Antigua super yacht race collision

[Rum_Pirate]

 

[Wansworth]

Oops!

 

[Rum_Pirate]

Looks like the aggressor snapped the backstay.

 

[lw395]

Question is whether the stbd boat altered course preventing the port boat from keeping clear.
He's not obliged to hold his course, but tacking so his stern swings into the path of the port boat would put him firmly in the wrong.
Could get flicked for not taking action to avoid the collision.
Camera is on the leeward port tack boat, which might have been called by the windward port boat for room to clear the RoW stbd boats. Looks to be a fair way apart, but such is the view from cameraphones.

 

[Keith 66]

Some good photos of the damage over on Sailing anarchy, One person hospitalised with broken ribs & two more injured. A miracle nobody was killed.

 

[Zing]

He just drove straight onto him, like there was no one at the helm. Ridiculous.

 

[Kukri]

Sticking some labels on, there were four J class yachts in the race: Lionheart, which is seen to tack at the start of the clip and then crosses the screen on starboard followed by Topaz, isn’t involved.

The video was shot from on board Velsheda, the windward port tack boat was Svea, and the starboard tack boat that she struck was Topaz.

I’m going to use the standard collision lawyer’s notation - t is the moment of impact and t-2 is two seconds before impact, etc.

Some observations: Velsheda has a bow lookout posted with a man at the shrouds to repeat his gestures to the helmsman. We can see that Topaz has a bow lookout also.

Svea does not appear to have a bow man - or if he is there he is behind the genoa, which would have unsighted him to leeward and rendered him useless.

It follows that Svea’s helmsman would have lost sight of Topaz behind the genoa.

Svea continues to bear off after the impact and starts to come down on Velsheda so we can take it that her wheel was well over to starboard at impact. This also suggests that she had not seen Topaz before t-5

Topaz starts to luff at t-3. We don’t know if she was putting a tack in but this seems a little unlikely, as Lionheart seems to be going for the mark and has cracked off a bit. The luff could be an instinctive reaction to seeing Svea closing. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that she would have done better to bear off, but only someone very accustomed to handling a big heavy boat under sail at close quarters would do that automatically.

The effect is that Topaz swings her counter into Svea’s bow, but we must allow for foreshortening due to the lens. Probably they would have collided anyway.

Svea’s bow carries away Topaz’s standing backstay; it was very fortunate that her mast did not fall.

As it was, we are told that the unfortunate chap who was projected overboard by Svea’s bow has broken ribs and one other person was hurt. Very very lucky.

 

[lw395]

I think it very likely that Topaz was tacking, covering the other two boats and securing her second place.
It's quite possible that Svea had a lookout to leeward, so you cannot say she lost sight of Topaz.
I don't think I can be sure from that video whether they'd have collided had Topaz held her course, or whether Svea was 'keeping clear' in accordance with the RRS defintion.

ISTM that around 16-18s on the video, Velsheda comes up quite a few degrees, presumably a windshift? That probably precipitated the unfortunate tack and lifted Svea into trouble.
Such is racing. People make the occasional mistake.

How many youtube views do they need to pay for the damage?

 

[bedouin]

Hard to tell from a single video but it seems the stbd boat was at fault - their manoeuvre swung their stern into the path of the other.

Very lucky it wasn't more serious

 

[Ingwe]

Looking at the videos Svea probably did see them as you can see that the main is dumped before the collision, however for whatever reason the genoa was not eased and without it being eased the helmsman would be unable to bear away no matter how much they turned the wheel.

 

[lw395]

Looking at the videos Svea probably did see them as you can see that the main is dumped before the collision, however for whatever reason the genoa was not eased and without it being eased the helmsman would be unable to bear away no matter how much they turned the wheel.

Quite likely the crux of it.
I've been in the situation of steering a big boat and some dinghy sailor decides that leaving the genoa sheeted in will help it bear away...
It isn't a Fireball, it doesn't work like that!

 

[Kukri]

Looking at the videos Svea probably did see them as you can see that the main is dumped before the collision, however for whatever reason the genoa was not eased and without it being eased the helmsman would be unable to bear away no matter how much they turned the wheel.

