Maybe you’ll remember back in 2014 when the Volvo 65 Team Vestas Wind, racing in the Volvo Ocean Race, slammed into the Cargados Carajos Shoals in the Indian Ocean in the middle of the night. Miraculously no one was killed or injured, but the boat was a total wreck, and the reef didn’t fare much better.
The team of highly qualified, professional sailors had already sailed together from Alicante, Spain, to Cape Town, in leg 1 of the round-the-world race when the accident happened about 10 days into leg 2. “What the hell?” I remember thinking at the time. “How on earth did they do that?”
A report into the accident found several causes, not least that in the days leading up to the leg 2 start, the team’s navigator may have been rushed and distracted, and a last-minute change to an exclusion zone by race HQ further confused nav planning. Most significantly, though, is that despite the reef being well marked on paper and properly scaled electronic charts, the navigator thought they had plenty of water, consulting charts that were zoomed out such that they showed 40 meters of depth. The critical feature didn’t show up in the zoomed-out chart layers.
An onboard camera documented the crash. Chilling to watch, it’s a stark reminder that no matter how experienced we think we are, mistakes happen.
We all know this as sailors, right? We all know that the sea—or the bay, or the lake, or whatever waterbody we happen to be sailing on—has the uncanny ability to illuminate flaws, lack of preparation, hubris, or misjudgment. You’d think we would learn this lesson, but sometimes it seems we need little reminders.
Aboard our Peterson 34, years of navigating in and out of our home river—albeit not typically at night—had me certain that we were good to go one evening late last fall when I finally spotted, in the glimmering moonlight, the silhouette of the unlit red daymark that denotes the river’s entrance and marks a significant shoal inside of it.
“Got it,” I said to Johnny, not bothering to check our position on the chartplotter, since it was clearly the mark, right where it was supposed to be. Another five minutes and we’d be ready to anchor. I went below and was rummaging for a sweatshirt when I felt the boat move weirdly. I popped back up to find Himself fuming and us not moving.
Even more startling, the red daymark that was supposed to be on our right was well off to port, bright and obvious in the moonlight. To our right, another mark, basically the same shape but squatter and broader than the daymark, glinted the fluorescent white and orange of danger.
“What the hell?” I said. “How on earth did we do that?”
I couldn’t believe how far out of the channel we’d strayed. The only upside to the situation was that we’d been motoring slowly when we hit, it was dead calm, and no one was around to see us humiliating ourselves. Johnny gunned the engine and started working us off the muddy shoal with limited success. I went up to the shrouds and hung out as far as I could to heel the boat, and we finally started to move, successfully plowing our way back to the deeper water.
At this point, I just had to laugh, although we still had to anchor—with a brand-new windlass that he’d just installed earlier that summer and had only tested in the slip. And oh, yes, inflate and row a new, untested dinghy to shore so our pup could relieve herself.
All day, we’d had a bad case of the noobs. It had been a minute since we’d been out. Stuff had happened. The best laid midsummer and early fall sailing plans had to be put aside to deal with said stuff. And suddenly, it was late October, and we were grasping at sailing chances before the cold weather set in. For this weekend, we threw gear and food onboard and couldn’t take off fast enough. The weather looked perfect, the full moon would be perfect, everything would be perfect. Never mind that we hadn’t set foot on the boat in two months.
“Hey, um,” I called up to Johnny somewhere mid-Bay, having gone below to get us something to drink. “Something’s up with the fridge. Temp is going up.”
I took the helm while he went below to troubleshoot. After a little while, he came up looking…distracted.
“I can’t sort it right now. I forgot the multimeter.” (What?!) Johnny forgetting his multimeter is like Captain Jack Sparrow forgetting the rum. It just doesn’t happen. Hours later, still chewing on the problem as we sailed, he realized the mistake; a switch that normally was on somehow had been turned off, preventing the batteries that support the fridge system from charging. How that had happened—and when—didn’t seem to matter. Point was, we hadn’t checked it when we turned the reefer on.
When we ran aground five minutes from the anchorage in our home river, it just seemed to be the cap on what had been a weird, unintended shakedown kind of day all around. We were rusty, we were unfocused, we were counting on our experience, and mistakes were made.
Luckily, the new windlass worked flawlessly, the new dinghy rowed like a champ, and the Chesapeake Bay has a forgiving muddy bottom, rather than rocks or reef. And, with the fridge mystery solved, the bevvies were finally cold. They made it easier to digest that humble pie—but it’s a dish I’ll keep well in mind when we head out this spring.
Wendy
wclarke@aimmedia.com