Yacht World News

A picture posted on the Volvo Ocean Race website shows the sad wreckage of Chris Nicholson’s Volvo 65 Vestas Wind that ran aground.

The nine-strong crew abandoned ship in the early hours of Sunday morning after the collision at 19 knots at 1510 GMT the previous day and waded through knee-deep water to a dry position on the reef.

They were picked up from there at daylight by a coastguard rib and taken to the nearby Íle du Sud.

The islet has very little communications with the outside world and the crew are awaiting transportation back to Mauritius. This is expected to happen within the next 24 hours.

The National Coast Guard of the Maritime Rescue Co-operation Centre (MRCC) of Mauritius took the pictures as part of its usual operations after such an incident.

All crew were uninjured.

In an interview that we posted earlier today, skipper Chris Nicholson suggested that there was little hope of recovering the boat.

“We’ve got all the videos and photos but can’t get them to the rest of the world at the moment. I’ll take them back with me and they [shore crew] can assess it, but unfortunately I’m pretty sure of the outcome,” he said.

This picture appears to show why and put an image to Nicholson’s graphic and harrowing account of the grounding. Here’s an excerpt of what he said.

“We knew there was shallow water on the other side of the reef in the lagoon side. The problem was that for most of the night we were just on the deep water side where the keel was jammed in the rocks on the deep water side and the boat was being beaten by those complete point break waves. We had to just hang on through that with the boat breaking up around us, and still we kind of literally found and landed our way just onto the reef. So even then we still couldn’t get off, not safely.

“And then towards daylight, like two hours just before daylight, the bulb broke off and the boat leaned over heavily. While that was happening we probably lost the back of the boat, it was gone, missing, and the deck started to fold and the boat was heeling over more so I made the decision that we were getting off.

“We’d already practiced deploying the jonbuoy off the back to see where it would drift to, its drift rate and we already deployed one life raft which was across the reef if we could get to it. We’d been practicing throughout the night how we were going to do it. We made the call and got on with the job.”

From earlier reports, shortly after the boat went aground, Nicholson described the boat’s orientation as being with the bow out to the sea. This appears to be the orientation of the boat in this picture.

The Medal Races concluded the inaugural ISAF Worldcup Final in Abu Dhabi, Arabian Gulf, yesterday. The participants were enthusiastic, not only because of the summery conditions with perfect winds, but also because of the prize money available for the first three in each event, i.e. US$ 10'000/6'500/3'500 for the podium. Olympic sailing is going professional !

The Medal Races had only a minor influence on the rankings. The winner in the 470 men were once more Matthew Belcher/Will Ryan AUS ahead of Panagiotis Mantis/Pavlos Kagialis GRE and Stuart McNay/David Hughes USA. Impressive the Austrians Schmid/Reichstädter AUT in this last race and as 4th overall, they missed the podium by 2 points only. Bargher/Mähr AUT won the Medal Race and finished 5th. Lara Vadlau/Jolanta Ogar AUT remained on top of the 470 women followed by Sophie Weguelin/Eilidh McIntyre GBR, winners of the Medal Race, and Ai Kondo/Miho Yoshioka JPN. Januszewski/Nowak POL celebrated their first win in an important event in the 49ers ahead of Paz/Paz ESP and Pink/Bithell GBR. Dominant winners in the 49ersFX were Alexandra Maloney/Molly Meech NZL with Ericson/Klinga SWE and Conti/Clapcich ITA on the positions 2 and 3. First ranked in the Finns was Vasilij Zbogar SLO closely followed by Ivan Klijakovic CRO and Caleb Paine USA. No surprise is the triple French podium in the Nacra 17 with Billy Besson/Marie Riou FRA Gold, Audrey Ogereau/Matthieu Vandame FRA Silver and Moana Vaireaux/Manon Audinet FRA Bronze. In the RS:X male windsurfers, the youngster Louis Giard FRA defended his lead against the Olympic medalists Byron Kokkalanis GRE and Nick Dempsey GBR. Byrony Shaw GBR dominated the RS:X female windsurfers ahead of Charline Picon FRA and Blanca Manchon ESP. In the Kiteboarders, the young Oliver Bridge GBR won the Final in front of Maxime Nocher FRA and Florian Gruber GER.