Boris talks about his heartbreak at the collision and the damage to his boat which occurred on Wednesday 27th at 19:50hUTC while racing in third place, some 90 nautical miles from the Vendée Globe finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne. The boat is damaged on the starboard foil.
The Basque fishermen of Ondarroa in Vizcaya reject any responsibility in the accident that would have cost the German skipper Boris Hermann victory on Wednesday night.
Position of Malizia II Solosailor with CLS on vendeeglobe.fr website before the collision
The navigator was about a hundred kilometers from the finish of the Vendée Globe.
The crew of the Hermanos Busto still can't believe it. During the hake fishing campaign, the 30-meter longliner from Ondarroa (Vizcaya) was hit during the night of Wednesday to Thursday by Boris Herrmann's sailboat 90 miles from Les Sables d'Olonne.
The 15 Basque sailors took a long time to understand what had happened.
"We heard a Boom! We saw that it was a sailboat but we couldn't see anyone," said Aitor Badiola, fisherman and owner of the ship.
And for good reason, the navigator was sleeping.
Hermanos Busto longliner
"We called him on emergency channel 16 and nobody answered! What am I supposed to do?" If the Basque longliner is made of steel and without major damage, they are worried about the consequences on a carbon boat.
You're at a speed of 20 knots, at night, you're sleeping, you hit another boat, and you say it's his fault? Bueno! (Aitor Badiola, fisherman of the hit ship)
The fishing boat tries to reach the monohull "but it continued its trajectory as if nothing had happened, _we thought it was a smuggler's boat!_" recalls Aitor Badiola. Until the moment when they make the connection with the round-the-world race. "I called the maritime rescue services in Spain, then in France, then by going to the Vendée Globe website I read the account of the collision and the coordinates of the accident, it's us!".
We were sad to see that he might have been in a position to win the Vendée Globe and that he would have lost because we had the shock of it, but when I saw the whole thing with the AIS system, damn it! Hey, you're at a speed of 20 knots [37km/h], at night, you're sleeping, you hit another ship, and you say it's his fault?! Bueno...!"
What is certain is that Boris Herrmann was third, and he finished fifth.
In spite of this misadventure, the Hermanos Busto continues its fishing - which is good assures its captain Josu Zaldunbide.
She will return to her home port in Ondarroa on Saturday.
Premiering at the Berlinale, where it opened the Panorama Special section, STYX is a work of unrelenting intensity and technical brilliance.
ER doctor Rike (Susanne Wolff) embarks on a one-woman solo sailing trip to Ascension Island in the Atlantic.
When Rike comes across a sinking ship of refugees, she is quickly torn out of her contented and idealized world and must make a momentous decision.
Aptly named after the mythological river that separates the living from the dead, STYX is an astute modern day parable of Western indifference in the face of marginalized suffering.
Carrying practically the entire film, Wolff is riveting as a woman pushed to her physical, psychological and moral limits.
A taut moral thriller, “Styx” is a story of what happens when self-reliance runs into other people’s desperation. The lives of others don’t seem of much concern to a German doctor, Rike (Susanne Wolff), when she sets off on her adventure. Alone on a 30-foot sailing yacht, she is headed to Ascension Island, a mid-Atlantic speck roughly halfway between Africa and South America. With grit, provisions and a pretty coffee-table book about the island that suggests her romanticism, or perhaps naïveté, Rike is following Charles Darwin to Ascension. It’s a dream journey that will slam into the refugee crisis.
Rike plotting her course on the map; and reading The Creation of Paradise
One woman’s dream can look like someone else’s worst nightmare, even if the director Wolfgang Fischer initially makes Rike’s passage into existential isolation seem inviting. After a brief, eloquent preamble in Germany, he deposits Rike in Gibraltar, where she efficiently packs up her boat.
Much like his protagonist, Fischer assumes a well-organized, seamless approach to his launch, setting the scene with a bright, direct visual style that feels largely informational — a lingering shot of what appears to be months’ worth of food and water — and only occasionally slides into the metaphoric, as when Rike sails past a gargantuan tanker that conveys an ominous dehumanization.
The barbary macaque in Gibraltar
Part of the allure of this expedition is its quietude, at least for the audience. Soon after Rike leaves Gibraltar, she is enveloped by the ocean, and the movie shifts into the visual and auditory minimalism that defines its alluring, almost hypnotically soothing first third. Fischer primarily shot “Styx” on the open sea, with Malta standing in for the west coast of Africa. It’s a headily seductive landscape painted in every conceivable shade of blue and daubed with white. Like Rike, you settle into the luxurious peacefulness, a stillness augmented by the water’s rhythmic splashes, her bustling movements and the boat’s gentle cacophony — the flap of the sails, the whir of the winch, assorted pleasant creaks.
