LucMee

That’s a lot of ship damage. Indicating something odd was happening out there. But still…Sukhothai could have weathered a lot. She was overbuilt for a corvette. And the Thai navy is pretty good about maintaining their ships. But she was getting up there in age. So something could have fatigued out. Here’s hoping that it was a catastrophic structural failure and not poor seamanship that did her in.

The ship does have an aux machinery space forward of the ER. But the way she went down means a lot of water got in really quickly. When she heeled over and stayed down…it was game over if ALL the watertight hatches weren’t dogged. She better have a huge gash in her side or belly… or a missing prop shaft. Otherwise, it comes down to poor seamanship on the skippers part and lax seakeepng discipline on the crew.

Not only was I one of her builders, but I came over on her delivery run. My first trip to Thailand. I can attest that she was well designed and built and from what I can see she didn’t break up or have any big holes in her. I can’t speak for the maintenance because I haven’t seen the ship in more than 15 years. But I suspect several hatches weren’t properly secured and she wasn’t rigged for storm running. There’s only a very few ways to get enough water in her to sink that fast without breaking her back. One is to leave hatches open. Two is to run into something and put a huge hole in her. Three is if she dropped a propeller shaft. Losing power? To lose all power isn’t easy. Not on that ship. But again…enough water will do it. And that much coming in through the stacks is pretty hard to do. My guess is that several critical hatches weren’t battened down. And whoever was driving got them sideways to a really big wave and dipped the open hatches far enough under to suck in tons of water at once. If they didn’t get torpedoed…it’s poor seamanship…the skipper’s career is over.