Can't Wrap my Mind Around this "Bluewater" Thing!

[Polux]

Originally Posted by Jon Eisberg

BTW, I don't believe this has been referenced yet in this thread...

As usual, John Harries offers a most excellent take on this subject:

Five Ways That Bad Boats Happen–Part 1

It is needed log in to see it and I would not do it but I can see their perfect cruising boat here, the one that excludes and measures all the others:

Adventure 40–January Bulletin

Not a bad boat but certainly an old design. A contemporary boat if it was designed 25/30 years ago. Not interesting today and outdated.

If one wants a good voyage boat (and cannot find one on the market) it only has to contract one of the Top NA to do it and the result will not always be the same type of design. It will depend on the client needs and tastes. Harries talk as if a single design could be the ideal boat to all in what concerns a bluewater boat.

Regarding the design they arrive to, here you have a boat with a similar criteria, but more modern and with a better design:

TERRITOIRE 11.80m - Eric Henseval, architecte naval

Here you can see some other different options:

Interesting Sailboats: TK - ALUMINUM BOATS

and here you have a completely different boat designed for voyaging too and this one to the criteria of a guy that circumnavigated 3 times already and will be circumnavigating one more:

Interesting Sailboats: Opc - GARCIA EXPLORATION 45 AND 50

And some including me would prefer something like this:

Cigale 14 m?tres

Making big generalizations like Harries do regarding the choice of the "right" boat excluding all that don't fit in his profile is inadequate and makes no sense. There are several choices and options and among them a contemporary way to deal with them, to the state of the art and that is a thing I don't see on the design of "his" Adventure 40.



An example of his wild generalizations regarding the "right" bluewater boat to all:

Hull Form Of The Adventure 40, An Offshore Voyaging Sailboat

Harries seems to me one more guy that thinks he know it all better than the best Na, a guy that instead of having a top Na designing his boat and discussing with him his particular needs, contracted a 2nd rate NA to do the design he thinks it is the perfect one.

Sorry Jon I don't buy it. I don't believe that there is a blue-water boat that fits all neither that Harries knows more than the ones that designed hundreds of great boats and sailed extensively.

[TeddyDiver]

Originally Posted by Polux

Off course, you buy what you pay for. You can except the same quality on same sized boats one costing 150 000 euros the other 450 000 but the quality and seaworthiness is not proportional to price and in what regards that the 150 000 euro boat is surprisingly close and in what regards sailing it can be even better in some aspects.

Regarding pushing harder and be worried with forecasts, I have a countryman that circumnavigated solo two times on the same "cheap" Bavaria 36. Do you really think the boat should be built tougher considering that 95% of the sailors would sail that boat coastly?

And sometimes the cheaper new is better, I know, depends of the bling factor too. And no I don't believe there's nothing wrong with sailing a Bavaria RTW, but there are some differences between adequate and good.
What comes NA's, they design boats according their clients wishes, not their own or what they might personally or after scientific research find best.
BR Teddy

[Jon Eisberg]

Originally Posted by Polux

Making big generalizations like Harries do regarding the choice of the "right" boat excluding all that don't fit in his profile is inadequate and makes no sense.

Nor, does offering a critique of an article you admit to not having bothered to read :-)

Originally Posted by Polux

If one wants a good voyage boat (and cannot find one on the market) it only has to contract one of the Top NA to do it and the result will not always be the same type of design. It will depend on the client needs and tastes. Harries talk as if a single design could be the ideal boat to all in what concerns a bluewater boat.

Which completely ignores one of the primary driving forces behind the concept of the Adventure 40 - that it be a relatively AFFORDABLE voyaging boat... Hiring a "Top NA", and contracting a custom build, is a different approach, entirely...

Originally Posted by Polux

Harries seems to me one more guy that thinks he know it all better than the best Na, a guy that instead of having a top Na designing his boat and discussing with him his particular needs, contracted a 2nd rate NA to do the design he thinks it is the perfect one.

