Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts

[accnick]

I'll betcha ol' ACCNICK knows a little something about shining those brass buttons on his blazer.

Never bothered, actually.

But I do know how to build my own boat, and sail it around the world. That's a pretty decent start on "knowing something" when it comes to sailing.

 

[Cruisin Loser]

I have the book, bought a sistership to her covergirl. 

Being able to heave-to can be an important skill for resting the crew. There are times when comfort and ride motion become important considerations. Sail offshore enough and you will experience those times. 

Most people who sail around with their wife, like me, want something that is safe, solid, comfortable, sails well, has no bad habits, and can carrry water, fuel, food, etc. for several weeks cruising. If you will not be offshore, seaberths diminish in importance, but I take my mom and pop cruiser offshore to Bermuda and back regularly (not this year, due to covid, sadly), so a seagoing layout is important. 

For such dual purpose boats, there is still plenty of valuable information in the book. It's short, concise, accessible. 

 

[mathystuff]

There's also Scharping's book.

Not sure if there's an english version. He also starts with an analysis of the fastnet catastrophe, but then makes the case for light boats with flat runs aft.

Good read.

On heaving to:

Short keel, light boats can do it, too.

 

[Jud - s/v Sputnik]

I see at least one book there that I wrote a lot of.

Can’t be Ashley (definitely the wrong century  ) or Tim (Brendan Voyage/Sinbad Voyage), as he quite recently passed away. Brion, too. Don Casey?  Nigel?  Hmm...

 

[MFH125]

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.  Some of the articles are better than others.  Some of them have aged better than others, often through no fault of authors.  Casting this book like it's a traditionalist manifesto seems strange to me.

There are lots of books out there which are technically out of date, but very worth the time: The Common Sense of Yacht Design, The Compleat Cruiser, From my Old Boat Shop, Of Yachts & Men, etc.  Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts is well worth reading if it sounds interesting to you, but I wouldn't personally call it a classic or a must read.

If the book sounds interesting, then I highly recommend reading Rod Stephen's unfinished and unpublished book.   I found it more fun to read, largely because it's less edited and you get a lot more of Rod's voice and rambling anecdotes and stories.  Since it's less dryly technical, much of the wisdom is less concrete and more applicable to modern sailors.

The book is a sort of fetishism, an exercise in cargo-cult boat design. Maybe if we build little CCA yawls out of popsicle sticks and set them in a shrine and burn a really fine pipe tobacco before the altar, the good old days of graceful underballasted-yet-still-grossly-heavy patrician racing craft will return. Hear us, Lord Olin

The irony, of course, is that Lord Olin was very heavily involved in the creation of the IOR...

 

[estarzinger]

Can a Moore 24 really heave to?  Is this just a terminology thing?  

The term 'hove to' means quite different things to different nationalities.  After the queens birthday storm a report was initially released suggesting being hove-to was the most used successful strategy . . and then they discovered that many of the kiwi sailors were not using the term in the way US sailors do - they were also referring to 'lying ahull' and to 'forereaching' also as hove -to.

We and Webb will look at the future weather and sometimes 'park' our boats to let something pass below or above us - we will be sitting in nice weather 'hove-to' while the bad weather goes by elsewhere.  This is super common on the passage from the islands down to Kiwi land.  So that again is a different usage of 'hove-to' as a 'waiting technique' rather than a 'storm technique'. Pretty much any boat can do that no matter the design.

Silk (and most ketches) will hove-to perfectly, sitting very calmly, with just the mizzen up.

Hawk could heave to but it was not very stable or settled or comfortable (in decent sized waves), but she would forereach perfectly.

We sailed down in Chile when the pardey's were also there, and interestingly in the biggest blow they were in they did NOT heave-to nor use their para-anchor but instead forereached.

A bunch of this depends on the wave conditions (and sea room) - whether they are coming from a single direction (which is easier to set up for) or multiple directions (which makes being hove to less stable), and the wave shapes (big smooth ones and the boat will just bob up and down and feel good, bad shapes even if smaller can knock the boat around).

I disagree with an unconditioned statement that 'every boat can heave-to' - yea it is technically true, but leaves too much unsaid, because some boats can technically heave-to but they are not very stable in that attitude in difficult conditions and other techniques are way better for them.

 

[Blue Crab]

Never bothered, actually.

But I do know how to build my own boat, and sail it around the world. That's a pretty decent start on "knowing something" when it comes to sailing.

There's a lot of that going on up in here, Nick. You a hedgehog or a fox?

