44 Helia "sunk" in the Atlantic

[admiralslater]

Originally Posted by mark_morwood

My guess is that even if there isn't a connection between the hulls at the stern for a steering rod like there was on our boat, in any sort of seas you'd get water sloshing across through the bridge-deck salon into the other hull.

We have a Pdq 36 ,in production they had solid glass below the waterline. Several years ago one went on a rock on the east coast. When the tidecame up it floated off level but heeled with no water in the undamaged hull. The steering bar is outside the rear beam and above the rear crash box ,there is no connection between the to hulls except the main saloon and even when fitted with diesels there are water tight compartments on each corner

[rabbi]

I don't know the FP Helia but FP knowshow to build cats.

In our FP Mahe there were no penetrations between engine compartment and main section of the hull.

All penetrations and connection between engine compartments (rudder link) as well as engine compartment and hull (diesel lines, wiring, etc) are just above bridgedeck level, and once water reaches that point its too late anyway.

The Mahe also has floatation at the bow, where the lower half of the bow storage compartment is foam filled. Worth maybe 3-400 kg. Then half of the section under the aft cabin beds is foam filled, should provide around a ton each. And finally there is foam under the settee in the saloon, maybe another 500kg floatation. Thats somewhere between 2 and 3 tons just in the floatation compartments, plus foam cored hull & deck, except solid glass below the waterline.

So FP knows how to build unsinkable cats. I just don't know if they still make them that way these days - but looking at the Helia maybe not.


If this quote from the norwegian article is correct then food or thought / speculation:
"I ran into the lounge and picked up a seat cushion from the sofa. I tried to close the gap with this, but this was useless. The pillow disappeared through the hole and into the sea."
Must have been a huge hole well above the waterline. A hole larger than a seat cushion below the waterline would fill the hull in seconds, plus rushing water would have pushed the cushion inside and not outside.

Maybe an escape hatch problem but I reckon this would have been mentioned in the article.
Pure speculation of course.


On a sidenote: The article says he woke up at 3am and the pump started moments later. He later woke the others onboard. So nobody was awake, and an impact could have gone unnoticed.

[Dulcesuenos]

Originally Posted by PortClydeMe

Them? What? Hatches? Cats? The EU can be blamed for many things, especially these days, but I'll blame Mother Nature bashing flimsy-production modern 'condominium-cats' for the need of escape hatches. That aside, should I ever find myself inside an inverted cat in heavy seas, I'll be one of the first wet rats desperately searching for an escape hatch.

By the way, was the cat delivery crew heading east from Cape Town ever found? I think I remember that the inverted cat was maybe found somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Was the crew trapped inside? Washed away?

Hmmmm. Hull construction. Naval architects. Mother Nature. Condo-cats. Swimming. Something to think about.

Yeah well, keels falling off, encapsulated and bolt on is why I feel safer in a cat 😅🤗
Maybe monos should have an escape hatch too?

[rabbi]

Originally Posted by PortClydeMe

Hmmmm. Hull construction. Naval architects. Mother Nature. Condo-cats. Swimming. Something to think about.

Not much to think about. Any person going to sea in a boat is nuts. Maybe a bit more nuts than the people crossing streets but not much. Driving a car is risky, too. Just as getting out of bed.


If you personally feel safer in a mono so be it, but no point in feeling superior because thats just your personal feeling. Others feel the safer in their cats and to them your choice is just as ridiculous as their choice to you.


The differences have been discussed to death, and any person starting this fight once again (from either side) has pretty much lost credibility in my view and deserves a prominent place on my "ignore list".
Get a life.

[catsketcher]

Well said Rabbi.

The hull construction for most boats will be based on the global and predicted local loads the boat will endure. There are lots of FP cats that do well - so their scantlings must be okay - getting hit by something that can breach the hull is something that could occur in any boat so I would suggest thinking about it for for all skippers. Flimsiness has little to do with cats/monos or build method - there are some extremely strong sandwich structures out there. Watch the huge loads that the Volvo boats and offshore French multis are subject to - all resisted by well built and well engineered lightweight foam and composite sandwich structures. If people want, they can read textbooks on composite structures and see how a well built sandwich skin can produce a stiffer and much more fatigue resistant hull than a single skin glass one for much less weight.

