34th America's Cup: multihulls!

Mike - my edition of Marchaj was printed in 1982 but it was first printed in 1964. I am pretty sure Marchaj back then would be saying that multis would be unsafe as ferries or charter boats or as around the world racers or cruisers. Things move on.

One problem with the cats as I see it is that the designers are very clever. Even though foiling was supposed to be impossible they found out a way to do it. Maybe next time they may choose cats - maybe smaller soft sail wing masted cats - that have safe and proven foiling systems that give perfect control. Safe and fast.

Then again I love watching any great sailors in any boat. I just watched the movie "Wind" for the first time (at home with a cold) You gotta love 12 metres.

There is one thing I would love to know that the AC sailors and designers have done that would be great to filter down to normal sailors. How do they get the boards to go up and down so well. Mine get stuck with much lower loads.

cheers

Phil

 

They use US $100 dollar bills soaked in the distilled vegetable oil from one of those "bloom once a century" cactus plants mixed with Beyonce's sweat as lubricating shims between the case and the board. Each Benjamin used can only be used once and exposed to light for 25 seconds. Let's see that trickle down to club racers! There will be lines forming outside Annapolis Performance Sailing now that I've exposed the secret.

The America's Cup has become a caricature of everything the general public thinks about yacht racing and elitist sports. I'd rather watch homebuilt Puddle Ducks built by kids race. At least they would be able to sail the Berkeley Circle more often than the AC boats would be allowed to play.

Larry should go back to flogging relational database software. He's just about killed our sport in terms of appeal to the general public.

--
CutOnce

 

Phil
He has around 60 publications up to the mid 90's. His view on these AC craft would have been similar to his view on sailing foilers in the mid Eighties, a curiosity doomed to the junk heap once it's 'stage' popularity has waned.

I think it's important to understand that the imagined pro\Anti multihull debate is largely due to ignorance of the process of matching a particular craft to a particular use for a geographic area of operation ( SOR). I don't think Marchaj would have been so prejudiced, he was far too professional for that, and he was around as a working NA professional long after cats appeared, retiring in the mid 90's. It was only the ULDB speed machines and particularly sailing foilers he was eloquent about and often wondered out loud why so much money would be invested in craft that were so utterly useless.

 

More video posted a few minutes ago, the footage of ETNZ is best. Looks like the ETNZ grinders do some of their work sitting down... recipe for soreness somewhere.

:

 

What bothers me most about this cup is Grant Dalton. If he wants to play the underdog, play it, but you can't complain about it. They can't complain about Oracle's budget when they too build 2 boats, 2 wings, and have a massive design and build team. The wind limits were changed because of the Artemis accident, not because Oracle wanted them to be. Yes, I think the lower wind limits are a steep overreaction to an incident that was primarily due to a faulty boat, but if they didn't they would get so much bad press about an unsafe event, so now they have to change everything they can to make it appear like they are making it safer so the event can still go on. Now I think ETNZ is a great team, great boat, and great sailors, but Dalton just complains, I feel sorry for the rest of the team to have to deal with that. Grant always complains about Ellison's money, I don't see how being successful is something to be ashamed of. If Dalton wants to see a real underdog story that doesn't involve complaining and whining, he should look at Larry Ellison, he started a tech company with less than two thousand dollars and in 30 years became one of the richest men in the world.

 

Seriously now, this is a real brain teaser for me as anything else about this boat. Not only can they get the board up and down smoothly but, when down, it is somehow fixed so that at the right time it can take on the load of practically the whole boat without lifting up while at the same time they apparently can manage to tilt it fore aft manually under load to maintain the right attitude.

I can't imagine Marchaj would have anything bad to say about that.

 

It's pretty simple. They are better at manufacturing matching boards and slots than the rest of us. Their materials deflect less and their finishes are better. Autoclave cured prepreg skins over foam cores, with optimal layup schedules. They are far beyond CNC machined board blanks and hand-layups.

More money, better materials, better engineering and fast development cycles using the best people in the business. No magic here. They learn constantly. Who had people hanging around the last Newport C-Class teams (including some people ON the C-Class teams)? Various America's Cup teams were there scouting people, methods and expertise.

In addition to the obvious quality, they've got professional athletes, who are training full time doing the pushing and pulling needed. In addition to better than average strength, they are finely tuned pros who know exactly when to time their movements to coincide with minimal lateral loads. There is a microscopic timing window in which boards can be moved during transitions - early or late make moving them far more difficult.

--
CutOnce

 

^^^

Not a bad description, CutOnce!

I remember curing our first hand-formed and glassed foam and epoxy rudders and daggerboards, in my sauna.

Lol



PS. Today a Frenchman happened to ask about this daggerboard issue on SA and got a couple of interesting replies:

...

 

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Mike, Marchaj was a hero of mine-I've read(and own) two of his books. Your comments, highlighted above don't ring true to me but I didn't know the man.
However, I have a friend and business associate that did and publish this with his permision. I showed Eric the highlighted comments:

Hi Doug,
That statement does not sound characteristic of Tony Marchaj. I checked his Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, and Marchaj devotes 13 pages to hydrofoils, speaking in very favorable terms about them, and not necessarily on UILDBs, but also on multihulls. This book was written in 1979, so it does not necessarily cover more modern developments. He references Bradfield’s work. In his Sail Performance—Theory and Practice, published in 1996, he devotes a chapter to “The Drive Towards Ultimate Speed.” In there, he mentions more modern foiling developments. The only thing that Marchaj bemoans is the fact that high-speed competitions have drawn more and more upon professional sailors at the expense of amateur sailors. But never does he couch his discussions as “useless.”
I think Mike Johns should document where it is that Marchaj expresses that opinion. Marchaj did write a number of technical papers over the years, and maybe he expressed something like that. But I think it would be out of character with his books on the subject, which, to me, reveal that he thought foils were certainly intriguing.

