Should Power Assited Systems be Allowed?

[RHough]

The debate in the S-H thread prompts me to try a poll.

The facts are:

The winning boat set a new race record.

The winning boat used movable ballast and an engine to move the ballast while racing.

Other boats used powered winches during the race.

My question:

Should power assisted boats be allowed to compare their performance against boat that don't require power assisted systems?

[usa2]

Yes, but they should make them take a huge rating hit(the PA boats), and they should allow any boat in the fleet to run their engine as much as they want, as long as it is not in gear. Powered Winches should be outlawed on the Maxi class and other boats.

[yipster]

wearing a wristwatch i say yes
or is that sponsoring

[D'ARTOIS]

For navionics? Yes - no problem; for the rest, no, sailing is sailing. When I was younger, I used to have a bunch of Thoroughbreds - we were in a small stable, a noble countess, however impoverished was the trainer - I was one of the poorer of her clients - she had also rich industrials as client - none of us, however, felt ever attempted to go for "giving the horses extra power" - and that, is my game. The brats on those boats are too spoilt.

[Chris Ostlind]

I'm of the opinion that racing sailboats can have any system onboard they wish... with a caveat attached. That would be that the boats that do run their power systems while in the race should be evenly matched against any and all other boats that also have their "power on" as it were. No trad operated boats will be scored against the non-trad operations and, in fact they non-trad boats will be encouraged to get their butts down the coast and run their own operation. Not banned... just collated.

Obviously, the ultimate and most elegant solution to this game would be to suspend the entire boat from a very powerful, turbine powered, twin rotor helicopter that can lightly touch the water's surface with the lowest of the boat's appendages and then drag said appendage dipping sailboat down the course to victory.

"Power assisted sailing vessels with your, think inside the box mentality... I spit on you!" I have been reading the comments from those who say that the genie is out of the box and we'll never go back to non-powered, non-canting keel sailboats again. I say their days are numbered once I hoist the all foam, no carbon hull of my fantasy with my high powered Chinook from military surplus.

Eat my dust, Wild Oats! I own the place. Friggin' Poseurs!

Chris Ostlind

[D'ARTOIS]

Rules are changed for what? To facilitate the few with more money than healthy? Changing rules is just like allowing doping. Rules are changed only to favour some people. Why should they change otherwise?
Give those boats a handicap related to their boatspeed. No complicated rules with measurement problems. Admiral Rous developed a very simple theory which works for decennia already in horseracing. No changes of rules necessary - only one international rule.

[Tim B]

In my opinion, it's a difficult question to answer. What size? what conditions? which boats? what class? All these this ,may, or may not demand the assistance of powered winches/systems etc. For mundane jobs like pumping water-ballast or moving keels I see no problem at any size, but electric or hydraulic winches are another matter. Nothing in Yacht Design or Sailing is a straight-forward question, that's what makes it interesting. So my answer is yes, PA should be allowed in classes which will need it (after all, the alternative is larger crew).

Tim B.

[Skippy]

Don't take away those billionaires' toys! You grinchy ol' spoilsports! Just make sure they stay in their own little sandbox (#3 "Yes, but only in One Design Classes"). And make them keep saying, "Yes, I own a power-assisted sail-propelled racing vessel. Would you like to know how much I payed for it?"

[RHough]

Originally Posted by Tim B

So my answer is yes, PA should be allowed in classes which will need it (after all, the alternative is larger crew).

Tim B.

That's exactly the point. Sailing has always been limited by the human factor.

Square Rigged boats required large crews, Fore and Aft Rigs require fewer crew per unit sail area.

Until very recently, the requirement for manual adjustments was a keystone in design of racing boats. If you wanted a 1000ft^2 sail, you needed to have big winches and big crew to trim it. The human limit is a natural one.

Designers had to design boats around the number of crew required to do the work. When power assist is allowed, there is no limit to the size of a sail that a crew can trim nor any limit to how much and how quickly ballast can be shifted.

A 10HP engine can do the work of 60 crew.

The ultimate crew reduction is when the engine does all the work.

