Artemis Pitchpoled; 1 Dead

Discussion in 'Multihulls' started by Earl Boebert, May 9, 2013.

  1. cavalier mk2
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    cavalier mk2 Senior Member

    People like that miss a lot of the finer points in everything they do. Still there was practice..... they swabbed him.....for DNA.
     
  2. CutOnce

    CutOnce Previous Member

    No guns involved.

    --
    CutOnce
     
  3. Gary Baigent
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    Gary Baigent Senior Member

    Seriousness, Ad Hoc, you mean like in serious career, like Professional career, like uptightness? Get real. This is a net forum, with a half life of 3 minutes ... if you're seriously lucky.
    Seen any sailing Baker/Navy Minotaur types around lately? You know, large monohull platforms with multiple and draggy ladder foils, requiring at least 15 knots wind to actually move.
    A whisper in your serious ear: don't include "lefty" Dave and Williwaw; his foils folded for light airs.
     
  4. Ad Hoc
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    Ad Hoc Naval Architect

    Ahh..you mean in the non-serious way you endlessly and tirelessly and continuously attempt to rebuke anything that does not resemble the world accordingly to your views of “anything” that is not fast with 2 (or 3) hulls or foils etc to the point of being a real predictable yawn???….I believe it is you that needs to chill out and realise that posts are just that….lines of text on a monitor (get the pun?) :p

    See that’s where you fail to grasp what is technology even though you profess to be the harbinger of all that is sleek fast modern and “cutting edge”. It is called evolution. Do you drive a BMW of the 1950s today just because back then it was WOW….or do you drive the latest inspired and continuously evolved and improved upon 2013 version with the latest advanced new materials and ideas; which side by side bears no resemblance to each other than the badge on the front?

    If you attempted to understand this “technology” you continuously love to force down people throats, even though you’re so non-serious about it “man”, then you may have a greater appreciation for what is being done and by whom and others in the periphery of this field and that any inspiration and advancement often comes from totally unrelated and sometimes very unlikely sources. Most designers/engineers don’t stand on soap boxes shouting to the world how wonderful their “advancement” is…only those that follow do owing to their lack of understanding how the incremental step by step evolution in such thinking and materials technology arrived at the end goal seen today.

    Ask Eric Tabarly & Dassault…this is of course such a small insignificant cash strapped no money for projects pioneer as you maintain..is it not??
     
  5. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    I'm all for thread drift, lots of times something interesting pops up.

    But you guys are wasting my time. How about sending a PM.
    Yea I know its better to have witnesses to how brilliant you both are.
    And you have the right to say anything you want.
    But really, does anybody but you two care?

    Artemis Pitchpoled, 1 Dead - remember? A fairly serious subject.
     
  6. CT 249
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    CT 249 Senior Member

    Checking the IOC's Olympic Programme Commission report shows that curling actually rates OK and is cheap to televise. Significantly, it outrates the most "extreme" and fastest sports in the winter Olympics (ski jumping, luge, bobsleigh and skeleton) making it yet more evidence that spectacular speed sports do NOT tend to rate particularly well.

    It would be an interesting study to find out why people appear so often to assume that fast and extreme sports rate well on TV, and why they assume that sports that rate well on TV attract lots of participants. Neither of these common assumptions is true so why are they so common?

    Looking at the sports that rate well indicates that Blackburn's comments may well be true - the appeal of curling is partly that cameras can get in close and that people can see what is happening. It's similar to the way, perhaps, that rowing gets more TV than white water kayaking when the rowing is just a bunch of people rowing in a straight line in flat water - but you can easily see who is in front and who is behind.

    So when there is sod-all evidence that more extreme sports rate better, and sod-all evidence that rating better makes a sport more popular, there is IMHO very, very little justification to believe that having a spectacular class in the AC will actually help sailing. And judging from the lack of entries, sponsorship, support and broadcasting it doesn't seem to be working very well on other levels either.
     
