sailboat sinks after hitting whale

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Sailing crew rescued after giant whale sank 44ft boat in Pacific Ocean

Whale collided with sailboat 13 days into group’s three-week sailing trip from Galápagos Islands to French Polynesia

A giant whale sank a sailing crew’s boat in the Pacific Ocean before the group was rescued at the end of an ordeal that could have come out of a novel.

Rick Rodriguez of Tavernier, Florida, and three friends spent 10 hours on a lifeboat and dinghy after a whale sank the crew’s 44ft sailboat Raindancer, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

The group had planned a three-week sailing trip from the Galápagos Islands to French Polynesia, about 3,500 miles away in the south Pacific . But on 13 March, only 13 days into the crossing, disaster struck. At about 1.30pm, Rodriguez was enjoying a vegetarian pizza for lunch with the others when he heard a loud noise.

“The second pizza had just come out of the oven, and I was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing,” Rodriguez said to the Post during an interview over a satellite phone. “The back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard.”

Other members of the crew were thrown by the large impact, but each saw from different angles that a whale had smashed into the boat.

“I saw a massive whale off the port aft side with its side fin up in the air,” Alana Litz said.

Five seconds after the whale’s collision, an alarm sounded, warning that the boat was filling with water. Rodriguez said the crew members, who each have experience boating, quickly sprang into action.

Rodriguez placed a mayday call on a VHF radio and dispatched the emergency position indicating radio beacon, a distress signal that is connected to a worldwide rescue network.

The Peruvian coast guard later picked up Rodriguez’s distress beacon and notified a US Coast Guard station in California that oversees American ships in the Pacific Ocean.

While saltwater spilled into the vessel, others in the boat gathered food, emergency equipment and other gear, as well as fresh water.

The crew launched their lifeboat and a dinghy. They had grabbed their safety supplies but didn’t have enough time to get their passports.

On the lifeboat, the group had sufficient water for about a week. The crew also had a device that catches rainwater as well as food for three weeks.

Now stranded, Rodriguez and the crew had a phone, satellite wifi hotspot and an external battery that were all minimally charged.

Rodriguez first messaged his friend and fellow sailor Tommy Joyce about the situation. Joyce was sailing the same route as Rodriguez about 180 miles behind.

“Tommy this is no joke,” Rodriguez typed. “We hit a whale and the ship went down.”

Rodriguez sent a similar message to his brother, Roger, adding: “Tell mom it’s going to be OK.”

Rodriguez then asked his brother to send a message to Joyce on WhatsApp because he checked the social messaging app more frequently. After turning off the wifi hotspot for two hours to save battery power, Rodriguez received a reassuring message from Joyce: “We got you bud.”

Hours later, Rodriguez and his crew joined the Rolling Stones, a 45ft boat captained by Geoff Stone.

Stone had received one of Rodriguez’s mayday calls from a friend and coordinated a rescue of Rodriguez’s group with Joyce and the Peruvian officials.

The crew should land in French Polynesia on Wednesday. Rodriguez told the Post he is grateful to be safely onboard the Rolling Stones but misses the Raindancer, a boat he was living on and had retrofitted for the trip.

“I feel very lucky, and grateful, that we were rescued so quickly,” said Rodriguez. “We were in the right place at the right time to go down.”

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Rescued at sea: After a whale sank their sailboat, Florida crew stranded in South Pacific

• A 44-foot sailing ship, Raindancer, was hit by a whale on March 13, sinking the boat in the South Pacific.
• The four people on board were adrift in a life raft and dinghy with a satellite phone and some supplies.
• Phone calls, texts and social media helped lead another ship, the Rolling Stones, to rescue the castaways in about 10 hours.

A lifelong dream sailing trip turned into a potentially life-threatening ordeal for a four-person crew after a whale shipwrecked their boat.

Rick Rodriguez, owner of the sailing ship Raindancer, and three crewmembers onboard were amidst a voyage of more than 3,000 nautical miles to French Polynesia in the South Pacific. The 44-foot cruising boat had left the Galapagos at the end of February, after passing through the Panama Canal three weeks earlier.

The crew would make it to French Polynesia, but not in the manner expected.

More than halfway to the Marquesas Islands, disaster struck: They were eating homemade pizza for lunch "when it felt like we ran into a concrete wall," Rodriguez recalled in a note posted March 14 on the Facebook Boatwatch Group .

"I heard a loud crashing noise simultaneous with a metal clanking. I heard (crewmember) Alana (Litz) yell, 'we hit a whale,' then I looked to port and saw a huge whale, and blood gushing out of the side of it as it began swimming down."

"It felt like a scene out of a movie," Litz told NBC's Today show during an interview posted Wednesday . 

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A whale of an emergency in the South Pacific

A former professional yacht captain, Rodriguez saw that the collision "opened up multiple holes (and) cracks near the stern of the boat and the water was up to the floorboards within about 30 seconds. Maybe less," he said in a post on Instagram .

About the boat, which he purchased in 2021 and had lived on, Rodriguez said, "I made attempts to save the boat but I was, unfortunately, unsuccessful."

The crew quickly gathered safety equipment, some supplies including water, emergency gear and  electronics including a satellite phone, satellite Wi-Fi hotspot and a power bank. The dinghy was launched and loaded. Rodriguez used a VHF radio on board to make a mayday call and set off an emergency beacon, he told The Washington Post .

Before Raindancer "took her last breath about 15 minutes after she got hit," Rodriguez said, the crew were in a dinghy and a lifeboat was deployed. "I’m proud of the way our crew handled the situation, and the first priority on any boat is always the safety of the crew and passengers," he said on Instagram.

Rescue mission: Wisconsin man sailing around the world rescues castaway crew in South Pacific

Now adrift, seafarers awaited rescue

Rodriguez, 31, of Tavernier, Florida, activated a Globalstar SPOT tracker, which regularly transmits its location, and continued sending a mayday call hourly on the radio, The Post reported.

Meanwhile, the crew's distress signal had been picked up by officials in Peru, who alerted the U.S. Coast Guard, The Post reported. 

A commercial ship 90 miles to the south changed course toward the castaways after getting an urgent broadcast from the Coast Guard and there were also about two dozen boats participating in an around-the-world yachting rally sailing a similar route, the Post reported.

With the crew in the dinghy and life raft, Rodriguez sent a text message to friend Tommy Joyce, a sailor whose boat was about 180 miles behind on the same route, as a safety precaution..

“Tommy this is no joke,” he typed. “We hit a whale and the ship went down.”

“Tell as many boats as you can,” Rodriguez said. “Battery is dangerously low.”

Rodriguez also texted his brother, Roger, in Miami, to let him and his mother know the situation. He also asked his brother to relay their location via WhatsApp to Joyce. 

Online lifeline helps save South Pacific castaways

Joyce also posted a note about the incident on the Facebook page for  Boatwatch , a volunteer network of amateur radio operators who search for missing boats and people lost at sea.

"It was the Boatwatch group that ended up having somebody on there who knew" a 45-foot catamaran called the Rolling Stones was the closest boat, Joyce told Today.

"I think we were about 60-65 miles away when we realized that we were the closest boat," the boat's captain Geoff Stone told Today. 

Stone of Muskego, Wisconsin, was circumnavigating the globe aboard the Rolling Stones, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , part of the USA TODAY Network.

When they learned about the boat's dilemma, the crew didn't hesitate. "It was going to take us a while to get there, but we were going to change our course," said Mark Moriarty, Stone's father-in-law, who was also on board.

When Rodriguez turned on the satellite radio and hotspot two hours later, there was a message from Joyce: “We got you bud.”

Rescue ship used beacon, coordinates for nighttime recovery

Just more than nine hours later, the crew on Rolling Stones saw the flashing light of the dinghy and rescued the castaways. As the Rolling Stones approached, they spotted a beacon and a flare and the crews communicated via radio.

"I thought for sure the hardest part was going to be locating them," Stone said. "Luckily with the new technologies ... the latest coordinates we were given was all very accurate."

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Stone, reached on his vessel on the way to an island in French Polynesia, told the Journal Sentinel the last few days have been "a real humbling experience."

"The right place at the right time to help them out was just by chance," he said. "I'm really glad and happy that we were able to do that."

Rodriguez mourned the loss of his ship, Raindancer, on Instagram, saying it "had all my belongings on it … it was my ticket to exploring the world, she was my refuge, my rock, the one place I could be where I felt myself, she was my friend, I would give to her and she would give back memories, lessons, and stories. … In the end, she was lost at sea, and left myself and the crew with one last incredible story."

Contributing: Bill Glauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter:  @mikesnider .

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Sailboat crew rescued in Pacific after abandoning ship sunk by whale

Four people aboard the raindancer were stranded in the pacific ocean for 10 hours.

His circumstances sounded straight out of “Moby-Dick,” but Rick Rodriguez wasn’t kidding. In his first text messages from the life raft, he said he was in serious trouble.

“Tommy this is no joke,” he typed to his friend and fellow sailor Tommy Joyce. “We hit a whale and the ship went down.”

“Tell as many boats as you can,” Rodriguez also urged. “Battery is dangerously low.”

On March 13, Rodriguez and three friends were 13 days into what was expected to be a three-week crossing from the Galápagos to French Polynesia on his 44-foot sailboat, Raindancer. Rodriguez was on watch, and he and the others were eating a vegetarian pizza for lunch around 1:30 p.m. In an interview with The Washington Post later conducted via satellite phone, Rodriguez said the ship had good winds and was sailing at about 6 knots when he heard a terrific BANG!

“The second pizza had just come out of the oven, and I was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing,” he said. “The back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard.”

The sinking itself took just 15 minutes, Rodriguez said. He and his friends managed to escape onto a life raft and a dinghy. The crew spent just 10 hours adrift, floating about nine miles before a civilian ship plucked them from the Pacific Ocean in a seamless predawn maneuver. A combination of experience, technology and luck contributed to a speedy rescue that separates the Raindancer from similar catastrophes .

“There was never really much fear that we were in danger,” Rodriguez said. “Everything was in control as much as it could be for a boat sinking.”

It wasn’t lost on Rodriguez that the story that inspired Herman Melville happened in the same region. The ship Essex was also heading west from the Galápagos when it was rammed by a sperm whale in 1820, leaving the captain and some crew to endure for roughly three months and to resort to cannibalism before being rescued.

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There have been about 1,200 reports of whales and boats colliding since a worldwide database launched in 2007, said Kate Wilson, a spokeswoman for the International Whaling Commission. Collisions that cause significant damage are rare, the U.S. Coast Guard said, noting that the last rescue attributed to damage from a whale was the sinking of a 40-foot J-Boat in 2009 off Baja California, with that crew rescued by Coast Guard helicopter.

Alana Litz was the first to see what she now thinks was a Bryde’s whale as long as the boat. “I saw a massive whale off the port aft side with its side fin up in the air,” Litz said.

Rodriguez looked to see it bleeding from the upper third of its body as it slipped below the water.

Bianca Brateanu was below cooking and got thrown in the collision. She rushed up to the deck while looking to the starboard and saw a whale with a small dorsal fin 30 to 40 feet off that side, leading the group to wonder whether at least two whales were present.

Within five seconds of impact, an alarm went off indicating the bottom of the boat was filling with water, and Rodriguez could see it rushing in from the stern.

Water was already above the floor within minutes. Rodriguez made a mayday call on the VHF radio and set off the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB). The distress signal was picked up by officials in Peru, who alerted the U.S. Coast Guard District 11 in Alameda, Calif., which is in charge of U.S. vessels in the Pacific.

The crew launched the inflatable life raft, as well as the dinghy, then realized they needed to drop the sails, so that line attaching the life raft didn’t snap as it got dragged behind the still-moving Raindancer.

Rodriguez grabbed his snorkel gear and a tarp and jumped into the water to see whether he could plug the holes, but it was futile. The area near the propeller shaft was badly punched in, he said.

Meanwhile, the others had gathered safety equipment, emergency gear and food. In addition to bottled water, they filled “water bottles, tea kettles and pots” before the salt water rose above the sink, Rodriguez said.

“There was no emotion,” Rodriguez recalled. “While we were getting things done, we all had that feeling, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ but it didn’t keep us from doing what we needed to do and prepare ourselves to abandon ship.”

Rodriguez and Simon Fischer handed the items down to the women in the dinghy, but in the turmoil, they left a bag with their passports behind. They stepped into the water themselves just as the deck went under.

Rodriguez swam to the life raft, climbed in and looked back to see the last 10 feet of the mast sinking “at an unbelievable speed,” he said. As the Raindancer slipped away, he pulled a Leatherman from his pocket and cut the line that tethered the life raft to the boat after Litz noticed it was being pulled taut.

They escaped with enough water for about a week and with a device for catching rain, Rodriguez said. They had roughly three weeks worth of food, and a fishing pole.

The Raindancer “was well-equipped with safety equipment and multiple communication devices and had a trained crew to handle this open-ocean emergency until a rescue vessel arrived,” said Douglas Samp, U.S. Coast Guard Pacific area search and rescue program manager. He cautioned that new technology should not replace the use of an EPIRB, which has its own batteries.

Indeed, the one issue the crew faced was battery power. Their Iridium Go, a satellite WiFi hotspot, was charged to only 32 percent (dropping to 18 percent before the rescue). The phone that pairs with it was at 40 percent, and the external power bank was at 25 percent.

Rodriguez sent his first message to Joyce, who was sailing a boat on the same route about 180 miles behind. His second was to his brother, Roger, in Miami. He repeated most of what he had messaged to Joyce, adding: “Tell mom it’s going to be okay.”

Rodriguez’s confidence was earned. A 31-year-old from Tavernier, Fla., he had spent about 10 years working as a professional yacht captain, mate and engineer. He bought the Raindancer in 2021 and lived on her, putting sweat equity into getting the boat, built in 1976, ready for his dream trip.

Both he and Brateanu, 25, from Newcastle, England, have mariner survival training. Litz, 32, from Comox, British Columbia, was formerly a firefighter in the Canadian military. Fischer, 25, of Marsberg, Germany, had the least experience, but “is a very levelheaded guy,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez gave detailed information on their location and asked his brother to send a message via WhatsApp to Joyce, who has a Starlink internet connection that he checks more frequently than his Iridium Go. Because of his low battery, he told his brother that he was turning the unit off and would check it in two hours.