The fact that this design will be far more than Harries' vision alone, and will receive a good deal of input from people like Steve Dashew and the guys behind Boreal, appears to be completely lost on you...

Me, I'll be content to wait until actually seeing Eric de Jong's finished design, before writing off either he, or his boat, as being "second rate"...

But most yacht designers have been tied to their drawing boards and computer monitors by the need to build a business and therefore have very little offshore experience. And that leads to bad offshore boats because the designer has simply not spent enough time in the environment that he/she is designing the boat to operate in.


Again, this assertion is backed up by looking at designers that have consistently come up with good offshore boats. Steve and Linda Dashew passed a quarter of a million miles some time ago. Jim McCurdy, designer of our boat, sailed offshore all his life. Olin Stevens sailed offshore a lot as a young man and always had his brother Rod as his eyes at sea.


The Jean-François (there are two of them) behind the Boreal offshore boats conceived their design when they met while voyaging near Cape Horn, and they both continue to sail offshore, most recently a voyage to South Georgia in a Boreal 44. A voyage that Colin will be telling the story of, along with that of the creation of the boat, here at AAC soon.


That brings us to Erik de Jong, designer of the Adventure 40. Erik started going to sea with his parents as a baby and has been doing that ever since…a lot. He has lost count of the miles of ocean he has seen go by, but its somewhere over 150,000.


Better still, Erik is still wracking up ocean miles, and hard miles at that. The Arctic expedition voyage he is planning for this summer will, all going well, cover over 8,000 miles. And as each of those miles goes by, he will be thinking about ways to make the Adventure 40 an even better offshore boat. Erik will see more offshore miles this summer than many yacht designers see in their entire careers!


If you are a potential Adventure 40 buyer, think about that and rejoice instead of being frustrated by the delays in the design and build process associated with Erik’s voyages.

[Andrew Troup]

Thinking about the arc of offshore sailboat design and construction, over the cruising era, I think the biggest change has been from one-off to series building.

There are a lot of implications, pro and con, so I'll just pick a few that strike me as particularly problematic.

1) Buyers of series boats are insulated from the process of compromise.

They are NOT cast in the role of having to say "Hold, enough, let's go to Plan B" when their aspirations for creature comforts and 'nice to have's, justifiable individually, prove to be unrealistic en masse.

They do not have to participate in deciding whether it is better to have 26 inexpensive brass thru-hulls servicing a plethora of 'hotel' services, vs a sea-chest or two, a small number of marine-quality thruhulls, and the odd bucket (for getting fluids to and from parts of the boat where they are infrequently needed or generated).

There are stark choices to be made, and only a marketer can pretend we can have our cake and eat it: that we can repeatedly sail across oceans with all the comforts of a boutique hotel, and have a reasonable expectation things will not go 'tits up'.

Effectively, buyers are outsourcing almost all these individual decisions, and voting on a fait accompli.

And, because genuine offshore sailors are a dwindling minority, they get the same deal (if they buy series-built) as a small minority gets in any democracy.

2) A lot of those who buy series boats with offshore aspirations do not yet have offshore experience. This makes them vulnerable to marketers who (even those who are not venal) will almost always have even less experience.

The resulting 'successful' transactions will inevitably send false signals to the market as to what constitutes an offshore-suitable boat.

3) Thanks Jon for posting links to the analysis of the "Be Good Too" abandonment. At the big, beamy end of the market, I'm struck by the incongruity of anybody exposing themselves to that amount of potential risk (financial and personal) without

a) Retaining a project manager to represent them, on site, during the build (if it was too late to do so during the design), with the skills, experience, and negotiating chops to ensure the boat was fit for purpose. The build is the final opportunity for this to be done for a 'big platform' boat, unless one has unlimited access to funds.

b) Retaining a 'First Engineer', especially for the maiden voyage.
(Ideally, the same person - but if they're good, they're unlikely to be available...)

