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.

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!

Doesn't look like a cat in this photo.
www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1524687243029385&set=pcb.1524718913026218

On the flip side in 2004 I had a whale swim into my Olympic 40 at Digby Island. Shook the boat something horrid. I imagined face prints into the keel but on haulout not a mark was found anywhere.

shaggybaxter said..
Sounds like a rudder let go and flooded the cabin. Man, I feel for him.

Fairly obvious point of weakness in a yacht so I'm of the firm belief that there should be a water tight bulkhead around that area.
My yacht originally did not have one but I installed one.
Interesting that it went down by the bow if the hole was indeed in the stern area especially considering the weight of the motor.