Almost a year ago, Bernadine Ingram was killed when Orca, the Moody 31 she was sailing with her husband Peter, collided with the dredger Shoreway.
At 1331 on 8 June 2014 the dredger Shoreway and the sailing yacht Orca collided 7 miles off Felixstowe. Damage to Orca was catastrophic (Figure 1) and it sank within minutes of the collision. The yacht’s skipper was rescued from the water by Shoreway’s rescue boat but the skipper’s wife could not be found despite an extensive air and sea search. Her body was recovered from the sunken yacht by divers the next day. There was no damage to Shoreway.
The vessels collided in good visibility as neither the chief officer, who was alone on the bridge of Shoreway, nor the skipper of Orca, who was below deck in the cabin, were maintaining a proper lookout during the period immediately prior to the collision.
Following an alteration of course by the chief officer on Shoreway, Orca entered a blind sector caused by the vessel’s bow-mounted rainbow discharge equipment and remained unseen by the chief officer until seconds before the collision.
Orca’s skipper saw Shoreway approximately 1.6 miles away and, from its aspect at the time, judged there to be no risk of collision and decided to engage his autopilot and go briefly below.
Shoreway’s officer of the watch should not have been alone on the bridge at the time of the accident.
The risks of vessels, especially small craft, not being detected in the blind sector on Shoreway, had never been assessed by the company or the crew and were not mentioned in either the master’s standing orders or the vessel’s safety management system.
The safety management system on board Shoreway was a computer based fleet-wide generic safety management system that was of little benefit to the ship’s crew as it contained no vessel-specific information, guidance or instructions.