The yacht SAILABOUT dismasted and lost.

I received the following message from a friend making a crossing from the Galapagoes to the Marqueseas.

"Had some very unfortunate business in this part of the world yesterday. A Norwegian flagged sailboat called SAILABOUT was damaged and abandoned. Both the people are unhurt. Seems their forestay broke causing a number of problems including at least a partial dismasting. What was amazing is how effective the rescue communications/operations were. In addition to setting off their EPIRB, they were able to broadcast a mayday on a maritime ham frequency that is monitored around the clock by volunteers. Radio communications are a bit like black magic sometimes - someone hundreds of miles away may hear better than others much closer to the action. The rescue involved boats in the Caribbean and shore stations in Miami, Texas and Ca. We were about 1300 miles away but one boat on our net was only 50m away. They spent all day pounding into high winds and seas to get on station. In the meantime, the USCG had sent 2 merchant vessels to the site. The people stayed with their boat all night with the other sailboat close by in case they had to abandon. The freighter showed up about 0400 and transferred the crew aboard. The boat was slowly sinking and was abandoned. The CG had a plane en route to drop pumps, supplies, etc if needed. Its a scary story but the communications were incredible and its nice to know that help is there if you need it. The tradition of the sea is that you do whatever you can to help and there were many folks who did that yesterday. The couple should be in Panama in three days. While all this was going on 2 other cruisers were communicating with the family so they were up on all the progress.

All is well here as we slowly close in on the islands.


Our position is 10*25 South/ 123*41 West
Heading 280*
Only 884 miles to Fatu Hiva"

Does anyone else have any information about this? How can a yacht be so poorly designed that a broken forestay can lead to a dismasting, or a partial dismasting, and a subsequent sinking?

BillyDoc

 

well considering the fact that a lot of boats only have 1 forestay i think the mast falling over is fairly logical as to the second part maybe a spreader punched a hole in the hull when it was in the water but still attached by the other stays
sean

 

Bill mate, most common in sailing yachts to lose the mast this way, or a shroud breaking, next thing the mast goes through the boats side, and , that stuff called water comes in
In one AA race Skoirn 3 or was it 4, an alloy boat , well made, had this happen, mast sunk her, he was rescued, next race he was lost, (he was A submarine captain)

 

Not poorly designed. The loss of a forestay, backstay, or a lower if singled, will likely bring down most modern stayed masts. Once the mast starts to fall, it is crapshoot. Housetops smashed, ports stove in, stanchions driven through the deck, coamings shattered, hulls holed.....I've seen it all. A 150 lb sharpened spear falling from 30 ft aloft does bad things. Even if it falls clear, it can still hole the hull in a running seaway. That's why it is important to carry cutters that will sever the largest wire in the rig...and store them where you can get to them quickly.

 

I can't remember where I saw it, but it seems I read somewhere that an important design goal for the rigging on a sailboat is to design it so that any one wire can break and the other's will still support the pole or poles. Is this so difficult to do? What's the cost of doing so, except maybe a little speed because the stays are slightly heavier, or perhaps there are more of them? Compare this cost to the one paid by SAILABOUT.

I suppose I'm spoiled, but I did most of my sailing on a Contessa made by Mr. Jeremy Rodgers. One of his boats was pounded against granite cliffs for 8 hours in a full gale with only cosmetic damage. I sailed mine in a full gale about 400 miles off the Bay of Biscay with little problem. To me, ANY boat that can be sunk like the SAILABOUT is, by definition and proven fact, very poorly designed! Or, at the very least, not designed for anything but a protected bay.

I bet it was fast, though. Yippee.

BillyDoc

 

BillyDoc,

This was exactly the subject of one of the longer threads ever (might still be going on) under Seaworthiness. The relative safety of fast cruisers with many racing innovations that push the limits of design strength vs robust cruisers heavier, not quite so fast, but able to take a pounding when the sea gods decide to have some fun with the little toy boat with the rag on the pole.

In all fairness to the fast boat guys, though, I thought pretty much all stayed mast were systems, in which the stays are as important as the aluminum pole in maintaining integrity.

 

EVERY boat may sink if holed - even Contessas! That does NOT make them poorly designed!

 

This is of course true, sorenfdk, but that isn't the issue. The issue here is how very little it apparently took to sink SAILABOUT. Was there bad weather? It wasn't mentioned, but maybe their was. What was mentioned was that the forestay broke. And that single incident led through a series of subsequent mishaps to the sinking. JUST that simple event, which should have been simply annoying and really should not have happened at all, led to the complete loss of this boat!

