Bad News
You're looking at the keel from Cynthia Woods, recovered this weekend from the sea floor where the Cape Fear 38 flipped near Galveston, Texas, killing Roger Stone, who was trapped inside the turtled boat after staying back to shove the rest of the student crew to safety. Since the incident, a lot of news and speculation have popped up in our forums, and some of it is incredibly unsettling.
According to a report attributed to one of the divers who recovered the keel, “The bolts with backing plates, washers and nuts were all still intact. The only damage on the fin itself is from when we were getting it back on board our vessel in side sees and it struck our a-frame. the bolts if I have to guess are 1"-1 1/4" in diameter and there were approximately 10. They would not let us take pics and all of our video footage from the dives was confiscated by the salvage company that contracted us. The key to the problem is that instead of having one large backing plate to distribute the load, there are three extremely small plates that do not even equal the area of the mounting surface of the keel itself. The 5,000 lb. keel bolted to a surface area of 3-4 ft x 4-6 in... Considering that there is only approximately 5/8" thickness on the fiberglass with no reinforcement, that is not much surface area...The area beneath the backing plates contained the fiberglass hull material but no more of the hull was ripped out than what came out with the plates.”
A Rhode Island-based composite construction specialist named Peter Ross was heavily involved with the initial build of the first of the Bruce Marek-designed Cape Fear 38s for yard owner Kent Mitchell. This weekend, Ross jumped into the discussion on the forums with a bang, and if his claims of the kind of negligent, half-assed work on the part of Cape Fear Yacht Works are even partially true, there will be hell to pay for Mitchell and his boatbuilding outfit in North Carolina, and current CF38 owners should rightfully be nervous. Here's an excerpt from one of Ross's posts:
“Their ads read that the boat was built by sailors for sailors. The problem is the people buying these boats didn't know there are no sailors in the shop, none have a clue about the loads or the importance of fiber orientation in these limited fiber boats. If the foreman is clueless and the guys laminating clueless, who was overseeing this? Why wasn't the designer on hand every day to ensure proper lamination and inspect the glasswork?
Sailors have a right to know their boats are built correctly and by qualified builders with a passion for their trade. I will take the hits for writing this with my chin fully extended, but it is time. The entire development process of that boat was a story in itself, I tried without success to buy those molds to destroy them, They want the barstool bragging rights too much. Silicone filled "brown eyed puppy dogs" touting off info as if full of knowledge and experience...sad. Arrogance, ego and ignorance it is difficult to keep my emotions out of this, I feel Roger's in my sleep, I feel his family's pain night AND day. Why would anyone want to be involved in this?”
Some have claimed that Ross is a disgruntled ex-employee. We spoke to him tonight, and while he is definitely an emotional guy, he certainly knew a great deal about Mitchell's operation, and in his opinion, it was “only a matter of time” before someone got killed on one of the boats.
The keel was apparently repaired sometime in the past 18 months, but we were unable to find anything else out about it. Bruce Marek wouldn't talk about the incident with us on the record given the likelihood of litigation, and the USCG station investigating the capsize told us that they wouldn't have anything for us for a few days. Both the Coast Guard and Texas A&M are investigating the incident, and we will stay on top of them both. If you have any additional information about the repair of the boat, let us know.
This is probably one of all racers' biggest nightmares – the sudden, unannounced capsize of a race boat. We are hoping that the investigations shed some light on what caused this incident, and on how we can all ensure that the likelihood of it happening again is substantially reduced. If investigations show that Stone's death was due to the negligence or cost cutting of Kent Mitchell and what Ross called “Mitchell's hobby shop boat building operation,” this is going to get uglier in a hurry.