Canting keels falling off supermaxis - how many?

Discussion in 'Sailboats' started by CT249, Nov 27, 2014.

  1. CT249
    Joined: May 2003
    Posts: 1,449
    Likes: 191, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 215
    Location: Sydney Australia

    CT249 Senior Member

    Sure, but was it a case of powerful people doing anything wrong, or was it a case of fairly intelligent, smart thinking people doing the right thing?

    In the Mystic Seaport Museum letters there's a copy of a letter from Nat to Francis, who had just outlined the design for Live Yankee's rig. Nat appeared to be fairly disapproving, and said that the rig would be the cause for rule changes - as of course it was. That fits in with Nat's expressed purpose in designing the Rule, which was of course to control what he called excessive development and create "wholesome" yachts.

    I got the feeling from the Herreshoffs' letters about Live Yankee that she actually never really got moving well under her luff spar and rotating mast before it all fell down. I would be very interested in getting some more primary source information on the episode, but it seems that those who banned the Live Yankee rig may have been doing the right thing; if the rig had been allowed costs may have skyrocketed and killed the class.

    I've got gear for half-a-dozen development classes, and I love the stuff. Only one of them still survives as an open development class, and that has tiny numbers. The rest have all become more restricted after the numbers collapsed due to excessive development and overnight obsolescence. Going through those experiences gave me a different viewpoint on the merits of uncontrolled development!
     
  2. Doug Lord
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 16,679
    Likes: 349, Points: 93, Legacy Rep: 1362
    Location: Cocoa, Florida

    Doug Lord Flight Ready

    =======================
    Repeatedly questioning my honesty because I emphatically disagree with you is
    just plain despicable. Further, I have said numerous times that I like how the Sydney-Hobart race committee handles canting keel boats*but you must choose to ignore that.

    * http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sa...-falling-off-supermaxis-how-many-51966-3.html post 45
     
    1 person likes this.
  3. Moggy
    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 181
    Likes: 8, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 76
    Location: Somewhere else!

    Moggy Senior Member

    A bit post the event isn't it?

    + I don't believe you. :D
     
  4. Moggy
    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 181
    Likes: 8, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 76
    Location: Somewhere else!

    Moggy Senior Member

    ?.....?

    Popularity grows organically, you can't dictate it, you seem to want to make other peoples choices for them. Designs will get thrown at the wall continuously, most will fail, some will do OK, some will become wildly popular for many differing reasons. Take the Laser, dog of a boat IMO but well marketed as a simple off the beach fun ---> hey presto dog boat makes the Olympics. Go figure! If it where a dictatorship some of the imitators where actually better boats to sail and would have been chosen (IMO) by a rational standard.... but they often could hardly form a fleet.

    BTW... the Hobart looks like a good fleet this year. Canters don't appear to have destroyed the race... at least this year.
     
  5. Moggy
    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 181
    Likes: 8, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 76
    Location: Somewhere else!

    Moggy Senior Member

    Control and development don't much go together. It assumes that those in control can correctly pick a suitable path for development without stifling it, they cannot.

    Some people would have banned foils in Moths, now look at the class what a great little boat. I wish I was still sailing them! One sailed around my cat the other day just checking the old dear out, I was doing something in the teens and he cruised up effortlessly, passed me, passed in front of me, and dropped back for another loop then just put the foot down and took off. He was high dry and relaxed all the way... looked like a magic carpet ride! I was SOAKED in the chop... :rolleyes: ... but having fun.
     
  6. Steve W
    Joined: Jul 2004
    Posts: 1,844
    Likes: 73, Points: 48, Legacy Rep: 608
    Location: Duluth, Minnesota

    Steve W Senior Member

    Doug, I would suggest that if they cant figure out how to move the canting keel of a hundred footer without making it a motorboat perhaps they should downsize to a more manageable size until such a time when the hydraulic technology catches up. Again, I have no problem with the use of the canting keel, just the need to run an engine to operate it.

    Steve.
     
  7. Moggy
    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 181
    Likes: 8, Points: 0, Legacy Rep: 76
    Location: Somewhere else!

