I definitely understand and feel your pain. Hopefully all will go well
with the insurance and repairs.
Good luck.
Neil Schiller
1983 C&C 35-3, #028
"Grace"
Whitehall, Michigan
WLYC
On 7/16/2018 11:18 AM, David Knecht via CnC-List wrote:
It is a sad morning here and I need some help to drag me out of my
depression. This list is my support group, advisers, experts and
therapists. Or maybe you will kick my butt for being an idiot and
that could help as well. Aries had a serious grounding on a reef on
Saturday and is currently awaiting insurance to start assessing the
situation. We were barely towed off the reef by SeaTow and the boat
is on the hard at a local marina. The damage is worse than I had
hoped and better than it could have been. When they were able to pull
us off the lip of the reef (tide going out, getting desperate) the
rudder hit the reef and bent the shaft, damaged the hull around the
shaft and pushed the rear tip of the rudder up through the hull.
The bottom of the wing keel is also chewed up from grinding on the
reef. That sound of hull grinding over rock is now forever seared
into my brain. South Shore yachts actually lists the rudder on their
site (thanks to the list for making me aware of their C&C parts), and
I am hoping there is nothing else damaged that was not obvious. No
one was hurt, except my pride and confidence. Leaving the marina, I
now have an appreciation for the emotions of people who abandon their
floating homes at sea. At least I will hopefully get mine back.
I have gone over the incident a thousand times trying to understand
what happened and how I could have prevented it. I thought I was
hyperaware of all the hazards in the Fishers Island Sound area and
swore that I would never ground the boat again after an incident with
an unmarked reef during a race a few years ago. I try to race with a
priority of safety, fun and speed, in that order. I almost always
have crew who are not sailors other than racing with me, which I
enjoy, but takes some of my focus away from other things. We had
spent the day in a long race all over Fishers Island sound. It was
blowing 15+ and we had worked very hard to get around the course and
the last leg was a straight downwind sprint to the finish heading due
North toward the CT coast. With 3 inexperienced crew I was happy that
we were in second place in our class and focused on getting to the
line. We crossed the line, then jibed over to head back west to
parallel the coast to our home port of New London and had just taken a
deep breath, congratulated the crew when we hit the reef. It turns
out that the Race Committee had set the finish line inshore and just
East of the single offshore buoy marking Horseshoe Reef. I never saw
(or recognized) the buoy because it was behind the mainsail as we
approached the finish and I was looking for the finish line, not other
buoys. By the time we jibed, it was essentially over my shoulder. I
did not see the buoy until I looked around when we hit the reef and
realized where we were. A hundred yards inshore and we would have
been fine and a hundred yards offshore and we would have seen the buoy
and passed the correct side of it. I think the Race Committee
deserves some part of the blame for setting the finish line in a
dangerous location but certainly my lack of awareness of where I was
relative to dangers (of which there are many in Fishers Island Sound)
was the major factor. If I had looked carefully at the chart at any
point, I presume I would have recognized the danger of the finishing
area, but we were closely following the lead boat and so our location
was not an issue until we finished. I was in familiar waters but I
just did not recognize precisely where I was in familiar waters. The
other boats near us turned East while we turned West so we were not
following anyone after the turn.
If anyone has any suggestions, comments or strategies to help prevent
this, I am all ears. A moments inattention is all it took and it
makes me concerned about several factors- age, racing with non-sailor
crew, racing in general. In our Wednesday night races, we race
around the same marks every week, and it has taken time, but I now
think I know every hazard and am aware of where we are relative to
them while also keeping on top of the boat and crew. This was an area
I have sailed in many times but rarely race there. Also in terms of
the incident itself, if Seatow had not happened to be in the area and
seen us and we were not able to get the boat off the reef until the
next high tide, I have no idea what we would have done. I know I have
learned from other people’s disasters (always the first thing I read
when a new Sail magazine is delivered), so maybe this will help
someone else not have this happen or make someone feel better about
things that have happened to them.
Relevant to the issue of thinking you know where you are when you
don’t, if you have not read Laurence Gonzales’s book Deep Survival, I
highly recommend it. He talks a lot about the psychology of visual
perception of your local environment and how it affects decisions. I
think there are lessons there for everyone, as many of the things he
alerted me to I can see over and over in everyday life and this is
perhaps another example.
Dave
Aries
1990 C&C 34+
New London, CT
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every one is greatly appreciated. If you want to support the list - use PayPal
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