Heavy Weather Sailing

An excellent presentation from Yachting Monthly U.K. He really covers everything that needs to be done. Enjoy.
P.S. That Contessa 32 is a real performer.

I watched the video and thought it was better than most. Most of the action shots where in just over 30 knots of wind from his commentary. The Contessa would have been just as comfortable with a fully reefed main and the headsail furled to about a third. He rigged the storm headsail in harbour but that's entirely different to at sea in poor conditions. In reality that whole video could have been made with no one leaving the cockpit!
This article about Jon Sanders has been circulating a bit lately on Facebook. Jon makes some very interesting comments on actions to take in survival conditions. His point on ignoring the old tactics is worth noting. particularly lying a hull.

www.yachtingmonthly.com/cruising-life/jon-sanders-the-way-of-the-world-75202?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_content=ym&fbclid=IwAR1hzcmPxWhRREhN5-Wz9QH74TxpdhblI5P6_pWxpX_nbE8Rq3QQPf0j18g

One significant problem I see with his heave-to setting is that the storm jib sheets are outside the shrouds and will chafe rapidly during a storm. Larry Pardy (and many others ) was adamant that one must eliminate all sources of chafe when setting for storm sailing. My dream set-up would be to have the inner forestay far enough aft that the natural sheeting would be inside the stays.

Heaving too you will still sail at about 2 knots. With a Currawong and an SS34 just fully reefing the mainsail and hauling the sheet tight, headsail fully furled you have the same effect. Easing the mainsheet slightly and set the windvane to steer the boat on a close reach is particularly comfortable. All done from the cockpit.

The Fastnet is underway. Some hull shapes there in the pictures I would not like to experience in a seaway!

www.livesaildie.com/50th-rolex-fastnet-race-sporty-start-leads-to-a-number-of-retirements/?fbclid=IwAR0I_sISJdxHuRBoKCKTeHfHRoFwar4hyfTXx61smi8Q6XqyRxlsdeZ05vI

Thank you - The only one enjoying it - 8565 at 12.32 . - solid as a rock !

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Ramona said..
Excellent video of the start of the Fastnet. Force 9 with wind over the tide. Very unpleasant weather as they clear the Solent. That out going tide sorts them out! Check the choices of rigs. Some sailing under main only and some just a headsail.

The swan ketch at 12:30 looks to be in its element.

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jbarnes85 said..

Ramona said..
Excellent video of the start of the Fastnet. Force 9 with wind over the tide. Very unpleasant weather as they clear the Solent. That out going tide sorts them out! Check the choices of rigs. Some sailing under main only and some just a headsail.

The swan ketch at 12:30 looks to be in its element.

Maybe Galiana. One of the boats getting ready for the Globe race. Some of those old Swan ketches are such great boats.

Kialoa II looking the goods at the start (4.10), sailed with a guy who has done some racing on her, apparently races are not measured in the amount of days it takes to finish but rather the number of roast dinners to the finish

Unfortunately yes. But he doesn't seem to phased and seems confident he will be there for the start of the Globe race.

Whats he say? I am preparing my boat for extended cruising and interested in hearing all the different tactics for dealing with foul weather.

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Chris 249 said..
The variation in how well the boats are being sailed in the Fastnet vid is very interesting. Some of the smaller Bennies etc are carrying quite a lot of sail (two or three reefs and a #4 etc) and going very well, being actively trimmed and well driven. Some of the bigger boats are struggling and flopping around under small sails. It shows the same thing we see in dinghy racing - that the difference in the skills of keeping the boat in the groove are more important than the details of what sails one is carrying a lot of the time.

I guess it depends on what type of offshore sailing your doing

As someone with short handed cruising aspirations I think a boat set up to require minimal active inputs from crew is more important.

Horses for courses. I know it doesn't look it, recently 20 - 30 kts wind over tide Whitsunday passage double reef & most of the head sail accidentally rolled out, beating to windward. The Catalina 350 was dry as a chip. We made good 5.6kts from Stonehaven to north molle. No swell of course but some nasty chop

I had forgotten Stormvogel was built from cold moulded plywood! I was fascinated by early stories of her construction. It seems she suffered some damage to the outer skin during the Fastnet. I guess someone got off the side with a battery screwdriver and attach the patches!
www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary-boats/extraordinary-boats-stormvogel-139120

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Kinora said..

cammd said..
Whats he say? I am preparing my boat for extended cruising and interested in hearing all the different tactics for dealing with foul weather.

