Letters to Yachting World may be edited yachtingworld@futurenet.com
LETTER OF THE MONTH
S&S duels
As a long time subscriber to Yachting World, I continue to enjoy this wonderful magazine as much as ever. It just gets better! I have sailed for more than 60 years, inshore, offshore, in the Admiral’s Cup and so on. So, while I love reading about all the latest, faster and faster yachts, I also enjoy revisits to famous older yachts.
The October 2022 issue includes a wonderful article on Running Tide, one of the most beautiful yachts ever in my view. However, one small mistake: you say that Ted Turner missed out buying her and bought an old 12 Metre called Tenacious. In fact, Turner owned the red-hulled 12 Metre American Eagle for a while, but the boat in which he competed against Running Tide was a Swan 61 called Tenacious, also designed by S&S.
She went on to win the 1979 Fastnet Race, notwithstanding that she was not a flat-out racer, and several years older than the current yachts of the time. She proved well equipped to handle the worst race in history in terms of lives sadly lost.
Rescue swimmers
Having read the 5 Expert Tips on MOB recovery (October 2022) Andrew Taylor’s ordeal during a Clipper Race came to mind. [Watching video of the rescue] the rescue swimmer who is attached to a halyard does a lot of swinging due to the movement of the top of the mast, and is really restricted in his own movements.
May I suggest that the equipment for a rescue swimmer should be a personal flotation device (PFD) but not an automatically inflatable lifejacket? In my crew we provide the rescue swimmer with the Palm Rescue PFD. The advantage is full movement of the arms which allows swimming some distance. Attachment point is a D-Ring on the back of the PFD which makes retrieval from the boat easier and much more safe.
On our boat we use a scramble/rescue net. This gives the MOB an opportunity to hang on to the net and can easily be used for a horizontal lift (preferable to winching in via the spinnaker halyard). The rescue swimmer is attached to a rope and really jumps to the person in the water. In addition he can use fins.
The simple life
I read with some amusement and bemusement, the article suggesting that two years was needed to prepare for a transatlantic (The Big Atlantic Countdown, Yachting World December 2022).
In the early 1990s I was part of a delivery crew that to
