Dee Cafari’s Turn the Tide on Plastic, competing in Leg 6 of the Volvo Ocean Race, last week came across the yacht Sea Nymph – famously abandoned four months ago by Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba with their two dogs in a well publicised story, of misadventure at sea.

The  two sailors from Hawaii and dogs were rescued by the US Navy from the cruising sail boat, 1000 miles off the coast of Japan after drifting at sea for nearly five months in their damaged boat, and abandoning their vessel in the process.

Photo: US Navy

On February 13 Turn the Tide on Plastic, racing from Hong Kong to Auckland, had a close encounter about 360 miles east of Guam with the abandoned vessel, which remains afloat and adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

You can see a vlog of the incident from Turn the Tide here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9OgNgiE2MA

From Marine Industry News:

Skipper Dee Caffari sent the following blog post on the incident:
What should you do when you see a yacht floating with no of signs of life? Well that question was asked onboard Turn the Tide on Plastic yesterday.

We were sailing within sight of Brunel and to weather we saw another yacht close to our track. We looked through the binoculars as there was no sign on the AIS software and we contacted race control. We called on the VHF with no response and race control confirmed there was no active SAR in the area. We sent up the drone with James, our on board reporter, for a closer inspection and to get some identification for the vessel.

We collected some images and sent them back to race control and they confirmed the vessel was the abandoned vessel, Sea Nymph.

Many may remember a big news story in the US, last autumn, regarding the rescue of two women and a dog from the vessel on their way to Hawaii. Well this was that vessel all these months later.

She was sitting pretty low in the bow and her mainsail was washed over the side but the rest of her looked like she would make a nice cruiser.

We discussed salvage rights for a while and estimated that the race director would not give us redress if we towed her to Auckland while racing. So there she sits a hazard to shipping, a risk to islands, reefs and atolls and slowly not going anywhere.

We are grateful we saw her during the day as this could have been a very different story had we come across her at night. She was floating stern to us with no lights or signal being given out, there is no way we would have seen her.

I just hope now we have given authorities her position there is a chance for salvage or for scuttling her to prevent a far worse disaster in our oceans. We are asking you not to litter the oceans with plastic and here we have a whole yacht floating aimlessly in our oceans!

Jennifer Appel and her crew Tasha Fuiava