With the Fastnet Race (from Cowes, UK, around Fastnet rock off Ireland and back to Plymouth) starting this weekend we’ve been thinking about the 1979 Fastnet Race storm. This was a watershed event in terms of yacht design and heavy weather thinking.
We were well into our circumnavigation when we first heard rumors of this blow upon arrival in Durban, South Africa. Having gone through three days of gales south and west of Madagascar (in which several yachts were rolled but made it to port on their own) our first thought was the stories of abandoned yachts, sinkings, and death must have been exaggerated.
But as the details began to filter in the story proved to be all too true. There have been many interesting books written on the subject, the best of which is John Rousmaniere’s Fastnet Force 10, and we have looked at it in our own Surviving the Storm. The boats which got into trouble were the product of a racing handicap rule gone astray and lack of preparation on the part of some of the crews.
There were numerous inquiries done, research projects commissioned, and suggestions for changes in the dominant IOR racing rule. And to a degree, there were some positive changes in the way yachts were designed and built for a while. Eventually the industry went back to designing and building what we call percentage boats, on the basis that the risks of a Fastnet 79 storm were so rare that it did not make economic sense to use this event as a baseline.
The impact on us was different. This race takes place in mid-summer, during a period of relatively stable atmosphere, yet there was a substantial weather event, which when combined with a shallow sea bottom and adverse currents, created yacht-destroying conditions. If it could happen here, it could happen elsewhere.
Prior to Fastnet 79 we had considered heavy weather in a theoretical context. We prepared for it, practiced tactics, and dealt with the odd gale or storm. But we never considered being caught in a deadly heavy weather scenario in a personal context. That period of ignorant bliss ended with this deadly race, and we’ve been trying to improve our odds ever since.
This started with taking a more formal approach to weather forecasting, something we’d done in an offhanded manner before. We began to look at the factors that could turn a normal sea state dangerous, such as current and bottom shape, and make voyaging plans accordingly.
We pushed harder on our passages realizing that the less time spent at sea, the less the risks.
Practice with heavy weather gear became more standardized, so we would know how to rig storm sails and drogues when the time came.
And as we got into designing our own yachts heavy weather capability became the bottom line.
So, here we are, 30 years later, a few miles from where this tragedy took place, with the Azores High expanding to provide what may well be too stable a meteorological environment. In the intervening years we’ve covered more than a quarter of millions miles at sea and been exposed to perhaps two days of potentially dangerous conditions. Do we still concern ourselves with stormy weather? No more or less than when the lessons of Fastnet 1979 started to sink in. We don’t obsess about it, but we try to know the risk factors and act accordingly
We want to make our passages quickly, have alternate destinations plotted, carry storm-size ground tackle systems, and want the best heavy weather characteristics in our yachts. We also take advantage of modern weather forecasting techniques, occasionally use a weather router for a second opinion, watch the atmospheric risk factors at the 500mb level, and try to minimize exposure with current and terrain influences on wave shape.
OK, enough of this heavy weather stuff. As mentioned, the Azores High is finally expanding, and we are expecting some nice weather in the UK. Let’s hope it stays this way for a while. We need to work on our tans.
Posted by Steve Dashew (August 7, 2009)
August 9th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Thanks, Skip. Here are my memories of the Fastnet storm:
The Fastnet Race Storm at 30, By John Rousmaniere
“Why didn’t you call your book Fastnet, Force 12?” my new friend half-asked, half-demanded. “Maybe it was blowing a mere Force 10 where YOU were, but not where I was.”
As our boat drifted around foggy Narragansett Bay last September, waiting for a starting gun, this shipmate and I reviewed some of the startling events that had been thrust upon us 3,000 miles to the east and half a lifetime ago, and that I’d written about in my book Fastnet, Force 10. We were not talking about a small difference in wind speed. In the Beaufort Scale of Wind Forces, Force 10 is in the 55-knot range, but Force 12 is in the realm of hurricanes—65 knots and more. For most sailboats 30 knots can be overwhelming.
Hair-raising tales of the 1979 Fastnet Race are told sometimes by acquaintances. My friend was in an American boat, a 64-footer, running at 20 knots toward the finish under number 4 jib alone when a crewmember decided she was carrying too much sail. They cut away that handkerchief – tack, sheet, and halyard – and watched it fly off through the dense cloud of thick spray suspended several yards above the sea. Other stories come through the interior voice of memory. With a shiver, I recall balancing precariously on the boom of a Swan 47 and tying in the third reef as she smashed toward Fastnet Rock with great wads of water simultaneously rising up from the sea and pouring down from the sail.
The Fastnet, our destination, is a ship-shaped lighthouse perched on a rock. It’s the outer turning mark in the odd-year 600-mile race that’s been run since 1925 from southern England to near Ireland and back again. Rarely easy, the race, with 303 boats, was hit in 1979 by a surprising, shockingly strong and unstable westerly blow, with gusts in the 60s and shifting constantly, and waves 30 feet and higher.
Boomerang, the 64-footer, and Toscana, my ride, came out of it with minimal damage. Not so lucky were the 100 or so boats that capsized or nearly so, the 24 boats that were abandoned, the five that sank, and the 15 sailors who died – all this in a sport whose total fatalities, until 1979, could be counted on two hands. For us in Toscana, the outlines of the calamity began to take shape on radio broadcasts as we ran home from the rock. Our navigator, John Coote, stuck his head up the companionway, paused for a few moments, and mournfully intoned words that I had never expected to hear when I first went to sea: “Men are dying out here.”
We did not feel the full thrust of the tragedy until after we finished at Plymouth, when Toscana approached a wharf crowded with silent, solemn women and men staring blankly out toward the Channel. On shore, I was approached by a man with an arm in a sling. Peter Johnson had sailed his boat and suffered the arm injury and broken ribs during three wild knockdowns, and now he was asking me to write a book about the race for his publishing house. The race was hard, but writing about it was harder. The seaman’s chores and the roll of the vessel are welcome distractions at sea, but on shore all is still, and the uneasiness planted by the sight of those people on the wharf grew with every interview with a survivor.
Back to hard facts, a proper question to ask is, “What’s the larger importance of the Fastnet storm?” My answer is that this is the watershed event in the long history of pleasure sailing, dating back almost 200 years. I don’t know of any other incident that has been both so catastrophic and so constructive in our sport – or, for that matter, in any sport.
The post-race review conducted by the Royal Yachting Association and the Royal Ocean Racing Club gathered more solid information about the behavior of boats and sailors in extreme weather than had ever existed through generations of anecdotes and cruise narratives. Building on this enormous data base, the boating industry and several non-profit organizations came up with the Lifesling, new rescue techniques, better safety harnesses, and other valuable innovations. Towing-tank tests of boat stability, heavy-weather steering, and storm tactics were run by the U.S Yacht Racing Union (now the U.S. Sailing Association), the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and the Wolfson Unit in England. The Cruising Club of America produced a manual on offshore design and gear, Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts, with chapters by Olin and Rod Stephens, Jim McCurdy, Bill Lapworth, Tom Young, and other leading sailors and designers of that era. When Olin wrote, “Some modern ocean racers, and the cruising boats derived from them, are dangerous to their crews,” people paid attention, and rating rules were improved.
Regulations and gear can’t solve every problem, which is why one of the most important developments in the wake of the 1979 Fastnet was that large numbers of sailors finally began to talk about safety – until then the elephant in the yacht club – at safety at sea seminars and other forums. Talking leads inevitably to stories, stories attract people’s attention, and so, as long as there are veterans of that wild August night telling those stories, lessons will be learned.