Training key to Concordia evacuation
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | No Comments
There are some 64 fortunate people around today, who survived the sinking in the South Atlantic of the Canadian operated sail training ship Concordia, which it is assumed was knocked down in a squall in heavy weather. Excellent coverage of this can be found at our friends, Sea-fever and Amver.
Somebody did something right with their evacuation plans to ensure that the 44 students and their instructors abandoned the ship safely, as she lay on her beam ends before sinking.
Training and discipline might have helped. Top marks to their rescuers aboard the woodchip carriers Hokuetsu Delight and Crystal Pioneer, and the LNGC Sestao Knutsen, along with the co-ordinating Brazilian SAR teams, in an operation which saw the entire 64 fished out of their rafts from a sea described as “rough and dangerous”. Not many people today can say they were shipwrecked from a tall ship, and one hopes that the survivors swiftly get over their trauma, and will be able to dine out on their experiences for many years to come.
Doubtless there will be the usual questioning about the safety of big sailing ships, and their suitability for training or adventure cruises for young and untrained people. Those who believe that all risks are unacceptable tend to surface at these times, failing to realise that if we were to hearken to their entreaties, our young people really would be dim and obese. There is probably sufficient regulation to reduce such risk to a reasonable minimum, but the sea is the sea, and windships have been ever been prone to heavy weather casualties caused by er, the wind. People who go into the mountains in winter sometimes fall victims to avalanches, but only those with a fetish for health and safety say we should all stay indoors.
All ships are brilliant for character training, teamwork, and the best possible introduction to the marine environment – even a sea career – but sailing ships probably do this best of all. But you don’t have to indulge in the expense of a full rigged ship to provide real benefits. In the UK, there is a brilliant small-scale operation which uses Thames barges, traditionally crewed by two men and a boy, to demonstrate the redemptive power of the sea and work under sail. Sea-Change it is called, and under the helm (literally) of champion barge racer Captain Richard Titchener , it provides “action-centred learning and seamanship training for young people and vulnerable adults”. Clients come from the county youth services, and are young offenders or at least “known to the justice system”. Time as the working crew of a sailing barge really makes a difference in their sad and disturbed lives.
Sea-Change presently operates with chartered barges, but has a project under way to build their own traditional Thames barge, so that the charity can up its game and help more young people over a longer season. It will be the first spritsail barge to be built for some 80 years, but it is a design that has proved itself over three hundred years and thousands of craft, which were the trucks of their day, and still carrying freight until the 1950s. www.seachangeprojects.co.uk tells more.
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