Beneteau First lost her keel, four good men lost at sea.

snooks said:
That's pure speculation. :(

You have absolutely no way of knowing this is the case. Likewise I have no way of know this isn't the case, so I keep my opinion to myself.

Unless you were there, you have no way of knowing what probably would or probably would not have saved their lives.
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It will be known how much water was in the boat when they reported in to the shore team. It's just not public knowledge. I would hate to think there was too much to see where it was coming from. I'm sure it will also be known how long it was between reporting the leak and the first PLB going off.
 
bedouin said:
Nonsense - we learned better than that in 79. You stay with the boat until it leaves you. It is madness to think that a liferaft is safer than a yacht however badly damaged. (Unless of course the keel is about to fall off).
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Err, so not so much nonsense, after all then, as the keel was at fault (according to recordings /info given out), mmm.
 
Sailfree said:
Awful lot of armchair sailors on here that know the perfect answer -- with hindsight!

All publicity is to stay with boat until you step up to the liferaft except in a fire. You can now add the if you are about to loose your keel which from my reading/info over the last 16yrs is a very rare event .....!
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It's pretty rare, but not exactly unknown.

I'm pondering whether they'd have survived inside the inverted hull, Bullimore style?
I know he was able to get out of the water.
But divers in drysuits have survived in the Irish Sea AFAIK for many hours.

In my view, if a GRP yacht is leaking, and its not deck fittings, thru hulls or an obvious collision, it's a structural problem, and the hull/keel join is the major suspect.
So as soon as you can't identify the leak as one of the other things, it's time to think the keel may be leaving.
So I'd either be leaving pronto, or having a plan that involved the horizon rotating 180 degrees.
As a yoof I spent a little time under an inverted dinghy, it's no big deal if your head is above water, in the short term.

I think in the end we just have to accept that many thousands of yachts which are no more seaworthy have crossed the Atlantic without major issue.
But an element of risk remains.
I would hazard a guess that more people have died cycling or motorcycling or whatever this month?
It's safe enough that you can't say it's an unreasonable thing to do, but not safe enough that tragedies won't happen.
 
Sailfree said:
Interesting post. Can someone explain whether dealers such as Opel acted as owners selling boat, agent or distributors for the dealer and what is the buyers legal rights as it appears to me that the manufacturers seem to be able to absolve themselves of any legal responsibility and most UK dealers/agents etc are men of straw.
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You think it's bad in the sailing world? I was a member of a gliding club which bought a new two-seater glider from the UK agents of a German manufacturer. While the agents were bringing the glider to the UK, they rolled it, in its trailer, on the motorway. The first the gliding club knew was when they got a demand for £30k to repair the damage.

In the end, by the way, the agent did the repairs for nothing and handed the club a large sum of money for loss of value. Lawyers have their uses.
 
snooks said:
That's pure speculation. :(

You have absolutely no way of knowing this is the case. Likewise I have no way of know this isn't the case, so I keep my opinion to myself.

Unless you were there, you have no way of knowing what probably would or probably would not have saved their lives.
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Snooks, that's far too sensible for this thread and possibly prevents all the "experts" pontificating on their theories, or rather, what they know for a fact to be true.
 
maby said:
In this case, the thing that would probably have made the most difference to their chances of survival would have cost very little - carry a spare four man valise liferaft. They would then have been able to deploy it as soon as they detected a problem and cut it loose if they succeeded in fixing the leak. As it was, with just one liferaft, they would have been unwilling to risk wasting it and would have kept it stowed thinking that the problem was controllable.
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A small point but maybe worth thinking about, it might be a bad idea to cut a liferaft loose leaving it to drift, as another vessel seeing it would be obliged to investigate and may take some risks to do so. Take it aboard and deflate it or tie it to the transom. We turned back upwind mid atlantic as we spotted what we thought was a liferaft, it took hours to get to it and it turned out to be a huge orange/red fender.
 
Rigger Mortice said:
Don't you believe it. A modern car is chockablock full of high performance steels.
A while ago I wanted to drill some holes on the back of seat squabs in my car. I was astonished to discover that even that was difficult......I struggled to drill the steel at all. (Yes the drill was fine!). One of the ways they reduce weight is to use thinner steel; that needs higher grades to be specified.
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Scares me how much people are all too ready to believe all this "Modern High Tech" Claptrap, today. It's the shoddy steel in your Chinese drill that is at fault!
 
haydude said:
If it where a container there would be scratches on the bow. It is clear to me that the keel to hull joint failed causing the loss of the keel. This is poor manufacturing or poor design. Not fit for purpose. You can see the hull fiber was peeled off like an onion skin.
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Perhaps on charter yachts, technology could be fitted to provide information that can be fed back to the companies to tell them what was going on with the boats hull.

