Garda crash

Steve Arkley's shots from last Thursday at the Murphy and Nye 1720 European Championship

The rather shocking scene of a yacht sinking was caught on camera by Steve Arkley at the Murphy and Nye 1720 European Championships at Lake Garda, Italy, last week.

The crash occurred on second race on Thursday as the predicted southerly Ora wind came in and took the wind speed up to the 20 knot range from more benign conditions at the start of racing.

Go Ferret was on starboard tack on the second upwind leg when she was hit just forward of the chainplates by Incognito. The two boats were locked together for some time and remained afloat while the sails on both were taken down, the relatively smooth water saving the masts from hitting.

Ribs from the host club, Fraglia Della Vela Riva were on the scene quickly and Go Ferret and Incognito were pulled apart with a line to one of the Ribs. Go Ferret, holed on the starboard side [correction, the hole as seen in the photos is on the port] was able to reach shore without too much difficulty, but things turned much worse for Incognito, with damage to both sides of the bow, she quickly started taking on water.

The crew of Incognito had enough time to save valuables and remove the sails before the boat became swamped and sank, stern down to the base of the mast. Additional buoyancy was attached in the form of the two windward marks and the finish line mark.

The race had finished but the boat remained a hazard on the course for over an hour before the local police boat was able to attach a strong tow and drag the boat downwind to the shore about a mile away. Water at this scene of the accident is 200m deep.

While the rescue was in progress the fleet remained without windward marks, or a finish mark for some time.

Incognito then sunk deeper as she approach closer to the shore, however the boat was raised sufficiently for two divers to start using pumps to clear the flooded hull. The boat was finally brought out of the water at Port St Nicolo in Riva.

All sailors were safe and well and the accident seems to have been caused by a combination of errors in the rising wind strength. There were several close incidents of port tack boats trying to cross starboard tack boats throughout the Championship as generally the right hand side of the beat was favoured in the Ora conditions. With a building breeze a duck becomes a much more complicated affair with jib and mainsail needing to be dumped to give the helmsman enough margin to get the boat to bear away.

Conclusions from the ‘post mortem’ seemed to focus on three main areas. It is now being discussed that all 1720 big jibs will have to carry a window in them, without one (as in the case of Incognito) there remains a large blind spot for the crew and helmsman at the critical stage when ducking a boat.

The boats perhaps should have been kept locked together – this way they plugged each others wounds. With a relatively calm sea state and the boats naturally moving downwind towards the shore then perhaps this would have prevented the sinking.

Using the racing marks to help the yacht remain afloat is the correct solution but perhaps spares should be ready on the shore for a more rapid resumption of racing when the incident is out of the way.

Overall the incident was handled safely and competently and was the only blip in an otherwise excellent European Championship

Feedback from the Andrew McIrvine, owner of Go Ferret:

Thank you for your feature on this. As the owner of the injured 'Go Ferret' I would be grateful for a couple of corrections.

Go Ferret, on starboard tack, was holed on the port side as shown in the photographs.

We did want to keep the boats together but the conditions were not calm and the grinding was working its way back to the shrouds and chainplate - and it looked as if the rigs were going to come down.

What they could have done was put a rib either side of 'Incognito's' bow with a line between which would have kept the hole out of the water. They were sitting ok with all the crew at the stern until the rib started to tow them by the bow fitting, after which they filled up and sank! There was of course a major problem of communication as none of the rescue teams spoke English - and we spoke no Italian.

Best wishes

Andrew McIrvine .