Unusual design for an extra-heavy-displacement 11ft long Atlantic Proa for circumnavigation

A mast tall enough to overcome the substantial resistance below the water line is going to likely cause some fore and aft heeling. Like pushing on an axe handle near its extreme end. That's a tremendous amount of "boat " and i use the term lightly on the vertical axis, it's going to need some yardage to make it move.

The other thread were small vessels with very little comforts designed to require very little sail to push along. All the living space equates to displaced weight, that requires more sail... that in turn will make the sketch rock like a child's hobby horse.
Yes, you are right. I have also been thinking about some serious fore and aft heeling, especially when sailing dead downwind the brisk trade winds. But how sure are you that it will rock like a child’s hobbyhorse? In my imagination, I am expecting a more or less stable forward heel stabilised by the active sail area, similar to the lateral heel which we normally get on monohulls. The only problem with that should be the necessity to adapt all the living arrangements to be okay with the heel on the two axis, which is entirely doable. Plus, I can always reduce the sail and go slower if at some point (like during a dinner) it feels like too much of a forward heel. Do you see any reason why am I wrong with that kind of expectation?
 
The difference between our minds eye and physical reality can often be a formidable gap. Seems like the small boat diy segment had a big gap between imagination and physics.

Short mini boats capture the imagination, but the reality is longer water line covers a multitude of sins. The truly successful mini boats are either a feat of minimalism or exceptional engineering.

I'd urge you to try downloading free ship and draw the basic shape your trying for. From there you can calculate sail area necessary for motion. My guess is it's a sheet size hard to manage on a boat shaped like a vertical butchers knife. Living quarters below the deck means displacement, displacement means weight, and that requires some sails to push.

The earlier poster was charitable and fair when pointing out the high probability the sketch provided would be at best used for drifting with currents. Heavy deep ballast conjoined with minimal waterline length will be like sailing an old semi submerged dead head (partislly submerged vertically oriented piece of drift wood). Not an easy task for crossing ocesns let alone circumnavigation.
 
longer water line covers a multitude of sins.
I agree that it does, you are right. But it also causes the roll, which in turn activates the single most important risk factor that we have for our circumnavigation plan- the seasickness.

Also, I understand that most sailors are impatient and want to reach the other shore as fast as possible, and therefore they consider anything that moves slower than five knots unbearable. But we are different- we have time and we enjoy ocean, as long as we have reasonably comfortable conditions (a pleasant temperature, dryness, plenty of provisions, and lack of excessive rolling movements). So we don’t mind if a typical Atlantic crossing in trades would take us 90 days of pleasant sailing. And in 90 days, we would cross it, even if we sailed at 1 knot(!).
 
Short mini boats capture the imagination, but the reality is longer water line covers a multitude of sins.
By the way, I indeed was tempted to make the waterline considerably longer, as it would increase the upwind performance considerably. That was when I was considering making a SWATH (Small-waterplane-area twin hull - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-waterplane-area_twin_hull) type trimaran like this:
IMG_5905.jpeg

or the same type of proa like this:
IMG_5911.jpeg

Or like this:
IMG_5912.jpeg

I was thinking to possibly make it much longer like this:
IMG_5906.jpeg

because that would allow me to make the draft as shallow as 1.75m or even 1.50m, as I could space out the accommodation and storage horizontally instead of going down vertically. It’s tempting because such a boat would sail a hundred times better. But it would also have the sea-sickening movements a hundred times worse as well. And that could easily mean the difference between us enjoying a slow comfortable cruising and us selling the boat and abandoning the whole sailing idea as untenable. If my wife will be sick all the time, I know that I will soon make the decision not to continue with the circumnavigation.
 
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Once in a while somebody posts a topic here that I think transcends rational behaviour.This is one of them.Objective-a couple of lines of ink in a book.Idea of how to achieve it-fanciful.When I saw the words "shower room" on a diagram for an 11 foot boat,it was quite clear.If you want to travel round the world there are other ways to do it and you might actually see something other than sea for months on end,or until you starve, and there are other stunts that will get you in the record books with less discomfort and potential for loss of life,I suggest you investigate them.
 