Eric

Eric W. Sponberg

Naval Architect

President

Sponberg Yacht Design Inc.

50 Ocean Court

St. Augustine, FL 32080

Tel/mobile: (904) 460-9494

Website: www.sponbergyachtdesign.com

 

34th AC

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Keep in mind that the L/D ratio of the foils on a Moth is 18/1(Drag 5.6% of lift) and it would seem that the AC foils would be at least that good.
----As I understand it the foils move in a trunk within a trunk and the trunk takes the load and transfers it to the lower bearing. I wouldn't be surprised if the trunk within a runk didn't have ball bearing rollers in it to facillitate board movement.

 

34th AC

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I don't think that is fair or accurate: there is no way because of one incidence of handling error and another of apparent structural failure that one can intelligently deduce that these boats represent a "failure of the chosen type of craft as a racing platform" ! That is just pure unadulterated speculation driven by other factors than a desire to make an accurate assessment of the situation. It seems to me that it is pandering to people not interested in or infatuated with the technology and leaves the exceptional level of technological development of these boats completely unrecognized-probably deliberately.
These boats represent the highest level of technology ever applied to a sailboat and their performance is spectacular. This kind of giant leap in sailing technology is bound to have developmental problems and it is profoundly sad that someone died while sailing one of these boats. But the facts are NOT in and already some changes are being made as a result of an accident that is NOT properly understood. If the crews support these changes, then I support them and the boats will still be the greatest sailboats to ever sail for the Americas Cup.

 

I have an old edition of "Seaworthiness - the forgotten factor" from Marchaj. It was written from the cruiser sailor's point of view, and apparently didn't see the racing rules of his time through a particularly benevolent lenses.

Couldn't find exactly the same phrase reported by Mike Johns, but at the page 20 there is a picture of a catamaran rigged with multiple rigid wings, accompanied by a pretty strong-worded caption, pretty similar to MJ's citation.

I will avoid venturing into interpretations what were his words exactly referred to (awful sails layout? odd hull form? both?), why did he chose that caption to comment that particular boat and how much could it be extended to similar designs. But it does sound like a strong point of view. Here is the photo:



Cheers

 

Just some back of the envelope calculations on the course, I'm perfectly capable of getting this wrong

Assumptions: the course map on the official site is to scale, and the boats are making 30kt or roughly 3000 ft/min.

Distances between marks calibrated by Google Earth, which shows roughly 17000 feet between Fort Point and the Southern tip of Alcatraz Island.

Longest legs: 5-7 minutes (two of these)

Shortest legs: A minute and change. (two of these)

Intermediate leg: 3-4 minutes.

Looks like about a 25 minute spectacle at 30kt, less if faster.

Distance between the bearaway marks (3) and reaching mark (4) and the "Accredited On-Water Viewing" is essentially none. Should be exciting head-on shots at those marks, even more so if there's a control problem while foiling.

Distance between those marks and the spectator boats is 1000 feet, the width of the "Accredited" area. No unpopulated buffer zone around those marks is shown.

Mark 3, the bearaway mark, is essentially at the Golden Gate. Tides can be strong in that area.

Rumors about changes to the course, but I have not seen anything official.

Cheers,

Earl

 

Unlike Doug I did meet Tony Marchaj several times, and spent several sociable evenings at his house. I know that by then he was a bit embarrassed by some of his original book - although to be fair it was basically written in the mid 1950's

The SOR for the Americas Cup has always been:

Stupidly expensive
The ultimate in boatbuilding and design
The pinnacle of MATCH racing

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the AC72's won't be match racing as we have come to know it from the 12m years.

I remember reading that one reason why the last British AC monohull was considered a failure was because it couldn't sail backwards very well - an essential requirement when "dialed up" in the prestart.

I also remember that back in the 1930's the J class were considered too delicate (Britannia excepted) to race in strong winds. The owners kept a little boat - a 12m - for racing then, as they were much more reliable. There was a big outcry in the mid 1950's when it was suggested that those little boats be used in the AC itself

I also recall that the rules originally said that the boats had to sail to the AC which obviously favoured the defenders. So the boats had small rigs and were made ocean proof for the crossing from England.

The photo is of Clifton Flasher,, which IIRC was one of Nigel Irens first designs

Richard Woods of Woods Designs

www.sailingcatamarans.com

 

What is "brave" about this?

and what is "new" about this?

Please explain.

Mine is the original 1964 edition of "Sailing Theory & Practice"

In mine, he, as Mike notes, professionally describes the technical aspect of each design and its merits.

For catamarans he does note:

"Naturally sailing at these speeds demands a change in the psychological adjustment of the crew..." and quote a citation from Dave Rochlen emphasizing his point.

When reviewing hydrofoil assisted cats, he called them "sailing creatures"...and also notes the difficulty of preserving stability.

I would agree with Mike. Even though Marchaj is being objective, it does appear that reading between the lines, he's not a fan! He marvels at the "technology" side, but not the practical side.