Missing yacht
 

BBC News - UK yacht Cheeki Rafiki missing in mid-Atlantic

Hopefully the Coastguard will be requesting that we immediately scramble one of our long range SAR assets ........

........ Oh hang on a minute :ugh::ugh::ugh:

I sincerely hope that the crew survive this ordeal.

Sadly the news was just saying the search has been called off. Have to say that seems rather premature.

Reported that they were taking on water, could not find the leak and were diverting to the Azores. They were in contact at some point with home base. Several hours between problem reported and contact lost.
That being the case, they would have had ample time to prepare their survival gear.

Only questions are; were they properly equipped and how well did the evac. go ?
The company is well established and conducts offshore training, and competes in the Fastnet, so the kit will have been up to spec.
Weather reported as F9 strong gale, which should not be a problem for a boat that size, but evac. could be tricky. One report said the hull was seen, capsized. Worse case scenario is a rapid capsize, but the liferaft should have been set up for deployment even if this happened.

Question -Do these boats carry distress beacons on their life rafts ?

After the 1979 Fastnet race, it was clear that sailors who stayed with their yachts stood a better chance of suvival than those who took to their liferafts. The advice from then on was 'only ever step up into a liferaft'.

Given that Tony Bullimore was able to survive for several days in the upturned hull of his yacht in the Southern/Antarctic Ocean, it certainly does seem premature to write these sailors off if the hull has been located.

As a flyer and a sailor I wish them well

Matelo - Apparently, it is not a standard requirement. I have a personal one*; I imagine the professional skipper at least had one also. Though maybe not....


*Fits in a pocket of the lifejacket, therefore usable if you go overboard, liferaft or not.

Good datum, capsized vessel found, US Coastguard will have ascertained that the coverage factor is >100% in the appropriate areas of probability. Then, and only then, they will have considered the likelihood of survival in a liferaft in the prevailing conditions and with great reluctance have concluded that the chances of survival are not realistic.

So if you feel that the decision to terminate the operation was premature, perhaps you could suggest the search tactics that should now be employed? How would a secure search be achieved in the new expanded area, and what assured coverage factor would you be prepared to accept?

YS

The identity of the hull has not been ascertained. The weather conditions are described as poor. At that range I doubt that they had continuous cover & the datum would be several hours old by the time the 1st aircraft arrived on task.

Therefore I also consider the cancellation of the search to be rather premature. I am also frustrated that there is absolutely nothing that the UK government can do to offer assistance because that proponent of gay marriage, Cameron, killed the Nimrod.:ugh:

Could a rescue operation have been carried out by RAF anyway?
 

Sad story this. Realistically, could the RAF carried out a location of these poor people, even with all their pre cut assets, say circa 1995 or some such time?
This is bound to be an on-going story in the future in the UK I would guess, if these poor people aren't found.
The search area indicated in the newspapers seems massive, could they not have got a better fix than this (see link to story).
4 British sailors missing at sea after yacht believed to have capsized in mid-Atlantic | Mail Online


Doe anyone think the RAF will ever regain very long range aircraft to carry out searches for people around the world?
Could a future drone type aircraft ever be developed.
Anyway, my thoughts with the men involved and their families.


Edited to add that like many in the UK really deep down I know zero about the capability of the Nimrod in a search role.

Maybe I missed it but could someone explain why the boats EPIRB or the sailors EPIRB are not showing the exact location of where they are ?



I think the Tony Bullimore example is a very good one.

The 406MHz EPIRB can either give a location within 2-3 miles by satellite triangulation, or 100m with an integrated GPS (significantly more expensive).

Most of those I met going transatlantic had, as I did, a manually activated, non-gps unit.

This is so true. As a sailor who has been at sea in F9 (and greater) the last place you want to be is in one off those life rafts unless you absolutely have to. The things are bad enough when you do your training in smooth water let alone big seas.

Not sure about fastnet, but in Aus any ocean racing under the umbrella of yachting australia requires you to carry a personal epirb. For the sake of $500 or so they are cheap insurance.

No, and we never did "carry out searches for people around the world". We carried out SAR within our area of responsibility. If we deployed for SAR it was either to support a fast jet deployment or to cover the overseas flights of Her Majesty.

It has become fashionable to lament the passing of our MPA by ex kipper mates suggesting/implying that we would have got involved with every high profile SAR effort, all over the globe.

We never did this and we would not be doing it now even if we still had an MPA. If we got involved with some random search for some random yacht/ship/aircraft outwith our area it was because we happened to be carrying out ops in that neck of the woods already. Not because we were sent there to do it. As I've posted before, despite the PR value, SAR is not a significant factor when it comes to deciding military priorities.

