The Melbourne to Port Fairy yacht race is a 135nm race through Bass Strait and into the Southern Ocean - as the season turns from Summer to the Winter storms. In 2012, with the forecast for mild north winds and a SW change, the fleet set off - the yacht Inception, a Beneteau 50 amongst the fleet with many of the crew heading to their home town of Port Fairy.<\/p>\n
When an un-forecast second front hit the fleet on the evening of Good Friday, the fleet was in dis-array. With winds gusting beyond 65 knots and waves recorded at more than 14 m (45-50 feet) the fleet were in survival mode. On board the yacht Inception, things took a rapid turn for the worst. With the loss of the liferaft, and then the rapid development of a large source of flooding, the crew were forced into the malestrom, in the PFDs alone. Tethered together they armed their ACR ResQlink PLBs (and the boat EPIRB) - providing GPS locations to the rescue authorities and the rescue vessel - a fellow competitor.<\/p>\n
Without their PLBs, it is reasonable to expect that the crew would have been left to survive the storm until daylight some 6 hours later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Melbourne to Port Fairy yacht race is a 135nm race through Bass Strait and into the Southern Ocean - as the season turns from Summer to the Winter storms. In 2012, with the forecast for mild north winds and a SW change, the fleet set off - the yacht Inception, a Beneteau 50 amongst […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"template":"","survivor-category":[11],"terrain":[22],"survivor-event":[133],"survivor-cause":[126],"survivor-rescue":[2300],"class_list":["post-17270","survivor-stories","type-survivor-stories","status-publish","hentry","survivor-category-boating","terrain-ocean","survivor-event-rogue-wave","survivor-cause-weather","survivor-rescue-other"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/survivor-stories\/17270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/survivor-stories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/survivor-stories"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"survivor-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/survivor-category?post=17270"},{"taxonomy":"terrain","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/terrain?post=17270"},{"taxonomy":"survivor-event","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/survivor-event?post=17270"},{"taxonomy":"survivor-cause","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/survivor-cause?post=17270"},{"taxonomy":"survivor-rescue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acrartex.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/survivor-rescue?post=17270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}