The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Susie Goodall Pitchpoled

Update April 2019: We now know exactly what happened with Susie’s drogue.

Most everybody interested in offshore sailing knows that Susie Goodall was pitchpoled on December 5th in her Rustler 36 while competing in the Golden Globe 2018.

And I’m sure many of you spent the next two days, as Phyllis and I did, checking the Golden Globe site, Facebook, and Twitter, for fragments of news about the rescue of this wonderful and adventurous woman. And then, like us, celebrated when the wonderful news that she was safe aboard a cargo ship came through.

As always happens with these sorts of things, within minutes of the news the speculation started about what happened, particularly since the GG 2018 release stated that:

…she said that before the incident, she had been enjoying the conditions and felt in control. But then the safety tube on her Monitor self-steering broke and she was forced to trail a drogue anchor astern and take down the mainsail.

She was below decks when the boat was pitchpoled, and when she returned on deck to assess the damage, found that the line attached to the drogue had parted.

I did a little investigation the morning after and it turns out that Susie had sourced three storm survival devices over the last couple of years:

Here’s my source for the last two.

I was not able to find out which of the above she was using when she was pitchpoled, or even which she had aboard, although I think there was a mention of using the sea anchor after the dismasting. Hopefully Susie will be able to tell us more.

And if it was the series drogue built by Ocean Brake, we will need to really dig into what broke and make sure there is not a potential weak spot at the bridle-to-drogue join.

The good news is that Angus and Ocean Brake have a great track record of learning from problems and improving their product, so I’m sure that if Susie was using their drogue they will be all over this looking for clues to what happened.

Here’s what Angus had to say in an email I received from him on the 6th in answer to my enquires:

I sold Susie her drogue a few years back now. It was a fairly standard 116 cone drogue, with 5m bridles and soft eyes inboard and outboard. I haven’t heard from her since.

We always splice with a very long tuck, at least 60cm, so I can’t believe that they have failed. I haven’t seen any images yet, but possibly there was chafe where the bridles were rubbing against the monitor self steer?

I am looking to do away with conventional double braid bridles from next year and only use dyneema, both from a chafe perspective and also from a weight perspective, but I will be looking into this situation to try and figure out what has happened.

I am incredibly concerned regarding what has happened, there is no reason why a drogue (or set of bridles) should have failed in “only” 60kts of wind.

That’s all I know right now and, further, I think it would be a waste of my time and yours to speculate about the causes until we have more information from Susie.

We also need to go into this realizing that we may never know what happened for sure. That said, if she was using the Ocean Brake series drogue, lack of real data won’t stop some people using this incident to claim that the series drogue designed by Don Jordan doesn’t work, even though putting a single incident with incomplete information ahead of hundreds of successful deployments, and solid science, is an epic failure of rational thought.

To those nay sayers I say “gotta better idea”? One thing the Golden Globe 2018 has proved for sure, is that the answer to that question is a resounding “no”.

Disclosure

Ocean Brake pays $50/month as a corporate member of this site.

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Scott A

Hi John,

The references you make to Susie’s drogue/anchor parting (whatever drogue that might have been) were confusing until I backtracked and read the GGR source article. It might be clearer if you added something specifically about the parting earlier in the post.

I’m definitely eager to learn more facts about the incident, and look forward to any further posts you make on the subject.

Best regards,
Scott

Jojo

Hi
Just listened to Don’s latest question and answer video and he confirmed that it was a series drogue that Suzie was streaming. He also suggested that it could have caused the pitch pôle by slowing the boat down too much, on a very steep wave!
Everything I have read from people using a JSD in the southern ocean goes against this comment!
But he also said that Robbin Knox Johnson was doing a review of all the issues boats have had in the GGR and would writer a report.
So maybe it will all become clear. My fear is that this accident will fuel the debate!
But so very very happy that Suzie was rescued successful!
Thanks for writing this article.

Ernest

Hi Jojo,
I’d be interested in this video but failed to find it on the net – do you have a link?
And at least as far as I am concerned I simply cannot envision the mechanics where the boat would pitchpole (i.e. stern over bow) because being “slowed down too much” simply because any drogue that is “slowing the boat down” will exert a force to the stern pulling it aftwarth-downwarth. I still believe that a drogue which is parting at the very wrong moment can induce an immediate acceleration resulting in a pitchploing event, but not the other way round. There is simply no mechanical model that would support this.

Richard Phillips

Just to confirm – I also saw the video from GGR saying she was using the series drogue. We await the full report to see whether this is confirmed and begin to understand the lessons to be learned.

