Whitby motorboat deaths (3)

Whitby Gazette report and astonishing pic of Whitby Lifeboat climbing a wave during the rescue here, BBC latest (ta Gruts) here.

I am told a former Whitby harbour berthing manager (and very experienced sailor) used to post notices around the marina when he considered it unsafe to go to sea.

He was told to stop this by Scarborough Borough Council because it ‘exposed them to potential liability’.

(Insert insult of choice here - a long portmanteau insult of withering unsurpassible contempt seems apt.)

As yesterdays tragedy shows, you cannot stop people being stupid, but you can in the light of experience advise them against it.

More eyewitnessery: they crew were seen struggling to fit life jackets as the boat got into trouble (disbelief). Whitby Lifeboat was scrambled as soon as it was observed that the cruiser was heading out of the harbour (very good call by someone). Three VHF calls to tell them to turn round were not answered, and the woman aboard made a 999 call which lasted 4 or 5 minutes as the lifeboat headed out of the harbour. Her male companions had (it seemed) been washed overboard. According to the Yorkshire Post her last words were ‘Oh my God’ then nothing.

This suggests they either didn’t have a VHF or didn’t know how to use it in an emergency (I am not surprised by this: I know many motorboat owners do not have VHFs or the basic knowledge to use them, relying on mobiles if they get into trouble). The cruiser was a Bayliner, very light at the bows and with a heavy engine at the stern: it would have been uncontrollable in those conditions and stood on its stern by the breaking waves across the harbour entrance. If the crew were not clipped with a safety line from their lifejacked harness to a d-ring or jacksay when that happened, it would be all over.

The seas were so heavy that even the Whitby lifeboat (a damn great big thing - Trent Class - with twin 1000 hp diesels) dared not risk turning across the waves, and had to manouvre into the rescue by staying bow to the waves while the heroic crew stood at the rails and used long hooks on poles to snag and recover the two casualties (the third was taken from the water by a SAR helicopter). The Lifeboat skipper’s actions sounds like one of the bravest, most skillful acts of seamanship on this coast in a long time.

I sail out of that harbour, I’ve done about 15,000 miles at sea (much of it in very dirty weather in the North Sea) and thinking about the terror that those three people suffered in the last few minutes of their lives in those waves kept me awake last night.

Mobula Rays jumping clear of the sea.

Absolutely bloody amazing, eye stretching pics of this world that never ceases to surprise here.

Last week it was equally ‘Oh my God!’ pics of Great Whites doing aerobatics as they attacked seals from below. (Although I have to cavil with opening cliched and breathless sentence: ‘It is the ultimate predator, nature’s most efficient killing machine which can hunt and kill its prey with remarkable ease.’ Er, sharks kill what they need to eat. Man kills for fun and ‘with remarkable ease’ despite - it is widely supposed - being possessed of a conscience.)

Kudos to the Daily Telegraph website for great photo essays. Today’s Telegraph front page has an excellent TV clip of recently defeated neocon twat and ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose grimacing face seems to bear out the old and odd Arab proverb: ‘A cucumber: one minute in your hand, the next minute up yours arse.’

I put them in salads.  Cucumbers, not Arabs. Although if we did embark on a programme of the saladization* of Arabs, before long we’d be able to take all their oil with a clear conscience having eaten them all.

*Not to be mixed up with the Saladinization of Arabs, which happened a few hundred years ago.

Whitby motorboat deaths 2.

More from eyewitnesses. The 24 foot cruiser was new, had arrived crated from the USA and was berthed in Whitby. The people who owned it knew little about it (or about anything to do with the sea, it seems), and couldn’t lower the outdrive leg without being shown by a local boatbuilder.

They intended to sell the boat at a profit. During the rescue the Whitby Lifeboat was completely swept by heavy waves on at least two occasions.

More from Press association in the Guardian here.

Excellent Yorkshire post report here.

Having seen the sea at Whitby yesterday I prefer the description of wave heights at 15-16 feet rather than the 20-30 stated earlier. It’s hard to judge wave heights accurately.

Whitby motorboat capsize.

