It would have been falling-off 60-90 degrees and they would have been paralleling the reef. I misspoke about the crash tack or gybe.)

It appears that they sensed they were coming into "something". Couple of crew are seen on the port (windward) side at the front of the coming looking forward and to port.

IF they would have immediately said, "oh shit", and fallen off, they would have had a chance.

You're right about the canting keels (worse than movable water ballast). When you work the other way, out of sequence, strange things happen. Like note releasing the running back- or check-stays and all kinds of other elements of a trimmed-up boat.

But I keep coming back to the guys looking out. I guess they saw, felt, or heard something or combination of things that should have said "that's wrong", WHOAA. Looking at that video. I sea that someone was looking out -- maybe at the lagoon, maybe at the effervescences, maybe noise, maybe the wave patterns, whatever.

If you had a depth sounder on the display, even if you weren't looking at it, you would have started glancing around. When it said that you weren't "beyond" limits ('---' on the B&G, for example) -- it would have said something.

At 19 knots they were going 31' per second. (That's over a football field in 10 seconds). They had some warning, but not a lot. Look at the prior charts (Navionics posts) -- you'll see that the sand spit comes up before it really gets shallow. they were in 1000's of feet -- then it comes-up -- a bunch of

I agree that the issue was that they had NO clew that they were in something other than deep water.

I have a several multi-function displays and large single function displays. ONE of them is always on depth. Even if its in water deeper than it can read a display for a long time. (Which is 600 or 700' on my boat.). From the chart, they should have seen a depth warnings that they were going into shallower water from stuff well over a 1000' earlier. They had to have warning if they would have only set their instruments to protect, as well as, drive the boat.