Flipped Cat Anna Washes Up on Tonga

"Anna, the Atlantic 57 catamaran owned by Kelly Wright of Santa Fe, New Mexico, that flipped 125 miles from Niue in the South Pacific the first weekend in August, somehow managed to make her way unscathed through the East Reef passage of the outer reef at Vava’u, Tonga, then washed up against an island and was badly damaged," report Scott and Cindy Stolnitz of the Marina del Rey-based Switch 51 cat Beach House. "She’s now tied to a mooring in Neiafu, where she looks like "parallel submarines at Disneyland."

With Anna‘s arrival has come a lot more misinformation and baseless speculation. First off, the name of the cat is Anna, not Anna Valdivia as previously reported. Valdivia is the city in Chile where Awolplast, the builder of Anna and other Atlantic 55s and 57s, is located.

There have also been erroneous reports that Anna was a "giant Hobie Cat" that only weighed about 14,000 lbs, and her ultralight displacement contributed to her flipping. Designer Chris White assures us that the 14,000-lb weight rumor is complete nonsense, and that Anna weighed about 30,000 lbs when she went over. We have no doubt this is true, as Bob Smith’s Pantera, which has been sailing all over Mexico for years, weighs 14,000 lbs, and she’s only 44 feet, has a tiny salon, is ultra simple, and was built of carbon fiber.

There have also been reports that Anna‘s spinnaker was up when she flipped, so that she wasn’t just carrying a reefed main and a self-tacking jib. Apparently this belief was based on the fact that the spinnaker, or part of it, was seen at some point billowing around in the water. Only Wright and his crewmember Glen McConchie of Christchurch know for sure, but we believe their claims that the chute wasn’t up. After all, it was nighttime, there were only two of them, it had been squally, and rough weather had been forecast. Unless somebody says they found the halyard attached to the head of the chute and all the other spinny lines had been run, we’re not going to doubt Wright. It’s very easy to imagine that the chute had been in a bag on deck, and some or all of it had come out after more than 10 days of sloshing around in the ocean.

One of the crew of Forum Pacific, the ship that rescued the crew of Anna, took some interesting video while picking up the crew of the cat. Check it out below, because it’s very interesting. You’ll see the two men, Wright and McConchie, each standing up next to a rudder as the ship approaches, one of the ship’s crew firing a really cool bucket-like device that shoots a line, and the two men climbing a ladder up the side of the ship.

The most amazing thing is how both Wright and McConchie, despite having been on the overturned cat for somewhere between 12 and 17 hours — reports have differed — looked like they had just come out of a very warm pool after a pleasant swim. Talk about being none the worse for the experience! As a result, the biggest lesson we’ve taken from the accident is that if you’re going to flip a cat, do it in the tropics. If you’re going to do it in cool or cold water, have a wetsuit or a survival suit handy.

There’s a rumor going around Tonga that the owner of Forum Pacific, which rescued the Anna crew, fired the captain. According to the rumor, the owner is mad that the skipper, having a 50-ton crane on the Forum Pacific, didn’t pick up the very valuable year-old cat. Don’t bet the farm on this rumor being even remotely true. Besides, judging from the sea conditions in the YouTube video, the cat would have been bashed to pieces had they tried to lift her aboard the ship.

As it was, apparently there has been a squabble over the ‘salvage’ of Anna. We’re betting that none of the squabbling parties know anything about salvage law — not that it tends to matter in the more remote parts of the world.