Historic schooner sunk by container ship...

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Frank Holden said:
Very good but that is the track of Elbe 5 after the incident ..... where she gets towed into that boat harbour and then settles on the bottom....
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I'm afraid I don't know. I came across it and reproduced it here for no other reason than to give people an idea of the location where the collision occurred.

You would need to find the source of that chartlet to get any more information.
 
It appears the two tracks are proceeding in the same direction; perhaps one is the Elbe or the Astrosprinter, but I do not think the two tracks represent both vessels. I've seen it debated whether a given area counts as a "narrow channel", but in this case the German rules appear to specifically define the fairway as a narrow channel in § 2(1).
 
Someone else (Sheik Yerbouti) posted this on the Sailing Anarchy thread:

The transcript -

this is what was sid on the video clip, who said what and which position the speaker has is not clear:



Male voice : Wat is he up to (Was hat der denn da vor).

- Most probably this person goes midships and presses the electrical whistle two times 5.

Male voice: Why is he doing that (Was das nun soll?) - referring to the cargo vessel

Male voice: Bear off ( Abfallen!)

Other male voice: we are going to hit him (Den Treffen wir).

Male voice: Hard to Port (Hart Backbord).

- tiller is pushed to the port side, making the vessel turn starbord:

Male voice: We are going to hit him right on (Den treffen wir volles Pfund)​
 
That rather looks like a breakdown in communication between skipper and helmsman. Skipper intended to bear away around the stern, but helmsman misinterpreted the "hard to port" order.
 
dombuckley said:
That rather looks like a breakdown in communication between skipper and helmsman. Skipper intended to bear away around the stern, but helmsman misinterpreted the "hard to port" order.
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Yes, now that I have read the transcript.... quite agree with that. Whistleblower is not the skipper...

A true CCF.... Cascading Cluster of Failures...
 
dombuckley said:
That rather looks like a breakdown in communication between skipper and helmsman. Skipper intended to bear away around the stern, but helmsman misinterpreted the "hard to port" order.
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That seems to me to be the most likely explanation so far. The order given was 'hard to port'. Inexplicable unless the helmsman understood it as 'helm hard to port' rather than 'turn hard to port.' Poor communication, poor training, a panic response from an inexperienced helmsman, or a skipper giving the wrong order under pressure?

Did they usually give the helmsman orders as helm or steering orders? The steering order 'turn to port' would in that case be understood as a helm order.

At close quarters, as I said earlier, collision avoidance overrules rights of way, and an ambiguous order could and did result in disaster
 
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How dissatisfying, if all the disagreement over who did what, why and whether they were in the right, is irrelevant...

...since the catastrophic cutting across the ship's bows seems only to be a misunderstanding by the sailboat's helm.

Thanks to Little Sister for the translation.

But I wonder why, after the skipper saw that the complete opposite of his command was being carried out, we didn't immediately hear some colourful bellowing in an attempt to correct the daftness?

Interesting to note from the website below, that the ship's draft is a very substantial 7.2m...around 24ft. If we supposed that the schooner's skipper had initially expected the ship to turn to starboard in order that the schooner needn't be pressed into shallow water by passing green to green, the much deeper ship would presumably have encountered the shallows herself.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/ASTROSPRINTER-IMO-9349215-MMSI-210167000
 
dancrane said:
How dissatisfying, if all the disagreement over who did what, why and whether they were in the right, is irrelevant...

...since the catastrophic cutting across the ship's bows seems only to be a misunderstanding by the sailboat's helm......
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There may have been a misunderstanding but I reckon only at the point when a collision was inevitable. It will have affected the point of collision though.

Been a useful reminder, God bless us all.
 
doug748 said:
There may have been a misunderstanding but I reckon only at the point when a collision was inevitable. It will have affected the point of collision though.

Been a useful reminder, God bless us all.
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I too would expect a quite colourful response to a wrongly interpreted helm order - unless the skipper turned back to see whsat the ship wa doing, and didnt realise until too late. At the point where he would have realised, the video stops anyway. As someone said earlier, a missed opportunity for a spectacularly unique bit of video! Not sure I would have had the nerve to carry on filming either, though!
 
bedouin said:
Your prejudice is showing - having had one set of false assumptions exposed as nonsense you replace it with another that are equally prejudiced.

What is without doubt is that the Schooner was stand on vessel so the responsibility was on the ship to keep clear - and that the ship did have room to turn as it did. only too late. All it needed was for the ship to take that same action BEFORE getting 5 from the schooner and everything would have been fine. Had he even given the sound signal required by the rules that might have been enough. In both points the ship is definitely to blame.

Not saying the schooner is blameless - I would love to know why he didn't/couldn't turn to port. But there must have been a reason for trying to tack rather than bearing away.
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it is not without doubt that the schooner was stand on. Why do you say that?
 
john_morris_uk said:
But I think you’re still stuck on the idea that the sailing vessel isn’t a big ship. It was a large vessel in a narrow channel and yours and others assumptions that the big ship has rights because it’s ‘obviously a large vessel in a restricted or narrow channel’ isn’t necessarily true.

I’m certainly NOT saying that the schooner was blameless, but the schooner wasn’t the give way vessel in the automatic way some people are suggesting.
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no not give way based on size John but if it was a narrow channel for the ship (likely as you say) he was obliged not to impede. Which he clearly did.
 
Out of interest, what role do you think the person was who hurried back to sound the Horn twice, and then took the helm at the last moment. was he the skipper, he seamed to be making decisions on what he could see. was he the Skipper ?. More surprising in the film is the Passengers, they could see early on the risk of collision. So Lucky no one was killed or drowned.

Steveeasy
 
Elessar said:
no not give way based on size John but if it was a narrow channel for the ship (likely as you say) he was obliged not to impede. Which he clearly did.
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I completely agree - but I was trying to get people to see beyond the silly knee jerk reaction of "It was a yacht in a narrow channel and therefore the ship was automatically the stand on vessel because it was bigger (and commercial was mentioned earlier which a complete red herring and nothing to do with IRPCS).

The yacht shouldn't impede because it was sailing. It's one of the very few exceptions to the power sail rule. Nothing to do with size.
 
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