Aug 28/2024: It certainly isn’t every day that a 183-foot superyacht sinks in a matter of minutes, while at anchor, with 12 crew and 10 guests aboard. So it’s entirely understandable that the very abrupt sinking of Bayesian, an enormous Perini Navi sloop, at around 4am on August 19 off Porticello, Sicily, resulting in the...
At the end of our last discussion on stability we mentioned the old mono v. multihull worst-case-scenario debate re sinking to the bottom (monohull) versus capsizing on the surface (multihull). This time we'll focus on that which drags the poor monohull to the bottom, which is, of course, its ballast. Ballast, ironically, is added to...
Stability, fundamentally, is what prevents a boat from being turned over and capsized. Whether you are a cruiser or a racer, it is a desirable characteristic. A boat's shape, particularly its transverse hull form, has an enormous impact on how stable it is. This so-called "form stability" is one of the primary reasons you should...
Canada's Transportation Safety Board has finally released its report on the loss of the school ship Concordia, the 188-foot square-rigger that capsized and sank off the coast of Brazil back in February of last year. I was more than a little surprised by its conclusions: a) there was no microburst, as was reported by the...
