Skipper’s 80-knot storm rescue
British solo skipper Ian Herbert-jones, who was competing in the Golden Globe Race, was rescued on 11 April following an international search and rescue operation after his 35-footer was violently rolled and dismasted in a South Atlantic storm.
Herbert-jones was approximately 900 miles north-east of the Falkland Islands when a severe low pressure system tracked over his position. Herbert-jones was at the time the last competitor in the solo ‘retro’ Golden Globe Race, sailing in the ‘Chichester’ division after previously making a stop in Tierra del Fuego to repair his steering gear.
Before the storm hit, Golden Globe Race organisers contacted Herbert-jones and advised him to sail south as fast as Puffin, his Tradewind 35 cutter, was capable of. “So I followed their advice and sailed south as fast as I could, but the barometer just kept falling,” he recalled in a video interview with race organisers after making landfall in Cape Town.
“This was after 219 days at sea, it wasn’t our first gale, it’s not Puffin and my first rodeo! It was building up but it was manageable. And then somebody flipped a switch. It was biblical, Old Testament fire and brimstone stuff.”
Wind battered
Puffin was battered by winds of over 50 knots, with wind forecasts for the area showing estimated gusts of 70-88 knots, and a sea state of 6.5-7.5m. “The boat was overpressed,” Herbertjones said. “I was down to bare poles and the steering system couldn’t cope with it, so I was hand-steering – or helping the windvane steering – but we were just tremendously overpressed and the boat kept rounding up, accelerating and getting laid flat on her side, taking tremendous amounts of water in the cockpit.”
Herbert-jones says he was twice washed out of the cockpit on his tether by the sheer volume of water sweeping the decks in confused cross seas. He issued a Pan Pan, and made a satellite call to race control.
“While we were on that call the boat got hit by a breaking wave: it was like being T-boned in a car accident. And a couple of seconds later I came to and she’d rolled, we’d capsized.
“My world changed in an instant. I just flipped from Golden Globe Race circumnavigation, on my way home, to survival mode. I knew my boat was in serious trouble.”
Puffin had been dismasted, a hatch had been blown open, and the cabin was awash with water, as well loose floorboards and items from broken lockers. Herbert-jones began working through the most immediate problems, including securing the hatch. “I also turned the bilge pumps off – which I know is counter intuitive
but I wanted to know if I had water ingress. And I started manually pumping while processing what to do next.”
Herbert-jones activated his EPIRB, the SOS function on his YB tracker, and made a call to race control on his spare satellite phone. Initial attempts to request assistance for Herbertjones failed, with ships to the north-east unable to divert into the head seas.
The first offer of help came from a British fishing patrol vessel, Lilibet, from the Falklands, though the crew were still 30 hours away. Herbert-jones was undeterred: “I had high hopes of being rescued, but I fully expected to be there up to five days, I was at 46° south,” he said.
Soon after a nearer Taiwanese fishing vessel, the Zi Da Wang, diverted to Herbertjones’s position. Two further Taiwanese fishing vessels also diverted, and the British Lilibet was later stood down.
The Zi Da Wang arrived sooner than Herbertjones expected, the captain immediately manoeuvring the 76m ship upwind of the disabled Puffin.
“The skipper had brought her beam on to create a lee, and because I’d deployed the drogue I was sitting stationary. He was basically coming down onto me, which is absolutely terrifying. It’s a big boat, and it’s basically a controlled crash,” he explained.
Leap to safety
“The big challenge was we had no communication, so I had to guess what the skippers’ plan was, and it all happened really fast,” he said. “I could see the whole crew, 56 faces looking down at me, but no ladder.”
A crewmember threw two lines to Herbertjones, and after several attempts he was able to secure Puffin at bow and stern. “By then the boats were banging into each other in the swell. What was truly dreadful was that Puffin was turning as if she was going to go under the hull.
“Then a ladder came down the side of the ship, eventually that lined up with Puffin amidships and I just had to pick my moment to jump on the roll of the waves. I think I took one or two steps before the guys grabbed me and pulled me up, and I was on the deck surrounded by happy faces.
He had no time to scuttle Puffin. “We’d let Puffin go. The ship’s bosun still had the line, and I just nodded, she had to go. They cut the lines, that was that. It’s not a boat, it’s more than a boat, she’s my friend and she kept me safe.”