migrobirdo e.V.

Report of Friends who stayed at home

Sunday, February 1st, 2009 | Uncategorized

[Für deutschen Text siehe weiter unten]

We tell all we know about the accident, the situation now and how we’ll go ahead now.

Our report is based on information of the survivor, witch reached us in the last days.

The sailboat Taube started in Larache at Monday 10:00 pm. They decided in face of bad weather to leave, because in port they felt unwelcome, because of frequent, unfriendly controls by the authorities. Supposable, Mohammedia was port of destination.

By reason of sea sickness and exhaustion, they decided to go to Medhia. Following to the survivor, they didn’t know, about the especially dangerous breakers there.

Why the danger was expected so totally wrong is a mystery to us. The skipper was since Baltic Sea nearly every time on board, mostly as leader of ship. He had a basic boat license and he had participated in a course for SKS-license, the German yachtmaster coastal certificate.

The accident took place at Tuesday 18:00 local time, shortly before twilight. The Taube was entering port mole or very close to do this. They had just started manually the diesel engine, so minimum one person got out of life jacket to do so. The persons in cabin of cause also weren’t wearing life jackets.

Suddenly, the boat was pushed very hard by a big wave and one or two windows at prow broke. Through cabin entrance water came into boat. Up to that, the survivor was laying in bunk because of sea sickness. She left cabin as quick as possible. For very short time she stood outside until the next wave throw her into water. According to her notice in this moment, everybody could leave the cabin.

As she swam in water, she wasn’t able to see the ship anymore, only one other person on another wave. She griped a camping mat, witch she found drifting in water and swam to a point of coast witch fishermen showed her. She guess that she has been in the water for max. 20 minutes.

What than happened to Taube we don’t know. Surely, somebody was able to activate the Epirb (satellite emergency sender), because in it’s fixture at cabin wall a false alarm was avoided magnetically.

Other safety equipment on board: Per person a life jacket with lifebelt, VHF-radio, signal flares, dinghy and more.

The Taube itself was a yacht in steel with ballast keel and additional sword. The keel was filled with cement and plumb and hat a draft of 0.95 meter. The sword could be handed by a hoist and put draft up to 1.6 m. We think the boat had a capsize stability as usual as yachts have. The type of boat as Taube was has a tradition in tidal water like North Sea. (E. g. SY ‘Kathena’, witch was sailed around the world in the late sixties.)

But in our opinion, neither the boat nor the safety equipment decided in this situation. No sport ship has a serious chance to survive breaker waves like that.

At place of accident the current direction was offshore, so it was extremely hard to escape by swimming. This explains why only one person without life jacket could safe herself.

As well as we know the Taube wasn’t found yet. All that was found is one dead person, a life jacket and some pieces of wood.

That’s all we can say about Morocco. We, the friends who stayed at home, are still in dolour but also have to think about how to go on now.

As next we collect all information we have for the BSU (Federal Bureau of maritime Casualty Investigation).

We are thinking about the project in general also. There’ll be a Migrobirdo meeting soon where we’ll discuss about that.

Friday, 30th of January, there was a small commemoration in Leipzig. Also there are some plannings to do a bigger one in south of Germany in about a month.

Some words about us: We are handful persons who try as well as possible to handle what happened. There isn’t anybody professional working for Migrobirdo, and nobody of us organized the trips of Taube, this was done on the boat. We hope this explains our small knowledge and the long time it took to publish this report.

That’s the situation;

With kind regards

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