Ocean Racing and Maritime Roadkill
A lot of the current Vendée Globe’s competitors have hit submerged objects, and in quite a few cases the collision has caused enough damage to force them to retire - thousands of miles later, if not immediately.
Sometimes these objects were inanimate and probably man-made, but quite a few seem to have been large marine mammals. More than one skipper has reported with great sadness the evidence of leaving a severely wounded creature in his wake.
A big ship wouldn’t notice such a collision unless the beast got wrapped across its bow, so we don’t really know how many times they hit whales and other creatures - but the noise and disturbance the ships cause probably warns them in time for them to get out of the way. The underwater part of a fast-moving Ocean 60 or 70 makes very little fuss (except for a sometimes infernal shriek from daggerboards with minor imperfections). The narrow, ultra-thin, deep keel must seem like a giant boning knife slicing through the water.
If I asked a random group of 30 cars to keep records during a year of driving around country roads and motorways, I would be surprised to find that a third of them had run over some creature during that period. I’d be even more surprised to find that a quarter of them had been severely damaged in the process. At that rate, our roads would be plastered with vastly more roadkill than they already are, so it looks as if the yachting situation demands serious attention.
People used to bump into things with traditional displacement yachts, but they were travelling more slowly and their keels didn’t resemble butchers’ knives, so large marine mammals probably suffered no more than a nasty bruise.
It’s no good just blaming it on reckless racing types, though. There’s a bigger gap between racing and cruising boat performance now than there was thirty years ago, but cruising boat design will always follow racing developments to some extent. We should never see cruisers driven to the level where a couple of wipeouts in the open ocean are a normal part of a typical day’s entertainment, but there are already plenty that surf downwind.
What can we do to reduce the likelihood of collision? The obvious solution is to make sure that sea creatures can hear us coming, and are motivated to get out of the way rather than get curious.
While I was in upstate New York, which has a large population of white-tail deer - an animal that you wouldn’t want to bump into, even at 55mph in a big pickup - I often saw vehicles fitted with a tiny device that emitted a supersonic shriek at highway speeds. I don’t know if it actually reduces the chance of hitting a deer, but if it does then perhaps we should consider an equivalent underwater device for fast sailing boats.
Unfortunately there’s still the problem of hitting trees, containers, railway sleepers (railroad ties) and other inanimate objects which are more rigid than any living creature. In the wake of the Vendée Globe - and, to a lesser extent so far, the Volvo Ocean Race - the class associations will be trying to think up rule changes that will reduce the chances of a boat being disabled by hitting a big underwater object. We’ll see what they come up with.