Rodriguez also activated a Globalstar SPOT tracker, which transmitted the position of the life raft every few minutes, and he broadcast a mayday call every hour using his VHF radio.

When he turned the Iridium Go back on at the scheduled time, there was a reply from Joyce: “We got you bud.”

As luck would have it, the Raindancer was sailing the same route as about two dozen boats participating in a round-the-world yachting rally called the World ARC. BoatWatch, a network of amateur radio operators that searches for people lost at sea, was also notified. And the urgent broadcast issued by the Coast Guard was answered by a commercial ship, Dong-A Maia, which said it was 90 miles to the south of Raindancer and was changing course.

“We have a bunch of boats coming. We got you brother,” Joyce typed.

“Can’t wait to see you guys,” Rodriguez replied.

Joyce told Rodriguez that the closest boat was “one day maximum.”

In fact, the closest boat was a 45-foot catamaran not in the rally. The Rolling Stones was only about 35 miles away. The captain, Geoff Stone, 42, of Muskego, Wis., had the mayday relayed to him by a friend sailing about 500 miles away. He communicated with Joyce via WhatsApp and with the Peruvian coast guard using a satellite phone to say they were heading to the last known coordinates.

In the nine hours it took to reach the life raft, Stone told The Post, he and the other three men on his boat were apprehensive about how the rescue was going to work.

“The seas weren’t terrible, but we’ve never done a search and rescue,” he said. He wasn’t sure whether they would be able to find the life raft without traveling back and forth.

He was surprised when Fischer spotted the Rolling Stones’ lights from about five miles away and made contact on the VHF radio.

Once it got closer, Rodriguez set off a parachute flare, then activated a personal beacon that transmits both GPS location and AIS (Automatic Identification System) to assist in the approach. Although the 820-foot Dong-A Maia, a Panamanian-flagged tanker, was standing by, it made more sense to be rescued by the smaller ship.

To board the Rolling Stones, the crew from the Raindancer transferred to the dinghy with a few essentials, then detached the life raft so it wouldn’t get caught in the boat’s propeller.

“We were 30 or 40 feet away when we started to make out each other’s figures. There was dead silence,” Rodriguez said. “They were curious what kind of emotional state we were in. We were curious who they were.”

“I yelled out howdy” to break the ice, he explained.

One by one, they jumped onto the transom. “All of a sudden, us four were sitting in this new boat with four strangers,” Rodriguez said.

The hungry sailors were given fresh bread, then were offered showers. The Rolling Stones crew gave their guests toothbrushes, deodorant and clothes. None even had shoes.

Rodriguez said he had tried not to think about losing his boat while the crisis was at hand. But, the first morning he woke up on Rolling Stones, it hit him. Not only had he lost his home and belongings, but he also felt as if he’d lost “a good friend.”

“I’ve worked so hard to be here, and have been dreaming of making landfall at the Bay of Virgins in the Marquesas on my own boat for about 10 years. And 1,000 nautical miles short, my boat sinks,” Rodriguez said.

The Rolling Stones is expected to arrive in French Polynesia on Wednesday, and Rodriguez is glad that he’s onboard.

“I feel very lucky and grateful that we were rescued so quickly,” he said. “We were in the right place at the right time to go down.”

Karen Schwartz is a writer based in Fort Collins, Colo. Follow her on Twitter @WanderWomanIsMe .

A previous version of this article misstated the size of the J-boat that sank in 2009. It was 40 feet.

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Their Boat Hit a Whale and Sank. The Internet Saved Their Lives.

After the collision in the Pacific Ocean this month, Rick Rodriguez and three other sailors were rescued by a fellow boater, with an assist from a satellite internet signal.

By Mike Ives

When Rick Rodriguez’s sailboat collided with a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean earlier this month, it sank within about 15 minutes. But not before he and his three fellow mariners had escaped with essential supplies and cutting-edge communications gear.

One was a pocket-size satellite device that allowed Mr. Rodriguez to call his brother, who was thousands of miles away on land, from a life raft. That call would set in motion a successful rescue effort by other sailors in the area who had satellite internet access on their boats.

“Technology saved our lives,” Mr. Rodriguez later wrote in an account that he typed on his iPhone from the sailboat that had rescued him and his crew.

People involved in the roughly nine-hour rescue say it illustrates how newer satellite technologies, especially Starlink internet systems , operated by the rocket company SpaceX since 2019 , have dramatically improved emergency communication options for sailors stranded at sea — and the people trying to find them.

“All sailors want to help out,” said Tommy Joyce, a friend of Mr. Rodriguez who helped organize the rescue effort from his own sailboat. “But this just makes it so much easier to coordinate and help boaters in distress.”

Starlink’s service gives vessels access to satellite signals that reach oceans and seas around the globe, according to the company. The fee-based connection allows sailors to reach other vessels on their own, instead of relying solely on sending distress signals to government-rescue agencies that use older, satellite-based communication technologies.

But the rapid rescue would not have been possible without the battery-powered satellite device that Mr. Rodriguez used to call his brother. Such devices have only been used by recreational sailors for about a decade, according to the United States Coast Guard. This one’s manufacturer, Iridium, said in a statement that the device is “incredibly popular with the sailing community.”

“The recent adoption of more capable satellite systems now means sailors can broadcast distress to a closed or public chat group, sometimes online, and get an instant response,” said Paul Tetlow, the managing director of the World Cruising Club, a sailing organization whose members participated in the rescue .

A sinking feeling

Whales don’t normally hit boats. In a famous exception, one rammed the whaling vessel Essex as it crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean in 1820, an accident that was among the inspirations for Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “ Moby Dick .”

In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, a whale interrupted a three-week voyage by his 44-foot sailboat, Raindancer , from the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador to French Polynesia. At the time of the impact on March 13, the boat was cruising at about seven miles per hour and its crew was busy eating homemade pizza.

Mr. Rodriguez would later write that making contact with the whale — just as he dipped a slice into ranch dressing — felt like hitting a concrete wall.

Even as the boat sank, “I felt like it was just a scene out of a movie," Alana Litz, a friend of Mr. Rodriguez and one of the sailors on Raindancer, told NBC’s “Today” program last week. The story of the rescue had been reported earlier by The Washington Post .

Raindancer’s hull was reinforced to withstand an impact with something as large and heavy as a cargo container. But the collision created multiple cracks near the stern, Mr. Rodriguez later wrote , and water rose to the floorboards within about 30 seconds.

Minutes later, he and his friends had all escaped from the boat with food, water and other essential supplies. When he looked back, he saw the last 10 feet of the mast sinking quickly. As a line that had been tying the raft to the boat started to come under tension, he cut it with a knife.

That left the Raindancer crew floating in the open ocean, about 2,400 miles west of Lima, Peru, and 1,800 miles southeast of Tahiti.

“The sun began to set and soon it was pitch dark,” Mr. Rodriguez, who was not available for an interview, wrote in an account of the journey that he shared with other sailors. “And we were floating right smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a dinghy and a life raft. Hopeful that we would be rescued soon.”

‘Not a drill’

Before Raindancer sank, Mr. Rodriguez activated a satellite radio beacon that instantly sent a distress alert to coast guard authorities in Peru, the country with search and rescue authority over that part of the Pacific, and the United States, where his boat was registered.

In 2009, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter rescued a sailboat crew whose vessel had collided with a whale and sank about 70 miles off the coast of Mexico. But Raindancer’s remote location made a rescue like that one impossible. So in the hour after it sank, U.S. Coast Guard officials used decades-old satellite communications technology to contact commercial vessels near the site of the accident.

One vessel responded to say that it was about 10 hours away and willing to divert. But, in the end, that was not necessary because Mr. Rodriguez’s satellite phone call to his brother Roger had already set a separate, successful rescue effort in motion.

Mr. Rodriguez’s brother contacted Mr. Joyce, whose own boat, Southern Cross, had left the Galápagos around the same time and was about 200 miles behind Raindancer when it sank. Because Southern Cross had a Starlink internet connection, it became a hub for a rescue effort that Mr. Joyce, 40, coordinated with other boats using WhatsApp, Facebook and several smartphone apps that track wind speed, tides and boat positions.

“Not a drill,” Mr. Joyce, who works in the biotech industry, often from his boat, wrote on WhatsApp to other sailors who were in the area. “We are in the Pacific headed that direction but there are closer vessels.”

After a flurry of communication, several boats began sailing as quickly as possible toward Raindancer’s last known coordinates.

SpaceX did not respond to an inquiry about the system’s coverage in the Pacific. But Douglas Samp, who oversees the Coast Guard’s search and rescue operations in the Pacific, said in a phone interview that vessels only began using Starlink internet service in the open ocean this year.

Mr. Joyce said that satellite internet had been key to finding boats that were close to the stranded crew.

“They were all using Starlink,” he said, speaking in a video interview from his boat as it sailed to Tahiti. “Can you imagine if we didn’t have access?”

Of course, there was one sailboat captain without a Starlink signal during the rescue: Mr. Rodriguez. After night fell over the Pacific, he and his fellow sailors resorted to the ancient method of sitting in a life raft and hoping for the best.

In the darkness, the wind picked up and flying fish jumped into their dinghy, according to Mr. Rodriguez’s account. Every hour or so, they placed a mayday call on a hand-held radio, hoping that a ship might happen to pass within its range.

None did. But after a few more hours of anxious waiting, they saw the lights of a catamaran and heard the voice of its American captain crackling over their radio. That is when they screamed in relief.

Mike Ives is a general assignment reporter. More about Mike Ives

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‘Tommy this is not a joke’: Friends send mayday message as boat sinks in Pacific after being hit by whale

Rick rodriguez and crew of three spent 10 hours on a lifeboat and dinghy after collision, article bookmarked.

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A group of friends had to be rescued from the Pacific after their 44ft sailing boat sunk after being struck by a giant whale.

Rick Rodriguez and three friends spent 10 hours on a lifeboat and dinghy after the bizarre reported accident took place on 13 March.

Mr Rodriguez, who is from Florida, was 13 days into a three-week and 3,500-mile crossing of the South Pacific from the Galápagos Islands to French Polynesia when the whale collision took place.

He told The Washington Post that he had been eating vegetarian pizza onboard the boat Raindancer when it ran into the huge whale.

“The second pizza had just come out of the oven, and I was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing,” Mr Rodriguez said in a satellite phone interview with the Post .

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“The back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard.”

Crew member Alana Litz added that following the collision she saw “a massive whale off the port aft side with its side fin up in the air.”

And within seconds alarms began sounding warning the group of friends that the boat was taking on water.

Mr Rodriguez says that he issued a mayday call on the boat’s VHF radio and sent out their position in an emergency distress signal. The crew then gathered enough food and water for around a week, as well as emergency equipment before launching the lifeboat and dinghy.

In the rush, they left their passports behind.

Using a phone and satellite hotspot, Mr Rodriquez messaged his friend and sailor Tommy Joyce, who was on the same route but around 180 miles behind them.

“Tommy this is no joke. We hit a whale and the ship went down,” Mr Rodriguez says he messaged his friend.

Sailors speak out after whale sinks boat in middle of Pacific

He also sent a message to his brother Roger urging him to: “Tell mom it’s going to be OK.”

He also asked his sibling to try to contact Mr Joyce on WhatsApp to try to reach him faster.

After turning the wifi hotspot off for two hours to conserve battery life, he finally received a message back from Mr Joyce, saying “We got you bud.”

The crew was eventually rescued hours later.

The Peruvian coast guard had picked up the distress signal and relayed the information to the US Coast Guard station in California.

But, in the end, it was another boat which reached the group first.

Rick Rodriguez says that he issued a mayday call on the boat’s VHF radio and sent out their position in an emergency distress signal

The Rolling Stones, captained by sailor Geoff Stone, had heard the mayday call from the Raindancer and coordinated with Mr Joyce and Peruvian officials.

“I feel very lucky, and grateful, that we were rescued so quickly,” added Mr Rodriguez. “We were in the right place at the right time to go down.”

While the crew of the Raindancer should have completed their journey on Wednesday – and had to say goodbye to the Raindancer – the group has no plans of quitting.

Now, they will complete their journey to French Polynesia onboard the Rolling Stones.

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Danish sailors rescued in Pacific after whale collision

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Reporting by Louise Breusch Rasmussen, editing by Terje Solsvik and Emelia Sithole-Matarise

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After giant whale sinks boat in the Pacific, Tennessee man helps with the rescue

Tommy Joyce was talking to his dad when an unknown number appeared on his phone.  

Moments later, the phone call with his father was dropped.

The spotty signal was expected, though. His father was in Dickson County, and Joyce was in the South Pacific, aboard a 45-foot sailboat named Southern Cross, halfway between the Galapagos Islands and French Polynesia, along with his wife, Katelyn, and friend Natalie Rudman. 

Joyce decided to call the unknown number back. 

Someone answered. He immediately heard an excited voice, uttering words he still remembers.

“You are friends with my brother Rick from Raindancer," the voice said. "This is not a joke, Raindancer just sank. They hit a whale and the boat sank. Rick says you know what to do.” 

Rick Rodriguez and three friends were on board Raindancer, on the same route as Southern Cross. They were “buddy boating,” to use sailing parlance. 

Joyce sent a message to Rodriguez: "We got you bud." 

The crew believes a Bryde’s whale crashed into Rodriguez’s boat . As the sailboat started to sink, the crew quickly grabbed supplies and boarded a lifeboat and dinghy. 

The Southern Cross was just under 200 miles away at the time. 

"As soon as we learned about the situation, we put a post on Facebook and set up a WhatsApp group," Joyce told The Tennessean. "Tried to contact every single boat they could." 

The story of the rescue has made national news.

“The sailing community is so tight," said Joyce, who is still sailing in the Pacific. "Everyone is trying to help everyone else." 

The closest boat was a 45-foot catamaran named Rolling Stones , captained by Geoff Stone. Stone’s brother saw a post in the social media group about the sinking boat. They changed course to help.

After 10 hours adrift in a lifeboat, the passengers from the Raindancer boarded the Rolling Stones.

‘Always wanted to do this big trip’

Joyce grew up in Dickson County, and his family owns Middle Tennessee Lumber. He was deputy assistant secretary for global energy security and multilateral engagement at the U.S Department of Energy until early 2021 when a new administration took office.

