Drydock and launching accidents for tall ships, especially century-old sailing vessels, are extremely rare. When the Bark Europa, a 115 year-old tall sail ship, suffered a catastrophic accident during maintenance in Cape Town, the owners turned to a specialist team who had the experience, patience, and engineering insight to deal with the complex salvage of this maritime treasure.
When the salvage team, headed by veteran salvage and wreck removal specialist, Captain Nicholas Sloane, Managing Director, Sloane Marine Ltd, arrived they did not find a neatly grounded vessel waiting for a crane.
The Bark Europa had executed what the team described as a “600 tonne belly flop” during transfer between the travelator, a concrete slab and the synchrolift (a large elevator system that lifts ships completely out of the water). Instead of being upright on the synchrolift bogies (heavy-duty, wheeled transport carriages that support a ship on land), she lay over on her starboard side, partly supported by the damaged structure, and with portions of the bow effectively hanging in free space.
With the vessel still sliding and not yet fully stationary, the team faced an immediate stabilisation challenge. Before any analysis or modelling could be trusted, the team had to regain basic physical control of the vessel, driving wedges and chocks (robust, reinforced fittings on ships that guide and secure mooring or tow lines) under key points to arrest residual movement.
A legend of the sea, but a nightmare with which to work
The Europa is a storied vessel with a rich mythology attached to her. She now has a reputation as a ghost ship with sightings going viral of her traveling alone through the mist in remote waters in the Drake passage close to Antarctica.
Speaking at the second annual African Root Cause Analysis conference held in Stellenbosch, Sloane informed the audience that the age of Bark Europa made the salvage uniquely difficult because it combined very old metallurgy with riveted construction and almost no reliable as‑built documentation. What’s more, her hull plates were rolled from late‑19th‑century steel, with variable and largely unknown toughness, residual stress and internal condition after more than a century of service
The primary joints were thousands of rivets, not welds, meaning the clamping force, corrosion state and remaining fatigue life of the connections were essentially unquantified.
This uncertainty meant the team could not safely assume the side shell would behave like a modern welded structure under concentrated lifting loads, forcing the team to abandon intuitive solutions, such as welded jacking points, and instead to design a keel‑based lifting system that respected the limited parts of the structure they knew were still sound.
A bespoke solution for a unique situation
To preserve the integrity of the ship, the team designed bespoke keel brackets that would clamp onto the undamaged keel and connect into a gantry‑and‑strand‑jack system (a powerful hydraulic heavy lifting solution) supplied by Vanguard.
Two gantries would span the vessel between the masts. The solution would include a wide, relatively forgiving forward gantry on the concrete slab, and a narrower, more critical aft gantry sitting over the damaged synchrolift and between the lift winches.
For the aft gantry, the foundation itself became part of the problem. The synchrolift steel was treated as suspect, so the team modelled the structure using finite element methods (FEM) – a computer-based engineering technique that breaks a complex structure into many small connected sections and calculates how each one responds to forces, weight, stress and deformation with the combined result predicting how the whole structure will behave.
“Anything that’s bright red normally gives engineers a bit of a wobble,” Sloane shared, describing the FEM results, which showed critical overstress zones in the original beams.
The answer was to double beams, add gusset plates inside H‑sections, lock transverse members with cross‑beams and studs, and create a sacrificial temporary floor and trackway that could carry the moving 600‑tonne load independently of damaged components.
In parallel, the vertical load path was engineered with a “no weak links” philosophy that materials engineers would recognise.
No compromise on materials
Keel brackets were fabricated under tightly controlled welding procedures with 100% non-destructive testing and longitudinal X‑ray of major welds. The team insisted on brand‑new strand‑jack wires (bundles of high-strength steel strands that hydraulic strand jacks use to precisely position extremely heavy loads) rather than cheaper second‑hand options, explicitly to avoid importing unknown fatigue or corrosion into the system.
Rigging from the brackets up to the gantries used bespoke Super‑12 synthetic ropes, a Dyneema‑class material that Sloane said was “15 times stronger than steel for the same weight” and has “zero recoil” if something failed, sharply reducing the kinetic hazard associated with wire rope breaks.
Lifting operations themselves were used as diagnostic steps. On the main lift, load was taken up in small, controlled increments, allowing the structure’s real response to confirm or challenge the model. The measured suspended weight, 596 tonnes, turned out to be substantially higher than the declared value, which Sloane said was an important reminder that design data are hypotheses until validated under load.
When one of the offsets showed signs of potential movement, operations paused immediately. The gap was wedged and filled with 350 bags of chockfast (a high-strength epoxy grout that cures into a rigid, load-bearing support) to lock the interface before proceeding. Only after the initial lift, rotation and temporary support did the team rebuild the damaged trackway, add further reinforcement where actual behaviour exceeded FEM predictions, and execute the final lift and translation back onto new bogies.
This did not mark the end of the work, but the transition from emergency salvage to controlled repair. With Europa upright, stable and safely supported, surveyors and repair teams could fully assess the damage, replace compromised steelwork and restore the vessel’s structure before she could be cleared to return to service.
Forty‑five days after the contract award, Europa was upright and ready for steel replacement. Four months after the incident, she was back at sea.
For material engineers and those involved in root cause analysis, Bark Europa’s rescue highlights that successful recovery is not about great equipment alone; it is a perfect marriage between understanding of structural engineering, materials engineering and application of root cause analytical experience. As Sloane prefaced his address, “Trust, transparency, and people are the most important things when you respond through a crisis.” On the Bark Europa salvage, that ethos became engineering practice.
About One Eighty Degrees
One Eighty Degrees is a global materials engineering and metallurgy firm. Founded in South Africa in 2002, the company has grown into Africa’s most widely scoped ISO 17025:2017 accredited materials and metallurgical testing laboratory, serving over 1,400 clients worldwide. The company provides advanced metallurgical testing, materials engineering and consulting, and failure investigation services that help organisations solve complex product and process challenges efficiently and cost‑effectively. As a Bureau Veritas Marine and Offshore–approved laboratory, and the only materials testing lab in Africa that is a SASSDA member, One Eighty combines rigorous quality, deep technical expertise and innovative problem-solving to deliver reliable, decision-ready insights across multiple industries. Guided by its vision to become Africa’s preferred partner for materials engineering solutions, the company is committed to driving sustainable growth and development across the continent.