nourishing obscurity

Nowhere is the Brit more conservative than in his choice of yacht.  Uffa Fox, Chichester, Royal Solent and so on – the boat of choice is a bermudan rigged monohull, that monohull has traditional lines, it plugs its way upwind and ambles downwind with a brightly coloured spinnaker, not unlike the brightly coloured tie with an otherwise conservative business suit.

The yacht has beautiful lines, traditional lines and shuns anything smacking of experimentation – even her stern, for goodness sake, is exactly everyone’s concept of what a stern should look like.  If you want to learn to sail properly, come to Britain and learn the thorough way.

The Contessa 32 embodies all of those values and her added attraction is that she just about falls within the realms of the possible, cost-wise.  Hence one aspect of her enormous appeal.  There are certain boats which are tried and tested, with a pedigree decades old and in the dangerous and icy waters of the British Isles, you don’t play games as the French are wont to do, with variable geometry and all that – you buy yourself a proven yacht and ignore the fact the monohull keels fall off more often than sailors admit … no, no, I won’t get into all that.

The Brit likes to play safe.  This article sums up the Contessa 32 very well:

The 32 is easy to underestimate if you are not aware of its formidable reputation for seaworthiness. Few boats can post more impressive curricula vitae. The Contessa 32 Assent was the quiet hero of the infamous storm-ravaged 1979 Fastnet race. It was a Contessa 32 that escorted 15-year-old solo sailor Seb Clover across the Atlantic just last year. At the other end of the spectrum, Imagine, a 1980 model, was sailed by 65-year-old singlehander Bill Williamson across the Atlantic and back a few years ago.

Contessa 32s have been everywhere from the Arctic to Zanzibar. And it was a Contessa 32 named Gigi, which was one of the last English-built boats, that carried me around Cape Horn, east to west against the wind 20 years ago.

In short, for your pound, this boat is going to get you there and back in once piece.  Contessa owners would say you can keep your flying catamarans and trimarans which flip and bury themselves in the sea. Here’s how she sails:

Faced with this innate conservatism, it’s difficult to make a case for any other form of boat but I’m going to.  For while this has been going on over here, on the other side of the world, there is an equally formidable boat, with an equally conservative designer and that is the Ian Farrier range of trimarans.

These boats have been in the very harshest of conditions and have come through with flying colours.  The test of a boat’s worth is how many there are and there are many Farriers out there – a most seaworthy craft indeed.  Ian says:

Comparing monohull and multihull, the multihull’s ultimate stability position is floating upside down, where it makes a great liferaft. The monohull’s ultimate stability position is resting on the bottom where it makes a good fish farm. There’s a reassuring sense of security in knowing that no matter what, your boat cannot sink.

However, this unsinkability can be a publicity magnet for any multihull disaster, whereas a monohull sinking attracts little notice as there is no evidence or nothing to photograph left. Thus multihull accidents frequently attract more publicity even though the boat and crew are usually saved, whereas a monohull sinking, with loss of boat and lives, is frequently overlooked.

In this regard, the multihull does require a reasonable level of maturity or common sense to operate safely within its limits, as with other modern forms of transport. Performance is not limited by restrictive devices or weight, and one is thus given the choice of going faster when desired. It’s the skipper’s decision.

In the end, it’s how you feel.  The Contessa weighs 4300kg, of which the ballast is 2045kg.  Now, imagine that the 2045kg is taken from the keel and put into two side floats.  Now you have the same narrowness and low profile, the same seaworthiness but you also now have huge lateral stability and secondary buoyancy beyond description.  The three narrow hulls meet the wind and sea and cut through, rather than wallow around in waves.

The temptation then is to crank up the sail area, giving even more speed and this is where Ian Farrier’s comment about maturity comes in.  There is a point where a boat is going too fast in sea conditions and that’s when accidents happen.  A trimaran can be made to wildly career of wavetops and bury in the next swell and the inevitable will happen.

It does attract the Jeremy Clarksons of the yachting world and hence the less than respectable reputation of trimarans.  However, were you to apply the same safety-consciousness of the monohull sailor, then you have a craft second to none.

The essential things with a trimaran are summed up in this youtube of the huge, state-of-the-art 60 foot monohull Hugo Boss [see pic at the foot of the post] being zipped past by a little 30 foot trimaran:

Weight for weight, length for length, a trimaran is so much better and is the perfect ocean craft.  Here are the real advantages, shown in the Dragonfly promo.  Don’t forget that the Dragonfly is Danish and is designed for northern conditions:

My last design dispenses with one of the floats, adds half its weight to the remaining float, set further out, drops the height of the rig to 70%, gives a viking longboat more rocker and a deeper section for big seas and is about 70% of the trimaran’s speed, which is still about double the monohull’s.

However, it is not a “respectable” boat and so the Brit sailor would raise his eyebrows, sigh and head into the clubhouse for a quick snifter.  However, I’ve already been in there for 30 minutes, waiting for them to come home.

Filed under: Diversions, Leisure, travel & sport