How big is your boat, part deux

[Blueboatman]

Given some of their long racing careers, it seemed unlikely. Ta

 

[Twister_Ken]

And same question if you were in Newport RI. about to return to UK with autumn gales (on the nose) in the offing?

(Yes I know that's not the usual direction but humour me).

Train to Boston, Silver Line to Boston Logan, 747 to LHR. Easy.

 

[Twister_Ken]

That just doesn't sound right to me. I had 6.9 out of my Sabre offwind, and regularly saw just north of 5 upwind on he RTIR, and the log seems pretty accurate looking at the GPS and factoring tide. I'm also not going to say she's quite as quick as an A22 (although the foiling moth gets close...) but surely the Swan is much faster than you report?

Granted I had brand new sails and standing rigging and a clean bottom (and a fin keel) and we were pushing hard with lard on the rail, but I would have expected the Swan to surf in double figures. Your upwind speed sounds possible, but downwind seems well off...

Trust me. I raced the thing for years. And we won stuff too. Offwind she just dug a big hole in the water that she couldn't climb out of. Fastest we ever saw was just over 11 kts , in a squall, just before the spinnaker halyard sheave broke at the masthead and it all went pear-shaped. The stern was so pinched-in she couldn't surf except on really good waves or when considerably over powered.

 

[Daydream believer]

So isn't the much newer club swan 42 supposed to be " blisteringly fast" or is that a fallacy?

 

[Twister_Ken]

So isn't the much newer club swan 42 supposed to be " blisteringly fast" or is that a fallacy?

I wouldn't know, but I'd be astonished if it weren't. That's my point really, how much design has advanced since the Anderson 22 - eeerrrr sorry - the Swan 411.

 

[Daydream believer]

I wouldn't know, but I'd be astonished if it weren't. That's my point really, how much design has advanced since the Anderson 22 - eeerrrr sorry - the Swan 411.

Perhaps those Anderson aficionados should look at the latest mini transat designs - even less recent like the pogo 2
They might get a shock when they see how the performance of those boats has changed over the years as well

 

[PeterR]

Original thread, somewhere below (or maybe above, later) got me thinking.

Most of my racing was done on a Swan 411. If we could her going upwind at more than 7 knots, we were pleased, 7 and a quarter brought smiles all round. 7 and a half, never achieved, and only rarely seen off the wind except surfing bigguns.

My current boat matches those upwind speeds without effort or constant trimming and tweaking, and often gets to 8 and a bit reaching or running even without a hatful of wind and a coloured sail.

I compared the dimensions. The 411, BTW is an S&S design, so no slouch on that front and we used to be competitive in class one.

A striking difference is the LOA/LWL.

Swan 411 LOA 12.44m. LWL 10.23m, B 3.64
Arcona 340. LOA 10.40m, LWL 9.30, B 3.45.

So over two metres more boat LOA, but less than a metre LWL.

The sail area - overall - shows a huge 'advantage' to the Swan. Main 33 sqm and genoa 72.1 sqm, so 105.1 overall
The Arcona has a much more modern sail plan, big main, small genoa. Main 37.8 sqm, genoa 41 sqm, for 78.8 overall

However in anything over about 15kts apparent upwind, the Swan's number one genoa would come off to be replaced by a number three spitfire jib - sorry don't know the size – so it would lose sail area as soon as the breeze piped up.

The Arcona will carry full sail up to about 22 kts apparent upwind, mainly because the main can be flattened out using mast bend and other bits of string.

Consequently the actual sail area difference would, in many conditions, be rather less than the headline figures.

I entirely agree with you about the advances in boat design but I think you are over egging the virtues of the Arcona a little.

The Arcona 41 sq m genoa ( to quote yourself from another thread ) “is only a light air drifting sail which no UK owner has bought”. The normal blade jib is in the order of 29 sq m giving a total white sail area of approx 67sq m. Its still impressive being able to carry that in 22knots apparent but to carry the genoa you would need the whole of the local rugby team on the rail.

Modern plumb stemmed yachts certainly have a much higher static waterline length than older designs of the same overall length but when heeled hard on the wind the Swan would have increased her dynamic waterline length a lot whereas your Arcona would only increase it by a little and I bet the Swan could keep up the seven knots to windward in seas that would knock quite a bit off the Arconas speed.

 

[flaming]

I entirely agree with you about the advances in boat design but I think you are over egging the virtues of the Arcona a little.

I disagree, both numerically, and with real world experience.

Looking up the IRC rating for a Swan 411 it appears to be in the region of 0.990. The Arcona in this year's RTI was racing off 1.012 with (I think) the small jib. That sort of rating difference is pretty big, if they were in the same class for events like RTI or Cowes week they would be very much at opposite ends of it. In my experience IRC ratings for boats of this type - cruiser racers - is pretty good. I would expect these numbers to hold up.

With regards to the relative performance as the wind and waves pipe up - I used to think that. However, having lined up against Sigma 38s regularly, and also a Swan 411, I now disagree. Modern IRC biased cruiser racers just get better as the wind gets up. They have so much more stability with L shaped, or even T shaped, keels plus the wider aft sections, that they just truck upwind pointing higher and going faster than their older cousins with their slab keels and pinched in sterns. I remember the first time it was windy and the Sigma 38s were in our class. I was expecting them to be with us, or ahead of us, at the windward mark. Nope, never saw them after the start, the newer designs just left them for dead and amazingly our winning margins on handicap were actually higher than they had been in the light.

Boat design has moved on a lot, certainly in performance terms. Aesthetics is a different debate....

 

[sighmoon]

The Swan would have been built to the IOR regs presumably - so she was designed to go as fast as possible and stay within her class or to have as low a rating as possible rather than for absolute speed? The trouble with the IOR was that it discouraged the narrow beam that would have suited the overhangs and made a boat good to windward but also made you carry the beam well forward with a narrow stern so you didn't get the form stability or wide area aft that a boat could easily surf on. It produced some lovely sweet-handling boats though as well as some horrors.

+1 Designers in the 70's knew that a light boat with a fat, flat transom would be faster, but so did the IOR regs, and over penalised it.

It's boat building that's moved on. I would like to see the Sadler Barracuda 45 relaunched with modern materials and building techniques.

 

[pagoda]

It's a general pattern - the new Jeanneau 33 we had last year could give ten year old Jeanneau 40s a good run for their money.

Not entirely general
Our 25 year old Sunrise 35 quite often gives much more modern boats a good drubbing, particularly in less than 15 Kts. When it's into the 20's she's a little tender, upwind, but goes like a train off the wind. I've sailed a few (dare I say it) more fat bodied more modern boats and found them quite sluggish. I don't think there are all that many general patterns -other than heavier boats generally cope with heavier conditions better?

Graeme