What amazes me is if the storms are that brutal to such a giant ship, how does a 30 foot sailboat survive at all?
A 30 foot sailboat is like a corked bottle. The size of the waves are not relevant. The keel on the bottom means it always turns right side up. (With or without a mast intact, that is another question.) But unless it hits a reef or is run down by a ship etc, it won’t just sink. Just like a corked bottle.
The “El Faro” freighter that sank a few years ago between FL and PR, drove right into a hurricane. Ships like El Faro have a “point of no return,” where if it rolls past a certain degree, it’s going over, and it’s not coming back.
Due to extreme rolling, its lube oil pumps cut out, and its engines died. Then it lost directional control, went broadside to wind a waves, was rolled over and sank. A giant ship.
A tough little sailboat in the same storm, like a hard little nut or a corked bottle, would have survived (with or without a mast.)
Now, the humans on the El Faro or on the sailboat are in for a very rough ride. A non-stop roller coaster does not come close. But the humans in the floating sailboat would have been alive at the end. On the El Faro, the humans went down with the ship.
SS El Faro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SS El Faro was a United States-flagged, combination roll-on/roll-off and lift-on/lift-off cargo ship crewed by U.S. merchant mariners. Built in 1975 by Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. as Puerto Rico, the vessel was renamed Northern Lights in 1991, and finally, El Faro in 2006. She was lost at sea with all hands on October 1, 2015, after steaming into the center of Hurricane Joaquin.[4]
El Faro departed Jacksonville, Florida, bound for Puerto Rico at 8:10 pm EST on September 29, 2015 [rest at link]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_El_Faro
Interesting phenomena with the very large ships, they actually do not ride very large seas as well as a smaller vessel. A large following sea that one of these ships must slow for will cause it to roll with increasing list on each roll.
A correct speed and course is critical and is usually found out the hard way in each class of these new larger vessels.
It’s been over 25 years since I retired and it takes me awhile to remember the sea stories, never mind the technical.
The damage displayed on that container ship was most likely from increasing synchronous rolling with tremendous inertial forces causing catastrophic failure of the container lashings.
Those containers breaking free probably kept the ship from capsizing.