Excalibur: The Trawl Warp Jam That Sank a Fishing Boat in Under a Minute

What Happened

Excalibur left Saint-Quay-Portrieux on the afternoon of 15 April 2013 with her sister vessel Tristall 2, working the same grounds under the same owner. Two men aboard: a skipper-mechanic and a deckhand. By evening they were trawling southwest of Plateau des Roches-Douvres in 55–60 metres of water — routine coastal fishing, nothing unusual about the trip.

Just before 23:00, hauling in for the second tow of the night, the main engine stalled. The skipper found nothing wrong on a first check, called Tristall 2 on VHF to let them know, then went back down and found the real problem: a diesel leak at a fuel filter he'd changed three weeks earlier. Slightly loose. He tightened it, the engine restarted at 23:45, and he decided to press on and haul the gear rather than head in.

That decision point is where the incident actually turns. During the 45 minutes the boat had been drifting with a dead engine, she'd ended up lying beam-on to the current — not bow into the wind as the conditions should have put her. Slack had built up in the trawl warps. When the crew tried to haul, the port warp jumped out of its sheave and jammed solid in the gallows block.

They tried to free it for the best part of an hour. At 01:00 the skipper gave up trying to force it and decided to pay the gear out to the seabed instead — a reasonable call in isolation. He didn't log the vessel's position first. The starboard warp ran out normally. The port warp, still jammed, didn't move.

The Capsize

At 01:02, with the tide running weakly across her beam and a force 4–5 southwesterly on the same side, Excalibur should have been riding it out lying into the wind. She wasn't — she was still beam-on, held there by the fouled port gear. The skipper saw her heel immediately to port. Water came over the deck. She capsized and sank within, by his own account, well under a minute.

Both men had their lifejackets on. They went into the water and held onto a fender until Tristall 2, already alerted and only 1.5 miles away, picked them up at 01:14 — twelve minutes after the capsize. The EPIRB fired automatically and was picked up by satellite at 01:04. Medical staff at Purpan Hospital, consulted by radio, didn't think evacuation by helicopter was necessary. Both men were handed over to shore medical services just before 07:00.

The vessel sank in 60 metres of water. The wreck has never been located. The liferaft did not deploy — its hydrostatic release failed to trigger, a finding BEAmer records as a distinct anomaly in its own right, separate from the cause of the capsize itself.

BEAmer's Conclusion — and What It Doesn't Say

This is the part of the report worth sitting with. BEAmer's official conclusion is that the sudden capsize of Excalibur remains unexplained and does not appear to be attributable to the weather conditions at the time. A 12-metre trawler, beam-on to a modest sea in a force 4–5, does not normally roll over and sink in under a minute just from lying broadside to the swell. Something about the combination of the jammed gear still attached over the side, the vessel's list, and the sea state produced a result the investigators couldn't fully reconstruct after the fact — because nobody logged a position, because the wreck was never found, and because the two men who lived through it were fighting to survive, not taking notes.

That's the real lesson underneath BEAmer's three published findings: when you don't know why something is about to go wrong, you don't get to wait until you do know before you tell someone.

Chain of Failures

1. A minor mechanical fault escalated without anyone outside the vessel being told. The fuel filter leak was fixed correctly and fast. But the boat had already been drifting, disabled, for the better part of an hour, and the only reason the coastguard (CROSS Jobourg) knew anything was happening was that they intercepted the skipper's VHF call to his sister vessel. Excalibur never called CROSS herself.

2. No cable cutter meant no way to free the jam. Once the port warp was fouled in the block, the only tools available were manual effort and time. A cable cutter carried for exactly this situation would have let the crew clear the gear in minutes rather than nearly an hour — and would have let them get the vessel back head-to-weather long before 01:02.

3. Position wasn't logged before deciding to pay out gear. A small thing that mattered afterwards: the exact drift track and final position had to be reconstructed rather than confirmed, which is part of why the cause of the capsize itself couldn't be pinned down with certainty.

4. The liferaft's hydrostatic release failed. Unrelated to the cause of the capsize, but a second, independent safety-critical failure on the same night. Two men survived because they were wearing lifejackets and a sister vessel was close by — not because the vessel's own life-saving appliances worked as designed.

Lessons Learned

• Always report a degraded situation to the coastguard yourself — don't rely on them overhearing it. BEAmer's own finding: Excalibur should have contacted CROSS directly the moment the engine stalled, not left it to be picked up incidentally from a call to another vessel.
• Carry a cable/rope cutter rigged for warp and rope entanglement, not buried in a toolbox. BEAmer's finding is specific: a cutter on hand would have let the crew free the jammed warp themselves.
• Log your position the moment things stop being routine — before you're troubleshooting, not after.
• If you're paying gear out to the seabed as an emergency measure, that's the moment to call it in, not a private decision to make alone at 01:00 with a boat already beam-on to the sea.
• Test hydrostatic releases on schedule, and know that a valid inspection date doesn't guarantee the unit will fire — Excalibur's liferaft didn't deploy, and the crew survived without it purely because help was close.

Human Factors

Two human factors run through this incident. The first is normalisation — a fuel filter leak, fixed once already, treated as a nuisance to solve and move past rather than a signal to check in with anyone ashore. The second is situational awareness under mounting pressure: 45 minutes drifting with a stalled engine changed the vessel's position and orientation relative to wind and tide in a way that wasn't tracked or accounted for until it directly caused the gear to jam.

Ask yourself: at what point in a developing problem do you actually pick up the radio? Is it when you've exhausted your own options — or the moment something first goes wrong?

Check Your Vessel

• Deckhand: Do you know where the cable/rope cutter is kept, and have you actually used one, even in a drill?
• Skipper/owner: Does your standing practice call CROSS (or your local coastguard equivalent) as soon as the engine fails, or only if the problem doesn't resolve quickly?
• Skipper/owner: When was your liferaft's hydrostatic release last serviced and function-tested, not just visually inspected?

Test Yourself

Play through Excalibur's decision points in the Decision Simulator — the same choices the skipper faced, in real time, before you see what actually happened.

Source: BEAmer (Bureau d'Enquêtes sur les Événements de Mer) — Rapport d'enquête simplifié, Naufrage du chalutier Excalibur, 16 avril 2013, published March 2014. www.beamer-france.org