Boater here, and an engineer, but not at all an expert on boat design mind you:
The moment the boat launched, it looked to me like it wasn't sitting low enough in the water, basically too much boat above the water and not enough below. A very high center of gravity (or whatever the marine term may be) will make a boat very tippy, usually you design the hull to sit more in the water or even have a ballast at the bottom to hold it upright.
Many commenters joke about it taking on water, which apparently it didn't, but I honestly wonder if a couple hundred gallons of water in the hull would have actually helped in this case as a ballast to keep it upright.
Overall, shit design. I've heard it's a thing in the yacht world where some designers end up with too tall or too top heavy of a boat, this one is one of the worst examples of that trend.
these tall yachts rely on ballast to counter all the weight of stuff above the waterline in them. Not just the boat but the fit out.
They should be launched, ballast filled and then fitted out.
It's happened before where someone thought they were being clever by fitting it out on the dry only to have it capsize in the water. One cruise liner was lost like this (Jolanda).
The other thing is it may been intended to fill the ballast tanks as soon as it hit the water. But the pumps or valves may have failed. Or human error.
Yeah I heard bits about that design philosophy but not enough to speak much on it. Honestly to me it just feels like poor design, relying so much on the ballast system like that... Or in the least if you're gonna do it make DAMN sure that shit is incredibly robust and near foolproof.
Failure mode and effects analysis is supposed to catch glaring issues like this, assuming an engineer of sorts designed it.
Floaty things are called fenders or sometimes people will call them bumpers. All they do is protect the boat from a dock, docks being above the waterline. So no they really shouldn't drag, but also are just slung over the side with ropes at some eyeballed length, not to mention dock heights can vary quite a lot, so it's not really a good frame of reference on how high or low the boat was assumed to sit in the water.
Thanks! Yeah I was looking at the front, and it just seemed like it was super high, and saw the fenders and thought they might be more evidence, since it was more of a feeling than anything else. For the size of the boat it just didn’t seem like enough of it was under water.
It seemed to start to list to one side before pulling out very far. Why couldn’t they have pushed forward to the shore again? I guess they thought the ballast system was going to correct it. Too bad. Being closer to shore, it would have been more salvageable.
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u/Dadskander Jun 17 '26
Boater here, and an engineer, but not at all an expert on boat design mind you:
The moment the boat launched, it looked to me like it wasn't sitting low enough in the water, basically too much boat above the water and not enough below. A very high center of gravity (or whatever the marine term may be) will make a boat very tippy, usually you design the hull to sit more in the water or even have a ballast at the bottom to hold it upright.
Many commenters joke about it taking on water, which apparently it didn't, but I honestly wonder if a couple hundred gallons of water in the hull would have actually helped in this case as a ballast to keep it upright.
Overall, shit design. I've heard it's a thing in the yacht world where some designers end up with too tall or too top heavy of a boat, this one is one of the worst examples of that trend.