Newport 17

Dinghy monohulls vary more than any other type of sailboat. The Newport 17 (and app the McGregor 26) has an unusual sailboat hull form. The chines have a very small radius, below much freeboard, and the bottom is nearly flat. It looks to have no more than 6 inches of rocker over its length of keel. This is not too far off a classic sharpie except that there is little or no tuck in the quarters. That is, the boat has a wide transom, 2/3 of the beam. My question: What are the advantages and disadvantages? It is not considered a fast hull but in its day was a reasonably popular design. HAILE

 

The wide stern keeps the boat from squatting under power. The new McGregors plane at something like 30MPH

 

More or less my own surmise, though I think the N17 has more grace, and I wondered if there could be a sailing advantage, such as stiffness, tracking, balance and a soft helm, gain in heeled waterline, or any consideration other than shipping an outboard. After all, the N17 comes from the days when trailer/sailers routinely carried a 5hp or less. What does a designer aim for with such a full hull? Plain roominess? I had just never seen a purely sailing hull like this and wondered what sort of coefficient was at work, that's all. HAILE

 

Wide stern boats have to be sailed flat or they drag the corner

 

Gonzo, Then a wide flat stern on this, or any, sailboat is purely for form stability to help it sail flat, right? I'm thinking of a Mobjack, which is a very fast boat without being extreme but does best flat. But the Mobjack differs from the N17 in having very round bilges amidships, making little beam at LWL when flat, but getting much harder towards the stern until there it looks like the N17. I just had a phone conversation with the N17 designer, Harry Sindle, who was short on numbers or specifics, but pointed to it and the N214 (a larger version of the same lines) as tough, fast boats, that were drawn for good form stability. There's no way either of them can be sailed flat, though. ED HAILE.

 

It is partially true that a wide transom may drag when heeled. Whether it does or not depends on rocker aft. How far above the normal waterline is the transom/bottom intersection? Does the transom/bottom have camber or deadrise? How does the boat trim, fore and aft, in normal sailing mode? What angle of heel is expected or tolerated by the crew? All that weighs into whether or not the transom drags. Indeed the heeled waterlines may become longer at certain heel angles and present little or no transom drag. That is of course, only if the boat was thoughtfully designed.... which we would hope for.

 

Hi Messabout,

That's just the kind of talk I want to hear. Re the Newport 17, I had an option to buy one, so I gave the boat some thought and asked around. My comments are all theoretical. I have not sailed this boat. But I will try to answer the considerations you raise. The boat kind of made sense to me after a while.

First of all, I decided to give Harry Sindle a call. He lives locally (in Virginia) and he designed the boat. Briefly, the boat is stiff, fast, and was popular. So he claims. The full bilges were designed for initial stability, and he didn’t have much to add more subtle than that. Needs no more hull ballast or keel/CB weight to do the job. Great for the Chesapeake, not for anything ambitious on the Atlantic. The high freeboard was to keep her dry. Did she have a hard spot when she heeled, I asked, or was she like a sharpie with initial stability, but little reserve? He couldn’t say, not familiar with sharpies. He acknowledged that the 17’s lines are a scaled down version of the Newport 214.

The lines are unpublished, but there is a plan profile and overview on line at a Newport boats page. The photos at Texas Sailing tell the rest. How well does a boat sail with these proportions and a chine with an 8-inch radius carried 3/4 forward? When you look at the 6-in rocker, the shallow vee bottom, wide transom and absence of anything you could call tuck in her quarters (high Portsmouth number?), ultralight displacement at 800# on a 16-foot-plus, and small sail area, I think the conclusion is no too hard to draw. She illustrates the distinction between a ballasted CB (a mere 125#) versus a true swing-keel that here should weigh at least 300#. The brochure calls her a family sailer, cruiser/weekender, and for that function no doubt she fills the bill.

She’s what I would call a Force 4 boat, and a very good example of the type. Plenty of initial stability through form, zero in reserve, too much wetted surface to be fast as a result. Though more daring souls might try to push her with more sail and more wind, she will not have a clean wake. An unusual feature is the forestay. It hits the deck 18 inches aft the stem. That must be in order to move the CE aft with the CLR and get the board trunk out of the cabin. But she has a long cockpit, so the cabin has to lose a sliding hatch.

Good points to me are internal volume, the possibility of working the foredeck from a hatch to be cut in the cabin top, and the ease a masthead drifter can be tacked around that forestay. All in all, I have decided to go with her very different sister, Bill Lapworth’s Gloucester 16.
ED HAILE