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Low drag running gear.  A feathering, or better yet a folding prop.  A retractable system would be best of all. In small boats, getting the boat to heel to leeward helps a lot by getting some shape into the sails.  That's hard to scale up to a 35 or 40 footer, though. Water ballast or other...

With all due respect to Dick Newick (whose designs I love) this quote annoys me, or at least the way it gets used annoys me. All things being equal, a faster boat is more fun.  Clearly.  But the way that much of the "fast is fun" crowd talk, you'd think it was a miracle that anyone ever sailed...

If you ever wonder why the sailing world is so conservative, look no further than this comment.  Not that I disagree, mind you, but the logical outcome is small iterative changes on the current formula.  The advantage of having a well explored design space and properly dialed in design is...

Are we talking about trying to make a competitive cat ketch rigged Open 60? Then you probably want to go and get VPLP or similar designers with experience in open classes and access to computational tools for analysis and optimization.  CFD, etc. have their limitations, but if the cat ketch...

Thanks, DDW. Is this about "small" or about "truly open" (or both)?  There are surely some scaling issues here.  Stability increases up by the 4th power of length.  Deflections of a cantilever beam are cubic, and buckling of a column (which I presume is the limiting factor in stayed mast size...

Hey @DDW, on your boat, are there retaining rings or similar mechanical devices to keep the wing masts from sliding off their bearings should the boat be fully inverted?

Wood epoxy boats are just as much monocoque structures as any fiberglass boat.  Sometimes more so depending on how interior liners are installed and hull-to-deck-joints are done. Really? I've never heard of wood epoxy boats having delamination issues.  Most damage I've seen has been the wood...

I think we're more or less in agreement, Evans. This was my point.  I don't doubt that they are successful cruising boats, but I'm suspicious that one can infer all that much from their success about acceptable AVS one way or the other.  A single knockdown in 600 boats illustrates that even...

A couple thoughts on this: What does a good record mean here?  How many boats?  How many cruising full time?  How many hours in breaking seas?  How many knockdowns or capsizes recovered from?  Can we really pull useful statistics from this? The conditions where AVS really comes into play...

Story of my not very lucrative life.

To add to this, since sailing is ultimately a leisure activity, the nature of the economy has a lot to do with it too. How much disposable income and leisure time the middle and upper middle class have has a lot to do with what kind of boats and boating are popular.  It's hard to sell someone on...

Do you ever respond to people's main points, or just side comments? Whether reality has moved on or not, you clearly have.  God bless, man.

@Borracho, You're ascribing an opinion to me which I am not saying.  I am not arguing that there has been no technological progress since the 1960s.  That would be ridiculous. This is what you initially wrote: My response was that development in computing is on a different scale than in naval...

They didn't have to tear down a Galaxie to learn from it because engineers document what they learn in standards, memos, technical reports, etc.  People designing modern cars are absolutely making use of technologies and design standards from the 1960s and probably much earlier.  I don't know...

Did you write this post from a Commodore 64?  Developments in computing technology have been exponential over the last 50 years (This is what Moore's Law explicitly claims, at any rate).  Development in boats and cars has been significant, but there's a reason that people might reasonably...

Frankly, I'm a bit confused why this particular book seems to have sparked this debate. Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts is a jumble of technical articles written 35 years ago by a series of experienced and opinionated people who didn't all agree with one another. ...

I've read it, although it's probably been a decade since I picked it up. The book was published in 1987 and spends a lot of time making specific recommendations about boat design and outfitting.  It's by definition dated.  Some of it is hopelessly dated.  No one should be following Rod...