ Roberson put lots of money and seven months of hard work in the yard at St. Kitts into bringing her a lot of the way back, only taking a break to visit San Francisco for the America’s Cup. Plus, they got lots of donated equipment from some of the biggest names in the sailing industry, in addition to cast-off-but-good gear from captains of other yachts. But now this, just a month before we planned to crew on Pplau in the Voiles de St. Barth. To make things worse, D. Randy had just let her insurance expire. After all, "What could possibly happen?"