Opinion: I was captain of a ship much like HMNZS Manawanui. Mine almost sank too

Commander Tom Sharpe OBE is a former Royal Navy officer. He captained four different British warships, including HMS Endurance, the navy’s ice patrol ship.
OPINION
Over the weekend, the Royal New Zealand Navy’s hydrographic, diving and salvage ship, HMNZS Manawanui, ran aground off the southern coast of Samoa.
All 75 of the ship’s company abandoned ship safely and only minor injuries are reported. She then listed heavily, caught fire and, some 11 hours later, sank.
As the commanding officer of the last Royal Navy ship to nearly sink – that was HMS Endurance, a ship with many similarities to Manawanui, in 2008 – I have views.
I’m giving them here partly to inform, but partly also to correct some of the narratives and commentary that have emerged following the incident, many of which appear to have their basis in misogyny rather than hard-earned sea time.
There are only a few ways a ship can run aground.
First, you don’t know where you are on the chart through human or system-induced navigational error (eg HMS Nottingham, Lord Howe Island, 2002).
Second, you do know but the chart is wrong (HMS Brocklesby, Burntisland noise range, 1997).
Third, you know where you are and the chart information is correct but conditions (wind, tide etc) overwhelm your ability to hold position (ferry Pride of Portsmouth collision with HMS St Albans, Portsmouth Dockyard, 2002).
Fourth, you suffer an engineering defect and the subsequent loss of control sees you run aground (MV Ever Given, Suez Canal, 2021; MV Dali, Baltimore Bridge, 2024).
For completeness, we should include showboating (Costa Concordia, Giglio, 2012) and deliberately grounding to save the ship from sinking (MSC Napoli, English Channel, 2007).
All initial indications in the case of Manawanui point to a loss of propulsion/control as the primary cause. This has been half confirmed by New Zealand Defence Minister Judith Collins, who said: “We need to find out what happened, apparently it lost power, I’m aware of that, and ended up aground on the reef”.
The photos of Manawanui before she sank show she had Restricted in Ability to Manoeuvre (RAM) shapes hoisted – a signal to other ships.
The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea says a RAM vessel is one which, “due to the nature of her work, is restricted in her ability to deviate from her course. These vessels include but are not limited to: vessels engaged in dredging, surveying, or underwater operations”.
In other words, when the machinery failure happened, Manawanui was probably operating in navigationally tight waters, likely surveying an area whose charting information was dated and therefore inaccurate.
Incidentally, surveying uncharted or poorly charted waters in South Georgia and Antarctica in HMS Endurance involved some of the most difficult ship manoeuvring I did in 20 years at sea.
Technically, once power was lost, Manawanui would have ceased to be RAM and would instead become Not Under Command (NUC), requiring a different signal hoist, before becoming Aground, requiring yet a third signal.
However, the crew probably had other priorities than flying the technically correct day shapes.
The lead-up to the grounding would have been tense. Assuming there was a loss of power, the bridge team would have known very quickly how long they had before they would run aground (assuming the chart data wasn’t way out).
“What’s failed”, “can we recover it” and “what are our reversionary options” would have been the conversations flying between the bridge and the engineering team.
I can’t tell from the photos if an anchor was dropped – this would be a natural reaction to try and prevent a ship which had lost power from going aground but it doesn’t work in every situation. In Endurance the anchors saved us in the end, but we drifted a long way before they took hold.
The grounding of Manawanui would have been horrific, with a lot of noise, the lurching and grinding of the ship on the reef and alarms sounding on the bridge.
Those from my ship’s company in 2008 who ran into the engine room of HMS Endurance to try and control the water flooding into it will never forget those moments.
It would have been the same here.
The damage control officer takes reports from the damage control parties so they can track the amount of water coming in and whether or not it can be stopped or contained. The ship’s marine engineering officer works alongside this, looking for ways to manage the water ingress while calculating the changing stability condition of the ship.
Vessels like Manawanui and Endurance, both originally designed for commercial service, are intrinsically less survivable than combatant warships: they’re not built specifically to take damage and keep on functioning.
The ship’s captain – Commander Yvonne Gray in Manawanui, a former Royal Navy officer – has to process all this information and make the big calls.
At some point, she would have looked the engineer in the eye and said, “are we going to make this?” The answer would have been the worst thing you can hear at sea, and she probably already knew it.
Then she made the call to abandon ship. This is brave no matter how you got there.
Every second of your training for the past 20 or so years has been about keeping the ship going, ultimately in the face of an enemy.
Repair the damage, recover the systems and keep fighting, or at least get away to fight another day.
