Born To Race, Built To Fail

How a Beneteau’s Glued-Together Construction Nearly Killed Its Delivery Crew

James Evenson Mar 23   ∙   Guest post

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The author has one of the few YouTube sailing channels worth watching. He’s a U.S. Navy vet who spent five years as a navigator aboard a submarine. The channel is Sailing Zingaro, named after the Oyster 485 that he later sailed with his wife. Evenson is also the author of “Be the Captain,” a book of lessons about leadership at sea.

The bilge pump started coming on somewhere off Haiti. The first time, the skipper checked the obvious things, found nothing, and kept sailing. The wind was building. Thirty-five knots, gusting 45. Gale conditions on a boat designed to go fast, not far.

They were triple reefed on the main and jib. By the time the crew was 150 miles from land, the pump was cycling every fifteen seconds. This was a Beneteau First 47.7. Farr-designed. High rig, nine-foot fin keel. A performance boat, beautiful to sail, the kind of thing that wins races and looks good doing it.

The skipper was a professional delivery captain with thousands of offshore miles behind him. He had put together a crew and taken the job without hesitation. Bahamas to Cartagena. Routine crossing. It stopped being routine somewhere around midnight on the final night.

“The floorboards were floating. We were on our knees with a vacuum cleaner, bailing a 47-foot sailboat in a gale. The pump died, so we got the shop vac,” he says. “Taking turns vacuuming water out of the bilge. Half an hour on, half an hour off. Nobody sleeping. And then the batteries died.”

No autopilot. No instruments. No pump. The crew hand-steered in 40-knot winds in the dark, still bailing. What saved them was geography. The Sierra Nevada mountains blocked the wind as they rounded the Colombian headland. The water ingress slowed. They reached Cartagena at dawn.

When they hauled the boat, they found out why it had been trying to sink them.

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The Build

This is how the First 47.7 is built. And it is not unique to Beneteau: The hull comes first: a fibreglass shell, curved and stiff in that shape, but structurally incomplete on its own. Then a prefabricated internal grid is built separately. This is the skeleton of the boat, with the berths, bulkheads and cabinetry designed into it before it ever sees the hull.

This is a cost-effective way to build boats. Efficient. Modular. You can vary the layout without retooling the hull. The grid drops into the hull. Contact surfaces get coated with methacrylate adhesive. Structural glue, aerospace-grade. The grid squishes it down and that bond is what holds the two halves of the boat together.

On most production boats under 50 feet, that glue is the only connection between the grid and the hull. No fiberglass tabbing over the joins. No mechanical fasteners. Just the adhesive. For most boats, sailed as intended, it works fine. The industry builds hundreds of thousands of boats this way.

The First 47.7 is not sailed as intended by most of its owners. It is a racing machine pressed into service as a cruiser. The tall rig and deep fin keel that make it fast also put the hull under loads that a typical cruising boat never sees.

In heavy weather on a beam reach, the sails drive the mast sideways while the keel fights back. The hull is caught in the middle, flexing with every wave, every gust. “You can reef the sails,” the skipper says. “You cannot reef the keel.”

Over 20 years, on a boat that has been raced hard, those constant small flexes add up. The methacrylate bond works a little every time the boat moves. Eventually, it stops working. On this boat, the grid had separated from the hull along most of its length, running forward from the keel area. The glue had failed.

The hull was flexing independently of the grid. The keel bolt bedding had cracked under the stress and seawater was travelling up through the penetrations from inside the structure. The hull below the waterline was completely intact. The water was coming from within. “We were lucky we didn’t lose the keel out there. If that keel comes off, 150 miles from land, in those conditions—that’s it.”

Four Words

Every delivery skipper knows the infamous case of the Cheeki Rafiki. A Beneteau First 40.7, the smaller sister ship of the boat he had just delivered. Same designer, same construction, same proportions, just seven feet shorter. In 2014, being delivered from Antigua to the U.K., the keel failed. The boat capsized. Search aircraft found the hull floating in the middle of the Atlantic, mast-down.

The EPIRB had activated. A life raft was recovered. They never found the four crew. The captain’s last transmission was four words: “This is getting worse.”

The skipper of the First 47.7 knew all of this. He just hadn’t been thinking about it at two in the morning with water over the floorboards and no batteries. That’s not what you think about out there. You think about the next fifteen minutes. It was only in port that he put it together.

The boat he had just stepped off and the boat at the bottom of the Atlantic were essentially the same boat. “That is the exact thought I had. In that cabin. Two in the morning, batteries dead, water over the floors,” he says.

“In the haul-out footage, I’m laughing,” he says. “Dark humor. Relief that we made it. When I started researching a possible remediation, I opened up the accident report and read that final transmission from the Captain…I got goosebumps. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.”

An inquest followed the loss of Cheeki Rafiki. Questions were raised about the boat’s condition before departure—prior grounding damage, gaps in the pre-departure inspection. A better-maintained boat might have survived that crossing. But this failure mode did not start with Cheeki Rafiki, and it did not end there.

Grid separation, adhesive degradation under sustained offshore loading, keel bolt stress working upward through the structure. It is not a freak occurrence. It is a known consequence of sailing a boat hard beyond the loads it was designed for. And the conversation about it, in this industry, has always been very quiet.

	MAIB Report on the Loss of Cheeki Rafiki 7.35MB ∙ PDF file
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The Question

Beneteau builds good boats for what they are designed to do. The First series is well-engineered for coastal sailing, racing, short offshore hops. The boats are great to sail, and the price point is inclusive. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that many of these boats are marketed as CE class A offshore and sold into a much wider world.

They show up on offshore rally start lines. They are bought by cruisers planning ocean passages. And the construction method at the core of this failure is not in any brochure. Most surveyors are not specifically trained to find it. Buyers are not told to look for it.

The skipper puts it charitably: “If you buy a sports car and take it off-road and the suspension fails, is that the manufacturer’s fault?”

It is a reasonable question. It is also worth noting that sports cars are not advertised with images of desert crossings. If you own a production boat of this type, pull the floorboards. Look at every contact point between the grid and the hull. You are looking for cracks, gaps, or any separation at all.

Check the bulkhead behind the mast for stress cracking where it meets the deck. If you are buying a used boat, do not rely on the surveyor to find this. It can be filled and painted over. You need to look yourself.

The Cheeki Rafiki crew were experienced sailors. They knew what they were doing. The captain’s last words were “This is getting worse.” Don’t let that be you.

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