35th Americas Cup: Foiling Multihulls!

You make a few salient points CT, but your emphasis regarding recent sailing developments is spoilsport and heavily negative.
However you counter this with an occasional positive sentence just to show you are in touch with high performance modernity.
But the poor dead horse you flog unmercifully has actually decomposed and has half rotted away underground.
You know it's dead but you continue your repetitve and fixated ranting. We have heard it all dozens of times before; it has lost all meaning.

 

I'll stop flogging horses when others do, Gary.

 

Maybe you think the excitement about foilers is killing sailing and it would be better if all the foilers were all thrown into a pit and burned so that sailing can go back to being unnoticed and people won't feel so dissatisfied with it due to their knowledge of new kinds of fast flying boats, but what a miserable bunch they must be if that's their attitude! I only see it inspiring people and don't believe that's a bad thing at all. Lack of money in difficult times is the real problem for sailing, but even if that problem goes away, the current foilers are too expensive, making them nothing more than a dream for all but a few. We either have to get the costs down by designing foilers for the masses instead of cutting-edge racers, or alternatively we can find ways to give buyers extra value so that they can justify spending much more money on them than for an ordinary dinghy. I'm actually following the latter approach with my current design, but there is plenty of room for making foiling inexpensive.

What is my trick for cutting foil costs? Well, think about the uptip foils on the Flying Phantom. They're essentially used as V foils, but they're only supported from one side, so that puts enormous forces through them, not only trying to snap them sideways but also to twist them hard. If you use two straight foils instead, you can create the same arrangement of lift surface in the water without the need for anything like as much strength in either piece. What effect do you think that will have on the price, materials and ease of manufacture? Then imagine shifting to a design with 50:50% shared lift between front and rear foils instead of 80+:20-%. Again you have an opportunity to scale down the foils as they don't need to be so strong, and you can eliminate the difference between front and rear foils (the steering now being done by rotating cylindrical foil cases to adjust the amount of sideways lift). Next, scale down the boat - the smaller you make it, the less expensive the parts. That's why I'm working on a design for a 12ft foiler using 8 straight foils (four on each hull), but I'm also making the design more versatile than an ordinary sailing dinghy so that it will be substantially better value for money than a mere toy for racing - I'm putting just enough accommodation space in the hulls (for no extra weight) to enable two people to sleep inside, and while the space will be tight, it'll be more comfortable than a bivvy bag. This will make it an attractive boat for long coastal voyages lasting many days, and it will make sea crossings safe too (think about Frank Dye with his Wayfarer turning upside down repeatedly behind a sea anchor in a force 9, and then imagine how much more civilised it would be to have a small boat you can get inside and which isn't swamped every time a wave breaks over it, and also how much more civilised it would be if you could outpace the storm and not get caught in it in the first place). Another thing you have to consider is the possibility of using robots to manufacture the foils - that isn't going to happen until the quantities go up into the hundreds of thousands with a design that remains constant, but it will happen at some point. I've seen video of robots stamping out carbon fibre bicycle frames.

The FP has 155kg of weight plus the same again in crew weight, almost all of it going down through a single foil. Each foil on my boat will have about 75kg of weight on it, but the foils will also be shorter and therefore have less leverage on them (4ft from hull exit point to tip) and hardly any twisting force. There will be a bit more drag from them overall, but there will be two masts, each carrying a sail of at least 12 square metres, so it shouldn't be slow. Of course the foils will still be expensive (and so will the hulls), but you'll be getting a dinghy that provides the most vital functionality of a yacht (namely shelter) without losing the ability to lift it out of the water and carry it ashore wherever you land. I'm also considering adding more functionality (which I won't discuss yet) and a bit more cost to make the boat even more versatile, because providing value for money is my main priority, but if you want to take things in the other direction and just aim for low cost foiling, the plywood Stealth catamaran has already shown that you can get that for less than the cost of buying an FRP Mirror dinghy, and the bulk of the cost (ignoring the time put in) was the uptip foils. I reckon that you could cut a substantial amount of that foil cost by using a pair of straight foils to replace each uptip foil, and this would also allow you to dial in a little lift to windward while going upwind, thereby leading to better performance overall, but the reality is that foiling is already affordable for those who are motivated enough to do their own build. If there's no prospect of the price of other foilers getting near to that of ordinary dinghies, I can imagine the Stealth (or something like it) selling well if available as a kit, but we're still only at the start of this and there could be all manner of things in development right now which could change the whole game. If it doesn't turn from a trickle into a flood, the only reason will be that the economy is in bad shape and people can't afford conventional boats either.

