Why do people keep on claiming that sailors are conservative about rigs?

[mydauphin]

Was that directed at me?, I don't understand if it was??

No one in particular... just the thread in general.

 

[brian eiland]

Ketch vs Sloop

Brian, the second post's references are still simply instances where a couple of people feel that "alternative" rigs suit them better. That's fine - but it does nothing to prove that other sailors are conservative about rig choice.

Okay, a guy wants to sail a 65 foot cat by himself, so he would like a certain rig. So what? It doesn't prove that people who want to sail other boats in other places and other situations are ruled by conservatism when they choose a different rig. Okay, so someone rates being able to set sail quickly very highly, so he wants an all-furling rig. That's great - but it does not have any bearing on the choices made by other people to whom other factors are more important.

The Sponberg piece says that rig choice has changed. How can something that says that tastes have changed be used to prove that tastes are conservative? Look at the language in the article - it speaks of how "equipment choices have expanded and improved so much....big mainsail is now easily tamed...all this new equipment". So Eric's piece speaks of innovations and changes that have been created and adopted - not of conservatism.

In both of these instances I was trying to point out that the ALMIGHTY fractional rig SLOOP RIG that you tout so highly and often, is not without some short comings in a number of sailor's opinions. The ketch has a lot of followers, and might have more if the industry were utilizing it more often. Some of the younger sailors have no idea of what they are missing,...because there are not that many (if any) new production vessels with ketch rigs. That was part of what Eric was saying in that article. In this case we might say the builders (not rule makers) are defining the market, by not providing ketches, ...without the virtues of the ketch rig itself.

Last weekend I went sailing on Randy West's 75' catamaran Ppalu. There were 3 of us on board, and all over the age of 55. The winds were 12-15 starting out and built to around 20 by the time we reached the inlet at Ponce (Daytona, FL). She is ketch rigged and the main spar is only 63' tall. Even then it was a real chore to get that mainsail up, and even more of a chore to drop it back into its 'stack-pack' enclosure when we were trying to negotiate a VERY rough inlet that had a large swell running due to constant eastern winds for the previous 2 days. We had real problems getting that mainsail flaked up onto the boom so we could see how to safely surf those waves in the very restrictive inlet

I found myself imagining what it would have been like had that vessel been rigged as a sloop,....probably a 20 taller mast, and that much bigger of a mainsail.

Then it took 2 of us a good hour to flake, bag, and stow those heavy sails. This is all not conducive to utilizing that vessel on a daysailing basis in anything over the 15 knots of wind, and certainly not short-handed. Randy had been asked to take a potential buyer out the next day, along with the gentleman's kids. He had to cancel out on that outing.

Just reconfirmed my thoughts on my all-furling single-masted ketch.

 

[motorbike]

I would say that seamanship is your issue, a 75 foot catarmarans rig problems can all be solved with a pair of 100 hp yanmars rather than with 3 middle age gents. No 75 foot boat is easy to handle when its fresh.

At some point all rigs on big boats become unmanageable by a small crew, with or without mechanical assistance. and in direct proportion to screw ups, wind strength and size.

Ketches are a logical choice to split the loads, so your argument is what exactly.......?

 

[CT249]

In both of these instances I was trying to point out that the ALMIGHTY fractional rig SLOOP RIG that you tout so highly and often, is not without some short comings in a number of sailor's opinions. The ketch has a lot of followers, and might have more if the industry were utilizing it more often. Some of the younger sailors have no idea of what they are missing,...because there are not that many (if any) new production vessels with ketch rigs. That was part of what Eric was saying in that article. In this case we might say the builders (not rule makers) are defining the market, by not providing ketches, ...without the virtues of the ketch rig itself.

Last weekend I went sailing on Randy West's 75' catamaran Ppalu. There were 3 of us on board, and all over the age of 55. The winds were 12-15 starting out and built to around 20 by the time we reached the inlet at Ponce (Daytona, FL). She is ketch rigged and the main spar is only 63' tall. Even then it was a real chore to get that mainsail up, and even more of a chore to drop it back into its 'stack-pack' enclosure when we were trying to negotiate a VERY rough inlet that had a large swell running due to constant eastern winds for the previous 2 days. We had real problems getting that mainsail flaked up onto the boom so we could see how to safely surf those waves in the very restrictive inlet

I found myself imagining what it would have been like had that vessel been rigged as a sloop,....probably a 20 taller mast, and that much bigger of a mainsail.

Then it took 2 of us a good hour to flake, bag, and stow those heavy sails. This is all not conducive to utilizing that vessel on a daysailing basis in anything over the 15 knots of wind, and certainly not short-handed. Randy had been asked to take a potential buyer out the next day, along with the gentleman's kids. He had to cancel out on that outing.

