TSB Canada Concordia capsize findings released

http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/medias-media/majeures-major/marine/m10f0003/MI-M10F0003.asp

 

Thanks for the link.

The book Tall ships down was a very good expose of this type of loss and well worth reading . Masters and crew 'feeling' intuitively that the ship is stable safe and invulnerable.

Tall Ships Down: Daniel Parrott "For all its romance, the tall-ship renaissance has a tragic side. Working from official documents, survivor and expert interviews, and his own tall-ship experience,
Parrott re-creates the losses of five sail-training vessels: the 316-foot Pamir (1957), 117-foot Albatross (1961), 117-foot Marques (1984), 137-foot Pride of Baltimore (1986), and 125-foot Maria Asumpta (1995).
He vividly re-creates each final voyage and then explores the roles played by ship stability, structural integrity, weather, human error, and standards of risk in tragedies at sea."

 

Fascinating stuff, those TSB reports. Especially in instances like the S.V. Concordia, where no one was killed or mutilated. Thanks for putting the link!

 

Which reminds me.. I really need to take that FishSafe vessel stability course the next time it comes around.

Maybe they need to expand their audience to include tall ship crews?

 

In the age of sail an average of 500 vessels a year wrecked on UK coast.

 

I think in general TC does a very good job of these reports and this one seems (on my quick first read through) to be typically thorough and complete.

I think a lot of "tall ship" crew will be rather surprised at some of the findings. That the ship was rolled down and sank in as little as 30-50knots of wind should startle some folks. That her stability curve and the wind heeling curve coincided at slightly under 40 degrees heel. That she probably would have been fine had every opening been dogged shut. That the officer of the deck did not understand the danger (from a sudden gust) when she was at a steady heel angle of 23 degrees.

And aside from the ship's performance we read about the difficulties of launching the liferafts, even though there were twice the required raft capacity. A good thing as half the rafts went under water in the first minutes. There's also some good comments about lifejacket stowage (not in cabins but on deck), radio access, and the whole search and rescue/EPIRB fiasco.....(apparently about 95% of EPIRB signals are false)......

Fishing vessel stability and sailing vessel stability are very different subjects though some of the fundamentals are the same. A short course in one or the other would be vastly different in focus.