Cynthia Woods update

[JungleJetJock]

I know some of you have been following the capsizing of the Cynthia Woods. This was in the online version of my local paper todayhttp://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/062808dntexcynthiawoods.3043a16.htmlSailboat in deadly Gulf of Mexico regatta capsizing was repaired before01:09 PM CDT on Saturday, June 28, 2008Associated PressAUSTIN — The keel that broke off the Cynthia Woods sailboat moments before capsizing this month had been repaired in March 2007 after the vessel ran aground and suffered more than $1,800 in damage, records show.The sailboat, which capsized June 6 in an accident that killed one crew member and stranded five others for 26 hours in the Gulf of Mexico, was also damaged in 2006 in another accidental grounding.The repair history of the 38-foot sailboat was obtained by the Austin American-Statesman under open record laws for a story published Saturday. After last year's grounding, damage to the keel and hull required $1,862 in repairs.But the official in charge of investigating the capsizing warned against reading too much into the earlier incidents."Vessels run aground, and vessels get repairs," said Jay Kimbrough, the Texas A&M University System's deputy chancellor and general counsel. "Just because it ran aground does not give me an 'a-ha' moment."Kimbrough added, "That's why cars have bumpers. The question is to what extent was it damaged, how was it repaired and was it fully repaired."The keel, a finlike piece extending about 5 feet from the bottom of the hull, is encased in fiberglass, contains lead and weighs about 5,000 pounds.The Texas A&M University-Galveston sailboat first ran aground in July 2006, records show. The only known damage was the loss of a cover for a navigation light on the bow.A recovery crew found the keel from the Cynthia Woods last week, more than 30 miles offshore. Investigators hope it will help them determine why the sailboat sank during a regatta from Galveston to Veracruz, Mexico.One of the six crew members died. The rest were stranded at sea for more than a day before their rescue. Officials think the keel came off shortly after the race began.The Texas A&M University System and the Coast Guard are investigating the sinking. Four A&M students and two safety officers were on board.

 

[John]

What brand of yacht was it?

Does anyone know what brand of yacht it was?

 

[Tim R.]

What a stupid thing to say

"That's why cars have bumpers". So keels are meant to absorb energy to protect the boats occupants huh? I know there are smart lawyers out there. This guy just ain't one of them.And then he made light of the fact that the keel had been grounded and repaired. Is there anyone here who would not be much less likely to trust a boat that had been grounded hard? More likely to pass on buying such a boat?Just another case of CYA for the school afraid of litigation. Maybe the boat should not have been sailing(kind of obvious now). Take responsibility and move on.

 

[Ross]

TimR, It all depends upon how the keel joins the hull.

On fin keelers some are very vunerable and some are more robust. If you have any mechanical engineering knowledge you will be able to see the weak places.try breaking the keel off this boat!

 

[Maine Sail]

Wow...

Quote Associated Press: "The only known damage was the loss of a cover for a navigation light on the bow."Ok so apparently, if I'm reading this correctly, they hit hard enough to knock something off of the nav lights on the bow? I don't currently know of any nav lights that have covers other than lenses?? So did they hit hard enough to knock a lens free? P.S. $1862.00 in repairs is a very inexpensive repair and certainly sounds more cosmetic than structural. I going to shoot from the hip and guess that this boat had been ground fairly hard and then never fully structurally repaired..Knocking a "cover" free from a nav light seems like a rather abrupt hit..

 

[jimq26]

This appeared early this week at SA = scary

You're looking at the keel from Cynthia Woods, recovered this weekend from the sea floor where the Cape Fear 38 flipped near Galveston, Texas, killing Roger Stone, who was trapped inside the turtled boat after staying The Cynthia Woods' Keelback to shove the rest of the student crew to safety. Since the incident, a lot of news and speculation have popped up in our forums, and some of it is incredibly unsettling.According to a report attributed to one of the divers who recovered the keel, “The bolts with backing plates, washers and nuts were all still intact. The only damage on the fin itself is from when we were getting it back on board our vessel in side sees and it struck our a-frame. the bolts if I have to guess are 1"-1 1/4" in diameter and there were approximately 10. They would not let us take pics and all of our video footage from the dives was confiscated by the salvage company that contracted us. The key to the problem is that instead of having one large backing plate to distribute the load, there are three extremely small plates that do not even equal the area of the mounting surface of the keel itself. The 5,000 lb. keel bolted to a surface area of 3-4 ft x 4-6 in... Considering that there is only approximately 5/8" thickness on the fiberglass with no reinforcement, that is not much surface area...The area beneath the backing plates contained the fiberglass hull material but no more of the hull was ripped out than what came out with the plates.”A Rhode Island-based composite construction specialist named Peter Ross was heavily involved with the initial build of the first of the Bruce Marek-designed Cape Fear 38s for yard owner Kent Mitchell. This weekend, Ross jumped into the discussion on the forums with a bang, and if his claims of the kind of negligent, half-assed work on the part of Cape Fear Yacht Works are even partially true, there will be hell to pay for Mitchell and his boatbuilding outfit in North Carolina, and current CF38 owners should rightfully be nervous. Here's an excerpt from one of Ross's posts: “Their ads read that the boat was built by sailors for sailors. The problem is the people buying these boats didn't know there are no sailors in the shop, none have a clue about the loads or the importance of fiber orientation in these limited fiber boats. If the foreman is clueless and the guys laminating clueless, who was overseeing this? Why wasn't the designer on hand every day to ensure proper lamination and inspect the glasswork? Sailors have a right to know their boats are built correctly and by qualified builders with a passion for their trade. I will take the hits for writing this with my chin fully extended, but it is time. The entire development process of that boat was a story in itself, I tried without success to buy those molds to destroy them, They want the barstool bragging rights too much. Silicone filled "brown eyed puppy dogs" touting off info as if full of knowledge and experience...sad. Arrogance, ego and ignorance it is difficult to keep my emotions out of this, I feel Roger's in my sleep, I feel his family's pain night AND day. Why would anyone want to be involved in this?”Some have claimed that Ross is a disgruntled ex-employee. We spoke to him tonight, and while he is definitely an emotional guy, he certainly knew a great deal about Mitchell's operation, and in his opinion, it was “only a matter of time” before someone got killed on one of the boats.The keel was apparently repaired sometime in the past 18 months, but we were unable to find anything else out about it. Bruce Marek wouldn't talk about the incident with us on the record given the likelihood of litigation, and the USCG station investigating the capsize told us that they wouldn't have anything for us for a few days. Both the Coast Guard and Texas A&M are investigating the incident, and we will stay on top of them both. If you have any additional information about the repair of the boat, let us know.This is probably one of all racers' biggest nightmares – the sudden, unannounced capsize of a race boat. We are hoping that the investigations shed some light on what caused this incident, and on how we can all ensure that the likelihood of it happening again is substantially reduced. If investigations show that Stone's death was due to the negligence or cost cutting of Kent Mitchell and what Ross called “Mitchell's hobby shop boat building operation,” this is going to get uglier in a hurry