 

Burn foilers? What a silly thing to do, and not a single thing that I have ever written could be reasonably interpreted in that way. Not one single thing I wrote indicated that foilers should not be around and enjoyed.

The issue is that concentrating so much promotion on the extreme end of a sport is arguably not good for the overall popularity of the sport. That is shown by factual evidence. It is shown by the major surveys of the sport, by growth patterns in the sport, and by the history of sailing and other sports.

That does not mean burning foilers. As an analogy, I would never burn my high-performance windsurfers or my high-performance sailing canoe, but there is lots of evidence that the excessive promotion of the high performance end of windsurfing and canoe sailing seriously hurt those areas of sailing. The fact that we can have (and love) leading-edge kit doesn't make it the best way to promote a sport. In fact, as many leading figures in windsurfing (like legend Robby Naish and the CEO of the world's largest windsurfer manufacturer) it can be disastrous for the sport.

As for the rest of it....do you know Barry Marmion's track record and expertise? Have you sailed a class like that? Boats of that sort of construction and weight are wonderful but not for offshore cruising or knocking about. BTW published figures indicate that the bulk of the cost was NOT in the uptip foils, leaving aside the fact that not many people have a university to assist.

It will be interesting to see how a 12 footer can be less capsizeable than a Wayfarer, able to outrun storms even in the light winds that often precede them and able to scare a Moth. Even for a simple dinghy (ie Sabre) an extra six simple foils and extra large rig is about $7000 Aus, ignoring the cost of the cylindrical mounts you are planning.

PS - LOTS of people can still afford boats - many people are still buying new boats as classes as diverse as the J Class and Aero demonstrate. Secondly, some countries (ie Australia) have avoided significant recession and yet there is no great rush to foilers that would support the vast numbers of new foilers you're talking about. Thirdly, the previous recessions of the past 40 or so years did not see new-boat sales slow down enough to mask a surge in interest in new types; for example the J/24, IACC boats and the America's Cup, IOR boats, beach cats and windsurfers all did well during periods of recession.

Anyway, as noted earlier, I will drop out of this conversation for the while.

 

35th America's Cup on Foils---Oracle

Oracle prepares for OMAN starting in 3 days: (Details from a previous post- http://www.cupexperience.com/blog/2016/2/americas-cup-world-series-oman-details/ )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laP3Pp3JEkA

 

I apologise for projecting other people's attitude onto you - I just assumed you're like the other people I've encountered who complain about the promotion of foiling and blame it for harming sailing, but you're not.

There are different ways of interpreting the evidence and distorting it to back different claims. Unless you can do the experiment both ways in parallel worlds, you can't be sure that there was any such causal link. With windsurfing, for example, it could just be that it was a craze which people got enthusiastic about for a while before losing interest, then when they turned their backs on it, something had to be blamed.

The figures I've seen report $4500 for the entire boat, while the materials for moulds and foils cost around $2500 of that. That may not qualify as being the bulk of it, and if you split away the mould cost it may not even be a half of it, but that's okay as it only shows a greater affordability of the foils.

It'll be less prone to capsizing, but will still flip over. What you really have to ask is how important is it to right it when you're safe inside the hulls. The idea is that you reduce the width to 6ft when behind a sea anchor to lower the forces running through the beams, and you take the masts down too, but you would also lash an inflatable dome onto the top to prevent the boat from lying upside down and to encourage it to flip back the right way up without anyone having to get out in a hurry to right it. If you make it much easier for it to flip the right way up than to flip upside down, it should keep righting itself.

