Met-Ocean and heeling analysis during the violent 21/22 October 2014 storm faced by the sailboat ECO40 in the Gulf of Lion: comparison between measured and numerical data.

On October 19, 2014 Matteo Miceli, a known Italian oceanic sailor, left the Port of Riva di Traiano (Rome, IT) with the sailboat ECO40, an Italian vessel, for the Roma Ocean World Project. This ambitious challenge consists in a non-stop sailing alone around the World in energy and food self-sufficiency. ECO40 is a Class 40 oceanic vessel (LOA of 12,0 m) that has been equipped with a data acquisition system for both the met-ocean parameters recorded on-board (i.e. apparent and real wind speed and wind direction, atmospheric pressure, current velocity, air and sea temperature, etc.) and the kinematic characteristics of the boat itself (i.e. speed and course over ground). Furthermore, the boat has been equipped with a three high precision GPS receivers, provided by Leica Geosystem, for measuring the movements of the boat and with an inertial platform. Due to these high-precision instruments it has been possible to fully measure and characterize the six degrees of freedom of the boat, and accordingly to use the boat as a “sailing wave buoy”. Within this paper we present the first analysis of the met-ocean data measured by the boat during the storm occurred in the Gulf of Lion on October 21-22, 2014 that ECO40 faced just few days after her departure. Furthemore, by analyzing the GPS signals by means of an innovative application of differential kinematic positioning technique, a detailed analysis of the boat heeling during the Gulf of Lion event has been carried out. The boat heeling measurements have been used to correct the measured wind data that have been compared with the hindcast time series