Passage planning risks were not considered before a motor vessel escorting a swim relay team around the Isle of Wight grounded, the MAIB has found.
Fourteen passengers and crew were rescued from swim support motor vessel Channel Queen before it grounded after passing over the wreck of the steam ship Varvassi near the Needles lighthouse off the Isle of Wight in southern England last summer.
Channel Queen was escorting a relay swim event around the island and had to be deliberately beached, with crew and passengers able to first safely disembark to a RIB and lifeboat.
The Channel Queen was subsequently declared a total loss.
The Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has found that there was no charted navigational passage plan; no effective use was made of available navigation equipment to execute safe passage; the qualified skipper had left the vessel to board a kayak before the Channel Queen grounded; and she was being driven by the vessel owner, who was not qualified to be in command.
“The skipper and owner prioritised the swim event over the safe navigation of the vessel,” the report says. “When the vessel grounded, the skipper had left the vessel after a very brief handover to the owner, who was insufficiently qualified to command and was attempting to deal with multiple distractions single-handedly.
“The risks associated with ineffective passage planning were not considered before the voyage commenced. The skipper’s passage plan did not provide a sound basis for the safe circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight while providing swim support close inshore.
“The skipper disembarking to the kayak had become a normalised procedure during previous swim support events. Both the owner and the skipper had overlooked the requirement for the vessel to always remain under the command of an appropriately qualified crew member when under way.”
History of Varvassi
The Varvassi is a Greek cargo ship that was carrying barrels of wine, tangerines, heifers and iron ore to Southampton from Algiers in January 1947.
The Isle of Wight local newspaper Island Echo reported that the Varvassi crew ignored a pilot cutter’s urgent warnings that she was steaming in the wrong direction, and became wedged on ’The Needles’, a row of three stacks of chalk that rise about 30 metres out of the sea.
After attempting for some hours to re-float, the 36-man crew were rescued by a lifeboat crew while waves pounded the vessel, which eventually broke up and sank.
Islanders were treated to much of the cargo of tangerines and barrels of wine that eventually floated up the Solent and landed on the beaches.
The Channel Queen is is not the first vessel to hit the Varvassi. In 1973 a fishing boat allided with the wreck and in 2016 a yacht hit the sunken freighter.
