Team Turn the Tide on Plastic apparently narrowly escaped a collision with a ghost ship during the Volvo Ocean Race yesterday. In a Facebook post, the crew led by skipper Dee Caffari commented on the incident: "While we were sailing within sight of Team Brunel, another yacht appeared close to our course. We looked through binoculars, but there was no AIS signal either - so we contacted the race organisers," said the team. But apparently no-one there was aware of an emergency at sea in the race area, which crosses the atolls of Micronesia on the leg from Hong Kong to Auckland.
A short time later, the team sent out a drone to take a closer look at the drifting yacht. With a surprising result: it was the "Sea Nymph", which had been abandoned under mysterious circumstances by two American sailors 900 miles off the Japanese coast in November last year. At the time, massive doubts arose about the credibility of the Americans, who claimed to have become unmanoeuvrable in a storm (click here for the YACHT fact check at the time).
Meanwhile, the team also commented on the current condition of the ghost ship, which "lies with its bow quite deep in the water, but otherwise gives the impression of a good cruising yacht". Turn the Tide on Plastic, which is committed to protecting the oceans in its very name, apparently even briefly considered taking the boat in tow to Auckland in order to remove "this danger to shipping, islands, reefs and atolls". However, the race management would probably not have honoured this with compensation. It is now "up to the authorities to salvage the ship to prevent further damage to the oceans".
Here are the spooky drone shots with commentary by team navigator Brian Thompson in the video:
Here the Turn The Tide on Plastic team shows the drone footage of the "Sea Nymph"
