Outremer 4x

[Ian_Edwards]

I'm wondering how good an Outremer 4X will be going to windward.
In particular,
what sort of apparent wind angle will they sail to?
what sort of angle can a 4X tack through, from settle and sailing well on port to settled and sailing well on starboard?
what would the optimum apparent wind angle be to optimize the VMG?
I know that they are very fast on a reach, but, I seem to spend a lot of time tacking upwind.
would anyone like to hazard a guess? I've had a good look at all the review I can find, they say things like good upwind, thanks to the dagger boards. but I have found any real numbers on what that actually means.

 

[Chiara’s slave]

I'm wondering how good an Outremer 4X will be going to windward.
In particular,
what sort of apparent wind angle will they sail to?
what sort of angle can a 4X tack through, from settle and sailing well on port to settled and sailing well on starboard?
what would the optimum apparent wind angle be to optimize the VMG?
I know that they are very fast on a reach, but, I seem to spend a lot of time tacking upwind.
would anyone like to hazard a guess? I've had a good look at all the review I can find, they say things like good upwind, thanks to the dagger boards. but I have found any real numbers on what that actually means.

I think, in flat water you’ll do 45 degrees true, which will probably be just over 30 apparent. It’s about the same NHC base number as us, and being longer, is probably a bit faster on a reach, and therefore must be a bit slower elsewhere, and for a big cat that is likely to be upwind. We do 30 deg apparent, and in 12kn yesterday at 30 apparent we were making 8.5kn, Our VMG seemed to be 30-40% better than anything else around us, including things about 40 odd feet with black sails, and a J109. They were definitely pointing higher, the J at least, just not footing as fast by some way. It takes a great deal of concentration to hold a fast multi on a decent upwind course, your normal wind senses are deceptive as the apparent wind direction changes very little for a fairly large loss of pointing, you just go faster, it feels like a gust.

 

[Ian_Edwards]

Thanks, that's a very useful reply.
As you see I have a Southerly 46RS.
In 12knots true, I sailing at about 30 deg apparent, a little closer in the gust, doing about 7knots, and very close to having to take the 1st reef in, about 20 deg of heel and beginning to generate a quite lot of weather helm.
The boat is heavy, with 4tons of cast steel in the grounding plate (recessed into the hull) and 2.5 tons in the lifting keel, with a draft of 3.3m.
The boat has a carbon mast and boom, and laminate sails made by Ultimate Sails.

 

[Chiara’s slave]

Thanks, that's a very useful reply.
As you see I have a Southerly 46RS.
In 12knots true, I sailing at about 30 deg apparent, a little closer in the gust, doing about 7knots, and very close to having to take the 1st reef in, about 20 deg of heel and beginning to generate a quite lot of weather helm.
The boat is heavy, with 4tons of cast steel in the grounding plate (recessed into the hull) and 2.5 tons in the lifting keel, with a draft of 3.3m.
The boat has a carbon mast and boom, and laminate sails made by Ultimate Sails.

You will notice a very big performance hike then. 1st reef for us or a cat like that is about 16kn, at that point we’ll be up to 10 or 11kn close hauled, and 15kn on a reach. The angles don’t change much for best VMG though clearly it’s occasionally useful to trade speed for height.

 

[dunedin]

Some polars here Outremer 4X Catamaran Review - Katamarans

 

[Zing]

Some polars here Outremer 4X Catamaran Review - Katamarans

Those polars start at 60 degrees. What’s the sense in that?

 

[Zing]

I'm wondering how good an Outremer 4X will be going to windward.
In particular,
what sort of apparent wind angle will they sail to?
what sort of angle can a 4X tack through, from settle and sailing well on port to settled and sailing well on starboard?
what would the optimum apparent wind angle be to optimize the VMG?
I know that they are very fast on a reach, but, I seem to spend a lot of time tacking upwind.
would anyone like to hazard a guess? I've had a good look at all the review I can find, they say things like good upwind, thanks to the dagger boards. but I have found any real numbers on what that actually means.

Outremer don’t publish their polars. I don’t get why not. As they are the best sailing volume production cat then why not boast how much better you are?

Marsaudon ( a step up performance wise from Outremer) used to publish their polars. I looked closely at them last year and was not too impressed going upwind. A cruiser racer monohull does better. Now they are a part of the same group of companies as Outremer I wonder if they will change policy.

