News Around the World
The 1998 Sydney Hobart again and the crew of the dismasted 40-footer Stand Aside fire off a smoke flare as the search and rescue aircraft carrying photographer Richard Bennett approaches at an altitude of 1,000ft. The yacht’s 12-man crew were all eventually recovered by helicopter. Not so fortunate were the crew of the timber classic Winston Churchill, whose skipper Richard Winning is seen (inset) getting out of the rescue helicopter. All nine crew made it into the liferafts after the elderly yacht was holed and began taking on water much faster than the pumps could handle, but three were lost after their liferaft was later overturned in breaking seas
Losing a rig is likely to be expensive but not dangerous – it nearly
always drops to leeward away from the crew and, as long as it doesn’t then go on to puncture the hull or the halyards don’t wrap around the prop when you start the engine, it is relatively easy to tidy up then motor towards home – which Gun Runner did. Injuries to crew are serious stuff offshore, but fortunately onboard Mens Business the crew also reported to the authorities they did not require assis- tance. Finally, Jason Ker speaks of the particular keel design and construction components involved in the Ker 40 Showtimein another part of this issue, so I wanted to focus on a few broader points about what happens when things go bang in the night. Firstly, expect the unexpected. A couple of years ago I was onboard
Wild Oats X on the delivery back from Hamilton Island Race Week to Sydney when at 2am we hit a humpback whale which was sleeping on the surface. It was a beautiful clear night with a steady warm westerly powering us south at around 20kt. When the collision occurred I was about to take over helming
duties and so was at the stern, taking what Phil Liggett, when he commentates on the Tour de France, calls ‘a natural break’. Inevitably I was flung backwards onto the deck from where I got
a nice view of the rig flopping around above me like wet spaghetti, while the burly helmsman swore in a falsetto voice for about a minute. Sitting up, I saw a massive circular plume of biolumines- cence disappearing away from us at an angle underwater, which meant both the whale and I had a very sore rump. Luckily for all concerned it was a glancing blow – but what would
have happened if we had been holed by an angry cetacean, smashing great chunks out of our thin carbon/Nomex honeycomb topsides with its muscular tail? The what-ifs are worth thinking about. First the physical stuff. Do you have the means at hand to alert
the relevant authorities that your yacht is sinking after tearing a great gash in the hull at speed, following an impact with a container, large chunk of tree or anything else hard and heavy floating just under the surface? Are you sure your onboard communications will
26 SEAHORSE
work? Do you have a liferaft handy – and what do you need to quickly remove it from its secure position and inflate it? When I say quickly, just remember how much water rushes into
the boat when you replace a hull transducer… and that is a unit less than the size of your fist, taken out and replaced in seconds. So how much water will get fired inside your boat from a jagged
hole, say the size of a bucket, or much larger, located frustratingly behind a locker or under a pile of sails? How long do you think your bilge pump will keep running and what happens if the rising seawater disables the power supply? Or among the swirling, knee-deep, salt water soup of sailing kit, sleeping bags and sail ties, something simply smothers and then jams the pump? And what are you wearing and how cold will you be after you have
got wet? Unless you are in a dry-suit, sitting in a liferaft it’s almost certain you will be wet, either from swimming to the raft or the water pooling around you. Without activity to generate heat it is not uncommon for people to start shivering pretty quickly – and some of them may be seasick, also quite quickly, due to the odd motion of the raft and the shock at what just unfolded. Reports from the Ker 40 that capsized on the delivery back from
Hobart revealed that one of the crew had to swim back into the upturned yacht to get the liferaft, and so had to remove his lifejacket to do this; a complex manoeuvre and, according to delivery skipper Rob Buchanan, their survival was in part due to crew member Chris- tian Charalambous ‘doing one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen, taking off his life jacket to head back under and get our raft. At the time the boat was trying to kill everybody as it was banging around as we were holding onto it – it even knocked out one crew member.’ I have had the illuminating experience of being rescued three
times. Once off the rocky coast of Jersey where I grew up, once in the Atlantic and once in the Irish Sea in 1979. Looking back at each incident, there were moments when some people around me simply went to pieces. Sometimes the body and mind are just too overwhelmed to be able to take any more information.
RICHARD BENNETT INSET PPL
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