Fysa, they almost certainly completed the rescue using their twin 500hp diesels rather than sail power. One sailboat towing another creates a host of sail/wind/wave issues. Almost every large sailing vessel, including historic replicas, has diesel engines for those times that sail is just too awkward.
I've towed under sail and it works fine if done properly... certainly it can be challenging and requires an experienced person at the helm of each boat, especially if going downwind or upwind.
In this case I am sure you are right, and the size difference would make towing under sail dangerous. A sudden gust enough to accelerate the larger boat to above the smaller boats hull speed could pull the smaller boat underwater quickly.
You would never tow so close that it would become a risk unless manouverering the disabled vessel in close quarters, and then it usually is preferable to tie the vessels alongside each other.
You can see the distances they chose in this particular case in the third image from their Instagram post.
Sail boat towing other boats (similar loa) should attach towing line close to her center of effort. Think like attaching towing line to the mast foot. Not on the stern. Not an easy task to do. That's why many sailors just use any stern cleat.
And the towed boat should attach towing line not to the bow, but also to the center of effort. Then both boats can manouver.
I also lost rudder blade, on the 10m sailboat, in the middle of Adriatic sea, 2005, during regatta, in 35kt NE wind and 3m waves. Not possible to steer anyhow. Tryed to improvize rudder, but we almost lost a crewman. We were on 2nd reef already. SAR came. Since there was no rudder on my boat, attaching towing line to bow was only option. My towed sailboat course was changing +-30 degrees every few minutes, and finally towing line broke loose because of the forestay chaffing.
Yeah and that's further than it looks. I doubt the smaller vessel would have enough line on board to reach that! It's really far. Of course with two boats easy to find enough line.
For commercial vessels like Götheborg they usually bring many hundreds of meters of mooring lines. Easy to get 20-30m runs on several lines when mooring.
yeah makes sense. That is least a few hundred meters!
Unless I were to start using halyards, I probably do not have more than 300' of line on my boat, which is really way more than I need for a smaller boat.
The two images in the article, taken from the rescued boat. Show indeed than the sails where probably not used. One of the photos even show the sailors at work wile they seems to furl one of the the sail.
Also, the road taken is interested. They could have go to one of the ports of the British islands, like St. Peter Port at Guernsey. But this would have been dangerous. This part of the English Chanel, is full of smalls rock islands, shoals and one of the most dangerous marine currents in the world : The Alderney Race (or Raz Blanchard in french).
On an open water moving under sails is not very different from moving under engine, except sailig boat deals better with waves because od stabilising effect of wind pressure. I often see how people under power hoist a mainsail for improved stability.
Furthermore you see clearly in the pictures taken from the small boat that the engine coolant system of the Goetheburg is working, spilling out water. Thus the main engines are in action.
Just imagine in the 1500's deciding to set sail to Asia. Hardly having a map. No communication means, food that's not easy to store, nothing more then a compass and if lucky a shitty map. If things go wrong no one is coming to help. Wild times.
Was actually the reason they founded the Amsterdam stock market to spread & share the risk of the ships not returning.
I know many bad things happen at well, but it's still a very interesting perspective.
I can't imagine how the polynesians discovered Hawaii. Sailing thousands of miles in a small wooden boat and finding a speck of land in the pacific ocean.
Traditional Polynesian boats were operating alongside modern technology in the 1950s and 1969s. The Polynesian boats put up a better safety record!
So yeah, they really were good at navigating. And to think, they did it lying on their back! The cues that they were using were from the swell, the stars, and birds. You feel the swell most clearly lying down. The other two are above you.
The stock exchange was about spreading risk too. You could raise equity from many small investors that individually are assuming a relatively low risk.
So arguably this was the foundation of modern capitalism too, just in time for the development of capital intensive industry to take advantage of the same financial structures.
Wonderful story of comraderie on the high seas.
It's one of the best things about cruising. Its as close to space travel as you're going to get, and you really stop taking humans for granted out there.
I've been sailing my whole life, but never lost a rudder (thank God!).
