Trawlers / Safety / Big Seas

[Honey Ryder]

i was having lunch in a restaurant in london last week and was lucky enough to share a table with one of the three men who took a 46' 1986 nordhavn around the world, the wrong way.

he said it took them two and a half years, and said it was easy, but rough in places (the pacific).

i bumped into another norhavn owner in sardinia two years ago. he had crossed the atlantic with his wife and was cruising the med. this gentleman was in his late 60s. last thing i heard they were in central america.

i 'd guess that trawler style boats with the right ratios (see beebe's "voyaging under power"), sailed well, are very safe. of course, if water gets into the boat and the pumps can't keep up, then it will sink, in "the perfect storm", a paravane broke a window and the storm boards were not fitted so when it went over if filled up.

keep the water out or have plenty of pumps and you should be ok is my guess.

[Paul Elliott]

Of course, The Perfect Storm was a fictionalized account of a real event. We don't really know how or why the Andrea Gail sank. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was storm-related.

[psneeld]

over simplifying the obvious?????

plenty of power vessels can cross an ocean...the right design with the right systems, with the right maintenance and spares , the right fuel tankage and the right skipper can go almost anywhere in the world as safely as any other vessel.

[Loquat]

Is a hull design with a retractable bulb keel , a la melges24, a good idea for power vessels in big seas? Just wondering...

[psneeld]

Originally Posted by Loquat

Is a hull design with a retractable bulb keel , a la melges24, a good idea for power vessels in big seas? Just wondering...

Not required for a power vessel...stability should only change a bit as fuel and water are consumed...a small ballasting tank can overcome that or if well designed...no balasting should be required.

[cat man do]

Originally Posted by psneeld

no balasting should be required.

[u4ea32]

As I've travelled around, I'm always impressed how very, very small budgets and very small boats get around safely. Not as comfortable as staying at home or running a huge vessel, but they get out there and the vast majority return safely.

Consider the boats used for commercial fishing. The vast majority are surprisingly small: outboard powered pangas travelling well offshore in even quite snotty conditions; sub 30 foot outboard powered aluminum pilothouse planing boats in Alaska.

Even a 21 foot single outboard flats fishing boat made it 8312 miles from Florida to NC to Bermuda to NY to Greenland, Iceland, UK, Germany, and a thousand miles up the Rhine. Their welded aluminum T top had some welds crack due to vibration, and they certainly had some uncomfortable times, but they did it safely. See Across the Atlantic in a 21-footer

Drascombe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under Notable Voyages covers how far people have taken the 22 foot open Drascombe Lugger boats. Its amazing.

A close friend sailed for years between Europe and the South Pacific, returning via Cape Horn, on a 50 year old lapstrake 26 foot folkboat. His total cost of the adventure, including food and gear and boat, was well under $10K USD. He has a new boat now for his voyages between his farm in Wales and destinations as far as the Outer Hebrides is an open wooden boat he built that is similar to the Druscombe Lugger.

Home | Open Blue Horizon documents what happens when the keel falls off sailing back from Hawaii while still 760 miles off California. Not much, it turns out. They made it home safely under power and even did some motorsailing. If a sailboat designed for a deep lead keel and lots of crew on the rail remains functional without ballest, maybe a powerboat actually designed to be without a keel will be safe at sea.

[Wavewacker]

Actually, as I have mentioned, it was the stories of micro cruising in the Bahamas that really sunk the hook with me, about two years ago. Matt Laden and Little Cruiser. On his site there is a list of famous small boats that made incredible journeys. From those stories I began considering living on a boat and cruising, the need to do it making my bucket list.

I certainly don't have the skills of those small boat captains, but I think I have time enough to learn sufficiently to make some passages safely. I have seen some people living on houseboats at the lake, no thanks!

There are so many advantages of a small capable boat. Limited capacities, I think can be overcome but at the cost of sacrificing luxuries. One thing that I have learned already on this site is that you don't need a 40'er, many do well with much less.

I believe years ago, Mecury outboards did a promotional circumnavigation in a small open aluminum boat, with assistance, don't if they made it. I tried to follow them on the internet but lost them when I lost my laptop to some hacker.

I don't want to ramble, and I can't really address safety issues of trawlers or small boats other than saying if it has been done before, I'm sure it could be done easier now.

[u4ea32]

Originally Posted by Honey Ryder

i was having lunch in a restaurant in london last week and was lucky enough to share a table with one of the three men who took a 46' 1986 nordhavn around the world, the wrong way.

he said it took them two and a half years, and said it was easy, but rough in places (the pacific).

i bumped into another norhavn owner in sardinia two years ago. he had crossed the atlantic with his wife and was cruising the med. this gentleman was in his late 60s. last thing i heard they were in central america.

I'd guess that trawler style boats with the right ratios (see beebe's "voyaging under power"), sailed well, are very safe. of course, if water gets into the boat and the pumps can't keep up, then it will sink, in "the perfect storm", a paravane broke a window and the storm boards were not fitted so when it went over if filled up.

keep the water out or have plenty of pumps and you should be ok is my guess.

Let me see if I can illuminate from my experience.

Beebe's ratios are interesting, but clearly they are simplistic. His lack of experience with 3D animated color dynamic modeling on PCs (because it basically was not done for another two decades ;-) means his insights are limited. Not worthless: he describes things as they appeared to him and others. But like the observation that feathers fall slower than bricks obscures the fact that acceleration near Earth is independent of the weight of the falling body (for those of you who really understand gravity, please ignore my simplification), Beebe's ratios obscure the truth and should not be used to judge boats far from Beebe's experience.

All simplifications, like hull speed or Beebe's ratios, apply best to vessels that are similar to those being observed when the simple "rules" were coined. Hull speed applies less and less as displacement length ratios get lighter, and length-beam ratios get longer and thinner. For example, a 27 foot Express 27, 25 feet on the waterline but 2400 lbs (empty, probably 3200 lbs with the crew and gear) Their best day's run on the 11-day crossing was 320 miles, which meant they averaged 13 knots for 24 hours in the 1984 Pacific Cup.

Really, Beebe describes boats he saw as being successful and appropriate. The ratios describe those boats.

But using 1.34 x sqrt(LWL) to predict boat speed for an Express 27 sailing downwind is as inappropriate as suggesting that only boats that conform to Beebe's ratios are the only boats good for passagemaking.

Specifically, some power cats can be very good passagemakers. Some are horrible. The bridge deck height .vs. bridge deck span is a critical factor, yet of course does not appear in the Beebe ratios. Beebe did not experience successful power catamaran passagemakers, so he did not describe them.

Beebe was trying to describe valid characteristics of dynamic motion, but the functions that lead to such actual dynamic motion is very, very far from Beebe's ratios. They happen to correlate to his observed data set, but they are not useful to predict if a given boat is appropriate or not for passagemaking.

For example, one time I crossed the Atlantic on a Swan 65. Another Swan 65 was crossing just a few days before us. They had severe problems. We had zero problems. Its not just the logo on the boat, its also the total history of the boat, including the person who oversaw the original build, the systems, the maintenance, the crew, and luck (weather is formally chaotic, so weather forecasts are of limited value more than a day or three in the future, depending on where you are).

Today, naval architects can and should do animated dynamic simulations of passsagemaking vessels. Steve Dashew sometimes posts such animations of his boats.