The Joyces saw an opportunity during the presidential transition. 

“We had always wanted to do this big trip,” Joyce said. 

So the couple set off on an adventure at sea. Along the way, they met Rudman, a freediving record holder from South Africa who teaches freediving and yoga in the Caribbean. 

Joyce, who is 40, said he reached his milestone birthday while crossing through the Panama Canal. 

Joyce said they have spotted whales during the trip. They’ve literally knocked on wood when talking about it, hoping to keep their distance. 

“We’ve seen a few in the Galapagos," he said. "We saw two a couple days after we left.”

Another emergency 

The whale wreck wasn’t the only issue the Joyces have encountered. 

About three days after the Raindancer went down, the Joyces heard another mayday call about a man who suffered a stroke on a boat.  

Joyce credits the power of the SpaceX-backed Starlink internet service for providing immediate communication in the Pacific. 

“This is out of the ordinary" he said. "We have a satellite internet that’s fast for the first time ever.” 

Once again, the Southern Cross crew began reaching out to nearby boats through social media and other methods.

“They were running out of fuel,” Joyce said. 

Ultimately, another boat rescued the man and brought him to shore. 

Joyce's father, Bill Joyce said the family worries about their son and daughter-in-law at sea. But they're able to temper their concern, knowing they are skilled sailors.

"When you are a parent and your children are at sea or war or battling some illness you spend a lot of time praying for their welfare," Joyce said. "We couldn’t be prouder of Tommy and Katelyn and their crew member Natalie in facilitating the rescue of their four friends on the Raindancer."

The crew has been sailing for more than three straight weeks now. But it won't be much longer before they complete their 3,000-nautical-mile journey to French Marquesas in French Polynesia. 

Tommy Joyce said they doesn’t expect to stop there. His crew has  chronicled much of the trip in a blog .

“Then we'll continue heading west to New Zealand or Australia,” Joyce said.

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How a sperm whale collision sank our yacht and sparked a mid-Pacific rescue

• December 3, 2020

A Pacific crossing became a dramatic mid-ocean rescue for Peter Nielsen after his yacht collided with a young sperm whale

Photo: Amana Images Inc/Alamy

It’s noon on Sunday, 23 August, and just another day in the life of our small crew sailing across the Pacific . The Atlantic 46 catamaran One Tree Island is making a steady 6-7 knots, heading south-southwest under a reefed mainsail and genoa, both well eased in the 12-knot south-easterly.

It’s less sail than we’d like to carry, but we’ve learned to tailor boatspeed to sea state, and the 2m swell is topped by smaller whitecaps that make for an uncomfortably bumpy ride if we push harder. Panama is 2,500 miles astern, we’ve been at sea for 18 days, and even if we keep to this modest speed we’ll be in the Marquesas, 1,500 miles away, in less than ten days.

Shoals of flying fish erupt, startled, from the water around us and scatter among the waves. Willy Stephens, One Tree Island skipper and owner, is asleep in his bunk in the port hull. I’m hoping he wakes up before too long to bake another loaf of his rather good bread.

The crew of One Tree Island (pictured before setting off from Florida) believe they collided with a young sperm whale (main image)

His wife, Anne, is below decks, rummaging for a book. I’m mentally planning next year’s cruise from Florida to the Bahamas and onward, reading a page of Bruce van Sant’s Passages South between each lingering look around the horizon. Not that there is ever anything to see; we haven’t had an AIS target in days, and only a few seabirds enliven our watches. There is only ever the sea, huge and indifferent.

We are late travellers in the Pacific; the prime season for the Panama-French Polynesia crossing is from February to April. Any later, and you don’t get to spend much time in these legendary islands before heading for cyclone season shelter in New Zealand or Australia.

In this year of COVID-19, however, there is no normality. Expat Brits (turned Kiwis) Willy and Anne had planned to sail across the Atlantic from the United States in May after launching their refitted cat. But as borders began to slam shut in March, their options became more limited by the week. They were stuck in a Florida boatyard, reading accounts of cruisers in limbo around the world.

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With their American visas about to run out, Willy and Anne decided to go for a near straight run to New Zealand, which was only letting in citizens and residents. The Panama Canal was open, though they’d first have to spend two weeks in quarantine. It appeared that they would be able to stop in French Polynesia, the previous weeks at sea being sufficient proof that they weren’t carrying COVID-19 to the islands.

I was refitting my own boat in the same yard, but it became apparent my 2020 cruising plans would have to go on indefinite hold. Being in possession of a highly desirable New Zealand passport; I gladly came aboard as the third hand, fulfilling both insurance and nationality requirements.

On this August day we are just over three months into the journey. We’ve motored down the Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Fort Pierce, sailed around the Bahamas, and across a lumpy and surly Caribbean Sea. We sweated out our two-week sentence anchored outside Panama’s Shelter Bay marina, then spent another two weeks at anchor waiting on a new staysail and deck awnings. We know we are better off than many. At least we’ll be welcome in New Zealand for the cyclone season.

Happier days: One Tree Island at Shelter Bay Marina in Panama

Whale strike

I stretch and take another look around the horizon, beginning with a squint through the rear window of the saloon. The previous week, while hundreds of miles from land, voices behind the boat had frightened the hell out of me. They turned out to be two Colombian fishermen in a small panga, asking for water (their mothership just over the horizon, minus an AIS transponder). When they peeled away, they were hidden by the swells within minutes.

As I turn towards the bow, out of the corner of my eye I register a dark shape in the water just ahead of us. A nanosecond later, at the instant I recognise it as a whale, the port bow makes contact and the boat jolts as if bashing into a steep head sea. I have just enough time to shout “****! Whale!” at the top of my voice before it passes down the port side. As it does so I hear, and feel, a crunching impact.

Willy shoots out of his bunk, instantly awake, and the three of us stare out the rear portlights at the whale lying on the surface in a froth of pink-tinged foam. For a moment we are all transfixed. Then I see a red warning light on the switch panel and say, “Bilge, check the bilge!”

Willy and Anne knee deep in water in the port hull

Willy jumps down the steps into water that’s already ankle deep, gushing into the boat from the hanging locker outboard on the port side. Tearing out the locker’s contents, he sees bright blue sea through a pair of inch-wide vertical cracks in the cedar strip and glass hull, water spurting into the air.

He grabs a couple of T-shirts and stuffs them into the cracks, then disappears into the aft locker and emerges with two of those orange foam rubber cones that are supposed to plug leaks – just not our kind of leaks, as he quickly discovers. Anne is in the cockpit, cranking away at the manual bilge pump, while I pull down the mainsail and roll away the genoa.

With the leak slowed if not staunched, it becomes obvious that we are in no immediate danger of sinking . When Willy replaced the engines he also sealed their compartments, so there is at least some reserve buoyancy in the hulls. There are no watertight bulkheads forward, though, but the entire forepeak is still above water and its door has a high threshold.

Sole boards and locker contents start to float around inside, but One Tree Island does maintain some buoyancy

Willy grabs a roll of sticky-back rubberised tape and applies it all around the door, effectively sealing it, moments before the rising water would have slopped over the sill. “Right,” he says. “Let’s have a look at the damage. Maybe we can patch it from the outside.” I tie a safety line around his wrist and the owner goes over the side.

“There’s a big dent maybe 3ft across, with two cracks in it, just above the keel,” he reports. That’s possibly the worst place for it. There’s no way we can fother it with a sailcloth patch, and nothing will stick to slimy, ablative antifouling .

By now the water is chest-deep in the port hull, but it seems to have reached a natural level just a few inches below the bridgedeck. The hull cracks are well out of reach from the inside, not that we can plug them effectively. We have not yet sent out a distress signal, although Anne has begun letting their shoreside contact in New Zealand, Frank Michaux, know what is happening via Iridium Go.

Willy and I talk through the situation. Could we sail or motor the boat? If we were 100 miles from shore, we would give it a go. But we are 1,500 miles from the nearest land, and with so many tonnes of water in the hull, would be lucky to make a couple of knots. Are we in danger of sinking? Not immediately. Catamarans are hard to sink, and this one is especially so, by virtue of its wood and foam construction.

What would make the situation worse? If the wind increases and the sea state gets up, there’s a good chance that water will slop over into the starboard hull and sink us lower in the water. Predictwind has the wind increasing to 20 knots in a couple of days. Do we want to abandon the boat? No, but it seems we have no option. The liferaft , though, will be the very last resort.

Abandon ship

Already we are taking some hefty slams from waves surging under the hull and smashing against the bridgedeck, and the decision is made. Willy activates the EPIRB , and I hit the emergency button on my SPOT X satellite communicator, tapping out a short message: STRUCK BY WHALE. TAKING ON WATER. Just over half an hour later, Willy gets an email from the Joint Rescue Coordination Center (JRCC) in Honolulu, Hawaii, asking us to confirm the EPIRB signal.

From then on, events develop in a slightly surreal fashion. The JRCC brings the Peruvian Coastguard into the picture (the US and Peru have a joint SAR agreement to work together in the Eastern Pacific) and we are handed over to an enthusiastic Peruvian Coastguard officer, who tells us that a Chinese fishing boat 24 miles away has agreed to take us on board.

The Chinese longliner won’t be with us until after dark, some six hours from now, which gives us plenty of time to pack a change of clothes and some personal effects to take with us.

We decide these emergency supplies will include the contents of the freezer and wine lockers, and all the chocolate and candy bars on board, as we doubt there’ll be much of that on a Chinese fishing boat. There’s a large piece of rather good steak in the fridge that we don’t want to leave to Neptune, so we cook that up for our last lunch. Then, there is nothing to do but wait.

As night falls, a bright light astern signals the arrival of the Fu Yuan Yu . We each fire a red flare – mostly just to say we’ve done it in anger, as we’ve got every light on board going so there’s no way she can miss us. As the small ship draws close to windward the excited shouts of her crew drown out the throb of her diesel.

She stops and drifts down on us, and the two vessels meet with a crunch. Her fish gate is only a couple of feet above our deck. Willing hands snatch the bags we pass up and then, one by one, timing the rolls, we are plucked off One Tree Island .

Next, half a dozen fishing crew swarm onto the cat. Two head for the dinghy and outboard , which are hoisted aboard in short order. Others disappear below deck, emerging with odd items of gear. Pillows and blankets come flying up to the deck, a pile of books is thrown aboard one by one. Towels, sun lotion, charts, random items of clothing, Willy’s drone, even my travel umbrella make their way onto a growing pile. There is shouting, a lot of it.

There is a final flurry as the crew carry up more tools, handheld VHFs and the like, all of which disappear up to the bridge of Fu Yuan Yu . Meanwhile the swell is increasing and the two vessels roll and grind against one another. I see the stanchions ripped loose and feel the crunching as the ship’s steel gunwale crushes One Tree Island ’s hull-deck joint. One of the crew almost falls between the boats as he scrambles back aboard. Then suddenly One Tree Island is drifting astern, her lights still ablaze.

I look at my watch. It is 2130, just nine hours since we hit what we later agree is a half-grown sperm whale and eight hours since we triggered the EPIRB. In this part of the ocean, it must be a record for a rescue. The transition from flooded sailing boat to noisy, brightly lit fishing boat is surreal.

The din from the engine is overpowering, and there seem to be people everywhere, all trying to help us in one way or another. We are ushered into a tiny cabin, just 10ft by 7ft, with four bunks in it. Somehow we fit all our possessions in there and immediately understand why the crew salvaged our blankets and pillows: there were no spares on this boat.

There are not even mattresses, the crew sleep on half-inch-thick futons. But an AC unit keeps the temperature manageable, and it’s still an awful lot more comfortable than a liferaft.

By the next night, we are in tune with the ship’s rhythm. It steams on a zigzag course, alternately paying out its miles of fishing line and baited hooks and reeling it all back in again. The primary target is sharks, but we also see marlin, tuna and big mahi-mahi reeled in.

MV Tonsberg hoves to off the Fu Yuan Yu

Each time there’s a fish on the line, the ship slows while it is gaffed and hauled on board. The sharks’ fins, great delicacies in China, are cut off, bagged and snap-frozen; their owners are weighed and then join their fins in the freezers. Much of the by-catch goes to the galley, and the staple diet on the ship is rice and fish.

The captain, aware of the political sensitivity surrounding longlining, makes clear that he’ll confiscate our electronics if we take photographs. He even gets angry when he sees me writing in my notebook.

Alternative transport

In the meantime, Willy has been in contact with the Peruvian Coastguard, who has been phoning the captain at odd hours. Each time, Willy is called up to the captain’s cabin, where he must drink beer and smoke cigarettes with our host while they communicate via the time-honoured method of sign language and raised voices.

The problem is finding a way back to land for us, given that the captain is as keen to get us off as we are to leave. The Fu Yuan Yu won’t be back in port for another six months. Our only hope of getting off seems to be on one of the tankers from Panama or Peru that periodically resupply the 250-odd Chinese fishing boats in the eastern Pacific. This may not happen for a few weeks: a dire prospect.

However, back in New Zealand, Frank has been tirelessly working on our behalf. He has found and contacted the agents for ships coming through Panama and heading west past our general location, which is on the rhumb line to Tahiti. He has good news; the captain of Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s MV Tonsberg , a RORO ship bound for—hurrah!—Auckland, has agreed to stop by and rescue us from our rescuers.

Finally, much beer and smoke later, there is consensus: the captain agrees to meet the Tonsberg at a specified position, the end point of one of its longlines. We will be transferred via the Tonsberg ’s rescue boat.

As we wait, we slip into the routine of the Fu Yuan Yu . We join the crew at mealtimes, eating our rice and fish at the officers’ table. The young deck hands are from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Some speak a little English, and Anne speaks some Indonesian.

They tell us they were hired on two-year contracts, and haven’t touched land since the previous October. They fish around the clock, every single day. It’s a hard life. Dangerous, too; the ship rolls enough in calm weather and I wouldn’t want to be on deck in a blow.

There’s high excitement among the crew when the Tonsberg finally comes into view, a huge red and white presence blocking the horizon. There’s a big swell running, and we are relieved to see the Tonsberg ’s rescue boat is considerably larger than the RIB I’d been expecting.

