What Can Cause the Sinking of a Sailboat on Open Seas?

[builder dan]

Ships I reckon are the biggest danger out there I doubt many keep even a half decent lookout,Still reckon ocean crossings are safer than road crossings.

[mrohr]

mostly water

[daddle]

It's not the water that sinks a boat. It is the lack of air.

[zeehag]

toilet will sink the boat fast if no one is watching or too busy to do so ....and lack of observation.

[HappyMdRSailor]

Stupidity, Negligence, Innocence, and Ignorance....

(or just plain bad luck)

[Panope]

Gravity

[TeddyDiver]

Funny!

Not so funny..
Fire, leak (throw hull, window, hatch etc), playing chicken with a ship, floating container, whale, dropping keel..

[brutb]

A boat from Tampa lost 2 weeks ago. They think the skeg snap off and could not plug it....shame they were racing and luckily they were picked up by a boat behind them. That was a lucky group of sailors. They finally made it to the keys.....(see Sailmonster.com for more''

[boatman61]

The Skipper...

[Sailmonkey]

I've found every instance of sinking that an amount of water has entered the hull greater than the hull's ability to carry water.

[JazzyO]

In case of the Warnow (NOT Warlow as the OP mentioned), I believe that the modifications made to that boat made it much less suitable to open water. The sides of the boat had been removed in a past life on inner waters, which makes it easy to have heavy water ingress. It is unknown what kind of pumping facilities were on board. But certainly, these people were very inexperienced.

The facts as they stand:

1. The boat got into serious trouble several days before it got lost. It had to be rescued by the Scottish coast guard. This ordeal caused the majority of the people on board to step off and abandon the trip. Saturday 23rd March 2013 Yacht Warnow in difficulties
2. There was no experienced crew member on board and there were no rescue facilities save for a VHF radio.
3. Navigation was done on a smart phone.
4. The rigging was heavy, made of wrought iron or something similar. This boat was never designed for sailing, and whoever put the rigging up seems to have had very little knowledge of how to design it.
5. The idea for this trip was to sail to northern Norway to see the Northern lights. But they left in March, which means that they would never have reached Norway to see the Northern lights (unless they waited until the coming winter).
6. When news first broke that the boat MIGHT be missing, the people operating the facebook page, in Dutch, (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wa...00090096715167) reacted as follows: "The media are whipping this into a frenzy. A complete and needless overreaction. A map was downloaded onto a smart phone a couple of days ago, they are fine.". I was personally very irritated by this attitude, as the Scottish Coast Guard had been searching for the vessel for days, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds and people putting their lives at risk. If they were fine, why didn't their family seem to think so? At the very least, an apology could have been made for causing such a stir. But of course, slowly it transpired they were not fine at all.

All of the above leads me to believe that the Warnow was sailed by a bunch of naive people who had no idea of what the sea can do, nor the kind of responsibility that they were taking on their backs.

It is very, very sad that this naivety has cost lives. But frankly, after having been rescued by the CG once, they should have known better. They didn't deserve to die, but they were victims of their own actions. It was most definitely not a freak accident.

There could have been any number of causes as to why the Warnow sank, but I think there is a likelihood that the open sides of the boat combined with the low freeboard was an opportunity for taking on a lot of seawater, and that either pumping capacity was insufficient or the pumps failed. The vessel itself seemed sturdy enough, and was originally built to be used on open water.


Onno

[JazzyO]

This I find a very interesting picture of the Warnow: that boat seems to list much more than normal.

Question is: did they install a keel? If you have heavy rigging like they had, then it must be quite easy for this boat to overturn if it doesn't have a keel.


Onno

[Teknav]

Boat was meant to carry 5,000 lbs useful weight...instead, you put on it 20,000 lbs of junk! Along with a good size wave, it will sink!

Mauritz
Going to behave now!

[David_Old_Jersey]

Originally Posted by JazzyO

In case of the Warnow (NOT Warlow as the OP mentioned)...............snip

1. The boat got into serious trouble several days before it got lost. It had to be rescued by the Scottish coast guard. This ordeal caused the majority of the people on board to step off and abandon the trip. Saturday 23rd March 2013 Yacht Warnow in difficulties

A pic from when she was towed into UK by the RNLI (in March).



My bet is that if overwhelmed she would have sunk like a stone - in under a minute .

I think a useful reminder for folks that with the sea there is a cure for stupidity and that there is a line between steely determination and wishful thinking..........

[AiniA]

There is an underseas volcano off the coast of Grenada called Kick-em-Jenny that has an exclusion zone around it. The fear is that if it erupted the gases being produced would reduce the density of the water to the point that a boat passing would sink, possibly without even seeing any evidence of the eruption.