You may be seeing a different video clip to me, as the one that I have seen does not seem to show Svea’s mainsail before t+1. I agree that her genoa was not eased before the collision, but having in mind that Svea is reckoned very competitive in the class, and Velsheda’s crew are basically the Kiwi AC team, I find it hard to think that the professional crews on these beasts make elementary mistakes of the sort that a weekend sailor such as myself might make.

I agree, on looking at it a few more times, that Topaz was probably tacking to cover Svea and Velsheda.

I still don’t see any sign of anyone on Svea positioned to look under the genoa, but, as noted above, surely these people don’t make elementary mistakes!

 

[E39mad]

I understand that there is a rule in J class racing that stipulates that boats must keep a certain distance from each other - something like 50 meters in an attempt to avoid this kind of thing.

I wonder if there was a communication breakdown between the bow and cockpit which are about 100 foot apart. It's interesting to watch Velsheda (the video boat) as the bowman's left arm clearly shows he wants the helm to go to windward and this is replicated by the crew standing at the shroud base.

 

[lw395]

I understand that there is a rule in J class racing that stipulates that boats must keep a certain distance from each other - something like 50 meters in an attempt to avoid this kind of thing.

I wonder if there was a communication breakdown between the bow and cockpit which are about 100 foot apart. It's interesting to watch Velsheda (the video boat) as the bowman's left arm clearly shows he wants the helm to go to windward and this is replicated by the crew standing at the shroud base.

If Svea was required to keep 50m clear of Velsheda (being WW boat) then she should have been hailing Velsheda for room to clear the STBD boats by 50m??

There seems to be a sort of modern proverb emerging 'man videoing incident often in wrong' (best said in an 'Electric Entwhistle' accent.

 

[Kukri]

Velsheda’s crew are probably the best on the planet.

 

[Kukri]

For what it’s worth, EG Martin’s little book
« Helmsmanship » describes the « basics » of handling a big fast boat with a rudder attached to the keel rather well.

 

[lw395]

Velsheda’s crew are probably the best on the planet.

They were last?

 

[dunedin]

I understand that there is a rule in J class racing that stipulates that boats must keep a certain distance from each other - something like 50 meters in an attempt to avoid this kind of thing.

I wonder if there was a communication breakdown between the bow and cockpit which are about 100 foot apart. It's interesting to watch Velsheda (the video boat) as the bowman's left arm clearly shows he wants the helm to go to windward and this is replicated by the crew standing at the shroud base.

There certainly is an extra rule in most superyacht racing which stipulates a minimum safety zone between boats - can’t remember if it is 50m or 100m. Don’t know if it applied in this regatta.
Also in superyacht regattas there is a mandatory safety officer on each boat, with radio contact on a dedicated channel with the other yachts. Each crossover, and certainly any tacking in close proximity, needs to be radio confirmed between the boats’ safety officers. The fleet is small so they should all know where the other handful of boats are at all times.
So clearly a lot of things went wrong here, procedure wise.

Also, comments like “need to be experienced in big boats to know that” etc are somewhat spurious on these J’s. The skipper and racing crew are all extremely highly paid professional sailors (though some let the equally experienced owners on the helm), who practice manoeuvres regularly so would know exactly how much of both sheets need to be eased to bear away. We watched them practicing this off Falmouth in 2015, pre racing.
However, they are extremely heavy and fast boats, with (I think, at least mostly) old style rudders on the end of the keel rather than at the stern, so slow to respond in close quarters situations. By the time they got within 2 boats lengths the mistakes had already been made and clearly too late even for the “professional” crews to resolve in the last seconds.

 

[lw395]

Are you sure they were all being sailed by full pro crews at the time? Not chartered out to bankers?

 

[Kukri]

Are you sure they were all being sailed by full pro crews at the time? Not chartered out to bankers?

We don’t know. But a reading of the race reports and suchlike, with names, suggests that they were not, although, as was the case in the early days of the J class, there may have been some passengers aboard.

Here’s a snap of Shamrock 2 after a mishap. Spot King Edward VII, who was boating with his grocer at the time...