How big are your balls? Tall mast & low bridge

This has been around for several years. UK reg boat, and very pretty...
No reason to think it is faked.
2 tons in the bags, and I expect a little practice.....
DW
 
It is not faked, but very real. I have personal knowledge of this.
The boat was named after a species of Amazonian Parakeet.
It was owned by a gentleman named David Parrot.
He passed away last year.
He was a pioneer in the field of marine salvage.
His life spanned a long career in scraping ships off reefs and beaches and refloating vessels gone agound in difficult circumstances.
He admitted his greatest challenge (successful) had been the removal of the "New Flame" wreck, a ship that went aground here in Gibraltar off Europa Point on a reef as a consequence of the master refusing the assistance of a pilot.
As a consequence of his expertise and inventiveness he devised this rig to tilt his ketch sufficiently to clear the bridges encountered in the inland Waterway, a system of inland canals in and around the US East coast starting in Florida and ending up near New York.
He achieved his goal by a blend of calculations and progressive experiments usiong water filled containers so rigged from the top of his mainmast to both control their vertical and horizontal element resulting in sufficient steady heeling in order to achieve the spectacular result you see in the video.
 
VO5 said:
It is not faked, but very real. I have personal knowledge of this.
The boat was named after a species of Amazonian Parakeet.
It was owned by a gentleman named David Parrot.
He passed away last year.
He was a pioneer in the field of marine salvage.
His life spanned a long career in scraping ships off reefs and beaches and refloating vessels gone agound in difficult circumstances.
He admitted his greatest challenge (successful) had been the removal of the "New Flame" wreck, a ship that went aground here in Gibraltar off Europa Point on a reef as a consequence of the master refusing the assistance of a pilot.
As a consequence of his expertise and inventiveness he devised this rig to tilt his ketch sufficiently to clear the bridges encountered in the inland Waterway, a system of inland canals in and around the US East coast starting in Florida and ending up near New York.
He achieved his goal by a blend of calculations and progressive experiments usiong water filled containers so rigged from the top of his mainmast to both control their vertical and horizontal element resulting in sufficient steady heeling in order to achieve the spectacular result you see in the video.
Click to expand...

Ok thanks.
With the aid of his name I found a webpage of his.
Link
 
VO5 said:
It is not faked, but very real. I have personal knowledge of this.
Click to expand...
Naaah ... its faked. Elementary applied maths shows that this cannot be a system in "stable equilibrium" - i.e. the merest ripple would upset the balance and bring the yacht swinging upright.

However, leaning a yacht by loading one side with ballast is a regular technique for getting under some bridges on the ICW. Bridge keepers keep ballast ready for yachts needing it.

The bridge in the video is at Vero Beach, Florida, where we laid up in 2007; not one of the lowest on the ICW but with notorious shallow patchs in the channel on either side of the bridge that might well have fin keelers leaning to get through.

PS That makes me wonder - is he in fact aground and trying to get off? Then the video becomes plausible.
 
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AndrewB said:
Naaah ... its faked. Elementary applied maths shows that this cannot be a system in "stable equilibrium" - i.e. the merest ripple would upset the balance and bring the yacht swinging upright.

However, leaning a yacht by loading one side with ballast is a regular technique for getting under some bridges on the ICW. Bridge keepers keep ballast ready for yachts needing it.

The bridge in the video is at Vero Beach, Florida, where we laid up in 2007; not one of the lowest on the ICW but with notorious shallow patchs in the channel on either side of the bridge that might well have fin keelers leaning to get through.

PS That makes me wonder - is he in fact aground and trying to get off? Then the video becomes plausible.
Click to expand...

Are you sure that's Velcro Beach? My recollection was that there were buoys for yachts just through that bridge? Mind you, after the first thousand, all bridges on the ICW looked the same to me.
 
AndrewB said:
Naaah ... its faked. Elementary applied maths shows that this cannot be a system in "stable equilibrium" - i.e. the merest ripple would upset the balance and bring the yacht swinging upright.

However, leaning a yacht by loading one side with ballast is a regular technique for getting under some bridges on the ICW. Bridge keepers keep ballast ready for yachts needing it.

The bridge in the video is at Vero Beach, Florida, where we laid up in 2007; not one of the lowest on the ICW but with notorious shallow patchs in the channel on either side of the bridge that might well have fin keelers leaning to get through.

PS That makes me wonder - is he in fact aground and trying to get off? Then the video becomes plausible.
Click to expand...

You might notive that the cables for the bags are not a parallel, and as such there is some control over the heeling moment. You should also notice that one bag is dragging in the water during the bridge transit, bringing the system into equilibrium at the critical point.

Perhaps your elementary maths isn't up to the job?
 
pyrojames said:
You might notive that the cables for the bags are not a parallel, and as such there is some control over the heeling moment. You should also notice that one bag is dragging in the water during the bridge transit, bringing the system into equilibrium at the critical point.
Click to expand...
As someone pointed out when this was posted a couple of months ago, dragging the bag in the water provides another advantage - certainty over mast height. If one were to measure and mark the length of the halyard, plus the length of the bag (and measure and add for masthead instruments etc), one could be certain that when the bottom of the bag touched the water, the masthead would be exactly X distance above the water.
 
