Volvo Ocean Race- Chris Nicholson Interview - Part 2 - On the Rocks

by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World.com on 17 Dec 2014 Part 2 of three part, 80 minute, interview with Team Vestas Wind skipper, Chris Nicholson on the wrecking of the Volvo Ocean Race yacht on an idyllic atoll in the South Indian Ocean during the night of November 29. In this part, Nicholson covers what happened from the time the Volvo65 hit the reef on the SE corner of the Cargados Carajos Shoals. Parts 3 follows tomorrow.

If you missed Part 1 click here

Nicholson says that when they hit he assumed the worst.

'We hit so hard and I saw jagged rocks. At that stage, I hadn’t seen any shallow water on the other side.

We didn’t turn the engine on straight away. We had to deal with the sails because we’d been tacked by the impact.

So while the sails were up they were just pressing the keel harder onto the bottom. Until we got that under control, there was no moving. We had no rudders, but the difficulty was that we needed to have the sails up to get steerage and get off the reef.

'That was a no-win situation with the sails up and the keel on the wrong side.

'Every time you try to heel the boat over, it just drives the keel down harder. We had a couple of attempts to cant the boat up and over, to get the bulb on the right side of the boat. It was a long shot – but we tried it. It didn’t work'

(The keel was on the port side when Vestas Wind hit the reef on port tack. The impact of the impact swung them around, with the sails now on starboard tack, with the bulb, now stuck underneath on the port side, effectively jamming the boat onto the reef)

'I knew instantly that both rudders had gone. The wheel was spinning violently. There must have been a little bit of rudder left, but the force was so strong you could not hold the wheel against the shock-motion of the rudder hitting the rocks.'

'There was instantly no steerage.'

'We very quickly closed the bulkhead doors down below. There was a little water in there straight away, but it wasn’t an area of the boat you could enter. We were getting pounded by waves and the jolting motion of the boat meant you could not do anything in a confined space.

'We got the sails under control – that was a difficult job as we were getting washed by breaking waves. Sometimes they would break on the bow of the boat. Sometimes they would break on the side of the boat.

'It was a very violent jolting motion on the boat. It was difficult enough to hold on, let alone deal with the sails.

'We were caught in deep ruts that run up to the edge reef. We felt like we were hooked in them and the boat would surge forwards and backwards - maybe only half a metre, but the blow that the boat would get at the end of that half metre, had no give in it at all.

'The boat would do a little surge and then just come to an abrupt halt,' he added.

'It took a long time for the boat to drive up on the reef (to her final resting place). She got pushed up and over the reef just after we got off.

'After we lost the bulb, we took one wave that knocked us over to a 45-degree angle'.

Threat of being rolled over
Nicholson says that he didn’t want to get off the boat until daylight. They had discussed the prospect of being rolled over, when a wave hit taking them over to 45 degrees. A second wave rolled her over even further over and pushed Vestas Wind more side on to the seas.

'That was when I made the decision to get off. Until then it had been a matter of deciding whether to stay on the boat or get off making an exit across the top of the reef.

It was Nicholson’s first experience of hitting a reef.

'Prior to this I have never run aground in my life. It was always something I had feared. I always had a picture in my mind of what would happen if you ran one of these boats aground at the speeds we do. I am amazed that no-one got hurt.

'The stop itself was nowhere near as bad as the pounding we took later. That was the very difficult part. We had no aft support for of the runner – no takeoff points which had gone when the transom broke up.

'We had to lash the check stays down to the traveler track just to hold the mast in. But then the traveler bulkhead started to give way as well. We had lost half the traveler bulkhead at that stage.

The disintegrating traveler bulkhead also has the watertight door for the aft compartment. Water ingress inside the boat was not too bad as she was hard on the rocks

'If we been in deep water, we would have completely flooded the inside compartment. There was a large hole through the starboard side in the transom are and also in the main area.

'The fact was that we were sitting on a rock. I wasn’t actually worried about sinking, I was concerned about a rollover, and where the guys on the deck would end up, if the boat rolled over. Without a bulb and being exposed to the waves, a roll-over was a real possibility.



'We couldn’t launch the liferafts beside the boat because of the breaking waves. We couldn’t sit them at the transom because they would have got nailed between the transom and the reef. The breeze was a cross wind. We did a first test by launching a Jonbuoy (a flagged inflatable marker) on a rope, and just set it off the back of the boat. We watched and hoped that it would wash across the top of the reef and into the lagoon.

'The Jonbuoy experiment worked. The next plan was to launch a raft in its canister, still with a rope attached to it. The hope was that it would bounce across the reef still with the rope attached and be able to be deployed.

'The raft deployed early on, but luckily it washed over the top of the reef in a breaking wave, and then it was there on the other side waiting for us. We did that maybe 3-4 hours before we ended up getting off the boat.

'We always wanted to keep one raft with us. Then as the boat began to break up even more we thought we might lose that raft altogether. It was too unsafe to go back and get it and bring it into the cockpit with us. So we launched the second raft in its canister, with a rope attached and hoped it would do the same as the first one.

'But the rope got tangled up and it remained sitting on top of the reef.

Rafts carried over reef in surf
The reef was substantially above the water, for the rafts to get over the top they required a wave to wash them over; they could not just float over, blown by the wind. The rafts aboard the Volvo 65 were manual inflate only – not automatically inflating on contact with water. The idea was that when the raft reached its required position a tug on the pull cord would be sufficient to cause the canister explode and start the raft inflation about 50 metres away from the stricken yacht.