You can't outrun every storm, but forecasts are good these days and you can predict where the best conditions are going to be in advance and use your speed to reach those places. The kind of sea crossings I have in mind are ones of 200 to 400 miles, and those can be covered in a day in the right conditions in a fast boat, but I can imagine people attempting 1500 mile crossings in it too. If you're in a big catamaran that flips over, you are reduced to swimming about inside it for days while waiting to be rescued. I want to build something that can just bounce about like a cork and wait for the storm to end before continuing on again, and that's easier for a smaller container.

If lots of people are still buying new boats, where's the big problem? If they're not rushing to buy foiling cats, that doesn't tell you they aren't interested in buying them, but that they aren't yet in the right place in terms of cost, and people are also reluctant to spend over the odds on something that won't last: they can see from the upwind performance that the foils aren't right yet and they don't want to have to buy replacements when superior designs emerge. Of course, there are also many who see the helmets and think foiling isn't for them as it's getting too extreme, so it's quite possible that the majority will never buy into it, and there are also problems with finding boat parking space: 10ft wide cats aren't popular with everyone at clubs for that reason alone.

Sailing has had very little promotion where I live (Britain), even with our recent Olympic successes. Over many years we've only ever had access to a tiny bit of sailing on free TV channels, and the kind of boats we've been shown are things like the Ultra 30s, VX40s and AC45s. The Whitbread/Volvo Ocean race had coverage for a long time too, but not the last few times. They still show a lesser round the world race with amateurs in tin cans who don't know how to sail, presumably on the basis that that makes it more appealing as anyone could get involved, but the audience is tiny and the actual race is pointless. The only dinghy racing shown happens every four years and tends to focus on the Laser and Finn, with very little of it being shown well enough to follow it. However, the last America's cup was a huge story that captured a lot of interest and the BBC showed us every race: it's turned an event that used to be a monumental bore (being little more than speculation about keel shapes hidden behind curtains) into one of the most riveting race events in history, and it was riveting before the big comeback began. The idea that this has harmed sailing is simply not credible: we have gone from decades of no promotion to just a little flash of excitement about something new, and then it's all gone quiet again. Meanwhile, the old boats that used to dominate my local club have been replaced with RS200s, RS400s and a Blaze fleet while only the Lasers have hung on. The slower boats have given way to newer, faster things, and it clearly wasn't the Olympics that drove people to those new classes: they are looking for better performance from more modern designs, but they're not ready to buy something experimental at a premium price, and they also want something that's settled down into the civilised category. Once there are foiling cats available that tick all the right boxes, no one imagines that they will take over, but they might easily gain a 20% share. At the moment though, there's no foiler on the market that I want to buy.

 

35th America's Cup on Foils!

Lets all of us(including me) try to keep this thread about the Americas Cup. The ACWS is in 3 days.
David, why don't you start a thread about the foiler design you mentioned here?

 

Hi Doug - It may have gone on a bit of a tangent, but it does relate to the America's Cup as we were discussing whether the promotion of foiling there is helping or hindering the health of sailing. As for my design, I will start a thread on it at some point, but I need to think about protecting a couple of key ideas first.

 

" With windsurfing, for example, it could just be that it was a craze which people got enthusiastic about for a while before losing interest, then when they turned their backs on it, something had to be blamed."

Many of those who have spent years in the sport and industry (including, as I said, top names) have a lot of experience and good evidence for our beliefs.


"The idea that this has harmed sailing is simply not credible"

Actually, it is very credible. To repeat, one can look at what the two biggest surveys of the public perception of sailing and barriers to entry showed. What is not credible about looking at the lessons of major professional studies? One can also look at the history of the sport since, for example, the sailing canoe boom and bust of the middle 1800s.


