From Mad Mariner:

Last month, the Concordia, a specially-built classroom vessel carrying scores of students, sank off the coast or Brazil after the tall ship was knocked down by a microburst.

This month, Nigel McCarthy, the head of West Island College's Class Afloat Program, explained to Mad Madriner's MadCast how the students survived for more than a day in the liferafts, helping each other out and singing Hakuna Matata to keep up their spirits.

http://www.madmariner.com/podcasts

Oh, the humanity! ....

The piece was interesting but he doesn't add much to what is known.

I'm looking at this as two separate events. There is the vessel, how it was designed, maintained, modified and sailed.

Then there is the response to the emergency of being knocked down, failing to right, water flooding in; the timely decision to abandon ship, organizing the crew and students, deployment of life rafts, getting everyone into the rafts and making sure the alarm got out.

I think that they did very well on the second part. They made it out in good order, no serious injuries, everyone as safe as possible with an EPIRB operating and, even though it took most of forty hours, rescue on its way. An excellent performance under pressure.

The first part is more clouded. Any sailing ship can be knocked down. But sailing ships are designed to handle those conditions. The ship should have righted itself. The openings in the hull that might down-flood are supposed to be capable of handling such extremes. Of course no watertight door will keep the water out if it isn't closed. Part of the responsibility of the captain is to make sure the ship is prepared for the worse foreseeable conditions.

The sound clip describes the conditions being 20 knot winds, two meter seas, with a forecast for unstable conditions. They were flying only a third of their sails and those up were reefed. Sounds good.

But the question is how did the down flooding happen. Were ports left open? That would be a error in captaincy. Did they break? That would point toward an inadequate design. And why didn't the ship stand back up? They don't describe the wind as being constant. I doubt they would have gotten the rafts off if it was blowing a gale.

Was it because cargo shifted? That would be a failure of management. Or did the ship lack reserves of stability? That might be a design issue. Or, perhaps, ballast, or something heavy that acted like ballast, was removed and not replaced.

The bottom line here is that a well designed, well constructed, well founded and ably captained sailing ship should never sink because it was knocked down. Not if there isn't a structural failure.

After an hour of Hakuna Matata I would have gone spare and started slitting throats. No jury would convict me. My defense would be making them listen to it for a couple of hours.

I did not listen to the entire interview, primarily because the interviewer was definitely playing softball. I don't think there was any intent to address the issues you bring up. What is the point of interviewing someone who wasn't even there? It was more of a press release than a probing discussion.

I assumed that when the ship went over on its side, the waves filled the sails with water and held it down, and the hatches were open because there were 60+ people coming out of them. While they were climbing out, the water was probably going in, more weight to hold the boat on its side.

They were already expecting a storm, that's why they had lowered most of the sails, but they couldn't lower them all or they couldn't control it. It was apparently the microblast that knocked the Concordia over, and the rest of the storm conditions assisted in preventing it from righting itself. It's often the combination of circumstances that causes major problems, not just one thing by itself.

I've got a 30x50' piece of plastic sheeting in my open field, held down very nicely with little lakes of water. Wind? No problem!

Sue