Another team that apparently has not got the word that these boats are crap.
http://www.sailinganarchy.com/fringe/2006/Patches 07.htm
Don't abandon the cause Frank! A few thousand more words of your incisive rhetoric and I'm sure the tide will start to turn.
The tide has indead turned. Thats Tide 28 if you want. Lets review:
I believe from reading Hobart transcripts that boats with a stability index of 110 are grandfathered but that new Hobart boats require 115.
A boat with 110 stability can not be knocked down by wind alone. However, all vessels can capsize in sufficient sea conditions. In 2004, an attempt to require a mathematically computed 128 limit of stability in ocean racing designs was orchestrated by those with vested interests in TP52s. In a stunning defeat, the grand prix (GP) Rule Working Party (RWP) rejected mathematically derived stability requirements.
The GP RWP did this to support movable ballast designs. Today stability tests for off shore monohulls are performed, not by mathematics, but in test pools where the sailboat must be righted after a capsize simulation. Overnight the TP52s were made obsolete because they adhere to 128 and higher mathematically derived stability ratios. They do this with keel attached weight. Weight that makes them slow when there isn't enough wind to carry them to hull speed.
In a mater of months after the GP RWP decision, Mac26x production in Australia began by a company known for its Sydney Hobart work, and a new British powersailer was launched.
That British powersailer used the engine as a significant portion of her ballast and is called the Tide 28. The manufacturers went through the hastle of trying to get the boat rated category A, not an unreasonable thing given that the boat has positive flotation and hence serves as it own life boat, but eventually settled with category B. Today the youngest sailor to cross an ocean did so in a British powersailer Tide 28. The tide has indeed turned.
The British powersailer was followed by a Swedish one, the Oden 720, to complement the German Oden 820. I believe TP52 supporters deliberately disparaged movable ballasted vessels of any kind. The Tide 28 uses a centerplank. Water ballast in concert with weighted and unweghted foils will be the new order. The external weighted fixed keel erra is over. The 100 year old experement in fixed weighted foils will soon be. The perceptions of the Mac26x and her cousens in the sailboat ocean racing community are becoming more and more favorable owing to the GP RWP rejection of TP52 design notions. We need to move on and start designing real sailboats for modern times, which not surprisingly are going to look more like the sailboats at the end of the commercial age of sail. Smaller and eventually no dangling testicles.
Frank L. Mighetto
South Sound Sailing Society
