Once upon a time, two cavemen were sitting on their floating logs, complaining about their spouses. One caveman stood up to pee-to-lee. The sun was hot. He opened up his furs to stay cool and caught a gust of wind. Modern yacht racing was born.
Ever since, a yacht race has been defined as “any two sailors within sight of each other.” There are lots of advantages to arriving first. The faster caveman not only gets to eat first and eat more, but he also gets to, er, snuggle for a longer duration than the loser.
Losers don’t like this. Not at all. Thus, for a long time, every yacht race has been divided into two groups: the skipper who won and the many angry skippers who believe they were cheated. We call this unfocused anger “wholesome competition.”
Now, the caveman who lost to the innovative, bladder-blessed sailor soon discovered that lighter, longer logs of the same buoyancy are faster. Basically, this was the first step on a winding road called the America’s Cup.
One hungry fellow in the village cooked up a T-rex burger on a log and then later attempted to scrape off the coals. He realized that the charred wood was easy to remove with his sharp oyster shell. Thus, dugout canoes were another great leap forward. I’ve had the pleasure of watching men build them using this exact hot-coal method in Micronesia.
Hoisting specially sewn furs on a vertical pole was another mega advance, as was mounting sheets of slate to the bottom of the canoe to add righting moment (weight) and reduce leeway by increasing lateral resistance.
Steering was done with an oar. Most men, even then, were right-handed. If the voyage was long, they’d lash the oar in place. As a natural result, they’d tie up to discharge their cargo on the port side, not the steering oar (starboard) side. Anatomy as destiny.
Newbies who steer from a proper helm often confuse the words “port” and “starboard.” An easy way to remember the difference is that port and left are short words, while starboard and right are longer. Or remember this simple phrase: “Red left port.” A sailor named Red sailed out of the harbor. The left side of his boat is the port side and the one with the red light. (When two vessels are on a collision course, the one who sees the red light should stop so that the green-lit vessel can go.)
Also, in the United States at least, sailor Red correctly kept the red navigation marks on his left as he proceeded out to sea, in order to stay in the dredged channel.
This is all basic stuff, correct? (Notice I didn’t say “right” and confuse you even more.)
Alas, sailing vessels that were intended to cross oceans soon began to look different from coastal counterparts. Why? Because their crew didn’t want to drown from waves sweeping across the vessel offshore and carrying them overboard. Plus, the excessive pitching of the vessels in a seaway slowed them down.
Designers felt that they most certainly had the answer: Make the bow and transom higher, more high, and even higher still. Thus, the lofty stern castles and towering bows of the man-of-wars of the 1600s.
This didn’t work. The weight added at the ends only increased the pitching. Who could have guessed?
If you think all this is ancient history, just observe the modern trend in multihulls with reverse-raked bows on their hulls or amas. This is the latest demonstration of the “migrate the weight toward the center” concept. Such design choices even affected the English language. Immodest, crude sailors stuck their naked butts over the bows at the “head” of the ship, while more modest skippers set up a canvas shield on the poop deck.
But getting back to the America’s Cup in the mid-1800s: Yachts had a problem. To be strong, they had to be heavy. And heavy required lots of sail area. But the designer couldn’t make the masts taller with the limited technology of the day. Thus, as the boats became heavier, the rigs became longer via overhanging booms and long widow-makers forward (that’s what bowsprits were called during my youth).
Sailing ships of the day had lots and lots of sails. They regularly left Boston with four to six extra crewmembers when they sailed to the West Coast via the Horn during the Gold Rush era. One clipper skipper bragged that he’d “lost only three crew” out of the rig during his last rounding of the Horn. How lucky was that?
Anyway, after the Americans carried off the Hundred Guinea Cup and renamed it after America, Europeans wanted to visit the New World to see what all the fuss was about. Shipping increased, and thus the need for pilot boats that could remain at sea for long spans of time yet return to port quickly. That was the heyday of the pilot and fishing schooners, the kind that I grew up aboard.
Why schooners, specifically? Because with their giant mainsails set far aft, they hove-to extremely well. Here’s irony for you: Some of the fastest boats of their day evolved from vessels specifically designed to bob in place. Ah, the historical goofiness of yacht design.
Back in my youth, large headsails weren’t practical. Not without sheet winches. Yes, some vessels sported sheets with block-and-tackles—all the better to kill any slow-ducking crew.
Now, during this time, most sailors knew empirically, not mathematically, about concepts such as lateral resistance. If you take a picture of a hauled-out sailboat from the side and cut away everything but its underbody, and then you balance the bit of the photograph on a pin, that’s the exact center of lateral resistance of the yacht.
Then, if you add up all the combined centers of effort of all the various sails, and then place that point a couple of inches abaft the center of lateral resistance, well, the boat will be perfectly balanced, with just the right amount of weather helm.
Don’t want to haul out to find the lateral resistance, or don’t have a camera? Fine. Just tie up your sailboat extremely loosely on a windless day. Then pull it in parallel to the dock. Then push it away from the dock with the point of the boat hook. If the bow moves away first, move aft. If the transom moves away first, move forward. Eventually, you’ll get to a spot where the boat will move away parallel to the dock from a single point. Drop a plumb bob into the water: That entire line is your center of lateral resistance.
What? You didn’t know this? Well, most of my generation of bilge rats did. The difference between us and yacht designers was that the yacht designers knew how to operate expensive slide rules (which were kind of the supercomputers of the era).
Of course, as wonderful as schooners were, it was only a matter of time before a smart-ass such as myself put the rig on backward by placing the smaller foresail behind the larger mainsail, thus inventing the modern ketch. (A ketch has its mizzen mast forward of where the rudderpost bisects the design waterline. Not aft, like a yawl.)
Now, I realize that knockabout split rigs are currently out of fashion, and they should be. However, once the wind pipes up above an offshore vessel, split rigs such as our Wauquiez 43 ketch really come into their own. The mainsail can be totally dropped in a gale, and the vessel remains in perfect balance. The boat not only can sail jib and jigger under mizzen and headsail, but it also can sail to windward if it’s well-designed. We regularly go through 40-plus knots with a fully battened mizzen and roller-furling storm staysail set, without leaving the safety of the cockpit. How cool is that?
In light-air off-the-wind conditions, we often fly our mizzen staysail instead of our heavy mainsail. The nylon mizzen staysail is ultra-easy to hoist and hand. (In my day, we didn’t take down a sail. We handed it.)
Of course, the real problem with racing boats is the boats themselves. In a way, they suck. I mean, in order to sail upwind, you need a keel and a sail; the hull of the boat is just useless baggage to support one or the other. Doubt me? Ask any foiling kiteboarder, especially one with a smug grin.
Or ask any of the crew of the America’s Cup boats Ineos or Taihoro, for that matter.
How much do I know about the finer bits of yacht design? Modesty prevents me from answering at length, but I do recall my father answering: “How much doesn’t Fatty know on any given subject? Well, usually just enough to get himself into trouble.”
Fatty Goodlander is still hard aground on his own coffee grounds in Southeast Asia.