With dinghy racing (as opposed to cruising) it's common to learn how to steer without the rudder, using the trim of the sails and your weight in the boat.
You can minimize rudder pressure on cruising sailboat too (again, useful for maximizing speed), but I'd be curious to know more about the limits of what you can do. There are probably some points of sail that work better without a rudder than others. (This is only even theoretically possible because the jib and main can rotate the boat, and the keel will still allow forward motion.)
But yeah, theory aside, 'losing a mast or rudder' level catastrophes like this basically require rescue.
I've only ever done river sailing (including some intentional rudderless sailing), but I imagine in the open seas rudderless sailing isn't really feasible (at least in some conditions). Waves might make it impossible on their own.
I've once sailed a smaller boat with a centerboard that didn't release. So similar to not having a rudder. Quite scary, everything else have a backup, but without that thing sticking out below the boat you're just drifting aimlessly around.
It was a Swedish warship that sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 after making it less than a mile (1,3 km). It was salvaged in 1961 and is today one of Sweden's most famous tourist attractions.
In Swedish, the v and the w only became distinct pretty recently. There are still people alive today who don't know which to pick if they don't already know how a v-sounding word is spelled. Also, the same person might say "Vilma" one day and "Wilma" the next, just as an example of the confusion (and Wilma is their own daughter...) Also, also, I have had older Swedes be completely unable to hear a difference between v and (English-pronounced) w.
Yes. In Finnish and Swedish, the letters V and W traditionally collated together.
In other words, this is a correctly alphabetically ordered list:
Wasa
Virtanen
Wiva
Viwe
The rule was apparently changed in 2006 in Sweden though (with Finland presumably tagging along).
There’s probably still plenty of SQL installations around using the old collation rules because tables were created before the 2006 change reached database software.
> “In a list of names, dictionaries, etc V and W would be separately. This is to make finding the word you are looking for easier.”
If you look at older phone books and dictionaries until the 1990s at least, you’ll find that V and W are combined.
There are common surnames in Finland that retain the V/W spelling equivalence, like Virtanen and Wirtanen. When they are grouped together (as they traditionally were), it’s easier to find a person by name because you don’t need to know which way it’s spelled.
The history of u, v, double-u and double-v is really convoluted. They're the same letter but also not quite. There are historical reasons that make sense as to why this is.
Japanese actually uses a different phoneme that is sort of halfway between an "r" and an "l" sound. Apparently, depending on where you are in the country, it may sound closer to one or the other. I learned to say it by consciously paying attention to the position of my tongue in my mouth and literally putting my tongue halfway in between the "r" and "l" positions. I actually learned to make the sound before I learned to hear it (which I can now, but I couldn't when I first learned of it). Source: married to a person who can speak Japanese.
I also encountered this with German folk speaking English and pronouncing "v" as "w" - "Let's meet up in the willage"
If they'd pronounced it "Let's meet up in the fillage" that would make sense as they'd be using the German pronunciation of "v", but I couldn't wrap my head around "willage".
> If they'd pronounced it "Let's meet up in the fillage" that would make sense as they'd be using the German pronunciation of "v", but I couldn't wrap my head around "willage".
Depending on the word, in German a "v" is either pronounced like "f" or "w", e.g.
[der] Vogel -> "Fogel"
[die] Vase -> "Wase"
A rule of thumb that I heard is that if a German word is of French origin and starts with V, the V is pronounced like W, otherwise like F.
You are correct. In German, V is F and W is V. There is no W phoneme, except incidentally as in "mauer". I can't imagine a German saying "willage" except perhaps as a joke. In German "willage" would be spelled "uilage" and that would just be really uierd. (Source: I'm a native German speaker, though my family emigrated to the U.S. when I was five so I speak German like a five-year-old who hasn't had much opportunity to practice in a very long time.)
What part of Germany are you from? Isn't there a clear distinction between Wolke (cloud) and Volk (people). I ask this as Dutch speaker (so, speaker of 'West Germanic') where there is a very clear distinction between volk and wolk (which presumably have the exact same meaning and origin as their German counterparts).
