So Hugo Boss is out of the 5 Oceans.

I'm a development dinghy sailor so all for pushing the boundaries of design, but how many more of these canting keels are going to break before the designers get it right?  Will it take a few fatalities to get them banned?  Or does it need some kind of extreme test (like the capsize test) involving canting the keel on each boat X times with a T ton weight on the end?

Discuss...

Re Alex Thomson / Hugo Boss, good news that he is safe onboard Ecover.  Anyone know what will happen to Hugo Boss now?  Is it just left to drift in the southern ocean until it breaks up and sinks?  The report didn't seem to suggest the keel damage was causing her to take on water.  Would they try and salvage the boat?

Anyway, what a shame.  Pretty crappy thing to happen.

Dennis

I really have to disagree that canting keels are a step forward from a safety point of view!  Just look at the numbers of high profile failures, Ericsson, Boss, Nicorette, the list goes on and on. How on earth no sailor or rescuer has been killed yet I have no idea. It just seems to an enormous achilles' heel of modern designs, there is no other failure that causes as much of an issue.

Granted they do make an inversion less dangerous, but I really would not fancy my chances of canting the keel in an upside down boat in the dark.  The issue here is to do more with the shape of stuff like an Open 60...however not sure on this but haven't the stability rules been tightened up anyway? 

I've been researching a lot about canting keels, and although they have had their failings, they do have the support from sailors such as Mike Golding, and it wasn't my own personal opinion, although I do agree with it, that canting keels are tending to make off-shore racing more safe on the whole. The tightening of the offshore rules for Open 60s has been aided through canting keels because it has allowed boats which would be incapable of self-righting with conventional keels, to right. There are two routes which the designs seem to be going down as I'm percieving it now, "beemier" boats with more upright stability and canting keels, which perform higher, or narrower boats with the ability to self-right but less sailing stability. It's a bit of a trade off between the two and it's really down to the sailor's personal decision on which design they choose, and at the present moment, the canting keel boats seem to have preference. My point initially was that if they can get the mechanics behind the canting keels right, it makes the sport slightly more safer due to the fact that wider designs of boats can be sailed, with the likely-hood of capsize reduced slightly and if need be, the canting keel can aid righting in the worst case scenario. From a general point of view, canting keels may aid the sport as a whole due to the fact that it's quite scary how many cruisers, racer/cruisers, etc have high inversion stability, in such they won't self right. If the cutting edge of the sport can pioneer and refine canting keels to the point there are no general failings, in years to come, they may filter down into other classes and lessen the ammount of  supposedly "safe" boats which can't self-right.

So name a few instances of an offshore monohull, with keel intact, failing to self-right. Other than the Open 60, which was been allowed to go a trend of exteme beam. You will find the offshore rating rules in use for cruiser/racers have provisions to ensure that designs won't go that way.  In any case, for general performance around the bouys, extreme beam isn't fast. I've matched the pace of an Open 60 for several hours in a 38 foot cruiser racer in light running conditions. Of course in the strong-wind reaching conditions they are designed for, it's another story.

I think you are confusing the preference of some sailors for canters for performance gains (which are certainly real) with safety improvements. Given the high number of failures it is rather hard to argue that canters are safer.

Depends on whether the keel is on the "right side". Dinghies mostly capsize to leeward (except, perhaps, Lasers and similar), whereas on a keelboat, broaches to windard (i.e. capsize to leeward) are generally quite tame affairs. It is broaches to leeward (with unplanned gybe) that cause the grief. In that case, not only will the sails be pinning you down but so will the keel, now on the wrong side.

Canting keels seem to be gettng a fair bit of grief and they obviously have some reliability issues, but the suggestion that they should be banned is taking things too far. 

Going sailing offshore short handed is inevitably going to be dangerous, whether going in a canting keel boat, conventional keel boat, or (craziest of them all!) a multi hull.  There are an almost infinite number of things that can go wrong with offshore race boats - for example snapping a mast, hitting something etc.  I guess it is best to let the sailors decide if the performance gain from a canting keel outweighs the risk of a keel failure.

It seems there are plenty of other dangerous things out there that don't get banned'so why pick on canting keels!