NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/rec/boats/8050

Text File | 1992-11-23 | 5.0 KB | 91 lines

Newsgroups: rec.boats
Path: sparky!uunet!walter!att-out!cbnewsj!legacy
From: [e-mail] (wayne.m.simpson)
Subject: Re: Coyote spotted, no sign of Mike Plant
Organization: AT&T
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 14:28:19 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: some thoughts about offshore boats
References: <[e-mail]> <lgvg1kINNhgo@cronkite> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (wayne simpson)
Lines: 78

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Lauri Tarkkonen) writes:

   (regarding the preponderance of racing boat keels falling off)...

>Before the actual round the world race Drum, a boat owned by
>a British pop star Simon Le Bon, dropped its keel, the weldings
>of a fancy system broke of.

   The story I got from Skip Novak's book "One Watch at a Time" suggested
that the keel casting was flawed. When the builder poured the keel, he
didn't have enough lead on hand, and tried to finish the casting later
with a second pouring. This is not recommended practice and you can see
why given the result.
   The weldings you refer to were, I believe, something to do the the
space frame within the boat's hull. Although this compromised the keel's
security, it was a separate incident and was attended to on the stopover
in South Africa.

>There are already more than a handfull of incidences where the
>keel bolts or some fancy welding or a bulb hanged on some struts
>or something has failed. This all is done for some few percentage
>of extra speed. If you want speed get a bigger boat. If we have
>racing rules and measurement rules, then why cant they have scantlings
>that demand integrity of parts like keels. When the keels were solid
>it was actually the only place in the boat that was practically
>foolproof. You needed 10 kilogrrams of dynamite to break it.
>Now we have development and you can break eaven your keel.
>If we speak about offshore boats, they should last the whole
>trip. They should be able to take whatever is given, but they
>are fragile eggshells that must be caressed through the waves.

   In the BOC, you can't go get a bigger boat. Class I is limited to 60'
LOA. There are very few rules in this race, but LOA is one of them. I
think another is that when full, any water ballast carried is limited to
that which can effect a 15 degree change of trim.
   The whole BOC concept is intended to "push the envelope" of performance
monohull design. I suppose the framers of the race thought this would
counter the trends set in IOR development, where rule cheating designers
created boats that were faster but sacraficed seaworthiness in the bargain.
For this reason, scantling rules were deliberately left out of the BOC.
But rules are rules, and the same thing seems to have happened here. I
suppose you can blame Jeantot, as he was the one who started this trend
toward the current generation of extreme beam BOC boats.
   I think most occurences of keel loss are the result of bad building
rather than bad design, the exception being Tony Lush's "Lady Pepperell".
Lush added several thousand pounds to the ballast of a modified Hunter
54 without re-engineering the hull to keel joint. Not surprisingly, the
keel began to work loose in the Southern Ocean, and fellow American
Francis Stokes came by and evacuated Lush before the keel fell off
entirely.

   In spite of this, I, too regard the current crop of BOC boats as unsafe
vessels engineered too close to the edge. When I saw Coyote at the Annapolis
Boat Show, I feared for Plant's safety, as I would for anyone who would
take such a craft to sea.
   The whole idea of the extreme beam boat is to maximize initial stability
in order to carry a big rig. That way, you can get by with less ballast,
and therefore, less overall weight. Trouble is, that wide hull is heavy,
so you need an even bigger rig to drive it. With a bigger rig, you need
more ballast to mantain the required stability. Get the picture?
   I think a better concept is the one explored by "Holger Danske", des-
igned by Dave Gerr. She is just the opposite of boats like Coyote, with
an extremely narrow beam. How narrow? 9 feet, 7 inches (2.9 meters) for
a boat 60 feet long overall. Long, narrow hulls are more easily driven
than wide ones, and are also lighter. So Holger Danske didn't need such
a big rig to get her moving. How small? Only 987 square feet. With such
a small rig, she didn't need so much ballast to keep her upright and
total wieght was thereby kept down. Holger Danske did pretty well in the
last BOC, and I think her concept is ultimately the one that can provide
for a boat that is both fast and safe.

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                                      Wayne Simpson, Technical Editor
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