Hello John, I wondered when you would jump in. I am glad you raised some of these questions as I have been trying to get a similar discussion going with others for a long time but could find nobody with a considered opinion. John Winters wrote: > > Mark wrote; > > > I guess one trip I would like to try when I can arrange the time as sort > > of a shakedown would be North Carolina to Bermuda. Around 600 miles. > > If I like that then longer trips. I wouldn't do it as any type of > > record attempt, just personal satisfaction. Shorter trips like Florida > > to the Bahamas have been done many times by sailing kayak and I would > > think that would be nice. In good conditions in a sailing kayak loaded > > for touring I would think 8 knots average reaching would be doing well. > > Bear in mind that when I say sailing kayak, I mean one that can convert > > from sailing to paddling while on the water and stow the sail gear > > aboard. I am not talking about kayak based performance sailboat. > > An interesting aspect of Mark's project has to do with when a kayak with > auxiliary sail power becomes a sailboat with auxiliary paddle power. This > might seem like splitting hairs but it has a lot of importance from a design > standpoint. Since there is no widely accepted definition, I have always just worked with my own practical terms. One place I have always drawn my personal line is mentioned above. If a boat can not be converted back to a kayak when needed, I have always considered it a sailboat or kayak based sailboat. > > Anyway, the problem a designer faces has to do with the fact that sails can > generate more power than a person paddling so one has to decide whether to > use a higher prismatic coefficient (Cp) for the sailing or a lower Cp for > the paddling. Generally one also likes to use more fullness higher up > forward to reduce trim forward when running under sail while preferring a > finer entry on a kayak. Next one has to face whether the boat must sail to > windward. Do you use a keel, lee boards, bilge boards, centerboard or what? > All affect the hull design and impact on paddling. You and I seem to approach this from different starting points. Your questions arise from trying to design features into a boat hull to optimize its performance for a given purpose, hull design decisions. I only rarely work on hull designs. My personal definitions stem from other practical considerations. Normally the sailing craft I deal with are some existing commercial boats, most often a kayak. There is little doubt to start with that the boat is a kayak. Depending on how the boat is rigged for sail, I might seperate them into three functional classes. If a boat has a minimal sail rig without much alteration to the boat, example, one of these strap on downwind rigs, I would call this a kayak with sail auxiliary. A boat with a serious windward rig, with or without outriggers might be a sailing kayak, if it can be converted at will back to a paddling kayak. There are boats out there that due to sail rig size or outrigger size and attachment method can not be converted at will to a kayak that I feel become kayak based sailboats or sailing trimarans. > > So, the question surfaces. Does the customer want a sailboat with and > emphasis on sailing or a kayak with the emphasis on paddling. My experience > with this leads me to believe that those who do much sailing really want > sailboats. When I asked Hugh Horton this question he had no ready answer but > every picture of his boats showed them sailing and that, to me, suggested > the answer. I understand your need to define the performance characteristics so that you can produce a design. To me, for my needs, the essence of the question is not how well the boat performs either function but its convertability. I have seen many paddling kayaks that don't paddle well and they are still kayaks. I have seen sailboats that don't sail well that are obviously sailboats. I have sailed and seen many sailing kayaks that run the perfomance spectrum of paddling and sailing from one extreme to the other, both aspects good or bad or one of each but I am forced to call them sailing kayaks if they can do both paddling and sailing and be converted at will. Whether the hull designer made appropriate choices for volume distribtion for the given purpose is subjective from my point of view. When I am asked to recommend a rig to install on a kayak for sailing, I will normally ask the person to evaluate his or her needs and to tell me how the boat will be used and how much emphasis the user will place on paddling or sailing. They may even express this in percentages. People have rigged some kayaks as schooners to add area for light wind sailing, most have outriggers for stabilitly and several have added outboard motors so they don't have to paddle when the wind dies. You or others may rightly feel that these boats are engine auxiliary sailboats or trimarans. My feeling is that if the boat can be converted at will back to a paddling craft, it still remains functionally a sailing kayak. > > The pedants among us might suggest that kayaks that get sailed more than > paddled belong in the sailing mailing lists. :-) I can certainly understand your point of view and usually duck and cover before I put sail and kayak on the same paddlewise page. Jackie's "- Anything to do with paddling boats!" is, unfortunately for the pedants, fairly broad and does leave the door open for some of us less desirables to sneak in on rare occasion. I would tend to wonder however if a 3+ week discussion of cable ties might not belong on the electricians list;-) Believe it or not there is a small kayak sailing list and I have tried pedantically to raise these same questions to the guys with kayak based hard shell sailing trimarans. One boat has two rigs on each ama, and even I who can't imagine kayaks without sails don't think of these as sailing kayaks. Since the list is so small and inactive I want them to stay anyway and admit I have a certain interest in these evolutions. > > No doubt Mark has thought his boat through carefully but, at the risk of > preaching to the converted, I think it worthwhile to mention that any boat > for a long open water voyage should have self bailing and self righting > ability. Most importantly the paddler/sailor should not depend upon form > stability. A careful reading of Lindemann's "Alone at Sea" and Marchaj's > "Seaworthiness: the Forgotten Factor" will explain why. I guess this goes back to the same personal risk evaluation that was discussed before in regard to the single use type kayaks. I am not sure that I can agree that these demands (self bailing and self righting ability) on a boat like a sailing kayak should be higher than those used in near shore conditions. It seems like most boating accidents happen near the hard. I personally have done most of my offshore work on trimarans and a proa and feel really insecure on balasted keelboats or other boats that are not positively buoyant when holed. The idea of hanging lead from a boat is not intuitive to me. I think that a sailing kayak that is of a scale that can be manhandled for self rescue is more appealing than the popularly accepted "safety" of a "lead mine sailboat" or powerboat but I am sure I would have a hard time selling that idea to the multitude who go to sea in such boats. I do not advocate passagemaking to others in paddling or sailing kayaks or balasted monohulls. Risk assement has to be a personal evaluation and I will not personally readily accept standards imposed from the outside simply based on conventional wisdon for another type of craft. I do not think the standards as outlined in Marchaj's book can be applied across the board to my ideal sailing kayak. I am not disagreeing with your position for you, particualarly as you are expected to be conservative when consulting profesionally, but some of that doesn't work for me personally (as opposed to professionally). I could not professionally encourage kayak passagemaking of any kind. I feel that any kayak needs floatation but some of the features you might advocate from the Marchaj information are perhaps more appropriate to larger boats. As far as Lindemann goes, I have read it several times and I do not think it is clear whether his makeshift outrigger induced the capsizes as it is widely interpreted or merely failed to prevent them for apparent design reasons. > > Whether one considers a self righting and self bailing boat a sea kayak or > not should cause some debate to relieve our early winter ennui. I will be curious if anyone else cares to weigh in on that one. I can just hear the roar now when the new self bailing and righting kayak regulations are introduced. It should be interesting to see these ultimately idiot-proof 400 pound kayaks. We should probably include mandatory electronics at the same time;-) Thanks for the stimulating post John. > > Cheers, > > John Winters > Redwing Designs > Web site address, http://home.ican.net/~735769 *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Nov 26 1999 - 08:08:26 PST
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