The boatyard that's at the crossroads of the world

How do you fix boats in the middle of the Atlantic? Ali Wood visits a unique business that deals with everything from broken booms to ARC crews and Interpol

- 

The workshop echoes with seesawing files and spinning sanders. A radio plays softly in the background, and fans whirr above as young men polish rudder bearings and weld spinnaker blocks. A grey tabby stretches on the office chair, while its owner, Kai Brossmann, talks me through the day's jobs: a snapped boom on an Ovni 370 and a mast wedge for a Nauticat 43 - plus a dozen other 'small things' such as a broken toilet seat and glitchy autopilot.

boatCV could be any marine workshop... except that 'CV' stands for Cape Verde, and it's in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean-over 300 miles from continental Africa-on an archipelago of arid and mountainous islands that have for centuries harboured weary sailors, fugitives and, more recently, yacht rallies.

For the past 12 years, the popular ARC+ has stopped here en-route to the Caribbean from the Canary Islands. After 750 miles, many boats arrive broken, and Brossmann's crack team work like a Formula 1 pit-crew to get them repaired in the five-day window before they set sail again for Grenada. On a windy passage this might be repairs to the rig - torn genoas and snapped forestays-on a calm one it will be engine repairs. And while the engineers get to work, the crews are free to hike lush volcanic craters, surf turtle-fringed beaches and listen to the soulful Morna music of the vibrant port city of Mindelo.

In the years I've been interviewing ARC crews, this boatyard has attained near-mystical status. Skippers get misty eyed when they recall the moment they thought their dream was all over, only to find their hull could be repaired or their mast re-rigged. For example, in 2023, I met Claire and Malcolm Wallace who snapped one of the two forestays on their Discovery 58, after overzealous use of the electric winch. They were exhausted and heartbroken, but still managed to save the sail, and had the foresight to order a new forestay, which boatCV fitted on arrival.