shaggybaxter forum posts in last 60 days

I look at escape hatches and really, really hope I never have to actually try and climb out of one.



Or, more to the point...

MrKyle44 said..
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.

Hi MrKyle44,
Nice boat!
I'm not quite sure why you see this as exclusive to multihulls. Monohulls can also have a watertight engine compartment. The last boat was like this, it only had two peno's into the engine bay, one was a sealed ducted air inlet that terminated at knee height in the cockpit wall and the other was a small watertight port for a fire extingusher that was accessible from the the rear cabin.
Edit: sorry, It did have of course the normal access hatches, one either side and the removable stairs , but these all had watertight seals.
The one thing that did give me pause was my house battery bank was also in the engine bay. Even though the batteries had their own well with an 8" dividing wall, the terminals were the lowest electrical connection on the entire boat, ie: lower than the cockpit floor. So a serious loss of water integrity would take out the house battery bank. All the important stuff like the main pos and neg bus bars were mounted chest high and the engine battery was in a separate area, so you could theoretically still have battery power with a flooded engine bay, but many times I would sit there trying to work out how I could fully waterproof the house battery bank.

The other mitigation factor was under the saloon and cabin berths were foam filled chambers with enough bouyancy to keep any water ingress in the engine bay from overflowing past the sumps. But I readily admit to never having brass ones big enough to test that concept out!
So whilst I'm a picklefork fan boy, I dont neccesarily agree this is a thing that a multi has over mono's.
Cheers!

saltiest1 said..
So fair to assume the keel was lost after running aground. What make is the yacht?

Looks a lot like a Dufour 41.

julesmoto said..
You still need a survey but did you ask the owner for the survey from when he bought the boat and also the last survey he had done for insurance purposes?

Any bulking on these requests is suspicious.

???
That is rubbish JM.
Example: I bought new so I didn't need a survey at purchase.
Not once did I need a survey for insurance purposes, despite it being fully insured, covered for ocean racing and insured for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If any prospective purchaser wanted a survey (which sensibly they did) , they were welcome to pay for one.
The idea that a seller should be labelled 'suspicious' if they dont supply their own survey (outdated or not) is just ridiculous.

Hi JM,
Unfortunately your comment on this thread made no sense because apparently it was plucked from a long thread on SA which I couldn't find
Tongue in cheek reference to a car event on the Gold Coast, some muppet wrapped a pristine HT Monaro around a tree (immovable object)

I'm still not sure whether this was the pivoting keel which seems to have been mentioned or a regular fixed bolted keel although it certainly looks to be the later. With that cord length depth and hull shape however I doubt that the impact was with an immovable object at high speed.
It's a swing keel. The hydraulics has a pressure bypass valve that lets the keel fold backwards to absorb the force of a big impact, ie: shipping containers and such like.
We also hit a whale at 11 odd knots on a delivery to Hammo one year. Same result except that one also caused a slow leak. The repair bill was an o-ring and a few sweaty weekends.

julesmoto said..

shaggybaxter said..

JonE said..
That's cool. Always interesting to get a look at that high-end kit.

By they way, your "Queensland" post over on SA nicely illustrates what I was thinking about "something has to give way".....😀

😀😀😀😀
I hope that bloke gave himself an uppercut. I love those cars.
Found a picture of the aftermath of the rock incident. Still hurts me to see this pic, but as this thread highlights, it could be so much worse.

What am I missing? That boat looks fine to me and not the aftermath of anything. Vulnerable looking keel but certainly intact.

Close up for you. As I said, it needed fairing. Ugh.
Finot would get a chuckle over it being vulnerable. The design has been around since the 80's and they've never had a failure.

JonE said..
He was in a 10 ton boat under motor at night, doing one assumes under 5 knots in that location.

The Oyster was a 50 tonne boat - if they were at hull speed about 11.5 knots.

My rough calculation says that's 25 times more energy that had to go somewhere during the impact.

Genuinely I ask - where would you like that energy to get dissipated?

Shaggy's example is a particulary nice one - I assume that was a steel fin Shaggy? The kind that everyone thinks is terribly dangerous? Absorbing the energy by bending the fin whilst keeping the lead attached to the boat seems like a pretty good way to fail.

Hi JohnE,
Not a steely, composite upper, lead lower swing keel. Had a hydraulic ram with a bypass system to let the keel fold back if you hit anything nasty.
She needed some fairing on the leading edge aftwards, but that was the extent of the damage.
It was built by the same mob that do the IMoca canting keels, much smaller but still a nice piece of kit to have.

Large vertical movement in the air mass can give you random uncharted gusts like you describe.
Evidenced when you have warm water, cold air conditions, where the cold air is sinking (heavier) and the water is heating the lower air mass, causing expansion and rise (lighter).
It's gusty and random.
Warm air, cold water has the opposite effect. The cold water cools the air, and there is less vertical movement, resulting in the delta between the constant wind and gusts being markedly lower.
Was there a lot of fluffy cumulus clouds around?
Reminds me of Breaksea, so many times we've had a calm forecast and out of nowhere your suddenly battling 30+ knots.
Gotta love sailing!