Gone would be the days of yachts smashing into a rocks, only for the next charter guests to notice water coming in through the keel. Sunsail 2010 a 36ft yacht went out with a dry keel and came back with enough water in it to suggest the yacht hit something very hard.
 
Sailfree said:
Interesting post. Can someone explain whether dealers such as Opel acted as owners selling boat, agent or distributors for the dealer and what is the buyers legal rights as it appears to me that the manufacturers seem to be able to absolve themselves of any legal responsibility and most UK dealers/agents etc are men of straw.
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You are rolling different kinds of relationships into one. Consumer law is very clear that responsibility for a product lies with the person or business that supplied it and with whom the customer has a contract. It has to be so in a world where manufacturers are often remote from consumers or the product comes from a variety of manufacturers but sold by one supplier. The structure of boat distribution in this case is no different from any other consumer durable such as a car or TV set where the interface with the retail customer is a dealer who operates on his own account. (however, for completeness a small number of builders sell direct, sometimes through an agent who is not a dealer).

In the normal course of events the builder supports the dealer by paying for warranty claims - again in the same way as a car dealer. The difficulty with high value low volume specialised products such as boats and gliders is that few dealers have the financial muscle to deal with major claims without involving the builder. Add to that the ever present problem of business failure and it is not difficult to see how warranty support can give problems.

In the case of the Bavaria mentioned earlier, at 4 years it would be outside the warranty period, but there could still be a potential claim for fitness for purpose if you could show that the defect was there from when the boat was built. You could pursue that direct with Bavaria, and they might settle on a goodwill basis, but if they contest the claim you are into the expense of expert witnesses, lawyers etc, the cost of which (never mind the delays) might make the £6k to carry out remedial work (on a £100k+ boat) by far the better option!

It is simply not true that manufacturers necessarily absolve themselves of responsibility for their products as the remedial programme on the Match class of yachts shows. Equally there will always be cases where the buyer feels he has not received the service he was expecting, but again that is not unique to yachts.
 
Neil_Y said:
A small point but maybe worth thinking about, it might be a bad idea to cut a liferaft loose leaving it to drift, as another vessel seeing it would be obliged to investigate and may take some risks to do so. Take it aboard and deflate it or tie it to the transom. We turned back upwind mid atlantic as we spotted what we thought was a liferaft, it took hours to get to it and it turned out to be a huge orange/red fender.
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Do many people care what "minor inconvenience" they might be causing others when they are in a dire situation themselves, at the time?
 
longjohnsilver said:
Snooks, that's far too sensible for this thread and possibly prevents all the "experts" pontificating on their theories, or rather, what they know for a fact to be true.
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It is natural to learn through "speculation", which is nothing but projections of the possible thruths.
The greatest philosophers of the past like Plato for example, set the foundation of modern science through pure speculation over the limited observations they could make of the world they were leaving in. Yet conscious of their limits they did and finally brought humanity out of their caves.
 
I still feel that the boat had been taking on water for some time given the colour of the damage shown in the released photos. The discoloration in this area I have seen once before on a C&C that was found to have suffered damage and erroneous repair years earlier. In my years of operating a boatyard it was the only time I've seen the laminate look as though it was covered in growth where it should have been sandwiched inside the outer layers. This combined with the furthest aft keel bolt rust tells me this MIGHT be the case.
 
KellysEye said:
>

I've never known a long distance boat carry two life rafts it just adds more weight..
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Personally if I was likely to have up to 12 crew on board I feel I might prefer to have 2No. 6 man rafts rather than a single 12 man
I always thought that in the Fastnet disaster it was reported that some boats did have 2 LR's

In the event of a smaller crew I am told that a smaller LR is safer than one large one
I assume A smaller raft would be easier to handle & easier to get at least one in place ready to use
 
Steve C Cronin said:
Do many people care what "minor inconvenience" they might be causing others when they are in a dire situation themselves, at the time?
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If you are considering cutting a liferaft free to drift off on its own you aren't in a dire situation, you're just thinking about inconvenience and boat speed. Spotting a liferaft say from an aircraft could initiate a search and take resources from one with people in it. I think people should care.
 
haydude said:
The greatest philosophers of the past like Plato for example, set the foundation of modern science through pure speculation over the limited observations they could make of the world they were leaving in.
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Much of their "science" was terrible, precisely because they refused to examine the real world, which they thought of as a messy place, not to be dealt with by those of higher, purer minds. It was only when scientists actively started looking at reality in a systematic way that things started moving forwards. Thank you, Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo ...
 
Neil_Y said:
If you are considering cutting a liferaft free to drift off on its own you aren't in a dire situation, you're just thinking about inconvenience and boat speed. Spotting a liferaft say from an aircraft could initiate a search and take resources from one with people in it. I think people should care.
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It would have been possible to sink it, you know! Anyway, nobody is talking about doing it lightly - even a cheap in-shore liferaft represents £600 - but it would be worth the lives of the crew to risk an unnecessary subsequent search.
 
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