Big platforms are heavily reliant on systems. And the engineering has to be done (both before and after launching) by competent engineers, not (as was amply evident on this boat) by enthusiastic lay people.

For example, it appears this boat was reliant for safety in bad conditions on having BOTH rudders operational. And, failing that, (possibly even given that) it could not necessarily be safely handled without BOTH engines.

So, instead of offering welcome redundancy, the doubled-up systems were DOUBLING the vulnerability. The platform was twice as likely to have a critical systems failure, in respect of both these critical systems.

4) I don't personally have a strong opinion about time of year:

It seems to me the necessity for avoiding hurricane seasons has, over time, become misused to justify the inverse proposition.

IOW "setting out at the wrong time is dangerous" has become inverted to
"setting out at the right time is safe"

Logic doesn't support this particular line of 'reasoning'.

I think it's a snare to assume that one can avoid getting spanked at any time of the year, when crossing major oceans; it's a numbers game, and the longer you play the game under this assumption, the less likely you are to remain a winner.

I think the fallacy of the above inverted proposition has been a major factor in the increasingly prevalent notion that vulnerable, inshore-capable boats are OK, provided those who cross oceans in them are sensible with their timing.

This has always been particularly and demonstrably untrue in some parts of the world, including where I live, but the increasing variability of climate, presumably resulting from an increasingly energetic system (but regardless of cause), seems to be affecting even parts of the world where seasons formerly seemed more reliable.

[Andrew Troup]

<<Retaining a project manager to represent them, on site, during the build (if it was too late to do so during the design), with the skills, experience, and negotiating chops to ensure the boat was fit for purpose.>>

It strikes me that this was also possibly Dr Paris's single irreperable oversight.

Designers, builders, riggers and sailmakers are almost invariably not offshore sailors, and they need to be bent to the will of someone who is, not treated as final arbiters.

[Kefaa]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

...
No way my 87 Island Packet is as good as a new Island Packet, but mine was 1/10 the price of a new one.
I thought the argument was if you had X amount of money, what's the best deal, new production boat or older less higher number production boat?

Thank you for the sanity check. I agree. It needs to be looked at like a ROI. You can do a lot with that 9/10ths.

Look around your marina - any marina and if your experience is like mine - MOST people like to say they own a boat. Few are sailors. I see boats put into the water in April and pulled in September that probably had one visit a season. (in my area that is a $4000 ride if you have a slip)

So why does this matter? If you are boat builder, you know of 10,000 boats sold 9,000 will rarely leave the dock. 100 will rarely enter open water and 1 will go into true deep water. Do your really want to build a boat for 1 person in 10,000? The market (and most builders) are just not there. So hulls are optimized for coastal cruising with lighter glass, new materials and often better performance (eek... I did say it). Lets face it - most of the market needs to get back to work on Monday.

Last century boats were owned by sailors. They had to be built like tanks, and repairs had to be possible in places where clean water was probably godsend. Does that mean today's boats are "worse" or "better" than 30+ years ago? For what? If I need to make a mast - wood would be nice. But is that really a need if all I do is all TowUS?

If you are truly going blue water (as someone pointed out a term as meaningful as "30 MPG") then you buy a boat and you do a shake down cruise in adverse conditions - learning yours and the boats limitations. [It boggles my mind that people never go out if the weather is bad and the think they know what to do if it gets bad when they are out.]

If you are sailing around Cape Horn, you probably want to avoid those new turbo chargers where getting a part could take 4 months. Just like you would avoid a Formosa for a lake cruiser.

I think many more people would be truly sailors if they sought a boat for the sailing they would really do, than what they hoped they might. But that is a topic in itself...

[neilpride]

Originally Posted by Andrew Troup

<<Retaining a project manager to represent them, on site, during the build (if it was too late to do so during the design), with the skills, experience, and negotiating chops to ensure the boat was fit for purpose.>>

It strikes me that this was also possibly Dr Paris's single irreperable oversight.

