Captain tells of moment his superyacht went haywire
Back-to-back electronics glitches behind a 77-metre superyacht’s Sint Maarten crash, skipper revealsYou’ve probably already seen the vision; a brilliantly turquoise superyacht’s bow slicing through a jetty as it runs amok at speed, a huge scar ripping into its side as it comes to a grinding halt.
Now the skipper of the 76.8-metre quad-deck motor yacht Go has revealed the reason why the boat rammed the shoreline – a vital electronic link between the fly-by-wire bridge and the engineroom failed at a critical moment. Not once, but twice.
Captain Simon Johnson, who has had more than 35 years’ experience as a skipper, and at the helm of Go for more than three years, said a software glitch left him with little choice but to try and beach the superyacht to avert an even more expensive, and potentially life-threatening, outcome.
He
that he made a quick decision to ram the jetty in an attempt to beach the motor yacht.Simpson Bay, where the dramatic crash was caught on camera, is a narrow, enclosed warterway on the southern side of Sint Maarten, a small island in the Leeward Islands group just east of Puerto Rico.
Narrow exit
It’s a frequent superyacht stopover, with Go’s run-in with the jetty happening just as the superyacht was lining up to leave the bay via a narrow causeway with just 50cm of clearance on either side of Go’s 13.5-metre beam.
Johnson told the Daily Herald that Go had docked numerous times at Simpson Bay, and on February 24 he was running through the procedure for getting the superyacht safely out of the bay while approaching the causeway.
“Then, when we were about 50 metres away and holding position, the yacht started moving mysteriously forward,” he told the Herald.
“There was nothing I seemed to be able to do; all the controls on the bridge were showing normal. I called the engine room and everything was normal down there.”
Control was limited to a bow thruster. In a split second, Johnson had to make a decision before the superyacht collided with one of the island’s bridges.
One option was to drop the motor yacht’s anchor. However, the superyacht risked tearing open its 160,000-litre fuel tank on a rock breakwall as it swung around the anchor.
Another was to try and beach the boat. That meant ramming the jetty of the Sint Maarten Yacht Club. He went for it.
Under the circumstances, it was the right decision.
“The fact that there were no warning alarms, no lights on board to indicate something was wrong was really scary,” Johnson said.
“I know this yacht so well, yet I had 13 seconds to make a decision before hitting the bridge.
“The decision I made was one I would make again if faced with the same circumstances.”
An official investigation has been launched into how the superyacht’s engines locked themselves on.
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