Old/strong vs New/weak?

[sailorboy1]

Well my 2001 Hunter 410 had a collision with a 75' fishing boat, ripping off all the mast and rigging, breaking the stay cables, bending 1.5" diameter mast struts into 4 sections, bouncing off the fishing boat at the stern of my boat.

Result was lost all the rigging, but not a single crack on the deck from it getting ripped right off. No damage to any of the chainplates or their attachments, no damage to any of the deck fittings the rigging was attached to. Only a 6" crack in the deck when the boats bounced off each other and a section of the rub rail that that protects the hull/deck joint being knocked off of a 3' length. No damage to the hull/deck joint that was right under the rub rail that took the hit.

I don't know what more one could hope for as to strength of construction!

[TrentePieds]

Bene:

Your doing your homework is most certainly to be respected, but I think you are coming at it rather from the wrong perspective!

You post suggests to me that you are wanting to give preference to “overbuilt” boats ”just in case” you have an accident. That way, you appear to suggest, some measure of safety is to be found.

So let me offer you some thoughts that some may consider heretical: NO boat, regardless of the medium of its construction - fibreglass, wood, steel, aluminum, ferro-concrete - will be damaged by the mere passage through the water. However, ALL boats - regardless of the construction medium - will be damaged by touching something they should NOT touch, including the sea bottom! Therefore safety is not attained through selecting one medium over another. Safety is attained by the vessel's skipper – in this case YOU – being competent enough to prevent the vessel from touching, ever, what it should not touch.

Accepting that thesis means that you are wasting your time comparing “solidity of build” as between various vessels that may be candidates for your purchase. The comparison is irrelevant to the matter of safety at sea!

What you SHOULD be spending your time on, IMO, is becoming a competent PILOT. A “pilot” is someone who is competent in the discipline of pilotage which is defined as managing and navigating a vessel in COASTAL waters. Navigation “off soundings” (which many call “deep sea”) is a kettle of fish of an entirely different colour, and you can safely put aspirations in that respect aside until you've become a pilot!

A pilot is, let us emphasize, a dab hand at reading nautical charts - not chart plotters, not i-pads, not any electronic gizmo, but CHARTS! - and he is able to fix his position in coastal waters by dead reckoning with an accuracy very close to that attainable by taking fixes. You will agree, of course, that it is ONLY in coastal waters that there can be a risk of running aground. But being a dab hand at reading charts means that you can always place your vessel where grounding is an impossibility!

One of the greatest dangers in pilotage is to find yourself “embayed”, i.e. to find yourself in a bay on a lee shore from which you cannot beat out to sea because your vessel is not weatherly enough. In the days before engines many a ship was lost through embayment and grounding. A moment's reflection will tell you that a weatherly ship, a ship capable of sailing close to the wind, will be in less danger of embayment than a ship that cannot make way to weather over the ground.

You already know that modern light displacement, fin-keeled yachts are more weatherly than old-fashioned heavy displacement, full keeled ones. It is not a stretch, therefore, to conclude that you need to rethink the premises on which you appear to have based your post.

Nothing wrong with that. Rethinking erroneous premises is how we all learn, and only a few of us had the good fortune to come from the womb sculling a skiff!

Join a sailing club. Crew on many different kinds of vessels before you make a final determination of what sort and what size of vessel will suit you. And when you think you are ready to commit to a purchase, remember that no sane man would ever spend more money on a boat than he can walk away from with a smile still on his face!
Bonne chance :-)

TrentePieds

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by TrentePieds

... NO boat, regardless of the medium of its construction - fibreglass, wood, steel, aluminum, ferro-concrete - will be damaged by the mere passage through the water ...
TrentePieds

I’d like to agree with TrentePieds, but the recent experience of “Translated 9"*, for instance, suggests differently. The, well built, Swan 65, hit nothing, but water.
Notwithstanding, he [TP] makes some valid points.

* ➥ https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3870757

[Pete7]

Originally Posted by GordMay

I’d like to agree with TrentePieds, but the recent experience of “Translated 9"*, for instance, suggests differently. The, well built, Swan 65, hit nothing, but water.
Notwithstanding, he [TP] makes some valid points.

* ➥

Should we add "recently" in there somewhere? Also its being driven by Italians. Have you seen them drive

Cheeki Rafiki is another very sad read, particularly when you start to count the number of times she had an allision with something solid.

Might be worth looking at this past winters ARC Rally to see what sort of yachts people are voyaging on https://www.worldcruising.com/arc/ar...ntentries.aspx

[Kettlewell]

Somewhat contradicting what I wrote earlier in the this thread, there is always the possibility of hitting something offshore. Numerous boats have come to grief hitting floating objects, whales, and even buoys. I've personally run down a floating 100lb. propane tank, a large floating chest freezer (6 feet long), and numerous smallish logs. Unless you keep an exceptionally careful watch offshore you will hit junk eventually, in my experience. An advantage of the old-school long keel with gently sloping leading edge with keel-hung rudder is that they tend to ride up and over junk, with the prop and rudder much more protected than on more modern underbodies. Also, if you go hard aground, which is very likely at some point, the full keel distributes the impact over a much larger portion of the structure and there can be no keel bolts to worry about. After a big blow in Rockland, Maine, I woke up one morning to see that a nice Cape Dory (old-school, full keel, fiberglass) had broken free from her mooring and had washed ashore on solid rock behind us. That day she was towed off and floated away near high tide with major scratches on the hull but no fatal damage as many fin-keeled, spade rudder boats would have suffered. I've noted the same thing after Hurricanes Bob and Gloria, with many boats washed ashore from their moorings. The full keelers were often able to be dragged back in the water and floated away.