    Moggy Senior Member

    A bunch of pedal powered rams? Keep the footy players fit out of season! :D

    Wind powered hydraulics, now that would be suitable!
     
  8. Earl Boebert
    Joined: Dec 2005
    Posts: 392
    Likes: 62, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 302
    Location: Albuquerque NM USA

    Earl Boebert Senior Member

    Oh, agreed, I was talking about the existence of power, not asserting it was improperly exercised. I'm no fan of gimmickry for the reasons you noted. I just loved that turn of phrase.

    Nat was always critical in his letters of Francis' penchant for complexity ; their exchanges about Whirlwind exemplify that.

    Speaking of which, one of the things I learned when helping curate Nat's sailing models for the Herreshoff Museum was that the published lines for Whirlwind are probably wrong, and the correct ones are embodied in the sailing model at Mystic. As best as we can tell no one has ever taken them off it.

    And (shameless plug) the next issue of the American Model Yachting Association quarterly will be on free-sailing models, and will contain drawings and photos of one of Nat's vane gears as well as the replica we had made for Halsey. It was an interesting exercise to figure out how that thing worked :)

    Cheers,

    Earl
     
  9. CT249
    Joined: May 2003
    Posts: 1,449
    Likes: 191, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 215
    Location: Sydney Australia

    CT249 Senior Member

    I've put Moggy on ignore because he accuses people of lying when he has not the slightest evidence to back his claim up, so it seems that he cannot hold a logical conversation. However, I thought I'd address the claim that powerful conservative forces, sometimes said to be the NYYC, killed off the Herreshoff catamarans. Apologies for repeating myself but this claim is also often repeated.

    The claim that the cats were banned is apparently based on a single line from Francis Herreshoff. My take on that is simply that Francis got it wrong in that case. He was writing decades later, about events that took place 14 years before he was born. In his handwritten history of Nat, Francis describes several cats but never says that they were banned. I think he gives other reasons for the death of the early cats somewhere else in his letters but I'm still tracking that down.

    There appears to be no shred of contemporary evidence claiming that cats were banned, apart from one incident where Amaryllis was DSQd from a race against workboat types; she was given a special prize instead.

    There is however abundant evidence that the early cats were treated just like other types; the owners of several early cats were club commodores after all (including John C Stevens, first Commodore of the NYYC and the schooner America) so they were certainly not powerless. We know that cats were not banned. The details of cat racing, with time and place and references from the New York Times and other sources, have been put up on this forum a few times before and are available under the search function.

    This was after all an era when the north-eastern USA was developing new concepts in sailing at an amazing rate. Rating rules, hiking devices, ocean racing, international racing in both big boat and small centreboarders, scows, amateur racing and many other concepts were largely developed at that time and place. These designs had worldwide impact. Members of the sailing establishment like Burgess and Iselin were extremely keen on radical development; it was Iselin who urged Nat to make Reliance even more radical than she was.

    The concept that the New York yachting scene was a bastion of conservatism is just not reasonable on the historical record. There's even been a marxist historian who has pointed out that yacht clubs at the time were less likely than many other clubs to be limited to the upper crust. Some major figures in the sailing scene were saloon keepers and suchlike, and they raced with scions of society like Iselin. In such a pro-development environment there was very little likelihood that cats would be banned, even if they annoyed some people. Francis supports this by noting (in his handwritten account of Nat's life on the Mystic Seaport site) that while some people complained about Amaryllis in that first race, other sailors of the time supported Amaryllis' right to race.

    Yes, cats raced by themselves but breaking boats down into small classes due to their design was standard thinking at the time - catboats raced catboats, sloops raced sloops, schooners raced schooners, etc. The significance is that there doesn't seem to be any "major race" that cats, and cats alone, could be banned from; each type normally just raced its own type.

