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REAL LIFE NEWS: SATNAV BOAT DISASTER

by Hazed

It’s not just motorists that trust their satnavs no matter what, and drive blindly into a dead end/river/off the end of a pier. It seems sailors are prone to this sort of idiocy, too - with tragic consequences.

In a race for sailboats run from Newport, CA to Ensenada, Mexico, one boat came to grief on some rocks.

The race rules were amended some years ago to allow cruising sailboats to enter - boats with sails and a motor, generally used for comfortable recreational sailing. The time and place for the race means its often held when the winds are light, so the rules allow the cruising sailboats to proceed under motor during the night, so they can get to the finish line in time for the party.

When dawn broke after the first night of this year’s race, three bodies and a field of debris were found near a set of rocky islets known as Coronado Island. The debris was identified as the wreck of a boat that had entered the race, and the bodies as three of her four-man crew. The body of the fourth crew member - the captain of the vessel - was discovered a week later.

He had been a highly experienced sailor, and an electronics executive. He’d equipped the boat with every possible electronic aid. So how could the boat have wrecked itself on the rocky islets?

One of the gadgets fitted to the boat was a commercial tracking system which allowed those on shore to view the vessel’s track on the web. It showed the boat had gone in a straight line into the northernmost of the Coronados - right into a sheer rocky cliff.

Best guess as to what happens is that the crew started up the motor, set a waypoint at the entrance to Ensenada harbor, turned on the autopilot and left it to get on with it. They possibly had their electronic chart zoomed out to a point where the small islets didn’t show up, so they didn’t realize their straight-line track would take them into a rock.

It then seems likely that the three crew members went below to sleep - and a while later the captain fell overboard. That left the unattended robot to motor the boat straight into the cliff.

As a commenter on this story says, “A half-smart robot (smart enough to steer a straight line, but not smart enough to know the line goes through a rock) is a dangerous thing.”

Source: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.83.html#subj2

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