Designers, builders, riggers and sailmakers are almost invariably not offshore sailors, and they need to be bent to the will of someone who is, not treated as final arbiters.

May i ask what you mean with this sentence??

Designers, builders, riggers and sailmakers are almost invariably not offshore sailors, and they need to be bent to the will of someone who is, not treated as final arbiters.[/QUOTE]

[Kevin84]

Originally Posted by neilpride

May i ask what you mean with this sentence??

Designers, builders, riggers and sailmakers are almost invariably not offshore sailors, and they need to be bent to the will of someone who is, not treated as final arbiters.

[/QUOTE]

Just guessing, but I believe it was a comment on the difference between theoretical knowledge verses practical experience. Someone may know what SHOULD work from book reading, but a person who has BTDT knows what DOES work.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app

[Polux]

Originally Posted by Jon Eisberg

...
Which completely ignores one of the primary driving forces behind the concept of the Adventure 40 - that it be a relatively AFFORDABLE voyaging boat... Hiring a "Top NA", and contracting a custom build, is a different approach, entirely...

Any custom boat well made and with a good finish will be more expensive than a production boat even using slightly outdated inexpensive plans. I have been there and asked for the budgets. If he want a simple boat as cheap as it can be (and with a similar concept) he have the 11.80 from Henseval built by Meta. He will not be able to have a custom boat cheaper than that, at least with the same quality. As I have said the design is way better anyway.

TERRITOIRE 11.80m - Eric Henseval, architecte naval

Originally Posted by Jon Eisberg

The fact that this design will be far more than Harries' vision alone, and will receive a good deal of input from people like Steve Dashew and the guys behind Boreal, appears to be completely lost on you...

Steve Dashew sails motorboats now. Its basic sailboat concept comes from 30 years ago. Previous boats were a refinement of the first concepts.

SetSail» Blog Archive » 30 Years Chasing the Dream

He completely disregards what have been learned in solo racing boats regarding the best hull shape to be driven fast and safely by a short crew. There are a reason for those boats to be designed the way they are and not like Dashew boats: they are more efficient and easy to drive by a solo or small crew.

I don't get that one regarding the guys behind the Boreal. There is the father, with a circumnavigation experience and the son that is a NA. Their boats are beamy, with all beam pulled back and in what regards form stability have a lot to do with the type of hulls used in solo racing. Their boats have nothing to do with the boat that Harries propose, they are quite the opposite.

Originally Posted by Jon Eisberg

Me, I'll be content to wait until actually seeing Eric de Jong's finished design, before writing off either he, or his boat, as being "second rate"...

2th rate is in this case not an offense but a fact. You have that in all professions: you have Cristiano Ronaldo and Leonel Messi as the top raking football players. You have thousands of players on the second and third leagues. Some of them are not bad, but 2nd or 3rd rate regarding those two anyway. That's just what I meant.

You seem not having understood my point: Harries treat is idea of a perfect bluewater boat as if it was the perfect bluewater boat to everybody. Besides the boat being outdated in what regards that particular type of boat, fact is that many other experienced bluewater sailors would prefer different types of boats as you have justly pointed with Boreal and I have pointed with Jimmy Cornell and his Garcia 45 or with Finot/Conq with Cigale, a boat designed for them in first place.

What pisses me most with Harries is his idea that there is only a suitable type of boat to be a perfect offshore bluewater voyage boat, his design off course. The truth is that each different type of design for bluewater sailing has shortcomings and advantages. Each type of sailor will prefer a different mix regarding the disadvantages that they can live with and the advantages that they definitively want in their sailboat. That's why there are on the market several types of voyage bluewater boats and not a single type: they offer the perfect choice for different types of sailors.

Harries seem no to understand this. His type of boat has only advantages and the other types of voyage boats only disadvantages. I find that quite basic and revealing of a not very good understanding of yacht modern Naval Architecture.

