Rescue of sailors, Hawaii

Hmmmmm...... You are presuming a lot, I've seen some mighty dumb missions. And with proper planning "one thing" sending the mission down the tubes should not happen. Redundancy... plan A/B/C/D. Loss of one single system should not render you helpless. The boat sinking is about the only thing that puts you out of business.

I don't know the conditions that led to the dismasting. I do know that it is rare. And of the cases that do happen only very few are caused by sudden, unpredicted, unsurmountable events. With a 100 foot rogue wave or a 90mph squall you have problems. However most dismastings are the result of letting the boat get away from you, or the failure of an under designed or poorly maintained component. There are a few "jezus bolts" on every sailboat. Better make sure they're properly sized, installed and maintained. That many boats designed for coastal cruising require beefing up the systems and rigging.

500 gallons at the END of the trip is a LOT for a sailing vessel that size, and would have been more than enough to cover the 700 miles to Oahu.... I suspect the media got this wrong..... (susprise) At 5-6 knots you figure 1 gph on the high side..... so 120+/- hours 120+/- gallons They would have been foolish not to have that on board...... If sea state was poor and they did HALF of that with 200 gallons on board it would still have gotten them very close in a little over 10 days...

They rigged a sail (usually with the boom as mast and the smallest jib rigged horizontally). Not familiar with the current/wind conditions there so I don't know how much progress that would have made them.

One month of water? No water maker? Two weeks of food? (I can stuff 6 months of freeze dried crap under a bunk) Unless the engine quit on them there's a lot of unanswered questions here. Of course doing a journey like that with a single engine and no generator would, again, be thin planning.

Be interesting to hear the rest of the story.

(And I have done a few miles off shore on a sailboat.... a lot of it alone).

23 years as a deck officer in US Merchant Marine. If you go off shore, get one of these!!! If you don't, you are trying out for the Darwin Awards!!

AND MAKE SURE IT IS REGISTERED AND THE INFORMATION IS UP TO DATE.

Google "Mike Plant" An accomplished solo ocean racer who disappeared at sea. There WAS a beacon, but he didn't register it and the system took too long to spool up.....

When I had my 42 foot sail boat we took it to FLL from the Chesapeake in the winter, and vice versa in the spring. Outside, and I did several legs solo. I had an EPIRB and the first phone number on the registration was my wife. I also rented a Satphone and called my wife every 12 hours with a position report.

The idea was that if the beacon went off they, CG, would call her, and she would be able to say " YES he's out there. At 08:00 he was at NXX.XX WOXX.XX" The idea being that this would immediately give me a high probability score and that assets would be deployed.

They would find me seriously injured on the boat or floating in my poopie suit (The only two reasons to set the **** thing off) with the beacon and a handheld VHF in hand, Pelican case with passport etc tied to my waist.

If you want to increase the odds of being rescued, you HAVE to make it easy for them.

One of the crew onboard lives in Taiwan and I talked to him a few days after his adventure . What a tail he has to tell.

Can you give us the short version?

Im trying to set up a video interview with the crew member and will keep you posted.