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When the guys eyeballing
the radar screen on Wahkuna decided that there was a risk of collision
and slowed way down, the Vespucci’s ARPA quickly picked up the change.
The captain sent a lookout to the port bridge wing and had manual steering
engaged but did not change course, as it seemed that Wahkuna would
pass two tenths of a mile to port. On Wahkuna—now sort of
circling or, in retrospect, behaving like a squirrel in front of a truck—they
thought the ship would pass more than a mile ahead of their intended track.
A mere 15 minutes after
the incident began, Wahkuna’s crew saw a wall of steel emerge
from the fog, and according to the MAIB report, “The container vessel’s
bulbous bow struck the forward part of Wahkuna’s port hull,
demolishing the first twelve feet of her bow [and dismasting her]. As
a result of the impact, Wahkuna rose up six feet on the container
vessel’s bow wave and slalomed at an angle of 20 degrees to 30 degrees
down her starboard side, stern first, for a distance of approximately
250 feet before being dropped back into sea.”
Amazingly, though their
yacht soon sank and their EPIRB failed to work, the Brits were picked
up from their liferaft five hours later, uninjured. Even more amazingly,
and confirming a phenomenon I’d always considered mostly mythical,
the crew of the Vespucci neither felt nor saw the collision. The
captain also said he never lost sight of the radar target.
So here we have an accident
between two boats that could see each other on radar and whose skippers
were both, at least on paper, expert seaman. Conclusions? MAIB faulted
Wahkuna’s skipper, who directly caused the collision by changing
speed, for “inability to use radar effectively.” The investigators
also faulted the ship captain for “over-confidence in the accuracy
of ARPA,” which led to too small of a passing distance (CPA). There
you have two opposite ways—too little skill and too much confidence—that
can get you in gizmo trouble. It’s really about good judgment, isn’t
it?
Was is it easier before
electronics? No way; Wahkuna joined wrecks that have been collecting
on the Channel’s bottom for centuries. I will grant, however, that
in the old days no one was driving 900-foot ships stacked with containers
at 25 knots in near-zero visibility. This incident caused the British
Coast Guard to issue an advisory about “safe speed”—not
its first. But defining that speed exactly is quite complicated, as detailed
in MAIB’s report. Suffice it to say that a French shore station that
was monitoring channel traffic that morning reported that only one of
several dozen ships seemed to slow down in the poor visibility.
That’s reality
in the 21st century. At the risk of provoking more letters from our verbose
PMY readers, my guess is that safer passagemaking will come from
even better electronics, like AIS, and better electronics training, like
simulators accessible to yachtsmen and programmed with scenarios like
this one. The good news is that such collisions are quite rare, even in
the very busy and often foggy English Channel.
There’s much more
in MAIB’s thorough analysis, like why that EPIRB failed and what
causes ARPA inaccuracies. You can find it and many more instructive casualty
reports in the MAIB publications section at www.dft.gov.uk.
For details on some U.S. incidents, visit the National Transportation
Safety Board at www.ntsb.gov. Check
out the publication describing a U.S. Coast Guard 24-foot patrol boat
ramming the tour boat Bayside Blaster one night in Biscayne Bay. Fortunately
no one was seriously hurt, making it easier to enjoy this incident’s
full comic value.
The report states that
the patrol crew tried to turn hard left to avoid the collision but failed,
leading to their “unexpected ejection,” which—along with
kill-switch failure—left their twin 250-hp Boston Whaler doing unmanned
high-speed pirouettes (fully diagrammed), again striking the tour boat,
then modifying the bow of a docked sportfisherman, before finally getting
corralled against a pier by a marine police boat, whose operator ultimately
subdued the outboards by beating the mangled console controls with his
baton. And, whew, in this case the investigators don’t even mention
the electronics—just, as usual, the human errors.
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