 

[Ajax]

I have heaved to (how awkward is that phrase?) on every boat I have owned, from a 16' Wayfarer to the current C&C 35. They will all do it, but sometimes you have to fiddle a bit...

Hove to.

 

[accnick]

There's a lot of that going on up in here, Nick. You a hedgehog or a fox?

That would depend on who you ask, on any particular day. I once thought I knew a lot more than I probably do. Ironically, thinking you know a lot can get you started in the direction to understand how much more there is to learn.

I take some things as truths, others as guidelines, some as absolute BS. The trick is differentiating between them. Experience can help in that regard, provided you survive and learn from your mistakes.

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

 

[fufkin]

I think that you are mistaken there, @fufkin.  The problem in 1979 was that the IOR penalised stability, so boats were built with as little of it as possible.  For example, when Denis Doyle's magnificent Frers 50-ft Moonduster  was launched in 1981, they were frantically bolting lad to the ceiling to try to reduce her rating.

That doesn't apply to contemporary designs.  The rating rules are less stupid, so new boats are not built with the keel style which Doug Peterson popularised in the 1970s.  That form concentrated weight high up, but contemporary boats keep the weight low, usually in a bulb.  So they have way more stability than the old IORs boats, and most rating rules now actively measure and enforce minimum stability requirements.

The irony of all this is is that it was the old dinosaurs like Olin Stephens who had created a rating rule which bred unsafe boats.  It was the younger designers from the margins of sailing who developed boats that that are significantly lighter, faster and safer than both the museum pieces which Stephens drew for the blazer-wearers of the NYYC and the diamond planform monsters spawned by his rule.

Olin Stephens was sorely disappointed in the instability that was bred by designers maxing out the IOR rule, and this is a large part of the book...an investigation as to what went wrong in the years between CCA and IOR. It is not necessarily a celebration of museum pieces, as you call them. You should read the book. I think you'll enjoy it as it has a lot of insight into an era that you seem keenly aware of, and goes through a deep analysis of its shortcomings. 

I've been mistaken before, at least a couple of times, and am happy to be corrected, but I'm not sure what exactly for in this case. My comments on a modern pizza wedge coming full circle and having similarities to an IOR were in the context of the book's discussion of AVS, as well as righting moment when inverted. 

It would be interesting to see where these old gents would end up on a discussion of an inverted POGO. I'll throw down a fiver that an old CCA has a better inverted righting moment score than a POGO. Having participated in a rollover test for an OPEN 60, my hunch is that the self righting claim is a bit of a dodge as they do the whole test with no rig on. As well, for a STIX type rating, the POGO gets a bonus for having positive flotation. I can't count how many pictures of inverted ocean racers I've seen that were not rated for positive flotation but remained floating when capsized, so there's that.

Another element of safety offshore is crew comfort. Have you ever sailed a modern beamy deep drafted racer? To me they are not nearly as comfortable as a narrower more conservative design. There is also the factor of upwind comfort and performance that some of the more modern lighter designs suffer a bit with.

When you say modern designs have more stability, that is true for initial stability only, not necessarily for vanishing stability, and they have an undesirable higher stability when inverted.

The way I look at it is, sure CCA was an era, IOR was an era, you have great boats designed outside of these rules from those eras, and perhaps a few within them. You also have some abominations. One of todays trends towards ULDB wider flatter hulls with deep draft, well its another trend with another bias. 

I think some of the ol dinosaurs still score bigger with upwind comfort in a seaway, so maybe there's still something to learn from them.

I'll mention it again. 'Surviving the Storm' is a great book that brings the 'Offshore Characteristics' discussion forward, analyzes the shortcomings of both CCA and IOR and arrives at a more modern conclusion as to what constitutes a safe offshore boat. Modern in the sense of plumb bows, max waterline and no overhangs, but maybe not in step with todays trends toward a higher length to beam ratio. Anything less than 4:1 was deemed positively uncivilized in a seaway and not a good bet in terms of how well your boat performs upside down.

 

[DDW]

I disagree with an unconditioned statement that 'every boat can heave-to' - yea it is technically true, but leaves too much unsaid, because some boats can technically heave-to but they are not very stable in that attitude in difficult conditions and other techniques are way better for them.

I know that a Una rigged boat cannot heave to in any sense. It can do a "Stephens Stop", but that isn't comfortable, essentially ahull with the sails up. Getting a good stable configuration heaving to may take a sail combination unavailable on some boats. It is one of the beauties of a ketch or yawl rig. 