[Polux]

Originally Posted by Andrew Troup

....
Designers, builders, riggers and sailmakers are almost invariably not offshore sailors, and they need to be bent to the will of someone who is, not treated as final arbiters.

I don't understand why you say that. It is quite the opposite: many of those have or had a sailing/racing offshore past.

You mean their knowledge (Na) need to be "bent" to the desires and will of someone that knows a lot less than them?

Even if not sailing now (many have more than 60 years of age) they have not only their past experience as they share knowledge with clients with all kind of experience, from world wide cruising to racing. All those clients experience integrated with their own and their vast knowledge of contemporary NA, will give to a top NA (with many designs and a contemporary outlook) a vastly bigger experience than any single sailor can possibly have, even if he does not stop circumnavigating the world on the same old boat. What he can learn with that is very limited.

[neilpride]

Originally Posted by Kevin84

Just guessing, but I believe it was a comment on the difference between theoretical knowledge verses practical experience. Someone may know what SHOULD work from book reading, but a person who has BTDT knows what DOES work.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app[/QUOTE]




Haaaa well, no, i dont agree with that, most NA this days have a nice Cv and experience sailing offshore , coastal, or even in races, same aply to sailmakers, riggers, and even boatbuilder workers in few places, take this for example, me, im a rigger for the past of 16 years , my partner is in the rigging bussines for the past of 25 years at least, both own boats, i own my third boat actually, the point is many NA design the plans and send the plans to the builder, after that its the builder responsability to get a decent product and follow the NA recomendations, not always....
And some builders have NA in a payroll, from my experience sailmakers, riggers, deck gear designers, etc... someone with real experience is involved .

The problem for me is that suckers in offices doing numbers and numbers, you know , we can cut here or there and make profit, this days many boats are made by robots, and few still doing by hand, i laugh a lot when someone mention ply laser cutting robot tool or WTF!!! choper guns are still in use this days...

I dont see a big huge diference this days with the past, in the past you have the same cheap crap in one side and the well done more expensive in the other, today the same, you can get a Bavaria or you can buy a Oyster, you can make a RTW with a Bavaria but dont get caught in serious weather...or not.

Im still stick to some old theoretical knowledge and old practiques when i choose a product for my boat or even if i decide to buy the next one, because i know it work and i know its designed for hard marine use, cant say the same with some new stuff around, boats , gear, etc... the industry is full of experienced competent people around , the problem its the suckers in hig instances cutting the labour and design of others in pro for more profit.

At the end you get what you pay for, last week we have a serious arguing discussion with Catana in france , how its posible to fit in a 1,5 million euros catamarán rigging gear with a horrendous quality and designed for a smaller catamarán size???? and the owner crying about all the stuff we need to fix before a pacific tour.... every day, same song.,...

[Kevin84]

Polux, I'm curious. You completely blasted that design for only presenting one point of view. Yet, you then turn around and insist that YOUR point of view is the only one that is truly viable. Do you not see the hypocrisy here?

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app

[Andrew Troup]

It is common for people who commission one-off vessels in larger sizes to employ someone with the necessary breadth of knowledge as their on-site representative, to sign off on the design, and then say 'yes' or 'no' to the solutions proposed by the various trades and specialists to the welter of issues which always come up during the build, and to reconcile and adjudicate when the 'experts' cannot agree.

Where necessary, this person will also mentor the client if they lack experience, interpret and explain to them arcane technical matters, and lay out the operational implications of the associated compromises.

That project manager acts in loco for the owner at the yard, and it is relatively rare for a rich owner to have the necessary expertise and experience, let alone the time, to carry out this role.

Dr Paris, and the owner of "Be Good Too", both encountered show-stopping issues which were preventable, and it seems to me there's a common thread: there was evidently no single person who could judge the fitness for purpose of the competing proposals.

