Recently the containership MOL Empire passed an abandoned sailboat in the mid-Atlantic around 1,500 nautical miles away from Jersey. The captain emailed photos of the boat to the Cross Jobourg Coastguard in France which was able to identify it as the Service Civique. The boat had been sailed in the 2018 Rum Route by Claire Pruvot. In mid-November, Ms. Pruvot was forced to abandon the race and her boat after a collision with a freighter. She was rescued by the cargo ship. 

Ms. Pruvot’s is not the only derelict racing boat known to be adrift on the oceans.  In the Golden Globe Race, Indian Naval Commander Abhilash Tomy’s sailboat Thuriya, was dismasted in a Southern Ocean storm last September,  seriously injuring Commander Tomy. After a dramatic rescue of the stricken sailor, the Indian Navy announced that it planned on salvaging Thuriya.  Before the attempt got underway, however, Thuriya’s tracking beacon went dark, probably after its batteries ran down. Unless the boat has sunk in the meantime, she is still adrift somewhere in the Southern Ocean. 

Another Golden Globe racer Gregor McGuckin was also dismasted and abandoned his boat, Hanley Energy Endurance, in the same storm which injured Commander Tomy. As of early January, a team was attempting to salvage not just McGuckin sailboat but also its cargo, a cask of 7-year-old Glendalough porter cask-finished single malt whiskey. The idea was that the seven months at sea during the race would improve the quality of the single malt. 

Whether or not the salvage operation will get underway is so far unclear. Glendalough is offering 1,000 euros—and a bottle of the whiskey—for the return of the cask. The backers are looking for additional funding.

We recently posted about the reappearance of Abby Sunderland’s boat, Wild Eyes, which was abandoned in 2010. The yacht didn’t sink because the Open 40 Class design was built with flotation making the hull virtually unsinkable. The yacht was abandoned in the Indian Ocean and reappeared eight years later off Australia’s Kangaroo Island, over 3,000 nautical miles from where it was abandoned.

Of course, derelicts are nothing new. Some of the most dangerous derelicts were lumber schooners from the late 1880s. Even when overwhelmed by the seas and abandoned by their crews, the cargoes of lumber often kept the schooners just barely afloat. 

As we posted a few years ago, in 1885 the three-masted tern schooner Twenty One Friends carrying a full load of lumber was abandoned after a collision with another ship off Cape Hatteras. The ship continued to be spotted for the next two years on either side of the Atlantic before she finally drifted ashore off Ireland. Remarkably, her cargo was salvaged and the schooner repaired. She spent several more productive years as a fishing vessel. 

Another interesting case was that of the three-masted lumber schooner Fannie E Wolston which was abandoned off Cape Hatteras in 1891. She was observed by dozens of other ships over the next three years. According to these observations, the schooner drifted almost due east, then south-east during the first year. For the next year, she drifted in circles in the mid-Atlantic before drifting west again, did one more loop before drifting north and east, finally seeming to ride the current of the Gulf Stream before finally being sighted for the last time on October 21, 1894. It is estimated that she drifted almost 9,000 nautical miles before she finally disappeared.