Anne scales the ladder on the sheer sides of the massive Tonsberg

It gingerly comes alongside, its bow rising and falling a metre or more with the swells while Chief Officer Boris Ribicic expertly steers away when the ship’s threatening steel rubbing strake rolls towards him. The bags go in first, then us, one at a time, helped by the longliner crew. Then we are off, bouncing across the steep seas.

The Tonsberg ’s clifflike topsides stretch 30m above the water, a rope ladder dangling down and meeting a partly lowered gangway halfway up. I try not to think of the Australian couple who, a few weeks before, had been lost while trying to board a freighter from a liferaft, but in the Tonsberg ’s lee the sea is flat and the three of us scale the ladder one at a time. Soon we are being welcomed by the ship’s officers in what seems to us like the lobby of a city hotel, then shown to large, comfortable cabins.

Later that night, over a beer with the ship’s Captain Josip and Ribicic, we relive the events of the past four days. Ours had been possibly the softest abandon-ship scenario I could have imagined. We’ll never forget the kindness of the Fu Yuan Yu ’s crew, who obeyed the law of the sea to help fellow mariners in distress, nor that of the crew of the Tonsberg , who were under no obligation to help us, since we’d already been rescued. Rescued twice in one week—that’s a record I hope never to break.

The rescued trio with Tonsberg officers

What we learned

• Communication is key. The ability to exchange information with rescuers can save your life. Take a satphone, a device like Iridium Go, Garmin InReach or SPOT X, and watertight bags or cases for phone or tablet.
• Don’t panic. We went through the stages one by one – identify and try to stop the leak, send the emergency signals once we were sure the boat could not be saved, communicate with the authorities, add other equipment and supplies to the grab bag we had already packed. We were lucky in that the boat was not about to sink. Had One Tree Island been a monohull, I’m sure we’d have been in the liferaft within an hour.
• Expect the unexpected. The hardest thing to defend against on a small boat is hitting something you cannot see. You won’t see objects that are just awash until you are literally on top of them.
• Stop the leak. Could we have saved the boat? Willy comments: “Of all the safety gear, tools and spares on board, I had nothing to plug a hull breach of this size and shape (two narrow 8in cracks, perhaps an inch wide at the middles). I had three or four JB Weld epoxy putty sticks, I needed 20 times more! It is so frustrating that I had no solution to plug a simple, fully accessible hull breach! What I needed was a six-pack of cricket ball sized epoxy putty balls. Knead for two minutes, stuff it into or over the hole, hold while curing, repeat until the leak is plugged: simple. Why is there no such thing on the market?”

About the author

US sailing journalist Peter Neilsen contributes to Yachting Monthly and recently retired as editor of Sail magazine. Based in Florida, he is currently preparing his Pearson 39-2 for extended Pacific and Caribbean cruising .

First published in the November 2020 issue of Yachting World.

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• Rick Rodriguez and his friends went on a boat journey from the Galapagos to French Polynesia.
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One of the first things Rick Rodriguez did after his boat started to sink was text his friend. "Tommy this isn't a joke," he wrote . "We hit a whale and the ship went down."

He really wasn't joking.

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Rodriguez, who fortunately still had some charge left on a portable wifi device, was able to reach out for help. "Tell as many boats as you can," he told his friend, who was also a sailor. "Battery is dangerously low."

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Alana Litz, one of the friends on the sailboat, told the Post she was the first to see what she now believes was a Bryde's whale that was at least 44-feet long — the length of the boat. Bryde's are a species of great whale,  similar to blue or humpback whales. 

"I saw a massive whale off the port aft side with its side fin up in the air," Litz told the Post.

Rodriguez said he saw it bleeding as it went back into the water.

Fortunately for the stranded crew, there were about two dozen ships sailing in the same direction — part of a yacht race known as World ARC, according to Sail World Cruising. 

"There was never really much fear that we were in danger," Rodriguez told The Post. "Everything was in control as much as it could be for a boat sinking."

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Whale Attack Sinks Sailboat in Pacific, Leaving Crew Stranded for 10 Hours Before Dramatic Rescue

Posted: March 27, 2023 | Last updated: February 3, 2024

For Rick Rodriguez and his three friends, it was a long-awaited adventure: A three-week sailing trip crossing the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia on his sailboat, Raindancer. Rodriguez, a 31-year-old former professional yacht captain, was eager to take out his boat, which he'd lived on for a year, fixing it up in preparation for many voyages ahead.  What the group didn't anticipate was hitting a giant whale, which caused the boat to sink. Forced onto life rafts, the group floated on the water for hours before being rescued. The story of the dramatic rescue involves a volley of distress signals, text messages, and a fateful Facebook post. Read on to find out what happened. 

1 "It Just Happened In An Instant"

2 Boat Sank In 15 Minutes

3 Quick Thinking Leads to Efficient Escape

4 "This Is No Joke … We Hit a Whale"

5 Facebook Post Leads to Rescue

After Joyce shared the incident on a Facebook boat watch group, a civilian ship, the Rolling Stones, came to the group's rescue. Geoff Stone, 42, captain of the Rolling Stones, told Today they were about 60 or 65 miles away when the crew realized they were the closest boat. Nine hours later, the crew was able to see the light from the group's dinghy bobbing in the darkness. "We were shocked that we found them," Stone said. "There was dead silence," Rodriguez told the Post. "They were curious what kind of emotional state we were in. We were curious who they were. I yelled out howdy" to break the ice." The group said they feel lucky to be alive and glad their experience made the escape as smooth as it was. Rodriguez tried not to think about the loss of his ship, which he considered a good friend. "I feel very lucky and grateful that we were rescued so quickly," he said. "We were in the right place at the right time to go down."

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Sailors Heading to French Polynesia Found in Life Raft After Whale Sinks Ship

Rodriguez was prepared for anything — but he didn’t expect his ship to sink after a whale strike. Photo: Instagram//Rodriguez

When Rick Rodriquez and three of his friends decided to spend a week sailing on the Pacific, they certainly didn’t expect to wind up sinking. Sure, the prospect might have entered their minds, but the way they sank? No way they considered it. Rodriguez and his friends were found bobbing in the middle of the Pacific after a whale collided with them.

“It just happened in an instant. It was just a very violent impact with some crazy-sounding noises and the whole boat shook,” Rodriguez told NBC’s TODAY show on Wednesday. “It sounded like something broke and we immediately looked to the side and we saw a really big whale bleeding.”

The impact, which was strong enough to ruin the boat’s prop and the fiberglass hull at the stern, was a death knell for the boat, called the Raindancer .

According to Rodriguez, the sailors were on their way to French Polynesia when the whale hit the boat. The journey was 3,100 nautical mile, 20-22 day passage, and they were eating pizza for lunch when it happened. Almost immediately, they were aware that the Raindancer was catastrophically damaged.

“There was just an incredible amount of water coming in, very fast,” Rodriguez remembered. “The water was up to the floorboards within about 30 seconds. Maybe less. I made attempts to save the boat but I was, unfortunately, unsuccessful.”

The group acted fast. They called in a mayday and sent texts explaining where they were and what happened. As they did so, they deployed the vessel’s life raft and a dingy, then climbed in.

“Even when the boat was going down,” said Alana Litz, a member of the crew, “I felt like it was just a scene out of a movie. Like everything was floating.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rick Rodriguez (@ricki_rod)

According to NBC , Rodriguez sent a text to his brother in Miami and a friend named Tommy Joyce who was sailing nearby.

“Tommy this is no joke,” Rodriguez wrote. “We hit a whale and the ship went down. We are in the life raft. We need help *ASAP.”

It didn’t take long for the ocean to take the Raindancer to the bottom. About 15 minutes after the collision with the whale, the boat had slipped beneath the surface. The crew, however, despite doing everything right, was still stranded in the open ocean for nine hours.

According to reports, Tommy Joyce shared news of the incident on a Facebook group. That news was seen by another sailboat called Rolling Stones . Geoff Stone, the captain, was about 60 miles away. Being the closest vessel, he knew he had to assist. By the time he reached them, night had fallen.

“After nine hours in our life raft we were rescued by some good hearted Americans on a Leapoard 45 catamaran called Rolling Stones ,” Rodriguez said. “We were all smiles for making it out of that situation alive and rescued. The number one goal was met.”

Whale strikes aren’t all that uncommon on the high seas, but the fate of those whales often goes un-investigated. It’s hard to follow up with a whale that’s been hit by a boat to find out how it’s healing up, after all, but The Washington Post reported that “there have been about 1,200 reports of whales and boats colliding since a worldwide database launched in 2007.”

Although Rodriguez and the others aboard lost many of their valuable possessions, they’re all just happy to be alive. To Rodriguez, The Raindancer was more than just a sailboat. The reality of the situation hit him when the sun rose the next day and he was on a different vessel.

“The next morning I woke up on board Rolling Stones , with still another 1,200 nautical miles to go to French Polynesia,” he wrote in an Instagram post . “I laid and stared at the ceiling panels. Reality began to set in and I began to mourn the loss of my boat. Raindancer had all my belongings on it, it was what I was doing, it was my ticket to exploring the world, I had put months and months of sweat equity into her.”

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A Wisconsin man sailing around the world rescued 4 people from the ocean after a whale sank their boat

For Geoff Stone of Muskego, it's a once-in-lifetime dream, circumnavigating the globe aboard his 45-foot catamaran the Rolling Stones.

But on March 13 in the Pacific, Stone's dream turned into something more: a lifesaving adventure.

Stone and his crew rescued four sailors who were forced to abandon a 44-foot sailboat named the Raindancer as it was journeying from the Galápagos to French Polynesia.

The Raindancer wasn't rocked by the sea. It was struck by a whale and sank, the sailors quickly hustling into a lifeboat and dinghy and activating a GPS beacon, with the captain sending a text message to a friend.

Nearly 10 hours later, the Rolling Stones arrived.

The daring nighttime rescue has become an international sensation.

Stone, reached on his vessel while heading to an island in French Polynesia, told the Journal Sentinel the last few days have been "a real humbling experience."

"The right place at the right time to help them out was just by chance," he said. "I'm really glad and happy that we were able to do that."

Stone and his family are sailing around the world a chunk at a time

Stone is a year and a half into his journey. But the dream has been with him for more than 20 years, even though he put it aside for work (he's in real estate) and starting a family.

But he finally made it happen, convincing his wife to come along for the ride.

Stone has been taking this 'round-the-world journey a chunk at a time with his wife, Meghan, and their young children Charlie, Eaylen and Lachlan. They started in Florida, spent a winter in the Bahamas, went through then Panama Canal and then it was on to the Galápagos.

Stone's wife and kids weren't on the boat during this latest 21-day leg to French Polynesia. Instead, they flew ahead with Meghan's mother, who was with them in the Galápagos.

Stone was with his father-in-law, Mark Moriarty, a retiree who worked for 30 years in sales and marketing for Rockwell Automation, along with his brother Alex, originally from Elkhorn and friend Cory Bergendahl, originally from Muskego.

"It's a very calm and common crossing for people navigating around the world," Moriarty said. "There were actually around 30 boats going around the same time as we were crossing."

Crew was 60 miles away, used coordinates and beacon to locate boat in nighttime rescue

On the day of the rescue, Moriarty recalled "the four of us were just sailing along, making another day of it," when Stone's brother Jeffrey came across a post in a social media group that a boat "was submerged."

They checked out the alert and realized that they were the vessel closest to where Raindancer sank, around 60 miles away.

"It was going to take us a while to get there, but we were going to change our course," Moriarty said.

The crew didn't hesitate.

"They were people in the sailing community that had a bad, unfortunate situation," Moriarty said. "It's what good people do. You go and help them."

As they made their way to the last known location of the Raindancer, Stone was apprehensive about how to perform the rescue.

"I thought for sure the hardest part was going to be locating them," Stone said. "Luckily with the new technologies ... the latest coordinates we were given was all very accurate."

Stone could even see the direction the Raindancer crew was drifting.

As they neared the dinghy and lifeboat, they spotted a beacon and a flare and the crews communicated via radio.

Stone said getting the others off the dinghy wasn't as hard as he anticipated.

"Luckily, because we have a lot of capable people on our boat and they're very capable as well, everyone physically was able to just like jump onto the back of the boat," he said.

Rick Rodriguez, the captain of the Raindancer, told the Washington Post: “I feel very lucky, and grateful, that we were rescued so quickly. We were in the right place at the right time to go down.”

Stone also expressed his good fortune with being able to play a role in saving others, providing food, showers and safety for a crew in need.

"It's my dream to make it back to Florida" where the trip began, Stone said. "But I've already got enough of this dream already. If we don't make it to Florida, that's OK with me."

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Sailboat crew rescued in Pacific after whale sinks ship

Rick Rodriguez and his three friends were 13 days into their three-week crossing from the Galapagos to French Polynesia on his 44-foot sailboat, Raindancer, when disaster struck on March 13. Rodriguez was on watch, and the crew were eating lunch around 1:30 p.m. when they heard a loud bang. In an interview with The Washington Post, Rodriguez explained that the ship had good winds and was sailing at around 6 knots when the back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard. The ship had hit a whale, and the Raindancer began to sink.

Rodriguez immediately texted his friend and fellow sailor, Tommy Joyce, telling him that they were in serious trouble and to tell as many boats as he could. The crew managed to escape onto a lifeboat and a dinghy, and the sinking took just 15 minutes. They were adrift for 10 hours, floating about nine miles, before a civilian ship rescued them from the Pacific Ocean. The rescue was a seamless predawn maneuver, thanks to a combination of experience, technology, and luck, and the crew was unharmed.

Rodriguez pointed out that the story that inspired Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” happened in the same region. The ship Essex was also heading west from the Galapagos when it was rammed by a sperm whale in 1820; leaving the captain and some crew to endure roughly three months and resort to cannibalism before being rescued. According to Kate Wilson, a spokeswoman for the International Whaling Commission, there have been about 1,200 reports of whales and boats colliding since a worldwide database launched in 2007. Collisions that cause significant damage are rare, the U.S. Coast Guard said, noting the last rescue attributed to damage from a whale was the sinking of a 120-foot J-Boat in 2009 off Baja California, with that crew rescued by Coast Guard helicopter.

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Dougal Robertson and family spent 37 days adrift due to being sunk by whales in the same area. Read his book Survive the Savage Sea. Good book.

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They were almost in the middle of the Pacific with no other boats in sight. But a successful rescue was coordinated through the power of social media and modern communications, including new kid on the block Starlink.