Anecdotally, I once spoke with Russian students (this was long ago) who insisted that there was a Russian 'v/w' sound in the word Berenburg (the name of a distilled spirit). I couldn't hear it...
Yes, but "volk" is IPA /fɔlk/ while Wolke is /ˈvɔlkə/. That's a major difference.
But in this context, the "v" we're talking about is the English IPA /'v/ (e.g. valley /ˈvæli/) vs. IPA /w/ (e.g. wool, IPA /wʊl/) and that difference is far less noticeable.
I find IPA terribly confusing myself, but I think the starting sounds give a decent indication to people how the starting sound of Volk differs more from that of Wolke than that of "valley" from "wool", and it's that latter distinction that is hard for those of us used to languages where that distinction is near non-existent or one of the sounds is rare/not in use.
For an English speaker, to put it differently, while the words as a whole are not pronounced exactly the same, the starting sound of German "Volk" is the same as for English "folk", while the starting sound of "Wolke" is the same as for "valley".
Similar in Norway. One of the most common pronunciation mistakes Norwegian makes when speaking English is failing to get the v/w distinction right. "Wally" instead of "valley" etc.. I've lived in London 23 years and spoken English for 38, and I still often need to consciously pay attention to that.
I used to work for a Swedish company with a system named "foo-ws," as in Foo Web Service. It's pronounced "foo vee ess." Because Swedish. IIRC, www is vee vee vee.
I can confirm. I mean, the "proper" pronunciation is dubbel-vee-dubbel-vee-dubbel-vee, but we can't be bothered to say all that so we just say vee-vee-vee.
I also think "double-v" is a better name for the letter w than "double-u" is.
Differentiating between English J and Y is also difficult for Swedes (at least for me), because in Swedish, a J at the start of a word is typically pronounced with a Y-sound. I have to make a conscious effort to make sure I don't get the words jet and yet mixed up when I say them.
This is so true. I made this mistake until a friend named Justin pointed out that his name was pronounced Justin and not Yustin... I found that to be bit embarrassing so that made the pronunciation rule stick.
> Usage of the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨w⟩ was, as long as the Fraktur typeface was used, guided by the typeface. In Fraktur, ⟨w⟩ was used as a rule to indicate the sound [v], except for in loanwords of Latin or Romance origin, when ⟨v⟩ was used. In SAOL 1874-1900, which were not printed in Fraktur, the number of words using ⟨w⟩ was very small, and primarily tied to names (clown, darwinism, schweizeri). (...) The attempt to remove ⟨w⟩ was further evident in the 1923 edition. Since 1950 however, the use of ⟨w⟩ in loanwords has been more acceptable, as the number of loanwords has increased. Since 2006, ⟨w⟩ constitutes an individual letter of the alphabet in SAOL, sorted separately from ⟨v⟩.
One rationalization I think we can be pretty happy about today that the article mentions is that [f,fv,hv] which all produced the same sound were unified into simply "v" in schools in the early 1900s.
I’m on a mission to rebuild a 1910 English sailing yacht called Tally Ho. Designed by Albert Strange in 1909, she is a well-known and important historic vessel – but after many adventures she was left in a remote port in Oregon to rot for decades, despite some valiant attempts to rescue her. I bought her and moved her to the Olympic Peninsular earlier this year, and am now rebuilding her from the keel up. Eventually I hope to sail her back to the UK.
That whole series is absolutely incredible, when I saw the first episode I was sure he'd let it go because it was just too much work, basically a complete rebuild. But then he pulled the trigger on it and is making really amazing progress. One of the most impressive projects I've every followed.
I was entranced by this project from the very first episode 5 years ago! I followed along for maybe a year or so, and haven’t caught any updates since.
Happy to see the project (and channel) is still going strong. Such an incredible endeavor!
I also assume the sailors felt they'd taken enough of the Götheborg's time and were willing to pay for a launch to bring their ship in for repair (also presumably it would be quite hard for a large sailboat to drag a small one literally to port).
