A sailboat en route from the Galapagos Islands to French Polynesia has sunk after colliding with a whale. In barely fifteen minutes the boat had disappeared under water. The four crew members quickly managed to transfer to a lifeboat. Ten hours later they were rescued.
On March 13, day 13 of a sailing trip that would normally take three weeks, disaster struck for the crew of Raindancer, a 13.5-meter sailboat. At about 1:30 p.m., as the foursome were enjoying lunch, they heard a loud bang. “The back half of the boat went violently up and to starboard,” said Rick Rodriguez, the boat’s owner.
The other crew members lost their balance because of the loud bang and just saw that a whale had hit the boat. Crew member Alana Litz saw a giant whale that was at least as long as the boat. Presumably it was a Bryde’s whale, a type of fin whale. According to Rodriguez, the animal bled when it submerged again.
An alarm sounded five seconds after impact with the whale: the boat was flooding with seawater. The crew members immediately sprang into action. Rodriguez broadcast a distress call over the VHF radio, transmitting a distress signal that relayed his position to a global rescue network.
The rest of the crew collected food, emergency equipment and drinking water, and launched their lifeboat and dinghy. There was no time to take their passports with them. There was, however, on board the small boat enough water for a week, food for three weeks and a device that collects rainwater.
emergency call
The team also managed to secure a phone, a satellite Wi-Fi hotspot and an external battery, all of which were undercharged. Rodriguez immediately sent a message to Tommy Joyce, a friend who was traveling the same route on another sailboat and was about 150 miles away. “Tommy, this is not a joke. We hit a whale and the ship sank,” he wrote. Rodriguez’s brother received a similar message, saying, “Tell Mom it’ll be okay.” He then turned off the phone for several hours to save battery life. Two hours later, he received a reassuring message from Joyce: “We’ve got you, mate.”
There was never really much fear that we were in danger. Everything was under control, as far as possible for a sinking boat
Rescue operation
The Raindancer crew was lucky to have more than 20 sailboats heading in the same direction for the World ARC sailing competition at the same time. Finally, after about ten hours of floating, the foursome were picked up by the Rolling Stones, a sailboat led by Captain Geoff Stone. He had received Rodriguez’s emergency call through a friend and had organized a rescue with Joyce and the Peruvian authorities.
“There was never really much fear that we were in danger,” Rodriguez said The Washington Post. “Everything was under control, as far as that is possible for a sinking boat. But I count myself lucky and thankful that we were rescued so quickly. We were in the right place at the right time to sink,” he said. The crew is expected to dock in French Polynesia on Wednesday.
Collisions between boats and whales happen quite often. Since 2007, there have been 1,200 reports of boat-whale collisions. But according to the U.S. Coast Guard, it’s rare for collisions to cause major damage.
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