The strange case of the lost keel: what do you think?

It all began on July 3, when the Oyster 825 Polina Star III (a hull said to have been extended during construction to 90 feet and not even a year old) sank about 25 miles off the coast of Alicante, Spain.

THE FIRST SITE REPORT
The first, sketchy, report of the incident comes directly from the British shipyard: no details to crown the statement that the boat had been “involved in an accident that had compromised the integrity of the hull.” The Italian skipper who was on board, Alessio Cannoni, retorts by saying that there was no collision. Oyster commissioned an underwater photographer to take shots of the wreck: based on the photos, which show the boat without its keel, the shipyard did not rule out the possibility of a collision with the seabed instead. The following month, the British magazine Yachting World published an article highlighting how only Oyster ventilated the possibility of a collision, while dockside rumors and talk of a scuffle before the sinking.

THE HYPOTHESIS OF SUBSIDENCE IS BEING RAISED.
Meanwhile, the wreck and keel are recovered: detailed photos of the boat begin to circulate on the web (the first to operate an in-depth report is a journalist from Yacht Russia magazine, who was interested because the owner was Russian) and rumors that the accident may have been caused by structural failure. As if to say: even Oyster, the shipyard that has always made quality construction its trademark, can make mistakes.

THE SKIPPER’S VERSION
In one forum, skipper Cannoni also speaks: he does so with a point-by-point analysis, where he begins by clarifying that he followed the construction of the hull in the shipyard from April to July 2014 (in this regard, he denies that the boat was extended in length) and that he sailed at least 10,000 miles on it. On board at the time of the accident, he was together with his colleague Dafne Mele (with them, we learn, three other non-professional members, an Italian and two Russians): “We sank on a sunny day, with 18 knots of real wind and 1.3 meters of wave, while we were sailing with the foresail and mainsail at 80 percent,” Cannoni says.

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Then he gets schematic: “2:07 p.m.: loud noise with hull vibration. 2:07 p.m. 15 seconds: major flooding of the engine room. 14.07 and 30 seconds: water on service batteries, all systems KO. 2:07 p.m. 45 seconds: I go out on deck, the crew prepares the emergency bilge pump, raft and grab bags, rolls the foresail and sends the may-day via Standard-C and VHF. 2:13 p.m.: the keel comes off completely, the boat capsizes, at which time I was in the deckhouse in front of the chart table to send the may-day, with the water at dock level. A fishing boat ‘caught’ us after a few hours.”. Reconstruction would show possible structural failure, possibly caused by suboptimal lamination. According to Yacht Russia’s analysis, the boat’s design was varied in construction to incorporate a stern garage, without modifying the keel to accommodate Polina Star III’s new center of gravity, instead adding a ton of ballast at the bow.

THE POSITION OF OYSTER
Meanwhile, Oyster relied on an independent team of experts to figure out how the accident could have happened. The analysis of the other Oyster 825s (not the Polina Star III), the shipyard notes, “revealed a possible weakness in the construction process of the internal structure.” These hulls were immediately reinforced, and this process, which had never been used before, was abandoned. “But we do not know at the moment,” the site adds, “whether this weakness is the cause of the accident that occurred to Polina III, because the structure was damaged during recovery operations.”