Americas Cup: whats next?

Mono, multi, or whatever...
The most exciting driver is wind. Pick a windy venue. Watching any sailing in 3-10 knots of wind is boring for anybody, sailor or not.

The most exciting Cup was the Aussie Freemantle Dr. Much more so than the last multihull race.

Wind, waves, straining crew, straining boats in close quarters. That makes exciting racing and exciting watching. In the US, my vote is Hawaii. Race time would be prime time tv in the contiguous 48. Spectacular scenery, warm sunny weather, at least we could sail vicariously through the tv....

 

Cats are unusual in my experience, which is limited to Canadian lakes, marinas and the odd sailing club. I have only seen one actually sailing once, and I was crew on that one. They are rare enough in marinas, a handful at most. I caught a ride once on a monster tri sailing out of Marseille but it motored the whole distance. It was outnumbered a hundred to one by monos, but it's mostly a fishing port (North side of the fort) so that's not so surprising. As far as live sightings are concerned, I've probably seen more tall ships than cats.

 

Cats are seen racing here more frequently than monos including Windsurfers. There is a lot more catamaran racing/beachcat sailing going on than is generally acknowledged especially in the South.

 

I have no idea how much cat sailing is 'generally acknowledged', but your just saying 'cats are seen racing here (wherever 'here' is - Cocoa Beach, E Florida, Florida, SE USA, USA, NA, the Americas, wherever) more frequently than monos' is not exactly "research" that proves that I "way underestimated multihull participation in the US", as you promised to post.

The biggest cat regatta in Florida (and one of the biggest in the USA) is the Tradewinds regatta, isn't it? I think the most recent one attracted about 109 sailors - that's fewer sailors than Key West had boats (155 yachts did that regatta), and the average yacht in KW probably had 8 or 9 crew - so the leadmine sailors outnumbered the cat sailors by 12 to 1. The Calema windsurfing regatta attracted more sailors than Tradewinds (by a very small margin).

Again, this is NOT saying that cat regattas SHOULD be small, or that cats are not fantastic boats, or that it's not a pity that there aren't more cats. It's just outlining that cat sailing IS a small sector of the sport of sail racing, and that surely that an indication that it is NOT better at attracting non-sailors than slower disciplines of the sport.

 

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You're 100% right-that was not my research-it was my observation. I will post the research when I can.

 

No close racing with multihulls? The myth falls again..

Check this out-from The Daily Sail:

1 minute 15 apart
Vendee-St Petersburg trimarans reach the finish line

Monday May 24th 2010, Author: James Boyd, Location: none selected
This morning, after seven a half days at sea the two frontrunners in the Vendee-St Petersburg race crossed the finish line separated by just 1 minute 15 seconds!

Having swapped the lead throughout the race, at 0531 GMT this morning, it was Crêpes Whaou! 3 sailed by skipper Franck-Yves Escoffier skipper and his crew, Loïc Escoffier and Antoine Koch, that claimed first place in a time to sail from St Gilles Croix de Vie to St Petersburg, Russia of 7 days 19 hours 31minutes and 49 seconds.

 

Doug: is that the result or the first boat over the line with some judging and handicaps yet to be applied? By the way, who said there were no close multihull race finishes? I don't remember that.

 

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On SA you said:

"Adding up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes, we find that there were;

932 in doublehanded dinghies (Snipe, V15 etc; 112 in skiff types)
900 in keelboats (Js. Stars etc)
850 in three-handed dinghies (Lightnings etc and counting the C Scow at 2.5 crew because they can drop one at times)
372 in singlehanded dinghies
106 in cats"
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The 106 figure is what caught my eye-completely absurd.
Your new figures are better but I came up with 500+ cat sailors. The NACRA "Nationals", as best I can tell was in Ft. Walton with something like 40 boats and 80 sailors.
One thing I suspect ,but can't prove yet, is that cats race a lot more frequently and different venues. The local cat fleet here(about 20 boats of different types) seems to race every couple of weeks.
I'm still working on this and will post more when I get a chance to put it all together.
Suffice it to say that I'm convinced that beachcat participation is probably underestimated.

 

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Terry, as best I can tell that was boat on boat-no handicaps. I've read in numerous places where its been said that match racing in multihulls is no good because they don't stay close. Read Randy Reynolds comments on the previous page if you haven't already.... post 234

 

For both multihulls and momohulls, I would expect finishes to get closer over time after a new class boat is introduced, especially if it becomes popular, as the quality of boat and crew evens out.

That would not be the case for the AC especially now when the boats can be wildly different. Even in the days when it was virtually a class boat race, the relatively long time between contests allowed for significant technological advances, which were carefully kept secret from the opposition, and crews and skippers were sometimes mismatched as far as their knowledge of the course was concerned. I suspect some of the boats were too new at race time to be properly tuned and perhaps the skipper did not always have enough time to understand how to get the best out of the boat.

I am not sure the AC should become just another class boat event: it is unique in more ways than the obscene amount of money involved and should surely remain so.

 

Ahhh, now I understand. You completely mis-read and mis-quoted my post in SA. The post is here;

http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/index.php?showtopic=106480&st=225

As you will see if you read it, I stated quite clearly that those figures came from "adding up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes". Those top 23 classes were the most popular adult classes, as set out in "Roger Jolly's" annual survey.

So yes, there are only 106 cat sailors who participated in a national championships that is big enough to be in the most popular 23 national titles for adults. That's what I clearly specified and it is correct.

The figures for monos I gave didn't include the vast junior monohull classes - Opti and 420 alone add another 450+ monohullers.