And for the homophobic ex Nimrod nav...long before the time we lost the fleet, continuous SAR cover was being compromised every which way. It was 2 hours standby, not one and it was being covered from home not the messes, usually by aircraft with more limitations than your social awareness. I think you'll find DC had f**k all to do with any of that.

I haven't read all the details, and while I wish the sailors well and hope they are rescued the changes are probably slim.

My only concern is that this tale gets propelled to the forefront of the media with headlines demanding to know why more was not done. Unfortunately, and I think the entertainment side of the media has something to answer for here, there is a swathe of the general public that believe anyone can be rescued from anything!

The truth of the matter is that there are risks in everything you do, and at some point you may find yourself in a position where there will be no-one who can help you.

Why can't an RAF C-130 carry out a search? USCG and others use them! Forward deploy to the Azores perhaps!

Looking at the latest Map of the last known position, it was only 600NM off the coast of the US.

In any case, why is it the UK's responsibility, it's miles from your SAR area ?

TOFO:
That's not true. A Nimrod was deployed to ASI specifically to search for an aircraft that had gone missing somewhere in the S Atlantic between ASI and Africa. Don't remember the details, because I wasn't there, but I believe that an account was published in Air Clues.

More about it here.
 

It does seem to be an incredibly short duration of searching.

My first question to the operating company is whether that yacht has ever been run aground before.

A Beneteau 40.7 could only capsize and stay capsized if the keel fell off. That could only happen if there was some previous damage to the area where the keel is attached to the hull. The Beneteau First series of boats are regatta yachts and are very susceptible to damage in a grounding due to a deep high-aspect ratio keel which has only a small area to transmit loads to the hull. A keel starting to work loose would explain them taking in water, and being unable to verify the source of the leak since the bilge pumps are inside a pit in the keel area.

They had a sat-phone and if they had time to abandon ship, they could have sent a message, so I suspect they capsized and sank too quickly to get into their liferaft. This would also be consistent with keel failure.

If the photo of they yacht in the Gruaniad is recent, it does not look like they had a fixed EPIRB, which is not unusual for a coastal racing yacht. They probably rented the sat-phone expecting that to be sufficient for their off-shore trip back home.

As for personal EPIRBs, they have very low power and need a stable platform and clear view of the sky to have any chance of being picked up.

Trim Stab

I think that is a good assessment, covers the leak, the pumps, the capsize.

yep, keeping in mind the effort we went for to get Bullimore

Yes, I remember that well, that went on and on and on because of the distance involved - plus everyone was on holidays so more time to catch up on the news.

Fox3
 

The cost of a 406Mhz GPS PLB becomes irrelevant when you are up to your neck in ocean, I will not rent an aircraft to a customer for a cross channel flight without providing one and making sure that they know how to use it..........if they choose to not wear the life jacket that it is attached to and stow it in the baggage bay that is their business.

I would have thought that a similar attitude would have been SOP within the ocean going sailing world, after all the cost of a GPS PLB for each crew member is not high in comparison with the cost of owning and maintaining such a vessel.

Always a sad moment when a search is called off, but I never recall a search I was involved in being called off without us thinking that everything possilble had been done and that there was no other option.
In this case it a relatively small area (4800 sq. miles has been quoted), presumably based on an accurate LKP, was searched from early Friday to early Sunday. Not sure a longer search would be justified.
What is worrying is the failure to investigate the upturned hull more thoroughly.

Just googled "Beneteau 40.7 keel failure" - no history of keel failures showing on the search. However, would not have been the first time someone took a keel off on semi submerged object like a container. Feel for them and families, not least as my youngest is a commercially endorsed Yachtmaster Ocean, although working ashore at present.

I fail to see what connection gay marriage has to do with the cancellation of the Nimrod. It is quite possible to be, like me, both a supporter of gay marriage and a proponent of the RAF retaining a long range maritime aircraft. The two have no connection whatsoever.

SAR is not an area I have any expertise in but I am sure these guys wouldn't have given up the search lightly. It seems like the sea has claimed four more, but at least they were doing what they loved.

Trim Stab - a good question and a plausible scenario.

Edit DT reporting Maersk Kure reported keel was missing

I'm not sure about the inverted stability point you make though. My understanding was that a monohull could stay inverted once capsized, especially if the hull were already partially flooded. Also, partial flooding could increase the risk of capsize in the first place.

I note from a recent fatal during a race on the Great Lakes that 2 crew (of 6) were knocked unconscious during a capsize in similar conditions and subsequently drowned. I carried and used an old kayaking helmet for very rough conditions.

