Moth on Foils: 35.9 knots(41.29 mph)

More hot air than a hot air balloon!

"Yes I've sailed one"
And,ah, I'm one of the only people in the world ( that I know of) to have sailed a 16' bi-foil monofoiler- not a Moth but great fun nonetheless.And further proof that the Peoples Foiler is not only possible- it is likely....." Doug, this is absolute B-S. We all know it and so do you, but you are in far too deep now to back out of the mire.
You know how I know? No, I didn't need to be there! If you had even a flight of 5 yards you would have gone back the next day with a professional photographer and try and repeat your big deal. Your vanity would have tried to move heaven and earth to present some tangible proof to the sceptics.

It didn't happen, I am absolutely positive. Why don't you just stop sprouting now. You have no support at all. Even the moth guys say:

Doug's Quote
I could give a rat's *** about the popularity of the Moth class

The Moth class would prefer if you personally didn't give a rat's *** about our popularity. We would prefer if you stopped hyping our boat out of proportion. We would prefer if you used your foiling experience as a basis for your opinions, not ours.

Seeing that all your experiences are sort of surrogate ones, you really have nothing left to talk about.!

 

Can we keep the conversation objective and impersonal?

I'm sure you'd agree that Doug's contributions to the discussion are always thought provoking, we don't really want to see him leave.

I don't want my contributions to be taken personally Doug. I'm not having a go at you here. I am only responding to your claims when I can, if you could be so kind as to respond in turn to my points, then we can all move the discussion forward.

Some input on how we (as a class) can convert our awesome speeds and fantastic publicity into more boats on the water would be greatly appreciated.

How can we capitalise the strength of the concept and at the same time overcome the drawbacks?

Where are all the new boats going? Who is filling the current and future building capacity? How many people, and who exactly has indicated that they will buy a Moth because of their foiling exploits?

 

Serial Killers and Terrorists get lots of publicity and neither are popular pastimes.

Here is the real underlying motive for the pages of hype ... profit ... patents and profit

Lord knows some have spent 5 years trying and have managed to get a 1 Metre boat to raise 3/4" in the water but not "foil" ... (Doug Lord's 1M aeroSkiff in 2003)

I wish them luck. If one of the foremost authorities (using post count as a yardstick) cannot get a one metre model to foil, what chance do these newbies have? Lets not even go into the conditions that a full scale ocean racing boat has to operate in and how foilers are not a logical choice for those conditions.

Oh please, hydrofoils are not new, neither are canting keels and moving ballast. Hydrofoils were supposed to revolutionize ships ... they didn't. One of the markets for high performance watercraft for testosterone overdosed young men is the PWC market ... see any foilers?

A 16' two-foil one foiler? That has never foiled ... at least not long enough for anyone to get a photo ... kinda like the Loch Ness Monster ... people believing in it doesn't make it exist ... lots of publicity though ...

 

Foilr, well said!
I am with you on all points.
All the Moths we have in Italy, 8 at the moment, were bought
because of the hydrofoils as the class before was virtually unknown.
Marco.

 

Invective reduction

I'll be glad to reduce the comments from my side of the coin if Doug will quit resorting to the use of terms such as, "Horsemanure!"... and "Rat's ***". This is posturing that demonstrates a lack of skill with the language and a guy on the verge of erupting.

I think we can all recognize when a hyped position is unsupported by legitimate, logical thinking and running purely on fluff.

My apologies to the rest of the gang if anyone was distracted by my writings.

 

Accepted.
Marco.

 

As I said a few pages ago, Doug's case of Cognitive Dissonance is reaching a critical stage!
Doug, I hope you are OK. As well put by Foilr, we don't want you to go.
BUT-- You need to get a grounding. Just because Rohan's website has an almost day to day report of some minor sailing experience doesn't make it a major news story!
Also if Langman believes he can design and sail a 50 foot Moth clone offshore doesn't make it so! We are all very well (and you also) entitled to be very sceptical. He has been very successful in what he has already done but like many of us he is allowed to "dream".
Until he can overcome almost insurmountable issues of basic physics, he is a very long way off!

