TP52s

OPD,
Whats up with SA?...By the way this thread is almost a copy of one you know only to well...only difference is the replies are of a more seemly tone..............so far anyway.Didnt you swear off that thread?Same should be applied to this one!
K4s

 

3,000 views, another milestone.

Old Business

K4, I fully agree with you on another thread that sailboats are evil because they are so habit forming. What you may not realize and what needs to be chatted about, (perhaps this week), is that in the 1930s, in the US, there was recognition that naval architects, while fully engaged in applying scientific principles to the design of power vessels, were neglecting sail boats, leaving those to "yacht designers". Designers who apparently were more interested in the interior of the vessel and looks while moored at the yacht club, than in function under sail, with no special training required to hang out a shingle.

At that time it was feared, even predicted, that foolish sailing vessels would be created, the TP52s being just the latest in a long line of them, I think, and Gimcrack? being the first. Yes lets chat about that later this week. You lead a sheltered life in New Zealand. Some American history will be of value.

Regarding the popularity of threads I participated on at Sailing Anarchy, the enthusiasm of those threads represented an awakening.

The Status Quo Blows.

10,000 views in one day on that forum really is a mandate to continue judging designs as all captains are expected to do and judging content on relatively new web sites, correcting that when possible.

Unfortunately, SA has chosen and continues to support TP52s. I understand that if you post ill of TP52s, or point out that the Star class, I-14s, VO70s, Mini-Transats, Class A cats and Little AC cats, are more worthy of development class designation, you risk being banned from the SA forum. So the discussion takes place here. The replies need not be of a more seemly tone. Chris 249 has shown us that.

New Business

Is Perry's review of the Donovan Transpac 52 (page 24 Sailing 2004 December) favorable or unfavorable? His last line

"Jims new 52 was built at ML Boatworks in Brazil and was launched late this summer. To my eye she's a beaut. I'll watch her progress in the fleet with interest." shows kind of an intent to give a favorable revew. But I think Perry raises more issues with the design.

"Displacement is tightly controlled so that owners don't 'play' with changing keel bulb weights for different conditions" like on Icon. Icon is a Perry design that does allow changing of bulb weights and retraction of the keel. This is a form of movable ballast. He is likely not a supporter of the tight control. Perry seams concerned about new rule limits on how low the VCG can be and on the SA/D of 41.

"But if you bear off you can hoist a spinnaker no bigger than 2,665 square feet. Damn!" I think the maximum sail size a real sailor cares to handle is 500 square feet. Am I wrong? Perry is making a joke, isn't he?

 

Quote; <"But if you bear off you can hoist a spinnaker no bigger than 2,665 square feet. Damn!" I think the maximum sail size a real sailor cares to handle is 500 square feet. Am I wrong? Perry is making a joke, isn't he?>

No mate, thats how you go fast downwind, somthing you know nothing much about, that is going fast under sail. Please shut up and learn, or at least shut up.

 

Matt, lighten up.

The prudent mariner will not rely solely on a single source. I am but one small voice. There are many.

The biggest issue US sailors have with the TP52s is that they probably are the reason for the withdrawal of the US Sailing delegation to the GP RWP. US Sailing may be the administrative arm of RORC http://www.rorcrating.com but that is its only role now. And until Barry Carroll is reoganized out of that role, there will be problems. Barry Carroll is a TP52 supporter and a retired boat builder of Farr 40s. He likely represents vested interests.

The vested interests run counter to any kind of movable balasted vessel. US Sailng's GRAND PRIX WORKING PARTY QUESTIONNAIRE is telling. In the questionare the notion of stability limits for safety as well as the allowing of water ballast and canting keels was raised and Jim Teeters was identified as the consultant for the US SAILING contingent to the Grand Prix Rule Working Party RWP.

Here is the deal. Cruising designs usually emulate racing designs. So what we have had with the GP RWP rejection of the box rules under which TP52s operate, is highly significant to the future of yacht design. Especially when you know that the fastest selling cruising sailboat is the movable water ballasted Mac26x.

Perry states " You can always chase big rig numbers but it just means that in less than experienced hands the boat will get overpowered more quickly and people will get scared."

You may want to listen just a bit to me, I do know a few things from experience with a water ballasted sailboat. But we might as well concentrate on what has been written by others for now. You do not go fast downwind just by putting up lots of sail. You also go fast by dumping water ballast. This especially true in doldrums. lighten up - it has more than one meaning.

 

Good Morning Boat Designers

I have been reminded that many are not familiar with the west coast of the United States and its irreverent view of designs from the east.

Stanford University and UC Berkeley are not only responsible for engineering Silicon Valley but also for MacGregor Yachts Company. Both Macgregor Yachts and Stanford University Network, now known as SUN, were founded as school projects.