We contacted Paul Tetlow, managing director of World Cruising Club, who is operating as “rally control” for the World ARC cruising rally. He told us that upon learning of Raindancer ‘s demise and the position of the crew, he contacted the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC) who then assigned MRCC Peru to coordinate the rescue. But before the official rescue had been executed, a network of communications had quickly arisen, much of it via Starlink, and around eight ARC vessels diverted their course to assist Raindancer ‘s crew. Along the way, ARC participants aboard S/V Far were able to keep up the communications with the lifeboat using Iridium and Starlink.

Here’s what we understand about the incident. Raindancer was “13 days into a 20-22-day, 3000nm ocean crossing,” Vinny Mattiola wrote on Facebook, when the vessel was struck by a whale, which “damaged the skeg and prop strut, and the boat was completely underwater in <15mins, forcing all four crew to abandon into the life raft.” They were approximately midway between the Galápagos and French Polynesia.

Fortunately the crew were cool-headed and quickly loaded the raft with water, provisions, and emergency communications and survival equipment, and secured Raindancer ‘s dinghy alongside. Mattiola believes the crew’s Iridium GO! device, which they carried along with their SPOT tracker, was instrumental in their rescue.

Within 10 hours of Raindancer going under, her four crew were rescued and taken aboard the sailing vessel Rolling Stones . “A very quick response time,” Tetlow said. “A good achievement.” Tetlow believes Starlink adds “another layer of ability to solve problems quickly,” and that the Starlink communications probably did add to the expedience of the rescue.

According to reports, the boat’s EPIRB hadn’t worked as intended, but the US Coast Guard later confirmed that it had indeed worked, the crew just “didn’t know it.”  When we learned of Raindancer ‘s distress, we contacted Douglas Samp, USCG Search and Rescue Program Manager for the Pacific, and Kevin Cooper, Search and Rescue Program Manager, Hawaii, who were already coordinating rescue with MRCC Peru. Samp later explained, “There is no country in the world that has SAR resources able to respond 2400 miles offshore, so we rely upon other vessels to assist. RCC Alameda assisted MRCC Peru with a satellite broadcast to GMDSS-equipped vessels and diverted an AMVER (Automated Mutual-Assistance Vessel Rescue) vessel, M/V DONG-A MAIA , to assist, but the Rolling Stones got there first. BZ to your sailing community for rescuing your own.”

Mattiola concluded his post: “All crew are safe and even sent me a voice message thanking everyone involved.”

We hope to share more about this story in the next issue of Latitude 38 .

*Editor’s note: Upon learning the full details of this story, the headline was changed from Sailboat Sinks After Being Rammed By Whale in South Pacific to Sailboat Sinks After Collision with Whale in South Pacific.

29 Comments

Seems the whales are trying to get even.

So glad everybody is safe! Kudos to the rescue team

It would be an interesting study to determine if there’s a correlation between whale strikes and the color of bottom paint.

A bit over the top on the title. “Rammed”? Really. Rammed implies the whale was trying to damage the boat. Do we even know if the boat hit the whale rather than the whale hitting the boat?

Exactly what I was thinking

The boat hit the whale. To say the opposite is just incorrect. Bad reporting.

The whale struck the boat. Scientists believe they associate boats in that area with whaling. Same thing happened around that area about a year ago.

This may have to go to litigation. Some say the whale was double-parked with one taillight out when the Pacific highway was busy with the World ARC Rally, PPJ Rally and other westward-bound cruisers.

It is roughly where the whaling ship Essex, which sailed from Nantucket, was sunk in November of 1820 when it was rammed/attacked by a vengeful sperm whale. The story laid the foundation for Herman Melville’s book ‘Moby Dick.’ The actual story of the sinking of the Essex is told in a great book by Nathaniel Philbrick in his book, “The Heart of the Sea.” Once again the whale didn’t get to tell their side of the story but it certainly might have included the fact that the whaling ship was out there trying to kill it. In 1820 whaling ships were starting to hunt for whales to the west of the Galapagos after major populations of whales in the Atlantic had been depleted. Moby Dick and The Heart of the Sea are both worth a read. Have a look in the Latitude 38 bookstore: https://bookshop.org/shop/latitude38

Hi John, Even if the whale did hit the boat (which is a really hard thing to determine at sea), using the word ‘rammed’ implies intent. And, except for the orca problems off of Gibraltar, and Moby Dick, I don’t think we can attribute intention to the whale. It just sounds sensational.

As for whales associating boats in that area with whaling… that’s a hard one to believe. Many thousands of boats have sailed safely through that area since whaling was banned.

Cheers, Bruce

Oh, and by the way, I thought the movie THE HEART OF THE SEA was excellent. One of the few sailing films that treated the sailing parts realistically. They were never turning the wheel to port and the ship would go starboard!

I was also thinking ? the same thing. Striking a whale that was “perhaps” (I don’t know) resting or sleeping, is completely different than rammed. That infers they were attacked.

As an aside. In their posts the crew have used the terminology that their boat hit the whale. Not that the whale hit them, or attacked them. This is verbiage used by other sailors.

It’s always heartwarming to hear that all survived. And yes, let’s not Moby Dick the whale, before we hear the whole story.

They said the whale hit the”skeg and prop strut” like they didn’t hit the whale, read the !@#$%^& message, I’m curious as to what species it was; the Galapagos islands area has a history of Orcas attacks.

The book “Survive the Savage Sea” by Dougal Robertson comes to mind. Similar situation and location aboard 43ft schooner “Lucette” in the year 1972.

I think it was reported other way round, the boat hit the whale who was sleeping on surface and crew didnt spot him.

Hope the whale is unhurt.

I hope so also??as stated above they maybe trying to get even,if so they got a long way to go

Regarding the incident and life-saving equipment referenced , can anyone remark about range instruments (existing or future planned) that can monitor/detect massive underwater objects (e.g. our beloved whales) ? I’ve crossed the seas, racing and deliveries; and such an event never occurred to me. Thanks

Everyone is so concerned about who hit who but do we know what kind of whale? Is it ok? Was it properly called in to authorities to try and see if it’s a tagged whale they might be able to check up on?

Good point! The collision must have done a number on the whale too.

One crew member saw the whale immediately after the collision, and believed it to be a Bryde’s whale. This would make sense as the species is highly sensitive to disturbances. She reported that the whale appeared to be bleeding. KP44’s are strong hulls and the area around the skeg/rudder post was caved in, which caused the vessel to sink in 15 minutes.

A sad business all the way around .

CLICKBAIT !!! The whale didn’t “ram” the boat… FFS !!

Sounds to me like the whale was surfacing from a dive and hit the propeller, which in turn, caused the damage to the fibergass where the shaft exited the hull. Using the word rammed is for publicity, and distorts the facts.

For those who wish to help the Captain and the crew in these tragic events https://gofund.me/c576a554

No insurance?

Shocking headline to catch readers but untrue. Read the skippers report- the boat collided with the whale which was seen swimming off in a trail of blood.

There is also the Theory that “Herd Bull” whales will protect their group by challenging intruders, just as large mammals on land will do.

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Orcas sank three boats off the coast of Portugal, but don't call them 'killer' just yet

Three recent incidents of orcas seemingly attacking and sinking boats off the southwestern tip of Europe are drawing intense scrutiny over whether the animals deliberately swarmed the vessels and if they are learning the aggressive behavior from one another.

Encounters between orcas, or killer whales, and boats have been increasing since 2020, though no human injuries or deaths have been reported. In most cases, the whales have not sunk the boats.

The string of incidents since 2020 prompted one scientist in Portugal to say the attacks may indicate that the whales are intending to cause damage to sailing vessels. Others, however, are more skeptical, saying that while the behavior may be coordinated, it’s not necessarily coordinated aggression.

“I think it gets taken as aggression because it’s causing damage, but I don’t think we can say that the motivation is aggressive necessarily,” said Monika Wieland Shields, director of the Orca Behavior Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington state.

At least 15 interactions between orcas and boats off the Iberian coast were reported in 2020, according to a study published last June in the journal Marine Mammal Science .

In November 2020, Portugal’s National Maritime Authority issued a statement alerting sailors about “curious behavior” among juvenile killer whales. The statement said the whales may be attracted to rudders and propellers and may try to approach boats.

The subsequent sinkings have caused more alarm.

The most recent encounter occurred on May 4 off the coast of Spain. Three orcas struck the rudder and side of a sailing yacht, causing it to eventually sink, as was reported earlier this month in a German publication called Yacht .

One theory put forward by Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, suggested that the aggression started from a female orca that was perhaps struck by a boat — a traumatic experience that caused her to start ramming sailing vessels. López Fernandez, who co-authored the June 2022 study published in Marine Mammal Science, told Live Science that other orcas may have then picked up that behavior through social learning, which whales have been known to exhibit.

But Shields said orcas have not historically been known to be aggressive toward humans, even when they were being hunted and placed in captivity.

“They’ve certainly had reason to engage in that kind of behavior,” she said. “There are places where they are shot at by fishermen, they’ve watched family members be taken from their groups into captivity in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And if something was going to motivate direct aggression, I would think something like that would have done it.”

Shields added that there are no clear instances of killer whales exhibiting what could be thought of as revenge behavior against humans.

She said the recent attacks on boats are likely more consistent with what’s known as “fad” behavior, which describes novel but temporary conduct from one whale that can be mimicked by others.

“It’s kind of a new behavior or game that one whale seems to come up with, and it seems to spread throughout the population — sometimes for a matter of weeks or months, or in some cases years — but then in a lot of cases it just goes away,” she said.

In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, Shields and her colleagues have observed fad behavior among Southern Resident killer whales who started carrying dead salmon around on their heads for a time before the behavior suddenly stopped.

Shields said the behavior of orcas off the Iberian coast may also be temporary.

“This feels like the same type of thing, where one whale played with a rudder and said: ‘Hey, this is a fun game. Do you want to try it?’ And it’s the current fad for that population of orcas,” she said.

While Shields did not dismiss the trauma response theory out of hand, she said it would be difficult to confirm without more direct evidence.

“We know their brains are wired to have really complex emotions, and so I think they could be capable of something like anger or revenge,” she said. “But again, it’s just not something that we’ve seen any examples of, and we’ve given them plenty of opportunities throughout the world to want to take revenge on us for various things. And they just choose not to.”

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

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A giant whale plunged a group of sailors into a scene straight out of “Moby-Dick” when it sank their boat in the Pacific Ocean — where they waited in a life raft for 10 hours before they were rescued.

Rick Rodriguez, 31, of Tavernier, Florida, and three pals set off from the Galápagos Islands on his 44-foot sailboat Raindancer for a three-week, 3,500-mile journey to French Polynesia, the Washington Post reported .

But on March 13, less than two weeks into the trip, things went horribly wrong.

Rodriguez, a native of Newcastle, England, and the others were enjoying a lunch of vegetarian pizza when they heard a loud noise about 1:30 p.m.

“The second pizza had just come out of the oven, and I was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing,” Rodriguez told the paper over a satellite phone. “The back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard.”

The group quickly gathered essential supplies, including water and food – then scrambled into a life raft and dinghy before the boat sank in about 15 minutes.

Rodriguez made a mayday and set off the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, whose signal was picked up by officials in Peru, who alerted the US Coast Guard in California.

Fortunately, the group also had an Iridium Go satellite WiFi hotspot and a phone, though they were only partially charged and an external battery pack was only at 25 percent, the Washington Post said.

“Tommy this is no joke,” Rodriguez messaged his friend Tommy Joyce, who was sailing the same route but was some 180 miles behind.

“We hit a whale and the ship went down. Tell as many boats as you can. Battery is dangerously low,” he typed.

Rodriguez sent a similar message to his brother Roger in Miami.

“Tell mom it’s going to be OK,” he added confidently.

When he checked the Iridium Go later, he saw Joyce’s reassuring message: “We got you bud. We have a bunch of boats coming.”

Rodriguez replied: “Can’t wait to see you guys.”

The Raindancer happened to be sailing the same route as about two dozen other vessels taking part in a yachting rally called the World ARC.

An alert sent by the Coast Guard was picked up by the Dong-A Maia, a Panamanian-flagged tanker sailing 90 miles to the south of Raindancer. It quickly changed course.

The sailors, who were thrown by the large impact, all noticed that a whale had rammed their boat.

“I saw a massive whale off the port aft side with its side fin up in the air,” Alana Litz, 32, a former firefighter in the Canadian military, told the news outlet.

She said she believes it was a Bryde’s whale that was about as long as the vessel.

Rodriguez noticed that it was bleeding as it slipped below the surface.

Bianca Brateanu, a 25-year-old from Newcastle, had been cooking below at the time of the collision and rushed up to see a whale at starboard, leading the group to wonder if at least two whales were present.

Also onboard was Simon Fischer, 25, of Marsberg, Germany, who had the least experience but “is a very levelheaded guy,” Rodriguez told the Washington Post.

The friends abandoned the Raindancer with enough water for about a week and roughly three weeks’ worth of food. They also had a fishing pole and a device for collecting rain.

But the rescue came after about 10 hours.

The Rolling Stones, a 45-foot catamaran captained by Wisconsin native Geoff Stone, was only about 35 miles away and he received a relayed mayday call.

Stone communicated with Joyce and with Peruvian authorities via WhatsApp to say he was heading to the last known location, which he reached a few hours later.

“The seas weren’t terrible but we’ve never done a search and rescue,” he told the Washington Post, adding that Fischer spotted his lights from about five miles away.

Rodriguez set off a flare and activated a beacon to assist in the final approach.

Although the Dong-A Maia also was nearby, the friends decided to board The Rolling Stones.

“We were 30 or 40 feet away when we started to make out each other’s figures. There was dead silence,” Rodriguez said.

“They were curious what kind of emotional state we were in. We were curious who they were. I yelled out ‘howdy” to break the ice,” he told the paper.

“All of a sudden us four were sitting in this new boat with four strangers,” Rodriguez added.

He told the outlet that “there was never really much fear that we were in danger. Everything was in control as much as it could be for a boat sinking.”

It also wasn’t lost on him that the story that inspired Herman Melville to write the 1851 novel happened in the same area.

The ship Essex also was sailing west from the Galápagos in 1820 when it was rammed by a sperm whale, leaving the captain and some crew members to spend about three months adrift as they resorted to cannibalism before being rescued.