Peter

Dear John,
I agree with you that the JSD is probably the best overall hope for keeping out of trouble. However, if I may politely observe, the unswerving enthusiasm you display for the device followed immediately by the disclosure that its producers make a significant regular contribution to your website, doesn’t look good vis-a-vis keeping an open mind on these things! There are always new angles to discover.

Dick Stevenson

Hi Peter,
I would think that you might consider John’s being clear of this contribution to his web site as evidence of his good faith effort to be as objective as possible.
I believe it to be nigh on impossible, in our world, not to have apparent bias and probably impossible not to have actual bias. That said, I also think it is quite possible to approach objectiveness and fairness. Part of the path toward fairness objectiveness is being clear where your own biases might creep in and keep a weather eye on them. Another is to be transparent in a manner that invites others to look over your shoulder and to point out areas where bias might have played a part.
In both these areas, I believe that John has done well.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Philip Waterman

However well founded the series drogue systems might be, one wonders how they cope with an extreme event; so called “rogue waves” (not a helpful term to my mind). Such events have been shown to be a statistical certainty, even in the absence of exacerbating currents or subsea topographical features. Moreover, satellite observations have shown them to occur far more often than one might think.

Such extreme statistical events are not just categorised by wave height but also by wave shape and direction. Even a 5m high wave with a short wavelength, near vertical slope and moving in a direction different to the prevailing seas is going to ruin someones day.

One can envisage the situation where the JSD is doing its job keeping the vessel correctly orientated and at a controlled speed relative to the predominant wave train and then a curve-ball wave screws things up.

Such waves are likely to be very short lived as their energy gets sapped by the predominant wave train. If you encounter such a wave you are therefore extremely unlucky. (So I guess that we can all carry on sailing?)

I have no idea whether such an event contributed to Susie Goodall’s predicament however, it is a possibility.

More worrying is that there have been 20 retirements from the Golden Globe (so far!). At least three dismastings, two vessels with severe rigging damage and several debilitating injuries to various skippers, all incurred during repeated knock-downs.

So have they all been unlucky in encountering “rogue waves”? I doubt it!

Perhaps these results highlight how much modern navigation systems, weather and sea state forecasting, and autopilots contribute to our safety at sea (all such niceties are forbidden in the Golden Globe – except in an emergency). When you look at the low retirement rates in the Volvo Ocean series and other techfest sailing extravaganzas, even though vessels are highly stressed, one can surmise that knowing where the next gust is coming from and the sea state a mile ahead is a boon.

As an addendum:

Some sources define a rogue wave as one that is double the significant wave height. If I remember correctly, some observations indicate that waves do occur that are double the height of the next highest wave in 24h period. That is high!

I believe that jury is out on the exact physics behind such events. I suspect that a combination of linear supposition, non-linear effects, chaos theory (look out for that flying fish plunging in to the big swell!), etc, etc. will just generate an unsolvable differential equation which in any case wont help you if you are blatting along in the South Atlantic.

Philip Waterman

Thanks John. I had seen the “no rogue waves” article.

Perhaps I have a slightly different view of what is a rogue wave. The wave event, for want of a better term, may be extremely localised, perhaps a few hundred metres across or less; essentially an isolated mountainous peak and not a wave in the true sense. It may be momentarailly stationary or perhaps moving even at right angles to the prevailing wave train.

If a series drogue is “dug in” to the prevailing wave train perhaps (and hopefully) several wavelengths worth, and a significant “mountain’ comes in abeam, the drogue will prevent the vessel from coming around to surf down the unexpected gradient. In these circumstance I feel that the vessel could get rolled and with the yaw, one side of the bridal might be fatally overloaded.

Don’t get me wrong, I am talking about an extremely unlikely and unlucky event in which any storm tactic would probably not be effective. I am a firm believer in the JSD et al in every respect. It is just to make the point that Mother Nature can always come up with something, however unlikely, that will overpower any best intentioned preventative measure.

When we hear of such events we should clearly look to learn from them. My view is that we should never denigrate a system, JSD or other, because it appears to have failed, as we don’t truly know what Mother Nature had in mind at the time.

I apologise. This probably not the thread for such metaphysical discussions. But Susie Goodall’s and the other GGR skippers’ experiences are rather thought provoking.

Stein Varjord

Hi Philip and John.
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve actually observed the type of “rogue wave” that arrives at a significant angle to the main wave pattern twice.