In Endurance back in 2008, at different stages of the crisis, abandoning ship was definitely on the cards. I found the idea of abandoning ship so uncomfortable, the team I sent to plan how we would do it were forbidden from saying the words – this was part superstition and part not wanting the phrase to be overheard, which could have led to trouble.
Commander Gray would not have had the luxury of time for any of this.
The act of abandoning is perilous itself. Most evacuation systems only work up to a certain sea state.
Then do it in the dark, in terrible weather and into rubber lifeboats with no engines, surrounded by the very reefs that you’ve just struck and the Manawanui’s company did well to not have any major injuries or fatalities.
When the captain disembarks during all this is the subject of much conjecture and folklore.
Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, for example, refused to abandon ship in 1893 as HMS Victoria sank beneath him following a collision caused by his orders.
Choosing to die while repeatedly saying, “it was all my fault” is a good example of the noble stubbornness that was common at the time. It’s ironic that these traits were largely responsible for the collision happening in the first place.
Other captains have chosen to go down with their ship, but not that many. It’s generally thought, however, that if it’s practical the captain should be the last person off.
The captain certainly shouldn’t be first or early off.
No one will forgive the captain of the Costa Concordia for deliberately imperilling his ship and then abandoning it with hundreds of passengers still onboard. Saying it’s because you “fell into a lifeboat” and decided to “co-ordinate from there” and ignoring the Coast Guard telling you to get back onboard and sort your life out is not a good look.
In my case, if we had abandoned the Endurance, I would have stayed back with a small deck crew because a cruise liner was going to reach us around the time we were due to hit the rocks and I wanted last-ditch options to take a line and be hauled off.
Keeping five people back to at least try this was, in my judgment, worth the personal risk. I wasn’t doing an Admiral Tryon; just managing the situation.
Staying on board to die is daft and of another era.
In the case of the Manawanui, it seems that Commander Gray made an early and brave call based on the inevitability of the situation, and then managed the evacuation well.
Now there will be a series of investigations during which culpability, responsibility and credit will be determined.
They will establish how the ship lost control at this critical and dangerous point but tight navigational conditions, poor chart information and bad weather will almost certainly feature.
It will be decided, given those last three, whether or not this task should have been conducted just then at all.
Some of my best decisions at sea involved tearing up the programme (which there can be significant pressure to achieve), waiting for the weather to improve, or daylight, and then restarting.
Suddenly everything is easier and recovering the rest of your programme is never as hard as you thought it would be.
But these are only the precipitating causes. Accidents of this magnitude are rarely black swan events; there is normally a tail of deeper causes.
For example, navies don’t operate commercially designed ships well.
We overcrew them and then overcomplicate the maintenance.
We often run them too hard, as if they were built with the resilience of combatant warships. We tend to conduct endless machinery drills, needlessly overstressing the kit, ‘because that’s what we do’.
Even combatant warships can be seriously damaged by overenthusiastic drills, for instance ones which involve suddenly cutting off electrical power.
Ships are designed to run a certain way and if you exceed or alter that, over time problems mount up. This is what happened to HMS Endurance and I’d be surprised if there weren’t similar factors in play with the Manawanui.
The prevailing leadership and culture onboard will also be examined.
Actions post-incident will be dissected and lessons passed on to the rest of the fleet. For Manawanui’s captain, I have no idea how this will play out.
Certainly in the Royal Navy, the line between an OBE and disgrace is a fine one.
For the ship’s company, there will likewise be decorations for those who excelled during the incident – there are always a few – and possibly punishment for others.
When a ship goes aground, the captain bears ultimate responsibility but the ship’s navigating officer and the officer of the watch at the time also have questions to answer.
Investigations will extend beyond the ship. How hard was she and the rest of the navy being worked in the run-up to this grounding?
Both the US Navy and the Royal Navy are seeing an increase in incidents caused by trying to do the same tasks with fewer ships and people. Fatigue is everywhere – both human and material.
Is the New Zealand navy, now reduced to five operational ships, suffering from the same? Is it big enough in the first place?
It was suggested only recently that the answer is ‘no’. In which case, what is the right number of ships for New Zealand and how do they now compensate for the loss of one? All of these will need to be addressed as well what to do with the sunken ship to minimise environmental damage and maybe even salvage her.
Hopefully this gives an idea of what might have happened last weekend while highlighting the complexity and risk navies take every day in the interests of defending their respective countries.
Those who have leapt to question the competence of the captain, often it seems based on her gender or sexuality, should take a breather.
Personally, I will be raising a glass to 75 sailors who for a few hours, miles from help, would have wondered if they had seen their last sunset – but hadn’t.