The yacht was called Bayesian

In other news, which you won’t be reading about today, the wife of a Baptist church leader was stabbed to death in Manchester yesterday. Two others, including her husband, are critically injured. The police have already arrested a 22 year old man of no name or appearance.

Less than 24 hours and already straight down the media memory hole.

Luckily the bbc news front page has room for the following:-

I never thought I’d get home, gay man arrested in Qatar says

‘I was addicted to smoking Spice vapes at school’

King Charles III £1 coin enters circulation

Actor Madsen arrested on domestic violence charge

Probably HP’s wetwork team.

Given that the woman “allegedly” driving the car remained at the scene it does appear to be one of those one in a million coincidences that happens every time.

Meg Whitman may be updating her priors.

@John; that stabbing is already looking like a domestic (possibly with a side order of mental illness) as the arrested man is known to them all and the brother of one of the dead girls.

‘I was addicted to smoking Spice vapes at school’

Would that be a ginger spice vape, or are spice vapes posh?

I wonder what the probability might be of a yacht named Bayseian sinking while another chap gets hit by a car.

Boddicker’s input is interesting. Sounds the sort of bloke always believes he’s the most important person around & wants everyone to know it.. Is that reflected in his business activities? Might explain why the yacht was where it was.

@BiS
Well maybe the mast was a design stretch too far…but.
The weight of the mast is tiny compared to the sideways force of a decent sailing wind. That is why yachets have tons of lead bolted to their keels (or gold, thank you Desmond Bagley 🙂 )

A bare mast would still generate a strong sideways force in a storm force wind, but more than full sail coverage in a breeze? Hmm. Sounds more like something underwater broke suddenly.

A lot may depend on who was ‘master’ and how well the yacht was anchored and secured for the storm weather. But if they go down to the hull, to retrieve the bodies, interesting if there’s a hole in an awkward place. But it was surely the Ukrainians, using the same yacht/divers as last time 🙂

Anyone asked the location of the Frenchie ‘Rainbow Warrior’ killers?

The timing, with his co-defendant’s fatal accident the same weekend, is either the most monumental coincidence, or a deliberate message. I mean, what is the conditional probability of a yacht foundering the day after a hit-n-run? If only there was a branch of such mathematical probability theory.

Buy shares in tin foil!

You have to understand how a fore & aft rigged ship actually works. The sails don’t just block the wind. They’re set so they produce lift much the same as an aircraft wing. With the lift vector being along the centreline. So a fore & aft rigged ship can travel faster than the wind blowing on it.

A properly designed and configured sailing boat (which I reckon the one in question was) is naturally stable. The keel will be of a fin configuration (which is has to be to stop the boat making excessive windage when sailing close-hauled or with the wind on the beam) with a bloody-great lump of metal at the end to provide balance. A boat of this configuration can be knocked over onto its side and then self-right – unless somehow the keel is broken off. It’s also most unlikely that during this upset it would ship enough water to sink or seriously destabilise it – unless it had lost the keel, then it would capsize or at least remain on its side. Otherwise, something would need to have put a decent hole in the hull, or perhaps some below-water-level equipment (log, depth transducer etc) my have been ripped-out somehow, but in general these are mounted through the hull in something like a 50 to 75mm hole – so not much water is going to come in through them either.

One possibility is that she was holed (or the keel was severely damaged/broken off) by one of the thousands of “rogue” shipping-containers lost from container-ships in bad weather that are floating about (most often at, or just under the surface) in the Med. They are a definite hazard to small(ish) non-steel-hulled boats (Bayesian was aluminium). My boat was fitted with a forward-looking sonar sensor that would warn if one of the damned things was within a couple of hundred metres – a great peace-of-mind, especially when sailing at night.

As the Baron says, it takes a lot to knock down a boat even with the sails up. Under normal sailing conditions as the wind builds the boat will naturally try to head in to the wind and the helm has to steer against it. Eventually the helm will be overpowered and the boat will head to wind and it sounds like all hell has broken loose with sales flapping everywhere. A good skipper will have had the engine on and headed in to the wind to reef and drop the sales well before this happens. (You still get the hell of flapping sails unless you power in to the wind if if you act early*.)

Knock downs happen when you get hit by a sudden gust of wind- around headlands and katabatic winds when there’s mountains around are favourites, but not the only ones eg tornados and squalls.

Even under bare poles in strong enough winds you can sail because of the forces on the boat but it not just the mast that provides resistance, the free board (area above the water line) also has a big effect.

At anchor a boat naturally heads to wind, especially in the med where there’s no tides worth speaking of, although when there’s strong tides they can be the main force and sailing boats can come off the wind if their keel is big enough. This can lead to some weird images of anchorages where motorboats are pointing in to lightish winds and sailing boats are pointing at 90 degrees to them because of local currents, and even weirder not all of them are in the same direction because of eddies.

So enough of the background, I’ve just been reading the sailing forum I used to read and here are some of their observations and speculations , in no particular order.

A wind that strong might well have snapped the mast and caused a knockdown. As I said look at that free board. It certainly won’t have time to swing on its anchor.

The boat has a lifting keel and they’d been in and out of port it may have been left up. To give some idea of keels, on my old boat and those of a similar size they are about 30% of the overall weight, I’ve no idea about Bayesian but they’d need to be heavy to do the job. That keel is apparently around 10m when down and 4m when up so a lot of stabilising force is lost.

If the mast had been hit by lightening it could well blow a hole in the below the water line where they are “earthed”.

There’s some very big doors at the rear on the lower deck, if those had been left open she would have shipped water very quickly which could explain why she didn’t immediately pop back up, which she wouldn’t if the keel had been up anyway. It should also be noted that the portholes are not the same as small yachts, more like windows so could have been left open or blown out.

That would also explain why some people had time to get out and even get in to life rafts, as it wouldn’t invert or sink immediately.

There’s a lot of things on the mast, they may, stress may, have been added after the design was completed (personally I doubt it).

As British citizens are involved the Marine Accident Investigation Board are involved, and apparently on site. Their reports cannot be used for prosecution and therefore in the interests of safety can be published before any court case so we should find out relatively quickly what happened.

I stress this is all speculation.

*The saying is: If you think you need to reef its too late.

Frothy water is a lot less dense than unfrothy. Make the water frothy enough, and any vessel designed for unfrothy water will sink. If the waterspout made the water around the Bayesian frothy enough, no leak would be needed for it to sink. I understand that the waterspout missed neighbouring boats which will therefore have been in unfrothy water and hence held up by normal buoyancy.

“The driver of the car, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, remained at the scene and is assisting with enquiries.”

So, fluke then.

The news here states that the ship was most likely hit by a waterspout, according to available data.

Besides the Instant Karma angle… Being hit by a seaside tornado would most definitely ruin your day, regardless of the design, size and/or anchorage of the ship.

@ Person in Pictland
As Mike Lynch said, it was because he could afford to pay for decent lawyers. HP was relying on the xenophobia of the American “Justice” system to pusue a nonsense claim to cover up their imcompetence.