One time was zero drama, as I was not in a boat but rather bathing and the weather was nice but windy. Location was the north tip of Denmark in southwesterly wind. The spot goes into a very narrow tip aligned with that normal wind direction, which continues in a sand ridge under water. The main waves were on the western side, coming in along the beach and the direction aligning with the land tip. The wind was maybe 25 knots and there were also proper waves on the east “inside” of the land tip. These were at an angle with the waves on the west side, since waves and wind adjusted to the shore line on both sides.

The waves were fairly big and they got very steep approaching the shallow ridge. At the shallowest point, they met the smaller waves from the east side at an angle of maybe 30-40 degrees. Mostly, this resulted in the waves cancelling each other some, but the bigger waves from the west would clearly dominate in the beginning. One could see them as well rounded swell quite far eastwards, under the smaller waves there.

The interesting stuff with “freak waves” happened just east of the shallow. Completely out of the blue there would be huge mountains rising straight up. Some were 3-4 times the height of the average of the bigger west side wave train. We would actually try to be at the location when one happened, but without proper success. These waves were not really waves though. They just shot up from “nothing”, really high, and then just disappeared in seconds. They didn’t move any direction and didn’t break. They seemed to have spent all their energy in the vertical jump. In a boat with bigger versions of this, I actually think they wouldn’t be dangerous, but very scary, though.

The only really dangerous offshore storm I’ve experienced, off Portugal about 20 years ago, steady around 60 knots of wind gusting way more, insanely huge waves. It’s impossible to guess wave height, but we agreed that when we were on any wave top, the next top was at least 100-150 meters away. They were mostly breaking. Very scary. I’ve never seen anything close to that.

We didn’t know about JSD. I stayed at the helm for almost 20 hours on a tiny 5,5m2 storm jib, going 15 to 25 knots (light 40 foot catamaran) until we got into Bayona in the north of Spain.

The wind stayed fairly steady on south, but once in the morning changed about 20 degrees west in just a few minutes. Since the wind was still very strong, the new direction got its own big waves within half an hour or so, while the original waaaay bigger waves continued rolling north.

I assume many others have experienced a 20 degree wind change or more in heavy weather, so no surprises here, but the effect of the changed wind direction was almost immediate. The huge waves turned into well rounded swell, no tendency to break anymore, and the general conditions were considerably less dramatic. Rapidly, the new waves were also very big, although far from the previous insanely big ones.

There was interaction between the old and new waves, especially a couple of hours after the change. It was way less dramatic than the effects I saw in Denmark, although the dimensions were way bigger, of course. I did kinda recognise it somewhat in that the highest peaks seemed to have lost their energy and speed and didn’t seem to break very often. Since we were deep reaching on starboard tack to get to harbour, our course got to be so that the swell came noticeably from starboard side while the newer waves were closer to straight aft. This made “never ending “ down hills and quite insane surfing speeds.

Even when being targeted by a new wave on top of a swell wave or even worse, at the front of the swell, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference in wave energy. The dimensions got impressive and the angles got scary, but we saw no possibility of walls of water coming from other directions than the wind direction. The combination of wave directions was actually not a considerable problem. The risk of flipping was only from the waves going along the wind.

So my take on it, so far:
As long as there is wind, the dangerous waves will all be fairly aligned with it.
There might be monsters from other directions, but they look scarier than they are.
Non aligned monsters seem to have have low energy and live only seconds.

Scary scenarios I haven’t experienced, that I don’t know how to solve:
No wind and extreme waves, like the eye of a hurricane.
Opposing strong wind and strong current, causing extreme breaking waves, like in the Gulf Stream.

Philip Waterman

So……playing devils advocate……I don’t agree with these two statements:

“A second optical illusion is that a dangerous breaking wave comes from a direction different from the prevailing wind and sea”

“From physical considerations it is virtually impossible for a breaking storm wave to approach from a significantly different direction”

With all due respect to Don Jordan, in the last 30-years the modelling of how oceanic waves develop and interact has evolved. I doubt that much of underlying maths has changed. After all, Schrödinger was touting his stuff long before then. Chaos theory has advanced somewhat but mostly it is Moore’s Law has obviated the need for the simplifications that were essential in the 80s.

In the day, models were primarily simple harmonic and based on the damping effect of gravity and the energy input by the wind augmented by empirical studies. Moreover, for simplicity it was probably assumed that there was a reasonably constant fetch.

Such models are still valid for oceanic wave prediction and are probably the source for generating commonly available wave GRIBS, which to be clear are remarkably accurate on a macro scale. However, I understand that there is now an appreciation of the potential effects of non-linear and chaotic inputs.

