Inviting another round of public criticism, BP CEO Tony Hayward took time off to watch his yacht compete in a prestigious race around England's Isle of Wight on Saturday.
Taking a break from overseeing his company's efforts to stop the gush of oil from a broken pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, Hayward watched his yacht "Bob" compete at the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race. Hayward's 52-foot American-built yacht finished fourth in its class.
The annual Round the Island Race is among the world's largest, pitting famous yachtsmen and wealthy amateurs in a 50-nautical mile competition.
In an interview from the Isle of Wight, an activist with Friends of the Earth said he does not begrudge Hayward some time off.
"It does seem extraordinarily insensitive, but perhaps he's just burnt out," Hugh Walding told CTV News Channel. After all, Walding said, Hayward is not going to solve the problem himself.
"It's going to be engineers, isn't it?"
The response from Washington was not nearly as conciliatory. Responding to reports of Hayward's day at the races, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told ABC this was another in a "long line of PR gaffes and mistakes."
"Well, to quote Tony Hayward, he's got his life back, as he would say," Emanuel added, echoing the tone of reaction spreading through social networking sites Twitter and Facebook on Saturday.
BP has faced growing criticism since April 20, when the rig Deep Horizon exploded, killing 11 workers and starting what has become the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
The company has taken a public relations beating for its subsequent response and, as the public face of BP's efforts to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf, Hayward has emerged as a lightning rod for the criticism.
First, he sparked an angry response in the United States when he was quoted in the Times of London suggesting Americans were likely to file bogus claims for compensation.
He later angered residents of the Gulf Coast when he said no one wanted to resolve the crisis as badly as he did because, "I'd like my life back."
Hayward's image suffered further last week, as U.S. lawmakers grilled the CEO to reveal the cause of the disaster.
Hayward told a U.S. House investigations panel he was, "distraught," "deeply sorry," and "so devastated with this accident." But as relentless questioning probed the CEO for details of the day-to-day policies or decisions that led to the explosion, Hayward insisted he was out of the loop.
"I'm not stonewalling. I simply was not involved in the decision-making process," Hayward said.
The next day, it was widely reported BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg was pulling Hayward from the spotlight. The remarks were quickly qualified when Svanberg made it clear a long process of transition to BP Managing Director Bob Dudley had begun.
"Hayward is very much in charge until we've stopped the leak," Williams told the Associated Press on Saturday.
In the weeks since the spill began, oil has washed ashore from Louisiana to Florida, devastating wildlife, destroying delicate marine habitats and littering once-pristine beaches with tar balls.
By late June, BP hopes to keep nearly 90 per cent of the oil spewing from the broken pipe out of the open water. A pair of relief wells that might actually stop the spill aren't expected to be ready until August.
BP, a lynchpin in the pension portfolios of millions of Britons, announced last week that it is cancelling its quarterly dividend. The company has lost 45 per cent of its share value since the oil rig explosion.
