Heavy sailboats : Can they point ?

Modern racing boat are quicker than Colin Archers but I do confirm that this one:

http://www.raphael-dinelli.com/

can just not progress upwind in a force 10 gale unless the waves are unusually shallow

luckily for those guys, you don't need to do that very often. Furthermore Southern Pacific has strong winds but shallow waves
Try this off Ireland and you will see the point ! :!:

 

SailDesign is right.Heavy boats can beautifully sail windward as long as they have adequate sail area.
Speed "made good to windward" doesn't depend on displacement.You can easily see it on a Gimcrack diagram or a polar diagram.

 

Shallow waves in the Southern Ocean? Hmmm...
The attached pic shows anything but shallow waves.
I know, the length is pretty long vs. the height, but I challenge to define these waves as "easy to sail into".

Steve

 

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4085

Attached pic has apparently already been uploaded here (on page 3).

 

Sorry, English is not my first language, I did mean waves with low heigh/length ratio.

 

You've helped make my point. It isn't lightweight, new, heavy, old. It is preparation and seamanship.

Police Car was one of the lighter types in the '79 AC and she seemed to do quite well in the Fastnet. Turner's big S&S was one of the heavier types and did very well. Both were very well prepared and sailed.

 

The Southern ocean has massive waves. Goss was lucky when he turned around sailed upwind to pick up Dinelli. The boats design team were somewhat alarmed that he was doing this. By careful helming and a tremendous amount of seamanship he acheived his goal. It is very unlikely from a structural pouint of view that his yacht could have continued to take the punishment indefinately. However the British steel racing yachts did sail W to E and were designed accordingly.

It is always incongruos that the boats which should be designed to work to windward in heavy seas are the very boats designed for fast sailing. It is the racing crew who force the yacht on to her doom in weather that a cruiser would lie to or run with. The lust for winning breeds bad seamanship and designers would be advised to accomodate for that. In the fatal Sydney to Hobart many competant skippers pulled out of the race when they saw the forecast.
I would like to see the IMS rules change to favour heavier and stronger racing yachts.

 

Considering the IMS rule is now dead I doubt anyone will be tweaking it one way or the other.

 

Yes
I suppose I should have said "The current rules" whether IRC, IMS, IOR, RORC or whatever.

 

Also, I believe that we generally tend to be somewhat too self confidents about the "progresses" of modern yacht vs. old timers, and not take enough interrest in some forgotten solutions which might quite well be revived in some cases, depending the requirements.
Concerning the capability to progress upwind in gales, I understand that it was a very debated issue betweens the 20' and the 50' for cruising yachts, because those guys didn't have gps (imagine that !), and often lacked reliable weather forecast. So they were very concerned about the risk of beeing tossed by a gale on dangerous coasts and paid serious attention to the capability of boats to escape such situations with their sails.
This debate brought a fair amount of publicity for late XIXth Norvegian rescue cutters designs ("Colin Archer" type) and Norvegian afts, which were frequently used in cruising boat of the days (including Francis Herreshof's..), mostly for this reason.
I guess that this point is now largely forgotten and that people tend to assume that the capability of yachts to work windward in gales did progress since the 20'.
Point is that, as far as I know XIXth century Colin Archers' or similar are still the only boats capables of progressing upwind with their sails in force 10 gales, say off Norway or off Ireland.
Those kind of boats were built in some quantities till the 70'. Looks like interrest for them dissapeared with the advent of modern electronics...

 

My perception is that no one suggests that the amount of mass, or displacement of a boat is a hinderance to windward progress, rather the reverse in a seaway. The question is, can a bluff, heavy boat with a large displacement for its DWL and rigging windage do well to windward?

The Colin Archer boats are double ended examples of the importance of low form resistance being useful for windward progress.

Dan

 

I am not sure that you guys are not mixing up your fruits here.

There is really more than one issue here:
1. Can the boat take you in the direction you need to go in an emergency at all times.
2. Can you travel in the direction you want to go with a reasonable degree of speed at all times (averages).
3. Do you have the necessary reliability for extended periods of time
3. What happens when the boat start breaking up - (redundant etc)

The difference between the heavy boats and the racers aside from speed is that the heavy boats can be build to last a lot better and they can carry redundant systems. I grew up walking the docks lined with Danish/Norwegian cutters and the defining quality was that they were build to go out and come back every day, every month and every years regardless of weather if you needed to do so to feed you family (they didn't go out in Gales but they regularly came back in gales). The Ocean racers are build to do that for a few month and they do so very well under the circumstances but they are also rebuild and refittet between each race.

Good seamanship is the primary reason any of those go fast AND come back at all.

Change the circumnavigation races to "Ten Times Around The World" which is less than an oldtime or contemporary fishing skipper would require from their builder in boat life expectancy (yes they had/have to fix stuff under way) and the boats would all look quite different.

 

I forgot to mention that as soon as it was available all of those boats got a motor - usually a one lung Bukh because that is a better way to go to weather in an emergency.

 

Not a load of progress in a few hundred years ,

Nelsons charts shoe 90deg tacking beating up on the Spanish.

FAST FRED

 

Just like any other broker's brochure