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Mystery of abandoned Sea Nymph
BY ADMIN • MARCH 26, 2018 • BREAKING NEWS, FEATURES, HOMEMOSAIC • COMMENTS OFF • 311
Screen grab of the Sea Nymph, four months after being abandoned. Credit: Turn the Tide on Plastic/Volvo Ocean Race
Many will remember the media attention given to Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiava when they were rescued in October 2017 from their 50ft yacht Sea Nymph after nearly six months at sea.
The pair claimed their boat was sinking as the reason for their need to be rescued. Yet the boat was found by one of the teams in the Volvo Ocean Race, Dee Caffari’s Turn the Tide on Plastic, more than four months later, having been drifting around 1,000 miles south-east of Japan.
While the circumstances around Appel and Fuiava’s situation may have been unusual, theirs is by no means the only occasion on which a frightened crew has abandoned a boat that subsequently turned out to be viable. There have even been cases of yachts abandoned during an Atlantic crossing that have then made their own way slowly across to the Caribbean, many of them sadly being driven ashore on beaches that they then litter, instead of being salvaged and subsequently repaired.
While it’s natural that a scared crew, in challenging conditions and faced with equipment breakages may wish to escape, abandoning the boat in deep ocean waters is often not a guaranteed route to safety. In particular, any transfer between a yacht and a ship is fraught with danger – with the two vessels moving several meters up and down relative to each other the risk of being squashed between the two vessels, or simply falling off the pilot ladder is very real.
When a yacht is rolling in a heavy sea it doesn’t take a huge amount of water sloshing around inside the vessel for it to lap over the bunk tops – a scary prospect. However, unless the ingress is fast and sustained over a long period the boat may be far from sinking at this stage and pumping/bailing out may not be as futile as it might first appear.
However, potential sinking is not the most common reason for abandoning a boat at sea – it’s far more likely to be a result of equipment failure. A broken rudder may seem like an unmitigated disaster. Yet it’s not all that long ago that many ocean voyagers didn’t have today’s sophisticated communication systems and EPRIBs and so would have to contend with such eventualities without outside assistance.
Given that most ocean passages are predominately downwind it’s not hard to make slow progress in very roughly the right direction – a speed of two and a half knots will give you 60 miles a day, sufficient to cover half the distance from the Cape Verde islands to the Caribbean in 20 days. All you need then is enough food and water – the latter can often be caught in rain squalls – plus a tow into port at the end of the voyage.
It’s much better than littering the ocean with many tonnes of used plastic yacht. And if you genuinely have to abandon ship, open the seacocks to allow it to sink before leaving – that way it won’t be a collision risk for others.
Sadly, Caffari’s team were unable to undertake salvage, but they were able to use a drone to confirm the identity of the yacht, and that the crew had therefore already been taken off. In reporting its position, it also leaves open the possibility of a salvage team recovering the vessel.