Cruising Sailors Forum Archive
...Than to come up from below after taking a nap off watch, and find your spouse or sailing partner GONE ?
Very sad news regarding the well-known voyager Pete Hill, perhaps best known for his cruising aboard his junk-rigged BADGER, with his previous wife Annie Hill - author of one of THE books on cruising on a small income...
Pete and Annie went their separate ways years ago, and he remarried... Sailing off the coast of South Africa last week, Pete went off watch for awhile, and somehow his wife Carly went overboard... A big search ensued, but she is obviously lost...
Here's a blog post from friends of the Hills, with more details of what occurred... Conditions were described as being only a Force 3 at the time, a perfect recipe for the possibility of letting one's guard down, and it seems unlikely she would have been wearing a tether in such moderate weather... I know I certainly would not have been doing so...
http://www.yachtmollymawk.com/2015/06/carly-hill-lost-overboard/
However, in reading of this tragedy, and looking at the various photos of ORYX, my first thought was this:
Could one POSSIBLY configure a multihull that might be easier for a sailor to fall off of?
Look at the pictures from Charlie's blog, how shallow that cockpit is, with no lifelines or stern rail whatsoever... Look at that pic from MOLLYMAWK's blog showing the group seated in the cockpit. That narrow 'transom board' well below the guy's knee represents the back of the boat, that's it... What would one hold onto in that cockpit, other than aft edge of the cabin top? Perhaps there's something hidden in that pic, but I don't see any indication of something like a folding padeye or similar jackline or tether attachment point anywhere... Could the sweep of the tiller knocked her off her feet, perhaps?
We'll never know what happened, of course, but looking at this thing, I can't help but think that the overall design and deck ergonomics/lack of cockpit security might have played a huge role in this tragedy... For a sailor with the vast experience of Pete Hill, perhaps the design of that boat was perfectly safe, for HIM... But for a partner of lesser experience and comparatively new to sailing as Carly was, perhaps not so much for HER...
What a sad story, I can't imagine...
Messages In This Thread
- Can there possibly be a more horrifying scenario for a cruising couple...?