Update: all three now dead. The Guardian’s caught up. Updates incluidng eyewitness reports and replies to points raised in sailing threads here, here,  here and here (26.11.07. new pics). OK, here’s the story from BBC North East news and a couple of eyewitnesses I spoke to: A small motor cruiser (22 footer) set off down Whitby harbour at midday. Today has been pretty rough: a northerly wind and big waves coming ashore. Whitby lifeboat crew saw the boat heading for sea and hailed it on the VHF emergency channel with a view to telling them to turn back. No response. The motorboat got 100 yards out, got into distress and was pitchpoled (capsized end-over end) in big waves and sank. Three people were seen in the water. Whitby lifeboat got out is minutes and recovered two men off the West Pier (the left hand one on the bottom pic, the woman was pulled from the water on Whitby east side below. Witesses saw one man being ‘worked on’ by paramedics on the stern of the lifeboat for 40 minutes, until he was taken to James Cook Hospital by Air Ambulance which landed on Tate Hill Pier. He is critical.

Update 18.10. The British media are a disgrace: two dead, one in trouble, a fantastically brave rescue by Whitby lifeboat and the SAR helo, Guardian, Times and Independent nothing as yet, BBC news website a good report, Telegraph a sketchy one. Here are the waters those people went into and the lifeboats braved:

A spokesman said that the swell was 20-30 ft high. This is what Whitby harbour entrance looks like with 20 foot swells. Just what were the people thinking of when they went through those pier ends? More pics of the North Sea at its worst here and here. If the reports are correct, that is something like what they motored into. In a 24 footer.

They may not look much photographed from 300 feet up a cliff, but those waves are big.

Gordon Brown: loser.

It’s an original, but share and enjoy.

New word of the day: crapacious.

Crapacious: (noun) a way being crap on a grand, egregious, expensive scale best exemplified by the English Football Association and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alastair Darling.

Glenarm salmon farm jellyfish massacre. Sea in crisis.

You want to avoid the rant, the story is here.

Funny how small things can affect you (bear with me here, there is meat after the reminiscences). Last year I skippered a youth sail training boat for Ocean Youth Trust Ireland, and our fave port was Glenarm Bay, Co Antrim, Northern Ireland. We’d regularly come in late at night or in the early hours of the morning, knackered, utterly knackered and we’d moor ourselves alongside the boat which serviced the Glenarm Bay salmon farms whose pens were out in the bay (we were too big to go in a normal marina berth).

The life of a sail training skipper is an exhausting one, and a couple of times I woke up with Four Sisters (my boat) tied up alongside the pontoon, the considerate salmon farm service boat skipper having slipped his boat out without fuss, without waking me (as was his right) and having pulled us close alongside and tied us up. He never got narked finding us moored outside him, when he moved us he tried not to wake me (and when you’re psychotic with tiredness, that makes him a prince among men) and was always, always a gent.

A vast jellyfish swarm has just swamped the farm and killed all the salmon.

I don’t know who Rowan Pelling is

but she writes a lot of sense in the Daily Telegraph about not buying presents people don’t need at Christmas.

The only things she omits is the need for inflicting humiliation and discouraging pain on anyone who does Christmas lights, adverts, special offers or jingles before the start of December.  And the pit for anyone who broadcasts Well Here It Is Merry Christmas and Christmas Time by Cliff Richards at any time at all.

Dinosaurs rock.

Pic © Lunartalks 2007.  From the Natural History Museum, London.   For some pics from the NHM’s Darwin Centre spirit room, go here.

It’s the stock in trade of lazy ad copywriters and journalists to describe anything incompetent or obsolete as dinosaurs. One of my occasional waking dreams is to put an allosaurus in a cage with a couple of pr/marketing/ad account executives and open a book on what would walk out at the end. A well-fed allosaurus would be my bet.

Lazy hackery is nothing new, especially when science is involved. CF the false icon of evolution being a ladder starting at bacteria and ending in white males. Dinosaurs are not here to defend themselves, but they did dominate the terrestrial environment (and in the case of Archaeoptryx, and probably a few others started moving into the skies) for around 140 million years. They were so ubiquitous that although mammals were around, so efficient were dinosaurs that any mammals which grew large enough to be worth eating, by and large were. There were dino carnivores and herbivores in every land ecological niche, of all kinds of sizes. We still don’t understand how their beautifully evolved skeletons supported such (in some cases) massive frames. And despite massive and repeated climate change, continental drift, millions of years of exposure to pathogens and competing mammals it took a sodding great chunk of rock from space and a cosmic winter to fishing them off. (Something we not so sapiens seem to be doing without the aid of cosmic intervention.)
Except, of course, it didn’t finish them off. Go outside and put a fatball or a string net of peanuts up and what comes to eat might well be called dinoaves: the hips, the bone structure are the same, feathers started on dinosaurs. So that’s 205 million years and counting. Dinosaurs rock.

Don’t know why I like this graphic