Catamaran aground on Niue

[IslandHopper]

Originally Posted by BobHorn

Wouldn't the use of radar be more accurate than just a chartplotter?

There is a radar on the vessel, for sure if the radar was on and it was functioning correctly, and the operator knew how to use it, it would have picked up that part of the coastline long before hitting it.....

What actually happened? we will just have to wait and see......

[Jim Cate]

Then this route must be displayed on a screen visible to the helmsperson and the ship's position and path constantly monitored to ensure that winds or currents or anything is nor carrying the vessel away from your planned route.

It is obviously a miracle that any of us old guys are alive today, Fred, for we sure didn't do any of that constant monitoring of a screen back when we used celestial, then when we used Loran and Transit and then when we used stand alone GPS receivers.

I think your requirements are a bit OTT. Preplanning a passage is a great idea and gives a starting point for your navigation. But just as battle plans unravel when the first gun is fired, cruising plans morph a lot, and slavishly following a set of waypoints, except in a few circumstances, is unnecessary IMO and in my experience.

For sure these poor guys failed to keep adequate watch... the exact mechanism is yet to be discovered.

Jim

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by Jim Cate

It is obviously a miracle that any of us old guys are alive today...

...I think your requirements are a bit OTT.

Yeah those earlier comments made me chuckle too.

As we see here, people still run aground these days, even with a modern boat and all the navigational toys.

So another reminder that it is not really about the boat, or the toys. It's about the crew and their level of diligence.

How capable a vessel is to make a certain passage can expand or contract quite significantly depending on the ability of the crew.

[b_rodwell]

Yeeees!

With Lainie I am the owner, I am the skipper and I was on watch when it happened.

A lot of views have been expressed about what happened. This includes the Police chief from Niue who does not agree with me.

My views are different. I don't want to state my position right now. I want to assemble more facts to support what ever I say. The relevant facts should be available. Right now I have no working credit cards, no phone and no computer of mine to support my research. I also have a few other things to attend to. It might take me a while to do this research.

I want to report to the cruising community and anyone else that should know. I would like you to be patient and wait before making conclusions.

Thanks

Brian

[B23iL23]

Brian,
thanks for the post. No matter what the reason or cause - I wasn't there so will never express a view. So sorry you lost the boat and your dreams - it's a disaster for everyone involved. If you find something that's helpful to the rest of us out there, come back and let us know so we can all learn from it.



thanks

Originally Posted by b_rodwell

Yeeees!

With Lainie I am the owner, I am the skipper and I was on watch when it happened.

A lot of views have been expressed about what happened. This includes the Police chief from Niue who does not agree with me.

My views are different. I don't want to state my position right now. I want to assemble more facts to support what ever I say. The relevant facts should be available. Right now I have no working credit cards, no phone and no computer of mine to support my research. I also have a few other things to attend to. It might take me a while to do this research.

I want to report to the cruising community and anyone else that should know. I would like you to be patient and wait before making conclusions.

Thanks

Brian

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by b_rodwell

Yeeees!

With Lainie I am the owner, I am the skipper and I was on watch when it happened.

Thanks for your post. Sorry for your predicament. Look forward to updates.

[Group9]

I was reading a book about PT boats in WW2 and at the end, there was an addendum with the final disposition of every single PT boat. I was pretty surprised to see that for the boats in the Pacific, reefs destroyed more of them than the Japanese. Of course, they were operating almost exclusively at night.

One of the skippers, who had contributed to the book had commented how he was looking at one of his charts, and saw in the notations, that it was from data gathered by Captain Cook.

[wingssail]

Originally Posted by Jim Cate

It is obviously a miracle that any of us old guys are alive today, Fred, for we sure didn't do any of that constant monitoring of a screen back when we used celestial, then when we used Loran and Transit and then when we used stand alone GPS receivers.