 

[Neeves]

Ours was not sold as a performance cat but as a cruising cat.....but we could reach peaking in high teens and achieve good averages, 10 knots over 100nm

If its a beat in open water then seas will develop and in blue water there may also be swell to contend with.

We tended not to sail upwind and as we were cruising we would wait till we did not need to beat, close reaching was fine. If we misjudged the conditions we would simply change the passage plan.

A problem is that if you are beating, necessitating tacking, so close to the wind in a sensitive monohull you sail to the wind and the waves - you minimise the impact of big seas. You cannot do that in a cat as there are 2 hulls, obviously, and you can steer to reduce the impact on one hull but not both. I can visualise that polars developed in flat water for a cat will be very different to polars developed 'offshore'.

Schionning designs performance cats, some of which are quite extreme, and are generally built as one offs, by professional builders or by owners (with time of their hands). I've sailed on a couple and accomodation is sacrificed for performance.

These notes have been published:

https://schionningdesign.com/wp-con...ning-Designs-Sailing-Performance-and-Tips.pdf

Our cat was a production cat, though they tended to be built one at a time, to a Grainger design. Grainger produces these notes:

Multihull Performance Factors

Both Schionning and Grainger are respected designers in Australia and there are hundreds of cats to their designs afloat in Australia.

Jonathan

 

[Chiara’s slave]

Grainger has, for us Brits, comfusingly reinvented a stat we use. Sail area/displacement is inverted to become kg per sqm. As if predicting performance wasn’t complex enough. Even more confusingly, our number in both regimes is almost the same

Oddly, Schionning seem to think best speed is at 90 apparent. For it’s 90 true where we get best speed. That is with our without the Code 0. The polars in the link above show best speed at 100-110 with the spinnaker. I can assure folks that the apparent wind will be a lot further foward than 90, at 110 true and 20 plus knots of boat speed. Draw yourselves a vector diagram if you are in doubt.

 

[Ian_Edwards]

Thanks for all the responses.
But, I don't think I'm much wiser.
I sail the west coast of Scotland, anywhere from Northern Ireland to Shetland.
Almost every trip has some passage to windward. I need a boat that will work efficiently to windward. The Southerly does this quite well, especially in light winds. She has a large sail area and an efficient hull shape (designed by Jason Ker), but much of the ballast is in the wrong place, 4tons recessed into the bottom of the hull. It's there to maintain stability when the lifting keel is up ( draft 3.3m keel down, 0.8m keel up).
Yesterday we were just touching 8knots sailing on a close fetch 35 to 40 deg apparent, winds gusting to 20knots, with one Reef in the main, easing the main in the gusts.
The boat is now 17 years old, and needs an up-grade, all the electronics are 12 years old, new sails and the antifouling paints need stripping off.
I'm now 77 and I can stills sail to boat single handed.
I like the idea of sailing with minimum heel, and faster passage times, is appealing.
I'm looking at the possibility of swapping the Southerly for a cat.
I dislike motoring. So the next boat has to go well on all points of sail.
All the local cats are blocks of flats on floats, and I can out sail them most of the time, when they aren't motoring.
There have been several second hand 4X's for sail in France, which may be possibilities, especially if EU VAT hasn't been paid.
Chiara's slave seems to sail a tri, and I think that they are noticeably better up wind than a cat.
Will a 4X tack through 90 deg, and match my 47ft mono for speed?

 

[Chiara’s slave]

Speed wise, it will chew your 47ft mono up and spit it out. Whether it will tack through 90 deg in anything but flat water is harder to say. Is a test sail a possibility? Have you considered other boats? Dazcat in particular might fit the bill, and they are uk designed and built, Millbrook, Cornwall. I think maybe suggesting a tri is not going to work, they’ll all be a lot smaller inside than you seem to want, though the Dragonfly 40 is worth a google if only to rule it out. Neeves was trying to offer you some numerical bass for assessing performance. Our Dragonfly 920 is 2 tons, about 62sq metres of white sail. I haven’t met any mono on the water that has been able to keep up for a few years. The last one to give us a run for our money was Gladiator. a TP52. We are 30ft 6. If the 4x is as quick as the numbers suggest, it will be slightly faster than us.

