john_morris_uk
Well-known member
I think it's your claim that "me and thousands of others yacht owners sailing oceans know better" that needs examining.
The reasons why things are designed and why they were designed the way they were is also not quite as straightforward as you suggest.
The ability to mould any shape of hull has only come about in the last fifty or sixty years. GRP and other laminate/moulded techniques have permitted hulls to be built with fin keels and skegs (or not) only since the early sixties. Long keels etc that you are extolling the virtue of weren't necessarily built out of design preference; if you build in a construction material like wood with its main strength linearly then it's a logical and necessary design outcome. It's simply impractical/impossible/prohibitively expensive to make a boat out of wood using traditional techniques with a bolt on fin. GRP made it possible but that doesn't make a virtue out of the old designs.
When GRP designed boats started to be built they were the same shape as traditionally built boats because that's the way boats were always built. Your argument reminds everyone that yacht buyers and designers are conservative. Change was slow and a few failures feeds/reinforces the traditionalist conservative viewpoint. But times move on and naval architects learned limitations and the reality is that there are many more modern designed yachts sailing across oceans than traditional ones and to claim weight of numbers in your argument is a complete fabrication.
We now need to unpick what you mean by 'better'. I assume you'd agree that all design is a compromise? There are compromises between draft and anticipated access to anchorages and harbours, scantling size and construction vs weight and cost, rudder size for slow speed manoeuvres vs drag at hull speed etc etc. There's no argument over whether a longer keel with a skeg hung rudder has better or worse sailing ability than a fin keel with a spade rudder. The fin and spade wins on most every test. It's faster and more manoeuvrable. You might rate the ability to sail in a straight line as a virtue only possessed by long keel and skeg rudder, but the less radical fin and spade designs track well too so I'm not buying that argument.
So your protest that 'thousands of people sailing oceans know better' boils down to a discussion about compromise. You are claiming that the possibility of a spade rudder taking a hit and bending and making the boat unmanageable is not worth the benefits of the design. You are entitled to your opinion, but the majority of yachts making serious passages shows that you are a dying breed. It's right to think about these things, but design has progressed and although mistakes have been made in the past, there's plenty of data about how to design a boat for ocean sailing safely without the poky interiors and poorer performance forced on yacht designers by the materials available years ago. As I've pointed out in an earlier post, our rudder stock is 3" stainless and I suspect the back end of the boat would break before that bends.
And I don't sit in my marina berth on my modern fin keeled spade ruddered yacht, so no sneering comments please. All the last few serious passages I've done have been on modern hull designs (I can't remember whether they all had fin and skeg or fin and spade) but I knew they were well built and easily up for the job.
(And to show that I'm not oblivious to the potential problems of my spade rudder, we have a Hydrovane which is of course an independent/separate emergency rudder in its own right.)
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