The boat I saw was a yellow or cream colour, and an Irish boat. But that was in the late 1970s, and the intervening 40+ years is long enough for a switch to UK sail numbers and a radical repaint.
Reminds me of pre-satellite navigation - I once had to make a landfall with 72 hours of dead reckoning after last celestial, and crossing an ocean current too. We had WFAX, so we deliberately aimed to offset to what was predicted to be upwind of our destination, so that when we found land we'd be certain which way to turn and sail downwind to patrol the coast and find the harbor. Nailed it 6 miles upwind of the harbor entrance!
We (or at least I) were talking about 30 years ago and earlier.
True. But as I said, it's not the engine. It's the sensors and the injections. For example, 30 years ago you had to guess your AFR across the RPM range. Today you can calibrate your fueling curve based on real-time data. My point was 30 years ago, everyone had a good idea how to extract power but couldn't implement it. It took real skill and guesswork. Today, even a moron like myself can read a log and adjust the parameters.
Do you remember the Pride sinking in 1986? I knew one of the survivors. Quite the story, sailing with the hatches open, a knockdown, down she went. Four dead.
My slip neighbors just bought a new Beneteau 38.1, not a piece of wood down below and the owner who has sailed across the Pacific commented that there were no hand rails on the overhead. Guess it is meant to sail gently from one protected harbor to the next so you don't need anything to hold on to. Looked kind of like a cheap trailer "downstairs". The owners were a little sheepish about it.It seems like if a boat isn't a racing boat, it is designed for the charter market and mainly needs 4 heads and 4 showers in a 40 foot boat
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 the virtues of an offshore cruising boat when they get two weeks of vacation per year. Interestingly, the wealthy in the US are working longer hours and taking less time off than ever before. That doesn't mean they're going to give up the sailboat, but it probably changes what is appealing to them in a boat.
GA aircraft design has been as affected by regulation as sailing as been affected by racing rules. In aviation, the role of rule makers is played by the slow, and very conservative FAA certification process. Your brand new Cessna comes with an engine based on 1930s technology. Things like fuel injection and computer controls are just starting to show up. And a 100hp airplane engine cost 10 times as much as a LA crate engine, and has to be torn down completely for overhaul the equivalent of every 30K-50K miles.1930 Waco:
View attachment 439033
2021 Waco:
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The radio is better in the 2021 version
Where I work we still have Cobol programmers too.
Turbocharging, supercharging, 4 valves per cylinder, and a whole shitload of "the newest thing" in cars is stuff that actually predates WW II. There were even electronic wastegates in WW II. With the notable exception of the now-extinct Concorde, passenger aircraft have not gotten any faster than the old beaters from the 1950s.
I think designing anything not made from microcircuits isn't as divorced from the past as some of you seem to think. Hell, Baltimore Clippers were the "extreme" boats of their day two centuries ago and earned a well deserved reputation as barely seaworthy boats that needed expert handling way way before the VOR.
There were several bad events about that time. It turned out that sailing 19th century vessels in the 20th century is just as hazardous as it was sailing them back in the day.
One of the “classic” books on big-objective alpine rock/ice climbing (Extreme Alpinism, by Mark Twight) starts out with the simple sentence, “Climbing is a mental game.” (Follow that up with his protege, Steve House’s book, “Training for the Uphill Athlete”, for ultramarathoners and ski mountaineers, and it’s a good picture of the basics required... Some cross overs there to sailing.)
And airplanes tend to receive inspection and maintenance prior to component failure. Imagine checking a marine engine for visible faults, draining sumps, inspecting the steering systems, sails for broken threads. etc. before each daysail.
I was struck with the apparent laziness of some who won't bother checking for water in fuel per video.
I'd argue that it given modern weather forecasting, it's considerably less dangerous.... but the basic hazards of vessel type/configuration cannot be overcome when you roll snake eyes, which is occasionally going to happen.