  7. oldsailor7
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    oldsailor7 Senior Member

    Well Chris, we shall see, won't we.
    The last AC was Cat against Tri. A real mismatch, but a real boost for Trimaran lovers.
    This AC will be by two matching Catamarans.
    I'll wager there are going to be lots of sailing fans wanting to see fast and challenging tactics between two similar boats whatever their configuration.
     
  8. CT 249
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    CT 249 Senior Member

    It's not a case of "we will see" - we have ALREADY seen things such as the smallest field for many decades.

    And what were the results of "the real boost for trimaran lovers"? Lots of new boats hitting the water? Where are they? Even the most vaunted new class of tris, the 70s, has failed to get critical mass.

    I wonder what sort of "real boost" - whether we are talking a boost in publicity or participation and for the whole sport or a section of it - is worth a life?

    And who is going to tell Simpson's family that their lifetime of grieving is balanced out by other people finishing their races faster? Faster sailing is not a development like space travel (which has been a huge boon in things like telecommunications, weather satellites etc) or flight (with all that has lead to changes in the world). It's nothing more than a way of going from A to A for fun.

    When I was a kid, growing up without a father because he had died sailing an early cat, I swallowed the "at least he died doing something he loved" line a fair bit. When I became a father, and then the stepfather to children who had also lost their dad too young, I realised that the manner of your death pales into insignificance compared to the enormity of going too soon and leaving young children behind.

    Yes, some lives are always lost in sailing - but major incidents have never occurred at such a high rate in this sport AFAIK. Yes, Simpson may have loved what he was doing - but his early death means that he has missed out on many other days on the water and, more importantly, many years with his friends and family. And they will miss him not just for years, but for all their lives. If you could ask Simpson and his family whether they were glad that he moved to the AC and died a short time later, instead of getting the chance to do all the other sailing and living he could have done over the next 40 years, they'd give you a quick answer.

    And all that just because some people wanted to get around a racecourse sooner.......
     
  9. oldsailor7
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    oldsailor7 Senior Member

    "When I was a kid, growing up without a father because he had died sailing an early cat,"

    Chris, I can truly say I was sad to hear you say that.
    However I can't help thinking it was resonating the connection with the word "Cat".
    My father died young of lung cancer because he smoked all his life. But I can't lay the blame on the cigarettes. They were inanimate objects, just like catamarans.
    My father loved cigarettes---but they killed him, your Father and Simpson loved sailing ---but it killed them both.
    Please don't let your understandable bias affect your judgement on Multihulls vs Monohulls, ---which I have been aware of for some time, due to your negative posts on SA.
     
  10. motorbike
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    motorbike Senior Member

    What a load of tripe.

    Your father died because he was addicted to nicotine, as well as the pressure of a multi billion dollar marketing campaign and the lack of education around the dangers of smoking. Plenty of people now know that it will kill you and choose to refrain.
    Drawing an analogy between the risks of sailing an unsafe design and smoking cigarettes is ridiculous.
    All the armchair admirals are happy to send the troops in as cannon fodder, I wonder how many would send their sons into the AC battle if they knew that 50% of the fleet had suffered catastrophic failure and a death.
     
  11. Grey Ghost
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    Grey Ghost Senior Member

    50% sounds like a lot of deaths. How many in total were there though?
    (I don't mean to minimize the tragedy or loss of life, only to look at it clearly compared with other races.)
     
  12. motorbike
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    motorbike Senior Member

    What I mean is of the 4 boats in the competition 2 have crashed one destroyed and the other effectively so. Plus the fatality, so not good numbers so far.

    One more pitchpole and the AC in this format is toast. I think a lot of people have investments in this fight, which is say they are dragging it into their favourite arena, old tech vs new or multi vs mono etc, I dont think any of that is relevant, but safety sure is. The boats are radical, have handling issues, and are predicted to remove the "match" from match racing, so it all seems a bit pointless.