Just reconfirmed my thoughts on my all-furling single-masted ketch.

I've never, ever said that the "all mighty fractional sloop" doesn't have shortcomings. I've never, ever said that it fits everyone. It does suit some of us, and we are surely allowed to speak out when other people make incorrect claims about it or about other rigs.

The issue that kicked off the thread is that people keep on claiming that sailors' rig choices are governed by conservatism, but they never seem to be able to back up those claims, apart from cherry-picking specific instances in which they personally feel other rigs may be better. Okay, you had problems with Ppalu - but that doesn't mean that other people on other boats are choosing their rigs because they are conservative.

Yes, I realised that Eric's article was about the fact that the industry wasn't offering the ketch rig much any more. But the very fact that sailors have gone from a situation where about 40% of cruising yachts were ketches to a situation where they are a small minority indicates that sailors are not frozen in their rig choice by conservatism as is often claimed. If they were so conservative, they'd still be sailing ketches (or gaff cutters and schooners). As Motorbike says, they are sensible people who have decided that ketches aren't worth the cash, and the builders have listened.

Sure, the industry isn't always right - but they also can err on the side of falling for the latest gee-whizbang trend as well. If we're going to prove they are being too conservative, we're going to have to find better evidence than people have brought up so far, which often gets down to "well, I want to sell this cool new idea that suits me and other people don't want to buy it, so therefore they must be conservative".

This isn't trying to say "my rig is better than your rig" It's trying to say to many fans of 'alternative' rigs "we will respect your personal preference in rig, so please do the same to us without casting aspersions at us and our reasons".

 

[Barra]

Brian can you post a couple of photos taken during your sail on Ppalu?

 

[brian eiland]

Brian can you post a couple of photos taken during your sail on Ppalu?

Didn't take along a camera (forgot it). Perhaps the other crew member will send me some images, or post them on Facebook, as he had a large format smart phone.

 

[brian eiland]

Looking for something else, but ran across this.

When i asked my first question i was thinking about the angle seen from the side , this turned out to be much more interesting..

Tomorrow Im off to Madagaskar, There I will be rounding the top and going down the westcoast and there meet a lot of headwinds.. Then I will experiment whit moving the foot of the sail to leeward.. If half of what u are saying is true ( not saying u are a lier) , then i should see some affect of that also i hope.. Will be very interesting.. I post a reply about that when i can..

I read something about Hunters Child in one of Dashews books. Lars Bergstom was the designer i think..? Dashew talks about his pivoting bowspeer on Beowulf and it seams to work well for him. But only to windward from what i remember. Thats where i got my bamboo ide..

Racing boats seam to be the "drive" in boatdesign.. But there rules sometimes just seam to mess things up.. The *** of my IOR like boat is one exampel.. This sail ides seam to be another..

In my mind i can see the use of this in cruisingboats (ore any boat) on a lightwind sail on a pivoting bowspeer, or a cuttersail.. The tripwire/lifeline might make it harder to use on a normal headsail.. Any Cat sailor should know a lot of this i would expect?
Cheers
Daniel

'Twas ever thus. This has been going on since the advent of rating rules than can be traced all the way back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in England.
Eric

 

[CT249]

Yes, rating rules have had an effect on boat design. However, many of the claims made about their effect are codswallop. The implication in your quote that the rules prevented the headstay being moved to leeward is probably one of them.

I note that on the fathead sail thread you wrote "I see a lot of cruising boat folks trying to adopt this latest 'fad'". It seems odd to be claiming that they are conservative on one hand, but that a lot of them are subject to fads on the other hand. So are "a lot" of them following fads, or are they conservative?

The supposedly conservative sailing public tried moving headsail tacks to leeward about in the '60s and early '70s, probably many years before Eric tried it in models. That shows that the real sailors are not as conservative as implied. They abandoned the idea because it doesn't work in reality. Of course, anyone who can windsurf can see what happens when you try to sail higher by dropping the luff too far to leeward- you start sailing backwards.

 

[Barra]

Brian, did they hoist the mizzen on Ppalu during your sail. I notice most ketch owners don't bother much with the mizzen as it makes so little difference to weather. A Roberts 60 ketch used to race in a mixed fleet I sailed in a while back. Sometimes they set the mizzen and sometimes they didn't. The crews consensus was it wasn't worth the effort.

CT249 you may be interested in Russell Browns Proa Jezero with the forestays to leeward. (mostly to keep the mast up) I got the impression the boat sailed well to windward. I'm not sure if the open slot or inclined to weather headsail luff had anything to do with this. The sheeting angle was set at the usual 7 to 10 degrees though.

The Jarcat had a great big "tack track" across the forebeam so you coud put the jib luff anywhere you wanted. Handy down wind as you could get the headsail out from behind the main.

