THE ROLLING STONES: The Turn That Shouldn't Have Mattered

Off Port-en-Bessin, 22 June 2014 — 03:00

THE ROLLING STONES, a 10m wooden trawler with two crew, had been working a mixed night — mackerel at dusk, bottom trawling through the small hours. On the third tow, the gear suddenly slowed hard, as if it had snagged something heavy. It had: divers later found a 3.5-tonne rock caught in the net. When the skipper called his deckhand up to start hauling, the strain proved too much — the upper warps parted, leaving the vessel stopped dead with the load just clear of the seabed. The skipper decided to head slowly for Port-en-Bessin, six miles off, to beach the gear and cut it free there.

What Happened

At 03:00, making the turn to starboard toward harbour, THE ROLLING STONES capsized instantly and turned over. Neither man was wearing a lifejacket. Both were thrown into the water and managed to climb onto the upturned hull; the vessel sank stern-first shortly after. Their distress beacon activated at 03:21 — but without an integrated GPS, it transmitted no position. For close to an hour, the two men swam toward the lights of another trawler working nearby, TANAELIS, and were pulled aboard at 03:53. Neither crewman ever saw the liferaft deploy — it surfaced on its own afterward and was recovered days later, washed up on a beach.

What the Investigation Found

BEAmer's stability analysis is precise, and worth walking through because it's the exact calculation any skipper working with a suspended load should understand. The loss of righting arm (GM) from a suspended weight is calculated as GM = P × h ÷ D, where P is the suspended weight in tonnes, h is the height in metres of the suspension point above deck, and D is the vessel's displacement in tonnes. For THE ROLLING STONES: roughly 2.5 tonnes of effective suspended load (after buoyancy), at 4m height, on a 25-tonne displacement — GM = (2.5 × 4) ÷ 25 = 0.4m, a serious reduction in the vessel's stability reserve, calculated under Division 227, the same French fishing vessel stability framework covered elsewhere in this pipeline. The gear hanging off the stern had already eaten most of the vessel's safety margin. The turn to starboard was the last small push needed to take the rest of it.

The Real Lesson

BEAmer's own conclusion is direct: the dangers of a suspended load are still underestimated by skippers of small fishing vessels. The vessel could very likely have been saved by releasing the fouled gear immediately after the cables parted, rather than attempting to transit six miles to harbour with it still hanging. A genuinely critical situation — parted cables, an unknown weight fouled and suspended — is exactly the moment that justifies stopping to put a lifejacket on, not continuing to work as though the situation were still routine.

Check Your Vessel

• Skippers: If your gear snags something heavy enough to part a cable, is your default to keep it attached and head for harbour, or to assess whether releasing it immediately is the safer call?
• All crew: Do you treat a parted cable and an unexplained loss of tow speed as a signal to put a lifejacket on, even if the vessel doesn't yet feel unstable?
• Owners: Does your EPIRB have an integrated GPS, or would a real activation transmit no usable position, the way THE ROLLING STONES's did?

Source: BEAmer (Bureau d'Enquêtes sur les Événements de Mer, France) — Rapport d'enquête simplifié, Chavirage du navire de pêche THE ROLLING STONES, 22 June 2014, published March 2015.