“The extent of the damage structurally is not as bad as we may have first anticipated, we immediately asked ourselves, what did they hit, was it a container on the surface? Perhaps a log or the whole tree! As we stood on the dock in anticipation this morning, we were somewhat relieved to see that structurally we survived. The steel keel and bearings were intact without any crazing and/or cracks, what didn’t survive was the carbon fibre fairing which fairs the leading edge of the keel. In short the keel is milled out of a single billet of heat treated steel, and the forward and trailing edges are added later as these shapes would almost be impossible to machine. We added pre-shaped fairings to these areas and fortunately the forward one also doubles up as a sacrificial leading edge or simply put a bumper. Unfortunately once you loose this you have a flat section across the front of your keel…. which really impacts your speed! We also lost the keel pin fairing, this is a conical fairing, which does exactly that, it fairs the 150mm keel pin, and without these we have a very unfair underwater profile. It would have the same effect, if a Formula 1 car lost all its wings and the nose!”
It says a lot about the build of the Green Dragon that she survived the impact with an underwater object on the run in to Cape Town. Still, there was a great sense of dockside relief when she was hauled yesterday and the only damage was a missing fairing. Dun Laoghaire's Johnny Smullen is in charge of the repair work:
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