Excursions into solitude invariably must end, especially when there’s another hour or so of movie yet to come. Civilization intrudes on Rike’s seclusion when a man’s voice begins squawking on her radio. It’s a friendly, ever-so-slightly paternalistic intrusion. He provides an extreme weather forecast and promises future help if she should ever need it. A no-nonsense woman who seems perfectly capable of taking care of herself, Rike politely accepts the offer. Still, there’s something about the exchange that seems to irk her (and you), partly because the movie is playing with the figure of the independent modern woman, one who seems capable of handling any reasonable challenge.
Susanne Wolff plays a doctor who sets off on a high-seas adventure in “Styx.”
The violent storm that soon descends precedes a dramatic narrative shift — after the weather clears, Rike sees a fishing trawler overloaded with passengers. (They’re between Cape Verde and Mauritania.)
Because the camera continues to share her point of view — and the trawler is distant enough — you hear voices but can’t make out faces, just bodies and frantically waving arms.
Rike sends out a distress signal. Her boat is too small to save all the passengers, who she worries will panic and scramble onboard, sinking it. One voice after another answers back, a clamor of international strangers who sternly tell her to do nothing and wait for help. Rike waits and waits some more.
In short order, the larger world crashes in, and a story of radical, deeply privileged individualism gives way to a potent, messy and sometimes uncomfortable parable about what human beings owe one another. The refugees are adrift on a sea of global indifference. Fischer puts a human face on the crisis through the introduction of a boy in his early teens (Gedion Oduor Weseka), who swims to Rike’s boat, almost drowning. Pulling him out of the water, Rike calls him Kingsley (the name on his bracelet), and they begin a wary relationship that movingly if schematically personalizes a larger social struggle.
Kingsley (Gedion Oduor Wekesa)
Fischer’s minimalism isn’t simply a stylistic choice; it’s also strategic. The story of an advantaged European face to face with desperately imperiled African refugees seems tailor-made for political pieties and the dubious enshrinement of one more white savior story. For the longest time, though, Fischer, working with a script that he wrote with Ika Künzel, refuses to preach or tip his political hand. Instead he focuses on the physical dangers and bodily assaults that Kingsley and Rike endure as the voices on the radio continue promising help and the voices from the boat eerily begin to dim. Rike’s stoic competence and Wolff’s attractive, contained performance have led you to think that she can handle anything, a fantasy that is as reassuring as it is grimly, horrifically false.
UK sailors are facing a host of new restrictions post-Brexit, the Cruising Association and RYA warn. Both organisations are trying to get answers from the UK Government but they expect the coming season to throw up many unresolved issues on the water.
The Cruising Association’s Brexit spokesman Roger Bickerstaff said anyone sailing to an EU country should be prepared for a more ‘administrative environment’, while RYA Cruising Manager Stuart Carruthers said: “The important point to get across is that we are now a Third Country and there are going to be some very significant changes to the way that people can do their boating.
“As an example, the whole idea of taking a sabbatical in the Mediterranean, living on your boat, which you’ve bought with your pension, has just disappeared out of the window now that we are subject to Schengen Area visitor visa rules. That is just one post-Brexit reality.”
Among a range of issues, the 90-day visa rule is likely to affect most boat owners. Bickerstaff said: “You need to sign in and out when you visit a Schengen territory. If you don’t sign out, the clock will keep running, so when you pitch up next into a Schengen country, a port or an airport, there is a chance they won’t let you in.
“We’re going to have to work out how, when yachts leave to sail back to the UK, they stop the Schengen clock – how are they going to get their passports stamped when they enter and when they leave?”
Referring to a widely reported incident at the Dutch border in January, when guards confiscated a ham and egg sandwich from a British truck driver, he said: “Like the ham and egg sandwiches, there are going to be all sorts of strange things to emerge this year. “What we’re doing at the Cruising Association is trying to identify and sort out these issues as they arise.”
One anomaly that has emerged is from Sweden, whose Customs officers are taking the view that British boats lose their VAT status simply because the transition period has ended. Bickerstaff said: “That’s never been something the EU Commissioner has said. In terms of HMRC’s view, that is pretty settled. Boats that have been in the UK are entitled to return by the end of this year and recover their UK VAT status. Boats that have been bought outside the UK will have to pay VAT when they come back in.”
He warned: “We’re going to be seeing different countries taking different views.”
“Another issue is your port of entry,” Bickerstaff said.
