Thanks, Doug.
70 mph squalls are a lot of wind.
My guess is that it got pinned on its side then hit with a breaker, which pushed her beyond the point of vanishing stability. That could happen to any boat. It happened to mine.
I had a Siren 17 at the time and was returning from a summer sail on a small lake. A thunderstorm was moving in and I had my severely handicapped brother on board. I desperately wanted to beat the storm in.
I had the boat less than 50 yards from safety, when we were hit with a sudden squall. Foolishly, I tried to maintain my course. The boat started to heel severely. I let out the main sheet, but it was too late. I told my brother to jump and, after he did, I did too.
The boat continued its capsize until it was completely turtled. My brother and I swam to shore, which was about a dozen yards away.
Thanks to my brother in law, who had a runabout, he and I were able to right the boat, bail it out, and have it tied to the dock by dinner time.
Still, the incident troubled me. I had been out in a far worse blow on Lake Si. Clair (winds gusting to perhaps 55 mph). While trying to reef the mainsail, the halyard untied a flew straight out from the mast, like a pennant.
With her side to the wind, the boat heeled sharply, perhaps more than 50 degrees, but heeled no more. She rode the seven to nine foot swells like an elevator.
Why she stayed up right in those conditions, but capsized on the smaller lake in much less wind has troubled me for some time.
I see two possibilities:
1.) We were hit with a wind shear, where the wind blows straight down, a possible but highly unlikely event, or
2.) There was considerably more weight on deck during the small lake incident than there was in the Lake St. Clair one. At the time of the Lake St. Clair incident, I weighed around 150 lbs. and I was by myself. In the small lake incident, I weighed 180 lbs and I had my 170 lb brother on board.
We were sitting in the cockpit, but the cockpit was of the self draining type.
In order to keep its sole high enough to drain, the seats had to be high. Once the boat tips beyond a certain point, the weight to windward, which was helping to hold the boat upright, starts to contribute to a capsize.
My lighter 150 lb self was probably successfully counter weighted by the 145 lb center board. With more than double the weight up on the windward cockpit seat, the poor thing was probably overwhelmed.
My guess is this is what happened to WINGNUTS. From the excellent photos of her capsized, I can see her keel bulb looks emaciated. At least in comparison to what it is supposed to look like in the presentation drawing. There, it looks like a fat blimp. In the photo, it looks almost like a thick end plate. Maybe ballast was added at one point. But I will not be surprised if it was later subtracted, and then some.
With less weight in the keel and more weight on deck, the boat likely developed vastly different behavior than in her original state, when hard pressed. Perhaps this is the reason for the behavior discrepancy between how she behaved that night and how Stumble said a boat of the same design had behaved in similar conditions.
