How many water ballast trailer sailers are there?

Seajet said:
seemed pretty katabatic to me; whatever it was I didn't like it !
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I've experienced true katabatic winds in the Schweizerland Alps in East Greenland - on a mountaineering expedition, not sailing. The wind can rise from nothing much to screaming howling in a few minutes. They are intensely cold, severely unpleasant, and often dangerous.
 
Seajet said:
even boats with lead or iron internal ballast don't stand up very well.
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Not true. Pretty much every sailing boat built before 1950, and almost all sailing boats designed for working, were built with internal ballast, and they stand up to the wind just fine. Can't imagine this getting blown over too easily...

220px-Smack-brightlingsea.jpg


The downside is they needed a lot of ballast, like 20 tons of the stuff.
 
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Floyd Raser said:
I've heard of Macgregeor and Hunters but I'd never heard of the Dehler 25 until someone plonked one next to my boat in the yard.
Are there any others?
the term "water ballast" seems to confuse the hell out of google.
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I have a Dehler 22 which is just a smaller 25 without a heads or inboard engine option. The water ballast is really simple and fills automatically and has a simple hard rubber ball valve that stops it emptying when heeled....and the entry/ exit is on the hull underside false keel (as opposed to the drop keel).

It makes the boat quite light for trailing, but they sail brilliantly. I'd just say the magic words " reef earlier rather than later", but that's as much to do with the incredibly tall mast as the water ballast. They are beautifully designed and constructed if a bit utilitarian by modern standards. They are all 30 years old or thereabouts. The keel and rudder are proper foil profiles not just slabs, and its that kind of design detail that makes them ballerinas on the water. Any dinghy sailer will feel at home. Bashing into a sea in anything above a force five will be hard work though

It's a market ( trailer sailing) that has all but disappeared which is a great shame.
Tim
 
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AngusMcDoon said:
Get the context right though. :) They are formed by intense cooling of air at height compared to the air at lower level making it significantly denser so that it rushes down the slope. Common in Greenland, Antarctica, Canada, Patagonia and other places where there is snow cover at height to cool the air. You don't get them in Studland Bay; there's not the temperature difference at the modest height of the adjacent hill to drive them. That's just turbulence on the lee side of a hill affecting the bog standard gradient wind - a very common effect in West coast Scottish waters.
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+1.

Katabatic winds are density driven winds, caused by the air at the top of a slope being cooler and therefore denser than at the bottom. Often it is a very long, gradual slope (in Antarctica, thousands of kilometres at less than 1 degree slope!). The cold air at the top of the slope simply "pours" downhill. Where there is a tiny convergence of slopes, katabatic winds reach extreme wind speeds (up to 120 kts), and persist over long periods - days, or even weeks at a time (see, for example, Cape Denison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Denison)). Shorter lived katabatic winds form over smaller icecaps such as those of Tierra del Fuego and Alaska, where they are known as williwaws.

As noted by Angus, what are often called katabatic winds in the UK are in fact simply horizontal "roller" vortices downwind of a hill. There simply isn't enough vertical relief or prolonged periods of a suitable temperature gradient in the UK for a Katabatic wind to form.
 
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I use the term ' katabatic ' for a downward blowing wind, as a lot of people get that idea.

if I/we start calling them ' rotors ' in the UK as glider people do, I suppose it will catch on but will need an explanation every time for quite a while; still I agree it's better to be technically correct and it'll presumably catch on eventually.

Rotors it is then, but expect lots of queries about ' why did you mention helicopters ?! '

Angus, as far as internal ballast goes, show me a decent monohull yacht with just internal, not encapsulated, ballast....
 
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Seajet said:
I use the term ' katabatic ' for a downward blowing wind, as a lot of people get that idea.

if I/we start calling them ' rotors ' in the UK as glider people do, I suppose it will catch on but will need an explanation every time for quite a while; still I agree it's better to be technically correct and it'll presumably catch on eventually.

Rotors it is then, but expect lots of queries about ' why did you mention helicopters ?! '

Angus, as far as internal ballast goes, show me a decent monohull yacht with just internal, not encapsulated, ballast....
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I have managed 58 years on your planet and never heard the word "katabatic" until yesterday. I really don't know how I've done it. Some digressions can be annoying but this one has been fun and educational, thanks. And true, "rotors" would have been more confusing; katabatic was so far off the scale it demanded attention.:encouragement:
 
Alfie168 said:
I have a Dehler 22 which is just a smaller 25 without a heads or inboard engine option. The water ballast is really simple and fills automatically and has a simple hard rubber ball valve that stops it emptying when heeled....and the entry/ exit is on the hull underside false keel (as opposed to the drop keel).

