Amaryllis

Yipster brings up an interesting point. I tend to not be a believer in flexible beam fastenings. In my perhaps unscientific view, any movement of the boat components tends to eat up energy that might be applied to driving the boat.

 

Flex mounts/ suspension

The Gougeon brothers designed and built a tri(or two*) with flexible ama mounts-it was pretty fast. These days a lot of multies are using lifting foils-flexible attachment of an ama with a lifting foil is probably a bad idea in most cases.

http://www.jamestowndistributors.co...cId=908&title=Pioneers of Speed - West System :

"The last commissioned boat the Brothers built was Adrenalin. Started in 1984 and launched in 1987, she was a trimaran with articulating amas built to Formula 40 rules for Bill Piper of Ossineke, Michigan and intended to race in the European circuit. She shocked the sailboat racing community by placing a very close second in her first regatta on the Grand Prix circuit in 1988.

She raced for two seasons in Europe against the traditional big cats until, as Jan put it, "They couldn't stand being consistently beaten and changed the rule so the boat became illegal and only cats could race." Adrenalin was purchased by New Zealander Grant Beck in 2007 and is awaiting his attention to get back on the water."

* Prior to Adrenaline Meade Gougeon built at least four small tri's-one, "Victor T" (a C Class tri) won the North American Multihull Championship in 1969. You can see the articulating ama if you look closely at the Victor T picture and compare the pitch attitude of the two amas......

 

Adrenalin Trimaran

Had a senior moment there and couldn't remember the name of that flexible tri that was being built for the original Forumla 40 races.

Just found it being rebuilt over in NZ:

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?103153-Gougeons-Formula-40-trimaran-Adrenalin

 

So you found that old original article
I had originally posted link to that article on my website, but then on second thoughts figured it was too long a version for people to read, ...so I modified the link to the shorter version/description.

Thanks for posting it anew Doug.

 

-------------------
Hi, Brian- the link here doesn't seem to work-will you doublecheck it, please.

UPDATE-Thanks Brian!

 

Why add flex?

I never get the idea of active flex unless you are up against the limits of the material and need to limit shock loads.

Although pushing a bow through a wave rather than over it may seem to need more energy it may not. Energy will still be needed to move the bows up and down - to overcome the hulls rotational inertia in that plane. I think that history tells us (beach cats, racing boats etc) that stiffer boats are faster.

I don't even like Wharram's beam bolt idea. It actually concentrates load onto specific bolts. If an engineer looked at the thing they would probably find more highly stressed parts because of the localised loading rather than Wharram's aim of reduced loading. Much the same would have happened with Amaryllis I suspect.

There are also second order effects of a flexible platform. Basically the rig is held up by the platform - if the platform wobbles then so to does the rig. I don't like wobbly rigs. This used to happen on my Twiggy when the under wires were too loose. A wave would hit the float, the float would shake, the windward stay would vibrate, the mast would shake, the whole boat would flex which would start the whole thing over again. One good wave could vibrate the darn thing for 15 seconds. When I tightened the underwires (waterstays) properly the rig didn't shake and the vibrations settled down much quicker. Made me feel so much happier.

cheers

Phil

 

1- I've checked out Chapelle, of course. That "rose tinted Polyanna viewpoint" is an objective view of the available facts - such as the facts that catamarans were not banned, and were sailed by influential sailors.

2- Your claim that the Sandbaggers were not used as workboats contradicts the research of people such as Ben Fuller as I recall his article in Wooden Boat. Ben was the curator of the Mystic Seaport museum, which has a vast historical database and an original Sandbagger. Ben's writings helped to spawn Sandbagger recreations and he basically had the perfect database at work; I'll go with him, thanks.

We also know that Sandbaggers DID work after their racing careers - for example Shadow and Walter F Davids worked into the 20th century. So there is nothing specious about the workboat comment - it is reality.

3) If the excessive anger you claim we had against multis and IOR lightweights was real, then surely it shows that such anger is negative and therefore something we should not encourage, particularly when historical documents are now so easily available that we can re-examine the myths of the past.

 

Only one reply to you CT249, yes, sandbaggers were originally work boats, never denied that, but Susie S, Comet and the others were race boats, and expensive ones at that.

 

havent given this real deep thoughts and dont have what i read up front, you have good points tho; enough flexing going allready
than again; flexing hulls may give a smoother ride, possibly take rig flex down, reduce wave drag and what else..

 

From The Foiling Week today: http://www.foilingweek.com/2015/11/cats-and-the-cup-the-first-encounter-over-a-century-ago/Amarylis

 

For more related fun... see Gougeon's Adrenilin
http://trimarancool.blogspot.com/2009/10/adrenalin-is-pumping-again.html

Cheers,
TomH

 

I can't seem to open that link,...tried this morning, and again this afternoon.??

 

I grew up in that era. It was the late 60's and early 70's when I got involved in boats,....and quickly became a multihull fan,....a number of others were coming onboard when I posted the website
Sailing Back to the Future

 

Governor's Cup Race on Chesapeake Bay

All of us aboard that catamaran vessel felt we were owned a little recognition, even though there was no 'first to finish'. trophy :?:

 

That's a one-sided view though, Brian. The rules you criticised are trying to balance between design progression on the one hand, and making the entire existing fleet obsolete and therefore killing racing on the other hand.

There is no way that Cascade can be claimed as any development that was killed by the IOR. It was an extremely slow 37 footer that was only made a winner by the IOR, because it went through a loophole to rate as a 30 footer. All they did was clean up the loophole that one boat went through. You can't on the one hand criticise IOR for slowing design improvement, while also criticising it for not forcing everyone to go to Cascade types that were much slower for their length and cost than existing boats.

What do you want the IOR administrators to have done to Cascade? Leave her with the huge advantage she got by going through a loophole, so that the owners of existing 37 footers had to sell their boats and buy 37 footers that were much slower than their old boats but rated lower? Did you want all the guys with 30 footers to sell them because they could not compete with Cascade but rated the same?

What was going to happen to all the people who lost most of the money they had put into Scampis, Ranger 37s and all the other new boats of the time? Once all their existing boats had lost most of their value, how could they afford to buy the new (and very very slow) Cascade type? Over in NZ around that time Bruce Farr's first half tonners were making waves. They, like the other lightweights from the Europeans, would almost certainly have been beaten by Cascade types and that could have snuffed out the entire lightweight "mainstream" revolution. Are you seriously saying it would have been better if we had spent all the remainder of the '70s running around with expensive and slow cat ketches instead of cheap and fast lightweights?

Could you please explain what you wanted the IOR rulemakers to do in that case? If what they did was so crap then why did they produce the biggest offshore racing fleets ever seen?


Re the Governer's Cup and getting a mention for line honours. Did they mention the line honours winners in every other division?

The fact that there was no line honours trophy could be significant. It could be that the organisers specifically did not want to stress line honours, because they wanted the handicap winners to get the recognition - not the people who bought the fastest boat (mono or multi). Given that the Governor's Cup is one of the biggest races around, the organisers must have been doing a damn good job. Maybe the very success of the race indicates that their way was the best way?

We got line honours in four of the five races in our last multihull regatta and no one mentioned it. Does that mean that the other cat sailors were biased or bigoted? Nope, it just means that line honours aren't always worth mentioning.

The world's biggest cat race has finally, after several decades, open itself up to one other form of sailing - windsurfing. This year the cats were beaten home by the windsurfers, which went almost 20% faster than the foiling cats - but the reports about the cat race and on at least some of the cat sites didn't mention that the windsurfers were faster. If the cats don't do make a fuss about a different type of craft beating them, then why should the monos?