 

[sailortonyb Allied Mis]

I think there is some confusion here.

There were 2 separate groundings. One in 2006 and all that was damaged was a nav light I think and I believe that was donr by the 'rescue' boat.A second grounding took place in 2007. Thios was a pretty hard grounding. Someone here posted photos of the grounding with the keel damage. I am not an atty, but my guess is that after a severe grounding, the builder would be off the hook and the repair yard would take the brunt of it. All the builder has to do is bring in naval architects to dispute the other architects and the botom line would be...."see, no others lost their keel".There are many articles on this right now and unfortunately most writers are not sailors and get the facts mixed up.My big question is where was their EPIRB and why didnt the life raft get inflated and why did it take the CG 26 hours to find the survivors? For this race an EPIRB and an Offshore life raft were required and I believe that the people in the water were only a mile or so from the boat and could see the CG looking for them. Like I have said many times before, the CG in most of the Gulf is quite useless and I know this from experience.IMHOTony B

 

[Menestheus]

more miss info ...

They were more than 1 mile offshore more like 3 also the eperb was more than likely a manual deploy rather than a automatic as far as the liferaft ??? but i do know for a fact they had one on the boat ( i saw it on the boat at the start of the race ) and to the extent it took so long to find them give me a break the seas were around 9 ft. you think its that easy to just point people out ....not really

 

[Ross]

Somebody got the engineering wrong

on this boat design. Among other things, bolts larger in diameter than the thickness of the material they are holding is generally a waste of material. The idea that a panel the size of that keel could be mounted on a 6 inch wide base defies logic.

 

[sailortonyb Allied Mis]

Things to thimk about...

I dont really know what happened to the Cynthia Woods other than what the media tells me, but whatever happened, it was quick.When I bought my current boat, the EPIRB was in a holder in the wet locker next to the exit. It didnt work so I threw it away, but I will get a new one.The EPIRB really belongs outside the boat so it can self deploy. I have seen other sailors tie their EPIRB's down so in rough weather it doesnt pop out and get lost by accident. Is it possible that the CYnthia Woods had their EPIRB mounted correctly but maybe the holder itself is not designed to float out the EPIRB in a rapid rollover? For those of you that do have EPIRB's it may be worth checking out the mounting. Maybe put it in the bath tub (remove the batteries first) and roll the holder quickly by hand and see if the EPIRB will float out or get trapped upside down or sideways and not enough to get 'set off'.Another thing...our ditch-kit was put together by the admiral in a typical backpack that you see everyone wearing. It's easy to grab and it too is in the wet locker adjacent to the compoanionway. Only seconds away. From the experience of the Cynthia Woods, no one had those 'just seconds away'. From what I understand, the security officer that died, pushed the 2 students out of the companionway and yet he didnt escape.....just literally 2 seconds away. From now on, whenever it gets rough, the ditch kit will be in the cockpit. AS for being in the water for 26 hours, maybe we ought to get Cyalume light sticks and pin them to our life jackets. I am fortunate in that I get stuff like that for free, just slightly expired. Better than none at all.MENESTHEUS...I see you are also in Kemah, I have some if you want them. E-mail me with a phone number or ask for mine. These cam off of a platform and expired last month.We can still learn from this tragic incident even if just speculating. Chances are we wont know the whole story for quite a while. Anything can happen and it can happen quickly.

 

[filthy liberal scum]

sailnet has some high res pics of the keel!

some observations here. from the pics its obvious that it was a quick catastrophic failure. the keel didn't work loose. to say that it was a design flaw is pure speculation. to say it was a repair flaw is also speculation. from what i can see in the way it broke away, my guess or speculation is that it was badly damaged in the previous hard grounding and the damage to the supporting glass wasn't found for whatever reason. they may not have been able to see the damage. if the guy woke up the crew to tell them they were taking on water, that tells me that the keel didn't completely break away in one quick departure. if it had it would have immediately left a hole aprox 6" wide by 2' long in the bottom.i would love to know how they managed to tow this boat back to shore without it sinking.remember a few years ago of the mike plant boat that lost its keel. he had a severe grounding and did't have the time to have it hauled and checked out. it cost him his life.S/V Que Pasa?