By the way, my Contessa (the little 26) was about 3/4" thick at the turn of the bilges with hand-laid fiberglass cloth. You could work on it all day with a sledge and not break through, and that is, in my opinion, one characteristic of how a boat should be designed because you never know when some crazy dude with a sledge is going to go after your boat. Or a whale. Or a half-submerged steel container you run into at 6 or 7 knots. You could also detach the forestay, and the shrouds (six husky ones) would keep the mast vertical. In other words, the same accident would not have happened with a Contessa, and it also wouldn't have happened with a great number of other properly designed, seaworthy, boats.

Admittedly, most of the boats sold are for use in some protected bay or to show off at the yacht club. Perhaps to race on the weekend. Unfortunately, though, some people who don't know any better take these "Cutsy Pie" excuses for boats to sea! And in this case they darn near got themselves killed doing it. These "boats" should come with a mandatory safety warning: "ATTEMPTING TO USE THIS CRAFT ON WATER WITH A VOLUME GREATER THAN THE CONTENTS OF A SWIMMING POOL WILL PUT YOUR LIFE AND PROPERTY AT GRAVE RISK."

BillyDoc

 

ironbark tree trunk on its way to you via DHL, freight forward

 

I've understood that stays hitting the hull is a "common" accident when dismasting. wouldn't it make sense to have rubber ballls or other blunt ends on stays so they don't do so much damage in case they end up poking the hull?

 

Jeez, that's gotta be expensive. The six new saw chains alone to cut one of those suckers down.....
Now as to the dismasting.
In almost all boats, the mast can support itself without stays. (Hinged deck-stepped masts excepted for the time being.) But in general it'll have a hard time supporting both itself and the sail. In my opinion, it's simply inherent to the nature of a high-performance stayed rig, that failure of a stay poses a very high risk of dismasting. We can reduce that risk by using more and heavier stays, with stronger fittings, but that increases weight aloft and parasitic drag.
Now, how a dismasting leads to the boat being holed and sinking.... my guess is the crew weren't able to cut the rigging free before the fallen mast hit the hullside. A guy with a 20-pound sledge is one thing; a 300-pound mast with a sharp end being slammed into the hullsides by fifty tonnes of ocean wave is a hell of a lot more impact energy to dissipate. The ability to quickly cut away all rigging has got to be essential on a boat with a stayed rig.
Personally, I subscribe to Eric Sponberg's theory on the solution the weaknesses of the stayed rig- if it ain't there, it ain't gonna fail. Perhaps it's just because I've been in the composites shop too much this week, but I'm really starting to like the idea of a freestanding mast.

 

I'm afraid it is never a surprise to see a rig collapse. I have seen many poorly designed rigs and attachments fail over the years.
Nearly always stainless steel components, shackles, sleeves, old wire and poorly designed chain-plates all take their toll on masts. It is seldom that the wire has its breaking strain exceeded unless well frayed, normally it is the accumulated fatigue damage to terminations that leads to failure. That is the rigging is well past its renewal date.

Massively over-designing the mast and rig is not the best option either.

Here's a classic example of a failed chain plate carrying the upper shroud on a medium heavy cruising 36 footer improperly designed and fabricated with no understanding of proper engineering design, and this on a production boat.

 

It reminds me a bit if that poem "For the lack of a nail the shoe was lost...".
I suppose you could design out all single mode of failure events (e.g. by having two forestays) but it would put the price up.

 

All of the strain on a mast is essentially in one direction. Every attachment point to the deck is commonly made using pins or solid connections. It's the way turnbuckles are made fast to chainplates and tangs that is the culprit.
Those fittings are not designed to release when the upward strain is no longer pulling. If the stay ends at the deck were designed to easily disengage when accidentally reoriented (or better still, self-disengage, at most with a little help from a blunt object like a hammer), then it wouldn't become such a life threatening situation.
I would liken this to pulling a heavy trailer with a vehicle on a long downhill stretch with lots of bumps and potholes. If I knew I were the only vehicle on the road, I would go back and undo the safety chains, which only serve to keep me locked up to a trailer that is out of control if the ball connction fails.
It isn't so much an inherent problem with stayed rigs, so much as the fact that few boats are engineered to deal with rare events like dismastings.
The fittings would be simple enough to design. More expensive, but not nearly so expensive as to even cause one to consider a free-standing rig.
Maybe would lower insurance rates and actually save money long term.

A.

 

And this is all precisely why I favor free-standing rig designs. You reduce the chances of a rigging failure from many hundreds of parts to just two parts--the deck fitment and the heel fitment. Well, three if you count the mast itself.

If it is not there, it cannot break.

Eric