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Vestas Wind Aground

Hurts

By Hurts,
in RaceTalk

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Guest

Guest

Posted
Posted

Just the simple act of sussing the screen and all the guff that's on those then transferring your position onto the appropriate scale paper chart will increase your safety a lot and in a few ways. Not only will you see large shoals, if you don't and smash into them when the water floods your battery killing all your electronics, you'll know where you are or were a hour or 3 ago.

 

confirm with radar,
While on a delivery to Tonga we helped some of the La De Da round the world cruising fleet in. We had a large pommie vessel who wouldn't come in the reef until daylight as he was concerned his radar wouldn't see all the coral bommies if it was dark. Maybe the same guy was Navigating on Vestas :)
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Island Time

Island Time 1,226

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Doh! Its radar, not Sonar!!

I'm with him on the not going in an entrance you dont know without being sure, especially in coral. That fwd sonar we talked about sure helps. Radar above water, sonar below. If they both agree with the chart, you are good to go.

I can't say Ive never made a mistake, but the Vestas one is a doozy!!

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Island Time

Island Time 1,226

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It does work BP, let me know if you need a hand.

I dont think it would have made any diff to Vestas - it WAS on their plotter. One of the videos shows it on their display. I'll see if i can get a screen shot. Standby...

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erice

erice 732

Posted
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dramatic video!

 

presumably the canted keel hit/stopped first and as the rest of the boat was to stbd it spun around the grounded keel bulb meaning the rudders went sideways across the reef, tearing out the transom and ending up with the boat pointing back out to sea?

 

aircraft have been hitting mountains under controlled flight ever since they took to the air

 

perhaps the next gen of ship electronics need to take a leaf from the book of TCAS and ground proximity alarms that yell "PULL UP, PULL UP, whoop whoop PULL UP...

 

perhaps fwd sonar linked to software to blast out various collision alarms

 

for costa concordia when it saw the rock marginally to port? of centre

 

"STEER RIGHT, STEER RIGHT, REDUCE POWER, REDUCE POWER - STEER RIGHT ...."

 

for vestas detecting a solid reef dead ahead

 

"ROUND UP, ROUND UP, ROUND UP"

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Island Time

Island Time 1,226

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That's the one eric, thanks! It shows the reef ON THEIR PLOTTER.

 

This boat was also equipped with a 4G broadband radar. It has guard zones, and would have seen the reef well in time. Either it was broken or not being used. I wait to hear.

 

Island Time has a 3G broadband radar. It would see that reef from 4 miles or more and sound the collision alarm. I do not understand what went wrong here!

 

Happy they are all OK - could easily be otherwise.

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Guest

Guest

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Here is the story from the navigator on Vestas. He didn't know the reef was there.... whoops :shock:

 

We finally have means of communications again, so a message is highly over due....

 

I am totally devastated and still in shock as the gravity of our grounding is slowly sinking in now that we are safely in Mauritius with finally some time to reflect on what happened.

 

We are very lucky that nobody was hurt, and a lot of that is credit to our team work in the seconds, minutes and hours after the crash.

 

I made a big mistake, but then we didn't make any others even though there were many difficult decision to be made and the situation was very challenging and grave indeed.

 

Once I can get power to the boats laptops (if they survived) I can look further into how we didn't see the reef on the electronic charts. I did check the area on the electronic chart before putting my head down for a rest after a very long day negotiating the tropical storm and what I saw was depths of 42 and 80m indicated. There is a very good article posted on http://blog.geogarag...ocean-race.html which highlights some of the zooming problem in the vectorised charts that we used.

I can assure you that before every leg we diligently look at our route before we leave and I use both Google Earth, paper charts and other tools. However, our planned route changed just before we left, and with the focus on the start and the tricky conditions, I erroneously thought I would have enough information with me to look at the changes in our route as we went along. I was wrong. I am not trying to make any excuses - just trying to offer up some form of explanation and answer to some of your questions.

 

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this, which we hope will be able to relay in the time to come.

 

I am immensely grateful for all the support that we as a team, my family and myself have received from our wonderful friends, colleagues, family, Vestas, Powerhouse and Volvo. More over we are heavily in debt to the thorough support of Alvimedica throughout the first night, as well as the local fisherman and the coastguard of Ile du Sud in the atol. So I want to thank everybody so very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

I am forever in your debt.

 

Wouter

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