Lucky escape for a race boat crew who lost their keel
All seven crew from the yacht Showtime, a modified Ker 40, were rescued from a liferaft after the keel of the yacht broke away on their return delivery from the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race.
Showtime’s keel detached at around 0230 local time on 5 January when the yacht was approximately halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, beating upwind in 45-50 knot winds. The yacht is understood to have inverted immediately, approximately 17 miles offshore.
Navigator Rob Buchanan told local reporters that the crew owed their survival to one crew member “doing one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen”. After they’d safely dived out from the inverted yacht, crew member Christian Charalambous removed his lifejacket to swim back under the boat and retrieve the liferaft.
“The boat was trying to kill everybody as it was banging around and we were holding onto it,” said Buchanan, who was skippering the delivery. One crew was knocked unconscious by the hull.
Having successfully recovered and inflated the liferaft, Showtime’s crew were able to issue a Mayday and activate an EPIRB, and were rescued some three hours later.
“I understand from the police that a helicopter spotted us. We were lucky as there were loads of emergency rescue people around because of the fires,” Buchanan said, who reported the crew was uninjured.
Yacht designer Jason Ker issued a statement after the incident: “I’d like to make clear that the keel lost by the Ker 40 Showtime was not designed by Ker Yacht Design. The yacht had a retrofit keel fitted, designed by its owner’s local design office near Sydney and built by a local fabricator.
“We have designed a great many keels over the last 23 years which have been constructed by many different builders around the world, and none [has] ever failed. To the best of our knowledge, Showtime is the only yacht designed by us to have had a keel fitted that was not designed by us.
“Showtime’s keel was configured as a vertical hollow strut welded to a horizontal mounting plate, which in turn was sitting in a shallow recess in the boat’s hull and bolted to the boat’s structure. This is not a design approach we would ever endorse as the high stress point at the junction is coincident with the horizontal welded joint.”
One yacht dismasted, and other competitors suffered incidents on the return delivery from Hobart which saw them sailing through smoke clouds caused by the bushfires sweeping New South Wales.
“When we got halfway through the Bass Strait, we hit the smoke cloud. It seemed like a post-apocalyptic 1980s ‘Mad Max’ movie. It was dark at 5pm,” Buchanan recalled.
See Matt Sheahan’s comment on the keel loss on page 18.