 

Langman's new ride for Hobart this year is quite different, but not in the way Doug seems to think.


http://rolexsydneyhobart.com/news.asp?key=2533

 

Disco Foiler

For all you rabid foilistas out there, this bit just showed-up on the Software section of these pages and it looks like a fun place to dream just a bit.

Apparently, a number of these boats were exported to Australia in the mid '70's for small-time ferry work. There's more here under Aquavion Hydrofoils a bit down the page http://www.foils.org/buyferry.htm

The photo is one of the sister ships to the boat shown above in the Software section.

Apologies for not hitting the proper sailboat content, but it occurred to me that a bunch of you guys in OZ might have actually been on one of thes boats sometime in their operational lives.

 

Junk in the water

I remember back about a month ago when I posted a osund argument about foiler susceptibility to stuff in the water. The predictable result was that all the foilistas dumped a flame barrage on me in defese of the beloved little gadgets.

Well, this just in from the North Atlantic;
http://www.orange-sailing-team.com/en/?page=story&id=505&univers=gclass

Bruno Peyron's Orange II ultr mega cat has hit a floating object in the approaches to the Lizard on his record run across thr Atalntic from New York and one of the rudders is very seriously damaged.

Geez, you'd think the vast expanse of the Atlantic would be reasonably safe for a high performance vessel, much less the original argument about sailing in tighter waters in which huge metropoitan areas dump their incessant stream of garbage and other detritus.

Ball's in your court, boys.

 

Yes, hitting solid objects would cause damage to the foils. Hitting garbage and/or heavy weed would cause a slowdown or crash which might need a capsize to clear.

But having said that I didn't have any such problem sailing on Sydney Harbour or Lake Macquarie in my Moth.

I can only remember picking up a cap on the centreboard of a 29er in 2001 and carrying it around a few laps... losing a bunch of places in the process.

So I don't think it's a huge problem really.

 

I sail on Botany Bay (Sydney) where there is often a tone of weed... In a foiler it's actually less of a problem than on a conventional boat. Why?

Because the weed can't get jammed between the top of your centerboard and the hull. The hull is out of the water so the weed is washed away with the speed of the foils going through water.

 

I don't doubt what you are saying, guys. I just look back at the times when I had sizeable lengths of kelp wrapped around the leading edge of my Nacra 6.0 daggerboard and the only way to get it off was to totally pull the boards up through the slot, ending my so-called speed run to the next mark.

I just get the visual that with a horizontal foil that is rather wide, the weeds would not only wrap on the strut, but on the lifting section as well. Perhaps it's just different weeds to which you refer.

Kelp is a big deal in SoCal waters with many sailors having fits with wrapped keels during races. If it's still attached to the sea bed, it is so strong it can actually bring your boat to a dead stop. Makes for a nice scene with the rig sheeted-in.

Still, I bet Bruno was a little more than perplexed to lose that big a chunk of his rudder at 30 kts. average speed.

 

Weeds, etc.

Not all foil proponents for a particular purpose are 'rabid', but there are many specific applications that work, and work well with foils despite the danger of impacts with objects. Most of todays 'wave piercing' catamarans have foils and other effectors simply for motion control in case you weren't aware of it.
I actually prefer SES vessels for high speed ferries partially because they don't have much in the water and have one of the highest transport efficiencies, but it's a bit hard to do with a sailboat- although we have pictures of a Norwegian built Cirrus 120P with a spinnaker- a long story in itself!

Any boat hitting a deadhead or other hard object in the water at high speed is bound to suffer damage, particularly to props and rudders and other such appendages. I applaud the efforts of the Moth sailors and the I14 sailors, as well as Doug's continued work despite the harsh criticisms, which I think have gone into the realm of 'rabid' if anything has. Experimental work in general has a tendency to be not very forgiving, we must learn from results of the experiments or they wouldn't be called 'experimental'- and many may fail entirely if we don't do adequate homework first. During my years at the 'Rocket Labs' (TSPC, or now the Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories at Purdue) there were many, many movies of failed rocket motor firings over the years- in fact, most of them failed in the '40's, '50's and '60's due to attempts to achieve high pressure and develop cooling methods that worked.

