The Boat Fell Ten Metres in Seconds — and the Crew Had Done Nothing Wrong: SEAHAKE's Rescue Boat Drill
Vessel: SEAHAKE, tanker for crude oil and petroleum products, 177.72m LOA, 21,329 GT, built 2003
Date & location: 6 June 2023, roadstead off Piraeus, Greece, at anchor
Outcome: Rescue boat's descent went out of control roughly 10 metres above the water; it struck the surface at speed. Three crew members aboard suffered injuries of varying severity — fortunately none life-threatening
Human factors: None found — BSU's own classification records this incident as having no human-factors cause. The crew followed procedure correctly throughout
Source: BSU (Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation, Germany) Investigation Report 271/23, published 23 July 2026
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The shipping company didn't wait for the final report. It issued an immediate fleet-wide safety alert after the accident, then reworded its ISM Procedure D04 to require the boat to be towed away unmanned first during launching manoeuvres. The launching davit involved was never returned to service — it was replaced outright. BSU published a standalone lessons-learned document on 2 May 2024, more than a year before the full report, specifically to get the freewheel-wear warning out to the wider industry faster; BG Verkehr (the German Ship Safety Division) helped circulate it to safety officers and major classification societies via an ISM circular.
Human Element Analysis
Most incident write-ups on this site turn on a decision someone made in the moment. This one doesn't — BSU's own classification records no human factors contribution at all. The failure had been building inside a sealed bearing housing for years, invisible to every routine visual check anyone could reasonably have performed. The lesson here isn't about better judgement in the moment; it's about whether your inspection regime can ever catch a defect that gives no external sign until the moment it fails.
The freewheel was added for a secondary convenience function — repeat liferaft launching after a blackout — but ended up sitting, unredundantly, in the main load path of the boat's primary descent control. A component justified by a secondary use case became the thing an entire safety system depended on. Worth asking of your own vessel's equipment: is there a component doing double duty like this, where its failure mode isn't obvious from its stated job?
Cross-Industry Parallels
| Industry | Incident | The parallel |
|---|---|---|
| Aviation | Alaska Airlines Flight 261 (2000) | A single load-bearing mechanical component — the horizontal stabilizer jackscrew's Acme nut — wore down over years inside a housing no walk-around inspection could see into, ending in catastrophic loss of control. Investigators found extended lubrication/inspection intervals had let wear go undetected. |
| Space | Space Shuttle Challenger (1986) | A seal (the O-ring) degraded under conditions its original design didn't fully account for, and the degradation gave no visible warning until the moment of catastrophic failure — the same shape of risk as a freewheel corroding, unseen, inside a sealed bearing housing. |
| Rail | Hatfield rail crash (2000, UK) | Rolling contact fatigue cracked the rail from the inside out. The existing inspection regime wasn't built to catch that specific failure mode until it was too far advanced — directly analogous to a visual/functional check that can't see corrosion inside a closed winch drum. |
Try the Decision Simulator
You're the Chief Officer preparing your vessel's next boat drill, after this incident's lessons-learned circular lands on your desk. Do you apply the new procedure the way BSU actually recommended it — or the way it's easiest to run on a busy morning? Play through the real decision points and see which ending you land on.
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