It makes the boat quite light for trailing, but they sail brilliantly. I'd just say the magic words " reef earlier rather than later", but that's as much to do with the incredibly tall mast as the water ballast. They are beautifully designed and constructed if a bit utilitarian by modern standards. They are all 30 years old or thereabouts. The keel and rudder are proper foil profiles not just slabs, and its that kind of design detail that makes them ballerinas on the water. Any dinghy sailer will feel at home. Bashing into a sea in anything above a force five will be hard work though

It's a market ( trailer sailing) that has all but disappeared which is a great shame.
Tim
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Thanks Tim,
I had a good look over this particular 25 and I was impressed by the sense of build quality, probably more pronounced because I had just left my Seal to go next door! It was only then that I did a bit of research via google to get more details.
As John the Kiwi says, they are a set of compromises and I think terrific sailing qualities will give way to space for my knees.
I'd like to say that if one checks the weather forecast, most winds above force 5 can be avoided inland but it may set Seajet off on another katabatic rant.:)
That said, according to the tour guide aboard a Windermere steamer, White Cross Bay is so named because of the small monument to 2 fisherman who perished in a storm. So I'll take nothing for granted.
 
Thanks to all who posted here.

Having read a few old threads on WB I was expecting some anti comment, probably more in fact. I have yet to read a post by a disappointed owner of a WB boat.

The Odins look huge; like an over grown Macgregor.
The Young 780 is unfortunately rare around here.
I would probably be dead before I finished building a Selway-Fisher.
The Swallow 26 looks superb and well built, but it's new and therefore out of the budget.
Macgregor rumoured to have thin grp to keep weight down. Not the end of the World; just be careful out there! A good design effort.
Hunters - I've seen one, nothing special. OK, but nothing special.
Dehler - looks well made and again, someone's thought about the design of a trailer sailer, not just shoved a trailer under a boat.

We'll see, how much is the Seal worth....(scratches chin):confused:
 
Floyd Raser said:
Thanks to all who posted here.

Having read a few old threads on WB I was expecting some anti comment, probably more in fact. I have yet to read a post by a disappointed owner of a WB boat.

The Odins look huge; like an over grown Macgregor.
The Young 780 is unfortunately rare around here.
I would probably be dead before I finished building a Selway-Fisher.
The Swallow 26 looks superb and well built, but it's new and therefore out of the budget.
Macgregor rumoured to have thin grp to keep weight down. Not the end of the World; just be careful out there! A good design effort.
Hunters - I've seen one, nothing special. OK, but nothing special.
Dehler - looks well made and again, someone's thought about the design of a trailer sailer, not just shoved a trailer under a boat.

We'll see, how much is the Seal worth....(scratches chin):confused:
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Silly me, nobody has mentioned the best of them all. The Parker 235. Silly because they took over making the Seals!!, and because I used to live about a mile from their yard in Kirton outside Boston. You will need to save your pennies, but there is no better trailer sailer....its not water ballasted though, but so what, its a lovely boat.

Tim
 
Alfie168 said:
Silly me, nobody has mentioned the best of them all. The Parker 235. Silly because they took over making the Seals!!, and because I used to live about a mile from their yard in Kirton outside Boston. You will need to save your pennies, but there is no better trailer sailer....its not water ballasted though, but so what, its a lovely boat.

Tim
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Yep it seems strange to me that the op is looking only at water ballasted for ease of launching.

I am not convinced that this is the major benefit. Surely the major benefit of water ballast is the lower trailing weight. So possibly no requirement for a decent 4*4 for towing.

However I found for ease of launching and recovery a decent 4*4 with a front mounted tow bar and solid extension bar to trailer worked really well on slippery slopes and sandy beaches.....

It also meant I had a boat (Trapper Ts 240) which gave me confidence that it wouldn't be blown flat on the water in 40 knot winds as it had a big lump of iron 1.7 meters down when lowered.
 
Seajet said:
Angus,

no I love OVNI's, pure sailing porn !

Have had a few merry evenings with OVNI owners, but I didn't realise or had forgotten - water ballast was involved...
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Eh? They're not water ballasted. They have internal ballast. Do you understand the difference? I agree that there are not many great water ballasted boats, but you came along and dismissed all internally ballasted boats as being unable to stand up to the wind, which is a yet another of your incorrect generalisations.
 
Ovni's have internal ballast yes, but a reasonable keel too; as I have mentioned but you must have missed my Christmas lectures ( to the club, televised to a wide audience in case any cutlery went missing ), once one gets a lift keel boat above about 25' the laws of physics mean a long fixed ballast keel with a relatively light keelplate is the easiest option, this means worse handling and less effective righting moment, but has the advantage of an electric keel winch if one fancies it - a la Anderson 26, Barracuda etc.

The only boat with internal ballast I can think of which stands up to the wind reasonably is the Red Fox, and I don't fancy being in one of those in 1979 Fastnet conditions.

Yes I did get confused - easily done these days - but I suggest you read the whole thread Angus.
 
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