hi folks,

why do people abandon ship ?

it's a naive question i'm sure, i have not ever been in this kind of a
situation where things are so bad you "have to abandon ship", and i
only know from what i've been reading in books and things how scary it
must be, etc. and for a cat if it flips over it's flipped and that's
the end of it, so i can kind of understand leaving, i guess. but for a
"normal" sailboat, a monohull, isn't it always the best idea to stay
ON/in the boat ? why do you EVER "have to abandon ship", it's the
"have to" part i'm not understanding ? i mean you go through regular
storm management ... heave to, run before the storm, maybe later put
out a sea anchor or something, all the usual things ... but even if
that all goes to hell, shouldn't you STILL stay in the boat ? i mean
the hull is sort of like a ping pong ball, even if it flips over, loses
it's mast, has all it's deck hardware ripped off, loses it's rudder,
everything ... as long as it's not full of water you should stay in it,
right ? it's still going to float. it might be rolling over every few
minutes, but it's still floating. isn't the idea to stay IN something
that floats ? even if a big breaker comes aboard and cracks the hull,
you can still leave, it's not going to go down like a rock, you'd have
a little time to get out, right ? how often does the sea actually
crack the hull anyway ? like this article says, most of the time they
find the boat drifting after the storm, wouldn't you want to be
drifting there inside of it ? why leave it in the first place ? it
just seems like you have more going for you IN the boat than OUT of the
boat. out of the boat, in the ocean, it seems like you'd have a whole
lot less going for you. like i said, i'm sure it's naive, but it just
seems like a lot of people leave a perfectly good floating boat for
even greater danger to me, i must be missing something ? people
sometimes joke that skydivers are crazy for jumping out of a perfectly
good airplane, isn't it just as crazy to leave a perfectly good
floating hull ? lol and even in this cat, if it flipped completely
over and stayed flipped over, it's still floating, right ? it just
seems like the only reason you "have to" abandon ship is the thing is
filling up with water and is headed for the bottom of the ocean.