Questions to be asked again

LymingtonPugwash

LymingtonPugwash

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With the capsize of Hooligan V today and the subsequent associated tragic death of a young crew member, I suppose the questions about the sea going suitability of modern light displacement yachts are going to be debated once again... quite rightly I might say.

IF, the Hooligan V mentioned in the news today is really the Hooligan V which is a Max Fun 35, then I suppose the questions are very relevant. If so, then the Max Fun 35 is based on a sports boat design with half the weight of the yacht in its torpedo keel and would normally require a crew of 8 offshore to race. Apparently, the keel fell off! Do we need to act surprised?

Having survived the Fastnet race of 1979 and gone through the subsequent years of questions about the suitability of certain yachts racing offshore, one would have thought that yacht designs would tighten up?

What a tragedy!
 
Pugwash of Lymington,

your post has 2 if s in it, thats 2 to many, wait until we know what went wrong then you can pontificate adnausa.

Till then dont rock the boat! /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif
 
As I understand it, we know what went wrong -- the keel fell off.

The official inquiry won't report for a couple of years.

How long do we have to wait before we can start asking questions about the likelihood of our own keels falling off?

These are burning questions and the sooner they are addressed the better.

Nobody is being disrepectful. High moral tone of a marsupial seems unwarranted.
 
You don\'t have to wait...

[ QUOTE ]
How long do we have to wait before we can start asking questions about the likelihood of our own keels falling off?

[/ QUOTE ]Unless you're one of the handful of people who enjoy the excitement of a Max Fun 35, you don't have any real worry about your keel falling off.
 
Re: You don\'t have to wait...

[ QUOTE ]
Unless you're one of the handful of people who enjoy the excitement of a Max Fun 35, you don't have any real worry about your keel falling off.

[/ QUOTE ]
That's assuming that whatever happened was specific to the MaxFun 35, isn't it?

...and certain yachts in the Fastnet race. And Bavarias. And that yacht found upside down of SA a few months ago. And...?
 
God, now I\'m worried...

You're saying it's common for keels to fall off? Maybe we should all be worried. My keel is fully encapsulated, should I worry about it?
 
Re: God, now I\'m worried...

Mine's fully encapsulated too, and isn't going to fall off in a hurry. But many (most?) aren't, and while the causes may vary, there seems to be a common theme of yachts with the keels bolted on suffering from catastrophic structural failure because the keels drop off. Admittedly occasionally it's the rudders that drop off instead.

That was one of the supposed lessons of the 1979 Fastnet - keels and rudders weren't built strongly enough and failed at bad moments (though not sure if there is a good moment for such a thing). I understood the original poster to be getting at the fact that these lessons hadn't been learned and people are dying as a result.
 
Re: God, now I\'m worried...

If it were aircraft with wings falling off they would all be grounded and checked, so yacht owners should do the same.
 
Re: God, now I\'m worried...

I, too, came through the '79 Fastnet. It was my first and only Fastnet and I must say that even before the start I worried about the design and build of some of the boats suitability for an offshore race. I also know that some of the crews had rarely ventured outside the shelter of the Solent and didn't understand that the Fastnet is a bit more than a way of extending Cowes week racing.

After it was all over and the enquiry reported I was hopeful that offshore yacht design would become a bit more seamanlike.

It would appear that, on the evidence of flimsy go faster 'big dinghy' designs (though I am not familiar with the Max Fun 35) lessons have, very sadly, been forgotten.

My thoughts are with the dead mans family.
 
Re: God, now I\'m worried...

I must say that my main concern leading to my original question about safety was the thought of designers such as Simonis and Voogd, the designers of Hooligan V, letting people loose with a yacht with 50% of it's weight in a torpedo keel in any and all conditions which more traditional yachts would be able to cope with.
Even cigarettes come with a health warning, so what about the designers and builders making it clear that this sort of design is really not for serious offshore conditions but for 'round the cans' type racing?
Despite Hooligan V having competed in the 2006 Shetland Round Britain and Ireland race and having completed the Fastnet race, the time had to come when the strain (perhaps accumulated strain) on a torpedo keel carrying so much of the overall weight of the yacht was going to part from the hull!
I hasten to state that I am not a yacht designer, nor do I have any sort of intimate experience of yacht design, but I have been sailing and racing seriously for almost 50 years now and do know what sort of boat I would trust my life to, as a serious sailor who has sailed all over the world in all sorts of conditions.
The pursuit of speed is admirable, just as the Max Fun 35 is an admirable racing yacht. But surely people need to fully understand the limitations of a yacht and can only do that with any degree of certainty with the help of the designers and builders?
 
Re: God, now I\'m worried...

An encapsulated keel is part of the structure and design of the hull.

A bolt on keel is a seperate piece bolted on to the hull and therefore a less structuraly sound design.

