Make it a big one!

The PTSD has started to wane and I am able to write about this. Not long after the start of the last race of the 2022-2023 Twilight season at GFS we had a sizable prang with our friends on Aetos. Fortunately damage was limited to the two yachts.

We lost the subsequent protest and to this day I still believe it was the wrong decision, OK I know that is a typical response, but a third boat in the incident made a water call on Aetos, that call I still consider as a call made way too early, in my defense a boat of the same design passed between it and the obstruction (moored boats) at about the same time as their call.

I had made a decision to tack and pass back between Aetos and the third boat then coming back onto the wind behind Aetos. There was room, albeit limited if the two other boats maintained their course, in the process of performing that maneuver I missed the fact that he third boat had made and acted on their water call.

The concept of perspective does come into effect here and I must admit that the three skippers probably see the legality and appropriateness of the actions that were taken to be the correct actions. Obviously the three differing action were contrary to each other.

Below is a video of the incident taken from Aetos I thank Christian Charalambous for making this available, on viewing it again (after all this time) I am still unsure of what was a correct outcome, I do caution viewers that videos can conflate and inflate distances and blur perspectives, while I still believe the protest decision against us was not the correct one but I am willing to accept that in the eyes of a learned protest committee we were in the wrong and the only boat to be deemed thus.

Of more importance is that we have remained friends with all concerned and have left “what happened on the water on the water”. It also makes a point that is not immediately obvious, in that I believe that the three (skippers) of us made decisions as to what we needed to do in the circumstances and stuck by those decisions, when a last minute (second?) re consideration by even just one of us could have avoided this and down-graded the incident from a physical one to just an on water (noisy) rule discussion.  The ability to make these last minute decisions is one of those aspects that separates us mere mortals from the sport’s elite.

As post scrip to this; subsequent to the repairs to G-whizz we commissioned a survey of the repairs, that survey discovered damage from a grounding that occurred some 2 years prior, repairs to that damage has taken some 9 months to repair, but more of that soon but in the mean time big thank you to:
Mitch Buckingham at Buckingham Marine Services
Jason Neuhaus at Diverse rigging 
and probably a surprise to most Club Marine Insurance who have been most understanding and supportive through this entire process.