So there is a strange oddity happening in the game. Randomly things are getting teleported around the game world. I had a bear and two chickens from my company show up on my brig. My brig is a gunship and is not used for transporting animals and to my knowledge has NEVER had chickens on it. The company is only friends and family and no one is trolling anyone. The animals just randomly teleported to the ship. Since they count as crew if the ship was already at crew max this would have caused the ship to sink seemingly randomly. This could be one explanation for how ships are randomly sinking.
In another episode with the game one of our other brigs randomly disappeared from our port and relocated to an entire other server. I went to the brig and picked up a blueprint. The owner of the brig logged in 5 minutes later and asked where the brig was. I was confused since I had just gotten off it. Using the atlas map we found the brig in another map. We stripped down items and used the bed teleport system to go out to it. The ship was in the middle of the deep sea and it was anchored in an area where the anchor shouldn't have worked. No one else was logged in for our company from the time that I got the blueprint off the ship and the time that the ship owner logged and and noticed the ship was missing. It clearly teleported there since the anchor was engaged in a location where a player couldn't set the anchor.