“In the past we have been able to turn up in France and not worry too much about it – it could be the middle of Friday night in whatever port we could make passage to safely. “It’s quite likely now we’ll have to go to specific ports of entry.”
Channel Islands sailors have already been advised by France that ports of entry and exit will be set up. Belgium has said the same.
The trade agreement reached late in December between the UK and EU made clear that reciprocal health care (EHIC cards) continues.
But the RYA’s Carruthers warned that despite a lengthy, ongoing dialogue with the UK Government, many issues were still to be resolved.
One question mark is over RYA qualifications and in which countries they will remain valid – an issue for charterers, as well as for local sailors and marine professionals. “While we’ve been in the EU, there’s been a mutual understanding of other EU countries’ qualifications, but that is now changing,” said Carruthers. “We do know that in Spain you won’t be able to use RYA qualifications on a Spanish-flagged charter vessel. This is something that we are endeavouring to address through ‘Diplomatic Channels’.”
Another issue is whether EU countries will continue to allow UK-registered boats to be berthed permanently in their waters and whether these can be used for commercial purposes – that is still under discussion.
Carruthers said the VAT issue was also on the table: “We’re still lobbying Government on this.”
He advised people hoping to sail to the EU this summer that “it’s a case of wait and see”.
“If recreational boaters are going to leave the shores of UK they’re going to have to fill in a C1331 form, like we used to do. Q-flags are coming back. I recommend that anybody who is sailing to and from the UK reads HMRC Notice 8.” “There are lots and lots of things that need to be sorted out. If people want to tow their boat to the EU, is there anything they need to do differently now? How is the boat going to be treated? “Another issue is food. Do the rules on what you can take with you apply to food kept on board? “The status of boats in Northern Ireland is also unclear – are they classed as UK goods, Union goods, will they be able to enter Great Britain VAT-free? “Despite our constant lobbying Government, officials cannot give us answers at the moment. We’re dealing with departments that have not had the chance to consider the detail of how these things affect our sector, but we are keeping the pressure on to find the clarity that boaters urgently need.” Links :
A free Cruising Association webinar addressing Brexit issues is available here
A net is hauled to the surface after being dragged along the seabed. The large amount of bycatch involved in ‘bottom trawling’ harms biodiversity. Photograph: Colin Munro/Alamy
Environmental groups propose urgent plan to stop overfishing and safeguard marine life, as existing laws go unenforced
A coalition of NGOs is calling for an urgent ban on destructive bottom trawling in EU marine protected areas, after the failure of member states to defend seas.
The ban is part of a 10-point action plan to “raise the bar” to achieve biodiversity targets, which they say will not be met by current promises, such as last year’s high-profile pledge by world leaders at the UN summit on biodiversity in New York to reverse nature loss by 2030.
A raft of EU laws to safeguard marine life – including a duty on EU member states to achieve “good environmental status” in seas by 2020, to achieve healthy ecosystems and to introduce sustainable fisheries management – have not been enforced, says the group, which includes Oceana in Europe, Greenpeace and ClientEarth.
They warn that this failure, combined with existing pressures on Europe’s seas, including climate change, risks triggering irreversible changes to the ecological conditions under which humanity has evolved and thrived.
Conger eel trapped in an abandoned net off the Costa Brava, Spain. Photograph: BIOSPHOTO/Alamy
The 10-point call to action, which the groupwill present to EU leaders, MEPs and member states, follows the commitment of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European commission, and many EU heads of state or government, to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
The call was published in response to a European parliament draft report on the EU’s biodiversity strategy for 2030. That draft report, which will be presented to the environment committee on Thursday, expresses strong regret that the EU has “neither fully met the 2020 biodiversity strategy objectives nor the global Aichi biodiversity targets”.
While the NGOs welcomed the draft report, they said it does not go far enough to ensure enforcement of current EU laws or to set action plans to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
Rebecca Hubbard, programme director of Our Fish, which aims to end overfishing, said: “The EU has failed to achieve good environmental status for EU seas and the EU biodiversity strategy must be implemented if we are to have a chance of saving it – this implementation needs to include the 10 action points we have in our report.”
She said the EU has also failed to end overfishing, and to protect marine habitats from bottom trawling. “What we really need to do is go from strategies and goals to action and outcomes. National pledges, goals and agreements are important for setting a direction but if we are going to save the planet we need action.”
The 10-point action plan calls for a network of fully and highly protected ocean sanctuaries covering at least 30% of the oceans by 2030 and a drastic improvement in fisheries protections. It urges the EU to commit resources to dramatically ramp up, implement and enforce existing legislation to safeguard marine life.
