The problem of downwind
Jessica gets dolphins, Abby pulls into Cabo, Laura doesn’t seem to be doing a lot. You can read those yourself.
I’d like to write to you about keels and the problems they pose. These people are missing the whole point of keels. All of them being from the Bermudan rig camp, they don’t really understand that the Bermudan is not the boat for cruising, except for daytrips.
First of all, what is a Bermudan? The pic above shows you. It is a boat where the rig goes up and up in a high, tall way which gives the boat great efficiency upwind, where effects other than the push of the wind come into play.
Excellent stuff for racing around buoys and you can even get over to France and back without too many problems but they’re not designed for ocean cruising. In fact, downwind, they are pretty useless for a number of reasons and need to run a spinnaker to make good.
Now look at the boat below:
It has its sail plan low and spread out fore and aft. More than this though, its keel runs the length of the underside and is called a full or shoal keel. Not only can it go into shallow water but downwind, it prevents yawing, turning of the boat around a central pivot point.
If you look again at Scandia above, you’ll see a white thing below the hull – that’s its keel. Deep and thin, to match the tall and thin rig, it is highly efficient upwind. The only problem is that downwind, which is where most ocean cruisers go, it is next to useless and this is the thing so many modern sailors can’t conceptualize.
They’ll laugh at gaff rigs with long bits of wood flying around up top in a gale, which they don’t actually do – they add stability to the rig in fact. They’ll point to the poor windward ability of these boats and that’s true – just look at this clip below and keep your eye on the back or main sail and see that the trailing edge, the leech, is flapping badly – it is very inefficient to have a spread out rig upwind.
So yes, the Bermudan sailors are right about that but not on all other points of sail. Any of the other rigs are better downwind – the lug, the junk [basically a lug], the gaff are good and the square rigger is the best. People today look at the old sailing ships and smile that we’ve come a long way since then. Well, in sailcloth, yes but not in rig design, over all points of sailing.
One of the main advantages of the traditional boat is the full or shoal keel. A long keel, fore and aft, is quite poor upwind but downwind, it prevents yawing and lurching, turning this way and that. So when Jessica reported that the big seas were knocking her boat around, much of what she meant was this yawing.
Long, thin, deep hulledfull or shoal keelers just don’t have the problem to anywhere near the same extent.
To the afficianados, I’d say – you can always have a cutaway fin and it would still be better than a centreboard clone. 
Filed under: Leisure, travel & sport
