Hey Tom,

According to the navigator himself, sounds like it was very much a BIG component of what happened...

Emphasis mine:

Team Vestas Wind Navigator Wouter Verbraak Speaks Out (facebook.com)

Here is his post:

We finally have means of communications again, so a message is highly over due....

I am totally devastated and still in shock as the gravity of our grounding is slowly sinking in now that we are safely in Mauritius with finally some time to reflect on what happened.

We are very lucky that nobody was hurt, and a lot of that is credit to our team work in the seconds, minutes and hours after the crash.

I made a big mistake, but then we didn't make any others even though there were many difficult decision to be made and the situation was very challenging and grave indeed.

Once I can get power to the boats laptops (if they survived) I can look further into how we didn't see the reef on the electronic charts. I did check the area on the electronic chart before putting my head down for a rest after a very long day negotiating the tropical storm and what I saw was depths of 42 and 80m indicated. There is a very good article posted on http://blog.geogarag...ocean-race.html which highlights some of the zooming problem in the vectorised charts that we used.

I can assure you that before every leg we diligently look at our route before we leave and I use both Google Earth, paper charts and other tools. However, our planned route changed just before we left, and with the focus on the start and the tricky conditions, I erroneously thought I would have enough information with me to look at the changes in our route as we went along. I was wrong. I am not trying to make any excuses - just trying to offer up some form of explanation and answer to some of your questions.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this, which we hope will be able to relay in the time to come.

I am immensely grateful for all the support that we as a team, my family and myself have received from our wonderful friends, colleagues, family, Vestas, Powerhouse and Volvo. More over we are heavily in debt to the thorough support of Alvimedica throughout the first night, as well as the local fisherman and the coastguard of Ile du Sud in the atol. So I want to thank everybody so very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I am forever in your debt.

Wouter

I have only used a computer for navigating on one boat, a Trintella 50 I used to run a lot... it had about a 15-17" display down at the nav station. When he did the Bermuda Races, the owner had a subscription to Ocens (if memory serves), on which WX routing software could be overlaid on the chart... As one accustomed to using a stand-alone plotter for navigation alone, I hated it. I found the 'layering' of such additional information like satellite imagery, Gulf Stream imagery, and so on - as useful as it was for weather routing - rendered the function of the computer for navigation to be less than ideal for anything other than open ocean between Bermuda and New York... If there was a reef in between those places, I could easily imagine it becoming 'lost' in all the other information being displayed simultaneously on the monitor, especially when the navigator is so intensely focused on tactics and optimization of the boat's polars, etc, in the midst of such intensely close racing... It's impossible to overstate the sustained pressure these guys must be under, and how deeply fatigued they might become... On the first leg from Alicante to Capetown, for instance, the 2nd and 3rd place boats finished within MINUTES of each other... Can we even begin to imagine how hard those navigators/tacticians are working throughout the course of such tight competition?

It's also amazing to me, on boats of this size, how confined and cramped the nav stations have become.... There's barely enough room for a couple of laptops, that's about it... If there's one single thing this incident underscores for me, is the value of being able to step away from a 15 inch computer monitor, and get the Bigger Picture at a single glance by spreading out a full size paper chart...

best regards,

Jon