The groups also call on the EU to carry out environmental impact assessments of fishing activities, to set fishing limits with “precautionary buffers” for climate change and mandatory remote monitoring systems for all fishing fleets. It calls for measures to mitigate bycatch and for protections of the deep sea, such as closing sensitive areas to hydrocarbon exploration. And it calls for an end to harmful fishing subsidies and controls on underwater noise.
Nicolas Fournier, the campaign director for marine protection at Oceana Europe, said: “The EU 2030 biodiversity strategy is strong on marine protection targets, but we want the European parliament to raise further the EU’s ambition on biodiversity, both internationally to champion the 30% of ocean protection and support the UN treaty for the high-seas, but also in Europe to call for a ban of all destructive fishing gear inside marine protected areas, starting with bottom-trawling.”
Fewer than 1% of European marine protected areas are fully off-limits to fishing. Last month, the European court of auditors warned the EU had failed to halt marine biodiversity loss in Europe’s waters and to restore fishing to sustainable levels. In 2019, the European Environment Agency found “signs of stress at all scales” and warned the current and historical use of Europe’s seas was “taking its toll” on marine ecosystems
The call for action comes just days after warnings from international scientists that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinctions, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” that threaten human survival.
A bomb cyclone was originally a slang term used to describe an extratropical cyclone that strengthened quickly—a concept similar to a rapidly intensifying tropical cyclone (e.g., hurricane).
Wind turbine component transports are key to the success of the U.S. offshore wind industry.
Weather strongly influences the timelines and movements of these shipments. Both the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. East Coast are frequently impacted by developing and strengthening “bomb cyclones,” which can significantly affect project timelines and the projected budget for component transports. A “bomb cyclone” is defined as a mid-latitude low pressure system exhibiting rapid intensification known as explosive cyclogenesis, characterized by a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure.
There are three types of winter/spring coastal storms: Miller Type A, Miller Type B, and the Bahamas Low. Here are some differences regarding: frequency, power, and unpredictability.
Track and Frequency Type A is commonly known as the “Gulf and Florida Low” and is the most frequent storm that moves from the Gulf of Mexico, across northern Florida, before continuing northeastward along the U.S. East Coast (Figure 1).
Type B, the next highest frequency during the season, forms across the Midwest and continues eastward as a cyclone but is then disrupted by the Appalachian Mountains. This results in an energy transfer to offshore the U.S. Mid-Atlantic, where rapid intensification occurs (Figure 2). The Bahamas Low, which is the least frequent, develops near the Bahamas before lifting and strengthening northward along the U.S. East Coast (Figure 3).
Power The Bahamas Low is the most powerful coastal storm. Type A is rated second on the power scale. Type B is typically the least powerful coastal storm but still dangerous.
Predictability Type A is the most predictable. The Bahamas Low is next in forecasting accuracy. Type B is the least predictable, which becomes threatening for mariner’s offshore planning.
The below Figures 1-3 show maps of the different storm tracks and potential hazards in relation to the offshore wind energy areas on the U.S. East Coast. Figure 4 highlights the threat of multi-directional waves and wave heights which can be produced by any type of coastal storm.
Figure 1: Type A storm
Figure 2: Type B storm
Figure 3: Bahamas Low
Figure 4: Multi-directional waves
With Type A being the most frequent coastal storm track, we will examine this in more detail. The developing low pressure moves eastward across the Continental U.S while strengthening, as the associated cold front drifts east-southeastward across the Gulf of Mexico and the Southeastern U.S. The cold front is the main culprit that will bring adverse conditions across the Gulf of Mexico, thus bringing challenging conditions for transports across this region. As the storm shifts northeastward, it will strengthen while moving over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, often bringing hurricane force winds along the Eastern U.S., delaying transports or creating challenging/dangerous conditions along the U.S. East Coast.
Other atmospheric phenomenon that can occur with these cyclones include:
Widespread Lightning
Complex/confused sea states and potential for rogue waves
Fog and/or freezing fog
Freezing spray (Northeastern U.S.)
Aside from affecting transports, these storms also impact the turbine blades themselves due to vertical wind shear and load concerns within the rotor plane.
Long term planning is key to ensuring the safe and timely delivery of the components. Historical Weather Risk Reports and tailored Weather Downtime Reports are helpful when planning a project timeline and when setting deadlines for the delivery of components. In combination with these reports, weather routing services in general increase the confidence in safe transport and delivery by minimizing adverse weather conditions for either Coastal or Transoceanic voyages.
no satAIS or AIS track in the Gascogne Gulf displayed since her last position at North of Spain
Figure 1: Type A storm