    The fatality is terribly sad for family and friends and all the comments about how the sailor would have wanted the sailing to go on etc is rubbish, I think the sailor would have liked to have lived while crewing on a safer craft than perished on the 72 given a choice.
     
  13. CT 249
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    CT 249 Senior Member

    Thanks for the kind remarks, but it's not a matter of being negative towards multis. What I am negative towards is anti-mono remarks and those who say that multis MUST be allowed into races created for monos.

    There are many examples of people who make anti-mono remarks, as you know. There are also many who deny to monos what just about every other sporting discipline or equipment type is allowed - namely, the chance to have races just for that type of equipment.

    I do not and will not believe that it is right or good for sailors to abuse other types of sailboat; over on SA I was recently taking issue with people from one class I own and have sailed with success, because they slagged off other boats. It's extremely arrogant IMHO, because it assumes that those who own other types are too stupid or ignorant to know what they should sail. Actually it is more than arrogant - attacking the boats sailed by others is also stupid (as who can know the reasons why others find something enjoyable) and illogical.

    I hope that one day we'll get another cat, probably a Tornado, but at no stage will I join in with those who abuse monos as many posters do. I will also not join in with those who say that monos should not be allowed to have major mono-only events, in the same way that cats are allowed to have major cat-only events, malibu surfboards are allowed to have longboard-only surfing events, V8s are allowed to have major events without Ferraris or F1 cars, kites are allowed to have kite-only events, and conventional bicycles are allowed to have restricted events like the Tour de France.

    If my feelings on the ethics, morals and logic of abusing other sailors seem more obvious in the mono and multi issue, it's because of the forums you see me on - on windsurfing forums I will stick up for boat sailors against the bigots who believe that boards are better.

    Having said that, I think that for some reason - perhaps the early and over-enthusiastic writing of people like Piver, perhaps the demonstrably incorrect claims that the Herreshoff cats were all banned and the fact that until the net matured it wasn't easy to show that such claims were unhistorical rubbish - a large proportion of the multi community appear to feel that they have been singled out and treated unfairly. In fact they have been treated just like just about all disciplines have been treated.

    Multis are great, abusive anti-mono multi sailors are not.
     
  14. CT 249
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    CT 249 Senior Member

    There's been something like 168 days of sailing in the AC72s, counting all boats. Two boats have suffered major problems and one life has been lost. Say it's 3 sailing months each boat x 4 boats = 16 "sailing months" for per death and 8 sailing months for each 2 calamitous incidents (ie capsizes or major failure).

    In comparison, there have been about 97 IACC boats built over about 17 years. Quite a few are still working as charter boats. There has been one death and two sinkings plus one major structural failure. Say the average boat is half as old as the class and that each boat sailed 3 month per year on average (remember, a significant number has been sailing for years) and we see one death per 2,500 sailing months and one calamitous incident per 1000 sailing months.

    Something like 100 12 Metres have been launched. Many are still sailing regularly at 40-50 years or age. AFAIK there have been no deaths in AC 12s and no sinkings or calamitous incidents. That's 0 deaths or calamitous incidents in something like 10,000 sailing months.

    The J Class AC boats got one death with about 10 boats sailing over about 25 years. The US ones had short sailing lives but some of the Brit ones raced the regatta circuit for years. Say 300 sailing months at a very rough guess for one death and 0 sinkings or calamitous incidents.

    These figures are obviously rough as guts and we are dealing with tiny sample sizes so the stats are very dodgy, but the trend is pretty interesting.
     

  15. michael pierzga
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    michael pierzga Senior Member

    But now we live in a TV world...not the Old World.

    Joe six pack is the audience..... crashes and death sells.

    Perhaps they can further degrade the event and turn it into a boat drag race. Teams could even put special effects fire breathing exhaust pipes on the sides.


    Dems dat died were the lucky ones.



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