Fortunately, Rodriguez and his friends didn’t have to face such an unsavory outcome.

“I feel very lucky, and grateful, that we were rescued so quickly,” he told the paper. “We were in the right place at the right time to go down.”

The Rolling Stones was expected to arrive in French Polynesia on Wednesday.

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Four Sailors Rescued from Liferaft after SV Raindancer Hit by Whale in South Pacific

May 23, 2023 | Resolved , Safety at Sea , Stories , Top Articles

Key Communications in An Offshore Rescue 

By ann hoffner contributing editor ocean navigator magazine  may/june 2023, short tacks​, on march 13, on a south pacific crossing midway between galapagos and the marquesas, s/v raindancer with four people on board sank after an encounter with a whale. it was lunchtime and they had been in the cockpit eating pizza. in 15 minutes the boat, a peterson 44, had slipped beneath the surface and the crew were surveying a sunny sea from the slim shelter of a liferaft and inflatable dinghy tied together., before abandoning ship the crew gathered supplies and the captain, rick rodriguez, acti- vated an epirb and sent out a mayday on vhf., once in the liferaft they activated a globalstar spot tracker, started regular mayday signals via handheld vhf, and turned on an iridiumgo and cell phone (creating a satellite service wifi hot-spot) to mes- sage rick’s brother on land, and a friend on s/v southern cross sailing 160 nm behind., after sending brief messages they turned the devices off. the liferaft carried several weeks’ worth of vital provisions but their emergency signaling devices had precious little bat- tery power. two hours later on start-up there were messages. one, from tommy joyce on southern cross , said, “we got you bud.”, what the raindancer crew couldn’t know was that from the time the epirb went off, and rick’s text messages were received, two streams of rescue communications were started and they flowed and inter- twined throughout the nine hours it took for a rescue boat to find them., initial reports of the rescue were confused and shifting. in the new age of commu- nications this shouldn’t be a surprise; much was said on social media, especially on the facebook page of boatwatch, an organization that main- tains a worldwide network of resources to aid the search for missing or overdue mariners and relay urgent messages. according to eddie tuttle, boatwatch was alerted by don preuss, a cruiser in panama, that mayday messages were showing up on social media and their own facebook page became a central message platform. the use of social media allows information to be widely disseminated but also leads to a cacophony of voices, not all directly involved but all eager to participate. initially it was reported that raindancer’s epirb did not function, but that proved to be false, and the signal set off an official sar chain of command that began in peru and was rerouted through rescue coordination center (rcc) alameda in california, where the us coast guard fielded phone calls and coordinated via automated mutual-assistance vessel res- cue (amver) to divert a commercial ship to the liferaft., rick’s text messages set off another effort, one that ulti- mately led to the raindancer crew’s successful rescue., an unusual aspect of this situation was the presence of a couple dozen boats in the 2023 world arc, an international circumnavigation rally, coming up behind raindancer . on receiving reports “by multiple means” of the sinking, rally control put out a fleet mes- sage to rally crews. the world arc ssb radio duty control- ler, chris parker on mistral of portsmouth, also relayed the distress message , and ten arc boats close to raindancer ’s lat- est coordinates changed course along with two non-arc boats, including s/v rolling stones , which turned out to be closest, only 35 nm away., tommy joyce did not receive the original message from rick because he doesn’t check iridium much, but he did get the message from rick’s brother which came through whatsapp via tommy’s star- link. (fb) “at that moment, i set up multiple chats, posts and other comms.” ninety per- cent of the tools tommy used required fast internet access, which starlink provided. he was able to communicate with both rolling stones and with the sar assets. ultimately rolling stones and a panamani- an-flagged tanker both arrived at the scene, but it was easier to board the sailboat and rain- dancer’s crew was able to turn on a personal locator beacon (plb) and shoot off a para- chute flare to guide them in., both efforts depended on satellite communications, and were run more or less in parallel. a question raised on boatwatch’s facebook page was whether/how in future the land-based sar scenario could be altered to include recreational boats, which are not now included. amver is a world-wide voluntary ship reporting system operated by the united states coast guard that gives the sar authorities information on and commu- nications access to vessels near a reported disaster. only mer- chant vessels more than 1,000 gross tons on a voyage of 24 hours or longer are eligible to enroll in amver, but sar coordinator at rcc in ala- meda kris robertson posted on boatwatch fb that it was helpful to have had phone numbers for all sailing vessels that were involved in the rescue or relaying information. “most of the time communications is the hardest part of any res- cue coordination…question for the group, is there a place where you all keep underway phone numbers for sailing vessels”, eddie and glenn tuttle and boatwatch along with tommy joyce were instrumental again a few days later when a crew member on board a world arc boat s/v cepa had a serious stroke. cepa was 6-7 days’ sail out of the marquesas without enough fuel to motor flat out. the captain was able to email rescue coordinators in germany, world arc rally control, and a medical support for german-flagged vessels. jrcc papeete was contacted, rcc alameda released safetynet and safetycast group emergency messages to ships over iridium and inmarsat, and the captain also sent a distress call to the chat group of the arc fleet. tommy joyce again acted as a mobile command center. the arc boats were able to scan the area around cepa’s position using ais and assist in locating nearby boats that could help. s/v pec divert- ed from the rally to provide medicine and ultimately their captain went into the rescue effort as doctor. even with this help, there was still the issue of time. a motor yacht, paladin, located through ais, did not respond to initial attempts to communicate. in a stroke of fortune for all involved, the email list used to forward the distress call to the rally fleet included a weather routing company that recognized the yacht as a previous customer and was able to contact the yacht’s owner, who then con- tacted the captain, initiating ​a successful evacuation of the crew member complete with delivery of enough fuel to increase paladin’s speed and allow them to divert to nuku hiva., “two back-to-back amazing rescues,” said eddie., it’s hard to imagine that all the activity in raindancer ’s rescue only lasted about 10 hours, yet photos of the four people sitting on s/v rolling stones showed up on facebook the day after the sinking., for all the hoopla, especially given the unusual circumstance of the rally being in the vicinity, it’s important to remember that rescue options are usually scant, potential rescuers scattered far and wide, and those of us out on the ocean need to be take responsibility for our adventurous tendencies., peter nielsen posted on the boat watch facebook page that when he crewed on a cat in the pacific in 2020 that was hit by a whale, the coast guard picked up the epirb signal, emailed the boat via iridiumgo and initiated voice contact, leading to rescue nine hours later by a chinese fishing boat., eddie says besides online they also posted an emergency message for the maritime mobile service network (mmsn.org) which is read by ham radio operators on ham radio frequency 14.300, a world wide network of ham radio operators communicating with vessels at sea. i spent 10 years in the pacific on a peterson 44, and often this radio net was the only live link my husband and i had to land., it takes an ocean., contributing editor ann hoffner and husband tom bailey cruised on their peterson 44, oddly enough. she’s now based in sorrento, maine., noonsite.com – re ocean navigator article”key communications in an offshore rescue” by ann hoffer, the role of technology in rescues, this article for ocean navigator by ann hoffer,   key communications in an offshore rescue (page 18), demonstrates how technology is changing the way rescues at sea work. it’s a detailed account of two yacht rescues in the south pacific in march 2023., eddie tuttle of   boatwatch , who was involved in the rescue, told noonsite; “i think this is one of the most amazing stories ever of communication, captain and crew safety skill and the maritime community coming together. when tommy joyce commented on   boat watch facebook   that he had set up a mobile command post in the vast pacific ocean, i drew a sigh of relief and amazement at this cruiser stepping up in such a profound and diligent way., he also did a great job along with   raindancer’s  shore side contact vinny matiola, of coordinating the numerous people trying to help. and then there is the boat, sv rolling stones, that diverted and took 4 more crew on in the middle of nowhere. i still wonder how the provisions went.to top off the   raindancer   episode, soon thereafter tommy joyce helped handle the medical emergency and dramatic rescue on sv cepa in the middle of nowhere, chris parker, marine weather center, who has helped boatwatch and various coast guards and relayed distressed messages for countless boats, also assisted as the worldarc ssb radio controller., ann hoffner sums up her article by saying, “it takes an ocean”. so true. i encourage cruisers to   read the article (page 18) “., the rescue coordination centers worldwide and other resources can be found at   https://boatwatch.org/resources/.

This is the Captain, Rick Rodriquez, of Raindancer’s first account posted on Facebook.

Update from raindancer captain after striking whale in pacific ocean., hey everyone, first off thanks for all the support. we are still feeling very drained by everything, but i wanted to put out a small piece of the story to answer everyone’s questions all at once. so here goes., we were sitting in the cockpit of raindancer, enjoying some homemade pizza that bianca was making from a recipe one of her friends had given her. it reminded us of a day we had in the galapagos before our departure. it was a beautiful sunset, and our crew, and the crew of southern cross shared a memorable evening together, eating pizza, talking about how lucky we were to be sailing across the pacific ocean with friends and the journey that lay ahead of us., fast forward a month and there we were, the 4 of us. myself, alana, bianca, and simon. on a 3100 nautical mile passage to the marquesas from the galapagos, with about 1400nm left to go. cooking up that tasty pizza. we had good winds, sunny skies, and were sailing at around 6kts. the second pizza had just come out of the oven, and i was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing when it felt like we ran into a concrete wall. i heard a loud crashing noise simultaneous with a metal clanking. i heard alana yell, “we hit a whale” then i looked to port and saw a huge whale, and blood gushing out of the side of it as it began swimming down., i told everyone to check the bilges, and went down myself to check for water and collision damage. within 5 seconds the high water bilge alarm went off, i could see water rushing in from the stern of the boat. at that point i knew the damage was very significant, and that most likely we were going to lose the boat., at that point the crew began gathering safety equipment, supplies, emergency gear, electronics, etc. and they did an extremely good job of it. i went to the back of the boat to search for the source of the water., at this point maybe 30 seconds have gone by since impact, and while i was searching the aft bilges, rudder, stuffing box areas, the water had already filled up above the floor. it was difficult to locate the source from the inside with the water level so high already., at this point i was nearly certain the boat was going down, and at a rapid level. i made a last attempt to plug up water intrusion from the outside. on my way out i helped bring out the liferaft and grabbed and set off one of our epirbs, and made a vhf radio mayday call. i deployed the life raft and it inflated as advertised., i then realized that the sails were still up and the boat was still moving forward and it put a lot of tension on the painter line of the winslow liferaft, which had automatically deployed a sea anchor. afraid that the painter would break, bianca and i quickly put the sails away., while this was happening, simon asked me, “should we launch the dinghy” i said absolutely. simon and alana were launching our 10.5ft. apex dinghy that was sitting upright and inflated on the foredeck. after helping simon and alana launch the dinghy, i put on my mask and fins on and jumped overboard with a tarp. i saw the damage instantly. there were multiple holes or “cracks”. the biggest one being around the prop shaft. it seems part of the whale must have hit the shaft with a strong force and busted open the fiberglass around the shaft. it was a very awkward hole to try and plug with rags and a tarp. it had a stainless steel shaft in the middle, and the holes around it were more like caves with broken pieces of fiberglass all around and inside it. in addition to this, i also noticed 2-3 full length cracks maybe an inch in diameter along the base of the skeg where it meets the hull, and about halfway down the skeg. i made attempts to shove a tarp in the hole (s) but it kept coming out. i tried to wrap the tarp around the damaged ared concicting of the rudder cked and and prop shaft and tie it around itself, but the open ocean waves and swell made that difficult, and with a boat that was already 2/3 full of water at that point, i decided to forego my efforts and focus on the safety and survival of the crew., we started to load the dinghy up with as much supplies and emergency gear as possible. at this point we could no longer fill up water jugs as the water level was above the sink. the toe rail was inches from the water. the girls were both in the dinghy waiting for simon and i to join them. i paused for a moment, tried to think of anything else i could be forgetting, or anything else i should do., i then took a moment to take in the scene of what was happening, a split second. i could feel my emotions wanting to rise to the foreground but i quickly shoved them back down and simon and i stepped into the water just as emotions wanting to rise to the foreground but i quickly shoved them back down and simon and i stepped into the water just as the toe rail went under. i then swam to the liferaft. when i got in it, i looked back and could see the last 10ft of the mast sinking down at an unbelievable speed., our painter line, which is designed to break before being pulled under with the boat, was still attached to the boat. alana noticed it and shouted to cut it.. luckily i had a leatherman knife in my pocket and cut the painter as it was coming under tension., the boat, and all our belongings was gone, out of sight, sinking to the bottom of one of the most remote parts of the ocean. 10,000ft down. we took a moment to breathe, and then began organizing and taking inventory of the items that we had manaded to secure., the sun began to set and soon it was pitch dark. and we were floating right smack in the middle of the pacific ocean with a dinghy and a liferaft. hopeful that we would be rescued soon., alana and i were in the dinghy which was secured to the liferaft by three lines, one with shock cord we had linked together from the tethers of our life vests. flying fish kept jumping in the dinghy through the night and the wind speed increased. a crazy moment floating in the ocean looking up at the stars., someone was always looking out for ships, and we were making a mayday call from our handheld radio every hour., at about 0500z on march 14th, simon spotted the first lights. this was shortly followed by radio contact from sailing vessel rolling stones. we all screamed in relief when we heard the voices of geoff (captain of rolling stones) over the radio. we were damn near over the radio. we were damn near rescued, and all we had to do now was safely transfer ourselves and our little belongings onto the leopard 45 catamaran., i set off a parachute flare and activated my personal ais beacon to help them with our location. once they approached, we all got into the dinghy, as we felt it would be easier to make the transfer. we came alongside rolling stones and threw over two lines. they brought us in and one by one we all dove forward onto their sugar scoop transom, timing the waves with every jump. we were rescued., a huge thank you to the crew of raindancer who made my job easy. i’m so proud of everyone for staying calm, gathering emergency equipment, and the way everything was handled. all the credit to them., big thanks to my brother roger, once i knew that he was aware of the situation, i knew we would be ok. big thanks to my mom for dealing with the caos on the homefront and all the emergency phone calls from the coast guard., huge thanks to tommy joyce from southern cross, and my good friend vinny mattiola. they were in contact with rescue boats giving them accurate information and advice. without them the rescue would not have gone so swiftly and smooth., a huge thanks to the entire sailing community for coming together to aid in our rescue. the one thing i’ve always loved about sailing is the people. we are truly special group of people. i’m thankful to be a part of such a supportive community., a big thanks to the starlink community, without starlink, our rescue wouldn’t have gone so swiftly and smoothly. technology saved our lives., perhaps the biggest thanks to our rescuers and captain geoff of sailing vessel rolling stones, for going out of their way to save us. taking 4 strangers in on their home, and sailing the rest of the way together to french polynesia., it’s true, i’m sad to have lost my boat. it was everything to me. it was more than iust what i was doing more than just my way to save us. taking 4 stangers in on their home, and sailing the rest of the way together to french polynesia. it’s true, i’m sad to have lost my boat. it was everything to me. it was more than just what i was doing, more than just my home with all my belongings, it was a part of who i am. it stings about as much as losing any inanimate object can sting. but at the end of the day the most important things, by far, were rescued. we all have a lot to think about. thanks to everyone for all messages and support., update: march 13 & 14, 2023, from boat watch facebook group, note from boat watch: great job by the other arc boats with communications and sv rolling stones in this rescue..