 

[brian eiland]

Mizzen as a Flap to the overall sailplan

Brian, did they hoist the mizzen on Ppalu during your sail. I notice most ketch owners don't bother much with the mizzen as it makes so little difference to weather. A Roberts 60 ketch used to race in a mixed fleet I sailed in a while back. Sometimes they set the mizzen and sometimes they didn't. The crews consensus was it wasn't worth the effort.

Yes we did raise the mizzen, and it was very effective,...but of course we were on a close reach.

I'm not claiming that the mizzen sail is that effective when close on the wind, but then a lot of cruisers (not racers) do often choose not to go out bashing to weather.

On another hand there are some reasons to reconsider the contribution of a mizzen sail to upwind performance. Could it be considered as potentially acting like a 'flap' to the sail plan as a whole?? Both Tom Speer and Mark Drela are very big fans of flaps,..ie...

"Think One" and Flaps

Think one
Originally Posted by Mikko
http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/209338/n...Shape/Main.htm

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/209338/n...ics/index2.htm

To understand how the mainsail and the jib work together, it may be useful to think of them as one wing with a slot in the middle. The jib forms the front part of the wing (leading edge in aircraft terminology) and the mainsail forms the back part (trailing edge). The jib is the curved, smooth shaped front part of the wing, the main is the more straight, flat part. When you adjust the main sheet or traveler, you adjust the camber of the whole wing in a very smooth way, around the hinge that the mast forms.

When you keep in mind that pressure always acts perpendicular to the surface, it is easy to see why the jib usually is in charge of most of the forward driving force, while the main causes most only heel. When sailing upwind most of the surface of the jib is oriented in the direction of the motion, while most of the surface of the main is oriented perpendicular to it, the leech often even pulling back. But it would be wrong to think that the jib is more important for that. The mainsail is bending the air in front of the jib, allowing the boat to point higher than with the jib alone, and also helping the jib bear more loading without stalling.

Flaps
Originally Posted by Mark Drela
The attached PDF gives the relation between an airfoil's lift coefficient and its local incidence angle distribution. This quantifies the stuff I've been saying about what does and does not affect the lift on a sail. The relation comes from thin airfoil theory, but it is still reasonably accurate if the camberline is broken up into a number of smaller pieces. It there's an overlap, then the local incidence of the overlapping sheets should be averaged.

The key part of the relation is the lift/incidence influence function f_a(x), which multiples the local incidence distribution. This f_a(x) is small on the front parts of the airfoil and grows over the rear parts, and becomes infinite (but integrable) at the trailing edge. Basically, any shape changes on the front of the airfoil get mostly quashed by the small f_a values there. Conversely, any shape changes towards the trailing edge get strongly magnified by the large f_a. So to control lift we need to modify the rear airfoil shape, and can mostly ignore the front airfoil shape.

This means that the shape of the rear half of the airfoil on average has 4.5 times more influence on the lift than the front half.

The means that the shape of the rearmost 1/6'th of the airfoil controls half of the total lift.

 

[brian eiland]

more 'flaps'

Flaps on Chris White's Mastfoil concept

Back to Chris White's new rig, the subject of this lastest posting. Did all of you take notice that his 'mastfoils' were two element foils themselves??
"Why does the foil have an articulating trailing edge flap?
Because a flap adds lots of power to the foil with very little additional weight and complication. Reaching and running the flap is set at a significant angle (approx 40 degrees) to the main foil which increases the overall camber of the foil and can nearly double its power. Sailing upwind only a small amount of flap angle is used but it helps create additional lift with very little drag"

This is an important and distinguishing feature of his design. This imparts a much greater contribution to their effectiveness, both alone, and in support of that headsail located in front of each MastFoil.

This unique design deserves more analysis before being tossed to the trash pile by the 'traditionalist'.

 

[rob denney]

Rob;

Re Wyliecats; you didn't limit your claim to 30 footers in any way, explicitly or implicitly. Nor am I under any obligation to carry out a full investigation into the loss of the 39's rig, since it proves that your claim was incorrect or incomplete and therefore maybe I am not the only one making "silly statements".

Your figure of 2 failures (1 x 30, 1 x 39) in 30 boats (the number of 30's) is shonky statistics.

Personally, I like freestanding masts (although I don't think they are the best for all purposes) and (from what I can see of them) Wyliecats.

I'm glad you like Wyliecats, and unstayed rigs, (and "my rigs") so can't understand why you are arguing against them, for the majority of cruisers. I am also not sure why, if you prefer them, you find their advantages to "not be significant"

However the point is that while it is quite likely that they are more reliable, there doesn't seem to be objective evidence to that effect. Okay, the Wyliecat 30 seems to have a good record - but is it BETTER than the dismasting record of (say) Northshore 38s, which aren't a boat I particularly like but which don't seem to drop rigs very often? Is the Wyliecat 30's rate of mast loss less than that of Contessa 32s or X99s or some other group of yachts?