Once in a while somebody posts a topic here that I think transcends rational behaviour.This is one of them.Objective-a couple of lines of ink in a book.Idea of how to achieve it-fanciful.When I saw the words "shower room" on a diagram for an 11 foot boat,it was quite clear.If you want to travel round the world there are other ways to do it and you might actually see something other than sea for months on end,or until you starve, and there are other stunts that will get you in the record books with less discomfort and potential for loss of life,I suggest you investigate them.
Thanks for your comment, although after reading it twice I still fail to to see any rational reasoning in it as WHY do you think that this design “transcends rational behaviour”. The only bit of actual information I see there is the “shower room in an 11 feet boat”. So just in case if you or someone else might find it useful, I will explain the rationale of the intended “shower room”. In my opinion, it is an extremely useful part of a small boat. It’s not only just a place where you take shower and use toilet. It’s a very important wet entrance which keeps all the other parts of the boat warm and dry while somebody enters or exits the boat, or handles the sails through the open hatch. And as the doors between the shower room and the other parts of the interior will be made with gaskets as a proper submarine doors, the boat will safely stay afloat, even in the case if the shower room would get seriously flooded with seawater through the open hatch by a breaking freakwave. The boat would stay afloat while the two bilge pumps are slowly pumping out all the water from the shower sump, no damage done to the interior living areas. Also, it is a space where to change after getting soaked outdoors and hang your wet oilskins to drip and dry, before drying yourself with a towel and entering the dry and cozy parts of the boat. I have spent enough time sailing in high latitudes with soggy saloon and wet mattress drenched with seawater, and I see no reason for continuing that kind of lifestyle if it can be so easily solved by a clever design. So I do seriously consider the wet room to be not only a matter of comfort, but a safety feature as well. Please write if anyone sees something what I don’t, why I might be wrong.
 
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Objective-a couple of lines of ink in a book.
By the way, just in case if it helps our discussion, I can add that breaking the Guinness Record is NOT my objective, but it might happen to be a byproduct, in case if my plan turns out to be successful (which I reckon has about 10% chance to succeed). My real objective is exactly how I described it in my first post when starting this thread. I want to find out if there is a way how to design a boat which wouldn’t make my wife seasick. And only later on when I realised that in order to achieve that, the boat must be floating vertically, I understood that it has to be very very short, if I don’t want it to have a draft of a 100m. And only then I got curious about what is the current world record in shortest boat for circumnavigation, and I added that as a bonus in my plan. But that being said, don’t hold me accountable on the Guinness Record part of the whole thing- if I will be convinced that a longer waterline is a better idea, I will go for it, no matter what the record says.
 
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artis,

Okay, so no timeline or budget.
When will you start building?
Finalize all your details in drawings and get 'er built.

Where will your heat come from?
Bilge pump arrangement?
Sewage plan?
Cooking?
Fresh water stores?
Radio?
Navigation aids?
Power?
Ventilation?

If you have time to respond to all the posts, then you have time for these essential drawings.
 
The main focus of the design is to build a seaworthy boat which would move in a pattern that would cause the minimum amount of sea-sickness possible. Due to my woman being quite prone to seasickness, I see seasickness as the highest of all the risks why our circumnavigation plans might fail. And because of that, we are happy to sacrifice many other things, such as speed, draft, conventionally acceptable looks etc.

Here is my train of thought:
1) The boat’s design has to minimise any rolling movements, as they are the component which makes the brain seasick. Straight up-and-down movements doesn’t matter, because our brain is perfectly accustomed to them, since it is the same kind of movement which our vestibular system gets when we walk.
I respect a design that states a requirement, then rigorously throws out everything irrelevant to the requirements. Bernard Smith's ideas laid out in "The 40 Knot Sailboat", which eventually inspired Sailrocket 2, would be an example. There was a lot of experimentation between the earliest ideas and the successful vessel, though, and I recommend the same. My own experimentation has led me to discard several ideas that seemed promising when I first thought of them. Most of them were partial successes in that they addressed the requirements I considered most important when I first stated them, but failed on requirements that I had not given enough weight. Practical experience made me reconsider the ranking of the requirements.

The one graph I have seen showing what causes seasickness contained roll amplitude and (if I remember correctly) roll acceleration. I suppose pitch was ignored on the grounds that pitch amplitude is normally a lot less, though pitch acceleration could well be higher than roll acceleration. In your proposed design, pitch amplitudes could be quite large due to the short waterline and small waterplane area, so you will have to consider that.

Further, you might consider what is just about the opposite to your proposal in most respects, an extremely wide and long Pacific proa. In catamarans, the wider the spacing between the two hulls, the smaller roll amplitude and acceleration. A proa could be wider still for the same displacement and amount of materials, and a very low volume ama should let breaking waves roll over without rising much, yet if you give it a large enough lever arm, it would still provide adequate righting moment. I built a radio-controlled model along those lines to test sail balance only, and steering without rudder, I did not test movement in waves:

Models for testing motion could be quite crude, as simple as plastic bottles and a few sticks lashed together and thrown into waves. Compare different beams and hull volumes.

To test whether your concept is at all viable as a sailing vessel, especially one to be steered by sails alone, I would build a scale model, though I note that even a 1:5 scale model would weigh over 100 kg. But if much of that can be water ballast, it should still be manageable.