Consider a typical low pressure system. It will be rotating and therefore the wind direction will vary through 360 degrees across the weather system. The wind speeds will vary depending on the pressure gradient plus the additive/subtractive effects of the velocity with which the system is moving. At sea level the winds will also depend on the convectional air currents, the surface conditions, etc. etc. That is to say that across the weather system, the surface of the sea will be subjected to a wide range of time varying wind speeds and directions. The wave frequency, amplitude and direction spectra from each point in the system and at each point in time will be very complex.

As the speed of wave propagation is frequency (wavelength) dependent, dispersion will ensure that the longest wavelengths, which correspond to the strongest winds and/or longest fetches and therefore the biggest amplitudes, will travel most rapidly away from the storm system. One might think that this relatively uniform primary component (all-be-it with its statistical highs, lows and interference patterns) is all we have to worry about when sailing. However, the storm system is moving. It may be moving faster than the propagation speed of the fastest waves, and almost certainly faster than a typical sailboat. On its way, each point in the system will be spewing off its divers wave spectra.

With dispersion, the waves experienced by the vessel at any one point will be the combination of waves from different points in the storm system and from different times during its passage. For example, the vessel may be experiencing the smaller wavelength, lower speed waves from when the centre of the system was at a bearing of 160 degrees mixed with the larger wavelength higher speed waves from when the system centre had advanced to a bearing of 100 degrees. This of course this will apply to all of the dispersing wave spectra from each point in the system and throughout its entire track. (Now there’s an an interesting finite element analysis that would warrant some time on China’s Sunway TaihuLight 200 petaflop supercomputer!)

The vessel may only see/feel the dominant component at any one time, perhaps with more and more confusion as the dispersed wave trains interfere. Nevertheless, the complexity of all of these different wave amplitudes, velocities and frequencies arriving together could give rise to the non-linear and chaotic conditions that create a statistically rare extreme event.

No doubt someone will point out that as the waves are arriving broadly from the same quadrant or from the same two quadrants, it would be impossible to generate a wave at right angles to the dominant component due to the needs to conserve momentum, However, I hypothesise that a “momentary mountainous event”, might not be carrying significant momentum to break any conservation rules. It will of course be carrying a massive amount of potential energy. The interfering waves are at liberty to exchange their kinetic and potential energies without infringing any fundamental conservation rules.

Through this hopefully logical conjecture I merely wish to reiterate my previous point that we should not denigrate a system that works 99.999999% of the time just because Mother Nature is capable of some extreme, unpredictable and impossible to model scenarios.

Even of we had time on China’s Sunway TaihuLight 200 petaflop supercomputer and could accurately calculate that at a particular moment 100 miles due south of Cape Horn there was a 1:1000000 chance of an exceptional momentary mountainous event, it wouldn’t stop people racing.

JCFlander

Hi John et al.,

I also have a problem on dismissing experienced sailor’s observations about “breaking waves coming from right angles” as optical illusions. And, yes, I don’t have anything concrete to back this up. This is just a hunch that there is more on this thing.
Then again, Don Jordan is right about wave friction, but I believe on that time rotary core stormclouds and thunderbursts were not yet on the discussion. Namely, Micro/macrobursts push huge amount of energy to sea surface very quickly, and they might also be the source of irregular wavefronts.
S/Y Destiny’s report from 1994 Queen’s birthday storm has some discussion of thunderbursts:
http://dragdevicedb.com/drogues-on-monohulls/dm-12-monohull-norseman-447

Second thing: Isn’t the most common JSD failure mode, so far, been bridle entanglement with wind vane gear, and subsequent parting?

Cheers!

RDE

Hi John,
This is a very interesting technical analysis of downwind yacht behavior in heavy following seas: http://nordkyndesign.com/heavy-weather-dynamics-yachts-in-following-seas. His experience as a designer and circumnavigator leads him to quite different conclusions to that of Don Jordan– at least when it comes to the style of boat that he advocates.

“The most dangerous situation develops in heavy following seas, when the front face of the waves can become overwhelmingly high in relation with the length of the vessel. In this instance, a boat that hasn’t managed to accelerate and outrun the crest can pitch down by the bow severely, and even engage the foredeck in the sea.”

