Sister's Journal

Date: 13.February.2000
Location: Rodney Bay, St. Lucia
Position: 14 degrees 05 minutes North, 60 degrees 57 minutes West
 
Crossing the Atlantic (cont)
Man Overboard
 
On Sister we have inflatable life jackets with webbing harnesses and stainless steel rings built into them. We always wear the jackets at night and, particularly when on watch alone, we attach our selves to the boat with a tether clipped into the rings and to corresponding rings or "jack" lines on the boat. This is pretty common practice among cruisers.
Listening to the weather report one evening I heard that a man overboard had been reported. Apparently the skipper had gone overboard from a small Norwegian boat at 0400 in the morning. The report gave the coordinates of his last known position and said that a search, including a US Coast Guard plane and a number of ARC boats, had been organized. The position was too far away for us to help so we didn't change course.
Prior to leaving, trying to convince our crew of the importance of wearing life jackets and harnesses, I told them that as far as I'm concerned to go overboard in the middle of the ocean, particularly at night, is to die. Very, very very few people are recovered alive after having gone overboard at night or in rough weather.
I speculated that someone on the Norwegian boat had come up to take his watch and discovered that the skipper was gone. Who knows how long he had been gone? In my mind I wrote the Norwegian skipper off ... he was a dead man. Damn!
We didn't hear anything the next day. It was clear that I was right. On the second day we heard that the skipper had been picked up by another Norwegian boat, one that was participating in the ARC. Further, we heard that he had been transferred back to his own boat and was en route once again to St. Lucia.
In St. Lucia that skipper came aboard Sister and told us what happened. He had not been on watch. Another crew member was on watch but called below to get the skipper to come up and help him change the sails. The skipper who had been sleeping in his life jacket came up on deck. Before he had a chance to "hook in" the boat jibed sending the boom crashing from one side of the boat to the other. The boot caught the skipper in the head and knocked him overboard. Get this now ... the crew is awake and aware that the skipper had just gone overboard but they couldn't find him. The seas weren't particularly rough. It was dark. The crew knew immediately when he went in but they still couldn't find him. The crew put out the call for help.
The Norwegian skipper determined that his only chance for survival was to "intercept" one of the ARC boats that surely were in the area. One, two, three times or more he spotted on coming boats and plotted a course to swim to intercept it. He said he got close enough one to see the expressions on the faces of the crew. He yelled, he whistled with the emergency whistle in his life jacket, but no one heard or saw him.
He did see the search aircraft but determined that it was too high and/or too far away to have a chance of seeing him. He kept trying his intercept strategy ... he decided that it was his only hope. Seventeen hours after entering the water one more desperate attempt to intercept a boat succeeded. The boat that picked him up happened to be Norwegian as well. They had been actively searching for the man overboard and, to some extent, their search effort had been coordinated by the Coast Guard airplane. The MOB, somewhat the worse for wear (exhaustion and badly sunburned face) was returned to his boat and proceeded to St. Lucia. When we met him in St. Lucia he was recovering from the blisters that the sun had burned in his face and lips.
The final chapter to this story is eerie and disturbing. The Norwegian boat that picked up the overboard skipper had pulled another man from the water in the Canaries just a few weeks before. The individual that they rescued in this case had been a stowaway on a cargo ship leaving the Canaries. On discovering the stowaway the ship's crew simply threw him in the ocean. We don't know how long he had been in the water. He survived by holding on to some flotsam until the sailboat rescued him.  Canarian medical authorities said he wouldn't have survived another hour. Throwing a man in the water as this ship's crew did is, at best, attempted murder as far as I'm concerned. Sadly, I'm told that it is not all that uncommon.
Follow these links to read about:
The Crossing main page
The Weather we had during the crossing
The Start of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers
Answers to questions people ask us

 

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