LE PETIT CORSE: 500kg Over the Limit, a Melted Exhaust, and a Liferaft That Took an Hour to Open

Plateau de la Gamelle, 18 December 2012 — 03:05

LE PETIT CORSE, an 11.92m netting vessel out of Audierne, left port before dawn for the fishing grounds south of Île de Sein — carrying, as usual, everything it needed for the day: 70 to 80 nets, plus the warps, buoys and anchors to rig them. Three crew, a skipper-mechanic and two deckhands, plus one passenger. The vessel was well maintained, its last safety inspection current. On paper, an ordinary sailing.

What Happened

Five minutes out, the skipper noticed smoke in the engine compartment — he assumed it was the oil breather, whose filter had been removed the day before and never refitted. By 03:30 the smoke had thickened until visibility inside the compartment was zero, and he turned back for port. Five minutes after that, a second check found something worse: water coming in, fast enough to trip the bilge alarm. He engaged both the mechanical and electric bilge pumps. The water kept rising. The crew put on their lifejackets; a deckhand launched the liferaft and pulled its inflation line — nothing happened, it didn't inflate. The skipper radioed nearby vessels and reached L'ARCHE D'ALLIANCE by VHF. At 03:45, with water still pouring in, the crew went into the sea. LE PETIT CORSE rolled and sank stern-first half a mile off the Plateau de la Gamelle, her bow left showing above the surface.

L'ARCHE D'ALLIANCE launched her own liferaft within minutes and had everyone safely aboard by 04:24 — a fast, well-executed rescue. LE PETIT CORSE's own liferaft, the one that had refused to inflate at 03:35, was finally recovered still attached to the sinking wreck: it opened on its own at around 04:45, roughly an hour after it had been launched, and only once rescuers were already on scene to see it happen.

What the Investigation Found

The chain traced back to a single failed part: the main engine's cooling water pump had a damaged impeller. Starved of proper cooling, the composite ‘waterlock’ — the fitting that muffles and cools the exhaust before it exits the hull — overheated past the roughly 100°C its material could survive, and melted. Once the pipe connection to it failed, the exhaust outlet was open straight into the sea. Under normal trim that outlet sits just centimetres above the waterline — not normally a problem. But LE PETIT CORSE was carrying 70 to 80 nets that day, roughly 2,100 to 2,800kg of gear against a legal pontee limit of 2,100kg, plus ground tackle and a passenger on top: at least 500kg over her authorised load. That overloading pushed the exhaust outlet permanently under water, and the moment the waterlock connection gave way, the sea came straight in through it.

The Real Lesson

BEAmer's conclusion draws a direct line: a mechanical fault (the cooling pump) became a hull breach only because the vessel was loaded beyond its limits. Neither failure alone sinks a boat in 40 minutes — together, they did. And the liferaft — inspected as recently as February that year — simply wasn't ready when it mattered; BEAmer's best explanation is an insufficiently firm pull on the inflation lanyard, a detail that matters exactly because it's so easy to get wrong under pressure, in the dark, with water already rising.

Check Your Vessel

• Skippers/owners: Do you know your vessel's actual authorised pontee load limit, and do you check the day's gear against it — not just judge it by eye?
• Skippers: Is your exhaust outlet height genuinely clear of the waterline when the vessel is loaded as it typically sails, not just when it's empty at the dock?
• All crew: Has your liferaft's launch and inflation procedure actually been practised — hands-on, not just talked through — so a hard pull under pressure isn't the first time anyone's tried it?

Source: BEAmer (Bureau d'Enquêtes sur les Événements de Mer, France) — Rapport d'enquête simplifié, Naufrage du fileyeur LE PETIT CORSE, 18 December 2012, published June 2013.