 

[Zing]

Outremer don’t publish their polars. I don’t get why not. As they are the best sailing volume production cat then why not boast how much better you are?

Marsaudon ( a step up performance wise from Outremer) used to publish their polars. I looked closely at them last year and was not too impressed going upwind. A cruiser racer monohull does better. Now they are a part of the same group of companies as Outremer I wonder if they will change policy.

Out of curiosity I checked and as predicted it has gone. I have the polars though. If you want them pm me. Marsaudon are as good as you will get in a cat. Not that great upwind even so in my opinion. Ditto downwind. Reaching, spectacular, but you need the sea state or it’s worthless.

 

[Neeves]

If you are 77 then you will be now have learnt patience and maybe can consider waiting for the weather windows. . If you sail to the weather you will, at 77, also appreciate the comfort of sitting. in your PJs, in the saloon, sailing flat, making 10 knots with the coffee, toast and marmalade sitting on a relatively flat and stable table + a 360 degree view.

Weather forecasts are now very good, though we have been seriously caught out - in your case you would need to change your passage plan and duck in somewhere new (and on the west coast of Scotland you must have a few bolt holes (that are missing, for us, when we crossed Bass Strait).

The price is - you cannot sail hard on the wind.

Whatever yacht you choose will have compromises.

A Schionning will out sail us - but is not quite so convenient to live on, you need to be supple to get down into the hulls. Grainger have updated our design, I can see one the same size as ours in front of me (looks very sexy) and I am sure will out sail, by a little bit, our 25 year old model - but will still not sail hard on the wind.

However, another downside, making an average of 10 knots does mean you will be hitting peaks of mid to high teens - (in our case) and making, say 17 knots in a 7t, 22'6" beam (floating caravan) cat keeps your attention. The bow spray is spectacular, the rooster tail, stunning and the noise - raises questions - the whole yacht hums and sings.

It is not relaxing.

You can sail more slowly - but then you are not using your investment to its potential.

I am sure a tri will out sail us - but does not have the accomodation, unless its a 50' tri.

Jonathan

 

[Laser310]

most performance cats can tack through 90deg.., but usually only with the staysail.

The genoa sheet leads are usually too far outboard for 90deg.

i looked at the pictures of the 4X, and that one does have a staysail, presumably led to adjustable cars on an athwartship track in front of the cabinhouse.

with that rig, and daggerboards, it should tack through 90deg.

As others have pointed out, in practice it will depend on the sea state. The boats are just too fast and light. Slamming into big waves at speed is too uncomfortable, and even frightening, for the crew, so on the ocean it is sometimes necessary to back off on the speed and/or sail fatter angles.

 

[Laser310]

Just to add a little more detail...

For several years I sailed/raced quite a bit on Gunboats; several longer ocean passages, including a transatlantic crossing.., as well as a lot of racing against similar boats.

I was the navigator, and one of my jobs was to call the laylines. Coming from mono's, it was a steep learning curve...

The tacking angles vary hugely with conditions, when compared with mono's, and the polars did not do a good job of capturing this.

a lot of the racing was in the Caribbean; day races that rounded various government nav aids, as well as small islands, reefs etc.

Beating in 20kts, in flat water between islands, with the small jib, we could be even a bit better than 90deg tacking angle. In lighter wind, with the genoa, it could be 110deg or more.

Because of the dependence on sea state, even at a given TWS, the optimum upwind TWA varied quite a bit, and it was always a bit of a process of discovery.

Polars have a unique optimum upwind TWA for a given TWS, so they couldn't be relied upon for the tacking angle even after some work went into refining them with logged data. You can have different polars for different sea states, but it would be kind of a pain switching between them during a race, and it's better just to get good at it and rely on experience.

Offshore was a bit different. Some of the wave models have both wave height and direction in the forecast, and the optimal routing program I use (Expedition) allows you to construct a table that modifies polar BSP (by applying a factor) according to the wave height and the angle between the boat and the waves. You can make the routing slower than polars with the waves forward of the beam, and faster than polars with the waves behind the beam. This doesn't modify the tacking angle, and offshore I just used polars with wider angles than I used for inshore sailing. The aim here is routing for weather systems so using polars that did a good job of predicting where we could and couldn't get to several days out was pretty important - probably even more so than with a mono.