Steve & Linda Dashew retire

[boatman61]

Originally Posted by K_V_B

I've actually read a lot of the IPCC reports. The real reports, not the "summary for policy makers" that everybody reads, and which is a political document, not a scientific one.

According to the IPCC the Caribbean will in 50 years time in all likelihood be pretty much the same as now...

As someone who was in the Caribbean 50years ago.. I seriously doubt their spin.

[john61ct]

Originally Posted by K_V_B

total lifetime energy balance

It's the same with cars. If you take the whole life cycle in to account a Tesla is not as good for the environment as a VW Polo...

Not going to argue that pair, but in general, electrifying everything seems to be the way to go.

Electric cars emit 50% less greenhouse gas than diesel, study finds
https://amp.theguardian.com/environm...el-study-finds

The key to tackling climate change: electrify everything
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/201...ify-everything

https://www.wired.com/story/even-mor...ave-the-planet

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Pete7

Why ever not, wasn't it Steve who suggested that the overall cost of a mobo and a yacht weren't that dissimilar for long distance cruising.
Pete

I think it was Robert Beebe (“Voyaging Under Power”) who claimed that the total cost of a trans-Atlantic crossing was roughly comparable in either sail or “passagemaker” power.
➥ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ng_Under_Power

[skipmac]

Originally Posted by boatman61

As someone who was in the Caribbean 50years ago.. I seriously doubt their spin.

Can say the same for FL and Bahamas. I started diving the FL Keys and Bahamas in the 70s. I vividly recall revisiting a reef in the far out islands of the Bahamas that I dove in 1976. Went back just 10 years later and the entire 4-6 acre reef was totally dead.

Similar experience with the Keys. Large patches of hard corals especially the branching corals that I saw in the 70s were gone in the 90s.

Caribbean the same 50 years from now? Extrapolating from what I have seen in the previous 40 years I seriously doubt it.

[skipmac]

Originally Posted by john61ct

Not going to argue that pair, but in general, electrifying everything seems to be the way to go.

Electric cars emit 50% less greenhouse gas than diesel, study finds
https://amp.theguardian.com/environm...el-study-finds

The key to tackling climate change: electrify everything
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/201...ify-everything

https://www.wired.com/story/even-mor...ave-the-planet

Whether or not electric cars over their full life cycle of manufacturing, environmental costs of the raw materials, etc are better or worse than internal combustion cars there is one major benefit.

With electric power you concentrate the power production resulting pollutants, greenhouse gases, etc into large, point source generating plants. That makes it much easier to manage the problems and update with new technologies as it becomes available. Much more difficult to retrofit millions of cars on the road if some new technology comes along to reduce pollution from their engines.

[Go Wildcats]

As soon as someone throws at "Snowflake", their national and political identity is revealed. Not to mention they are the true thin skinned kind. I don't know Steve & Lisa from Harry & Izzy, but now I want to side they seem so polarizing.

I agree that times have changed and we need to be better stewards of our environment. Good riddance to thoughtless pollution and the willful ignorance toward searching for a better way. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the past. After all, if we forget the past we end up back there.

Originally Posted by Bigmarv

Hilarious. But if it saves you all time, I was meaning good riddance to their business which promoted enormous carbon footprints that only an idiot could think was ok.

Pretty bizarre crowd to be offended by this being pointed out, but not be offended by people behaving so selfishly - motoring to see the very natural wonders that they are helping destroy. People are going to die because of this, and species become extinct.

Read the science. If you're not scared you didn't understand it. If you think it's ok to build or buy one of those motoryachts, you didn't understand it.

You could do something about that, or you could all be offended by two words in a post.

[boatman61]

Kinda consider these studies suspect personally..
Studies not to many years ago said all diesel was the way to go.. today its in the process of being banned in cities all over Europe..
Just another hype to keep the car companies going and keep public transport from developing to greater efficiancy and capacity..
Now we are being hyped into driverless cars.. which will just make people into bigger blobs than they already are..

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Bigmarv

. . . If you're "disgusted" by somebody criticizing a boat design on a boating site I can see the problem. . . .

You know perfectly well that we weren't discussing boat design, but a nasty personal comment directed at the people this thread is celebrating.

You are welcome to criticize boat design all you want, and by all means even criticize the Dashews, but mind your manners, and be aware of context. This is not Sailing Anarchy.