The potential for the success of both projects comes from recognition that if you take ten common perceptions about a product or service, and discover that two or three are Bravo Sierra (BS), you can build a plan that, given a free market system, should result in an ongoing concern.

I think in SUN's and MacGregor Yachts cases, 10 out of 10 myths were discovered to be incorrect. All the myths could be traced, I suppose, to MIT, an engineering school of declining usefulness in the east. Usually I pick on Harvard and Yale, but MIT is also worthy of scorn.

There is more to that story, but I have told it elsewhere. All these schools can be saved by just being open to new ways of looking at things. If folks are interested in what I have posted previously on this they can Google or better yet http://www.dogpile.com.

What has not been laid out in any form on the web is information that is conveyed from the History of American Sailing Ships, a book published in 1935.

This is a rather common book on the west coast of the US, in spite of its age, for folks who are studying sailboat design on the west-is-best-for-sailors coast. The story of Onkabye and Gimcrack is found in Chapter 7 of the book.

Onkabye (Oncabye) is thought to be the start of the evolution of American Sailing Yachts. The name means 'dancing feather.' Gimcrack in the 1840s was Yankee slang for 'useless thing'.

Onkabye, as her name implies, was a radical departure from the heavy keel-pilot schooners used for the sport of yachting in the New York and Boston areas. She was a 90 foot internally ballasted centerboarder. She was very fast, stiff, and smart, and to be used only for pleasure purposes, racing in particular.

At the time of her launch there were arguments, kind of like those we have today on movable ballast vs fixed keels. They really are the same arguments we are having today. They were on centerboards and fixed keels.

When ever yachtmen gathered in those days there was argument over the comparative merits of different types of boats. These days we have character assassination of any one who dares to bring a message that is unpopular with the status quo - which blows BTW. Sigh, it is the modern American way. Free the robots from Connecticut! Lets have discussion. Anyway...

Onkabye, didn't last long as a pleasure boat. In about 3 years the US Navy made an offer and the experiments that the owner was conducting regarding external ballast tacked onto the side of the hull and rolling in heavy seas, stopped. Rigged for war, Onkabye was a slow sailboat, very sensitive to the extra weight. She was lost 5 years later on a reef. Because of Onkabye, a very big distinction between the hull forms of a commercial Naval sailing vessel and a yacht was made by 1935.

Soon after the Navy purchased Onkabye, her owners built Gimcrack. This 52 footer had a fixed fin of between 12 and 15 feet long. Gimcrack was quickly recognized as a failed experiment.

The owners of both boats when launched were the Stevens, sons of Colonel John Stevens, the engineer so responsible for steamships. They were considered hobby sailboat designers and "apparently desired to prove that a centerboard vessel could be designed that would combine the advantages of both the keel and centerboard types and thus demonstrate the arguments of the supporters of the centerboard."

Interestingly, those supporters would later found the New York Yacht Club NYYC in the cabin of Gimcrack, the useless thing not unlike a TP52, on the afternoon of July 30, 1844. "Because of the shoal anchorage of the New York Yacht Club at Weehawken, later at 'the foot of Cort Street' on the Brooklyn shore and on the Jersey side from Commnipaw to Kill van Kull, the shallow centerboard yacht was most popular with NYYC boat owners.

Fast forward to today and we see American ocean sailboat yachting dominated by the deep fixed keel supporters trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Supporters of the deep keel were concentrated in Boston, with its deep water anchorage, back in the days of Gimcrack and Onkabye as well.

The bottom line is that the notion that Naval Architects do power and not sail boats and that a power boat designer is only a hobbyist if doing a sail boat is traced to day one of the evolution of the American sailing yacht. The separation between sailors and powerboaters, rag baggers and stink pots, was orchestrated right there.

It is also interesting to note that Gimcrack today means pretty unless thing. IMO, as folks in Massachusetts started prevailing with incorrect notions of sailboat design, they spun the word Gimcrack to be less harsh. Who wants a useless thing on the ocean? Well TP52 designers and Spartman & Stephens. They just do not get the joke.

http://www.sparkmanstephens.com/design/0068-press-release.pdf

For another look at Gimcrack. Those boys at the NYYC back in the day were just hillarious. Nice looking? Well to Some.

 

Any owner of a MacGregor 26, I guess...

 

Migholetto, here's an offer for you. you bring a Mac26x, and I'll bring my favourite Open60 (something like this http://www.boatdesign.net/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/2485

I'll race you - 2500 miles, no limits. Bring your engine

Steve

 

This fellow is right off his rocker, and I really cannot believe people are trying to communicate with him. He has shown himself on a number of sites and has been spewing this tripe everywhere. You know he's just pulling your leg. If he isn't he's needing prescription drugs to stop the hallucinations and voices in his head. Bob Perry tried to talk sense into him but it's clear he was not successful.