Yes, of course there are other cat classes, but there are also many other mono classes.
I did not include all the other cat classes because I specified different criteria. And there are more mono classes than cat classes, so if we include the minor classes the picture isn't any better for cats - in fact it gets worse.

If you want to include all the other classes, mono or multi, go ahead. Roger's done a lot of the work, but I'll leave it for you to find out the numbers in other mono classes like the Sweet Sixteen, the International Canoe, the J/80, the International version of the 420, etc etc.

Put it this way. Ignore all the windsurfers and all the sailors of day-racing keelboats like huge classes such as Stars and Etchells. Let's just count only five dinghy classes and the 20,000+ active paid-up PHRF boats (I did further research that indicated the 7,000 figure in my SA post was wrong) which have an average crew of 6 or more.

We then see that we'd need no less than FORTY ONE THOUSAND active cat racers in the USA to make the claim true. The biggest class, the Hobies, has only about 900 or 1000 members. No cat race seems to attract much more than about 60 boats, or 120 sailors.

And even if you did find that missing 39,000 or so active cat racers who aren't in an association and don't do nationals, then it wouldn't be enough to make them 25% of the sailing racing population, because there are still vast numbers of sailors of windsurfers, day racing keelboats like IODs and Atlantics and Shields and Ensigns, and dinghies like Sweet Sixteens, Geary 18s, Duckboats, yada yada yada that haven't been counted yet.

PS - the cats may sail more often (jeezers, who only races every second week????) but that claim is unproven. I'd guess many leadmines do weekend races and beercan races each week. However, that's irrelevant because the claim I (and people like John Williams) were disputing is that 25% of racing sailors were cat sailors - not that 25% of races were cat races, or that they sailed more often.

 

Stephen Ditmore



Tp52 sets exact values, not ranges...

MAX len 15.85
beam 4.3 to 4.42, or 4.36 +/- 1.4%
MIN disp 7300Kg

(the designer gets to muck around with bilge curvature, CG%aft and Cp, wow!)


IACC v5

len not specified
beam 0 to 4.5m (v4 5.5m)
disp 0 to 24000kg (v4 16000-25000Kg)


It took 3 generations for the boats to appear to bunch-up, and still there was lots variance in beam (2.1 to 3m) and displacement (22,000Kg was discussed by a team, if not built). Although not readily noticeable to "our" eyes.

The concept of the trade-off is sound. Cause fundamentally lighter (l/disp) is faster than heavier, yet you need the stability(weight) to harness the sails.

Ignore "the constants", they are just used to get the equation to equal 24. The formula pairs len with SA, to match Disp. Hence at the max Disp you get the most len and SA.... But also the most drag.

So if we a changed the formula (a bit) not to reward Disp with so much SA, then there'll be a point when lighter will be faster! And a designer's nightmare deciding just where that is, and in face of all the normal parameters.

To me seeing what the designers come up with is half the excitement of the Cup. They'll be chicken sh*t in my book if they adopt a box rule, and your non-sailing friends will conclude that too, when the tv host/commentator explains to them, why all the boats look exactly alike and it was never that way before!


"so long as they achieve a minimum righting moment at 90 degrees"
At 90deg??? then beam does not enter into the calc?

 

Doug, are you there?

You said days ago that you had already done some research..... any chance of you posting it to prove your point?

 

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I most certainly DID NOT MISQUOTE you!!! What I posted was IDENTICAL to what you wrote.

"Adding up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes, we find that there were;

932 in doublehanded dinghies (Snipe, V15 etc; 112 in skiff types)
900 in keelboats (Js. Stars etc)
850 in three-handed dinghies (Lightnings etc and counting the C Scow at 2.5 crew because they can drop one at times)
372 in singlehanded dinghies
106 in cats"

 

That's funny. Strangely, at the time I quoted your post, that bit "Adding up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes, we find that there were" does seem to have been there....

That leaves what you are trying to say very unclear. If you realised that my figures only came from the 23* most popular national titles, then why call my claim that there were only 106 cat sailors in those events "completely absurd"?

It's not "completely absurd" to say that there were only 106 cat sailors if one adds "up the sailors who attended the nationals in the top 23 classes"*, because there WERE only 106 cat sailors in those classes.

A week ago, you said you had done some research to say that I had way underestimated multi participation; if it's done, why not show it?

By the way, the Nacra nationals is normally a multi-class event, therefore (not surprisingly) it's not classified as a single class. The Nacra 17 class nationals had 20 competitors in 07, 18 in 08 at Ft Walton. The Nacra 20 class nationals had 18 boats in 07, 12 boats in '08. The Nacra F18 class had 7 boats in '08. I think both 17 and 20 were down to 11 boats in '09. Therefore none of the Nacra classes come close to qualifying for the "top 23" in terms of popularity, and therefore they don't affect the figure of 106 that I mentioned. Even if we make a special case just for Nacras and count them all together, they don't qualify.

And, of course, bringing in the Nacras doesn't change the relative popularity of cats as a proportion of all racing sailors, because so far I haven't included the nationals for significant yacht classes like the Atlantic, Shields, J/80, Ensign etc, or small disciplines like sailing canoes (even canoes, in total, attract about as many boats to nationals as all the Nacras). The Atlantic nationals alone has more boats on average (24) than the most popular Nacra, and each of those Atlantics has four times the crew.

So..... where's the proof of the absurdity? And have you found the 40,000+++ missing active cat racers?


*23 may have been a typo, the list is of the top 25 adult classes. As mentioned, adding the junior classes like the Opti, C420 and CFJ brings in a few hundred more mono sailors and no cat sailors.