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by GordMay

I think it was Robert Beebe (“Voyaging Under Power”) who claimed that the total cost of a trans-Atlantic crossing was roughly comparable in either sail or “passagemaker” power.
➥ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ng_Under_Power

The summary:

In World War II, aboard the aircraft carrier Saratoga, Captain Robert Beebe dreamed of one day retiring and cruising the world in a small boat. At that time world cruisers voyaged exclusively in sailboats. But sailboats are confined to narrow lanes of predominantly favorable winds

"confined to narrow lanes" ? lol. If I didn't know better I would think it impossible to sail most places.

So far whenever I ask anyone to produce some details to the claim that "power is cheaper" they have nothing to show. Virtually everyone uses sailboats, and a big reason being cost. There are also several other important advantages.

I would have to agree to "good riddance" to the dashew design. Simply motoring across the ocean is not nearly as bad as designing excessively large boats for few passengers to do it.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

The summary:


"confined to narrow lanes" ? lol. If I didn't know better I would think it impossible to sail most places.

So far whenever I ask anyone to produce some details to the claim that "power is cheaper" they have nothing to show. Virtually everyone uses sailboats, and a big reason being cost. There are also several other important advantages.

I would have to agree to "good riddance" to the dashew design. Simply motoring across the ocean is not nearly as bad as designing excessively large boats for few passengers to do it.

Sean, you are obnoxious, but at least you're not a hypocrite

I agree with you about Beebe, who obviously didn't know anything about long distance sailing. He must have been thinking about square riggers

As to "excessively large boats" -- I don't think you can call stretch 45 footers "excessively large". Look at the tonnage, not the length.

As to the cost of sail versus power -- there is no hard and fast rule possible. Large sailboats, especially with any pretension to performance, get expensive per mile to run, fast. That's primarily because of sails. My boat is certainly as expensive to run or possibly more expensive to run than Dashew's smaller FPB, because of the carbon sails, which definitely cost more per mile than diesel to run a FPB.

I don't really care; I don't sail to get anywhere cheap. I'd fly if that were the mission.

A smaller boat with less expensive sails will obviously be cheaper to run than any power boat. The problem is that the cost of sails goes up exponentially with size because they can't be just bigger -- they also have to be stronger.

While we're talking about Beebe -- he apparently didn't understand anything about stability. But he was a great inspiration to a lot of boaters. I know, Sean, you equate internal combustion engines with the devil, and we love you for it, but I personally -- and I respect your opinion to the contrary, but hear me out -- believe that people out on the water, even in -- gasp -- power boats, are doing less to destroy the planet than your average suburban shmo commuting in his Suburban.

[250224]

>Happy retirement to the Dashews. They did it the right way: they shared and contributed mightily to our knowledge base.

Happy retirement I wish too. Yes.

But otherwise, no no no. What an ugly boat. The only thing missing, is some guns.

I didn't know them. And now the thing here I have learnt is that they built panzerkreuzers wasting (obviously not-as-much-possible) oil for sailors too - what do I know - old/lazy to sail or use smarter more energy efficient vehicles. And many here find this cool. One wonders.

Success is nice (and good for jobs). But there *are* ecological issues and such leisure battle cruser boating should not deserve much respect imho. It cannot get much more cynical than to name such 'beauties' ICEBERG (https://www.setsail.com/wp-content/u...9-1024x435.jpg).

If I have respect for them, than for this comment/ https://www.setsail.com/evaluating-n...comment-911230 where Steve himself said how he classifies sailing- and powerboats. That was nice to read. Maybe resettles their priorities?

[estarzinger]

We have known Steve and Linda for a long time.

They are good folks - very genuine and caring and generous to the cruising community.

If you read the actual post about their retirement (from the building business) it is all about their attempt, but ultimate inability, to maintain the (high) quality they expected in their builds. I highly respect that. I wish more people were concerned about maintaining quality standards in boat building. It is broadly a miserable industry in that regards.

Steve is one of the most curious and open minded high-mileage sailors I have met. Most folks with some miles form a pretty strong conception of 'the one way it is best done'. Steve never did that. We was always looking at alternatives and options and saw how many vastly different ways people could successfully go cruising. He never looked down on small boats, or people who did it a different way than they did.

Regarding the whole 'pollution/global warming' discussion - do realize that one of Steve's primary design factors for the power boat was very high efficiency at cruising speed (vs other power boats). They valued and prioritized that over high top speed, unlike many/most power boats (most of which are less efficient in actual cruising use).

Doing an honest and complete comparison between an efficient power boat to a sail boat in actual real world cruising usage usage is difficult. But you do have to somehow factor in that most sailing cruisers in fact actually motor quite a bit. 50% of miles (or hours) motored is not at all uncommon today among the sailing fleet. The Dashew's motored quite a bit when they were on their sail boats. And they are not all that optimized for that motoring (props especially - the dashew big sail boats were better at motoring than most but still less good than their power boat). Obviously there is a significant distribution range on motor usage, with some picking one end and others the other, which makes any 'general analysis' difficult.