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BOLO Ended (0615z): Final Update: All four (crew + Captain) have been rescued.

Their vessel sank just 15minutes after striking a whale. their epirb never functioned as intended. 10 vessels responded, all due to starlink being active., update 4: rolling stone spotted liferaft, update 3: sv rolling stone, sv far, mv dong a maia are closest and responding now (0459z 3/13), update 2: eight or more vessels are responding. new position from sv raindancer @ 0223 11 31.129 s / 117 31.247 w, sv raindancer has sunk in the pacific. all four crew are not injured and in liferaft with dinghy in tow with ample food water. their iridium battery is low. iridium appears to be their only comms device and will only turn it on every 2 or 3 hours., their last coordinates are:  11°30.7s. 117°26.9w., coast guard has been contacted. 20+ world arc boats are nearby. sy far is closest and is responding now (2310z 3/13), not a drill. we are in the pacific headed that direction but there are closer vessels., vessel has sunk. they were hit by a whale., facebook post by vinnie mattiola, edit 3/15: we’ve learned that the epirb did function as intended to transmit position data to sar services in peru & uscg great to hear of the device’s successful operation, however worth noting that only commercial vessels are privy to amver notices issued by jrcc, and not local private yachts who were better equipped to assist promptly., early last night my friend on sv raindancer @distantseasyachts hit a whale mid-pacific while crossing from galapagos to the marqueses….to put that into perspective, they were 13 days into a 20-22 day, 3000nm ocean crossing. the capt reports the whale strike damaged the skeg & prop strut, and the boat was completely underwater in <15mins, forcing all 4 crew to abandon into the life raft. they brought provisions and water, secured the dinghy to the raft, and carried emergency equipment for communications and survival., their iridiumgo device was instrumental in broadcasting their position via the vessel’s predictwind tracking page, in addition to their spot tracker. unfortunately, it appears their activated epirb malfunctioned and did not transmit a gps position to the coast guard., in an astonishing effort by the cruising community, boat watch , and world arc participants, communications were quickly established with nearby vessels using starlink devices and assistance coordinated immediately. within 10hrs they were rescued by sv rolling stones, with assistance from sv far and sv southern cross in the vicinity as well. all crew are safe and even sent me a voice message thanking everyone involved., watching this rescue-at-sea be conducted so efficiently is truly inspirational, let alone in real-time thanks to the updates from vessels equipped with starlink devices. i was able to whatsapp and facebook message with the nearest yacht to pass along additional info.….something that may not be appreciated by land people for how remarkable it is., the pacific ocean is a vastness which can barely be fathomed. we’ve entered a new era for safety-at-sea and tonight’s events highlight the need for widespread utilization of all available resources to promote the type of competent and outstanding seam’nship displayed by these crews., the swiftness of action from sv raindancer’s crew was incredible given the circumstances, and i’m grateful to all others involved for assisting our friends. i can only hope this becomes a case study for model emergency response in the future., sailboat crew rescued in pacific after abandoning ship sunk by whale, four people aboard the raindancer were stranded in the pacific ocean for 10 hours., his circumstances sounded straight out of “moby-dick,” but rick rodriguez wasn’t kidding. in his first text messages from the life raft, he said he was in serious trouble., “tommy this is no joke,” he typed to his friend and fellow sailor tommy joyce. “we hit a whale and the ship went down.”, “tell as many boats as you can,” rodriguez also urged. “battery is dangerously low.”, on march 13, rodriguez and three friends were 13 days into what was expected to be a three-week crossing from the galápagos to french polynesia on his 44-foot sailboat, raindancer. rodriguez was on watch, and he and the others were eating a vegetarian pizza for lunch around 1:30 p.m. in an interview with the washington post later conducted via satellite phone, rodriguez said the ship had good winds and was sailing at about 6 knots when he heard a terrific bang, “the second pizza had just come out of the oven, and i was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing,” he said. “the back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard.”, the sinking itself took just 15 minutes, rodriguez said. he and his friends managed to escape onto a lifeboat and a dinghy. the crew spent just 10 hours adrift, floating about nine miles before a civilian ship plucked them from the pacific ocean in a seamless predawn maneuver. a combination of experience, technology and luck contributed to a speedy rescue that separates the raindancer from  similar   catastrophes ., “there was never really much fear that we were in danger,” rodriguez said. “everything was in control as much as it could be for a boat sinking.”, it wasn’t lost on rodriguez that the story that inspired herman melville happened in the same region. the  ship essex  was also heading west from the galápagos when it was  rammed by a sperm whale  in 1820; leaving the captain and some crew to endure roughly three months and resort to cannibalism before being rescued..

Coast Guard saves overboard cruise passenger in ‘Thanksgiving miracle’

There have been about 1,200 reports of whales and boats colliding since a worldwide database launched in 2007, said Kate Wilson, a spokeswoman for the International Whaling Commission. Collisions that cause significant damage are rare, the U.S. Coast Guard said, noting the last rescue attributed to damage from a whale was the  sinking of a 40-foot J-Boat  in 2009 off Baja California, with that crew rescued by Coast Guard helicopter.

Alana litz was the first to see what she now thinks was a bryde’s whale as long as the boat. “i saw a massive whale off the port aft side with its side fin up in the air,” litz said., rodriguez looked to see it bleeding from the upper third of its body as it slipped below the water., bianca brateanu was below cooking and got thrown in the collision. she rushed up to the deck while looking to the starboard and saw a whale with a small dorsal fin 30 to 40 feet off that side, leading the group to wonder if at least two whales were present., within five seconds of impact, an alarm went off indicating the bottom of the boat was filling with water, and rodriguez could see it rushing in from the stern., water was already above the floor within minutes. rodriguez made a mayday call on the vhf radio and set off the emergency position indicating radio beacon (epirb). the distress signal was picked up by officials in peru, who alerted the u.s. coast guard district 11 in alameda, calif., which is in charge of u.s. vessels in the pacific., the crew launched the inflatable life raft, as well as the dinghy, then realized they needed to drop the sails so that line attaching the life raft didn’t snap as it got dragged behind still-moving raindancer., rodriguez grabbed his snorkel gear and a tarp and jumped into the water to see if he could plug the holes, but it was futile. the area near the propeller shaft was badly punched in, he said., meanwhile, the others had gathered safety equipment, emergency gear and food. in addition to bottled water, they filled “water bottles, tea kettles and pots,” before the salt water rose above the sink, rodriguez said., “there was no emotion,” rodriguez recalled. “while we were getting things done, we all had that feeling, ‘i can’t believe this is happening,’ but it didn’t keep us from doing what we needed to do and prepare ourselves to abandon ship.”, rodriguez and simon fischer handed the items down to the women in the dinghy, but in the turmoil, they left a bag with their passports behind. they stepped into the water themselves just as the deck went under., rodriguez swam to the life raft, climbed in and looked back to see the last 10 feet of the mast sinking “at an unbelievable speed,” he said. as the raindancer slipped away, he pulled a leatherman from his pocket and cut the line that tethered the life raft to the boat after litz noticed it was being pulled taut., they escaped with enough water for about a week and with a device for catching rain, rodriguez said. they had roughly three weeks worth of food, and a fishing pole., the raindancer “was well-equipped with safety equipment and multiple communication devices and had a trained crew to handle this open-ocean emergency until a rescue vessel arrived,” said douglas samp, u.s. coast guard pacific area search and rescue program manager. he cautioned that new technology should not replace the use of  an epirb,  which has its own batteries., indeed, the one issue the crew faced was battery power. their iridium go, a satellite wi-fi hotspot, was charged to only 32 percent (dropping to 18 percent before the rescue.) the phone that pairs with it was at 40 percent, and the external power bank was at 25 percent., rodriguez sent his first message to joyce, who was sailing a boat on the same route about 180 miles behind. his second was to his brother, roger, in miami. he repeated most of what he had messaged to joyce, adding, “tell mom it’s going to be okay.”, rodriguez’s confidence was earned. a 31-year-old from tavernier, fla., he had spent about 10 years working as a professional yacht captain, mate and engineer. he bought the raindancer in 2021 and lived on her, putting sweat equity into getting the boat, built in 1976, ready for his dream trip., both he and brateanu, 25, from newcastle, england, have mariner survival training. litz, 32, from comox, british columbia, was formerly a firefighter in the canadian military. fischer, 25, of marsberg, germany, had the least experience, but “is a very levelheaded guy,” rodriguez said., rodriguez gave detailed information on their location and asked his brother to send a message via whatsapp to joyce, who has a starlink internet connection that he checks more frequently than his iridium go. because of his low battery, he told his brother he was turning the unit off and would check it in two hours., rodriguez also activated a globalstar spot tracker, which transmitted the position of the life raft every few minutes, and he broadcast a mayday call every hour using his vhf radio., when he turned the iridium go back on at the scheduled time, there was a reply from joyce: “we got you bud.”, as luck would have it, the raindancer was sailing the same route as about two dozen boats participating in a round-the-world yachting rally called the world arc. boatwatch, a network of amateur radio operators that searches for people lost at sea, was also notified. and the urgent broadcast issued by the coast guard was answered by a commercial ship, dong-a maia, which said it was 90 miles to the south of raindancer and was changing course., “we have a bunch of boats coming. we got you brother,” joyce typed., “can’t wait to see you guys,” rodriguez replied., joyce told rodriguez that the closest boat was “one day maximum.”, in fact, the closest boat was a 45-foot catamaran not in the rally. the rolling stones was only about 35 miles away. the captain, geoff stone, 42, of muskego, wis., had the mayday relayed to him by a friend sailing about 500 miles away. he communicated with joyce via whatsapp and with the peruvian coast guard using a satellite phone to say they were heading to the last known coordinates., in the nine hours it took to reach the life raft, stone told the post, he and the other three men on his boat were apprehensive about how the rescue was going to work., “the seas weren’t terrible but we’ve never done a search and rescue,” he said. he wasn’t sure whether they would be able to find the life raft without traveling back and forth., he was surprised when fischer spotted the rolling stones lights from about five miles away and made contact on the vhf radio., once it got closer, rodriguez set off a parachute flare, then activated a personal beacon that transmits both gps location and ais (automatic identification system) to assist in the approach. although the 820-foot dong-a maia, a panamanian-flagged tanker, was standing by, it made more sense to be rescued by the smaller ship., to board the rolling stones, the crew from the raindancer transferred to the dinghy with a few essentials, then detached the life raft so it wouldn’t get caught in the boat’s propeller., “we were 30 or 40 feet away when we started to make out each other’s figures. there was dead silence,” rodriguez said. “they were curious what kind of emotional state we were in. we were curious who they were.”, “i yelled out howdy,” to break the ice, he explained., one by one they jumped onto the transom. “all of a sudden us four were sitting in this new boat with four strangers,” rodriguez said., the hungry sailors were given fresh bread, then offered showers. the rolling stones crew gave their guests toothbrushes, deodorant and clothes. none even had shoes., rodriguez said he had tried not to think about losing his boat while the crisis was at hand. but, the first morning he woke up on rolling stones, it hit him. not only had he lost his home and belongings, he felt like he’d lost “a good friend.”, “i’ve worked so hard to be here, and have been dreaming of making landfall at the bay of virgins in the marquesas on my own boat for about 10 years. and 1,000 nautical miles short my boat sinks,” rodriguez said., the rolling stones is expected to arrive in french polynesia on wednesday, and rodriguez is glad that he’s onboard., “i feel very lucky, and grateful, that we were rescued so quickly,” he said. “we were in the right place at the right time to go down.”, a previous version of this article misstated the size of the j-boat that sank in 2009. it was 40 feet., broadcast version for maritime mobile service network and other net, emergency bolo for 4 sailors in a liferaft after sv raindancer sank in south pacific. the last coordinates are:, 11 31.129 s / 117 31.247 w, vessels in vicinity are requested to keep a sharp lookout, assist if possible and make all reports to rcc alameda., reports to rcc alameda, telex: 230172343, phone: 510 437 3701, e-mail: [email protected] ., 140022z mar 23 hydropac 845/23(22). eastern south pacific. dnc 06. s/v rain dancer sank in 11-30.70s 117-26.90w. four persons abandoned ship in liferaft. vessels in vicinity requested to keep a sharp lookout, assist if possible. reports to rcc alameda, telex: 230172343, phone: 510 437 3701, e-mail: [email protected] ., recent posts.

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Ship collides with whale, sinks in same South Pacific waters as vessel that inspired ‘Moby Dick’

• Published: Mar. 21, 2023, 5:04 p.m.

The sailing vessel Raindancer sank in about 15 minutes earlier this month in the South Pacific after it was hit by a whale. The ship sank in the same waters as the Essex, a whaling boat that sank after it was rammed by a sperm whale in 1820. It was inspiration for 'Moby Dick.' Here a humpback whale breaches in the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Mexican resort city of Mazatlan, Mexico. ASSOCIATED PRESS

• Robert Higgs, cleveland.com

WASHINGTON – A ship sailing in the same South Pacific waters as the vessel that was inspiration for the “Moby Dick” novel sank in a matter of minutes after it clashed with a whale.

Rick Rodriguez and three friends were 13 days into a three-week crossing from the Galapagos Islands to French Polynesia aboard Rodriguez’ 44-foot sailboat Raindancer when he heard a terrific bang, Rodriguez told The Washington Post via satellite phone.