I did the North Sea Race about 20 years ago in F8-F10 conditions (similar to the recent accident). This was as navigator on a well-found RAFSA cruising yacht, with a skipper who had skippered in the Whitbread in the Southern Ocean - very educational. Relevant points are that we stopped racing at F10 and hove-to, then started racing again when the wind dropped. We won our class, beating all the cruiser racers, and came second overall to a larger cruising yacht (Hallberg Rassy). Two cruiser racers did start to break up and had to be rescued by rig support vessels. It was the bulkheads which gave out due to excessive flexing, not the keels. However these were both racer-cruisers really, less conservative designs than the First 40.7

I also spent most of one night doing Pan Pan relays for damaged yachts and those that had lost their electronics and thus their position (no back-ups/physical map plotting).:ugh:

A and C
It can be surprisingly cheap to run a boat - there are a large number of people doing it on a shoestring, it being their home as well as their means of transport. You meet a lot of people from poorer countries for whom sailing round the world is just affordable. Not everybody owns a First 40 and parks it in a marina.
Secondly, there's the argument Blondie Haslar made before the first Transatlantic race, that he wouldn't want to put anyone to the trouble of rescuing him.
Lastly, in the deep ocean, there are a large number of accident scenarios where the beacon would just tell people where to find your body.

None of these applies to people renting your aircraft, and I have a beacon myself; but there isn't a good argument for making them, or any other electronic gizmo, SOP.

A modern yacht would never pass certification if it was capable of staying upside down, even if partly flooded. Some extreme racing boats used to be so beamy that they had no righting moment when inverted, but these have now all been banned (well except for multi-hulls but that is a different argument).

The Beneteau 40.7 is CE certified as a Cat A boat (designed to cope with over F8 and waves over 4m). Unfortunately the certification process only examines measurable factors such as AVS, ballast ratio, down flooding etc and does not take into account factors such as build quality. The Beneteaus are built to be light and fast, not to stand up to days of bashing in a storm. They are counter moulded and have no stiffening stringers, so flex badly in heavy weather (I call them Bendytoys). They also suffer very badly at the keel/hull join when grounded hard - I've examined a smaller First that almost sunk after a grounding against a sandbar (something which I do regularly in my boat!).

Having said that, lots of people have sailed them around the world, including around Cape Horn, and I read an account recently of a German couple who sailed one through the North West passage.

One question I have is why were they headed to the Azores when they were so close to the coast of the US ?


Can anyone tell anything from the photo of the upturned hull in the DM ?

Families of one of British sailors lost in Atlantic call for fresh search | Mail Online

Trim Stab - thanks.
I've helped deliver a new Beneteau, USA-Virgin Islands. The electrics were...interesting!

Probably prevailing wind direction. The engine can be unusable in those conditions (prop out of the water often). Also, I doubt they had the fuel for 600nm under engine. General advice is to go downwind if the rig is still up.

Thanks.

Yes, it does make sense. I am not a sailor (wind type).

Seems sad that the biggest clue to their location wasn't inspected -i.e the hull .
At least the families would have some closure.

http://www.seapixonline.com/NSImages...6%20(1)%20.jpg

Impossible to get anywhere near the hull with the Maersk, especially in 20 foot seas, never mind attempting a rescue.

There are certain activities and parts of the world where there is still little hope of rescue, much less a right to rescue.

Difficult to be sure, but the vertical object does indeed look like the sort of unskegged deep rudder on the Beneteau First, and the smaller dark object above it and to the left in the photograph could indeed be the sail-drive unit - in which case the keel is definitely missing.

Here is a line drawing of the yacht which shows the underwater appendages:

http://www.murrayyachtsales.com/wp-c...8/Sailplan.jpg

I agree with Trim Stab - the proportions of skeg/hull length are correct. The liferaft aboard was likely a 10 man, as this was the authorised max crew for that boat according to the company's website. Presumably the Coastguard failed to find any sign of this.

Loss of the Cheeki Rafiki
 

Many yachts take this route after sailing out of Antigua en route to the UK or the Med after Antigua Race Week.Many pass close-ish to Bermuda ( & so leave Bermuda to Port) in a great circle tending East to follow the prevailing winds in April and May.It does indeed look as if they lost their keel having either been grounded at some stage or colliding with something at sea causing keel bolt damage.Such an impact must have been serious IMO to cause such extensive fast flooding.As a long time experieced Skipper I am also surprised that no inspection has yet been made of the capsized hull.Surely 600 nm from land is do-able for S & R ?
I guess it depends on weather conditions,but still...

There's a bugger of a search mission. :eek: