Legacy on the Hard

There is a lot of info on her at this thread

http://www.sailinganarchy.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26039

Hi,

Here is a vanity fair article from this month that interviews the owner.

http://www.box.net/public/v9z89pds84#main

Hmm, that would be last month's article? Check post # 43 on this thread from 12-10-06

Hi,
Thanks for pointing that out.

I don't know anything about Vanity Fair and when it goes on sale. I said it was this months issue because at the lower right corner of each page it says January 2007.

I thought as it is still January 2007 today this would make it the same month.

Ha-ha, life is not that easy...

My wife gets the magazine in the mail, and we had it early December.

At any rate, thanks for posting the article on the web, I was not sure how to do that..Scan and paste? Or did they have an "online" version?

Sad reading however, the owner and the captain did not take the hurricane warning seriously, instead they blamed to Coast Guard for not "rescuing" them...

here are a few images of Legacy "before"

http://www.perininavi.it/galleria.cfm?IdBarca=19#

Hi,

It looks like the pages were scanned and it was uploaded to the www.box.net site to host it.

I found the link to it about 2/3 of the way through the thread that Surf Cruise linked to.

Here is a story from the Palm Beach Post (2/4/07) on thet status of Legacy but also its owner.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/accent/content/accent/epaper/2007/02/04/a1D_marooned_0204.html

Kenny Bracewell just left a voicemail about the PB Post story. I found the story online, copied the URL, went looking for our Legacy thread... and voila, you beat me to it. Thanks Tom!

I guess my Saturday night was not as exciting as yours, since I was probably up earlier, reading the paper. Nice photos in the paper edition, but also an on-line story version with narration and photos: http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/palmbeachpost/photos/accent/marooned/

PS For those that don't realize it, Hurricane Wilma, which caused the grounding of this yacht, is the strogest hurricane on record, with the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in a storm. It lost a bit of punch as she came across the gulf (after dealing with Legacy), but hit us folks here in South Florida as a strong cat-2. We had more damage here than from hurricanes Frances and Jeanne the year before.

Yup, know all about hurrican Wilma:
She came right over my boat here in Ft. Lauderdale.
I am happy to report no damages, but I take full credit.
(With a bit of luck)

Some of us pay attention to forecast's and prepare accordingly.

The sad part about the boat, the owner and skipper in this thread is that they had the same forecast as the rest of us but choose to ignore it. Then they blamed the USCG for not bailing them out when the sh!t hit the fan.

Kind of hard to feel sorry for those guys: It would only take a small amount of common sense and a small amount of preparation and voila: No multi million dollar damage, no crying stories, no nothing....

While I agree with you completely about the wisdom of heading forecasts and preparing accordingly, it seems like a harsh codemnation of their preparations if indeed they did sheer at least one anchor and lose the other two. I wasn't there and don't know what options they had but thre "heavy" anchors is generally a pretty secure mooring.
Plus, it is easy to feel sorry for someone who's boat is that badly damaged and unusable for so long, whether it is their own fault or not! At least it is easy for me.

Life in the path of a major hurricane is indeed harsh.

If a little guy like me can afford to invest in heavy anchors that won't "break" in a hurricane, so can the big boys.

Guess the priority was plasma TV's and fancy interiors, not basic stuff.

I too feel sorry for anybody loosing their ship in a storm, but when ya scratch the surface of this story ya may discover gross negligence mixed with a ton of arrogance.

That being said, I am not judging per see, but feeling sorry for other boaters, including myself. who lost hurricane coverage due to the losses incurred from amateur boaters not paying attention to weather and equipment.

With 8 years and numeorus hurricanes around here I have seen horrendous negligence and stupidity, the Legacy story being no exception.

Nice pic..

Speaking of the broken masts:
Did they just snap in the wind, or is there more to it than that?

Wonder what the designer and the builder have to say about the situation: The water in the air intakes that shoted out the electrics, the anchors that failed, the rig, the masts etc.

Assuming the holding was good and the anchors had dug in, then survival was possible, at least in theory.
But the anchors "failed"..?
Inferior metal or poor design of the anchors, or just way unders-sized for actual storm conditions?

Lots of questions, and I sure would like to know the answers, not out of idle curiosity, but to learn from this whole mess.

Ken, Very creative. There is some good use for that **** purple dinosaur.
Just don't know why they haven't slapped on a fresh coat of bottom paint while they've been sittng there. LoL

Hate to say it but it was the Capt's fault

It's always the Capt's fault no matter what goes wrong. If they headed out to sea and all died then it was his fault. If they wash up on a mud bank it's still his fault. It's hard to say what you would have done in that situation. I have survived a Cat4 at anchor by running my engines to take strain off of the anchors but it was just blind luck. You never know what those freaking storms will do. I now have hurricanes figured out. I hole up at 45 degrees north for the summer! They all survived and are here to tell the sea story. Still it all boils down to the capt's judgement and right or wrong it's your fault if your in command.

Yup, I know all about it.

For the last umpteen years I have been the captain on a 225' fast ship called the Boeing 747.

Whenever something went wrong the fingers pointed in my direction.
Fortunately I have never bent any metal or caused any damage to flesh.
On the other hand, disasters can be avoided by being super-conservative, not just by pure luck.

(The experienced mariner and the experienced flyer however knows that luck plays a part in the big picture.)

Or as my bumber sticker says:

"Just because you are not paranoid does not mean somebody is not out to get you."

What could he have done? Armchair quarterbacks

The owner of the boat I run originally brought this incident to my attention and asked me who was at fault. I can only guess that the owner wanted to hang out in Key West for some reason at that time of year. That being said could a sailing vessel of that size gone anywhere that would have been safer?
Out to sea is one thought but the Phantome did the same thing in Mitch and has not been seen since : . Any harbors big enough to hide in? Run to Cuba? Tie to the dock. Where the hell does one plan to hide from a Cat 5 storm in a big freaking Perinavi? Could it have gone up the Miami River to Jones or Merrill Stevens? I guess most big sailing boats head to the Med and spend the summer with Meltimi and Sirocco's and not Fran, Hugo and Katrina. Or hang out with fog in the NE until after the cold fronts make it down here. Any armchair captains have any good ideas what they would have done if they were at the wheel of that boat say a few days prior to the known storm coming at them? After Andrew and Hugo I know now that my life is not worth staying aboard the boat.

Hmm, good questions.

I am fairly certain that if I was going to hang around the path of the big storm I would have made sure I had solid anchors and some swinging room.

One can only judge by the results I guess.

If memory serves right after reading the VF article a month or two ago, the captain on the ship recommended going somewhere else, but the owner had no respect for no hurricanes and insisted on staying in place...