Blog for today day 14 Wednesday 43.32.763N 5.40.020W

Voyage of Wanderingstar
Ben Bonnick
Wed 18 Oct 2017 16:32
Hello 

I read through the last blog and noticed a few typos which I put down to the predictive text, not reading through properly and having had a couple of beers first day ashore and all that. For the grammatically sensitive I will continue to put in a few deliberate spellos and typos. Clearly you will be unable to determine if they are deliberate or not….(yes I noticed that one) but they will be there.

Now for today - the broken cable that saved my life……

That is no exaggeration and I can only now, having let a number of days pass allow myself to reflect upon it. This is what happened:

It was day four of five but it was night and from nowhere a storm sprung up with winds suddenly increasing from 18 to 40 knots. It was my first encounter with excessive winds and particularly difficult as they occurred unexpected and at night. I watched the wind velocity increasing and after an hour I was getting gusts of 50 plus knots…..also a bad swell had established and I was having problems keeping to a course. At this point I remembered basic storm tactics and the survival method of shutting oneself in the cabin with a solid door over the hatch and then to sit out the storm, so I decided to put that into practise knowing that even if the boat should capsize it would simply right itself albeit with a level of chaos and confusion within the boat. 

So there I was hove to (that's with the boat at rest) safe within my capsule listening to the howling gale outside. My plan simply to sit out the storm. After 3 hours I was still there and I knew it would be a further two hours before daybreak. I decided to leave it until daybreak before I looked outside to see if conditions had improved. 

Then I heard my AIS alarm warning of an impending collision. 

I was aware that my AIS alarm was giving me less warning than I had expected maybe 5 mins maximum and it was intermittent - I subsequently found the reason for this was because, instead of being attached to an antenna it was attached to a piece of redundant cable that didn’t go anywhere (pic below). However, this miserable piece of cable had been just enough to pick up an AIS signal from another vessel when it came close enough.

On hearing the alarm I froze for maybe 15 seconds before the realisation that to do nothing was not an option.

The boat was still swaying badly but I got the heavy solid 12mm ply hatch off and what I saw almost paralysed me. 

Bearing down on me was the superstructure of a massive container ship. It could have been no more than 20 maximum 40 meters from me. I had to look up to see what it was, with its green and red navigation light so clear that I could see the supporting bolts that held them in place.

I was being run down and probably had 60 to 90 seconds to get out of there. The next 20 seconds are a bit of a blur, but I was able to lean over, start the engine, get out through the hatch into the cockpit, and pull away while I was actually being run down.

And it was that little piece of broken cable that gave me enough warning to at upon…..

Ps the AIS all works ok now and I get maybe fifteen or twenty minutes notice. The second picture is a typical one showing vessels around me to avoid, the black vessel is me. I was surprised at the number of ships I came across in the bay far more than I expected.

Looking at the weather forecast there is another large storm scheduled for thur/fri so will probably wait for that to pass before moving on

All the best for now
Ben