November 24th saw an amazing event held at the fabulous Astilleros de Mallorca’s La Cantina in aid of the Yacht Aid Global’s Hurricane Relief fund. This fund was been set up by the Superyacht Industry several years ago with the aim of assisting areas hit by natural disasters around the globe. Many of these areas are difficult to access, but with the help of some Superyacht owners and captains, relief can get to these areas often before international coordinated efforts. This event was set up in order to raise much needed funds to assist the Caribbean islands so devastatingly affected by the hurricanes in September rebuild their communities.
Steen Christensen from Fraser Yachts contacted me on the 9th November to see if I thought it was feasible to arrange an event and get the word out to enough people to make it viable. So, an initial meeting was held at the Palma Tennis Club, with myself, Steen, Fiona McCarthy, Caroline Antlett, Melanie Winters and Helena Clegg where we eventually decided on the date and the preferred venue of Astilleros de Mallorca’s Cantina.
The next 10 days saw frenetic activity with everyone doing their best to arrange logistics and spreading the word, and crucially finding sponsors to help raise the funds. The sponsors logo’s all appear on this page! All this when METS was happening in Amsterdam taking a few of us out of Palma for several days !
The plan was to buy the drinks from No 12 Wines, get a DJ to play for free, The Islander to supply nibbles, and try and get the Superyacht industry to pull together for this very worthy cause.
The result was an amazing event with around 400 people turning up. Beer stocks had to be replenished 3 times and the 13 litres of Rum used to make the “ Dark n Stormys” was drunk in 3 1/2 hours !! DJ Leeroy played some great tunes and everyone had a blast. We managed to raise around 4500 eu on the bar, plus another 5000 from Sponsors, so overall almost 10,000 raised on the day. Sail Aid T Shirts were on Sale too!
A huge thanks to all concerned, sponsors, all the fabulous volunteers and of course the people who supported the event.
BY the time you read this, we will have also filled a 40 ft container with much needed building materials and supplies to help rebuild these communities. We have asked that a substantial amount of the funds we raised to go towards helping the island of Dominca who were hit particularly badly and are apparently receiving very little international assistance.
This event and the monies raised will go just a small way to helping the desperate plight of the inhabitants of the affected islands, and the rebuilding work will be going on for several years. In my opinion, we should look at assisting these islands, where many of our yachts visit, in a more long term manner, not just with a one off event.
Let’s see what we can do !