[TrentePieds]

I think Translated 9 must be considered an "outlier", and I don't think that that particular boat and its mishap is germane to a discussion intended as a reply to Bene's OP.

It is very clear that one can always, in the interest of "saving weight", UNDER-dimension a construction, including a boats hull, to such a degree that it will no longer serve its purpose reliably. This ancient Luddite is quite prepared to believe that vessels designed and built primarily with racing in view, and having cruising accommodation fitted somewhat as a afterthought, may well have their hulls laid up so scantily that slamming into a head sea at 8 or 10 knots for hours on end may flex the layup to the cracking point. Anyone who has done a belly flop from even a three metre board knows that that hurts :-)!

Our friend Bene has shown fortitude, IMO, by placing his original post before the hoary shellbacks in this forum. Going back through all his posts I conclude - and NOT uncharitably - that he yet has much to learn, so let us not drag the discussion into the weeds of ocean racing, but rather make constructive suggestions to Bene about how he can advance in the first instance to the exalted status of AB and thereupon to Pilot. We might even go so far as to make sensible suggestions about what sort of cruising boat would be a good choice for a neophyte in the waters where he intends to sail :-)

Cheers!

TP

[MicHughV]

I remember in the last singlehanded around the world race, the Vendee Globe Race, Alex Thompson had severe delamination of his hull, a state of the art hull....a kevlar hull I believe....various structural supports in the bow area started to crack and delaminate, etc. He tried some band aid fixes, but nothing worked and had to retire from the race.

Another Vendee boat broke in half and sank off southern Africa.

You can't separate racing from cruising, it's all ocean sailing, s**t happens to even the most well prepared...imo

[Kettlewell]

A huge difference between racing and cruising is that most cruisers will stop sailing in such a manner and direction that will put the boat's structure under tremendous strain. We generally don't beat to windward in offshore seas if we can help it. However, there are times once in awhile when you absolutely need to smash your way along, whether you or the boat likes it.

[TrentePieds]

indeed - as I alluded to in my comment about getting embayed.

But, of course, the sensible cruising skipper anticipates such possibilities before they present insurmountable dangers and modifies his passage plan to mitigate, or better still, avoid, the dangers he expects to meet. And those dangers include straining hull and gear beyond reason.

I have a somewhat unforgiving attitude to people who don't know when to "back off", and to people who choose as a matter of entertainment to go dicing with Poseidon. If you challenge him, or if you are heedless of his power, then, obviously, you must wear what he flings at you. IMO horror tales of what can happen to racing boats really have no place in teaching ab initio.

Bene worried specifically about damage through grounding, and obviously I understand that he meant that rather as a proxy for all manner of potential impact damage to a boat. In the old days when there were sailplanes in my life, it was axiomatic that ALL aircraft accidents are due to pilot error, in so much as the pilot should have foreseen the cause of the accident and avoided it.

Just so do I believe, and I would so teach Bene if he were sailing under me, that if a sailing vessel is wrecked, the skipper is to blame. Skipper's proudest task is to keep his crew safe, and he cannot do that if he doesn't keep his ship safe. And that requires forehandedness. But I'm sure that all-out ocean racing militates against forehandedness.

TP

[boatpoker]

Originally Posted by BeneG

Hello All,

To the point question with more deets below:

-Are there any new-ish builds that have thick/ sturdy hulls? Say within the range of 2005-2024 mark?


-When were the last years that manufactures over fibreglassed? I assume it was a tapering off over the course of a few years?

- is an older hull with a massive makeover/refit the only way to achieve this?

Where did you get the idea that more glass is better/sturdier ?

Are you talking of the days with many more layers of chopped mat and cheap orthopthalic resins ? The switch to isopthalic resins tremendously reduced blistering and hydrolysis.

In the good old days boats were built with about a 70/30 resin/glass ratio while modern engineering is pretty close to the exact opposite.

In short your premise is incorrect.

[MicHughV]

one word....steel !!

[MicHughV]

Seriously though...many years ago I was on an offshore voyage in company with another boat....A full keel Valiant 40-something, me on my fin keel steely. During the morning, we sailed in relative close proximity to each, and all was well, as our speeds were neatly matched.
That afternoon the weather turned to snot, the winds and sea really picked up, right on the nose off course, and we both reefed down.

I was taking a lot of spray over the bow and my boat was having a hard time of it, and so was I as my boat was sailing on it's ear.
Looking over to the Valiant, I noticed that skipper in his cockpit, under the dodger, reading a book, while the autopilot did all the work.

There was but no question, he was having the easier time of it. I don't know what vintage that Valiant was, but it was your classic big heavy cutter, probably not much good around the buoys, but offshore it was in it's element.

[Don C L]

Actually the Valiant 40 is not a full keel. It’s a Perry design with a pretty modern underbody for its time and pretty good around the buoys. From the waterline up it looks more traditional. I knew a guy who had one many years ago in Santa Barbara and I saw him sail it into the harbor to his slip! Pretty nimble for a bigger boat.

[MicHughV]

I was surely impressed by it's seakeeping qualities !!
You don't see many around these days.
It's a "classic plastic" as they say...

[Russ]

Any build in metal, steel or aluminum will out last any FRP in a confrontation with a solid object or the sea
As they say, what do they make aircraft carriers out of?

Yes I own a steel boat, yes it is a PIA to maintain but it always comes out on top when it is boat versus anything solid.