By Lynn Fitzpatrick

Northern Hemisphere (September 2009) - There was a time on Wednesday afternoon when I had resigned myself that I would be writing about the drowning of two sailors. I’ll remove some of the suspense by letting you know up front that everyone returned to shore alive. Despite that, I couldn’t sleep last night. Had I been continuing to sweep Long Island Sound or holding vigil ashore while the authorities searched for two men last spotted clinging to one another in the breaking swells in the middle of Long Island Sound, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep either.

How Many are Out There?

There were 47 boats competing in the regatta. Was the number 48, 47 or 46? I had tried to verify it the first day, but I wasn’t sure because there were multiple versions of competitors lists printed. Nonetheless, someone should be sure because we want to be able to account for everyone who leaves and returns to the dock, who starts a race, who withdraws and who is disabled. I'll give the regatta organizers the benefit of the doubt that someone was on top of it. A day before the men overboard incident took place, some of the racing boats turned back to shore as soon as they got a clear view of what the conditions would be like in the open waters of Long Island Sound. They took it upon themselves to report to club staff that they had returned and the information was relayed to the Race Committee. Should they have reported to somebody who was keeping count of all of the ducklings? Absolutely. Was there a procedure that everyone was aware of? There was a procedure in the Sailing Instructions, but no penalty was prescribed for not complying. If pressed would everyone in the fleet have known what was written of paragraph 18.2 of the SI’s? Doubtful. There is no excuse for not reading the SI’s, but people tend to focus on the starts and the courses and skim over much of the other material until it is necessary to read it in detail.

Which Channel?

Knowing that the weather was going to be bad and it was going to be a long day, I persuaded my mate on the press skiff that we wouldn’t miss much if we left the dock later yesterday than we had during the first day of the regatta. As it turned out, we climbed the rollers and made it to the vicinity of the first weather mark rounding without ever getting airborne. The critical piece of information that we had missed by not going out earlier was that the Race Committee had switched the radio channel on which it was operating.

The first race ended without incident and without the familiar chatter of the Race Committee over the radio that we had heard the prior day. As the Committee waited for the stragglers, we performed a radio communications check. Nothing. When we were in shouting distance of the pin boat we asked what station they were on and quickly switched over to the station of the day.

The Start

There were multiple general recalls before the second race finally got underway. Two of them were under a black flag. The scope on the anchor lines for the committee boat and the pin boat was questionable. Hoping to make it easier to adjust the starting line, we offered up our towline as extra scope for the pin boat.

After the first attempt at a start under the black flag, some of the competitors sailed by the stern of the Race Committee boat and were close enough that they could read their numbers on the board. They peeled off and started their multi-mile sail downwind in the rollers and under skies that obscured one, and at sometimes both, shores of Long Island Sound. Did anyone know which five boats headed off in the direction of the yacht club? Doubtful.

The race got started and the discussion over the radio was about piecing together the list of boats sited for black flag infringements, posting black flagged numbers on board on the weather mark boat and identifying the boats that were black flagged but still competing.

Needless to say, at that point in the day and in those conditions (small craft advisory and storms on the horizon), you were only in the middle of Long Island Sound if you had a purpose.

The First Mark Rounding

With most of the competitors around the weather mark, we started to head toward the leeward mark. Our boat was lifted so high above the troughs, that I passed the helm over to my Southern California skiff mate who had had more years of hanging ten on a long board than I did. Even surfing with an engine, we could not reel in the leaders and position ourselves at the gate to take the roundings. Knowing that it would be an uncomfortable slog upwind into the face of waves, we questioned whether we should just hang out, but because three legs remained and there was an upwind finish, we decided to head upwind and watch the final weather mark rounding, hover and stay around for the finish.

Distressed Boats on the Horizon

The horizon was dark and curtains of precipitation veiled familiar landmarks. Our focus was in picking our way through the waves. As we motored upwind, I noticed what I thought could be a dismasted boat. It was so far away that I wasn’t sure. We motored further and noticed another boat nearby the dismasted boat. Its main sail was split. We hailed the Race Committee and continued toward the boats. Walls of water prevented us from going fast.

As we neared the two sailboats, we did not see any activity in the dismasted boat and one person in the boat with the ripped main was standing up and pointing in a vague direction off to the southeast. In one hand he waved a handheld radio. When we got close enough to hear him and to realize that there was only one man, not two, in each of the sailboats, his signal made sense. “There are two men in the water. We’re okay. Go find them.”

Search

Clearly, the men on the disabled boats had lost sight of their teammates. We hailed the Race Committee and went off on search mission. At one point, we thought we had sited one of them. (We did not know that they were drifting together. We thought that we were searching for two individual men overboard.) It was nothing more than a buoy marking a lobster pot. We headed south and west, toward the boats that were heading upwind toward the weather mark. Nothing. Other powerboats arrived on the scene and began reporting ages of the men and other details over the radio. One was wearing a life jacket. The other one was not.

The search went on. Nothing. Just when I had given up all hope and had radioed the Race Committee that we really should elevate the search and alert the authorities, they came over the radio and said that the men had been found.