"Meanwhile, the old boats that used to dominate my local club have been replaced with RS200s, RS400s and a Blaze fleet while only the Lasers have hung on"

That's a classic example of the point I was trying to make. The comparatively slow and conventional RS200 and 400 (basically modern versions of the elderly N12 and MR concept) have thrived while the high-performance boats launched around the same time (Boss, Buzz, Spice, L4000, L5000, RS600, B14e) are dead or close to it. When the 400 came out, there were a lot of people saying "skiffs are the future"..... history repeating itself once again.

 

Thought you were going to give this thread a swerve, CT??

 

It would be rude to ignore someone who has quoted me. I tried to keep it short and didn't quote people like Tim Niemier (sp) a pioneer in the boom sport of plastic sit-on-top kayaks who confirms that windsurfing's move to high performance really hurt its popularity, or the research of Vladimir Andrefj (sp), a leading sports economist from the Sorbonne.

 

I think it is a mistake to blame the contraction of windsurfing on the promotion of high wind/wavesailing, etc. I was a part of that process, and the reason that everyone, once they had learnt, either stopped or moved on to high wind/wavesailing was not because of the promotion of high performance windsurfing, but because, once the fun of learning is completed, windsurfing at displacement speed is no longer a challenge or particularly interesting, unless you are racing. On the other hand, planing on a windsurfer in high winds, and especially in waves, is one of life's great pleasures. Everyone I sailed with moved on to high performance windsurfing, but an inevitable consequence of this is that we stopped sailing unless the conditions were perfect. This leads to an instant reduction in the number of people sailing at any given time. The people who didn't move to high performance windsurfing would never have stayed sailing boards in displacement mode, they would have stopped anyway.

It's a completely normal cycle of a maturing sport, and sailing is not immune to it. I was also part of the dinghy boom in the 70's, and the beach cat boom in the late 70's/80's. Kitesurfing will go through the same process, as will SUP, foiling boats and whatever comes after that. Everybody tries a new sport, then only the people who enjoy it enough continue, which is always a smaller number.

Foiling boats offer a different experience than "normal" sailing, and people will try it, some will continue, some will not, but anyone who moves from a different type of sailing to foiling, then after some time stops foiling and doesn't go back to a different type was already lost to normal sailing to begin with, and promotion of one type over another will not alter this process.

In summary, after the above diatribe, the reason sailing participation is reduced is the same reason participation in many other pastimes are reduced - there are now so many different things to choose from, and different ways to access them, but still only 24 hours in a day. My son didn't learn to windsurf by committing every weekend for a year trying to master heavy boards and stretchy sails, saving up to buy the new gear that actually allowed a performance improvement, then repeating the process. Instead he spent a week with me in perfect conditions with modern equipment and was competent in one week. He then moved on to try something else.

Back on topic, the current AC is not about the promotion of foiling as a participation sport, but as a viewing spectacle to be marketed to a non-sailing audience. Whether it succeeds or fails in this, it isn't going to have any impact, positive or negative, or other forms of sailing, IMO.

 

35th America's Cup on Foils! OMAN

----------------------
Racing begins at 5AM EST Friday,Saturday and Sunday. Friday is practice.
Swedish TV4 may carry the racing live starting Sat morning at 5AM: http://www.tv4play.se/sport
OR https://www.tv4play.se/program/artemis-racing-americas-cup?video_id=3290672


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4QgcS9iPA8

 

That's a pretty reasonable summary. The biggest boost to interest in sailing at our club was when 3 gold medals returned from the 2012 London Olympics. They were in Laser, 470 and 49er classes, not a hydrofoil in sight. I suspect the extremely entertaining women's match racing was also a factor (it was the best of all from a TV spectator perspective).

The introduction of foiling into the AC has a certain gee whiz factor, but it's hard to see any consequent effect on general sailing participation. It has boosted foiling Moth and A Class numbers, but mostly through purchases by AC teams for training. The Moth is probably the only class to significantly benefit from foiling in terms of numbers, but it was near death to start with and I don't think global numbers will ever reach it's heyday as a scow.

 

35th America's Cup on Foils! --Team France!

From The Foiling Week: http://www.foilingweek.com/blog/2016/02/le-ridicule-ne-tue-pas-silly-never-dies/