I think your requirements are a bit OTT. Preplanning a passage is a great idea and gives a starting point for your navigation. But just as battle plans unravel when the first gun is fired, cruising plans morph a lot, and slavishly following a set of waypoints, except in a few circumstances, is unnecessary IMO and in my experience.

For sure these poor guys failed to keep adequate watch... the exact mechanism is yet to be discovered.

Jim

Our hearts go out for those sailors whose lives and dreams have been wrecked along with the boat, and I, in no way, am commenting on what they did wrong or right, we don’t know.

As to your point, yes, for sure, it is not necessary to keep your eyes glued to a screen when crossing an ocean, however having that screen available for periodic checking is valuable even if there are no islands around, for multiple reasons.

I never took for granted that we would survive “in the old days’. I can tell you that night sailing through the Tuomotus, or flying past Taveuni in Fiji, or even approaching Opua after a rough passage from the islands, put me on high alert. Only my skills and some luck kept us off the rocks, or so I imagined, and I was ever thankful for daylight. Even then, in daylight, the Tuomotus were scary. Relying on a plotted running position on paper seemed fraught with unpleasant possibilities. Getting a chart plotter system on the PC was, for me, a breakthrough.

Perhaps it has gotten too easy for a family to buy a nice, big, comfortable boat, and to head off cross oceans. Some fear based survival instinct perhaps has not been developed. Two years ago Tanda Malaika ran up on Huahine and was lost under similar circumstances. There have been several others lost or damaged in recent years. I had NO problems finding five for my presentation on navigation techniques including, Moonshadow, (Deerfoot, twice, under different owners), Crystal Blues 53’ well found and well sailed, yet hit rocks on USA East coast, Danika, Westsail 43’ owned by Alaska pilot, Maluhea, 37’ and of course Tanda Malaika, and now this one. I think there are many others. In ALL cases that I have investigated the crews failed to do route pre-planning and route following, and they sailed exactly onto the rocks while thinking they were safe.

Yes, maybe the odds of it happening to any one yacht are not high; it is not common considering how many boats are doing crossings, but scary enough that we should utilize the best available tools and techniques, and that includes route planning and keeping track our course and position, in my opinion.

I really hope that the experienced sailors who we take as mentors will promote this technique.

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by wingssail

As to your point, yes, for sure, it is not necessary to keep your eyes glued to a screen when crossing an ocean, however having that screen available for periodic checking is valuable even if there are no islands around, for multiple reasons.

The first part was what made me initially chuckle, but now with the further clarification I totally agree.

Originally Posted by wingssail

Perhaps it has gotten too easy for a family to buy a nice, big, comfortable boat, and to head off cross oceans. Some fear based survival instinct perhaps has not been developed.

This I totally agree with too, it has become very easy. But then when it does go wrong, it goes totally wrong because the skills haven't been developed.

Certainly in the past the fear of not really being totally sure where you were absolutely created some survival instinct. The consequences of a mistake were quite high.

This fear factor seems to have been somewhat lost with the pretty boat shape moving on the map - "see, I know where I am, it shows me right there!"...

This can easily bring about a loss of what I would call situational awareness. Thinking you are sure of your position, but ignoring other factors that clearly indicate you are not.

[jmh2002]

I went back and reread your earlier post because there were a lot of words and I think I just skimmed over it quicker than I should have.

Originally Posted by wingssail

Create your route in a zoomed out mode then zoom in and inspect it in detail for small errors or dangers which might have been masked by the level of zoom. You will need the capability to adjust waypoint positions after you have created your original route.

Yes, 300% very important. But it is standard practice isn't it?
(clearly not I guess from the reports of hitting 'uncharted objects')

Originally Posted by wingssail

When I review wrecks of underway vessels the most common cause is failure to plan a safe route ahead of time, or subsequently, failure to follow said route. Too often a pilot or watch-stander is, at best, monitoring a moving chart display without a pre-planned route and misjudges whether or not their position and heading was safe. I'll repeat: Virtually every underway wreck I've investigated has been caused by failure to plan a safe route ahead of time, or subsequently, failure to follow said route.

