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.