Photo: Bob Aylott
On April 1, Sarah Young was swept from the cockpit of the yacht IchorCoal sailing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Clipper Round the Word Race. By the time the crew reached her, she had died. She was wearing a life-jacket with an AIS locator device but she had not been tethered to the boat. Many have commented that being tethered might have saved her life.
On the other hand, going overboard without being clipped in is not necessarily a death sentence. In the previous Clipper Race in 2014, Andrew Taylor, 46, from London, a crew member on Derry–Londonderry–Doire yacht fell overboard in the Pacific, untethered, and was rescued safely after ninety minutes in the water.
What was different between the two cases? No doubt, many things, including luck. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and small differences in conditions and circumstances can mean the difference between life and death.
Unfortunately, being clipped in doesn’t necessarily guarantee safety either. In 2011, Christopher Reddish, captain of the Reflex 38′Lion died after being washed overboard while working on the foredeck. He was tethered to a jackstay and wore a life jacket. The crew got Reddish back aboard within about 16 minutes, by which time, he had drowned.
Ben Meakins writing in Practical Boat Owner notes, “The tragic drowning of the skipper of the Reflex 38 Lion 15 miles south of Selsey Bill in 2011 shocked the sailing world. But the subsequent Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) report was truly chilling because it emerged that Mr. Christopher Reddish (47) had done everything by the book. He was wearing a lifejacket and he was clipped on with a tether, or safety, line – but when he went overboard from the foredeck on a dark night he was dead by the time the crew could recover him.”
Unfortunately, the events of the Lion are not entirely unique. The MAIB report noted four other cases where sailors tethered to their boats were incapable of getting back aboard, even with crew assistance. In one case, two sailors and the captain were washed off a 35′ yacht after being hit by a swell while entering port. The sailors were tethered to the boat and subsequently drowned. The captain who was wearing neither a life jacket nor a safety harness survived.
Returning to the tragedy on the Lion, if the captain and crew were doing everything right, why did the captain drown? The MAIB noted that the captain was wearing a 1.8-meter long tether. If he had been wearing a shorter tether, he may not have been washed over the side.
Once the captain was washed overboard, why didn’t the tether save him? It appears, tragically, that the tether may have contributed to the drowning.
In August 2015, Robin Knox-Johnston, Chairman and Founder of the Clipper Round the World Race, invited MAIB and Yachting Monthly aboard one of his Clipper 60 cutters, Black Adder, to test man-overboard procedures using a life-size dummy. In a simulation similar to what happened on the Lion, the results were grim.
The dummy was heaved overboard from the foredeck while the boat was sailing at around 4 knots through the water. The tether held the dummy’s head face down, into the boat’s oncoming bow wave. Water would be funnelled directly down the throat, drowning the casualty in a few minutes.
The situation was not markedly better if the dummy went overboard from the cockpit.
When the dummy went overboard from the cockpit while the boat was sailing downwind, it was dragged through the boat’s wake, which would soon have caused drowning in a real-life situation.
The MOB tests done on Black Adder are described by Yachting World in MOB lifesaving lessons learned at sea. It is well worth reading.
Is all this to say that safety harnesses with tethers should not be used? Of course not. The immediate lessons appear to be that one should keep clipped to the high side when moving about and try to keep the tether as short as is practical. The goal is to stay aboard the boat at all costs.
The longer term lessons seem to be that more work is needed on man-overboard procedures and training, as well as improved safety gear overall. When sailing offshore, we are not as safe as we might think we are or as we need to be.
A tether might not have saved her but it would have added to her chances of survival.
It’s human nature to become fixated on failures of safety systems while forgetting the other side of the statistics. Seatbelts: “I might be trapped,” trimmed with an anecdote*, while ignoring the vast number of positive outcomes.
Stats on tether systems are of course more sparse than those for other systems but in between are PFDs, where we see much of the same cognitive fallibility displayed.
Offered sincerely and with no irony. Science tells us about these pitfalls in our reasoning.
And as with wearing a self-inflating PFD inside the cabin, tethers can go wrong in use, or perhaps it’s safer to say that once a tether has failed to keep a crewmember on board it needs to be disposed of immediately. This is akin to stirrups when riding a horse: vitally helpful to a seated rider but possibly a hazard when their capabilities are swamped.
In response to the dragging situations described by Rick where a tether has done its all but failed to keep a crewmember on the boat, tether manufacturers and sailing organizations have responded with vastly improved releasing mechanisms, designed to be used one-handed and under the stress of the possible hundreds of pounds imposed on the shackle while being towed.
As Rick concludes and as Sir Knox-Johnston obviously still believes per his remarks in the Clipper Race crew manual, despite the edge-case failure modes of tethers they’re still a Very Good Thing.
*quite possibly apocryphal
Why not adjustable-length tethers? So you really can’t go over the side… http://sailingauklet.com/2014/03/23/safety-tethers/
Life Jacket, and AIS…maybe a head trauma occurred.
-No Life Jacket, Drown Proofing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownproofing
To me, this highlights the inadequacy of the protocol/compliance-based approach to maritime safety currently embraced by most regulatory agencies, captains, and sail-training programs. Sailors should be taught to embrace that they are engaged in an activity which is inherently dangerous and fraught with risk, and that no equipment or set of protocols can change that. Life jackets, tethers, and other devices can all be part of sensible risk-mitigation, but their use alone in rigid procedures will never guarantee safety. Protocol/compliance-based approaches train sailors to think that if they have followed procedures they are safe. This is not the case, and should neither be how we train sailors to think nor how experienced sailors think ourselves. Risk mitigation and contingency planning must be active, ongoing thought processes which sailors perform as an aspect of every move made aboard. New sailors should be taught to look for risk factors in all situations and think critically about how to minimize their exposure. For example, in some cases the decreased mobility which result from wearing a PFD will pose a greater risk to safety than the potential harms it mitigates. Sometimes the ability to change locations quickly is a better guarantor of safety than being clipped in. These are judgement calls which sailors should be trained to make for themselves with the understanding that their safety is ultimately their own responsibility and no one else’s.