Quote:
Originally Posted by ontherocks83
Thank You for your post Rovin and I am sorry for the loss of your friend.
I would like to ask about the onset of the weather conditions. Basically how long had the weather and the waves been that bad? Did it build slowly over a day or two or are we talking about a few hours? At what point and why did you decide to put on survival suits and so on?
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Please remember there is larger story that surrounds this
accident not just that the we flipped a
lagoon 380 off of
Bermuda. That IS a whole other story that I may touch on later but I would like to get information go over what happened, what we did wrong and what we did right. I have gone over this for years and there are things that seem like they would happen some way but happened another so here we go.
We were in a strong low pressure system of 30-35kts consistent winds sailing towards
Bermuda for 3 1/2 days, over that time the waves built to 30' rollers. I have to say that the lagoon handled fair in these conditions and never felt like "we were in for it at any moment" but rather we sailed up the hillside, sat on top, then sailed down the other side. This went on from late early Friday through Monday.
We knew that there was an unusually fast approaching low pressure wave that came off the states at 40kts traveling.
It had extended all down the
east coast and with our weather reports we knew it was going to catch up with the system we were already in. And catch up it did.
Monday morning I came up from my
cabin with Steve saying "well you wanted to see some big waves well here ya go."
Bands of clouds would pass over pick up
wind speed drop torrential rain then the sun would come out. The problem was that with each successive "cloud band" for a lack of a better meteorological term, the winds would pick up and would not let off after the band would pass over. So the winds went from 30-35 consistent to 35-40, 40-45 and so on. This went on for for morning to early afternoon.
We had already the day before turned and were running but we were becoming blatantly overwhelmed. Monday at 12:05 I was sitting in the
salon on the settee looking back over our starboard quarter watching the waves starting to break with more and more frequency, volume and height. I was trying to not come to the inevitable realization that we were not going to make it out of this.
Just then I watched in silence as this wave rearing up over the others coming from the starboard quarter then would duck down and come up closer then before.
When it came to us the stern of the boat fell into the hole that was in front of it and I couldn't if I tried to see the top, my guess was 40+. Out the salon doors all I saw was a wall of water with white streaks going up and the the whole back of the boat exploded. We heeled within just a few degrees of going over then. Ole flew from the
galley down the port stairs and hit his
head on the wall down below, Steve held onto the starboard side of the
cabin, the salon doors blew open and about 300-350 gallons of water poured in the salon.
We came up on our side almost over then came down.
We almost went over then. 5 hours later we did.
We did not have survival suites, we weren't suppose to be there in the first place. I am skier and brought all of my technical mountain
gear which served me well.
Things we did wrong: we weren't suppose to be in the North Atlantic in
winter.
If you can find "BBC Inside Out news show from the UK about Reliance Yacht Management" you will get a better idea of why we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Kevin
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