Heaving to isn't something that is done much anymore, but everyone should try it. Motion and noise calm down and you can make your lunch and espresso in peace. It is about 1% of the effort to do compared to deploying (and recovering) any kind of drag device. 

 

[Ishmael]

I know that a Una rigged boat cannot heave to in any sense. It can do a "Stephens Stop", but that isn't comfortable, essentially ahull with the sails up. Getting a good stable configuration heaving to may take a sail combination unavailable on some boats. It is one of the beauties of a ketch or yawl rig. 

Heaving to isn't something that is done much anymore, but everyone should try it. Motion and noise calm down and you can make your lunch and espresso in peace. It is about 1% of the effort to do compared to deploying (and recovering) any kind of drag device. 

It's handy to heave to while you go down to the head, especially when there's traffic. If there's nobody around I'll just let the autopilot drive while I pee.

 

[fufkin]

not sure how to edit: My previous comment should read 'todays trend toward a lower length to beam ratio', not 'higher'. Cheers

 

[El Borracho]

The full keel aficionados boast about how they can hold a course like on rails. I call that "doesn't turn well." The displacement aficionados boast about calm motion in rough seas. I call that "not moving." They wax romantically about restful tradewind cruising. I say "boredom."

 

[Cruisin Loser]

The full keel aficionados boast about how they can hold a course like on rails. I call that "doesn't turn well." The displacement aficionados boast about calm motion in rough seas. I call that "not moving." They wax romantically about restful tradewind cruising. I say "boredom."

That in no way diminishes the validity of their choices. They are buying the boat for themselves, not for you or me. I happen to prefer a deep fin, spade rudder, tall carbon rig, paradoxically on a wooden boat with a 1930's interior aesthetic, but I appreciate the different boats out there as other people's ideas of the pursuit of happiness. 

If an Island Packet is what makes you happy, that's what you should sail. If a Pogo makes you happy, that's what you should sail. Classic, catamaran, meter boat, catboat, whatever. The goal is happiness, and whatever gets you there.

 

[El Borracho]

That in no way diminishes the validity of their choices. They are buying the boat for themselves, not for you or me. I happen to prefer a deep fin, spade rudder, tall carbon rig, paradoxically on a wooden boat with a 1930's interior aesthetic, but I appreciate the different boats out there as other people's ideas of the pursuit of happiness. 

If an Island Packet is what makes you happy, that's what you should sail. If a Pogo makes you happy, that's what you should sail. Classic, catamaran, meter boat, catboat, whatever. The goal is happiness, and whatever gets you there.

I didn't diminish the validity of anyone's choices. You colored it with negativity. Only pointing out differing opinions of each quality. If a sailor seeks not turning, moving slowly and avoiding the thrill of lively sailing so be it.

 

[SloopJonB]

The term 'hove to' means quite different things to different nationalities.  After the queens birthday storm a report was initially released suggesting being hove-to was the most used successful strategy . . and then they discovered that many of the kiwi sailors were not using the term in the way US sailors do - they were also referring to 'lying ahull' and to 'forereaching' also as hove -to.

Then they were wrong.

Hove to is a very specific thing, not an opinion.

 

[Commercial Boater]

Just as an aside, and in reference to the original post in this thread quoting a review lamenting how you can't buy "fishermen's anchors" today: you can! They're still used in modern longline fisheries, in my personal experience. You can often order them special from commercial fishing supply stores and magazines. I toyed with the idea of using one as a spare anchor for my Catalina 22 but they're incredibly awkward to stow and don't provide holding power per weight comparable to a Danforth or newer style.

 

[TwoLegged]

I've been mistaken before, at least a couple of times, and am happy to be corrected, but I'm not sure what exactly for in this case. My comments on a modern pizza wedge coming full circle and having similarities to an IOR were in the context of the book's discussion of AVS, as well as righting moment when inverted. 

Your mistake is in failing to distinguish between two types of beamy boat:

1. a beamy IOR boat which carried some of its ballast in the ceiling, and the rest high up in the keel
   
2. a modern beamy boat, which carries its ballast in a deep bulb
   

That gives the modern boat a higher AVS than the IOR boat.

 

[shaggybaxter]

???

Don't know about a Pogo, but most cruising boats can be made to heave to effectively.

I was pleasantly surprised to find mine hove to quite easily. Took a bit of fiddling to work out the traveller position to keep it sitting still but not much more than you’d normally do. 

It never ceases to fascinate me watching the water to windward settle down, it’s like magic.