“The back half of the boat lifted violently upward and to starboard,” Rodriguez said.

The ship was sailing at about 6 knots. Rodriguez was on watch, and he and the others were eating a vegetarian pizza for lunch around 1:30 p.m. “The second pizza had just come out of the oven, and I was dipping a slice into some ranch dressing,” he told The Post.

The boat sank in about 15 minutes. Rodriguez and his friends escaped in a lifeboat and a dinghy.

In his first text messages from the life raft, Rodriguez said he was in serious trouble, according to The Post.

“Tommy this is no joke,” he typed to his friend and fellow sailor, Tommy Joyce. “We hit a whale and the ship went down.”

“Tell as many boats as you can,” Rodriguez also urged. “Battery is dangerously low.”

The crew spent just 10 hours adrift, floating about nine miles before a civilian ship plucked them from the Pacific Ocean.

The ship went down in the same region as the whaling vessel Essex, captained by George Pollard, which was headed west from the Galapagos in 1820 when it was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale .

The crew abandoned ship into whaling boats and drifted, thousands of miles from land, in a horrific three-month ordeal that resulted in sickness, starvation and cannibalism.

A young Herman Melville was inspired by Pollard’s story, using it as the basis for his novel “Moby Dick.”

That wasn’t lost on Rodriguez, who said a combination of experience, technology and luck contributed to a speedy rescue.

“There was never really much fear that we were in danger,” Rodriguez told The Post. “Everything was in control as much as it could be for a boat sinking.”

There have been about 1,200 reports of whales and boats colliding since a worldwide database launched in 2007, Kate Wilson, a spokeswoman for the International Whaling Commission, told The Post.

Collisions that cause significant damage are rare, the U.S. Coast Guard said, noting the last rescue attributed to damage from a whale was the sinking of a 40-foot J-Boat in 2009 off Baja California, with that crew rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter.

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Climate change and boat strikes are killing right whales. Stricter speed limits could help them

• Emily Jones, Grist

This story was originally published by Grist . Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here .

Amid a difficult year for North Atlantic right whales, a proposed rule to help protect them is one step closer to reality.

Earlier this month, a proposal to expand speed limits for boats — one of the leading causes of death for the endangered whales — took a key step forward: It’s now under review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the last stage of federal review.

Fewer than 360 of the whales remain; only about 70 of them are females of reproductive age. Every individual whale is considered vital to the species’ survival, but since 2017 right whales have been experiencing what scientists call an “unusual mortality event,” during which 39 whales have died.

Human actions — including climate change — are killing them.

When the cause of a right whale’s death can be determined, it is most often a strike by a boat or entanglement in fishing gear. Three young whales have been found dead this year, two of them with wounds from boat strikes and the third entangled in gear. One of the whales killed by a boat was a calf just a few months old.

Climate change, meanwhile, has disrupted their food supply , driving down right whale birth rates and pushing them into territories without rules in place to protect them.

“Our impacts are so great right now that the risk of extinction is very real,” said Jessica Redfern, associate vice president of ocean conservation at the New England Aquarium. “To be able to save the species, we have to stop our direct human-caused impacts on the population.”

This is not the first time humans have driven North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction .

Their name comes from whaling: They were known as the “right” whale to hunt because they spend time relatively close to coastlines, often swimming slowly and near the surface, and they float when dead. They also yielded large amounts of the oil and baleen whalers were after. So humans hunted them to near extinction until it was banned in 1935.

Many of those same characteristics are what make right whales so vulnerable to human-caused dangers today. Because they’re often near the surface in the same waters frequented by fishing boats, harbor pilots, and shipping vessels headed into port, it’s easy for boats to collide with them.

“They’ve been called an urban whale,” said Redfern. “They swim in waters that humans are using; they have high overlap with humans.”

To reduce the risk of vessel strikes, ships over 65 feet long have to slow down during set times of year when the whales are likely to be around. In the southeastern U.S., the speed limits are in force during the winter when the whales are calving; off the New England coast, the restrictions are in place in the spring and summer when they’re feeding. Regulators can also declare voluntary speed restrictions in localized spots if whales are seen, known as dynamic management areas.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, in 2022 proposed expanding those restrictions in three ways.

First, the new rule would cover larger geographical areas. The protection zones would extend down the coast from Massachusetts to Florida at various times of year, instead of only applying in certain distinct areas.

Second, the change would apply the speed limits to smaller craft like fishing boats, rather than only ships over 65 feet.

Third, the new rule would make the speed restrictions — the temporary speed limits where whales have been spotted — in dynamic management areas mandatory.

Since NOAA published and gathered feedback on the proposed rule in 2022, whale advocates have been clamoring for the agency to implement it. Those calls have increased in recent months as dead right whales have washed up on beaches.

“There have been three deaths, and that has been really devastating this year, and two of them are related to vessel strikes,” said Redfern. “It’s just highlighted that absolute urgency, the necessity of getting this rule out.”

A leading boating industry group is speaking out against the expanded speed restrictions, arguing they could hurt small businesses in the recreational boating industry.

“We are extremely disappointed and alarmed to see this economically catastrophic and deeply flawed rule proceed to these final stages,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president and CEO of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, in a statement. “The proposed rule is based on incorrect assumptions and questionable data, and fails to distinguish between large, ocean-crossing vessels and small recreational boats.”

Right whale scientists have documented in recent years that small, recreational boats can injure and kill right whales. At least four of the lethal vessel strikes since the current restrictions began in 2008 have involved boats smaller than 65 feet and thus not subject to that speed limit, according to Redfern.

NOAA estimated that, based on the size and placement of the propeller wounds, the boat that killed the months-old calf this year was between 35 and 57 feet in length — too small to fall under the existing speed restrictions, but subject to the new rule if it were to be implemented.

In his statement, Hugelmeyer also pointed to new marine technologies aimed at detecting right whales in the water to reduce vessel strikes without expanding the speed rules.

Scientists like Redfern remain skeptical, though.

The tech “offers a lot of promise,” she said, but the speed limits are proven.

“It’s really important, I think, that we rigorously evaluate the technology that’s proposed to make sure that it is going to achieve the same type of risk reduction that we see with the slowdowns in expanded areas,” she said.

Many groups, meanwhile, have raised concerns that offshore wind turbines could harm whales. There is no evidence of that, according to NOAA.

This article originally appeared in Grist ,  a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Israel-Hamas war latest: Hamas number three killed, US says - as video shows anguish after Israel's raid on hospital

The US has said Israel killed Hamas number three Marwan Issa in an operation last week. Meanwhile, the Israeli military claims 20 Hamas fighters were killed and dozens of suspects arrested in a raid on Gaza's al Shifa hospital - which the health ministry described as a war crime.

Tuesday 19 March 2024 10:55, UK

• Israel-Hamas war

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• US says Hamas number three Marwan Issa killed by Israel
• Alistair Bunkall: Death is a big success for Israel
• IDF soldiers raid al Shifa hospital in Gaza City
• Screams of anguish in video showing aftermath of Israel's raid on hospital
• Several killed as hospital on fire, say Palestinian health officials
• Journalist 'beaten and detained' in raid
• Michael Clarke : Israel under pressure as evidence grows it is committing systematic war crimes
• Watch: Israel films storming of hospital by drone | What video tells us about the raid
• Biden speaks to Israeli PM - their first call in 32 days

That's all for this evening, but we'll be back tomorrow with regular updates and analysis.

Scroll down to read what happened during the day.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has joined those to express their concern about Israel's planned assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Mr Trudeau was speaking with Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz on Monday.

A statement from Mr Trudeau's office said he had "shared his concern" around the planned offensive "and the severe humanitarian implications for all civilians taking refuge in the area".

"He underscored the need to increase the volume of life-saving humanitarian aid for civilians and to ensure aid reaches all those in need, safely and without delay."

Christopher Lockyear, from Doctors Without Borders says any attack on Rafah would be "a disaster upon a disaster".

He tells the camera he is travelling through part of Rafah "which is incredibly crowded - we've been moving at a snail's pace for the last 10-15 minutes or so".

"There are people everywhere, there are tents and makeshift shelters to the left and right of me and there are kids literally everywhere, which is a real shock."

Mr Lockyear said: "Clearly any ground invasion into Rafah would be an absolute catastrophe.

"It doesn't bear thinking about."

As we have been reporting today, the situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly desperate, with children now starving to death in the enclave.

The UN has said famine is imminent, and the head of its  Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief body, Martin Griffiths, has condemned world leaders for failing to prevent the current state of affairs.

"Famine is imminent in Gaza," he said.

"More than one million people are at risk because they have been cut off from life-saving aid, markets have collapsed and fields have been destroyed.

"The international community should hang its head in shame for failing to stop this.

"We must flood Gaza with food and other life-saving aid. There is no time to lose.

"I renew my call to the Israeli authorities to allow complete and unfettered access for humanitarian goods.

"We know that once a famine is declared, it is way too late. We also know that, with action and goodwill, it can be averted."

This is footage filmed by a Sky News team near the al Shifa hospital earlier today.

Israel raided the hospital for the second time during the war, accusing Hamas of using it as a base.

Israel said it had killed more than 20 gunmen in the operation.

The hospital was Gaza's largest before the war and is now one of the only healthcare facilities that is even partially operational in the territory's north.

It has also been housing displaced civilians.

Israel's prime minister has agreed to send a team of officials to Washington DC so "an alternative approach" can be discussed with regards to Israel's plans for Rafah.

The news comes from US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who was speaking after a call between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The team will include military intelligence and humanitarian officials but it was not clear when they would travel to the US.

Israel said last weekend that it planned to launch an assault on Rafah, but there is growing concern about the safety of civilians in the city - where more than one million people fled to after being ordered to evacuate other parts of Gaza by Israel.

The call between the two leaders also comes amid US frustration with Israel's conduct during the war, including accusations that it has prevented from getting into the enclave.

Mr Sullivan said a major ground offensive would be a "mistake" and would "further isolate Israel internationally".

Bearing in mind that Rafah is a primary entry point for aid from Egypt and Israel, he said an invasion would also "shut that down or at least put it at grave risk right at the moment when it is sorely needed".

Looking across the rest of Gaza, Mr Sullivan said a "humanitarian crisis" had descended.

"Anarchy reigns in areas that Israel's military has cleared but not stabilised," he said.

The death of Marwan Issa is a big success for Israel, writes  Middle East correspondent Alistair Bunkall .

First reported a week ago by the Jerusalem Post after an air strike in central Gaza, there was no official confirmation until tonight.

It's unclear why the US confirmed his death before Israel.

Issa is the deputy Commander of Hamas's military wing and would have been involved in the planning of the October 7th attacks. He is normally regarded as the number three in Hamas.

Issa has the nickname "shadow man" for his ability to evade Israeli forces.

The whereabouts of Hamas's leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, remains unknown, likewise Mohammed Deif, the commander of the military wing.

It's thought they might be hiding in the southern city of Rafah, one reason why Israel wants to send ground troops in, though if Issa was located in central Gaza then it's possible others might be there too.

The US says Israel killed Hamas number three Marwan Issa in an operation last week.

Sky News has approached the IDF for confirmation but their response was: "The IDF has no comment on the matter."

When we covered reports of the death on 11 March, Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari had said they were awaiting confirmation.

Below is the last-known photo of Issa, taken at a 2015 security conference organised by a Hamas-aligned organisation.

For those following the situation in the Middle East, one of the big questions is when - or if - Israel will launch its assault on Rafah.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during the weekend that the assault was still necessary to "eliminate the remaining terrorist battalions in Rafah".

But for those who are trying to arrange aid deliveries - and those who are desperately waiting for them - the lack of certainty is already risking lives.

United Nations humanitarian coordinator Jamie McGoldrick said aid operations in Gaza cannot be planned more than two or three days ahead at the moment because of the instability and uncertainty.

"It would be a really difficult scenario for us to envisage the possibility of hundreds of thousands of people being forced from Rafah because of the incursion.

"We are not in a position to contingency plan that. We're not in a position to pre-position shelter, material, food, medical supplies and especially water... It will be a real problem for us." 

Why does this matter?

It is already extremely difficult to get aid into Gaza due to the security situation and Israeli restrictions.

In desperation, a small group of countries has resorted to dropping aid from the air and deliveries have finally been arriving by sea - but neither of these makes up for the capacity that should be brought in by road.

And, as has been confirmed today, the need is immense - the UN says famine is "imminent" in northern Gaza and people in the rest of the enclave are struggling to access food.

Mr McGoldrick said: "If there was to be an incursion, that (aid) system we have, which is already precarious and intermittent, would then be broken."

Middle East correspondent Alistair Bunkall  is in Jerusalem and says the US and Israeli leaders would have had a lot to discuss during their 45-minute call.

"We have seen over recent weeks, in the absence of communication between the two leaders, quite a public spat between Israel and Washington, the US president making it very clear that he is not happy with the way that this war is being fought and the lack of humanitarian aid that is getting into Gaza.

"For his part, the Israeli prime minister has been defiant and adamant that Israel will pursue its war aims, specifically, the release of all the hostages and the elimination of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. If that means going into the southern city of Rafah, then that is what the Israelis plan to do."

Over the weekend we learnt that Israel is still planning to push ahead with an assault on Rafah, in Gaza's south.

The US, Israel's staunchest ally, has said it will not support such an operation without the Israelis presenting a credible plan to ensure the safety of civilians.

Bunkall said an assault on Rafah does not seem to be imminent but that the world is "increasingly concerned that Israel is gearing up for it", with all of the humanitarian consequences that could have.

Meanwhile, ceasefire talks have resumed in Qatar, with a senior Israeli delegation flying there today.

"The expectation is that they might take a long time, maybe a couple of weeks if they're going to be successful.

"But Hamas has lowered its demands, Israel is still saying that are being unrealistic in what they are expecting. But there is certainly, it seems, room for negotiation. And as long as that stays the case, then there will remain hope that a new ceasefire deal can be agreed at some point."

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Environmental worries after ship hit in Red Sea sinks

Environmental concerns are growing after the Rubymar, a UK-owned vessel, sunk in the Red Sea. It was hit last month by anti-ship missiles launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen. It had been leaking oil and fertiliser from its cargo.