Aftmast rigs???

Discussion in 'Sailboats' started by jdardozzi, May 28, 2002.

  1. Yobarnacle
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    Yobarnacle Senior Member holding true course

    Sharpii and CT.
    Since photography hadn't been invented, only paintings of caravels exist.
    Considering the curved belly of a wind filled sail and the cant and bend of the yards and that even the rigging was some distorted by wind into catenaries, and no straight lines anywhere, accuracy was unlikely.
    Artists painted their visual impression of vessels rather that dimensionally correct schematics.
    I have looked at as many paintings of lateen rigs as I can find on the internet.
    Both tacks are represented, from various angles, but not a single painting of a lateen fouled around the mast.
    I deduce they must have moved the yard/sail to the lee side of the mast each tack so not to foul the mast.
    Dropping and manhandling a long heavy yard and large sail around the mast like a dipping lug sail, would be a lot of work, cumbersome, and slow, and require a number of crew.
    Or! Simply see-sawing the yard accomplishes the feat and quickly easily done.
    Simply casting off the downhaul on the yards low-end where tethered to the rail or stem, the sail/yard would self rotate and naturally tend to assume a horizontal attitude, just from gravity.
    Maintaining and augmenting the momentum of the already swinging yard by heaving down on the opposite (formerly aloft) end until it was snubbed to rail or stem, would be a graceful, natural, efficient and rapid maneuver requiring very few crew, and maybe only one man.
    I believe our sailing ancestors were intelligent men. After all, they were contemporary with Da Vinci and Michelangelo.
    A symmetrical yard and sail would work well. Asymmetrical would also work, but be peaked higher one tack.
    Anyway, I "suspect" they did it this way, because it would make sense to do it that way.
    Were their sails symmetrical?
    How reliable is the evidence of paintings by non-seaman artists, and whose intent was a pretty picture, not technical accuracy?
    I believe the paintings accurately record, they weren't confusing the lateen with a leg of mutton (Marconi main) sail and didn't foul the mast by letting it swing across like the main on a modern Bermuda rig.
    Whether my "suspicions" are correct or not, are pure conjecture.
    I know how I plan to manage the lateen topsail on my aft mast rig. :D

    And a long lateen yard dropped on deck, lowers the rig dramatically in stormy weather. Observe how the peak of a lateen rises well above the mast.
    Do you suppose they might have had storm sails to set? Smaller and heavier constructed?
     
  2. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    I think a lateen sail is worth a try. First I will need a suitable boat.
     
  3. Yobarnacle
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    Yobarnacle Senior Member holding true course

    Collaborate with me on my boat Hoyt.
    Or would that be a conspiracy? :D
     
  4. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    UNUSUAL Rigs can be Good Ocean Rigs

    Just another confirmation that UNUSUAL rigs that DON"T follow the Bermudian norm can made good ocean cruising rigs.

    Here is one quoted submission by High Tacker discussing his UNUSUAL A-frame rig. Do a search on this forum, "CatBird", and you will find quite a number of other postings by him.





    (and how many designers and sailors might follow this path, even thought it appears to work extremely well,.... :rolleyes:)

    (wonder what innovations to this concept might evolve if more folks where to follow this path? ...my observation is that we will probably never see an evolution of this type, as there will never be a substantial volume of experimentation with this type of rig,.....just as there may never be an evolution of my aftmast rig for lack of participation.)
     

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  5. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    Just yesterday I visited a small marina on the St John's river near Palatka, Fl. As I explored the dock just prior to boarding a friends boat (power). I discovered a nice little 40ish steel sailboat at the end of the dock.

    And what a surprise it had an A-frame rig on it, roller furling jib/genoa and roller furling mainsail (akin to Procyon). The owner was on board, and we spoke briefly. He was 80 years old and had bought the boat several years ago from a German fellow who had custom built it. He had sailed down to the keys and back up to Cape Kennedy., then subsequently up to Jacksonville and down the St John's river.

    What did he like. He could sail the boat by himself (80 years old), and he could easily reach hull speed. And he could lower the mast and rig for low bridges. (as far as we got with the conversation at the time, and my new-used camera did not have a photo card :eek:)
     
  6. RHP
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    RHP Senior Member

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  7. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    That may be a possibility. :cool:
     
  8. CT249
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    CT249 Senior Member

    There is some interesting re-telling of the usual tales there, and also some re-telling of old falsehoods. The funny thing is that so many people who like to think of themselves as progressive have yet to find out that now we have access to so much more information courtesy of the web, they can't get away with making incorrect claims such as the one that cats were banned.

    The webpage is, like so many, wrong to say that "catamarans threatened to change the course of yachting history both in 1876 and in 1898, to no avail, they failed to convert yacht clubs as rating rules were amended to prevent them."

    No such thing was done in New York (although one cat was banned in Sydney years later). Catamarans were accepted and raced in their own class, just as schooners raced in their own classes, catboats raced in their own classes, and sloops raced in their own classes.