In such situations it generally happens that whoever thinks their idea is good enough, in their narrow area of expertise, will implement it, often with little regard for how this fits the overall mission.

In the case of Stanley Paris, the fact that his boat was effectively a racing boat, drawn up by a racing design office, does not seem to have helped, because what he ended up with was manifestly unsuitable for his purpose.

Dr Paris takes no responsibility for that, claiming he was let down by his multiple experts.

My point is that he should have either driven the process himself, (in which case he cannot blame others) or -- due to relative inexperience, not just as a solo sailor, but with regard to things like winch layouts/rigging/engineering/sail repair for LARGE solo sailing yachts -- he should have appointed a 'mini-Me' - or better still, a Maxi-me"

Then at least he would only have one person in his sights - and if he did not have the judgement to pick the right guy, ultimately, the responsibility comes back to him.

I'm talking in blame terms for simplicity of explaining my point, not because I literally blame anyone. It was just an unsatisfactory project with an unsatisfactory outcome, and hopefully lots of lessons to be learned.

And the same is clearly true for "Be Good Too". It's a shame to see all that talent, all that material, all that enthusiasm and all that care be wasted, in a situation where the right person, just one person, could have made all the diff ... or so it seems to me ... from in front of a screen ... on the other side of the world

- - - -

I think it's axiomatic that high-achieving designers, builders, sailmakers and riggers cannot simultaneously be offshore sailors.

I've waited in several ports for a designer to join the boat to go cruising, generally the shake-down for a new build; they've always had to cry off at the thirteenth hour. The next project ALWAYS takes precedent over the last one.

I once did cross a major ocean with a highly esteemed designer of cruising vessels, top guy from a renowned practice. He was in his fifties, near the end of his career, and it was his first trip offshore. Good on him, I say.

Designers might have done some offshore cruising in their past (very rare, in my experience) or racing (more common, but usually predominantly inshore - almost the exact opposite of 'blue water cruising' in every way)

... and even offshore racing, particularly with big, competent crews, is hardly a venue for learning about the challenges facing short-handed offshore cruisers, ordinary folk, with limited physical and technical resources, and an entirely different focus.

[bigjer40]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

Bigjer40,

After reading and rereading your post, your what I first took as a tongue in cheek, and then a philosophical, and finally as an honest question, as stated, can not really be answered. At least not beyond the point that you already answered it yourself.

Certainly, cutting edge (or at least modern) technology and materials can be generally perceived as 'superior', and properly applied, they usually are.

Unfortunately, as for all our history, availability doesn't ensure proper (or otherwise) applicability.

There are boats being laid as I write this, plastic and wood, aluminum and steel, that will be cherished by their owners. And likewise some that will be despised.

So what makes the difference? Is it actual "blue water superiority"? As you and many others have already said, "We got some pretty good stuff nowadays!"

And therein lies the rub. At what point how, do you (or does anyone), personally, determine what's good enough?

Well, I guess most of us fall back on experience. "This looks strong enough, I trust it." Fair enough. And very generally statistically speaking, the result is Darwinian. The most "Blue water superiority" will be demonstrated by those that do the best in "Blue water".

You know, though it may be an urban myth, I've heard that most people who die from drowning do it in their bathtubs.

Regards, jbyrd

Thanks for taking the time to really read my question. A few others understood what I was asking and a few saw the word bluewater and lost their freaking minds. Even if it was the usual "should I buy this boat as a bluewater cruising boat" post, I have learned so much and I appreciate most of the posts. I think at this point, my money is going on a proven vessel with a good reputation. Of course a year, make, and a model does not make a dependable, safe and comfortable boat. That is up to the previous owners. But I just can't help but wonder which boats of today will be the go anywhere boat with a surprising reputation in 2050. But I am not willing to gamble my hard earned money to find out if I was right.

[Terra Nova]

Originally Posted by bigjer40

...a year, make, and a model does not make a dependable, safe and comfortable boat. That is up to the previous owners...

That is up to you.