What We Learned From Our Capsize on the Janet Anne

Doing a bit of a de-frag after our 000 rescue episode, we wanted to consider what we did wrong, and what in the circumstances we did right as well as what we could have done better.

Ready to Race 

 

We often joke about racers being shoppers. Competitive sailing involves pushing the margins and consequently stressing equipment and creating a well worn path to the chandlery, workshop and sail loft. As cruisers we follow very different and more conservative rules. We neither want to stress ourselves or our boat and our measure is “Will this spill our chardonnay?”.  Of course we don’t drink on passage but the principle is that we never want to be on such a heel that we’d be spilling wine. Racing creates another mindset altogether. Take risks. In land sports you’d call it “White line fever”. Oh yes, we were in the zone, white line fever for certain! WRONG for us. We didn’t know the Janet Anne well enough to be pushing her.

We learned several things. If a capsize happens quickly as it did for us in a small boat, the resources to which you have access to save you are the ones that are physically on your person. There will be scant time to collect stuff before you go over and little time to snatch at stuff as it floats away. Survival /safety gear needs to float but not necessarily away, hence a buoyant ‘Grab Bag’ of emergency stuff is helpful. On Zofia we have one. While the Janet Anne had all manditory safety stuff it was all attached to the boat and became unusable or inaccessible. The VHF radio was under water and no longer usable. We have a buoyant hand held VHF radio on Zofia as a back up to the fixed VHF radio. The EPIRB was clipped into a holder and was underwater. Although Zofia’s EPIRB is clipped to the hull in the cockpit too, we also have personal ones that we wear. Those were in Brisbane as we hadn’t traveled with any notion that we’d go sailing. Flares, despite being in a watertight container were also in an airtight compartment. Retrieval would compromise the integrity of our little floating pontoon. Zofia’s are in the Grab Bag.
Many people commented to us afterward, that it was lucky that we were wearing life jackets. Lucky? Hell NO! We pretty much always wear them! In that sense we created our own good luck. The age range of our crew was from 61-71. None of us are athletes, nor do we have gills, as the Bloke often points out, so staying afloat for any length of time without some form of floatation was not a proposition. Swimming 2nm to shore was not an option either.

"Wear a close fitting life jacket WITH a crotch strap!". That was the message Doug Abbott imparted after spending 3 hours in Bass Strait with the rest of his racing crew after their race yacht rapidly broke up and sank. Our own PFD's on Zofia do have crotch straps (we upgraded them for this very reason) but we were wearing borrowed life jackets. Luckily we had adjusted the fitting before we left the jetty by tightening the chest strap. Ladies probably have an advantage here as the strap sits below the breasts and the inflated jacket is less likely to ride up as much.

Thanks for sharing Doug Abbott!

Staying together and with the boat, which was not fully submerged, and a larger target than 3 small specks in the water, was helpful. In the end one of us was able to climb up and stand on it making us more visible above the waves. We were surprised that the rescue crew couldn’t see us as easily as we could see them.

Dress for your activity. Janet and I both wore a long sleeved synthetic sailing shirt against the skin and beneath our spray jackets. The Bloke was wearing a cotton one under his spray jacket and was less comfortable once immersed. We were acutely aware that we needed to keep warm giving us another reason to climb onto the hull and out of the water to delay the possibility of Hypothermia. Sharks were also front of mind !

You’ll be hard to spot. The brighter your clothing the better. We only had our more fashionable black ‘jetty walker’ spray jackets with us on our visit to Perth. All our serious red coloured sailing kit was aboard Zofia in Queensland. The bright yellow life jacket floatation tubes proved essential for the VMR crew to locate us. A mirror attached to a life jacket will be a low tech addition to our own life jackets. We’ll also be adding a small submersible torch with a flashing mode to our bum bags. We’d actually brought such a torch along but it was in a kit bag that floated away. Our own life jackets do have water activated lights attached (an opted for upgrade) but in daylight, they probably wouldn’t make much impact.

  

Selecting the PHONE function from the home screen 

does not deliver the user to the keypad!

A hand held waterproof floating VHF radio would have be an asset. Instead we had to rely on our phones. Smart phones are now so smart that the dialing function is a little buried. We’ll be adding ‘000’ to our favourites list to simplify making such a call in the future. All in all, our take home message is to take being on the water seriously - we were probably a bit too relaxed on this occasion.