Beyond those comment about their specific design priorities; they, like most cruisers, had a smaller footprint than the vast majority of western dirt dwellers. And they, like most cruisers, could have made choices which made their footprint smaller (with a smaller boat, and less comforts, and different material choices). But most of us draw the 'compromise line' somewhere way above the 'minimum footprint' level.

I'll be curious how long they continue to cruise. Steve's dad sailed (local waters) into his 90's. Their power boat has given the capability to cruise globally well past an age where they had difficult managing their sail boats (Linda was somewhat afraid of the loads on their last big one).

The generation which Beth and I sailed with is coming to an end, with our friends coming ashore.

[Polux]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

People are not offended by that. They are disgusted. There's a big difference.

The Dashews have given all of us something nice. Many of us have their excellent books, which they have been giving away for free. Some of us finally figured out weather from their excellent volume about that. We will miss them, and you barge into their retirement party (as it were) and make a nasty remark like "good riddance", in order to preach to us about carbon emissions.

Is that clear now? There is a time and place for everything. We're going to have a word with your mother about your upbringing.

It seem you can only see one side of the the matter and the less important since this thread is not about the Dashews per si but regarding them to abandon the building of big long range motorboats.

What some are disgusted is with Dashews having abandoned sailboats for motorboats and not coastal motorboats but long range motorboats that waste necessarily tens of tons of diesel with the corespondent digital foot print.

Nobody is denying their past contribution regarding sailing but that is the past, what they were doing on the past decade was promoting big motorboats as the ideal mean to long range cruising and that is that what they are stopping to do.

I am glad they stopped with that since I don't consider tha to be the right way to go, I mean crossing the Atlantic with a boat that makes 30 to 40 times more pollution than a sailing boat with the same interior space (the sailing boat using the engine too).

Others can have different opinions but considering this opinion offensive and insulting to the ones that don't agree with it, it is a very narrow minded stance , kind of a totalitarian view where not only I am right but other opinions are necessarily not only wrong but disgusting or insulting opinions.

From the first post that defines what the thread is about: The retirement of the business of building huge long range cruising motorboats.

"With the passage of years and ever-changing designs, we have sought the Holy Grail of cruising, the perfect blend of tradeoffs that optimize comfort and safety at sea together with life at anchor. ...The closest we have come is with our FPB series....

We know that we have disappointed many people by closing the FPB order book and retiring. We would have preferred that the business continue, but could not find a formula with which we felt comfortable lending our name"...

We will see you out there cruising.

https://www.setsail.com/evaluating-n...-fpb-market-2/

[K_V_B]

Originally Posted by john61ct

The key to tackling climate change: electrify everything
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/201...ify-everything

And how are we going to produce all that electricity?

But that leaves out the elephant in the room. It doesn't matter a single thing if a subset of the world electrifies.
The problem is not fossil fuel consumption. It is fossil fuel production.
The countries producing oil and coal are currently consuming about a third of it themselves. They have no incentive whatsoever to stop producing, and to stop consuming. If we don't buy the Arab's oil, they will just burn it themselves. To power air conditioned dairy farms in the desert, and indoor ski resorts.
Norway may pretend to go green by going all electric, as long as they pump up oil and sell it, it doesn't matter.
Germany is one of the biggest producers of coal. They are increasing their coal production. All those solar panels in Bavaria are just window dressing.

So in all likelyhood we will end up burning all the fossilised dinosaurs. This will change the world. In what way is actually not that well known (the IPCC's projections aren't much more than a wild guess either).
But I am not to worried. Change is business as usual for the world after all.

[K_V_B]

Originally Posted by Polux

What some are disgusted is with Dashews having abandoned sailboats for motorboats and not coastal motorboats but long range motorboats that waste necessarily tens of tons of diesel with the corespondent digital foot print.

"disgusted" is a pretty strong word. So is using terms as "good riddance". You do not use that kid of language when someone retires.

You can use "good riddance" when a criminal gets locked up...

What the Dashews did was noticing that many people when they got older switched to power boats. They applied their experience to making the best (and most economical) powerboat possible, one that is actually rather efficient, and I find them even attractive. You can disagree. But keep "disgusting" out of it please. Disgusting you can use when you are confronted with a ships' head that hasn't been cleaned in ages.

Two years ago I ran in to a FPB and a Bestevaer, next to each other in Bergen. Two works of art in Aluminium. Don't know which one I'd buy if I had the money.