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Displaying items by tag: Flotsam

13th January 2013

From Yacht To Flotsam In Just Five Minutes

#Sinking - How fast can a yacht sink? The video above shows just how swiftly one's dreams can disappear into the murky depths.

The clip, via Elaine Bunting's blog at Yachting World, captures the Sweden Yachts 45 Ciao in the waters north-east of the Cocos islands in the Indian Ocean last September as its rudder is damaged by impact with an object below the surface, quite possibly a whale.

Within the space of just five minutes, the fully functioning vessel is reduced to flotsam, its crew Srecko and Olga Pust escaped to their liferaft for rescue at the last possible moment despite their valiant efforts to save the yacht.

"The boat had been their home for several years while cruising, and they were to lose almost everything in the sinking," said Bunting.

Published in News Update

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William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago