Uli
Senior Member
Registered: September 2001
Location: Germany
Posts: 146
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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
"Reliance" was the largest sloop ever built. At 200 feet (61 m) overall sparred length, with the top of the topyard 215 feet (65.60 m) above the water, she carried more than 16,000 feet (1490 m.sq.) of sail, giving her more sail area than the clippership "Flying Cloud".
Designed, engineered and built by Nat Herreshoff of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company in Bristol, Rhode Island, "Reliance" was an extreme design and a paragon of technical innovation.
Her hull shape is that of a flat-sectioned scow, with a 20 feet (6.10 m) deep keel, so short in length as to be virtually a fin keel, with a bulb. She carried 90 tons of lead ballast. "Reliance" was constructed to give maximum strength and lightweight. Her hull was plated in bronze, steel and aluminium.
http://www.gdnp.nl/
This is Reliance, the America's Cup defender in 1903." The narrator is Mrs. A. Sidney DeW. Herreshoff, who with her cousin Louise DeWolf, a walk-in storehouse of boating history and lore, will go on to explain the Reliance's remarkable features.
Restricted to a waterline of 90 feet under cup race rules, the yacht has an extended counter stern and over-hanging bowsprit that stretch it's length to more than double that figure -- to 201 feet.
A mast towering 196 feet above the water carries 16,160 square feet of sail -- the most ever carried on a single mast. Its club topsail is larger than a 12-meter sloop mainsail
This summer as many as 68 visitors a day have looked around the museum on the original Burnside Street site of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Co., where boats have been built since 1863.
The 30-foot power launch with a gleaming wood deck dominates the center of the room, dwarfed in turn by the Reliance mural behind it. A varnished lapstrake dinghy is suspended above a 12 1/2-footer next to an array of brass fittings glinting on one wall. Numerous photographs cover the opposite wall, chronicling three generations of boatbuilding.
Tall and tanned, Halsey C. Herreshoff is the latest of the Herreshoff designers, a marine engineer and yacht architect who has taken over from his father, A. Sidney DeW. Herreshoff. Sidney DeW. opened the museum in 1971. The present room was built and dedicated to him in 1977. It is Halsey's grandfather, however, who is the focal point of the museum. He designed no less than six America's Cup winners, a record for any designer.
"All the innovations of yacht design were really made by Nathaneal Greene Herreshoff," the grandson said of this marine Thomas Edison. "This is generally acknowledged around the
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