The PDQ diagram showing flotation areas shows the problem we are up against. It is easy to seal the front 3.5 metres of the boat from the accommodation (that is what I have in my cat - I access the area from the deck). I really like the way it is set out and I get loads of sealed volume.

But down the back is harder - for one, there is much more weight aft and even with our sealed aft 2m sections I would think we would only have a few hundred litres volume each side. If we breach the hulls we are going down aft a lot, and that is in a lightweight 4000kg cat. I am rather paranoid about capsize and holes and was the only buyer to ever ask my designer to put in more watertight compartments. But getting a cat to sit high and level when the hulls are breached is very difficult because you simply don't have much volume in the ends of the boat. Our boats are floated more by their middles rather than their ends.

So it makes sense to try to increase the number of areas where a hull breach would enter a built in water tank, or a raised seating platform, under bunk area or a sealed part that is hard to access and to avoid cutting into those areas for extra room. That is the hard part - stopping the owners from breaching the sealed areas for a reasonably rare issue. But sinking bum down is a problem for almost all of our cats and so we have to work out how we will deal with it if required.

[Tornadosailing]

Originally Posted by AllenRbrts

The escape hatch is inside the head on the starboard side for the owners version, but I don't know how to tell it is an owner's version from those photos.

Look closely at the hull side window. The owner's version has very wide border paint to reduce the size of the window for privacy in the head.

While a hatch failure would certainly explain the sinking, I would think they would have reported it as such instead of hitting something. But then there are a few things about the story that don't add up. More than likely due to poor reporting, then translate poor reporting from Norwegian to English.

Another thing that jumped out at me was that he was sleeping (on watch???) and heard an alarm and ran down to find half a meter of water in the hull. I suspect his bilge pumps didn't activate immediately, which is the M.O. of those junk Jabsco Hydro Air switches FP installs. I hope that you've replaced all of them in your boat with something more reliable like Ultra Switches.

For those of you who like to argue the merits of cats vs mono vs production boats vs custom built etc, give it a rest. I think it's safe to say that hitting anything hard enough to open a hole below the waterline large enough to swallow a salon cushion would have holed just about any fiberglass boat. Even if the boat was built with flotation fore and aft, they were still going to be disabled and in need of rescue. So the whole argument comes down to whether they get rescued from the life raft (mono), the trampoline (production cats), or from the still floating side of the cockpit. All boats come with inherent risks, and every boat is a compromise. Choosing a boat based on your preferred mode of rescue when it sinks seems a little silly.

[14murs14]

Originally Posted by arsenelupiga

i bet the issue is not properly sealed barier between living space and engine room. Like in lagoons. One that sunk in bundaberg.

One needs to do this unpleasant work and TEST it to improve seaworthiness of the boat.

Hard to expect from new owner to be aware of this issue, and lets face it surveyor would not pick that up either. At least mine hasnt although accredited etc.

Assuming this is the case, then i know of 4 cats sunk for that reason. Worth fixing it.

On my Mahe they purposely put a hole plugged by a soft plastic plug from the aft staterooms to the engine rooms to allow for spraying fire extinguishing agent in without opening the engine compartment. Plus the liner sits with a several inch gap from the hull which is where all the wiring runs. Not to mention as already discussed the engine room hatches aren't waterproof when submerged, and it would be difficult to make them such without serious work, you're talking a 3' square watertight hatch you'd be requiring. And you've got to have vents into the engine room for airflow, basically it's not reasonable to have a waterproof engine room with a typical cat design unless you require engine access through the stateroom.
The cat designers don't make any attempt to claim that engine rooms are waterproof or try to "hide" it from surveyors who "miss it. It's not right to say they didn't "properly" do something, there isn't a standard anywhere that says engine rooms have to be watertight. For example on my Mahe the area under the aft bunks is sealed and filled with foam, as is the area under the settee. There are several ways to engineer a boat, waterproof engine rooms are just one option but by not means the only "proper" option.

