The A-Z of ????

[Guest]

Sailing is sailing in all weathers. We've had several months of the A-Z of sailboats but nothing about their seaworthiness - all we've had sofar (and with neither disrespect nor projudice) is about what nice boats they all are.

IMHO, sailboat descriptions should be about what might happen to them in F9 - and will they bring you home? Sofar I've found two out of the plethora of nothing more than best suited for inland lake whastits at F5 (etc) ... (etc)

Why can't YM Editorial really say what they want to say : "Most past and present sailboats are about as much use as a fart in thunderstorm when puffs of wind get upto F7 and are are totally useless/about to sink when it gets upto F9.

I recently sailed in a CE Approved Cat A in a F7 .... In my opinion, as we started to sink ...



Birgitta

 

[Guest]

Worse than useless

I could hardly agree more - the list is almost worse than useless as there is no depth of information, much less opinion.

 

[oldsalt]

Re: Worse than useless

It's a cheap and easy way of filling up pages, just look through a few old brochures and copy the information. Perhaps that's why I read this month's copy in record time.

 

[Guest]

It is actually the E - V !!!

A well known fact that Yachting journo's hate going to the extremes which they would have o do if it was the A-Z!!

You know, when there is so much breeze that it blows the froth off their half pints of shandy it would obviously be totally unsafe to even think about going afloat to write a review of one of these twin aft cabin(under the cockpit floor) category A GRP urinals! So they sit in the bar, copy a few bits of blurb from the builders brochure, talk to an owner "Well actually its our first boat, and we bought it because it's got a sticker on it that says its exclusive", wander down to the marina take a couple of pictures of the insides, and everyone is happy!

Talking about these CE categories, why the hell do we need to have boats neatly labelled with their category? Have we all become so bloody stupid as to try to push our boats beyond their limits, that some Eurocrat has decided that we need to be told what our boats are capable of, and where we should be sailing them?

A friend has a lovely old 36 footer built about 1920. She is as solid as they come and a marvellous seaboat, and certainly is one that I would prefer to be caught out in rather than one of the recent tupperware offerings from over the channel irrespective of what it's supposed Category A (Ocean)rating is!
Enough said!

 

[billmacfarlane]

Sorry to disagree with you guys on this subject. I've sailed a couple of these so called "dingies with lids", "plastic fantastics", in adverse conditions, including a 6 hour passage to France in a uldb, and I've never really found a problem with them. Sure they have a much livelier motion than a heavier displacement boat, and are more responsive to sail trim, especially going to windward in a gale but I've always got there without much drama. The latest designs that carry their beam aft to the stern can be a problem as the hull shaoe becomes imbalanced and the rudder loses it's grip and they need a fair a bit of sail trimming to keep them going.Does that make them unseaworthy ?
I agree about yachting magazines not giving opinions. Read any sailing review and you won't see much adverse comments though sometimes you can look at what's not been said and form your own opinion. I supposr they're terrified of litigation.

 

[Guest]

Sorry chaps but the statistics are against your argument that "modern" equals "useless" in a gale.

In most extreme situations it is the crew that give up (or cock-up) well before the boat itself (properly handled) would otherwise come to grief.

Even as I type there is apparently some poor sod out in the North Sea trying to sail round Britain "for charity" in a rowing boat with a "wind-surfer sail" on it. He has been out for nearly a week now but due to "bad weather" he has apparently travelled a mere 8 miles - and this is in the wrong direction!!

Poor sod may die - but I'll bet the boat makes it to shore in one piece!!

Incidentally on the news today I heard a Radio 4 commentator (John Humphrey's I think it was) talking to one of the rescue helicopter crew.

The man had refused help from the helicopter but the crewman said he was "in the shipping lanes". The interviewer tried desparately to get the crewman to say something really negative about the bloke without success so he reverted to a gem of a question.

"Surely he's a danger to shipping isn't he?" The crewman muttered somthing neutral but I bet he was thinking "Oh yeah - right!! A small fibreglass boat is really going to worry a 150,000 ton tanker as it runs it down!!"

Where do they get these interviewers from??

I think the man in the boat is mad - but I hope he survives in his plastic tea-tray and maybe makes it back to land if not "round Britain".

Best regards )

Ian D

 

[Bergman]

Perhaps the problem really is that there is no precise way to measure seaworthyness.

Clearly the category system is a very blunt instrument and its has a number of anomalies but is there an alternative?

I can think of no way to produce a seaworthyness index on a scale of,say, 1 to 10

What do you measure, in what units.

Is wood more or less seaworthy than GRP and/or steel?

The differences of opinion are clear to see from this thread and are produced by people with experience and knowledge to back them up. Where does someone go find out how seaworthy a particular boat is?

I like to look at the stability curves that show the angle of vanishing stability, but that is a static measure and does not completely describe the boat. Compare the curves for the Moody 38 and the Southerly in this months issue for an example.

Any ideas would be appreciated
Perhaps someone out there has a solution.

 

[Mirelle]

Bravo!

