Another keel lost, a Class40

Roberto

Roberto

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A Class40 has just lost the keel and capsized, mid Atlantic not far from the Equator, off the Brazilian coast. The Italian skipper went into the liferaft on the side of his boat, he has now just been rescued by a passing ship, the boat is still afloat and the shore team is working on solutions to recover it.

Matteo Miceli was attempting a round the world, non-stop, solo passage Rome-Rome, he was on the final return leg, after having passed the three capes.

Eco40 had a strong accent on energetic self-sufficiency: he had two chicken onboard, one died a few weeks ago, the second one was onboard today, he tried to rescue it but the animal had already drowned.

They have no idea why the keel was lost, weather was good, the sailor mentioned earlier some problems in steering the boat (possibly because the keel was already moving?), then it suddenly capsized.

More info here, sorry all in Italian
http://www.saily.it/it/news/non-ci-voleva-miceli-ribaltato
 
Yet another keel lost. I feel too many boats have been engineered to the perceived keel loads, but the loads are far greater than expected. This is an area of yacht design needs attention to increase the strength of the reinforcement.
 
Concerto said:
Yet another keel lost. I feel too many boats have been engineered to the perceived keel loads, but the loads are far greater than expected. This is an area of yacht design needs attention to increase the strength of the reinforcement.
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Keel fixity and rudder adequacy - both recurrent recorded failures over many years with many boats. In all cases extreme designs:- ie High aspect ratios, spade rudders.
 
charles_reed said:
Keel fixity and rudder adequacy - both recurrent recorded failures over many years with many boats. In all cases extreme designs:- ie High aspect ratios, spade rudders.
Click to expand...

Is your statement really true Charles? I agree that when they fail the results do tend to be catastrophic, but how many failures have there been and what percentage of boats in active sailing have been affected? I thought that a recent thread started with a similar sweeping statement and in the end came up with only a miniscule number of cases in evidence.
Peter
 
These are very extreme boats, almost completely unrelated to AWBs.
Yet there are quite a lot of extreme canting keel racing yachts out there, all designed to be very light and raced hard across oceans.
Not that many fail, compared to any other highly engineered sporting machine, say engine failures in motor racing?
It's not a tragedy like a certain Beneteau, it's just a broken racing machine.
(assuming I'm reading it right, he's on a cargo boat?)
Pleased the bloke's OK, can't get too excited about the loss of a chicken TBH.
Maybe it is significant that canting keel machines are sailed differently and equipped differently, rather than being essentially a coastal circuit cruiser/racer not designed with survival in mind.
 
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