Lady Victoria's Tow Line Snaps and Fouls Props. Salvors Ask $1M
So the Captain Reportely Dove Down With a Chef's Knive
I know you’re out there somewhere, just beyond my reach Probably drinking margaritas, lying on a beach Guess you had the itch. Guess you had to roam But all will be forgiven if you just come home. Dinghy, come on back. Come back, dinghy. Come back to me.
—Eileen Quinn, “Come Back Dinghy” from the album Mean Low Water
There’s a YouTube channel I follow even though it’s subject matter is barely relevant to Loose Cannon’s small-craft world. Super Yacht News had a good story last week about a big boat that lost her big dinghy and did so with extreme prejudice.
Host Terrence Ward, an Englishman and yacht technical officer, reported on how Lady Victoria lost her tender while underway southbound along the U.S. East Coast on passage from Newport to Charleston. The tender was under tow (of course), and the tow rope snapped off the Carolinas.
How many of us have experienced misadventure while attempting an ocean tow? As if to confirm just how scalable this kind of event really is. Author Alison O’Leary reported on Facebook that she too had lost a 10-foot dinghy while underway in a sailboat in the same waters—about 20 miles south of Morehead City, North Carolina.
O’Leary said she and her sailing parner had become complacent:
It was dumb to tow it in the conditions we were in, but we'd towed it all the way to Nova Scotia this summer without a problem (Yes, we checked and replaced the line more than once). Rookie error. We have an Island Packet, and we use the staysail so there's very limited space on deck for a hard bottom 10-footer. We should have swallowed the cost of davits before we left. Hindsight is 20/20
As Lady Victoria struggled with her problems, O’Leary was asking fellow sailors to be on the lookout for a 10-foot West Marine dinghy bearing New Hampshire registration numbers. She offered a reward.
Usually the big boys do better than the rest of us when they tow, because they are operated by professional mariners and use expensive, beefy towing systems. However, that often means that when failures do happen, they can be pretty sensational.
According to Super Yacht News, Lady Victoria’s tender was too big to store on deck, as is often the case in offshore towing mishaps. That was also the case with a Nordhavn 96 immobilized after a failed towline fouled her prop while underway off the coast of Australia in March 2023.
After Lady Victoria’s towline snapped, her captain maneuvered ship to retrieve the tender. Instead, part of the severed line wrapped itself around around both props. The 152-foot Feadship then found herself adrift without power or steering.
Speaking in a Super Yacht News broadcast, Ward narrated the sequence of events:
The tender was taking on water and it potentially sank. They tried to arrange a tow, and they received a quote for one million dollars to to do this salvage operation, which is outrageous. Anyway, they declined the offer. Apparently, the captain actually went into the water himself…
The last report we received was that the captain was able to free one of the engines using one of the knives from the galley—believe it or not—and the vessel is now underway under her own power heading to Charleston.
You laugh about the choice of knife, but a chef-quality knife with a scalloped blade is probably and excellent choice for sawing through a two-inch-thick line.
After getting underway on a single screw, AIS tracking indicates that Lady Victoria headed not to Charleston but to Southport in North Carolina, where she was anchored, and presumably her crew worked to square the ship away.
Loose Cannon’s coverage of the Nordhavn case quoted a surveyor and professional yacht captain named John Wenz, who wrote a technical manual on offshore towing with 80 chapters. The manual began with a quotation: “Any guidelines for towing small craft on ocean tows should always begin with ‘just don’t do it’.”
For us small-craft operators, the problem may be that we just don’t know what we don’t know. (Certainly, that was the case when I lost a dinghy 50 miles off the coast of New Jersey.)
As far as the superyacht crowd, Wenz said it boiled down to arrogance. “Why do you need to tow that boat? Because you’re a spoiled rich bastard, and you can,” he said. “In the old days, we put tenders on decks. There were a lot reasons for that.”
Registered in the Cayman Islands, Lady Victoria is advertised for charter for up to $250,000 a week. She can accomodate 12 people in seven cabins. She has a crew of eight.
A bread knife is actually an ideal tool for cutting lines.
"As far as the superyacht crowd, Wenz said it boiled down to arrogance. “Why do you need to tow that boat? Because you’re a spoiled rich bastard, and you can,” he said. “In the old days, we put tenders on decks. There were a lot reasons for that.”"
I've been in this business for almost 40 years and I will never understand the overt hatred I encounter in colleagues for the wealthy. Most of my clients are what one would consider to be extremely wealthy, some could easily buy the builders who build their yachts, some of those several times over, and they are some of the nicest, most unassuming, and self-deprecating people I know, when they have crew, they trust them to do the right thing. The "spoiled rich bastards" are truly the exception in my experience. The clients I have who tow, usually do so because the vessel they are towing is too large to be placed on deck, and they use it for offshore fishing, making the size necessary for their goals, and not because they are spoiled. For every towing disaster story you hear, there are thousands of tows that are uneventful.
I'm currently in Taiwan, inspecting vessels under construction, for some really nice rich clients;-)
Made my day with the dinghy song (an artist). I’ll be a good album when I have passengers aboard.