    The commodores of several yacht clubs, including the founder of the New York Yacht Clubs, owned catamarans around this time. They raced in New York and other places like New Orleans for some years, then faded away. This is a proven fact as demonstrated by numerous accounts of cats racing in New York that are available on sites like the NY Times archives, as well as the letters of Nat and Francis Herresoff on the Mystic Seaport site.

    Some of reasons why the early cats faded away were explained by one writer many years later. "It is my impression that their average speed is not as great as some single hulled boats with less wetted surface for their sail area and more useful room.... to make an all-round improved catamaran that is dry and safe seems very expensive indeed...these boats are far too expensive for the average person to build..." .....all catamarans are slow in light air". He also wrote that a cat with a cabin "will prove in every respect unsatisfactory"; that the Herreshoff cat Tarantella "does not come around as quickly as a single-hulled boat"..."when driven hard in rough water she is very wet". He also said that cats would not take over sailing, and that by the early 1900s fast multis were irrelevant as people had turned to powerboats, bicycles and cars for their speed fix.

    The guy who wrote all that was Nat Herreshoff himself, mostly in letters to his son Francis. Francis also wrote repeatedly that cats were slow in light winds and expensive.

    I'm a cat owner and sailor and I come from a family that has been into multis for three generations, so I've got no reason to be biased. The early cats - like the current ones - are fantastic, but they don't suit a lot of people for very good reasons. The clear facts are that there was no change to the rating rule to ban cats.

    The website you linked to also says "It may be surprising that Nathanael Herreshoff never mentioned Oceania pirogues." He did mention them in his letters to Francis, but if I recall correctly he said that they were "primitive" boats owned by "savages" and that they were not an inspiration for Amaryllis.


    PS - the banned "Francis rig" was an aerofoil-shaped rotating mast and wooden forestay. It was extremely expensive and banned by the R Class. Wooden forestays were standard in some other racing classes.
     
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  9. CT249
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    CT249 Senior Member

    Caravels may have disappeared before photography, but lateen rigs certainly did not. They were were still common many years after people started writing detailed accounts of the way they were used in working craft. They were still raced up till around the turn of last century even in the UK.

    We know how "traditional" and western versions of the lateen rig were handled when they were still working craft, because it was described in detail and it's still done. Yep, dropping and manhandling the big yard did require a lot of crew - old books mention it.

    The racing dhows of today don't end-for-end their yards, despite the fact that doing in the conventional way takes LOTS of time. The smaller racing dhows do what we would call an outside jibe if we were using an asymmetric spinnaker, apparently.

    How reliable were old pictures? It probably depends on the individual. As you say, they were intelligent men, and sailing vessels were one of the great drivers of world economy and power. People had a big interest in getting information about them, and therefore probably a lot of the drawings were fairly accurate.
     
  10. RHP
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    RHP Senior Member

    Thanks the very interesting explanation CT.
     
  11. Fanie
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    Fanie Fanie

    One of the problems with Europeans are they are control-sick and any change is a big threat to their ego. If one considers the resistance to accept multihulls which was discussed elsewhere on the forum before, then accepting a different type of sail is going to be the same pain.

    One can understand that there are rules in race classes to make it as fair as possible, but the stupid comments and critique from some who are scared someone else may think up something else every one overlooked is retarding development. Like when I was testing the aft mast sail the wife and I were cruising at one stage when she said "that boat is following us". It was the marina owner and he seems to have the idea that he was going to run down this weird looking little thing on the water with his big boat. I said to the wife move up a bit and I adjusted my position and we lost him. That evening he stood on the marina telling me all the Africans sail these type of sails, as if they do not work and who would be so stupid. Well. Some people say something not realizing what they are really saying. He was just pssed off. And one more thing. Even if he was fast enough to keep up, I can sail higher into the wind than he can...

    It was this higher sailing to wind that gave me an idea... I think there may well be a way to sail even more to wind, perhaps to wind. If you think it impossible, just think Wright brothers.

    LOL. I was just thinking if the Wright brothers were Africans they would have been the Wright-bradha's-fkn-A man !
     
  12. gggGuest
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    gggGuest ...

    Oh precisely: it took, what, 4 or 5 years after Andrew Buckland/Julian Bethwaite came up with the asymettric spinnaker before they became widely used. And how about that Kite surfing stuff...

    Same old nonsense. Racing sailors will adopt any new innovation if it helps them win races, they're notorious for it. Of course they also refuse to consider any innovation that doesn't do so...
     
  13. jimburden
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    jimburden Junior Member

    A small diameter stiff mast, jib fully batten on roller boom.