Well said. Could not agree more. Nigel's point really is that whilst the fozen snot urinal with a fat backside to allow the twin double cabins may be safe enough if manned by a strong crew, a point made by several people above, she will NOT look after her crew in a blow, in the way that your friend's boat, or my 1937 37 footer, do. They may be unsafe in marinas but at sea it is a different story. I am speaking from experience and I know that Nigel is too.

Delighted to find we are not alone!

 

[seahorse]

Re: Worse than useless

Isn't there an old saying that "any boat can be sailed anywhere, but not by ANYBODY"?
North sea passages in Wayfarers spring to mind along with "Shrimpy". I feel that the RCD is giving in experienced sailors a false impression that if you buy that type of yacht then it is automatically safe within its paper restrictions & will lead people into a false sence of security.

 

[tony_brighton]

I suspect it may be a case of not wishing to upset the hand that (indirectly) feeds them.

 

[billmacfarlane]

Re: Worse than useless

Exactly. It's not so much the boat as the people who sail it that ultimately determine how seaworthy a boat is.

 

[AndrewB]

Err ... am I in minority of 1 here?

I really welcome this series! I've reached the stage where all modern yachts seem identical both inside and out, and its handy when some one in the Club mentions they have a Phrog Snot 321, to be able to check it out and make vaguely intelligent remarks about its self-evident superiority to the Legendary Pithball 292.

It is extremely tempting to go along with the notion that no decent yacht has been built since 1937, and if it doesn't leave a trail of gribble and cauking alike as it sails then it can't be considered seaworthy. But much as I hate to say it, some of these new yachts offer a pretty decent sail. What's more, they arrive on the same day.

 

[ianwright]

What should we have said?

“no decent yacht since 1937",,,,,,,?
Could be,,,,,,,,
A couple of old farts in their 1936 design Vertues were moored behind a Oceanutoe nearly 40 something when the owner of the large plastic object looked over (and down) his transom and remarked “I’ll bet you chaps wish you had one of these, eh?”
We (yes, I was one of the old farts) looked at each other each hoping the other had something appropriate to say. All that we could come up with was a feeble “Not really, no.”
Any idea of a better response? Something expressing the depth of our despair that anyone could be so bloody ignorant at the same time pointing out that no one with any idea of what a boat should look like and perform like,,,,,,, but you get the idea,,,,,, How should we put that in half a dozen words or so?.

IanW

 

[Guest]

Make that 2

Boat design has always been a compromise between speed and safety. The facts are that the majority of boats that live in The Solent don't leave it and what's wrong with that. Apart from the fact that it leaves more room for me, not everybody wants to circumnavigate the IoW, let alone Britain and good for them.

I hope this post doesn't mean we are creeping back to the narrow view of yachting that used to prevail on this BB.

Chris Enstone, Rival Spirit

 

[Guest]

Re: Unsafe In Any Wind

Given their cost, numbers and US legal culture, I wonder why boats don't seem to be very much "storm-tested" at all. Provided that the gas bottle is in the right place (er under the helmsman and next to the liferaft) and the calculations show that it won't tip over too much, then it's a jolly fine boat.

Not like the vehicle industry, where the thing is tested to destruction, or the aircraft industry where regular mandatory non-destructive tests abound. Shouldn't volume production boats be somehow tested towards extreme conditions? If so, how? lettem go in a force 9 and see what happens? Simulate rundown in a shipping lane?

Cynically, I suppose that the lack of mandatory severe testing of boats is of course that nowhere near enough poor people have yet been killed, and of course, they won't be.

 

[billmacfarlane]

Re: Err ... am I in minority of 1 here?

You're in the minority of 2 Andrew. See my earlier comments.

 

[billmacfarlane]

Re: Unsafe In Any Wind

The problem with testing in F9 winds is that the boat will almost certainly be fine - it's really down to the crew to keep the boat going.

 

[billmacfarlane]

I\'ll second that.

Quite agree Chris - it looks like the narrow view is starting to creep back again.

 

[pugwash]

Re: Seaworthiness in general

This is a fascinating discussion about a subject that has interested me for a long time. My mind goes to those dramaticTV sequences of big racing yachts riding gigantic breaking waves in Bass Strait filmed from a chopper and shown in a documentary recently. Those boats were the extreme form of the modern shallow displacement, "sailing dinghy with stateroom" marketed as modern cruising boats. What struck me was that it was not Mum and Dad and a couple of kids sitting out to windward and praying for rescue but virtually a rugby team of gorillas in foulweather gear. Surely the distinguishing characteristic of the modern cruising boat is that it has to be "sailed" all the time, requires full-time concentration on the part of a helmsman, and while it will indeed survive a storm, its sea action is so violent that exhaustion and other problems creep in more rapidly. However, the older generation of cruising boat (like mine, a 30-ft Holman, or like the Wanderers and Vertues and Harrison Butlers etc) is more stable, more sea-kindly, invites you to walk away from the helm when you need to, is generally less "wearing" on skipper and crew. Slower and less roomy, yes, but more survivable. Indeed, when she really blows and there's plenty of sea-room, you can lash the helm and disappear below with popcorn and a good book.

 

[Twister_Ken]

Pugwash gets it in one.

Wish I'd written that.