Boat launches are meant to be joyous celebrations, commemorating years of hard work. And boats are supposed to float… But if weight calculations are off, so too are all bets.
After two and a half years in build, the 85-foot expedition yacht was ready to taste water for the first time. Supported by dollies holding custom steel cradles, hull No 8501 was towed to the ramp and lined up to splash stern first. It was close to high tide, the weather was ideal and the launch team was ahead of schedule. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly.
Then, about 40 seconds after the forward dolly submerged, a loud clank and a crunching noise came from the stern area, and the vessel listed 12 degrees to port. The team stopped the launch to check the hull’s condition and, upon finding no leaks, decided to continue, believing it would right itself once free of the cradles. The team on board started the main to help the boat on its final stretch. As it began to move into the water and slipped off the front cradle, it listed further to port. The captain increased the reverse throttle to quickly free the yacht from the cradles. It accelerated aft and a few seconds later capsized and began taking on water through its engine air intakes, eventually coming to rest on the marina basin floor.
This worst-case scenario is the real-life launch of Baaden that ended the ambitions of New World Yacht Builders in Anacortes, Washington, in May 2014. The $10 million yacht was a total loss and the company did not recover.
The 2026 Global Order Book by BOATPro predicts 530 yacht projects 79 feet and longer will be delivered this calendar year (see page 28). The vast majority of these will splash without a hitch but, once in a while, the process goes horribly wrong.
More recently, this past September, a 78-foot yacht in Turkey, Dolce Vento, capsized to port just after launch. Caught on camera, the unfortunate incident made headlines around the world. Findings from that investigation have not yet been published, but local reports at the time attributed it to a stabilization issue. Yet chief engineering officer Jeffrey Bowles of Gibbs & Cox, an engineering and design firm specializing in naval architecture and marine engineering in Arlington, Virginia, points out that naval architects rarely get stability wrong.
“The likelihood of a naval architect, engineer or shipyard getting confused or having an error with the stability properties of the whole form are very low because that’s tied to the geometry of the form,” he says. “And most, if not all, organizations use very well proven software in order to perform basic stability calculations and hydrostatic analysis.”
The tricky bits are ballast and weight. “Weight is often a very hard thing to track,” Bowles says. “Within shipbuilding there are numerous times every year [when] ships end up being overweight when they’re delivered or overweight after a modification. Sometimes the center of gravity ends up in a different place than it’s supposed to be.”
In the case of Baaden, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined two key errors led to its sinking. First was a transcription error that led to the wrong weight of the aft starboard load cell — 8,000 pounds too much — being given to the offsite naval architect, which led to an incorrect assessment of the center of gravity. Secondly, the shipyard overstated the ballast weight by nearly 40 percent.
“They thought the ballast was greater than it was, which should have lowered the vertical center of gravity. But it wasn’t that low, so therefore it was too high when the boat was launched, and so it toppled over,” Bowles says.
One underlying cause was human error, the other stemmed from the difficulty in estimating weight. “The study of weights is actually a science,” Bowles says. “Weights are super critical in naval architecture, almost as critical as they are in airplanes.”
For any vessel launch, a weight estimate is performed the day of launching, or should be, he says, and the owner’s rep, build captain or chief engineer can ask to see the calculations. “The captain is ultimately responsible for the stability of the vessel once they take ownership, and so they should absolutely be involved with all of these processes,” Bowles says, adding that they also need to be careful not to overstep and give the impression they are assuming responsibility or liability, as it’s not their boat yet.
There is something to be learned from simply asking for the weight calculations, he says. “They can figure out if the shipyard is going to say, ‘Yes, here they are.’ Or ‘We have some, but they’re not really good so we don’t want to give them to you,’ which raises a yellow flag. Or even ‘What launching calculations?’ which raises the red flag.”