Can a ship tow a sail boat?

[KTP]

Here is a good example.

You are driving down the freeway at 60mph with 5 miles to go to make an interview in 20 min for a job that pays $250,000 a year. You notice someone on the street toss a aluminum can in a garbage bin.

Is it reasonable to stop and get the can so you can recycle it for money?

[grantmc]

Don't know where you guys got 14 knots.
Most container ships steam at 22-24 knots.

[Souzag818]

Originally Posted by grantmc

Don't know where you guys got 14 knots.
Most container ships steam at 22-24 knots.

Watch the video. At 5:05 the captain says his ship cruises at 14.5 knots.

[Donald Bryden]

Can a ship tow a sailboat? The answer is yes, if the ship will go slow enough and has a long enough tow line. Ships are on schedules, and can't be expected to vary from that schedule by much, so going slow is probably not something they would do. They are committed to saving lives. Beyond that, not so much. To attach the tow line, the hull can be used with lines to cleats to keep the tow line in place. This looks to be a steel boat and wrapping a line around the circumference should work. It looked like the boat was yawing violently, and that can be minimized by using a drogue. The facts in this rescue don't add up. The original post says the boat was later found stripped. If so, flooding was not that big an issue. The boat, if in route to Bali and south of Batam, was never far from land, and as has been mentioned, the sails appear to be useable. Maybe it is because not all factors are known, but on the face of it this doesn't smell very good.

[SteveSadler]

Not knowing the hull design makes it a guess but most modern boats can surf under sail at 14kts so definitely possible. The bow cleats can take very high loads as well so I would certainly do as a last resort.

[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by MJH

I was once towed by the USCG out of the Gulf of Mexico and they would not honor my request to slow down (they probably had a party to go to that night).

That's a surpise to me. My experience with the USCG has been much better. When I needed a tow from the USCG they were very accommodating and our four-five hour tow was paced in accordance with our boat and the weather.

Originally Posted by redneckrob

I was on a 110' Coast Guard WPB in Alaska and had to tow a small fishing vessel some distance back to port. The hull speed on the boat was something like 5 knots and our clutch-in speed was something like 7 knots. When we tried to tow at 7 knots the towed vessel veered wildly from side to side and would almost certainly have parted the tow line or whatever it was attached to if we'd continued. So we had to clutch in and clutch out about every 10 seconds for 18 hours to maintain our speed at 5 knots. Very painful!

This was the kind of experience I had with USCG. Thank you.

[inspectr]

In my days as a merchant navy officer, we were called on to go about 100 Nm south of Hobart to rescue a displacement yacht in distress.
As others have posted, the best place to secure a tow rope was around the keel stepped mast. We secured the tow rope in the stem fitting.
We used a 300M long mooring line as the tow rope, with a long catenary to absorb the shock loads and towed the distressed boat at around 5 knots back to Hobart, I recall it took nearly 24 hours, but the boat arrived undamaged.
Container ships are mostly liner services with booked docking times, towing a yacht worth less than the contents of one container and missing the berthing slot would cost fortunes in demurrage and delay costs.
Most captains would save the crew and carry on.

[mowerandy]

Originally Posted by Brewgyver

The simple answer would be "badly." But again, it's not likely to happen in the first place.

So, for the hypothetical, how badly would it behave? I think this is how it would go:

Given the specific case of a conventional monohull sailboat
Given an attachment point of infinite strength on the bow of the sailboat
Given a tow line of infinite strength
Given a towing vessel with infinite propulsion power (granted, a large container ship has enough)
Then, as the sailboat exceeds hull speed and starts to rise above the surface, the ballast is no longer effective, the boat loses its righting moment, it falls to one side or the other, and is destroyed.

Last time I was surfing a waveface in my 6.5 tonne sloop (well beyond hullspeed at 13.5 knots) she did not appear to immediately capsize - I would have noticed this!