Another model would be of the interior space. That could be made of the cheapest plywood, and you could approximate the curve with a polygon. If you can find a space where you can build this, do so, then spend a weekend in it. See whether a tall, narrow space is as liveable as you hope. The outrigger will contribute very little to longitudinal stability, so you have to expect the boat to lean forward enough to matter. So try leaning that living space 10 degrees to lee and 20 degrees forward (or whatever heel and pitch angles your scale models assume in equivalent conditions), then spend another weekend inside.

5) As one of my big concerns is if such a hull would sail enginelessly at least as close to the wind as the old square riggers did, I minimise the windage by having a small above-water volume (compared to the excessive underwater volume), which makes this boat to behave almost like a surfaced submarine. I also streamline the pointed hulls and outrigger, and I take advantage of the proa design and make the leeward sides of the hulls absolutely flat and vertical, which will maximise the lateral resistance, as well as giving a hydrodynamic lift towards the windward side.

I think you need to aim for better than that. Many of the old square riggers could not get upwind in rough conditions. See Roger Taylor's account of being embayed on Endeavour II, and eventually being wrecked (https://www.waterstones.com/book/voyages-of-a-simple-sailor/roger-d-taylor/9780955803505). Also see if you can find the track of Sven Yrvind's voyage in ExLex Minor (Exlex Minor – Simple habits, simple boat https://www.yrvind.com/category/exlex-minor/) a few years ago. He focuses so much on going downwind in the Southern ocean that he neglects both upwind ability and speed. He averages about 2 knots. When the wind turned he went far out of his way to stay clear of the whole Faroe group, presumably because he could not trust his boat to sail off a lee shore in unexceptional conditions. If that is true for your boat, there will be very few harbours you can approach safely, which is not much good for a cruising boat.

As for the possible benefits of hull asymmetry, the closest you can sail to the apparent wind is the sum of drag angles (lift to drag ratio expressed as an angle) of all the bits underwater and all the bits above water. With a lateral area that large, you probably have plenty of lift already. With a hull that fat, the increased curvature of the windward side may increase your drag so much that your drag angle is larger and your upwind ability worse than if you had made the hull symmetrical, or at least only mildly asymmetrical. I think the Goettingen profiles are arcs of circle and a flat side, so data might be available, though I don't know whether anyone aver tested a wing as fat as you intend. And possibly they have not measured a Reynolds number that corresponds to your chord length and a speed of 2 knots. In that case, you will have to build models, and compare them.
 
Seems the driving factor in your designs is your wife’s propensity towards seasickness.
Wouldn’t it make sense to get a wife that liked the ocean, and get a boat that likes the sea?
By the time you get the boat designed and built, I can assure you that you’ll be divorced anyway!
 
There are some good points in posts 25 and 26.I suggest you research the definition of permeability and then calculate it.Followed by righting moment.Then consider whether the same quantity of material could be better deployed in a more conventional boat.Of which there are several thousand for sale at any given time and some of them are available for less than it would cost you to build.I will not post further to this thread.
 
artis, it seems like the primary concern behind your designs is sea sickness. When I was a kid, living aboard, or going out aboard my father's head boats, I never got sea sick. But, after a few concussions and becoming an adult, I get sea sick almost as soon as the lines are thrown from the dock. I have found that after three days at sea, I no longer feel the effects of our motion and the rest of a crossing is completed in fine comfort.

Considering you are looking at several weeks at sea, sea sickness may not be such a major part of your journey.
 
Anything we say isn't going to help much because you seem to have made up your mind. Instead of listening to us, do a little experiment. Build a scale model of your proposed boat, 1:25 or 1:3 should be enough. Place a smartphone inside, running an accelerometer app. Go out on a big heavy catamaran (say a Lagoon over 40ft, they are common in charter and should be easy to find) on a moderately windy day, with wife, scale model and another smartphone running the same accelerometer app. Toss the model into the sea, observe wife getting seasick. Back home compare the accelerometer data from the two smartphones.
If your wife gets sick on a boat that is twice as heavy and four times the size of your proposal, carefully designed to minimize pitch and wich effectively doesn't roll at all, just imagine how she will feel in your design, wich will pitch like crazy, roll, and can't really be steered.

There is of course a solution for it, employed by hundreds of people with the same problem. Sail whatever you like, alone or with friends, have the wife meet you at the destination with the help of a plane ticket. Take the wife daysailing in light conditions, make sure there is a protected anchorage or marina every evening. Repeat for the next leg of the journey, until you circumnavigated.
 
E x a c t l y

with total accuracy

The Admiral's Question has a simple, straightforward and elegant solution

For the young adventurers "plane ticket"

(and for us old fogies who move along the coast "train ticket")
 
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