In 2010, 16-year-old Abby Sunderland was attempting to become the youngest person to sail around the world, non-stop singlehanded. It didn’t go well. Sunderland’s boat, Wild Eyes, an Open 40 class racer, capsized and was dismasted in a remote region of the southern Indian Ocean. Abby Sunderland was rescued by a French fishing vessel but Wild Eyes was abandoned to the mercy of the sea.
Now over eight years later, Wild Eyes has reappeared off Australia’s Kangaroo Island, over 3,000 nautical miles from where it was abandoned. Wild Eyes was found adrift, bottom-up, without her keel. Initial reports from 2010, suggested that the keel had been lost in the capsize as well as the rig. Later reports said that the keel was intact. If it was intact, at some point in the last eight years, the keel broke off.
How did Wild Eyes survive so long in some of the roughest seas on earth?
Wild Eyes, was originally BT Velocity, built to race in Class III of the 2002 Around Alone race. (The Around Alone race was subsequently renamed the Velux Five Oceans race.) Like all Open 40s class racers, the boat was designed to be self-righting and unsinkable. The boat incorporates buoyant material capable of supporting 130% of the displacement of the boat, so even if holed, the boat was intended to be safer than a life raft.
Unlike most Open 40s, BT Velocity was a built with a fixed rather than a canting keel, reportedly for budgetary reasons.
Scott Jutson, the designer of BT Velocity, describes the boat in an article in Soundings a few months after Sunderland was rescued. He writes:
Structurally BT Velocity was designed to exceed ABS/ORC requirements and had structural supplementation, which we carried over from our previous single-handed designs, including a tear-away bow section in the event of collision. The steel keel was fitted into the boat as a spar and was designed to withstand a high-speed grounding without damage to the surrounding composite structure.
The rig was a stable carbon, swept spreader design fitted with running topmast and check stays for extra stability in extreme conditions. BT Velocity completed the 2002 Around Alone without incident.
There are ongoing discussions about whether to not scuttle sailboats by opening through-hulls before abanding then at sea, so as to not create a derelict and a hazard to navigation. Even with open seacocks, Wild Eyes would have stayed afloat.
After the loss of the Titanic, to say that no vessel is unsinkable has become almost a cliche. Nevertheless, Wild Eyes and other Open 40 racing boats may be the exceptions.
I would suppose that the keel wasnt as well attached as the designer had hoped. Maybe the designer needs to look at the hull to understand why it failed. Just my thoughts
Maybe the keel was intact, just not attached to the boat?
With no rig surely the hull would have self-righted in the next storm if the keel was waving about in the air?
It was obviously slightly better built than a certain Oyster 825 http://oysterstory.info/
I said right from the start of this nonsense that there was nothing wrong with the boat, only the person driving it. The very fact that the boat is still afloat after all this time is testament to the fact that, had Sunderland had the skills to do it, the boat could have been jury rigged and sailed to Australia. I reckon she just had the life scared out of her and panicked. As a young, inexperienced girl might be expected to do. Which is why she should never have been out there in the first place.
A google search on images.
https://www.google.com/search?q=wild+eyes+boat&num=100&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQw53Ry9LfAhUEZd8KHYY6DkQQ_AUIDygC&biw=1408&bih=648
Looks like the boat cant right itself from muscle growth on the hull. It must make for one hull of a reef! pun intended
I’ve just been looking at generalised GZ curves and that boat was probably more stable upside down than the right way up by design. The price of speed. As a knock down in a southern ocean storm is an odds on cert who would let their daughter try and sail around the world in a boat like that?
I was also mildly amused when reading her wikipedia article that someone in France was so incensed by the cost of her rescue that they wanted to propose a law that any visitors to France should pay for rescues from doing stupid things. They obviously hadn’t thought it through as the French are one of the great ocean sailing organisers and what goes around comes around.
It appears that Abby Sunderland disappeared from the sailing scene, but her older brother Zac was still doing lots of sailing stuff fairly recently. It would be fascinating to see if she ever had much to say after becoming an adult.
Does anyone remember the video footage of Abby’s departure from Cape Town? I was puzzled by the fact that she hadn’t set and trimmed her sails properly even by the time she was well out to sea. A bit worrying, and dudn’t give the image of the competence and confidence she had shown up to that point…
As the owner for 5 years prior to the Sunderlands (renamed Velocity to Wildeyes ), I can say without any hesitation that Abby Sunderland was fortunate to have been in THAT boat. She was designed with intent and after careful thought in collaboration with the designer, the builder and the owner.She survived a savage Southern Ocean storm in the 2001 Around Alone .She met a predictable end after an I’ll advised decision to continue the voyage. Fortunately the Sunderland team had enough sense to attempt this caper in the Paris 40 by Jutson and Sayre. Life saved 1 ,Darwin Principal 0
Who would allow their 16 year old to drive from coast to coast of the U.S. alone, much less sail around the world? Been around the world on 400+ foot freighters; to quote the advise to Kevin in Home Alone, ‘it can get scary out there kid’.