Is there a difference between using the engine to drive the boat through a propeller and using the engine to drive the boat through sail trim?

At what point does it stop being a sailing vessel and become a motor vessel?

[mattotoole]

I'm kind of a purist like RHough, but then again... a lightweight boat w/ CTBF and PA is probably a higher quality sailing experience than, say, a Soverel 33 with 8 crew aboard. Been there, done that. OTOH, a trimaran probably has them both beat, and leaves ol' Rube Goldberg at the dock.

I say let the gearheads sail whatever they want. There always has been, and always will be, plenty of action in regular old sailboats for the rest of us. Someday a J105 will seem as quaint as a Shields, Rhodes 33, Cal 20, etc., and most of us can still get our butts kicked every weekend in boats like those.

[RHough]

No law of physics prevents using wind power to move the ballast.

If the wind can move the whole boat including the ballast, the wind can certainly be used to move the ballast within the boat. If the wind can move a boat at over 25 knots, the wind can move the ballast 50-60 degrees. In the last In Port race we saw the wind move the ballast almost 90 degrees in seconds when Pirates got the gybes wrong.

Choosing to use a diesel to move the ballast because you can't figure out how to do it with wind power is like choosing a trawler because you can't figure out how to get the wind to move the boat.

I've suggested more than one way to do this. Here is another: Link the traveler to a hydraulic pump, load the boat up and the traveler moves the ballast. Lock the ballast, unload the mainsheet, reset the the traveller and repeat the process until the ballast has been moved as far you need to move it. There is more power in the wind than you could ever need to move ballast. It might take a half dozen "wiggles" after a tack or gybe to pump the system up but it would work. No stored energy needed, no engine needed.

You can have all the performance of a moving ballast system without using a diesel to do the work, if you want to. If an old purist like me can come up with ways to do it without using an engine, surely the designers of yachts can.

What it boils down to is this:

A boat can be made faster if an engine is used. That's not new technology.

[RHough]

Originally Posted by mattotoole

... a lightweight boat w/ CTBF and PA is probably a higher quality sailing experience than, say, a Soverel 33 with 8 crew aboard. Been there, done that. OTOH, a trimaran probably has them both beat, and leaves ol' Rube Goldberg at the dock.

GASP! Are you saying that the PA VO70 that just did this:

ABN AMRO ONE, 72 ft monohull
Mike Sanderson and a crew of 9
26th/27th November 2005
546.14 nm
22.75 kts

Is just a little slower than this:

Orange II Catamaran, 120 ft
Bruno Peyron (FRA) and a crew of 10
22nd and 23rd August 2004
706.2 nautical miles
29. 42 kts.

Like 22% slower?

We won't even consider this:

Oct 2005, Finian Maynard, Windsurfer, 39.97 kts, Walvis Bay, Namibia

Old Rube needs to do some work ...

Of course catamarans have been around for 100's of years, PA shifting ballast boats are relativly new. They might might get much closer to the 700nm mark next year, maybe even beat it ... unless they run out of diesel fuel ...

[sharpii2]

Originally Posted by Lorsail

This is more appropriate here than it was at the SH thread so I've moved it. It's about the best I can say on this subject:
When the ballast moves, whether it's on an FD, Aussie18, Schock 40 or Wild Oats, the RM is increased and the boat is able to carry more sail and SAIL faster. It doesn't matter, in the scheme of things, how the ballast is moved because the boat reacts exactly the same way to the increased righting moment.
Trying to denigrate the awesome performance of boats like Wild Oats because the boat is too big to move the ballast manually and it is moved by a diesel is just plain silly in my opinion. The boat SAILS extraordinarily well because of her extraordinary power to carry sail.It is a fantastic advance in sailing yacht design that big boats now have the ability to move ballast in a way similar to the way it is done on the fastest dinghies. It broadens the horizons of sailboat designers in many different ways that still have yet to be explored and it offers those of us that couldn't afford a Wild Oats a chance see what the utmost in technology can accomplish.It has helped big sailboats trancend the old images of sailing-imagine a 70 footer approaching 40 knots under sail! You bet it's sailing in the grandest tradition of the sport with risks increased many times over the old leadbellies. The guys sailing these high performance, technologicaly incredible, sailing machines are in the tradition of the greatest sailors of the past-to fail to see that is the worst kind of "purist" blindness; to fail to realize the new horizons of performance upwind and downwind intrinsic to these technologies is to intentionally deprive oneself of understanding one of the greatest revolutions in SAILING in the last two hundred years. Take the blinders off and open your eyes to the incredible, risky, exciting, beautiful new world of sailing technology unfolding right in front of you!