These ships are a wonder of human achievement. While on vacation in Mexico I was able to spend the day on a boat of a similar age—I don’t remember the details. It really connects one to the past.
And they let complete newbies (like me) sign on as crew for a week or two. It’s the adventure of a life time to work on board such an accurate replica. It was hand built - even the nails and ropes were hand built, using tools and techniques from the time period, which if I recall correctly took something like 10 years to research since much of that knowledge had been lost.
I know nothing about sailing so this is probably wrong, but I was slightly surprised at the fact that the people on board the small boat didn't get rescued onto the Götheborg.
Given the concerns in the article about the size difference possibly causing problems, wouldn't that have been safer?
I don't know what were the reasons in that situation, but getting the two sailors safe from an uncontrolled vessle is not an easiy task. At least you would have the smaller vessle hit the larger. Depends of course on the weather conditions at the time. Sending over a line is much easier.
Also, this would have meant abandoning the ship. Unless there is a present danger, it is easiest to tow the boat with the crew to the harbor.
I suspect they were not in immediate danger, the small boats rudder was inoperative, so they had little to no steering control. I suspect mainly poising a navigation hazard for other boats in the area. What they needed, and got was a tow.
The funny thing is, they were grateful for the assistants of the Götheborg, but a bit incredulous that such a large ship would go out of it's way to help them. (they were also worried about the speed at first before learning it was a sailing ship_
I think they were worried about speed because it was a large ship, regardless of propulsion method.
I believe that the longer a sailing ship is, the faster it can sail. This affects the construction/dimensioning. So this small boat would have a hull that can withstand the seas at a certain speed, but might have trouble if towed faster. And they worried that a large sailboat, built to go quite a bit faster, might accidentally go too fast.
Sailor here - an 8 meters boat is in that awkward spot where it's big/heavy enough that it can do damage if incontrollably drifting against something (e.g. the wooden vessel itself) but light enough that you can literally just push it with the strength of two people if that happens.
So I'd argue it's more safe to have some crew on it in case you need to be hands-on, and just talk over radio while being towed.
Do not attempt to push an 8-meter vessel by hand while at sea. Even a smallish 1-foot wave, when pushing against an 8-meter hull, can generate thousands of pound of force.
The towing was a fairly simple procedure and they could maintain a safe distance. Transporting crew between ships on the high sea would be a dangerous and complex task. They might not even have the equipment for it.
I have a question. this is going to be a really uninformed question but keep in mind my knowledge of boat transfers come from movies and I don’t consider Pirates of the Caribbean authoritative on the topic.
What makes it so difficult, and what sort of special equipment is required?
I know, I know, cargo nets on the side of the ship are not going to be sufficient, easy as it looks in pop entertainment, I just don’t know why.
You can get an idea of the challenge by searching Youtube for videos of "pilot transfer" -- keeping in mind that pilot boats are intended to be boarded from, and container ships intended to be boarded by pilots.
(But then again, Gotheborg is surely equipped to take on pilots to enter harbours, so it was probably more about not abandoning the otherwise perfectly good sailboat.)
Need to get close enough that someone can go between without a wave throwing the big one into the small one.
Which is why “touch and go” between ships of equal size was considered a test of skill and a bit risky, normally they’d drop a rowboat or dingy. A tiny boat can’t really be crushed as it just bumps out of the way.
I don't think it's specific to sailing. If you're towing a car, would you let the driver of that car get in your back seat?
Someone needs to be in control of the vehicle being towed, in case you need to break (if possible), change course (if possible), disconnect the tow (if possible), etc.
Would one receive a bill in a situation like this? To cover the cost of lost time and/or extra diesel burned? Or is it purely out of the goodness of the hearts of the management of the towing vessel?
Potentially. From the wikipedia article on ‘Marine salvage’:
All vessels have an international duty to give reasonable assistance to other ships in distress in order to save life, but there is no obligation to try to salve the vessel. Any offer of salvage assistance may be refused; but if it is accepted a contract automatically arises to give the successful salvor the right to a reward under the 1989 Convention.
