Revealed: Search for sailor agony
Scallywag skipper David Witt has revealed how his friend and crew mate John Fisher lost his life during the Volvo Ocean Race. In an interview with another friend Geoff Waller, Australian Witt describes the moments which led to Fisher’s death in late March when Scallywag was battling cold and heavy seas 700 miles from Cape Horn.
Video captured the tragic moments with Fisher being hit by part of the mainsheet. Witt has watched it numerous times, analysing what occurred.
Witt says Scallywag had trouble motoring back to where the 47-year-old British sailor went overboard. He also details the flash of false hope the crew went through, the failure of the boat’s search system and how time stood still during the long and agonising search.
In the interview, posted on sailingillustrated.com, Witt says Scallywagg had sailed conservatively after fixing broken gear following the Auckland stopover.
“We had lost 100 miles [but] weren’t too worried about it because we knew what was going to happen with the weather, we knew there was going to be more carnage and a big high pressure system around the Horn — there was going to be a restart of the race,” he said. “We sailed probably the most conservative we have ever sailed, then the accident happened like two days later. We had all the right planning in place, it all went wrong on us.
“It was just a whole lot of things all went wrong at the same time, just one of those unfortunate things. It could have happened to me five minutes earlier.”
Witt said the wind lifted from 35 to 45 knots and Scallywag “went down a massive wave and the boat nose-dived”. The rudders came out of the water leaving the boat impossible to steer.
Witt said: “It happened to be at the same time Fish was forward trying to tie up a sheet or something . . . he sort of moved back, got into the wrong spot basically. When the boat gybed, the boom came across — the mainsheet got him on the back of the neck.
“The boom didn’t even get him, the boom is too high on these boats. It was a bit of the mainsheet at the wrong angle.
“I’ve watched [the video] quite a few times — I’m pretty confident he was dead before he hit the water. He actually ended up on the [sail] stack for a while. A wave came and he basically just rolled off the stack.”
Witt said he called out to Fisher and received no communication back.
Witt confirmed the AIS (automatic identification system) antennae had broken after leaving Auckland, so they could not locate Fisher via his personal beacon. He thought they had been searching for about three minutes and was told it was 31⁄ hours. Breaking point came when a potential sighting of Fisher turned out to be an albatross.
“There were pretty broken people,
I had four or five people crying.”
Witt said support from other teams “blew me away a bit”.
“Everyone realises it could happen to anyone, it could be them. It changes you,” he said.
“Our result was getting back in the race and having everybody in a sound mind and keen to keep going.”