Daggerboards vs keeled hulls

[rayaldridge]

Originally Posted by Alan.M

Unless it was blowing a gale, sailing at 16 - 19 knots and 45 degrees AWA means you quite likely were not making any progress to windward at all....

Sounds like a beam reach, doesn't it?

[Bruce Woods]

Originally Posted by Richard Woods

Yes but after his first season racing the first Lynx owner changed it to daggerboards because it was too slow (but then was not much faster with boards fitted).


www.sailingcatamarans.com

Great, some real world results. Richard woods says the same boat fitted with either option makes very little difference on the race course. Boards obviously slightly faster for racing as one would predict. Is this the end of the discussion?

Catsketcher you seem to be cherry picking to suit your argument. You as much as anyone would know the finish on a high aspect foil has got to be good to work well, which is not always easy to maintain on a cruiser especially if one is using them as depth-sounders, and the large amount of buoyancy that a keel provides if taken into account by the designer can lead to finner waterlines for instance or the cruiser can carry more crap for the same waterline,to mention just a couple. Of course boards can be more efficient at some things. A lot depends on where one sails, and how they sail, as to the best choice for them.

Regards
.

[Steve W]

Phil, i think that Buddy Ebsens Polynesian Concept, launched in 1968 was about when Rudy Choy went to symetric hulls and daggerboards a very succesful boat for sure.
Steve.

[Richard Woods]

Originally Posted by Richard Woods

Equally if you are fitting daggerboards there will be little performance gain if you use crosscut dacron sails

Sorry, I didn't express myself well. I agree with you that a daggerboard boat will sail better, even if it has cheap sails. What I meant was I don't think it is cost/time effective to go to the trouble of installing daggerboards if you don't also spend extra money on good sails

The Lynx went from very slow to slow (relatively speaking) when it changed to boards

I have raced a LAR keel Strider against a daggerboarded Strider many times. The hull was the same, the rig the same, yet the daggerboarded boat always pointed higher and footed slightly faster. The difference was more obvious in light winds and also in high winds/big seas.

I'm sure you've already read my FAQs page to see more of my opinions about keels, performance etc.

As Ray says, sailing at 45deg apparent is not going to windward. You should be sailing at 32-35deg just as a monohull does

Richard Woods of Woods Designs

www.sailingcatamarans.com

[rick.hayjpn]

Mea culpa, mea culpa.

For those of you who picked up on the glaring error in what I wrote earlier about the Vince Bartolone 42 foot cat's speed, somehow in making some minor change to my text I let a chunk of a sentence fall out and didn't catch it. It should have read something like the following:

"...going to windward at 45 degrees apparent, the boat surging over the waves [and spray flying, we could make eight or ten knots, and I thought I saw twelve once or twice, while off the wind the needle was over] at sixteen knots and above, regularly touching nineteen..." etc.

Whew! That'll teach me to check more closely before I put something up. I should have been tipped off when I saw the first doubting comment. I hope I can finish this post without messing it up.

The boat was an amazing work of catamaran design and a work of art really, much lighter than a lot of cats today because lean on accommodation (more to my taste) for a boat of her size, and beautiful to look at, no big deck house and not an awkward line to her. Right after arriving on Maui I saw the boat swinging at her mooring and went and asked around for the skipper. Took two days to find him and fortunately he had a charter captain's license, so some friends and acquaintances made there on Maui and I got together and chartered with him for two days of great sailing and diving. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that the boat had been designed by Bartolone. I was deeply impressed with how well the boat performed, not only in speed but in balance and nimbleness. As for the wind on the channel between Maui and Molokai, the trades are funneled through there like a wind tunnel. It makes for some fabulous sailing if you're aboard a good boat.

But the principle stands, cats don't have to motorsail to windward. That depends on a lot of things not necessarily related to underwater appendages. We lowered the sled for the outboard and motored only as we returned to pick up the boat's mooring toward evening, as we came under the lee of Maui's "North Island" area. On the other hand, I remember a friend's smaller cat built with LAR keels that was a dog on the wind and very disappointing, but the boat was too heavy for her lines and drug wide transoms, so no surprise.

Don't anyone get me wrong, please, I am not arguing with the reality that a boat with well designed boards and rig, all else equal, will go faster to windward or, in some cases, point higher than one with none or with an LAR. It's just that a well designed cat without boards can be an excellent boat for some people, depending on how they want to sail, and where.

And for those of you who reasonably ask about the symmetrical hulls on that boat as opposed to the general impression that CSK designed asymmetrical ones, beginning with a little cat named Foamy and going on to the well-known Polynesian Concept, often called Polycon, they did design cats with symmetrical hulls. Rudy Choy's later work mostly was of very large cats with symmetrical hulls. I talked to him about it one time back in the early nineties, and he told me that despite the more recent work in symmetrical hulls he still had the feeling that way back in the early days when he was at the helm in a race in pretty hairy conditions he could feel the boat correct herself while surfing before a steep overtaking wave and avoid broaching, a phenomenon he didn't detect in boats with symmetrical hulls. He felt that the asymmetrical hull form may have had something to do with that, but at the time there was no way to prove it. I don't know if there is even today.

[rattus]

Man, this is a ridiculous argument.

For anyone who is interested in performance enough to get their fat ass off the lounge and set their beer down once in a while in order to actively manage their craft, the daggerboard(s) is the right answer.

If you're not interested, then keels, mini or not, are for you. Throw another martini at the barbie.

Jeesh, is that so hard? ;-)

Mike

[cavalier mk2]

I actually did motorsail to windward for a while on our spring cruise. Driving rain, winds 25+ knots. With the pilot house we decided to stay dry and ran the extra long shaft on half throttle for lateral plane and assistance with sloppy tacks. I mean, really who wants the cocoa to get cold....