Belinda Moore

🚨🇬🇧 No one is saying Danny Tommo intended to hurt anyone in his Channel escapade. At sea, that isn't the test. The test is what a competent seaman would do. He failed it four times in one afternoon. You don't crowd a rescue. Unless the coastguard asks for you, you stand off. Rescue is the most dangerous moment for an overloaded dinghy. People panic, surge to one side, and boats break up. Tommo drove a speedboat into a live rescue and picked out the dinghy with the most people on it. You don't take a knife to an inflatable with someone on it. When a tube goes soft, the boat loses its shape and its buoyancy fast. The rescuer was standing between two hulls. Go in the water there and you face a crush risk as well as the cold. That's basic seamanship. You don't leave wreckage behind. A half-sunk dinghy full of lifejackets can look like casualties to a helicopter or a passing ship. False alarms and mistaken identity cost lives in the Channel. In 2021, rescuers found the wrong boat, the search for the sinking one appears to have stopped, and at least 27 people died. These waters have already shown what happens when small boats go unseen. In 2006, three men died off the Isle of Wight when a ferry ran down their yacht. It never showed up on the ship's radar. The bridge didn't see it until it was too late. Small boats are close to invisible to big ships. Everyone who goes out there in one owes it to themselves, and to the rescuers who'd have to come for them, to act like it. And the oldest rule at sea: you help people in distress. Whoever they are, however they got there. Tommo's words on the livestream were "we're going to take the one with the most on." He wasn't going out to help. He was going out to find out where they'd land. Then he told the rescuer, "Get off the boat, you've got time." While cutting it. You don't tell a man he's got time unless you know he's in danger. He knew. He cut it anyway. Not malicious. Just dangerously ignorant, and reckless with other people's lives. On the water, that's worse.