I missed the actual simple points of your findings. You mean:

- Crew are sailing off into the wild blue without a plotted route?

- Crew are not monitoring that they are following this plotted route?

Well I'm surprised since that is pretty much the basics of navigation. You can't do much less than that and still be navigating (as opposed to just 'steering').

Also these days with all the electronic navigation aids, doing both of the above is ridiculously easy compared to the old days, so there is really no excuse for sailors not to be doing it.

Originally Posted by wingssail

I really hope that the experienced sailors who we take as mentors will promote this technique.

Agreed. And additionally to promote basic 'situational awareness', which all sailors used in the past as part of the Route Monitoring process.

- Look out and around you, not only down at the chart or screen. Do your surroundings match what you expect compared to the chart?

- Look separately at the depth sounder, does it match the chart sounding?

- Why are there breaking waves over there? That doesn't seem right...

- Or the opposite, ok, there's the reef I expected, I can see the breaking waves.

- Why I can't I see the (island, lighthouse, channel, etc) yet?

- The sea state has increased, why? Did I expect this?

- Etc, etc.

Always be constantly confirming your position by different methods as part of the normal routine of sailing the boat.

I realise that these are fairly basic examples, but it seems that it is the basics that are often missing in a lot of cases.

[Maka]

looking forward to more details

[barnakiel]

Are we going now into yet another stupid CF exchange?


The island is there. You can see it on any general area paper chart. You can see it in Google Earth. You can see it on sailors fb pages. You can see it on 30 y.o. stolen CM charts.



It is there and if you hit it you either were not looking or you had a boat issue and could not control your track (no rudder, no mast, no engines, whatever).


My bet is it was the former. It is OK and I will be happy to lose this bet. No worries, mate.



If you pass it by in daylight, you can get closer after having a visual.



If you pass it by at night, you simply add a margin.


Maybe they made the same error I made back in 2006?


I used a wpt from some useless source, maybe Cornell's book or something. Then I forgot the wpt was at the W side of the island (we approached from the E). Good news we approached in daylight! But it could have ended otherway.


Plain navigator's mistake + bad practice. Like 90% of all sea accidents are due to human error in one form or another.


Good news sailors are fine. It will now cost them (or rather the insurer) some $$$ to clean up the mess from the coast.



Will be educating to read their first hand account.



Cheers,
b.

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by barnakiel

The island is there. You can see it on any general area paper chart. You can see it in Google Earth. You can see it on sailors fb pages. You can see it on 30 y.o. stolen CM charts.

It is there and if you hit it you either were not looking or you had a boat issue

[ArmyDaveNY]

Originally Posted by wingssail

Create your route in a zoomed out mode then zoom in and inspect it in detail for small errors or dangers which might have been masked by the level of zoom.

Remember the Vestas Wind. Same issue.


Please note I am not commenting on what happened in the Niue incident. I wish them well. I also want to thank Brian and Laine for their post and look forward to the accident report. There is always something to be learned or reinforced from these. Good luck Brian and Laine.

[wingssail]

Originally Posted by jmh2002

...- Crew are sailing off into the wild blue without a plotted route?

Yes, absolutely. In many cases they are sitting on a cockpit seat with a tablet on their lap looking at FB and occasionally glancing at Navionics to see if where they are looks safe, with NO pre-planned route. I've documented this over and over.

- Crew are not monitoring that they are following this plotted route?see above

Well I'm surprised since that is pretty much the basics of navigation. You can't do much less than that and still be navigating (as opposed to just 'steering').

Also these days with all the electronic navigation aids, doing both of the above is ridiculously easy compared to the old days, so there is really no excuse for sailors not to be doing it.it seems that it is the basics that are often missing in a lot of cases.

The problem is that it is so easy to do a minimal amount and get away with it that people get complacent. And when their friends all tell them that this is how they navigate also...well, people are sheep.