Who’s in Charge of a Vessel?

We always assumed that it was a captain’s decision whether to put to sea or not, particularly if bad weather is approaching. But that doesn’t seem to be the thinking of British Admiralty Registrar Robert Jervis Kay.

In December of ’06, delivery skipper John Anstess of Plymouth, England, and Southern Californian crew Dave Rodman and Richard Beckman, died when the 44-ft Voyage 440 catamaran Cat Shot they were delivering for Reliance Yacht Management of Farnborough, England, got caught in a horrible storm off the coast of Northern California, capsized, and washed up on the beach. Apparently the boat was in something of a rush to be delivered in time for the Seattle Boat Show, although the show was nearly two months away.

The body of Anstess, 55, was never found. His sister sued Reliance in British Admiralty Court in September of ’10. Some of the details of the case were just released, but to our mind not the most pertinent stuff. In justifying his decision, Registrar Kay said that Reliance had "pressured" Anstess, who had apparently suggested leaving the boat in San Diego for the winter, into continuing on toward Seattle. Kay went so far as to absolve Anstess, who everyone agreed was a highly trained and extremely experienced mariner, of even partial responsibility for setting sail into a tremendous storm.

Reliance responded angrily to the ruling. "Anstess was a true professional, and it would be a sleight to his character to suggest that he would allow himself to put the crew and boat in undue danger for financial reasons or was pressured to do so by management or non-sailing administrative staff."

We wish the nature of the "pressure" on Anstess had been revealed in detail by Registrar Kay. Perhaps a gun to the forehead of Anstess’ oldest son, if he had one, or a knife held to the throat of his mother. With all due respect to the dead, had we been in Anstess’ Topsiders, and had we had the weather information he had, we can’t imagine anything short of preventing the murder of our family members that could have pressured us to put to sea from San Francisco Bay that morning. "Kiss our ass!" would have been our last words to Reliance after we secured the cat to the dock and left town for somewhere warm.

We have no idea what Cat Shot crewmen Rodman and Beckman were thinking, and if they had objections to continuing. But according the report in the January 2007 issue of Latitude, the weather forecast showed a huge storm was on its way out of the Gulf of Alaska and was due to hit Washington and Oregon in just a few days. You just don’t knowingly go out into stuff like that. Particularly in catamarans, which are not immune to flipping in severe weather. After all, it hadn’t been that many years before when a Lagoon 42 catamaran departed the Northeast on a delivery to the Caribbean in winter. She got into a bad storm, and neither she or her crew were ever heard from again.

Another consideration is that it’s generally easier to go north from San Francisco to Seattle in the winter because heavy weather is more predictable and there are often generous periods of calm between storms.

Clouding the situation is a previous incident that would seem to suggest that Reliance may have asked their delivery skippers to do unsafe things. Just two months before Anstess and his crew were killed, delivery skipper Steve Hobley of Newton Abbot, England, died when the 38-ft catamaran he was delivering across the Atlantic for Reliance was overwhelmed by 45-ft waves and capsized. The two crew, American Kevin Klinges and Ollie Templeman of Poole, England, hung on for 11 hours before the U.S. Coast Guard managed to rescue them. The cat was initially to be delivered across the Atlantic to Miami but part of the way across, Reliance told the captain to change course for the much more northerly Annapolis.

Any seasoned skipper knows that you don’t deliver a boat across the Atlantic to north of Miami in the winter, and only to Miami because you can almost always quickly dive to the south if trouble starts heading your way. Call us chicken if you want, but had we been in Hobley’s shoes, and Reliance had told us to change destinations to Annapolis, we’d have had a simple two-word answer for them. The first would have started with an ‘F’, and the second would have ended with a ‘U’.

According to news reports, crewman Klinges testified that Reliance told Capt. Hobley that if he didn’t divert to Annapolis, he wouldn’t work for the company again. Shame, shame, shame on Reliance if that’s true. But that should have been an idle threat, because who would want to work for a company that would request such a change in route at that time of year? Once again, had it been us, Reliance would have gotten the same two-word response. We would have sailed the catamaran to Miami as originally planned, then chained the boat to the dock until we and our crew got paid in full.

It seems to us that the principle here is who is in the command of a vessel — and we’re somewhat surprised to learn that a British Registrar apparently believes it’s not the captain, but rather someone — perhaps not even a sailor — in a warm office thousands of miles from the boat itself. Does that seem as weird to you as it does to us?

We want to emphasize that we mourn for those mariners who lost their lives or suffered in these incidents, repeat that we’re not privy to all the evidence, and acknowledge that hindsight is 20/20. Nonetheless, if the loss of these sailors’ lives is not to be in vain, it will be because all other sailors will have learned that it’s the captain of the vessel who should call the shots on the vessel he/she commands. After all, it’s the life of his/her crew, as well as himself/herself, that is at stake.

We’re interested in knowing what you think.