(pre-race photo from the NY Times:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/photo/2010/02/08/020910_SAIL/33172593.JPG)
All I can say after watching the live video feed of the first America's Cup race in Valencia yesterday is "Wow!"
Actually, I'd like to say more about it
What a tremendous engineering achievement by BMW-Oracle. As the announcer said:
"Soft sails seem to be a fail, but the wing is king!"
Everyone seems to think that all of this is 21st century technology. Cutting edge stuff.
Well, many of the lightweight construction and engineering methods are certainly new.
But the basic ideas aren't new at all. Far from it!
Rotating wing masts, rigid foils, high aspect
rigs, etc. were all implemented on iceboats back in the 1930s
I've been reading the 1973 book "Sailboat Design: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow"
by iceboat and multihull designers Meade Gougeon & Tyrus Knoy. And the chapter
"Outracing the Wind", i.e. designing boats to go faster than the wind, runs down
the history of design ideas that are all found on US-17:
Ultra-high aspect rig: one square foot of a high aspect rig generates a lot more
power than one square foot on a conventional rig. BTW: It's easier to stabilize
a super tall high-aspect rig on multihulls, since the stays can be set much wider apart.
Rotating wing mast: Introduced on iceboats in the 1930s to reduce 'eddying' and
make big aerodynamic gains. Wing mast rotation is controlled by separate lines; the
mast rotation does not just 'track' the angle of the soft sail to the aft of it.
Most of the ideas go back to a book written in 1925 by Dr. Manfred Curry, German
scientist and yacht enthusiast: "Yacht Racing: The Aerodynamics of Sails". He
came up with the ideas of full-length variable thickness battens, streamlined
rotating masts, overlapping genoas, low-friction sail cloth, internal halyards,
hydrofoil centerboards, loose-footed mainsail, etc.
And he proposed a 'profile sail' - a wooden sheath
enclosing a round mast that would make up the forward third of the sail.
Charles Lindbergh even came up with an advanced rig design for iceboats back in
the 1930s. And Detroit millioniare Joseph B. Lodge of Detroit is thought to have
built the first rotating wing mast on his "Deuce" series of huge A-class
iceboats back in the early 1930s.
Why weren't these ideas adopted by soft-water sailors?
Quote:
"Soft-water boaters were not nearly so quick to take up the new innovations in
rigging. While the rotating masts, wing masts, and full-length battens were
revolutionizing iceboating in the 1930's, staid old soft-water classes and clubs
were busy protecting the status quo by outlawing the advancements"
Catamarans aren't new either - besides being used by islanders in the South
Pacific, they were introduced to USA racing by Nathanael Herreshoff back in the
late 19th century
Quote:
"He built six of them, ranging in length from 24 to 33 feet, between 1876 and
1879. With the first of these, Amaryllis, Herreshoff entered the New York Yacht
Club's Centennial regatta in 1876 and beat every other boat by a wide margin.
His reward was that catamarans were promptly and permanently barred from club
competition. Similar rulings met his other catamarans at other events, and he
eventually gave them up to build steam yachts before turning to building the
monohull sailing yachts for which he is best remembered."
BTW: Amaryllis was clocked at 19.8 knots! (in high winds)
And so it goes ...
The author Meade Gougeon was a pioneer in applying the idea of high-speed
downwind tacking to soft-water sailing - back in 1966. This sailing method eliminates
the traditional spinnaker just like on today's AC boats; after all, a downwind spinnaker
makes no sense when you're going faster than the wind
Quote:
"(Gougeon) decided in the middle 1960's to try to adapt the iceboat technique of
downwind tacking to soft-water boats. He chose the trimaran design concept as
the vehicle for his experiments, and he built four of them .... The idea began
showing promise in 1966 when Gougeon used the third one of his trimarans tacking
downwind to build up tremendous leads over the field on downwind legs of the
One-of-a-Kind regatta at Miami, Florida, beating the second-place boat, a much larger
Class A scow, bynearly an hour in a four-hour race. His boat was disqualified from that
race for touching a mark ..."
This history goes a long way to explaining why iceboaters are taking such a keen interest
in this year's America's Cup duel. The AC teams are using iceboat sailing concepts to go faster
than the wind.
************
One last note on these AC rigs. I don't know if other viewers of race #1 were affected this
way, but my jaw dropped when US-17 dropped its jib and sailed on mainsail alone
upwind in 8 knots of breeze:
But then I read that 'uni-rigs' are often faster than mainsail-jib combinations.
More efficient. So BMOR probably just powered up the mainsail more, moving some
flaps.
"In the 1961 North American [Class C Catamaran championships], Peter and Phil
Ottking, brothers from Dallas, Texas, but former ice boaters in Wisconsin,
proved conclusively that more power can be developed going to weather by putting
the entire 300 feet of sail area in the mainsail, rather than splitting the area
up between the main and a jibsail. The Ottking brothers' catamaran had no jib at
all, only a mainsail of very high aspect ratio on a rotating, streamlined mast."
(Gougeon)
BTW: There is one huge disadvantage to solid wing rigs- : it's a real bummer having to
set up and take down the tall high-aspect wing mast rigs every time you want to
go sailing
Another BTW: The Gougeon/Knoy book has a 30+ page chapter on catamaran and trimaran
hull design that reads like it was written yesterday! Yet it was published 37 years ago.
99% of the concepts apply today. Only the boat materials and construction methods have changed.
Another shock for me was the price sticker on this book. It says "$3.95" on the cover.
What a deal
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