Attempts in Alderney to refloat floundering yacht
RESCUE efforts were being made last night to save a 43-year-old yacht after it broke its moorings in Alderney’s Braye Harbour.
The 40ft cutter-rigged Ragtime floundered on rocks beneath Fort Grosnez on Sunday night after the gale-force easterly winds.
At low water yesterday afternoon a team, including Guernsey lifeboat coxswain Buz White, was preparing to try to refloat it.
‘I think they’re going to try refloating it with buoys,’ said the boat’s co-owner Martin Smith.
He now shares the boat with his grandson, Jake Woodnutt, but it was Mr Smith who bought it from Fort Lauderdale in the USA.
‘I had read about this peculiar boat,’ he said, and bought it with a view to a round-the-world trip, which he did in 1999, completing it in 2006.
Mr Smith thought that the boat would have weathered its misfortune relatively well, since it was built at a time when fibreglass hulls were much tougher than they are today.
But he was surprised at what had happened.
‘Two people went out to check the moorings and everything else [on Sunday],’ he said.
‘Why it went I will never know because we’re so careful and I’ve worked in the harbour for many years.’
He expected that it would be rebuilt, although thought it likely that the insurers would consider it a write-off.
