It has happened again. While sailing in a qualifying race for the upcoming transatlantic solo sailing contest Route du Rhum, 62-year-old French sailor Laurent Camprubi found himself trapped inside his sailboat after it capsized. The keel on his boat, the Jeanne Solo Sailor, sheared off and the boat capsized 14 miles (22 kilometers) from the Sisargas Islands off Spain’s northwestern Galician coast.
Camprubi sent out a distress signal and, remarkably, was able to survive in a pocket of trapped air for 16 hours until he was rescued by a Spanish search and rescue team.
The Washington Post reports that the air bubble was about 27 inches long on Monday but shrank drastically overnight. By Tuesday, water was filling up, and he knew he was running out of time. But he kept calm, Camprubi said.
“I couldn’t understand how was I able to survive,” Camprubi, of Marseille, told the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia. “The conditions were very adverse.”
In a rescue mission that has been described as “on the edge of the impossible,” rescue crews battled the rough seas. Vicente Cobelo, a member of the coast guard’s special operations team, told the laSexta TV station that when the rescuer banged on the boat Monday night to see whether there were any survivors, he got a response.
“We knew then there was someone underneath,” he said. But the waters were too rough to attempt a rescue. So the team had to wait until next morning to try again.
On Tuesday, two divers swam under the boat to free the sailor, who was wearing a survival suit and submerged in water up to his knees, coast guard officials said.
Cobelo, the coast guard member, told reporters when the divers approached the boat, the sailor jumped into the freezing water and swam under the boat to reach the surface.
“Of his own initiative, he got into the water and free-dived out, helped by the divers who had to pull him through because it was difficult for him to get out in his survival suit,” Cobelo told the laSexta TV station.
“Cada vida salvada es nuestra mayor recompensa”
Así fue el rescate realizado ayer por Salvamento Marítimo al tripulante del velero francés JEANNE SOLO SAILOR que estaba quilla al sol a 14 millas NNW de Islas Sisargas. pic.twitter.com/gqobWTSoWc
— SALVAMENTO MARÍTIMO (@salvamentogob) August 3, 2022
Keels Breaking Off
Camprubi’s boat, sadly, is not the first to lose its keel at sea. In 2017, a few days after Dutch yacht designer Frans Maas and two of his crew drowned when the fin keel broke off from Capella, a boat he designed and owned, we posted Keels Falling Off — How Many More Sailors Will Die? By then, keel failure was a common enough occurrence that the folks at the Sailing Anarchy blog coined a name for it — keel kills.
The International Sailing Federation (ISAF) commissioned a Keel Structure Working Party to investigate and report on the problem in 2015. They investigated 72 known cases of lost keels that had been reported since 1984 and which involved no fewer than 24 deaths by drowning. It is unknown how many keel failures were responsible for sailboats and their crews that simply disappeared.
The underlying problem is that keels have evolved from being an integral part of a sailing vessel’s structure to become a thin and heavy appendage, connected to the hull as a highly stressed cantilever. Looking at many fin keels today raises the question of not, why do they fall off, but how do they stay connected?
The performance and handling advantages of a fin keel are simply irresistible. But fin keels involve engineering that axiomatically reduces failure margins. We can make this work yet it needs a change in habits against simply depending on pure high mass and high modulus.
Short of having any specific reason for suspicion, frequent inspection as a matter of routine helps. There’s enough overhead in the typical design that the keel will hang on despite a bit of working, and working leaves plain evidence– if somebody bothers to look.
Any insult to the fin demands immediate inspection, close attention to condition of fairing at the joint between hull and keel, checking attachment bolts for mysterious increase of tolerances, rhythmic deflection of the keel while the hull is up on blocks. This doesn’t cost much unless it interrupts a monetarily or psychologically expensive schedule.
The investigation into Cheeki Rafiki is a helpful case study of the general picture. Allisions and other insults involving fin keels have crept into the province of “routine” and hence are shrugged off, despite the low margins necessarily involved in a fin keel.
Highly engineered artifacts require high attention. Lack of brute strength purchased by high mass requires payment via attention. When boats begin to resemble aircraft or the most efficient bridges, we have to upgrade maintenance philosophies. If an aircraft’s wing comes in contact with another object, we don’t ignore that and carry on as though nothing happened. The design doesn’t support such cases– the wing is built to only touch air.
And of course, short of recipe-book engineering solutions for hanging a keel from a hull, a marine architect needs the humility to call in a consulting engineer for a second set of eyes and caculations, surely. Errors won’t be covered up by extra mass and margin.
A full keel comes without these burdens but of course carries its own set of trades. Awkward at the dock, etc. Arguably much better suited for activities including gunkholing and the like, anything