[billgewater]

Maybe I missed it but did the yacht use an EPIRB? Did the ship need to digress from its course to reach the yacht?
I really wonder if the yacht really needed "rescuing". A bleeding shaft can probably be managed and, after all, it was a sailing boat, so progress could have been made albeit slowly.
Did the ship offer to look at the leaking shaft. Surely with their workshop facilities they could have made some suggestions. Why didn't they consider taking on a few jerry cans of water or topping up the water tanks? The captain of the ship would have been well aware that the yacht could not be towed at 14 knots.
The abandoned boat then represented a shipping hazard and it was not surprising that it was later stripped. Why did not the "strippers" tow it to a harbour and claim salvage?
If the vessel was later stripped then clearly it stayed afloat for some time. Maybe the leaking was not as bad as proposed.
I once had a gearbox failure in the middle of the Banda Sea along with two near useless crew members who were constantly sick. Mainsail blown out. We managed to sail back to Darwin.
I think there is more to this story than we got. The careful video and treatment handed out by the ship and crew seems like an attempt to "cover" themselves in case any questions were later asked. It's what was not discussed that seems questionable.

I wonder how the yacht's insurance company reacted.

[StuM]

It seems a lot of posters missed the fact that they had also lost steering - rudder broken (at around 3 minutes).

[redneckrob]

Originally Posted by billgewater

Maybe I missed it but did the yacht use an EPIRB? Did the ship need to digress from its course to reach the yacht?
I really wonder if the yacht really needed "rescuing". A bleeding shaft can probably be managed and, after all, it was a sailing boat, so progress could have been made albeit slowly.
Did the ship offer to look at the leaking shaft. Surely with their workshop facilities they could have made some suggestions. Why didn't they consider taking on a few jerry cans of water or topping up the water tanks? The captain of the ship would have been well aware that the yacht could not be towed at 14 knots.
The abandoned boat then represented a shipping hazard and it was not surprising that it was later stripped. Why did not the "strippers" tow it to a harbour and claim salvage?
If the vessel was later stripped then clearly it stayed afloat for some time. Maybe the leaking was not as bad as proposed.
I once had a gearbox failure in the middle of the Banda Sea along with two near useless crew members who were constantly sick. Mainsail blown out. We managed to sail back to Darwin.
I think there is more to this story than we got. The careful video and treatment handed out by the ship and crew seems like an attempt to "cover" themselves in case any questions were later asked. It's what was not discussed that seems questionable.

I wonder how the yacht's insurance company reacted.

Never in a million years should a merchant ship be expected to take the risk of sending their people below decks on what they're told is a sinking vessel that is unknown to them to fix a problem with a system they're entirely unfamiliar with. We lost a Coastie to that when the boat taking on water suddenly overturned with him below.

[skipperpete]

I'm also a little curious re the mayday call, no life threatening situation appears to exist. A leaking stern tube can be "caulked" and unless the rudder was actually missing it's usually possible to steer by various techniques well discussed on this forum.

[leboyd]

Originally Posted by StuM

It seems a lot of posters missed the fact that they had also lost steering - rudder broken (at around 3 minutes).

And they ran out of drinking water.

No water, no steering... Seems like an emergency to me.

[Don C L]

In '81 I was crew on a Frers 65 that lost its rudder. The RFA Sir Tristram happened along on its way to Hong Kong. They gave us a tow for the two remaining days but they had to slow way down and in fact ended up shutting down on of her engines. They towed us at about 8-10 kts as I recall. The cleat was not the issue so much as the chafing of the tow line. we ended up with chain going through the hawshole.
I have to say the Captain, Captain Green, and his crew were fantastic and a jovial bunch. At one pint they tried to float us back a big roast beef and some wine wrapped in a dry bag. It didn't quite work, but we enjoyed their efforts. We all had a good laugh about it all and a good drink or two in the ship's pub once in port. Really fond memories of it all.
The following spring the Sir Tristram was badly damaged in the Falkland Islands war.

[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by leboyd

And they ran out of drinking water.

No water, no steering... Seems like an emergency to me.

Someone has to say it so it might as well be me: "Why is the rum always gone?"