Not to my knowledge, and certainly not for boats like the small yacht being towed here. The idea is that if the it happened to you someone else would help.
And sometimes what goes around comes around happens quicker than expected!
Different scale, different waterways, but a couple of weeks after spending half an hour dragging a boat off a fallen tree, I got a tow off a trip boat full of people eating Christmas dinner after losing power in the middle of the Thames...
Not the worst consolation prize to have an experience like this & story to tell after undergoing such a dangerous and potentially life threatening ordeal.
The drag introduced by the bucket would help align your boat as a makeshift drogue. If you can find a way to rig it up so you can adjust the angle from port to starboard, you could very roughly steer.
Yes, the first line of the article. The rudder on the yacht fell off, so they were towed. In the middle of the pacific, the likelihood of a tow is low. In that case, you can fashion a rudder out of a line and a bucket.
In the post they mention that Götheborg had to adapt it's speed to the boat being towed, which probably limited the larger vessels sail-usage.
As another poster here, I also have a friend who has been able to sail on Götheborg once. The ship definitely have usable sails that are used most of the time. If I understand it correctly the motor is to some degree there as a modern safety requirement (and possibly it makes handling in port much easier, I would guess - don't know personally).
There's also the thing that while modern keeled sailboats are able to sail well upwind, that is not the case for these classic vessels which have a much smaller/shallower keel, and have a lot of trouble upwind. So if the wind is not right and you're on a schedule then motoring is the only option.
The keel is a factor but bigger factor are the sails. Modern sailboats are fore-and-aft rigged which can sail closer to the wind. Gotheburg is square-rigged which can barely sail upwind.
Square-rigged allowed for more sail. It also worked better for larger ships since had lots of little sails instead of one big one.
I have sailed on the Oosterschelde (1918). One journey I was supposed to be on was cancelled as the diesel engine broke down and the insurance is not valid without a functional engine, even though we would sail 99% of the time.
The Oosterschelde once rescued a single sailor from his boat that was sinking in the middle of the Atlantic (I wasn’t on that trip).
It was on the Mediterranean Sea. I am also a sailor and can testify that the Mediterranean Sea is the hardest to sail because of often changing wind direction. I assume that’s why the didn’t use sails while rescuing. I wouldn’t either.
They were in the English Channel. Brittany is in the north of France. The map in the post shows the Channel Islands.
They used the engine for the rescue to minimize time and safely approach the small boat close enough to heave a line.
Doing all that under sail, like the OP seems to think they should, wouldn’t just be extremely difficult, it would be dangerous and profoundly irresponsible.
Modern sailboats (as in since 1900) have auxiliary engines for a reason…
The original method is to use many smaller ships to guide and drag the ship to where it need to be whenever the sails are not suitable (that and wait for better weather conditions). If they had used this original method, the sailing boat would had been rescued by those ships.
If they'd have used the "original" method, they wouldn't have any radio onboard either, so would never have gotten info about the sailing boat in distress. :)
That’s a nav radar not a satellite antenna. It would be down right irresponsible (and probably illegal - I’m not really good with law concerning civilian ship) to sail a ship this size without one.
Restoration is good but there is no reason to put the crew in unnecessary danger.
The white blob on the mizzen mast is a satellite antenna. To have the vessel sail in A3 areas the common choice is to have satellite communication, and it is used for their social media and outreach.
The navigation radars is actually quite well hidden sitting on the platform of the foremast.
There is more information about the emergency communication requirements on commercial vessels for different areas of the planet here:
The original didn't have to share shipping lanes with huge modern cargo ships that often rely on their radar to go quite fast in bad visibility. Faced with adding anachronistic radar vs. dying from hazards that the original ship didn't have to face, most sailors pick the radar.
She's also big enough to be legally obliged to carry radar under SOLAS V regulations.
Fysa, they almost certainly completed the rescue using their twin 500hp diesels rather than sail power. One sailboat towing another creates a host of sail/wind/wave issues. Almost every large sailing vessel, including historic replicas, has diesel engines for those times that sail is just too awkward.