    First this boat is heavy and the weight of a high mast will be little loss for its center of gravity. I would suggest installing, in the bilge, water shifting ballast tanks to the farthest sides, for self righting control in fast beam wind passages. 16 inch lay flat industrial discharge hose can be slipped in almost anywhere and secured with straps as ballast tanks. Proposed here is using the smallest heavier wall stiff aluminum or steel tube mast with a mass balanced trialing wing section plastic or metal sheath pivoting around it that is mass balanced to spin freely on the mast and streamline it in all wind directions and angles. Side back and fore stay support this mast set just forward enough for possibly two back stays from the probably square transom corners. A small electric winch line on the fore stay can lower the rig for bridges. A fully external surface area battened sail can be rolled onto a fairly large diameter aluminum tubular boom that is at 90 degrees to the fore stay. Assuming this as a fairly high aspect ratio Jib the boom air drag is not significant under sail. This with the windage stiff jib would be as flat as any possible sail with a small amount of curvature that might be kept at around a 12% cord depth by design of the right thickness external battens. This is like a roll top desk or garage door, smooth and stiff in one direction but flexible in the roll up direction. There is a lot more to this idea. Jim Burden, Lincoln Nebraska
     
  14. CT249
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    CT249 Senior Member

    Sure there are some stick-in-the-muds, and some people who are scared of development. But it's all too common for people who have reasonable points of view to be classed as hidebound luddites. Equally, there are many people who think that they have a brilliant idea who just don't understand the faults it has, or why other people may not be interested.

    I don't know what "resistance to multihulls" discussion you're talking about, but as noted recently, there is a huge amount of rubbish thrown around about how "resistant" people were to multis. They were never banned. They were treated like other new types - in fact more favourably than most new types. The big reason multis are not more popular is that they don't suit most people - and that's coming from a multi owner who now mostly sails a cat. Most mono owners are not stupid - they choose a mono because it is the best boat for them. Two of the greatest multi designers, Irens and Farriers, also prefer monos for some uses.

    As gggGuest says, it is simply factually wrong to say that all racers are resistant to things like new sails. The modern asymmetric spinnaker was first flown in July 1983. It was basically universal in 18s by later that year. Many other classes were interested straight away. Before the '80s were out, we were using them on 38' offshore cruiser/racers. The reason some classes didn't adopt them instantly had little if anything to do with conservatism, but were mainly about the practicalities of getting them to work better than a symmetrical spinnaker. Those who didn't adopt them were normally NOT silly conservatives, but intelligent people who understood the issues.

    About the Wright Brothers - when Wilbur decided to get into research into flying machines, the first thing he did, on June 1 1899, was to write to the Smithsonian asking for all the information they had about heavier than air craft, so that he could "begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work....I want to avail myself of what is already known..." So Wilbur didn't start his project by dreaming of "the impossible" - he started his project by researching all available knowledge about the concept, and before he and Orville had progressed very far their successful tests had attracted the interest and applause of leading experts like Octave Chanute, who arranged for Wilbur to give a talk to a significant engineering symposium when they were still in the early stages of gliding. And as soon as the Wrights showed their airplanes publicly, those who had saw them, even sceptics like Santos-Dumont, were convinced and converted.

    It's interesting to see that the Wrights were NOT people who ignored the previous experts in the field (far from it, as the episode with Smeaton's air pressure measurements showed) and they were NOT rejected by the "establishment". That's the opposite of the cliche of the unknown genius who works it all out for themselves and battles the "establishment".

    PS- Can I ask how often you have done, say, the first regatta in your country for a new type of sailing, or sailed the first example in your country of a new type of class, or created a new class, or been one of the first to use a particular sail in a particular context? I've done it quite a few times from the '80s to the 2010s, and I never heard anyone unfairly resisting these developments, or being "control sick".
     

  15. Yobarnacle
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    Yobarnacle Senior Member holding true course

    Some folks are traditionalists. Some are cutting edge extremists. Many are cautious and accept innovations slowly, but eventually accept them.
    I designed, built, and raced Moths as a kid in 50s and early 60s. I liked the "Experimental" aspect of the class but never dreamed it would eventually include hiking boards and foils and other high tech expensive innovations.
    Different strokes for different folks.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moth_(dinghy)

    "The Moth Class is the name for a small development class of sailing dinghy. Originally a cheap home built sailing boat designed to plane, now it is an expensive largely commercially produced boat designed to hydroplane on foils."

    "Also, in the early 1930s a small group of sailors in Great Britain formed a British Moth Class. The British Moth class was restricted to a particular hull shape of a 1930s Vintage American Moth Boat, and is thus a one-design boat,"

    "In USA. Racing of "Classic Moths" resumed in 1989 and in 1990 a new club was formed to govern racing and construction of Classic Moths. This club, the Classic Moth Boat Association or CMBA is the current governing body for the original US type of Moth Boat. The intent of the CMBA is to revive the original US version of the boat and update the rules so that development is permitted without allowing the boats to become too freakish. The IMCA rules from 1965, the final year prior to the phase-in of the Australian rig and wings were consulted as a starting point for reviving the US Moth"

    "Recent years have seen the International Moth literally take flight with the advent of lifting hydrofoils on daggerboard and rudder, which lift the entire hull and skipper above the water surface, dramatically reducing drag and increasing speed. Top speeds achieved are above 30 knots, the highest 10 second average of 30.7 knots[2] (56.9 km/h) was recorded on 2 May 2010. This high speed is reflected in the International Moth's RYA Portsmouth Yardstick of 600, the fastest (As of 2012) of any sailing dinghy or multihull.[3"

    Aftmast rigs are interesting and in development. Experimental. Who can guess where it will lead?
     
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