[rabbi]

Originally Posted by 14murs14

On my Mahe they purposely put a hole plugged by a soft plastic plug from the aft staterooms to the engine rooms to allow for spraying fire extinguishing agent in without opening the engine compartment. Plus the liner sits with a several inch gap from the hull which is where all the wiring runs. Not to mention as already discussed the engine room hatches aren't waterproof when submerged, and it would be difficult to make them such without serious work, you're talking a 3' square watertight hatch you'd be requiring. And you've got to have vents into the engine room for airflow, basically it's not reasonable to have a waterproof engine room with a typical cat design unless you require engine access through the stateroom.
The cat designers don't make any attempt to claim that engine rooms are waterproof or try to "hide" it from surveyors who "miss it. It's not right to say they didn't "properly" do something, there isn't a standard anywhere that says engine rooms have to be watertight. For example on my Mahe the area under the aft bunks is sealed and filled with foam, as is the area under the settee. There are several ways to engineer a boat, waterproof engine rooms are just one option but by not means the only "proper" option.

I think you are talking about something different.
I don't think Aresnelupiga wants engine compartments sealed to the outside.

He talks about penetrations in the bulkheads between main hull and engine compartment. Something that Lagoons have to accomodate wires and fuel lines.
Our FP Mahe had completely sealed bulheads up to the bridgedeck level.

Once water reaches the bridgedeck its free to wash around anyway, and there is no point in making anything above bridgedeck level segmented.

[flee27]

A little off topic... I am a little over 6' and 180lbs. Not small but definitely not of a larger size either. I have stared at those hatches a few times while chartering and contemplated if I could fit through. Has anyone on here tried to get through that opening? Looks like it would be a definite challenge. Just curious.

[14murs14]

Originally Posted by rabbi

I think you are talking about something different.
I don't think Aresnelupiga wants engine compartments sealed to the outside.

He talks about penetrations in the bulkheads between main hull and engine compartment. Something that Lagoons have to accomodate wires and fuel lines.
Our FP Mahe had completely sealed bulheads up to the bridgedeck level.

Once water reaches the bridgedeck its free to wash around anyway, and there is no point in making anything above bridgedeck level segmented.

I actually just spent several days fishing wires from the port engine compartment into the port hull between the liner and the hull and even sent a camera down there. It certainly isn't sealed above the level where the batteries sit, as that is where I was able to run the wiring. Just a gut feel but I'm guessing if the engine room flooded the water level would be above that and progressively flood into the aft cabin. They implicitly acknowledge that with the giant block of styrofoam under the aft bed. Based on the styrofoam throughout the boat it seems FP doesn't count on any compartment except the front crash compartments in the bow to be isolated, for example it appears the bilge runs under that otherwise apparently sealed compartment under the aft beds?

[admiralslater]

After coming back to those pictures, I really wonder if the aft flotation was punctured or if the angle is induced by the loads aft . If the aft chambers where actually flooded i would have expected the angle to be much more vertical . Also did this vessel actually sink.
As for the poster who suggested that building a performance cat is cheaper I have one word Gunboat

[Tornadosailing]

Originally Posted by flee27

A little off topic... I am a little over 6' and 180lbs. Not small but definitely not of a larger size either. I have stared at those hatches a few times while chartering and contemplated if I could fit through. Has anyone on here tried to get through that opening? Looks like it would be a definite challenge. Just curious.

I've not tried the escape hatches, but the round deck hatches on my boat definitely look smaller. I was certain I wouldn't fit through them, but it's surprisingly easy. I'm 6 foot, 200lb.

[AllenRbrts]

Originally Posted by flee27

A little off topic... I am a little over 6' and 180lbs. Not small but definitely not of a larger size either. I have stared at those hatches a few times while chartering and contemplated if I could fit through. Has anyone on here tried to get through that opening? Looks like it would be a definite challenge. Just curious.

For the Goiot hatch, you would fit. It is approximately 15"x19". I'm 6'3 and 220 and I have gone through it.

[AllenRbrts]

For those with Goiot 49.42 escape hatches which are used on Fountaine Pajot, Nautitech and many others, here is the fix I installed so the glass can not come out of the frame. The acrylic block is welded to the lens with solvent glue. I came up with this fix after jury rigging something similar when the glass started to fall out mid-Atlantic.

[tiopirata]

That is unacceptable in a multihull. Sadly, most multihull yachts are poorly designed and built, the exceptions generally being one off vessels. I have owned 8 yachts over 55 years of sailing and would not invest in FP, Lagoon etc, and never have. 7 of these vessels were multihulls and all 7 are still afloat, and all 7 performed well.