I’m watching a show that is speaking about ships sinking in storms at the Cape of Good Hope, and evacuating to lifeboats. If seas are so rough that a large ship goes down, how are lifeboats able to stay afloat? Are they able to bob in the waves easier? Or are they just a last ditch option that often capsize but are better than nothing?
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There are several reasons. It is much easier to build a robust small vessel then a robust large vessel. This is both because the costs involved are much smaller, the extra reinforcements do not cost as much on a small vessel compared to if you were to reinforce the entire big vessel. But the forces involved are much smaller. Larger vessels struggle in storms because the ship can be supported by multiple waves at once essentially making the ship a bridge between the waves which end up bending the ship in half. A smaller vessel will not have this happen to it as it is too small to span between the waves. So not only are lifeboats built much stronger but they also do not have to handle the same forces as the ship.
And of course if something is wrong with the ship causing it to not handle the weather and sink the chances that the lifeboat have something wrong as well is quite small. So just having two ways of getting through the storm is protection in itself.
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