A bolt on fin is, in my opinion, fine for day sailing/coastal but not for offshore sailing where it would, probably unreasonably, give me something more to worry about. I've delivered enough of them in my younger days!

Healthy paranoia may be a skippers safety net but there are limits!
 
Speculation isn\'t helpful...

[ QUOTE ]
Despite Hooligan V having competed in the 2006 Shetland Round Britain and Ireland race and having completed the Fastnet race, the time had to come when the strain (perhaps accumulated strain) on a torpedo keel carrying so much of the overall weight of the yacht was going to part from the hull!

[/ QUOTE ]I don't think that speculation as to what might or might not have happened to Hooligan V is helpful at this stage. Simonis Voogd Design have a good reputation, and have recently worked on the Dehler 60 and the Dehler 44 - voted "European Yacht of the Year 2007". When the MAIB release their findings, there'll be plenty of opportunity to comment.
 
Re: God, now I\'m worried...

Basically an encapsulated keel is inside the hull of the boat itself, so any impact is distributed pretty much throughout the hull, not on the backing pads of a few keelbolts, or the point where the trailing edge of the keel is joined to the hull. In my boat's case you can't say where the body of the hull ends and keel begins, so removing the keel would be the same as ripping the hull in two. The lay-up of the hull is very thick indeed, so it would take an enormous force. I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible that the hull could be ripped in two - clearly if you're hit by a ship or smashed to pieces on a reef etc. it can happen, but it's a different kettle of fish to a keel that has a joint to concentrate stress at one area, a few bolts (which may be rusting) to hold almost half the weight of the boat to backing pads attached to (what in the case of the photos of the Bavaria that lost its keel looked on the face of it to be) a small area of not-very-thick glass fibre.
 
Re: Speculation isn\'t helpful...

I agree that speculation about what might have happened isn't helpful. On the other hand, if we wait for the MAIB findings, the topic will barely get discussed at all, because it is an unfortunate fact that people by then will regard it as history.

There are some facts that we know now. We know that the keel dropped off, and we know that someone tragically died. We don't have to speculate yet about the detailed reasons as to why it fell off - perhaps more information will become available in the next few days. But we do know even now for certain one reason why it fell off - ultimately, when all's said and done, it wasn't strong enough.
 
Re: Fin keel failures

Fin keel failures are caused by high lateral moments at the point of attachment of the keel to the hull.

Simply, the narrower the width of attachment, the higher the stress. This stress has to be resisted by a thickened and strengthened floor by way of the attachment, which will, in turn transmit the stress to a wider base. Whether you've got keel bolts or encapsulation, is not really an issue.

If you remember the Croatia charter story concerning Bavarias, those keels were bolted, with steel backing plates. The plates merely started to pull the bottom out of the boats . . . the skin by way of the attachment was too thin for the job. Encapsulation, without skin thickening, would have created the same problem.
 
We know nothing...

[ QUOTE ]
But we do know even now for certain one reason why it fell off - ultimately, when all's said and done, it wasn't strong enough.


[/ QUOTE ]We know nothing for certain. Saying "it wasn't strong enough" is rather simplistic. If you run into a brick wall in your car and its front end collapses, would you grumble that it wasn't strong enough? Boats, like cars, are not engineered to be invincible.
 
Re: Fin keel failures

The attachment area in the case of the bolt on keel at one point is the thickness of the bolts... OK, steel is strong - provided it hasn't deteriorated, the nut is in good condition, the bolt hasn't threaded, and the keel-end of the bolt is well embedded in the keel...

Assuming they're OK then the attachment plates the keel bolts were attached to are the next attachment area where forces are concentrated - in the Bavaria they were backed up on a tiny area of GRP compared to the attachment area of my encapsulated keel. In any case it's not so much the thickness of GRP behind the backing pads that matters, as the thickness at the edges of the backing pads - this is the bit that is likely to break if the backing pads get ripped out of the hull.

Obviously a lot depends on the shape of the boat. In the case of a fin keel attached to a flat bottomed boat then the forces will be concentrated on whatever attaches the keel to the boat at that point, whether fibreglass or bolts. No one would suggest that you can make a thin high aspect ratio keel with lead torpedo on the end safe by gluing it on with fibreglass rather than steel bolts. In a wineglass hull where there is no identifiable point where keel becomes hull, which is more typical of encapsulated keels, then there is no particular point where you can say that the forces particularly concentrate.
 
Re: We know nothing...

A car's a bit different, in that crumpling can be a good thing to absorb energy. I think we can assume for the purposes of the discussion that a keel dropping off isn't a good thing.

No one was raising the ins and outs of what might or might not have happened to Hooligan V. But I think that there's no need to censor the suggestion that it's not good if a keel drops off a yacht, and that it's happening too often at the moment.
 
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