'We hoped to have the rafts sitting in the lagoon on the calm side attached by the spinnaker sheets to the yacht.

'Safety wasn’t far - it was just hard to get to', he explained.

The crew discussed the abandonment procedure for the most of the night. The boat was moving along the reef, and the rock formation was changing which also required the crew to change their escape options. But the decision was made for them when one part of the deck broke up and became unsafe.

'We had to adjust the plan the whole time. Sometimes we would have to swim and hope that we could get washed over the reef. Other times we could have made a big jump and almost landed on the reef.

'We didn’t know how bad the rock was and whether we would get cut and broken on it. We had to consider a few variables. How to get there, whether you’d clip onto a rope, how we’d get the grab bags across – all those things.'

Their exit in darkness became inevitable after the second roll of the boat when she went over past 45 degrees, causing a lot more damage as the hull collapsed on the starboard side. With no bulb, the boat was at the mercy of the waves.

'It was a decision I was fighting against making,' Nicholson told Sail-World.

'I was extremely concerned about the risk of injury or worse the whole time. It could have gone down that path very easily. We were getting hit so hard by the waves and rolling of the boat, and there was a risk that could have dropped the rig as well. We had a lot of trouble stabilising the rig. We did get it onto the traveler bulkhead, but that was disintegrating pretty quickly. Then we were out of options, as there was nowhere aft that we could tie the mast.

'If it had continued, I would have given the rig another hour to stay up. The runners were flopping around, and the boat was slamming so hard, I thought the rig would have just fallen over.

'That wasn’t the major concern. The major concern in the end was the rollover. If the bulb was still attached the risk of rollover is very low, but once we lost the bulb the risk of rollover was very real.

In their survival gear waiting for dawn
None of the crew remained below-decks and all moved on deck, dressed in survival suits, exposed to the elements and breaking waves from two hours after the boat hit the reef. Occasionally they'd make the occasional visit below to check the extent of the damage.

'You could get around the high side down below, but it was very dangerous down there', Nicholson told Sail-World.com.

The crew did go below to run the radio to Race Control and to a second competitor, Team Alvimedica, who diverted and stood by Team Vestas Wind, on the other side of the lagoon.

The Turkish flagged, American skippered, competitor acted as a relay communications vessel between Vestas Wind, the local coastguard and Volvo Ocean Race Control in Alicante, Spain.

The crew maintained some radio contact from down below at the navigation station for 4-5 hours, but Vestas Wind lost power very quickly within an hour of hitting the reef. 'We lost all Satcom power and then everything shut down very quickly. All we had was a hand held Sat-phone and a hand held VHF.

'Tom Johnson was the first to get off. He was the youngest guy, but also the surfie. He was pretty handy on rocks and surf conditions, so he went first.

'By that stage the transom was almost hard up against the reef. Tom could almost make a bit of a jump off the back of the deck, land onto the reef, and then get washed over the top and into the lagoon by the next wave.

'That was a far better option that any other we had during the night. Prior to that, we would have been going into deeper water and then trying to climb rocks in the surf.

'Tom went first holding the rope that was attached to the raft. He established a good area to stay dry and be able to pull the rope tight. Then Salty (Rob Salthouse) went next, and he took over control from the shore-side.

'I was up forward calling the waves as to when there was a gap, and they could go. Trae (Tony Rae, the required trained Medic) was further aft, relaying when the person could go. It was Trae’s final call for the person to jump, based on my calls plus his opinion at the time', Nicholson explained.

'Everyone was dressed in full survival suits, PFD’s and strobes. A couple of the guys kept their shoes on, but most were in full Musto boots, and all were wearing leather gloves in case there was sharp coral.'

'There were no injuries at the time, but the next day you could see a lot of bruises on everyone.

'We couldn’t stay on our feet all the way to the raft, because the white water would knock you over in the direction of the raft - that was OK. But you’d prefer to do it in the daytime rather than at 4.00am in the night.

Skipper last to leave
As skipper, Chris Nicholson stayed true to the long established seafaring tradition and was the last to leave his ship. ‘I just didn’t have anyone to call me as to when the waves were good. I just had to pick my moment as to when to get onto the rock. If I couldn’t keep my balance, I would just get washed across by the waves. But it was controlled.

There was no real moonlight for the crew to see their way across. However, they did have good torches. During the hours sitting on the deck, the crew scanned the reef behind the boat, and Nicholson say they had a fairly good mental picture of the reef terrain before making their break.

'For all the guys except for Trae and myself, we could shine torches from the boat as they were going. But if they tried doing that from shore, we’d get the light in our eyes, which didn’t work. So we had a good awareness of what was coming up before we each made our run.'

The crew made landfall as such in the lagoon. The sand of the atoll was still over a mile and a half away. Nicholson said they were aware of sharks in the lagoon, which initially was just knee-deep water, but got deeper as they tried to walk across to the sand.

'We quickly pulled out of that move and got into the raft and tied up to a rock. At that stage, we were in calm water inside the reef.

'Over the course of the night the waves were bad. Then there was a calm section, and then an hour prior to getting off it went bad again. It was hard to tell if that was tide or just a different swell pattern.'

The coastguard told the crew as soon as they were called, in the night, that they would not be able to get to the crew until daylight as they did not have night rescue capabilities. 'It was also far too dangerous to try anything from the deep, seaward side. They could not have got a boat close to us from the shallow side either.'

The coastguard arrived soon after dawn in 20ft open fiberglass boats. One was a coastguard and the other a local fisherman. Just eight people live on nearby islands. Most are fishermen.

Part 3 will follow on Thursday