Ouzo yacht sinking: a yachtmaster’s thoughts.

In August last year Ouzo (a 25 foot sailfish yacht) sank in the English Channel. All three of its crew died. Today the helmsman of a ferry thought to be involved was cleared of involvement in their deaths.

I know the area in which the sinking occurred area reasonably well: it’s busy. Container ships, ferries, liners and tankers pelt in and out, and it’s also UK leisure sailing central - yachts and (regrettably) stinkpot motorboats everywhere. Friends who work there tell me of occasional near-misses, groundings, the odd bump when people race enthuiastically.

Ouzo was different though: a yacht with an experienced and reportedly safety conscious crew sunk without even time to get a mayday out. Two vessels (a ferry and a tanker) had been implicated in Ouzo’s loss.

As a commercial yachtmaster with 15000 miles behind me, this kind of story gives me nightmares. I wasn’t there, and have seen none of the evidence, so this is speculation on my part.

This sinking was catastrophic: it happened too quickly for a crew member to send a distress call. That’s a yacht being hit by a ship or sailing into something big like a container just below the surface or suffering a massive structural failure.

In the rules of the road, there are conditions in which a yacht under sail is perfectly within its rights to sail at a supertanker and expect the supertanker to give way. These rules date from the time when sailing vessels were complex as hell and hard to tack (turn). There is also the ‘asshole’ rule, which states that even if you have right of way and the other guy is acting like an asshole and not getting out of your way, it’s your responsibility to avoid a collision and it overrides all else.

Only a foolish sailor plays chicken with a big ferry or a tanker. These things are hard to turn, hard to stop and run to timetables and they often don’t keep a good lookout. Ouzo’s skipper was reportedly an experienced local skipper: he would have known the high volume of traffic in the area and known its nature. My only observation here is that inexperienced watchkeepers often don’t check astern and can often underestimate the speed of approach of a vessel. My gut instinct - nah. That crew looked like proper sailors and I suspect they were briefed to keep a good watch and call the skipper if any boat appeared to be on collision course.

Next, and possible, she struck something afloat. Brit-built boats of that age are usually shithouses: lots of thick, well laid up fibreglass, nothing like the modern see-thru numbers shat out of French and German yards by the lamentable million. But hit a 40 foot container while scudding along at five or six knots and even robust Brit fibreglassing won’t stop a massively stove bow and a catastrophic sinking. The boat stops dead, everyone flung off balance possibly knocked out (certainly disorientated for those vital seconds) boat floods rapidly, electrics maybe knocked out stopping distress call being sent. This is a recipe for a rapid sinking. An estimated 10,000 containers are lost over the side of container ships each year and many float just below the water.
Remedy: even small boats should have a float-free liferaft, grab-bag with portable VHF and epirb.

Next: structural failure. The Sailfish 25 is a lifting keel yacht. It has 1600 pounds of metal keel that can be winched up into a housing in the hull to let the boat take the ground and is lowered for sailing. It is raised and lowered by an electric hydraulic pump with manual backup. This set all my alarm bells ringing: keels should be bolted solidly onto hulls, there should not be big slots in the bottom of your boat with boxes, no matter how well built sticking up into your boat with holes for wiring and pipes and bolts and shit. No matter how well built or intended, it’s a weakness, a big weakness.

It has happened to one Sailfish before: the keel fell off. That causes an immediate capsize, an incident as rapid, initially more disorientating and perhaps even less survivable than ramming the container. Unless the wreck is found, raised and bears obvious evidence of the cause of the sinking, we will never know. Would I sail an old lift keel yacht in the open sea (the English Channel may be small, but it can be very, very rough, demanding sailing)? No.

Generally, my feeling about sailing around commercial boats in a yacht is: stay out of their way. I know what the rules of the road say, but they were written in the days when sailboats had complex rigs and no auxiliary engines. Sailors are fiercely protective of their rights of way, but times and boats change, maybe we need to accept that for now, small boats just stay out of the way of the big stuff. For now: after all, sail is the future.