Centerboards, keels and a rudders are also 'hydrofoils', and as you've pointed out already are susceptible to debris as well, the odds might be slightly in their favor since they are mostly vertical other than when heeled, but only slightly with currents swaying weeds and kelp to and fro.

After 5 years of operating our hybrid hydrofoil testcraft with both 'regular' foils and lifting bodies, I will admit we hit objects twice. We are in the Chesapeake- once it was a crab pot line in the channel where they are not supposed to be (which only slowed us from 32 Knots down to around 22 before breaking the line) and once in grass we accidentally strayed into, which thankfully only arrested the boat and caused it to 'land' without damage. Something hard would not have been so kind, but luckily it never happened. Fortunately I built the foils really strong.

The vessel shown here weighs about 6 tons, is 44.5 Ft long, and has a fully computerized flight control system and a fully submerged foil system in an airplane layout like the 'monofoilers', albeit with more struts. It is roughly a 1/4 scale model of a 56M design design by Rune Odegard of Norway. Both the forward foil and the aft foil are flapped. The concept is designed to fly only a certain 'lift fraction' of the vessel, allowing the centerhull to contribute bouyancy and planing lift. This allows the craft to be scaled up slightly more than a 'conventional' all flying foiler. the math is the required foil area goes up as the square while displacement goes up as a cubic function- so there is a limit to how big you can build a fully flying hydrofoil. The 'can' on the bow is a radar height sensor.

This vessel is superior to any other 44.5 Ft boat I know of (on the Chesapeake at least) at one thing in particular- seakeeping. It is also very efficient, though this picture is with the lifting bodies, which have higher drag than conventional foils but add more lifting capacity and vertical damping like a SWATH vessel. The 1/3rd octave plot enclosed here is data acquired from this vessel in scale seas of 2-3M, or .5m-.75M (1.6-2.5 Ft) model scale. with normal foils. While this may not seem to impressive to you, in 4-5 Ft seas on a delivery voyage I could have had a cup of coffee without fear- any 45 Ft deadrise vessel would have been pitching and rolling tremendously. We thought we were in a limit sea state, athough we never even took spray on the windscreen!

But motion control systems is what we do....Sorry to inject a powerboat into the sailing forum, it's to illustrate the point that each technology has it's applications, and I think foils can live in harmony along side other sailing vessels even with the inherent weaknesses of the technology such as debris and occaisional breakage.

 

Might try them at a later date. The current Fastacraft kit is about $2400, I think. I don't know if the Bladerider people offer the foils separately.

My first priority is to get a feel for whether the hull shape is good. My mast and daggerboard will be farther aft than my competitors, and the board a little deeper than most, so I want to see how that works out, too. Overall, I want to produce a design that's both fast and easy to sail. One guy in Sag Harbor came into the class, geared up a narrow waterline boat like a hot rod, took one bruising sail in the thing, and has given up. His boat's now for sale. I want my boat to be something one of my daughters could jump into and not regret it at the end of the day.

Also, I may be interested in trying to sail my boat longer distances than would be typical of a Moth race. I'm not a distance unicyclist, and I have no immediate plans to try to be a distance foiler. I wish you luck with the Aeroskiff, though, and would love to see picks of it foiling.

If I were to try foiling, I think I'd want to try a TriFoiler or Windrider Rave first. It's not like I loathe multihulls... in fact I like some quite a bit. (I think some catamarans are aesthetically challenged, though).

For anyone interested, here's the new Bradfield/Irens 60' foiler: http://foxxaero.homestead.com/indsail_019.html

Rick:

I'm glad you posted a photo and discussion of your experience -- I like your boat a lot. How do the drag numbers compare to a similar sized / weight monohull at what would be semi-displacement speeds (Fr=0.4 to Fr= 0.9) for the latter?