Haul out failure

Just saw this on FB, I hope the boat wasn't damaged badly and no one was injured.
Lift cable snaps, boat slips at Port Townsend marina | Peninsula Daily News

Ouch. But sounds like minimal damage to the boat.

A local boatyard here had a strap break and they dropped a big boat onto keel blocks. A fair amount of damage.

I noticed a few weeks later other yards had nice new straps on their lifts!!!

From past litigation I know how specialized those small straps are to support a large load.
Many Australian facilities have travel lift systems, many others have older type rail cradle winched haulout systems. No straps to break. Very rare for a boat to fall from one, but it has happened.

In 1997, the rear strap on a travel lift broke when we were hauling out on our sailboat. 4 months and $66k worth of insurance money, we were back in the water, better than new, other than the hassle factor. We preferr railways but there aren't many left.

The old Halvorsen factory (now a degraded boat repair facility) at Putney on the Parramatta river is reported as having the odd mishap launching from a railway haulout system. The factory, from Halvorsen`s heyday, had about 8 working production lines, each with its own railway line to the water. The downhill run is long, about 70 feet, sometimes the cradle was let run downhill with minimal or no restraint on the cable. Big splash, and the occasional spectacular event.

I had my prop strut crushed in a railway system in Long Beach, Ca. I say railway because it had a platform that was pulled up and down in the water with cables, but once it was up and the boat sitting on rail cradles it moved on rails up on land.

What happened is that the operator didn't pay any attention to the manufacturer supplied marks indicating where to support it for haulout. He supported it 2-3 feet further back, right on the strut. When the platform came up, the strut was crushed and the prop shaft bent They were nice about fixing it though.

David

Wonder when this happened?
Was just there an hour ago.

Nomad Willy said:

Wonder when this happened?
Was just there an hour ago.

Click to expand...

According to the article in the link Monday morning. I've only seen a boat mishandled one time, the marina failed to locate the straps properly. The hull was doing a lot of popping but there was no visible damage or other problems.