Tungsten Alloy Sailboats Counterweights

Ballast is used in sailboats to provide moment to resist the lateral forces on the sail. Insufficiently ballasted boats will tend to tip, or heel, excessively in high winds. Too much heel may result in the boat capsizing. When sailing vessels carried cargo, it was at times necessary to sail to a port with no cargo. In order to do this enough ballast of little or no value would be loaded to keep the vessel upright. Tungsten heavy alloy counterweights would then be discarded when the cargo was loaded.
On larger modern vessels, the keel is made of or filled with a high density material, such as lead. However, lead is not environmental-friendly, so owning to high density and non-toxic, tungsten heavy alloy is increasingly adopted in counterweighs for sailboat. By placing the weight as low as possible (often in a large bulb at the bottom of the keel) the maximum righting moment can be extracted from the given mass. Traditional forms of ballast carried inside the hull were stones or sand.