34th America's Cup: multihulls!

34th AC

---------------------
They've been up on foils a lot but ,apparently, can't foil in as light a wind as can LR. 94.2% of their problem is time on the boat, in my opinion.

 

Then, why not use the power of the sail itself ? Something like "reverse pumping", where the skipper makes a slight turn to load the boom of the wing more, the wing winds the hydraulics by been left free to rotate a little bit, then he steers the boat to windward again so it would be easy to put the wing back in its previous position without dissipating and consuming as much hydraulic power as it was absorbed and stored during this manoeuvre.
If that was possible, there would be less need for weight lifting, which is not what sailing was meant to be...

 

I guess some people might know what is happening in the race from shore.
Others might only see the tips of the sails and have no idea what is actually
going on. I suspect the latter make up the majority.

How did you estimate that there is more interest now in the AC than ever
before?
And do you think that interest will translate into something "useful", like more
people actually buying boats and sailing, especially foilers?

 

Good question.

In good or in bad, the TV power of the AC event has all of a sudden injected the concept of foiling sailboats to the general sailing and non-sailing community at the worldwide level. I know people around me, educated people with an engineering degree, who have seen "flying boats" for the first time in their lives by watching the LVC races. And they have expressed me the admiration for these boats. So, judging from their reactions, from the promotional and informative point of view this edition of the AC72 has already scored some important points.

What I am not sure at all is that it will translate into more new sailors, especially on foilers, because of the cost and intrinsic difficulty of sailing on foils. Sailing on displacement monohulls is already pretty difficult and too-demanding for majority of boat owners (and in fact, the market share of sailboats is just a tiny fraction of the total number of boats sold each year), so foiling will imo remain a sport activity for just a small, young and physically fit community of sailors.

Cheers

 

34th AC

==================
More people in my daily life are talking about the flying boats-and not all of them are in the boat industry.(!)
But the coverage is just better than it was years ago.
----
The "trickledown" has already started with companies like Sail Innovation( http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/multihulls/flying-phantom-f-18-catamaran-43898.html ) developing a foiling F 18 that uses the AC three foil configuration and a single main foil with a similar configuration to TNZ's innovative foil break thru. A catamaran manufacturer that I know personally is begining to invest in a prototype foiler. And I've been PMed by several people about their plans to do the same. And with the success of the foil system almost every C Class in the LAC has adopted the configuration and it looks like this years LAC will be on foils. See the Little America's Cup 2013 thread. Never in history have hydrofoils worked so well on cats as the TNZ three foil configuration and foil does, and yes, it is a revolution.(sorry, couldn't help myself)
========
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5doBIv3TVbA&feature=player_embedded

 

Why is it "useful" to people to buy boats ? And why it is not "useful" to just watch and enjoy the sight of sailing boats they will never buy ? Do people watch F1 races because they will buy a racing car someday ? Would it really be "useful" to them, to actually buy a racing car ?
I enjoy football games, although I have not played football since my college years. So do millions of people - and the same is true for many sports we watch, but not actually participate- the sports of the Olympic games, for example. I do not understand why most members of this Forum have such a negative attitude against sailing as a spectacle - but, of course, they do watch thousands of other things on TV, for a great portion of their lives...

 

Sour grapes and bitterness from the bloodless.
Pathetic attempts at rationalizing away fear of a new type of sailing.
Too late, chaps. Genie has flown.
Actually it is not new; some of us have been playing around with flying boats for 3-4 decades.
But to the grumpy brigade ... way too new.
So let's moan and whinge and whine negatively.
Makes great reading.

 

Don't get your pantaloons in a bunch, Xarax.
I also like watching many different sports without any intention of taking
them up myself. I'm genuinely interested in how the AC might impact sailing
and whether foilers really will increase their share of the market, or whether
they are a fad that will have trouble breaking out of their current small
niche.

 

I am pretty sure foilers will get a boost from this event. But I am also convinced that it will be a share of market stolen from other types of small multihulls, which people used to buy for their speed. Monohull market will hardly be affected by the AC-induced mediatic exposure of foiling cats.

 

It could hardly get worse than the old helicopter shots we used to get!
(My first memory of the AC was the series between Weatherley and Gretel
which was only in B&W in newspapers).

There's no argument that the current AC will increase interest in foilers.
Do you see foilers making up more than, say, 10% of the total catamaran
recreational fleet soon after this AC? Ever?

Also, do you think that foilers might be held back a bit by restrictions on how
close to shore and other users of beaches they will be allowed to operate?

I'm thinking here of the danger (real or imagined) of being hit by foils. I'm
not saying that they are more dangerous, just that I can see some safety
conscious types shouting that decapitation is a possibility.
I doubt that Simpson's death will have an impact, BTW.

