Curious, how many privately owned yachts sink every year?

Catyans · Post by **Catyans** » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:41 pm

Expanded version is how many are there at any one time in britain, and how many sink every year?

It was just from a safety point of view and I suppose it's all relative to who owns/uses the yacht and their experience and character?

One person buys a house, puts lightning protection on, buys away from flood zones.

The other buys a yacht, is highly safety conscious and a good seaman to the same result?

Google wasn't turning anything up in regards to any statistics.[/u]

Post by **Jeff** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 3:48 pm

I don't know the answer but I'd be interested too. It only takes one failed seacock and that's it. I've lost count of the number of masts I've seen protruding from the depths in swing mooring locations. Doesn't bare thinking about!

Catyans · Post by **Catyans** » Mon Mar 17, 2014 2:53 pm

Thanks Jeff, yeah it also relates as I know for a fact when people bring up my liveaboard the usual gab of "better not sink! Har-har-har" will come up a lot, and be nice to have some hard facts ready to go.

Post by **Jeff** » Mon Mar 17, 2014 3:49 pm

We use 'My Anchor Watch Pro' when anchoring. It sends us a text if we ask it to which tells us the current lat/long and distance from anchor. Also sends a text if it detects a drag conditions. I'm sure it wouldn't be massively hard to have something similar for water ingress.

When we're aboard we have an alarm which sounds whenever any of our 3 bilge pumps kicks in. It's a pain sometimes because we don't have a dripless stern gland so we do constantly take on a tiny amount of water so every 4 or 5 days we have an alarm if I've forgotten to do it manually. But I sleep sound knowing that we're not sinking without being pre-warned.

With diligent checking and maintenance the chances of catastrophic sudden sinking are incredibly low if you're not underway.

Check seacocks very carefully, all parts of them. Our survey gave them a clean bill of health, but that was the skin fitting only. What was attached to the skin fitting on all 9 of our seacocks was completely rotten. If one of them had gone in the night the alarm wouldn't have given us all that much warning time I suspect.