    So the objective facts indicate that Francis was simply wrong. However, some people apparently think that Francis could never be wrong. In that case, Francis must also have been perfectly correct and true when he wrote that cats were, on average, slower than some monos, for their sail area and useful room (letter to Paul Fenner, Jan 8 1946, from the Mystic Seaport museum site*); that a dry and safe cat is "very expensive indeed" and indeed "far too expensive" (ibid). Francis also said that Nat himself thought that cats under 30' LOA were impractical because their hulls were too narrow, (letter of March 7 1947 to J.C. Chartres, also on the Mystic Seaport site). In the Catamaran Chronicles, Nat said that cats should not have cabins.

    The significance of these statements is that you can't have it both ways - if Francis and Nat are unimpeachable sources who never made any mistakes, then they must also be unimpeachable sources when they claim that they were too expensive and impractical and could not carry cabins. They were obviously wrong with those claims, so therefore Francis can also be wrong with the claim that cats were banned.

    So the evidence appears to be pretty simple. The early cats were treated just like every other type and they suffered no discrimination. The true stick-in-the-muds are not the sailors of old New York, but those who want to cling to an old falsehood that the wonders of modern technology like Google and on-line databases show to be a load of bollocks.

    Sure, some people, especially in the past, don't like multis and have criticised them in public. There are also many multi fans who criticise monos, and that's been the case for decades. Let's bury the misunderstanding and just let people like what they like!

    And having said that, I'm off for an afternoon of sailing on my fast cat!


    * The Jenner letter briefly mentions a small cat that was seen sailing fast around Hawaii - too small and too early to be Manu Kai. I wonder what it was?

    PS - While searching for info about the small Hawaiian cat, I came across a site where cat designer Steve Dashew said that when the Hobie 14 first turned up to a cat regatta, "The contestants had a good laugh at this funny little beach cat sans daggerboards. “It will never sell” was the consensus. Dashew also tells tales of sailors from one early cat class bagging out other cats, and about the tension between the early open-bridgedeck cats and the CSK cat sailors of California which lead to the open cats being chucked out of the existing cat racing. See http://setsail.com/catamaran-history-the-early-days/

    So some early cat sailors insulted and excluded some early cats, but no one sees it as evidence of bad attitude by multi sailors in general, or a conspiracy by multi sailors. Some early mono sailors did exactly the same thing when they insulted and excluded cats, and some people still whine about it today. Strange inconsistency!
     
    1 person likes this.
  10. CT249
    Joined: May 2003
    Posts: 1,449
    Likes: 191, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 215
    Location: Sydney Australia

    CT249 Senior Member

    Ah, cheers Earl. Yes, those letters between Nat and Francis are fascinating from many angles. Interesting info re Whirlwind.
     
  11. Boat Design Net Moderator
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 564
    Likes: 162, Points: 43, Legacy Rep: 1004
    Location: www.boatdesign.net

    Boat Design Net Moderator Moderator

    Let's please try and keep the forums polite to others and keep the jabs and fighting off the forum please. If you find someone's posts are never useful to you or are causing you more annoyance than interest, please click their username and click "add to ignore list." If you want to jab at others or try and provoke them to fight, please direct this type of activity to another site or facebook instead. Thank you.
     

  12. pdwiley
    Joined: Jun 2008
    Posts: 1,004
    Likes: 86, Points: 48, Legacy Rep: 933
    Location: Hobart

    pdwiley Senior Member

    Actually, IMO he's right. If you want to call someone a liar, the onus is on you to back up your claim, not on him to disprove it.

    You back up such a claim by pointing out where, after checkable facts being presented, the person keeps making the same claims after being presented with evidence that those claims are factually incorrect.

    If you don't do that, you're basically engaging in abuse to bolster your position. That simply doesn't work around here. Annoy enough people, your rep score drops, if it goes far enough negative your posting privileges get restricted and it's goodbye time.

    I see the moderator has given you a public warning. I'd pay attention.....

    PDW
     
    1 person likes this.
Loading...
Forum posts represent the experience, opinion, and view of individual users. Boat Design Net does not necessarily endorse nor share the view of each individual post.
When making potentially dangerous or financial decisions, always employ and consult appropriate professionals. Your circumstances or experience may be different.