Low bridges

A few years ago we went up the Herault (?) river to Agde in the S of France and just below the town was a road bridge with a clearance of something like 12.10m. Our air-height was 12.05, though to be fair the last 80cm was only the vhf aerial and it was due to be renewed anyway.

As we motored up toward it, it seemed like it was going to chop us off at the spreaders, so having got us lined up, I decided that for the last few boat lengths until clearance/impact, I would just look elsewher. I turned around just in time to see the four or five small local boats frantically peel off and spin 180 degrees, presumeably to keep clear of our anticipated dismasting.

Went through without a scratch, though on the way out a couple of days later, the vhf aerial just 'scraped' one concrete beam on the underside of the bridge deck
 
I don't know the provenance of this video but based on having put our boat through dozens of 20m bridges and a 16m internal crane hoist in Norway plus a 15.5m bridge at Poplar Dock with a mast height of 15.4m it always looks bloody impossible until you come out the far side.
 
On more than one occasion we sailed the boat under bridges in Holland. Our boat does not heel more than 30° but that was enough to get through. Some bridges open only once a day, so after having checked what clearing we needed ( very gentle approach on engine ) we took some distance, waited till no commercial barges ware in sight, put all 4 sails up sheeted hard in. Approach with engine on one side of river, and some meters before the bridge diagonally to the other side. Only with head wind. One time we past a fixed bridge ( Brielse meer ) with the whole family hanging on the main boom, the boat slowly motoring on autopilot. We did not have much heeling with that 3 ton keel but cleared the bridge scraping just the VHF antenna a bit. Little did I know there is a weak tide on that inland lake, so on the way back we ware a feet to high. Had to wait for wind.
 
I watched and photographed this event for myself from my own boat whilst in Vero Beach on 22 November 2007 at around 1630 - according to the time on my pohotos.
You can debate as much as you like whether you think it was faked or not, but I and many other witnesses saw it happen!
What we could not undrstand was why such a large and well found boat was making its way south slowly and so akwardly down the ICW rather than proceding offshore. Presumably some sort of challenge.
Hopefully the photos I have attempted to upload show what happened & I am far too simple to fake them!!
It is interesting to have learnt from the previous comments the details of the owner etc.
 
My elementary maths aren't up to much but I'm struggling to see what causes the bags to stay suspended over the side of the boat. I'd have thought the weight of the keel would bring the boat upright regardless of how much weight you had suspended from the mast head.
 
AndrewB said:
Naaah ... its faked. Elementary applied maths shows that this cannot be a system in "stable equilibrium" - i.e. the merest ripple would upset the balance and bring the yacht swinging upright.

However, leaning a yacht by loading one side with ballast is a regular technique for getting under some bridges on the ICW. Bridge keepers keep ballast ready for yachts needing it.

The bridge in the video is at Vero Beach, Florida, where we laid up in 2007; not one of the lowest on the ICW but with notorious shallow patchs in the channel on either side of the bridge that might well have fin keelers leaning to get through.

PS That makes me wonder - is he in fact aground and trying to get off? Then the video becomes plausible.
Click to expand...
Don't think it's a fake - just too consistent.

Once one bag is in the water then it is stable equilibrium as if the heeling increases the "buoyancy" of the bag takes some of the leaning force off.

It is also clever that they use two bags, as that must make it much easier to control and to right than just one.

In interest question is how they set the initial leaning up
 
bedouin said:
In interest question is how they set the initial leaning up
Click to expand...

From the thread on this from a few months ago: they fill the bags on deck, hoist on the halyards, motor forward and turn sharply. The bags swing outboard and start to lean the boat over.
 
bedouin said:
In interest question is how they set the initial leaning up
Click to expand...

My guess is that the center of gravity of the whole 'system' (boat, mast and bags) will lower a bit because of the heeling.
In other words the boat is in a lesser energy state when heeled because of the bags as the center of gravity moves down the vertical during the heeling process.

This may be pretty unique for this specific boat model, I don't know.

Edit:

The movement in the vertical direction must be very little, otherwise the boat would capsize. Also the movement will invert when the boat heels further, again else it would capsize.
 
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SimonJ said:
I watched and photographed this event for myself from my own boat whilst in Vero Beach on 22 November 2007 at around 1630 - according to the time on my pohotos.
You can debate as much as you like whether you think it was faked or not, but I and many other witnesses saw it happen!
What we could not undrstand was why such a large and well found boat was making its way south slowly and so akwardly down the ICW rather than proceding offshore. Presumably some sort of challenge.
Hopefully the photos I have attempted to upload show what happened & I am far too simple to fake them!!
It is interesting to have learnt from the previous comments the details of the owner etc.
Click to expand...

Thanks for those pics, I'm now convinced.
 
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