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Mobile phone app leads yachtsman astray (twice)

Alice Hutton

It seems there’s an app for everything these days but an experienced yachtsman had to be rescued

twice in a week after trying to sail 300 miles along the British coast using his mobile phone to navigate.

The mariner was making a journey on Vita Lote II, his 32ft yacht, from Milford Haven in Wales to Portsmouth, when he got stuck in shallow water in Poole harbour, Dorset, on Monday.

After he was towed to shore, the coastguard visited the vessel and her skipper, who is thought to be in his 40s, and discovered not only his unorthodox method of course plotting but a host of other problems, including 27 out-of-date
emergency flares.

A spokesman for Poole coast guard said: “We were paged to meet a vessel at Salterns Marina which had run aground in Poole harbour and needed some safety
advice.

“The vessel was using a 2014 almanac and an app on a mobile phone to navigate from Cornwall to Portsmouth. It turned out he had already been seen by the RNLI down south, so seeing us was nothing uncommon to him.

“After a chat and some safety advice given about a passage plan from Poole to Portsmouth, it was deemed necessary to take the 27 out-of-date flares from him and hand them in to the RNLI College for disposal. The flares ranged from five years to 13 years out of date.”

The previous Monday the yacht had been towed into St Ives, Cornwall, after the unnamed man, who at that time was travelling with a passenger, got into trouble 3 mile out from the holiday town. Two lifeboats from St Ives were called out after the engine failed. They found the yacht and two crew drifting perilously close to rocks but were able to take it back into the harbour. Allan Norman, senior coastal operations officer for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, said of the Poole harbour incident “In this case the skipper had been caught out by the weather. He was single-handed and had been sailing for quite a long time, so he was
exhausted.

“He was using a navigation app on his mobile phone but he did have the right equipment on board. He was quite experienced, so our advice to him was to make sure he got enough rest and to call us with his passage plan in future.” 
It is understood the man bought the yacht in Oban, Scotland, last year and then sailed it to Milford Haven to spend the winter there.