And: “Attempting to tow drogues in heavy weather is a double-edged sword:”

“(1) By increasing drag and overall resistance, a drogue pulls the yacht further up the slope of the wave as it approaches, into a steeper gradient and closer to the broken water of the crest. *
(2) By introducing an additional resistance force located as far aft as practical, the drogue can mitigate or cancel the shift in hydrodynamic resistance towards the forebody of some hulls. This can greatly help with preventing excessive course instability from developing.”

The boat that he created is superficially similar to the A40 design that was developed on this site, but is specifically designed to behave entirely differently than the style boat that has come to grief during the Globe Challenge. It is well worth a look:
http://nordkyndesign.com/nordkyn

*That is why surfers paddling out dive through the wave rather than allowing themselves to be swept “over the falls” by the breaking crest.

Stein Varjord

Hi Richard.
The guy behind Nordkyn seems very experienced and also like a good and thorough thinker. I’ve read several of his articles earlier. Very useful and interesting. Most of this article also fits completely with both my experience and logic. I totally agree that some boats are fundamentally unsafe for going with the weather. That is an important issue, since those boats are typically the old fashioned strong boats seen as very sea worthy, like those in GGR. However, when he at the end shortly mentions JSD and drag devices in general, he doesn’t use his own logic explanations from earlier in the article. That makes the conclusions about drag devices flawed.

As he correctly observes, when hulls not designed for high speed accelerate to speeds way out of their design capacity, the lateral centre of resistance moves very far forward. Since the boat mass is the main driving force at this point, and the centre of that is far behind the centre of resistance, the system becomes very unstable and can only be handled by very active steering. Since the rudder is often operating in white water from the braking waves, the small rudder older designs normally have is left with an impossible task.

The conclusions from this is, as stated on the Nordkyn site, and I agree with, that the boat should be able to plane well or some other strategy is needed. He basically says that the alternative strategy is to not be in that weather with a boat that cannot plane well, because a drag device is a two edged sword and quite a risky undertaking, so its not a suitable alternative. This does not seem to follow neither logic thinking nor observations.

He says that the mentioned unbalance of the poorly planing hull is mitigated by the drag device being attached to the stern, but fails to point out that the main reason for turning it into a stable system is that the drag device removes the speed peaks causing the unbalance. Held at 2 to 5 knots max, the lateral centre of resistance does not move forwards noticeably. The bridle pulling on the stern moves it extremely far aft. Hanging on a JSD, any hull shape is a fundamentally stable system, no matter where in the wave the boat is.

His main issue with a drag device is that it will hold the boaat back so it will experience the portion of the wave where the worst action is. The steepest parts and the breakers. Running with the weather with a good planing boat can avoid this. All true, but I think there are some misunderstandings in this. As mentioned several places in this thread, the water of the waves doesn’t move much, mostly up and down. The motion of the wave is thus to some extent an illusion. This illusion becomes more real in the breaking part, where the actually moving pressure wave is distorted so the water falls down from the broken crest and can then be redirected “forwards” by hitting its own lower part.

This does give the illusion of the whole wave being a moving mass of water, like in a river. This can indeed have destructive force, but it is definitely on the surface and the mass is vastly less than it seems. As also mentioned before, I’ve never used a JSD, but I have run with the weather in insanely big waves and hurricane wind strength with a fast boat. We did get some breakers hitting us when I wasn’t good enough in my predictions to steer away from where they would land. It was very scary and wet, but surprisingly unviolent. It’s a lot of water, but at least just as much air. I’d guess more air than water actually. In those conditions, there’s lots of water in the air all the time, of course.

My point is, as one might have guessed already, that being held back by a drogue to experience the steepest part of the wave, and the breaking part, is probably not such a bad deal. The descriptions from those that have done it supports that. Of course one could argue that there might be a risk that an extreme wave comes that has just too much power. I doubt that the huge waves behave very differently from other waves and would assume that it will only mean being lifted higher.

If we still say this is a real risk of catastrophe, how does this risk hanging on a JSD compare to the risks with running with the weather? Is the latter strategy without risks? Definitely not, of course. There’s a lot higher probability to be exposed to one of the several risks with this. It demands skilled and very active steering, nonstop, until the weather and waves are calm enough. It also demands a lot of distance available to lee. If something goes wrong, like with the steering, which does get a beating, it’s a near certain catastrophe. If the one at the helm makes a mistake, very big risks arrive in seconds. If one gets too tired and theres no one to take over, the solution is easy…… one needs a JSD!

RDE

Hi Stein:
Extremely well thought out analysis as usual! As always there are trade offs. I personally am not qualified to decide which approach is best because I haven’t been there and done that. Unfortunately my boat building years outnumber my sailing miles!
Richard