I love your passion!

Even though I disagree. Designing and making what are essentially big throw away toys does kind of irk me.

Then again, they have been doing that in NASCAR and formula 1 auto racing for decades.

Why not sail like a bat out of hell if you can afford it?

As for the original question. Why not allow diesels of a certain hp size to be used as the owner/designer/skipper see fit. Say about 2hp per mt.

I sincerely doubt that any owner who thinks he's clever could stand a chance against one of these flyers with with his boat rigged as a motorsailer.
It would be an interesting experiment, however. Design a boat that can really fly only when the wind is blowing hard, with a cut down rig and good fuel tankage.

Maybe in a really light or really heavy air race it would actually win (better average speed/or less breakage). Even if it didn't, it would probably do more to develope usable products for John Q. Sailor than all the jacking keels and carbon sandwitches in the world.

How about it?

Bob

[mattotoole]

Originally Posted by sharpii2

I love your passion!

Even though I disagree. Designing and making what are essentially big throw away toys does kind of irk me.

Then again, they have been doing that in NASCAR and formula 1 auto racing for decades.

Why not sail like a bat out of hell if you can afford it?

It's always been this way, at least as far as I can remember. I crewed on a few IOR boats as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, which were more "throwaway" than the exotic yachts being built now. Some of those boats are still around, and these days they look like cartoons.

[mattotoole]

Originally Posted by Lorsail

Trying to denigrate the awesome performance of boats like Wild Oats because the boat is too big to move the ballast manually and it is moved by a diesel is just plain silly in my opinion. The boat SAILS extraordinarily well because of her extraordinary power to carry sail.It is a fantastic advance in sailing yacht design that big boats now have the ability to move ballast in a way similar to the way it is done on the fastest dinghies. It broadens the horizons of sailboat designers in many different ways that still have yet to be explored and it offers those of us that couldn't afford a Wild Oats a chance see what the utmost in technology can accomplish.It has helped big sailboats trancend the old images of sailing-imagine a 70 footer approaching 40 knots under sail! You bet it's sailing in the grandest tradition of the sport with risks increased many times over the old leadbellies. The guys sailing these high performance, technologicaly incredible, sailing machines are in the tradition of the greatest sailors of the past-to fail to see that is the worst kind of "purist" blindness; to fail to realize the new horizons of performance upwind and downwind intrinsic to these technologies is to intentionally deprive oneself of understanding one of the greatest revolutions in SAILING in the last two hundred years. Take the blinders off and open your eyes to the incredible, risky, exciting, beautiful new world of sailing technology unfolding right in front of you!

Well said, Doug. However, I don't think these boats are any faster, even upwind, than big multis -- which are a lot simpler, and arguably a more elegant approach.

But maybe it's just a matter of taste. Yachting is all about whatever brings you pleasure. Just look up the definition of "yacht." These days, more than ever, there's something for everyone. Personally, I'd rather race upwind in an Etchells than, say, a Tornado, which is obviously faster. So I do understand and appreciate the visceral differences among different kinds of boats. Since sailing is basically a sensation-seeking pursuit to begin with, why not build what gives you the experience you want?

BTW, I voted "who cares."

More about the "throwaway boat" argument -- I just came across an interesting discussion at Sailing Anarchy, about an old IOR boat for sale. Though very cheap for its size and condition, most sailors would find more attractive alternatives (thus the low price). Read the thread to find out why. "Throwaway" boats were probably no less common 20 years ago than they are now.

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