For National Safe Boating Week (May 17-23) we’re revisiting some of the best safety stories, recommendations, and gear from our sister publications. Today, from Sail magazine, Managing Editor Lydia Mullen and her shipmates share the lessons learned from the dramatic sinking of their boat during last year’s Newport-Bermuda Race.
By Lydia Mullen
From its onset, the J/122 Alliance program was designed for learning. It created opportunities for talented young sailors to participate in offshore races alongside veterans, held scores of training days to prepare and foster crew dynamics, and enriched the on-water experience with supplemental educational materials. We learned countless lessons on seamanship and the practical skills of running a boat. In the wake of her sinking, boat owners Mary Martin and Eric Irwin, along with crewmembers from the boat that rescued us and carried us to Bermuda, share the program’s final lessons.
1. Keep Learning
For Eric, the successful rescue of all nine crew member on Alliance can be traced to the founding ethos of the program. “When we bought the boat four years ago, we wanted to establish a solid foundation for everything: safety, navigation, crew development…That solid foundation from the very beginning was key. Practice, repetition, muscle memory, all of that made a difference in an emergency situation,” he says.
“We recognized that we needed to learn. As new skippers of an offshore race boat, we had to,” says Mary. “We had offshore experience, but being the owners and in charge of the boat, we needed to ensure that we could safely race the boat offshore and be responsible for other people’s lives. We don’t take that lightly.”
Before the race, our team met monthly to discuss everything that goes into a race like this: navigation, weather, medical…there was homework, and we were assigned pretty much every lecture, report, and presentation on the race that’s ever been posted online. We discussed in depth the lessons from the tragedy in the 2022 race, when 74-year-old Colin Golder went overboard and drowned. There were pop quizzes, and many of us were involved with pre-season prep.
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