Sailor went overboard in the Southern Ocean during the Volvo contest
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Libby Greenhalgh was wedged into the navigator’s seat below decks on the Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag when the helmsman shouted repeatedly, “Man overboard.”
It was before dawn on March 26, and 35-to-45-knot westerly winds had been violently thrashing the competitors in the Volvo Ocean Race for weeks, since they left Auckland, New Zealand, and headed for Itajai, Brazil, in the seventh leg of the round-the-world event.
The helmsman hit the red man-overboard button at the wheel, which records the boat’s GPS location. But in those frantic moments, the button was not depressed for the compulsory four seconds it takes to record the spot.
Greenhalgh instinctively locked the boat’s coordinates ? 1,400 nautical miles west of Cape Horn in the Southern Ocean ? into her navigation software, which shows the boat’s on a digital chart. That was roughly the position where the crew’s safety officer, John Fisher, 47, had been knocked over the side of the boat.
Rapidly calculating in her head how Fisher would drift in the frothy, cold waves, Geenhalgh drew a search pattern on her screen. Fisher was miles behind by the time the boat was under control and pounding back upwind into the waves.
Greenhalgh directed the crew, shouting into the intercom. Four and a half hours later, with no sign of Fisher or the inflatable buoy and life ring the crew deployed, she radioed Race Control in Alicante, Spain, that they were suspending their search.
Making sense of the tragedy has been difficult for even these elite, professional sailors. The Volvo crews are drilled relentlessly on recovery of a person overboard, and the latest locator beacons are provided to each sailor. Sailors are also given inflatable harnesses with tethers to clip into the boat.
Still, sailors continue to die while racing at sea. Fisher is the second sailor fatality in an ocean race in the past five months. In November, the same stretch of water claimed the life of Simon Speirs, 60, a crew member in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race for amateur sailors. In that accident, the clip for Speir’s safety tether broke and he was washed overboard. He was recovered but had died of apparent drowning and was buried at sea.
Although the risk of going overboard will never be eliminated, race officials and crews said, Fisher’s loss revealed several safety areas to be addressed, including redundancy in new technologies, to help in preventing people from going overboard and in recovering lost crew.
“I’ve seen worse conditions,” David Witt, the skipper of the Scallywag, said about the weather during Leg 7 in recent phone interview. “But never so consistently, so relentlessly, for so long.”
The 7,600-nautical-mile leg, which started March 18, covered the most dangerous stretch of the race, where rapidly changing depressions spin unimpeded in the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and Cape Horn. Winds this year rarely dropped below 30 knots and often exceeded 40, considered gale force.
Two of the seven teams retired during the punishing leg. Vesta 11 th Hour Racing arrived in Itajai on Monday under a makeshift rig after its mast broke past Cape Horn. The Mapfre team, the overall race leader entering the leg, finished fifth after having to anchor off the coast of Chile to repair a mainsail that had ripped in two, and is now second overall, behind Dongfeng.
The Scallywag sailed into Puerto Montt, Chile, on April 3, and most of the crew flew home to be with their families. But the team plans to start the next leg, to Newport, R.I., on Sunday. ?
The loss of the sailor was the second in recent Volvo Ocean Race history. The Dutch sailor Hans Horrevoets went overboard in a North Atlantic gale during the 2005-06 edition. He was about to put on his harness when a wave swept him away.
“Nothing’s guaranteed when you are on the water,” Richard Falk, the Royal Yachting Association’s director of training and qualifications, said last winter regarding the Clipper fatality. “Our take on training is giving as much knowledge and trialing to make better decisions. What can never be done is completely eliminate the risk.”
In the Volvo Ocean Race, crews are given R.Y.A. safety training and inflatable harnesses with single or double tethers. According to the Scallywag team, Fisher had unclipped his tether to move forward from the cockpit when the boat, moving at 20 to 30 knots, surfed down a wave and accidentally jibed, changing the wind’s direction relative to the vessel. Fisher was thrown overboard, and crew member believe he was knocked unconscious.
For the first time, every Volvo crew member received a Yachtmaster certification from the R.Y.A. And Greehalgh said that training allowed her team to gain control of the boat and return to the area where Fisher went overboard.
Professional ocean sailors have been criticized for being cavalier and not clipping into the boat or not wearing a harness. As can be seen in onboard images and videos.
In January, Witt and the Scallywag crew were targets of this criticism when the youngest crew member, Alex Gough, 24, fell off the boat during Leg 4 in benign conditions during daylight. He was clearing a sheet while hanging over the side without wearing a harness.
An upset Witt, in a video from onboard after the recovery, said: “You should, one, either be tethered on, or two, at a minimum, tell the driver what you’re doing so he knows. He didn’t do either of those.”
In a phone interview from Race Control in Alicante, the race director, Phil Lawrence, said: “It’s always the responsibility of the skipper and crew to wear the equipment. We have recommendations, but we can’t enforce it when they are a thousand miles away.”
Greenhalgh, who helped propel Scallywag to a victory in Leg 4, said clipping in all time was not realistic on almost any offshore boat.
“When you go to move about the boat, you can’t tell me there isn’t a fraction of a second where you’re not clipped in,” she said in a phone interview from her home in England last week.
The conditions the night Fisher was lost were some of the worst she had seen, she said.
“The sea state was the size of mountains,” Greenhalgh said. “You’d ask yourself, ‘Is that an island or a wave?’”
Zooming in on digital charts and satellite phone communications with rescue services was a challenge, she said. But communication failures did not hinder the search for Fisher. Scallywag’s Automatic Identification System, or A.I.S., was broken.
This edition of the race is the first to provide personal A.I.S. beacons for the crews. The system is used on commercial and recreational ships to observe boats on navigation screens to avoid collisions. Personal A.I.S. instantaneously puts a person overboard target on the screens of the ships within several miles of the victim.
For Scallywag, this lifesaving new technology went away when, two days out of Aul;and, the boat’s lone A.I.S. antenna at the top of the 100-foot mast was damaged in the strong winds.
“If we had our A.I.S., we would have found him,” Witt said. “I’ve learned that redundancies in this system is an example of change, like a second antenna.”
He added that he believed the race’s saftety procedures worked well but that “we waste an awful lot of time and money” on safety equipment that is not as useful as a second antenna would be.
Lawrence, the race director, said the skippers meet at each stopover to review safety procedures and equipment, and investigate accidents. Such a meeting is scheduled for Friday.
“Race procedures can change after each race, even each leg,” he said. “We will take into account new techniques, new technologies.”