Yes, but if it fails to overthrow the old order it's just a rebellion and you are
nowhere near a majority yet, and probably never will be. ;P

 

34th AC

==============
I think that is preposterous! Boats, windsurfers, kiteboards all have vertical (and some have horizontal) foils that could injure anyone they hit. Foilers approaching a beach will retract their foils and slow down out of self interest if for no other reason. A person hit by foils would have to intentionally put themselves in harms way or be the innocent victim of of a sailor intentionally trying to harm them.
All boats going fast can be dangerous and I don't see any greater danger from foilers operated responsibly. Don't forget that a limited number of Moths, Raves and Hobie trifoilers have been around for 15 years or more.
Lines from kites(man/woman carrying) are probably the greatest hazard on any beach for the forseeable future.

 

It's the horizontal foils that I was thinking of.
And jetskis are far more dangerous in my reckoning.

I was just wondering if you had heard of any opposition on the grounds of
foilers being more dangerous.

 

But ( like a broken record) foiling is neither new nor revolutionary it's been around for many decades and has a very refined implementations which are really as good as they are going to get. Certainly far more robust implementations than the AC72's. Any recent flurry is more about cheaper light weight composites making the small lightweight faster classes even faster. That's hardly a revolution.

But the current AC72 is a flawed design that quite clearly failed it's SOR. Rather than talking up the design you should be looking at how it should be improved to make it safer. Those long slim overhanging bows with no robust pitch control are just accidents waiting to happen ( and accidents that happened). Images of tumbling sailors from ahigh and wrecked boats will be the enduring media images of this series.

The father of all this foiling is arguably Eric Taberly and he's a good subject. I wonder what the handful of 'manic edgers' think about Eric since he was a bit odd wasn't he? ( not just that he was French either ).
He was a very capable and experienced multihull and even foiling multihull sailor. But his real love for relaxed sailing both offshore and coastal, was an old ballasted classic traditional monohull with a gaff rig. He said he got more out of sailing that boat than any of his racing boats, he said he thought of the foilers as machines and that his monohull had a soul.

People like Eric Taberly had it all in balance, he knew about the thrills and spills and he had a love of the sea and understood the limitations of all the types of boats he sailed. Some posters here just don't seem to get that.

The whole "either it's on steroids or it's worthy of contempt" is a very myopic view that I see as born from a lack of real experience of the sea on a variety of boats.

People like Taberly illustrate this quite well.

 

As I said in an earlier post, the 1987 AC was shown prime time Sunday evenings every week on national TV in the UK.

One of the biggest winter dinghy races in the UK is the Bloody Mary held at QMSC. 400+ boats, typical conditions are like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcCfE9T_QQM

There is serious talk about banning foiling boats because of the injury risk to other sailors if they get hit by foils.

The last time I raced a dinghy (a RS400) was this February in the snow at QMSC. There were a number of foiling Moths racing and watching them come into shore showed how impractical they are for many venues. I remember from my non-foiling Moth days how difficult it was to launch and recover at many clubs.

Weston SC, home of many beach cat champions, is typical. A lee shore, so breaking waves, shallow so you have to wade out to launch, gooey mud and shingle. You cannot leave a lightly built boat on the beach while you fetch a trolley - it gets holed.

Or along the coast to the east - where to launch you sit in the boat and a launching party carry you into the water over the surf

yet more people race dinghies at those sort of venues than they do in the whole of Florida

And the biggest beach cat race in the world, the Round Texel, sails off a surf beach. Imagine having foils in this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLsXBn3Jfrk

and watch the end of this one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9c64N3H9GE

to see how what the beach looks like after the race. That's why "beach cats" got their name and why Hobie 16's are still popular

Richard Woods of Woods Designs

www.sailingcatamarans.com

 

34th AC

=================
Vast oversimplification. Foils never worked very well on catamarans until the recent development of the TNZ configuration. Bi-foilers like the Moth were unheard of until 10 years ago. These aren't minor evolutionary changes ,they are major ,profound breakthrus that have opened up design avenues never considered before.
Mike, do you know anything about A Class catamaran design? When they introduced "wave piercing hulls"(long, slender with buoyancy toward the bottom) the incidence of pitchpole dropped a great deal. The long narrow AC72 bows are an advantage, not a detriment-at least they would be with the proper rudder foil in concert with a plan that allowed both main foils to be controllable simultaneously in an emergency(requires better hydraulics).
As to the "Father" of foiling-don't think I'd pick Taberly alone-probably Keiper, James Grogono(and some of his UK contemporaries), and the guys that first used curved lifting "foil assist" on big tri's inluding Ian Farrier for early development and Dr. Sam Bradfield and Greg Ketterman designers of the first production sailing foilers for the transition to the modern era and John Ilett, Rohan Veal for the incredible Moth development which has opened such exciting design avenues and more recently the unnamed(so far to me at least) designers of the TNZ foil configuration and foil(combination of fully submerged with surface piercing and intermittent manual altitude control). Major, revolutionary, innovative development that will change multihull foiling-and sailing- forever.