Rescue

An Olympic coach, who was supporting one of the top teams at the regatta, picked up the men overboard. The coach was in a RIB, had safety equipment and even had a radio. Picking his way through the waves while going up the left side of the racecourse, he was completely stunned to see two men adrift. During the first day of the regatta, he spent time searching for the radio channel that the Race Committee was using and found it. When he tried to tune in during the second day of the regatta and all was silent, he didn’t bother to spend time trying to find the secret channel.

As we towed the boat with the shredded main back to shore, rescue boats streamed out of the harbor. They checked on us and checked on the other combination of towboat and dismasted boat. They had been monitoring various radio channels and mobilized.

The race continued. The weather mark boat tried to identify which teams were deemed black flagged and continued to sail. At least one hypothermic sailor was delivered to the Committee Boat.

Redress

The Jury and the Race Committee heard testimony. They poured through documents well into the night and missed the midweek prize giving dinner and the promise by a representative of the regatta organizing committee that safety issues would be addressed.

Elevated safety measures were effected for the remainder of the regatta. Throughout that time, there was a nagging feeling that if conditions suddenly deteriorated and several sailboats were disabled at once, would we have chaos or would we have enough eyes watching, manpower and equipment to assist and assure safety.

Reassessment

The Class had banned the use of coach boats earlier in the year and ISAF had overruled the decision. ISAF is reviewing the class’ petition to effect the ban.

At a recent non-Olympic Class world championship, I asked several of the members of the top teams including the coaches what they thought about the issue. After all, in that class sponsorship for a multi-year Olympic campaign is not a factor. The people racing in that class are doing it for the joy of sailing, the thrill of competition and the sake of improving.

A multi-time North American champion and arguably one of the best crews in that and any other class, said among many other solid arguments, “The boss wants to know he’s safe.” That boss and some other bosses with similar sailing programs, insist on having a safety boat nearby. In the scheme of things, it doesn’t cost much more to have the trained eyes of a coach onboard their safety boat also. Accidents will happen on the water, even with those programs, but they are comforted to know that a skilled helmsman in a RIB with twin outboards, a radio and safety gear is prepared to render assistance immediately.

Hopefully, the day won’t come when in addition to having safety gear on board the racing sailboat, having proof of insurance to be eligible to compete, having organizing authorities amply insured and having disclaimers about sailing at your own risk, each of us won’t have to resort to having our personal safety vessel follow us.

We must, however, be safety conscious and establish safety procedures for running races, for on the water communications and for rendering assistance. No matter what we do, accidents will happen, but with the proper use of PFD’s, radios, race committee boats, assistance vessels, coach boats, media boats and spectator boats our community should be able to keep this sport fun, safe and fair.

I don’t ever want to have to publish an article that is a firsthand account of deaths on the racecourse by drowning. Yesterday, I composed one that thankfully, never made it to the keyboard.

How Did Two Men End Up in the Water?

The sea state and wind shifts did a very good job of separating the fleet on the first beat. Crews in the top of the fleet bounced up from their droop hiking positions, wiped the salt out of their eyes and set straight to work preparing for a jibe after rounding the offset mark. Skippers found the crests of waves and used the speed to roll right into a quick and controlled jibe. The further back in the rounding order the boats were, the more tentative the maneuver. Apparently, boat 60’s jibe swept the skipper off of the boat. The boat spun out of control and the whisker pole went through the main sail. The crew faced quite a challenge to regain any semblance of control of the boat. In the meantime, his skipper’s inflatable life vest did not deploy automatically and he did not know that it could be inflated manually.

Boat 68 noticed that boat 60 was having difficulties near the mark, but did not realize that a man had gone overboard. With boats ahead of them and boats trailing, the crew of boat 68 headed downwind. They eased the runners to let the mast go forward and the mast snapped. As they assessed the situation in their boat and started to clean up their own mess they took note of hull 60 about 50 yards to one side of them. About ten yards on the other side of them a head bobbed. It was barely above the surface. They asked if the man overboard needed help and the desperate and urgent “YES” set them into action. They wrested a spare PFD free and tried to toss it to the man overboard. It was as if they had spit into the wind. The PDF landed back in their boat. With no way to get their boat close to the man overboard, the crew dove in with the spare life vest and swam it to the man overboard.

The man overboard calmed down and the two remained clinging to one another. Their crewmates made attempts to maneuver their boats toward them, but nothing worked. The boats moved faster and in different directions than the drifting men. Well before the first powerboat arrived on the scene, the men on the distressed sailboats had lost sight of the men in the water.

Fortunately, the water was warm. Afterward, the hero of the story, Kevin Elterman, who loves the water and loves to surf, said, “It was all dumb luck. If we hadn’t broken our mast, we never would have seen him and he probably would have gone under. He had about five minutes left in him without the life vest.” As for going unnoticed for so long, Kevin said, “We never thought that we would be lost. We knew that the fleet was coming back up to us and were confident that someone would spot us.” Whether they were in the water for 15 minutes or 45 minutes seems irrelevant. We were lucky this time. There is plenty to consider and room for improvement on all of our parts.