Offshore Yacht Racing Can Get Really Goddamn Expensive

The Puma Mar Mostro had her mast snapped on the first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race (which, if you're unfamiliar with yacht racing, makes the America's Cup look like a Boy Scout portage), and the crew wound up on a barely inhabited southern island roughly equidistant from South Africa and South America.

Things got pricey, explains the New York Times:

"We booked a ship to pick up the boat, got approval from sponsors, and that fell through," said Worthington, who is working on his fourth Volvo Ocean Race campaign. "By that afternoon, we had another ship, the only one around, booked from Durban."

The container ship arrived in Cape Town from Durban on Nov. 27 to pick up Mar Mostro's cradle, which was welded to the deck along with a work container. It arrived in Tristan de Cunha on Friday to pluck the boat from the ocean with a several-hundred-foot-long crane.

Mar Mostro's spare, 100 feet long, was shipped from Rhode Island last Monday morning on a nose-loader Cargolux plane. It traveled through Amsterdam before landing in Johannesburg. It arrived in Cape Town, via truck, on Saturday. [...] Frostad said that the cost of shipping a mast as far as Puma did fluctuates from $100,000 to $300,000, and to charter a cargo ship to carry one boat was "quite a bit more than that."

So, if you're following, the 70-foot boat broke, so they had to get another (giant) boat, pictured, to pick up the boat, and they had to fly the spare mast for the broken boat out from Rhode Island. They also had to enlist a Greek freighter to throw drums of diesel fuel at the Mar Mostro.

Kids, let this be a lesson—stick to frisbee!

First Leg of Ocean Race Is an Adventure