Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts

[WGWarburton]

The only Julian Everett boat I ever saw up close was an Eliminator 32.   There's a good page on it at https://julianeveritt.com/2017/02/07/eliminator-32/ ... which confirms my recollection of its warped shape.

This one?

https://www.facebook.com/653448044/posts/10157939898888045/

 That angle brings out your concerns really well,  I think...?

That boat was for sale with an asking price of 8000 Euro or so last year. The ad shows up if googled,  though withdrawn. 

Cheers, 

              W.

 

[estarzinger]

nutrition and meal planning is a huge part of athletic performance

Really nice.  Great contribution, as has been all your work - much appreciated.

I am a long distant bicyclist (was doing 8000miles/year before covid).  Mental attitude (mostly the discipline to train consistently - to follow the plan)  would be the #1 factor. 2nd would be nutrition and recovery, HUGE issues there.  You can't put out power (or think well) unless you are properly fueled. 3rd would probably be training methodology (a surprisingly complicated topic but really more 'icing on the cake' so long as you were already simply putting the work in).  The bike is way way down the list.

As a sailor I have to say I was not very conscious about nutrition.  But looking back it was not too bad, probably because I had elite coaching when I was young, and some small amount of that just stuck with me.

 

[Foolish]

As a sailor I have to say I was not very conscious about nutrition.

Thanks for the nice comments.  If you've read the study on SHTP racers in my singlehanded book you realize just how much of a role that  lethargy plays.   I faced this myself and realized that we need to do something about it.  If proper meal planning can reduce lethargy but even just 5%, the overall results would be dramatic.

 

[Bryanjb]

Offshore, new or old...

 

[climenuts]

Really wish I didn't come across this thread when I had things to do... Just spent the last 6 hours reading the Mariner's Weather Handbook and comparing to the current NOAA Pacific Charts...

 

[estarzinger]

It is a little off Jud's topic . . . But just while I was writing something else - I will include a few of the comments here. I dont mean to be 'preachy' here (I apologize it it sounds preachy and critical), but represents 'current' thinking on such situations.

It is not obvious that any kind of "keel tripping" occurred.

It is likely that the 4 skippers below used the storm tactics they did because they did not feel their boat designs could safely run off unconstrained in big seas.

Abhilash Tomy: rolled and dismasted while lying ahull.

You can lie ahull in unpleasant but not breaking seas - but we have known for almost 100 years now that you should NOT lie ahull in a small boat in breaking waves, unless you are willing and able to take a full 360 roll.  Excuse me but this was just plain bad practice.

Are Wiig: rolled and dismasted while hove to.

Hove-to is slightly better, if your boat is big enough compared to the waves to be able to hold her head up when getting hit . . . but with these size boats in a southern ocean storm it just does not add up.  If this was going to be your tactic then you should have known there was a point when you needed to use a para-anchor to hold the head up.

Susie Goodall: pitchpoled and dismasted while using a series drogue. 

She was let down by her series drogue supplier.  It had an obvious design flaw/weak point (which as a skipper where the buck stops for everything - she also should have known).  She was the only one to use what is considered 'the modern solution'.  But, see discussion below, may not have been the best macro met option, even if it had been properly built.

Gregor McGuckin: rolled and dismasted while trailing warps in cross seas.

He appears to not have split the several breaking wave trains correctly.  He seems to have put the main train behind him, which caused a secondary train to be on his beam - that can be (and was here bad).  You want to split any breaking wave systems so that none are on the beam.

For Susie and Gregor, running might not have been a very good macro tactic if they were in the dangerous semicircle.  It would have prolonged their exposure and put them into potentially progressively worse conditions. It is not clear to me from their commentary if they understood their met situation in much detail other than they were in the shit.  In bigger boats forereaching might have been the best macro solution for these designs and this situation (and worked better than running in the Sydney even in modern boats) - but I dont know if they were big enough to pull it off given the conditions (this is the exact situation the Pardey para-anchor technique was designed for - a small boat, which can't run off safely, in waves too big to simply heave to in).

 If they were simply too small for this - the best option would ofc been to have enough met information to just give the storm a miss.  In the southern ocean, the big blows are perhaps the most predictable of anywhere in the world.  You can see them coming from days away.  

 

[estarzinger]

Offshore, new or old...

View attachment 438998

View attachment 439000

lol - well it is all about which compromise best fits your objectives -  it a booz cruz, or a smart ocean crossing?

 

[shaggybaxter]

Offshore, new or old...

View attachment 438998

View attachment 439000

Nice trim and a beautiful boat. 

 

[SloopJonB]

Internal combustion has been pretty well understood for a long time.  What's changed is materials science and advances in computation (CFD) and sensors have allowed designers to put those concepts into practice.  Much of the advances have been applied to safety and emissions controls. Interestingly in many cases, today you can get away with using inferior materials due to the use of electronic controls. For example, you don't need a forged piston and can use a cheap aluminum one if you have a way to detect and prevent knock fast enough. 

None of that gets you over 400 HP and over 20 MPG out of a pushrod small block.

There have been major advances in every aspect of car design over the past 30 years.

Well, except weight that is - Keeriste have cars gotten heavy.

