Rodriguez was prepared for anything — but he didn’t expect his ship to sink after a whale strike. Photo: Instagram//Rodriguez
When Rick Rodriquez and three of his friends decided to spend a week sailing on the Pacific, they certainly didn’t expect to wind up sinking. Sure, the prospect might have entered their minds, but the way they sank? No way they considered it. Rodriguez and his friends were found bobbing in the middle of the Pacific after a whale collided with them.
“It just happened in an instant. It was just a very violent impact with some crazy-sounding noises and the whole boat shook,” Rodriguez told NBC’s TODAY show on Wednesday. “It sounded like something broke and we immediately looked to the side and we saw a really big whale bleeding.”
The impact, which was strong enough to ruin the boat’s prop and the fiberglass hull at the stern, was a death knell for the boat, called the Raindancer.
According to Rodriguez, the sailors were on their way to French Polynesia when the whale hit the boat. The journey was 3,100 nautical mile, 20-22 day passage, and they were eating pizza for lunch when it happened. Almost immediately, they were aware that the Raindancer was catastrophically damaged.
“There was just an incredible amount of water coming in, very fast,” Rodriguez remembered. “The water was up to the floorboards within about 30 seconds. Maybe less. I made attempts to save the boat but I was, unfortunately, unsuccessful.”
The group acted fast. They called in a mayday and sent texts explaining where they were and what happened. As they did so, they deployed the vessel’s life raft and a dingy, then climbed in.
“Even when the boat was going down,” said Alana Litz, a member of the crew, “I felt like it was just a scene out of a movie. Like everything was floating.”
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According to NBC, Rodriguez sent a text to his brother in Miami and a friend named Tommy Joyce who was sailing nearby.
“Tommy this is no joke,” Rodriguez wrote. “We hit a whale and the ship went down. We are in the life raft. We need help *ASAP.”
It didn’t take long for the ocean to take the Raindancer to the bottom. About 15 minutes after the collision with the whale, the boat had slipped beneath the surface. The crew, however, despite doing everything right, was still stranded in the open ocean for nine hours.
According to reports, Tommy Joyce shared news of the incident on a Facebook group. That news was seen by another sailboat called Rolling Stones. Geoff Stone, the captain, was about 60 miles away. Being the closest vessel, he knew he had to assist. By the time he reached them, night had fallen.
“After nine hours in our life raft we were rescued by some good hearted Americans on a Leapoard 45 catamaran called Rolling Stones,” Rodriguez said. “We were all smiles for making it out of that situation alive and rescued. The number one goal was met.”
Whale strikes aren’t all that uncommon on the high seas, but the fate of those whales often goes un-investigated. It’s hard to follow up with a whale that’s been hit by a boat to find out how it’s healing up, after all, but The Washington Post reported that “there have been about 1,200 reports of whales and boats colliding since a worldwide database launched in 2007.”
Although Rodriguez and the others aboard lost many of their valuable possessions, they’re all just happy to be alive. To Rodriguez, The Raindancer was more than just a sailboat. The reality of the situation hit him when the sun rose the next day and he was on a different vessel.
“The next morning I woke up on board Rolling Stones, with still another 1,200 nautical miles to go to French Polynesia,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I laid and stared at the ceiling panels. Reality began to set in and I began to mourn the loss of my boat. Raindancer had all my belongings on it, it was what I was doing, it was my ticket to exploring the world, I had put months and months of sweat equity into her.”
