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Anyone else see this one? The Australian-flagged yacht Tai Tam, 51ft, four aboard, hit a whale about 250nm north of Norfolk Island on Saturday afternoon. RCCNZ got the EPIRB at about 1pm NZ time, she was taking on water and going down, the crew went to the raft, and the cargo ship Sofrana Surville had all four aboard at about 6am Sunday. Seas up to 2m. Maritime NZ said the crew did everything right and the early EPIRB press was the key. Nothing out yet on what kind of boat she was, where they were headed, or where the hull opened up.
We run that stretch every year, NZ to Fiji and back on a Fusion 40 cat out of Kerikeri, so it got us going through what we would actually do. For a cat the strike lands in the hull skin low down, a saildrive leg or a rudder, and the saildrive is the one that worries us. A leg torn out of the hull is a hole you cannot plug with a T-shirt, so the compartment it sits in has to hold. The compartments are the whole advantage over a monohull. One Tree Island, an Atlantic 46, flooded one hull to chest height after a sperm whale in 2020 and stayed up. Raindancer, a Peterson 44, went down in 15 minutes in 2023 when the shaft log burst. But the bulkheads on an owner-completed cat are only as watertight as whoever ran the last hose through them, and ours have never had a hull full of water to test them.
The forum wont let a new account post links yet, so the full write up (first ten minutes on our boat, where the EPIRB and raft have to live, what we dont know) is on the Ma Tori blog under guides, whale strike catamaran. Ill drop the link in a reply once the restriction comes off.
Curious what people carry for plugging a hole, and whether anyone has actually flood tested a compartment on their cat.