So take that tub you call a boat and do the TransPac mate. Oh wait that's right you couldn't even handle a non-stop trip around Vancouver Island without cranking up your outboard. Now show respect for those who actually know what they are talking about.

1. Your boat doesn't have moveable ballast
2. You can't be bloody serious about what you write.
3. TransPac 52's are not Santa Cruz 52's.
4. I don't know what you have against people who desire a class of boats with owner/driver rules, box design rules, and have the money to afford 2M USD. You don't have that kind of money and you don't know what it is like to run in those circles.
5. Not sure why you can't comprehend plain facts unless you are learning disabled.
6. Not sure why you are convinced that there is some plot against MacGregors just because everyone but you knows they sail for s**t and are cheaply made.

 

Lucus Carter

Hitting nerves I see. Lighten up. I am not running for office. There is good stuff above, read it.

Then read Stan Honey's special report on page 48 of Sailing World December 2004. If designers are going to design to a rule it might as well be IRC. ORCA is out. Oh pay attention to what happend with the SC52s and the TP52s at SFYC. Argh.

After reading the special report, I am almost thinking Stan Honey is part of my team. Please comment on that and what is written above.

Stan and Peter Reichelsdofer were the US Sailing delegates to the GP RWP. Read what Stan says today in the special report and tell me he doesn't see the error of following Jim Teeters. Tell me he isn't busting his arse to work with Janet Baxter who is on record as recognizing that the top-down approach has not worked in the past. Tell me NYYC isn't finding its roots.

That top down approach would have taken 10 boats at 2 million each for a market cap of 20 million (the TP52s) and put them above 5000 boats at 20,000 each or 100 million (the Mac26x) even though the TP52 box rule allows for the building of vessels that do not pass the SNAME capsize risk ratio and are hence not TransPacific worthy.

It would also have put 10 TP52 owners ahead of 5000 Mac26x owners and an International Company (Farr) ahead of a US Company (MacGregor Yachts). And, this is the sad part, US Sailing was expected to financially support the TP52 owners through ORCA. It is mind boggling how things are done on the east-is-least for sailors coast of the USA. No wonder Sailing Anarchists question paying US Sailing dues.

The connection between a Mac26x and a TP52 is only through Jim Teeters. I have been very clear of my biases. Filter that and chat like in the 1930s.

 

toomanyhitstothehed.

How does the 5000 Mac26 at 20000 compare to the 175000 lasers at 5000 each? And they are an olympic Class designed by Bethwaite.

Conspiracy me thinks.....

 

Bruce Kirby would be offended as he designed th original Laser with input from Ian Bruce and Hans Fogh.Frank Bethwaite is responsible for the Laser2.

 

Animus, I know you are right. just stirring the pot of conspiracy theories that are running through this guys head.

 

Just making sure that history is right.As a former builder of the Laser[in the early days],I like history to be correct.

 

Re "Bruce Kirby would be offended as he designed th original Laser with input from Ian Bruce and Hans Fogh.Frank Bethwaite is responsible for the Laser2."

WRONG!

The Laser was designed by Roger Macgregor, who was the first person to think of a water-ballasted dinghy, with help from Frank Bethwaite. You guys all thought the Laser had a crappy bailer because it was a badly-designed boat from a bunch of east-coast Yanks, but you're wrong! The boat was DESIGNED TO BE SAILED WITH THE COCKPIT HALF FULL. The water in the Laser cockpit is an early example of Macgregor's movable water ballast (it only moves when you capsize or take the boat out of the water, but hey, we still count that as "movable").

The Laser 2, Nova, Tasar, 29er, B 14, B 18 and 49er are all movements from the Laser to the Mac 26X. Don't you see how they all develop the Mac's low freeboard, inverted chines, and the wide stern? If you look closely at a 49er, you'll see where Roger Macgregor and Julian Bethwaite experimented with putting a 30 hp Mercury on the back. I was at the first 29er trial race and at that stage, the boat had a 15 hp. That's why you have to stick the crew on the foredeck on a 29er or 49er in light airs - it's cause they were designed with a wide stern, to support an outboard.

It was just those ******* from the NYYC and US Sailing that ruined the idea of skiffs racing with outboards.

Didn't you notice the other similarities between the Laser and Tasar and the Mac? They are all unsuited for ocean crossings; they are all built much lighter than a real offshore boat; they all capsize; they can all plane (even if one of them needs a motor to do so). More PROOF that they are all Macgregor/Bethwaite designs.

 

249,
I'm amazed you can talk at all with your tongue so deeply in your cheek
Personally, I feel that migholetto is just a bot. Any mention of "Mac" and "bad" on a forum anywhere starts it spewing it's pre-written rubbish.
Steve