Why are So Many Sailboats Sinking in French Polynesia?

Comments · 994

• SA

  @SailingNahoa · 1 year ago · pinned

  Correction:<br>In the video I showed Outremer’s post stating Luna Bay 2 sank due to saildrive damage. The owners have since clarified that the actual cause of the flooding was never identified.<br><br>To be fair, Outremer may have jumped to what seemed like the most obvious conclusion — the saildrive is a known weak point if you strike something in the water. But as the crew made clear, they never found the source of the water ingress. Other possibilities — including structural damage elsewhere, or even water intrusion through the daggerboard cases. No one knows exactly where.<br><br>One incredible detail: Luna Bay 2 didn’t actually disappear beneath the waves. She drifted for two months, covering 1,434 nautical miles at about 1 knot, before eventually wrecking on the island of Nassau in the Cook Islands at the end of July.

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• DA

  @DavidFalcone-d6s · 8 months ago

  I&apos;m a 63-year-old commercial fisherman we have a saying in the commercial fishing industry in New Jersey the only reliable bilge pump is 3 terrified men and a 5-gallon bucket

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• NA

  @navigator2012 · 1 year ago

  As someone else already observed, all five boats were catamarans. I find this fact even more startling, and in need of explanation, than the number of sinkings.

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• NE

  @Necrotic99 · 1 year ago

  I had the flood alarm go off 200miles offshore, I had bought every plug for every thru-hull. As I pulled up the floor from front to back, it was all dry and couldn&apos;t figure out where it was coming from until I was told they heard something on the stern. When I pulled the back floor, the entire shaft was missing. I never planned for that to ever happen....Pulled a rag and a screw driver and jammed it in there. We fully stopped the ingress and got to port just fine, ran like that for like 10 days before we could get to a proper port, just kept an eye on it. Water coming in at 3am can be scary, just need to focus on solving the problem and not panicking.

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• RO

  @robbierobot2979 · 9 months ago

  My guess is the post Covid van life crowd that also flowed in as an uptick in new sailers ?

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• DR

  @DrDonkeySavage · 1 year ago

  “Assume the next problem is the one you didn’t expect.” This is really good advice for sailing and life in general.

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• DI

  @DistantBeat · 1 year ago

  Having spent 15 years cruising the South Pacific we&apos;ve seen many casualties due to inexperience and lightly built production boats. Sailing has gotten very popular with people thinking they can buy a boat and head offshore as push button sailors without learning lessons handed down for hundreds of years.

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• CH

  @CheyneDaggett · 1 year ago

  Watching the video on our Lagoon when the beeping in the video started, but both my wife and I right away looked over at our nav table to see what was beeping before I hit pause and figured out it was in the video and not us.

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• MI

  @michaelallford6741 · 1 year ago

  At all times you have to remember SOD5 Law, &quot;If the worst thing possible can happen, it will, but only at the worst possible time.&quot; About that life raft, how much would you pay to have a serviceable life raft if your boat has sunk up to the deck? Exactly, you would give your life savings and then some! Very long story but briefly, I know a glider pilot who was killed because he objected to paying $30/year to get it repacked. Another glider took his tail off, he got out, but his parachute didn&apos;t open.

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• PE

  @PeaceLoveJoy2 · 1 year ago

  Wow! So many sinkings are shocking.<br>We had a Viking life raft we&apos;d bought new in the USA like you, and after about 35K nautical miles, when we had it serviced in NZ, the certified technician found not one but TWO HOLES that could have drowned us had we had a similar UFO strike. They replaced it with a new one but it was chilling to think we had sailed twice across the Atlantic and all the way across the Pacific relying on a faulty life raft!

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• BO

  @bobjuniel8683 · 1 year ago

  I think a hand pumped desalinator and water containers should be included in every life raft as a lack of drinking water is a major problem in surviving at sea. Extra flares is a good idea. So often people use flares and vessels are too far away or are not searching the seas for life rafts from ship wrecks. Satellite emergency signals like EPIRBs, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons, have made emergency rescues highly successful. Distance and weather are still major factors and the raft that looks big in a workshop is very small when thousands of miles out at sea.

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• CA

  @catamaranseapearl · 1 year ago

  Nous avons connu cette famille du &nbsp;Luna Bay2 &nbsp;la marina au Panama. Cela nous a fait beaucoup de peine d&apos;apprendre ce naufrage au large des Marquises. J&apos;ai eu Charlène au téléphone le lendemain du naufrage.. heureusement sain et sauf toute la petite famille.. ils ont été intégralement remboursé par l&apos;assurance. Nous sommes actuellement à Raiatea et demain nous partons à Bora-Bora. Au plaisir de se rencontrer

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