Floating Hazard Or Tall Tale?

Millions of containers are shipped around the world. helen fretter investigates what the chances of hitting one at sea really are

It is the stuff of every sailor’s nightmare – the unseen object, lurking beneath a wave, which punctures your hull or smashes your rudder mid-ocean. Never have our oceans seemed so crowded – last year’s Vendée Globe was peppered with reports of single-handed racers smashing into ‘UFO’s (unidentified floating objects), often at high speed, in remote regions, with devastating effects.

But do containers represent a genuine hazard? There is an acute awareness of the impact debris has on the marine environment, yet an apparent lack of current data on how many containers fall overboard – and what happens to them when they do. There is no requirement for shipping lines to sink, track or retrieve containers lost offshore, so their positions are almost entirely unknown. Sailors who suffer a mid-ocean impact usually have little evidence of what they hit. The risk may be minuscule, but it is almost impossible to quantify.

‘Like a car accident’

Mike Sargeant was delivering a Farr 52 from the UK to Las Palmas via Cascais last autumn when they collided with something that damaged the yacht’s 3.6m draught keel.

“We were probably about two days out of Las Palmas,” Sargeant recalls. “We had good winds, and it was about 0130, pitch black around 400 miles off Madeira. We were doing about 8 knots, which was quite slow really – we had been surfing at around 17-18 knots. I was helming on the port wheel, and it was like a car accident. The yacht just went BOOM, and stopped dead. The collision basically threw me off the wheel, it broke one of the spokes of the carbon wheel, and it threw everyone onto the deck.