 

[MikeJohns]

.............. no smart yacht designer would bother reading any dusty books searching for tech tips. The experiments have been done and the results are clearly presented in recent designs. Whatever was successful in 1962 has been preserved by its success. No need to look backwards.

The science hasn't changed, validated test results from the 1960's on are often used as references in current yacht design papers.

Designers in the transition period were stuck between modern knowledge and often very conservative clients. It takes a charismatic designer to convince a client to let them move the rudder away from the keel and put it on a skeg. S&S didn't manage this till what, the 70's . Van de Stadt even removed the skeg in the same era to the condemnation of many at the time.

Balanced or Partially balanced rudders  were roundly condemned by some popular designers as having no place on a sailboat. A decade later they all did it. The problem was the designers and the clients. The technical  and research material is as valid today as it was in 1970.

 

[SloopJonB]

Remember when the Valiant 40 was condemned as dangerously light and unseaworthy offshore because of the fin & skeg?

 

[zenmasterfred]

Just had a presentation by the Dogbark owners (ex RTW boat) about their attempt to go through the NW Passage.  When that fell through due to weather and time they sailed Alaska to Hawaii and were going to winter over, some friends were heading to the South Pacific so they changed plans and provisioned and went south.  They then sailed back to Hawaii, back to Alaska and down the inside passage to home in the PNW.  The big takeaway is SPEED is good and a fast passage maker makes a lot of miles easy.  They sailed Hawaii to the Marquesas in under 11 days.  Similar passages back uphill.

 

[El Borracho]

Remember when the Valiant 40 was condemned as dangerously light and unseaworthy offshore because of the fin & skeg?

I think it is more often overly conservative designers being pushed hard by clients that moves the development. I recall (some magazine glitz piece) that Lapworth had to be pushed by hard by Jensen to "lighten" the Cal 40 as much as they did. And then after making that significant contribution to the revolution did not like the ULDB developments at all. A stodgy conservative bunch, those guys. The downside of customers and clients making the choices is exemplified by that booze cruise cat ^^^ above. (Although, scientifically, the 24 sailors on that fun and beautiful classic are likely far better at executing a booze cruise...in my professional opinion.)

 

[DDW]

Fin keels and separate rudders were being used on boats in the late 1890s, but largely fell out of fashion for ~70 years because of racing rules and the limitations of contemporary construction materials.  I'm sure the underwater profile of the Star Class and other boats from 50+ years earlier had no influence on Bill Lapworth and others who were reintroducing them in the mid 60s.

This is one of the issues in yacht design that is absent (to a large extent) in other engineering efforts. Yacht design is less driven by science and more by fad and racing rules, resulting in enormous and decades long excursions into the nearly absurd. You have to be asleep at the wheel not to recognize this even in today's offerings. In some cases the NA knows better, but he/she works for a client that doesn't. The series builder wants to sell boats, for the most part doesn't really care how they sail, as long as they sail out of the showroom. The end user has read too many ads in magazines, and today's end user is probably buying a 45'er as their very first boat. There are only a few niche corners of sailing that are truly driven by science and results. 

The largest changes in yachts by far in the last 100 years have been due to materials science advances developed in other fields, not any epiphanies in the knowledge of sailing. 

 

[accnick]

Offshore cruising is not a zero-sum game, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the cruising boat choice dilemma.

If you get to the end of your intended voyage with both the boat and crew intact, you had a boat that did the job for you. Bottom line, that's all you can ask.

 

[Elegua]

None of that gets you over 400 HP and over 20 MPG out of a pushrod small block.

There have been major advances in every aspect of car design over the past 30 years.

Well, except weight that is - Keeriste have cars gotten heavy.

Sorry, not following. Bolt-ons will get you that out of an LS1. 400 at the wheel with 20mpg is not difficult.  Basically Chevy built in every tuner modification invented over the last 50 years into the stock LS series engines.  

Didn't say there weren't advances. Materials science and ECUs allowed engine builders to implement designs they already understood. 

 

[MikeJohns]

You want to split any breaking wave systems so that none are on the beam.

Heaving to as well, there's usually one good and one bad option dictated by the primary cross sea. I don't think I've ever seen that mentioned in any of the sailing how to books.

 

[estarzinger]

Heaving to as well, there's usually one good and one bad option dictated by the primary cross sea. I don't think I've ever seen that mentioned in any of the sailing how to books.

yes, exact - and also if there is a frontal system coming, with a wind shift, you want to be positioned to accept that shift gracefully.

It was always something we thought about when we had multiple waves trains and/or frontal systems coming.

I remember this being mentioned in some storm book I read way back when, cant remember which one . . .but you are right it is not commonly brought up.

 

[Ishmael]

I remember this being mentioned in some storm book I read way back when, cant remember which one . . .but you are right it is not commonly brought up.

Pretty sure that was in Heavy Weather Sailing by K. Adlard Coles.

 

[Jud - s/v Sputnik]

But man there is a big difference from 30's to 40's, 30's is enjoyable, 40's is not.       

Fun fact:  when wind speed doubles, the force of the wind increases by the square.  So, going from 20 kts to 40 kts, the force of the wind on the sails goes up four times...and so on....