Behind the ARC – Sail-World talks to Andrew Bishop

by Nancy Knudsen on 16 Nov 2006 If you’re going to run the most successful cross-ocean rally in the world, you have to take it pretty seriously. While World Cruising Club’s Managing Director Andrew Bishop is pretty serious most of the time, he actually has plenty to smile about.

This year his Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) has currently 232 entrants and a closed waiting list. The World ARC, set to depart in January 2008, has a full complement of heavily deposited entries – 45 – and a growing waiting list.

Add these successes to the other rallies that the company runs - In May there’s ARC Europe, a return trip for ARCers from the Caribbean. In June, there’s Rally Portugal, which starts from Plymouth, and in July there’s the Classic Malts Cruise in Scotland – and you have one of the most successful rally organisations of all time.

In a management buyout in January this year, Bishop and the then marketing director Jeremy Wyatt, took over the company. There is only one other shareholder, Adam Gosling, who is a non-executive director. While this was a pretty dramatic sequence of events - Challenge Business, from whom they bought the company, went into administration within the year - the two active directors, Bishop and Wyatt, are low key in their approach, and their style is very much hands-on.

Here in Las Palmas, from where the ARC will depart on November 26, there’s only 12 days to go. Outside the small office that is the heart of the organisation of the rally, there is an explosion of activity in the marina – 232 boats are arriving within a week of each other, and will depart simultaneously. The tension and excitement is palpable along the docks.

Yet the atmosphere here in the ARC office is quietly controlled, busily efficient. They’ve obviously done this before, and know what they’re doing.

I grab Andrew for a cup of coffee. We sit in a smart glass and timber café overlooking the hundreds of boats in the marina. There are so many masts that they look like a field of tall silver grass.

‘This is a very challenging business to be in,’ I comment. ‘Why do you do it?’

His normally serious face lights up like a child’s, and hints at an enthusiasm and determination that have made his management of the company for 11 years so successful.
‘I really like the satisfaction of seeing an event run to plan’ he says, ‘and also,’ and now I can see he is onto his subject – he leans forward. ‘I like to see the smile on the participants faces – the delight they show after achieving their goals, their enthusiasm for the experience that we have facilitated.’

But Andrew Bishop is not just a good organiser, who happens to be involved in sailing. He’s a long time sailor, who just happens to be a good organiser.

He started sailing on his father’s Royal Ocean Racing Club boat as a kid, and did his first Fastnet at 15. He went on to join the Royal Navy, and sailed in many locations around the world, including Hong Kong, where he spent two years. After 11 years in the Navy, he joined Jimmy Cornell’s Round World Rally, on a contract for 18 months.

There he met Jeremy Wyatt, who had also joined the organisation, and it was this partnership that was to prove so successful in the future.

In 1992, however, he left to start his own rally organisation, in which he was very successful, running various rallies around Britain and near Europe, and also their own trans-Atlantic Race.

In 1997, he approached Cornell again, and after discussions, the two companies were merged, with Andrew as Managing Director of the combined operations, but with ownership still vested in Jimmy Cornell.

Later the company was taken over once again by Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business, and finally, nine years after making his first approach, Andrew Bishop and Jeremny Wyatt succeeded in purchasing the World Cruising Club.

‘Of course,’ he says modestly, ‘we wanted to make our mark. We have upped the customer service aspects. But our biggest change to date is our introduction of the ‘World ARC’ for 2008. We announced it at the London Boat Show this year, started accepting bookings in May, and now, as you know, we are sold out.’

Now Andrew is buzzing, and he is obviously delighted with the response. ‘Will you run one of those every year?’ I query.
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‘No, I think that would be too much.’ And now I see the innate conservatism that makes him a good businessman as well as a keen event organiser. His enthusiasm gives way to cautious introspection for a moment. ‘I can probably safely confirm to you, however, that we will run the next one in January 2010.

And when Andrew is not running the World Cruising Club and affording so many hundreds of people huge pleasure in their sailing, how does he spend his time to unwind?

Why he goes sailing!

‘For about five weeks a year,’ he says. But not in a Beneteau (the most popular boat in the ARC), but in reproduction of the famed Joshua Slocum’s Spray, built with loving care by the students in the international Boat Building Training College at Lowestoft.

- And he doesn’t sail in the Med or across the Atlantic, but on the west coast of Scotland.
‘Yes,’ he says, and that mischievous enthusiastic smile returns, ‘it’s a little cold, and a little wet, but then, that’s sailing!’