It is not about which rigs stay up, it is about how much maintenance they require.

Compare the numbers using North Shore 38's which are 10+ years old, sailed regularly, have never had the mast removed for examination, have not replaced any standing rigging and have never had anyone up the mast to check for damage.

It is untrue to claim that I am "ignoring the reality" of cruising wives

You used your sample of 2 very experienced cruising wives to dismiss my comments about average cruising wives.

The fact that we all have personal preferences is why your list of issues associated with the "conventional" rigs is not a list of objective reasons why such rigs are inferior. .

The values under discussion are those of the majority of cruising sailors, who would like to spend less money, do less maintenance, have easier to sail boats and improve their performance. If you have a more "objective list", or can point out why stayed rigs are better than unstayed rigs for these purposes, for this demographic, please tell us.

You didn't say how often you and your unnamed "experts" recommend rigging renewal on well used boats that are contemplating going offshore?

 

[brian eiland]

Hi CT249
This video certainly speaks well of the fractional rig use

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ-nBDcMlWs

 

[catsketcher]

If I think of the changes I have seen in rigs there are quite a few. Compared to the rigs on the family Manly Junior

-wooden mast replaced by alloy mast and boom to carbon to high modulus carbon today
- full battened sails, better batten cars, expensive batten cars to cheaper UHMWPE batten cars,
- wooden battens replaced by x cross section battens, to pulltruded rectangle battens.
- wire/rope halyards replaced by spectra
- almost any wire replaced by spectra
- stainless fittings replaced by moulded glass or carbon fittings
- shrouds/stays replaced by Dynex dux
- turnbuckles replaced by lashings
- terylene dacron replaced or modified with Mylar, Spectra, warp orientated stuff, Carbon, cruise laminate

So almost every part of the yacht rig has been modified apart from its basic structure in many classes where there are no rating rules. That is probably because the stayed sloop rig is such a good rig.

I like tuning my rig, using the stays to hold onto, running under headsail alone downwind, trimming the main for balance upwind, shifting to the staysail as the wind blows up, fanging along under the reacher in a blow and would not trade this rig for another - even if that rig were free.

There has been massive change in rigs over the last few decades but more in build than type. Even with the Wylies, Team Phillips, Freedoms, unstayed rigs have not caught on. The Prouts and John Hitch's X-it with the aft mast rigs did not take over the world. Spectra has as has cruise laminate and carbon chainplates.

In the evolutionary arms race that is the sea some great ideas don't bear fruit. I have eliminated more than half of the "amazing ideas" I put into our boat. They did not translate well into real time use - they were pretty dumb.

I think we have to respect the opinion of the many who decide to build their own boats - free of any accountants or need for sales. These boats are usually built by people like me - who just need to build a boat. Schionnings have sold a few plans for twin unstayed rigs but these have been dwarfed by the desire for normal sloop rigs. If the Radical Bay rig was a fabulous idea then it would have grabbed a few more adherents. If John Hitch's aft mast huge genoa rig was truly fabulous he would have found it easier to sell a few plans or sell his boat, but the loads on the sheet are tremendous and it is not the boat for you if you like to tack at all quickly.

Maybe another reason there are few unstayed rigs is because they are really expensive - or we get told they are. I was in Ushaiai 3 weeks ago and saw Icebird - an amazing looking boat used for Antarctic exploration with an aerorig. On the other side of the wharf was the Ben Lexcen designed Spirit of Sydney, used by the same company to do the same type of trips. The owner, Darryl liked the aerorig but IIRC the cost was something north of US 1.5 million for the mast/boom alone. AND it had quirks like - don't reef the main too much or the boom just comes to windward. And get the preventers rigged quickly to stop it swinging.

The greatest number of masts I have ever seen break is in a large Laser fleet. Carnage occurs regularly in big wind and waves. I know they are not carbon but they show that unstayed masts can break regularly. I probably wouldn't trust a Laser mast over 3 years old. I loved my time sailing the Laser and was good at getting the most out of it but I never wanted an unstayed rig for my own cruising boat yet I did want a wishbone after my experience with windsurfing. I decided to go down the stayed sloop route even with championship experience with an unstayed mast. It was a conscious decision.

cheers

Phil

 

[Barra]

Flaps on Chris White's Mastfoil concept

Brian you are aware that the latest iteration of the mast foil doesn't have a flap.

Sounds much modified after failures.

Posted on another forum by the owner of A47 Agility in a thread you participated in.