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
Sailing Doodles - youtube.
See a clip of what he went thru. Cost estimate is $100,000 to repair and the insurance company will not cover.
On Fire, Sinking, Rescued by the Coast Guard
149,990 views
•Dec 16, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELa66tQU3f4