Our boats are strong… inside of the envelope

Find a salty sailor from the wooden-boat era, preferably one who has been in a monastery for the past 50 years and hasn’t kept up with boatbuilding technology, put him aboard a state-of-the-art, custom-built ocean-racing sailboat, take him well offshore in lively conditions and send him below. He would be terrified.

Our ancient mariner would be appalled by motion unlike anything his old sea legs had ever experienced. The heavy boats he once sailed rolled slowly and predictably with the waves. Today’s high-performance boats skip over the sea like an out-of-control skier on a mogul-studded slope. They twitch and yaw at neck-snapping velocity, go airborne off seas with disconcerting ease and land with an impact that imperils dental work.

If that weren’t enough to convince the old sailor that shipwreck was imminent, the noise surely would. The astounding din inside of a modern racing sailboat’s composite hull can be appreciated only by being there. Standing in the invariably empty hull just forward of the mast with the boat at speed in a seaway is an experience that might be likened to being in a large steel pipe while a dozen strong men beat on it with sledge hammers. Or, just guessing here, riding in the space shuttle when it re-enters the atmosphere. The wood-boat sailor, comparing the racket to the melodic gurgle of the sea filtered through the insulation of two-inch planks, might exclaim, “Holy mackerel, this hull can’t be much thicker than cardboard!”

He would be right, of course. The hulls of today’s high-performance boats are made of an incredibly thin sandwich of fiber and resin assembled in a vacuum and cooked. The wonder is that this yields enough strength and stiffness to keeps boats together under tremendous stress.

This, to borrow a phrase from a movie title, is all about the incredible lightness of being a modern racing sailboat. It’s what is responsible for repealing the law of hull speed and making 20 knots a rather ordinary speed for racing monohulls longer than 50 feet.

Not so fast, our fictional survivor of the wooden-boat era might say. Are you sure those thin-skinned boats are as strong as the oak-framed schooners I used to sail? Are they really tough enough to take everything the sea dishes out? Funny he should ask.

Two new and very big examples of composite boatbuilding, both 98 feet long, literally fell apart in the Sydney-Hobart Race in December.
Skandia and her crew barely survived a fall off a large wave. The impact broke the hydraulic rams that controlled the canting keel. The keel started canting out of control, swinging like pendulum from the bottom of the boat before dropping off altogether. The 16 sailors on board escaped to life rafts before the hull rolled over. They were rescued and the boat was recovered, but her owner declared the $4 million uninsured vessel a total loss. “Trashed,” he said. The trauma of the hard landing after falling off the wave wrecked the boat.

The fate of the other victim didn’t make a pretty picture either, particularly unfortunate for a boat named after a camera. Konica Minolta suffered profound structural damage after dropping off a wave described by her crew as 10 meters high. The instrument of her near destruction was not a canting keel, but the boat’s fixed keel was implicated nonetheless. It seems that the appendage, instead of being bolted to the bottom of the hull, extended through the cabin to the deck, an arrangement that saved weight overall but put heavy loads on the deck—too heavy obviously for the way the boat was built. With further disintegration of the hull a possibility, the boat limped into a tiny Tasmanian fishing port, where she no doubt had the distinction of being the highest-tech hull in the harbor.

The two spectacular failures have generated a good deal of criticism (not to mention ridicule) of high-performance boatbuilding. The state of the art and the state of the engineering behind it are suspect, the critics say. They point out that the conditions in the race, while challenging, were not so severe that a well-found sailboat would not be expected to get through them without hull damage.

If 10 on the Sydney-Hobart misery scale was the 1998 race in which six sailors died and waves were estimated at 80 feet high, the 2005 race was probably a 6. The 40-knot head winds and quite nasty seas did persuade 57 of the 116 starters to withdraw, in almost all cases because crews were worn down to the danger point by fatigue, cold and seasickness (the decisions to take shelter were rightly praised by race officials as good seamanship), not because of boat failure. What’s the expression—plastic ships and wooden men?

Most of the plastic ships that finished were rather ordinary boats, like the tough little Sydney 38 marching resolutely upwind under a storm trysail on this issue’s cover. Isn’t it interesting, and in a way satisfying, that the more conventional boats that most of us sail are more seaworthy than, say, a $4 million custom racer?

Yes, but still it would be a mistake to assume that the boats that broke are typical of the construction quality of one-off racing boats. You have only to look at the lightweight composite boats that routinely race around the world and finish intact to know the failed 98-footers are exceptions.

The skipper of Skandia got it right when he likened himself and his mates to test pilots. His boat and Minolta have much in common with experimental aircraft. The term “pushing the envelope” is aeronautic lingo, but here it applies to sailing.

I’m all for pushing the limits (though they ought to find a way to test the limits before putting a crew on board and dropping off waves). Someone has to do it if the technology is going to advance. In the meantime, while all that pushing is going on, those of us who sail more mundane boats have the benefit of solid technology that advances with trickle-down from exotic applications but remains based on proven techniques and materials.

There’s an appealing egalitarian aspect to production boatbuilding. Everyone who buys a series-built fiberglass boat from a reputable builder gets the same strong boat. Most of them are used for daysailing, coastal cruising or as floating vacation homes, but you could drop any of them off a 30-foot wave and I can just about guarantee they wouldn’t break like the one-offs that came a cropper on the way to Tasmania.

I will admit to a fleeting moment of doubt during a midwinter passage on the North Atlantic in weather that was perfectly appropriate for that place and time, probably equivalent to that 6 on the Sydney-Hobart scale. It dawned on me that I had entrusted my life to a very ordinary fiberglass boat favored by owners who rarely sail out of sight of land and made by a boatbuilding company known for the affordability of its products. The thought blew away in the gale, or washed away in the waves that regularly filled the high center cockpit, and never returned. The boat handled everything the ocean dished out and made it to port some days later not a bit the worse for the beating it took.

That would have amazed our ancient mariner, as would the news that the boats we sail don’t leak, spring planks or rot.

As for his being scared aboard the hypothetical exotic racing boat, judging from what we learned from Skandia and Minolta, that might just mean he’s a wise old salt.