The Boat Fell Ten Metres in Seconds — and the Crew Had Done Nothing Wrong: SEAHAKE's Rescue Boat Drill

A Drill Run Exactly by the Book

On 6 June 2023, SEAHAKE lay at anchor off Piraeus, in ballast on a voyage from Mersin to Piraeus, when the crew prepared to run a routine rescue boat drill. Every preparatory step was carried out correctly. The unmanned boat was lifted from its stowed position on the main deck, slewed outboard over the ship's rail, and lowered to bulwark height. Three crew members boarded from there — this was SEAHAKE's actual boarding sequence at the time, not a shortcut the crew improvised, though it's a more exposed sequence than lowering unmanned all the way to just above the water and boarding from the embarkation deck instead, which is what BSU went on to recommend as the safer standard.

On the command to lower, a member of the boat crew disengaged the davit winch's hydraulic brake using the cable-operated remote control, exactly as trained. The boat began its descent from a height of about ten metres. Within seconds, the lowering sped up far beyond anything the system was designed for. The boat struck the water hard. It stayed afloat, which is the only reason this incident has a survivable ending — but all three crew members aboard were injured, one badly enough to need helicopter evacuation alongside a colleague, the third taken ashore by a Greek Coast Guard patrol boat. None of the injuries proved life-threatening.

What BSU Actually Found

The investigation's first move was to rule out the two obvious explanations: operator error and visible material fatigue. Neither held up. The crew had done everything correctly, and there was nothing to see from the outside. BSU brought in an outside technical expert to strip the winch down, and what they found was a single hidden point of failure: the freewheel module inside the winch drum's bearing system had been slowly corroding for years, unseen, under the combined effect of salt air and moisture that every ship's deck machinery lives in permanently. The corrosion weakened the freewheel's locking torque. A shock load during the lowering was enough to make it collapse outright, and the winch lost its ability to control the boat's descent.

There's a grim irony in how the boat was ultimately recovered at all: the same uncontrolled fall generated enough frictional heat inside the bearing to weld it to the shaft, which is what eventually arrested the freefall before the boat hit the water at full uncontrolled speed rather than merely "hard."

The freewheel itself wasn't there by accident — it exists to let the davit repeat-launch liferafts after a blackout, and to recover the release hook for reuse. That's a genuinely useful secondary function. But it also means the freewheel sits directly in the winch's main load path with no redundancy behind it. When it failed, nothing backed it up.

What BSU Recommended

1. To the German Shipbuilding and Ocean Industries Association (VSM): raise industry-wide awareness among launching-appliance manufacturers of the risk that freewheels built into winch drums carry, given how they're designed and integrated.
2. To German Tanker Shipping GmbH & Co. KG (the operator): review ship safety manuals fleet-wide for the scope of prescribed lifeboat/rescue boat launching appliance inspections; add procedures to check freewheel function specifically and regularly; and change the drill procedure itself — make it mandatory to first lower any open boat unmanned to just above the water before boarding, and consider loading test weights into the boat during that first unmanned lowering to simulate the load it will carry once occupied.
3. To VIKING LIFE-SAVING EQUIPMENT GmbH, Hamburg (the manufacturer): pay specific attention to hidden freewheel defects during maintenance and inspection of their winch systems generally, not just on this unit.