i hope this is not old, but this is a must see. Ouch!
Link

see what... is there supposed to be a link/pic or something

if its the french trench video then [old]

there ya go.

WOW... the bows hit the bottom? looks like it.

Incredible crash! Glad to say I've never done that on my 16.

yeah - that trench is something like 3' deep.

and not wide enough, when a big gust hits, to avoid a pitchpole.

Do you know what the oddest thing about that video is?

If you step thru it very carefully, at 14.21 seconds, you can see the helm trying to uncleat something !!!!!!!!

By 15.02 it's too late. Another reason for not cleating something when it's windy !

Major Doh....

I don't think he hit bottom. If he did, the alluminum spinnaker pole would have broken. At the very least, there would be mud on the pole end and there is not. I know this from personal experiance. Also look a the angle the mast is at after the boat flips forward. for there to only be a few feet of water, the mast would have to break to be at that angle. lastly, both skipper and crew are only thrown a few feet in front of the boat. If it had been a bow hit at full speed the skipper would have landed 15-30 feet in front of the boat. Matt Mayfield and I did this on a N 6.0 once in the steeplechase. I hit the mast and got my trap hook caught on the diamond wires (above the spreaders) and I watched matts 220 lbs of grace sail over my head. He cleared the mast tip. The pole did not break because it was carbon, but it made a hell of a twang and the block at the end got so much mud in it it never worked again. Every time we hit a wave afterward we got a shower of mud from the mast tip.
What you saw was just a regular old nasty pitchole.
Thank god for motrin.

Eric

In the other thread with this video in it from back in May, Fritz Klocke spoke with one of the guys on the boat and they said the following. So they probably hadn't gotten the boat up to warp speed to throw themselves that far forward before the gust hit. The previous thread is Here . I would say, however, that the bows should have gone much deeper and you can see a sudden upward acceleration if you slow the video down.

I think they had to hit the bottom- the sudden acceleration upward. Seems like it wouldn't have popped up so quickly without hitting the bottom. even with the bouyancy in the bows it wouldn't have shot up that quickly.

That much wind? Things happen waaaaaay faster than you would expect. Get a little air under that tramp and bye-bye

I can't imagine they hit the bottom, wouldn't the boards hit? I've had some spectacular crashes on my H16, and I've gone out in some crazy winds, but I've never pitchpoled so hard that the boat came totally out of the water!

There are no boards in the hulls during the pitchpole. The other shots show the boards raised significantly.

As discussed the last time this came up, in the last shot, the boards are in upside-down to better fill the wells. They tried a lot of stuff to see what was fast and what was not.

If the boat hit the bottom; the pole would be broken - the pole us not broken; Thus IMO they did not hit the bottom. I've pitchpoled in (slightly) less wind and you do get spat out PDQ.