On 6th December 2016, skipper Kito de Pavant violently collided with a UFO while in the Indian Ocean. The Mediterranean skipper then detected a major leak aboard his IMOCA Bastide Otio. "I touched something in the water. The keel well's blown! "says the skipper in the video.
On 7th December, Kito de Pavant was forced to abandon his boat, rescued by the Marion Dufresne II, then on a mission in the French Southern lands. He then followed his boat thanks to its beacons and set up a rescue operation to recover it. Unfortunately, the beacons stopped transmitting on 13 December 2016.
At the end of February, the videos are found on Bastide Otio's hard disk. First, we see the scene filmed from the inside of the sailboat. We then hear a thud and we see the boat shaking under the shock, then the skipper going out on deck. The same scene is then filmed from the cockpit, where you can see the violence of the shock even more clearly.
In spite of the developments on board the boats, the tools still do not allow us to predict collisions with marine animals.
Even if the skipper has not been able to identify the UFO, the videos on board clearly show that it is a sperm whale. It is thanks to the MediaMan-Assistant software that the team was able to recover these exceptional images. Indeed, this software records continuously 24/7 all the cameras on board and stores them on a PC. As a result, when an action occurs (manoeuvre, glitch, breakage...) the skipper can devote himself entirely to his problem, without thinking of filming the scene.
