In the beginning of September Tapio Lehtinen set off on an 11-meter Asteria boat for solo sailing around the world.
On Friday morning, November 18, he woke up to a loud bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Lehtinen jumped out of the 55 cm narrow coffin-like trunk and swung his feet on the floor of the boat. The water was knee-deep, and it flooded from the stern of the boat in rapids.
– I said that now it’s really in question, Lehtinen tells two days later.
He has been rescued on an Indian cargo ship, which is currently making its way slowly towards the Chinese port of Rizhao.
The media has followed Lehtinen’s solo sailing closely. Friday’s events are straight out of Hollywood.
The boat had to be the most durable in the race
Lehtinen says that the situation was “excellently under control” before the accident. The race went well and the weather was calm.
Lehtinen had bought an Asteria boat built in 1965 in Italy five years ago. In Finland, it was designed and built practically from scratch.
– It was certainly the strongest of the boats in the race. I never would have thought that it would be the one that suddenly sinks in five minutes in beautiful weather, says Lehtinen.
However, something went wrong. Lehtinen reasons that the bang that woke him up could have come from the collapse of the watertight bulkhead in the aft compartment. The bulkhead is a transverse partition that extends from the hull to the deck. The failure of the bulkhead, on the other hand, could have been due to the fact that one of the pipes passing through the boat has broken and filled the stern with water.
– As is usually the case in larger disasters, not one but several things go wrong.
When the stern filled with water, there was no time to waste. Lehtinen grabbed the radio, the survival suit and one of the three first aid kits. There was no time for the other two. He got on deck, unstrapped the life raft and threw the raft into the sea.
– I looked inside the boat to see if I could take a water canister or a satellite phone with me. However, the boat was practically full of water. Should have dived.
At the same time, Lehtinen noticed that the knot with which he had tied the life raft to Asteria had opened. The ferry floated 2-3 meters away towards Ulappa.
– I dived headfirst into the water next to the life raft of the tiger leaper, caught hold of the raft and pulled myself on board. What followed was 20 wistful minutes of me watching Asteria’s death struggle.
Lehtinen followed the sinking of his beloved boat with his hand in the magazine. He breaks down in tears when he talks about the moment on the ferry.
Competitor saved
The Golden Globe Race is sailed with old technology. Navigation is handled with a sextant and compass, communication is maintained with old-fashioned shortwave radios.
However, modern technology is used in the security arrangements. It came to Lehtinen’s rescue.
– I had three different satellite alarms and at least four satellite phones. On top of that, a lifebuoy and a survival suit, Lehtinen lists.
Lehtinen sent an emergency signal from the lifeboat, and managed to keep in touch with the race organizer with the YB3 tracking device. It soon became known that help would be offered by a fellow sailor Kirsten Neuschäfer and an Indian cargo ship.
Reading the messages was its own challenge, because Lehtinen did not have glasses with him.
– By squinting my eyes to the extreme, I understood the text and was able to communicate during the night.
Nature kept company
The wait for Neuschäfer and the cargo ship went smoothly. The summer sun dried Lehtinen’s clothes, and the nature around began to wake up.
First came the great storm terns, pitch black birds the size of a large seagull. One of them grabbed Lehti’s finger a couple of times with his beak.
– I had a little doubt that they were sea vultures. Do I dare to fart, or do they think the guy is already rotting?
The biggest impression was made by the albatrosses, which landed within touching distance. Lehtinen had already watched them enraptured in his previous sailing race and had read several books about the birds since then.
– At night, I woke up to find that the albatross couple had landed a meter away from the boat. They were there around the corner, poking around with their long beaks, making a noise.
When Neuschäfer finally got to Lehtinen, everything went “like in the movies”. The experienced Neuschäfer offered Lehtinen a glass of rum and took him to the freighter, which had already arrived nearby.
From the cargo ship, he was pulled in a life raft to the side of the ship, from where he climbed a ladder onto the deck. The ladder reminded me of the moving stairs of Linnanmäki’s Vekkula device, where each step must be timed precisely.
– Climbing along the side of the ship felt damn long. On the edge of the deck, the skipper and a crew of twenty people were welcoming.
One month vacation
The Darya Gayatri cargo ship is transporting soybeans from Argentina to China. It will make the journey slowly, trickling down the days of another month, and it is probably not possible for Lehtinen to leave the ride earlier. So the deadline is known.
Lehtinen says that he has already tested the route around the ship. Three times around the ship is roughly a kilometer. There is a gym on the lowest deck. The chef makes good Indian food.
– I have to walk around the ship, go to the gym and not gain too much weight.
In Cape Town, which served as an intermediate stop, Lehtinen left the log books he had written until then on the mainland, but the log books after that sank to a depth of five kilometers with the Asteria. Lehtinen rewrites those log books while waiting to land.
When he gets to Finland, he plans to thoroughly review with the experts what really happened to Asteria on November 18.
Then the preparation for the next race begins. It is the 50th anniversary race of the first Whitbread sailing in 1973. Lehtinen took part in the Whitbread race in 1983 as watch captain of the Skopbank of Finland boat.
In Whitbread, Lehtinen has a crew of eleven people.
The matter was corrected on 20.11. at 17:32. Corrected Tapio Lehtinen’s misspelled surname from Lahti to Lehti.