I recently read an article about an Australian sailor who circumnavigated 11 times but couldn't remember his name. Wikipedia suggests it may have been Jon Sanders. As I recall, in heavy weather, he favoured a conservative sail plan and getting prepared early. In very heavy weather, he used a drogue rather than heaving to or lying a-hull and on one occasion, a tyre when the drogue fittings broke. I can't remember clearly whether he deployed the drogues from the stern or the bow. I'll try and remember where I read the article. It may have been Yachting Monthly.

Cheers,
Kinora

I think most of us would struggle to find a tyre onboard if the circumstances required this. =)

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cammd said..

Chris 249 said..
The variation in how well the boats are being sailed in the Fastnet vid is very interesting. Some of the smaller Bennies etc are carrying quite a lot of sail (two or three reefs and a #4 etc) and going very well, being actively trimmed and well driven. Some of the bigger boats are struggling and flopping around under small sails. It shows the same thing we see in dinghy racing - that the difference in the skills of keeping the boat in the groove are more important than the details of what sails one is carrying a lot of the time.

I guess it depends on what type of offshore sailing your doing

As someone with short handed cruising aspirations I think a boat set up to require minimal active inputs from crew is more important.

IMHO the setup and skills that allow you to keep a boat in the groove are the same ones that allow you to set up a boat so that it requires minimal active input. At around 14:15 in the Fastnet start vid, for example, there's the two-handed J/99 Axe Sail with probably three reefs and a #4, both trimmed trimmed flat and beautifully and giving the boat good gust and wave response and minimal helm movement from what can be seen - and that's reflected in her performance. In the clip and on the water she's with much bigger boats using storm gear but struggling or running for home. She's still way up in her class, 3rd ahead of many fully-crewed boats, so she's obviously going very well without a huge amount of active input. There's a similar rival, also going beautifully in the clip and in the current results, at 16:50.

Shortly after that first clip, around 14:30, there's a pic of a fully-crewed boat of almost the same size and rating but more of a heavy-weather specialist, with smaller sails but (IMHO) way too much twist and way too much ease (and therefore low-down depth) on the jibsheet, and it's staggering around from flat to too heeled, as are many of the other boats. There's some boats that look good (crew stacked, flat sails, etc) but have reefed the main way down and left up a fairly big jib, and interestingly none of them seem to be going well in the current results; arguably that setup gives many boats a very narrow groove compared to a smaller jib and bigger, slightly twisted but flat main.

I'm betting (and I think the 2H results show) that the boats that are set up with flat sails and nice twist are not just faster, but also have a better groove and therefore would require less active input.

As an analogy, it's like when you're tired and trying to get home upwind after a hard day of raceboarding; if you have lots of downhaul and outhaul and the CB and mast track in the right place, you'll sit in the groove naturally, using little effort and going fast while chilling most of the time. If you have the outhaul bagged out, no downhaul and the mast back in the track you'll struggle and go slow no matter how big or small the sail.

It's interesting, though, that while the C32 has become a reference point, their actual record in that race for capsizing seems to have been the same as that of the other boats in Class V (about 32-28ft). Years ago I went through old mags and books and analysed Class V knockdowns in the '79 Fastnet. Forty seven percent of the boats in the whole class were knocked down. Fifty percent of the 12 "unsafe" Grimalkin-style boats were knocked down. Forty five percent of the 11 Contessa 32s were knocked down. There's therefore NO statistical evidence that Contessas were less likely to be knocked down than an "unsafe" boat of the same class (the 5% difference isn't statistically significant).

The C32s were theoretically less likely to be inverted or get close to it - but in the '79 Fastnet they would have been in a different area than the "unsafe" boats so maybe that is the reason they were less likely to invert in reality. Or maybe the C32s copped the worst of the storm - we'll never know.

However, in the '98 Hobart the old-style boats were statistically MORE likely to be inverted than modern boats, and yet that's often ignored. Similarly, in '98 and, I think, in '79, inversion was far from the main cause of death. Flashlight, a slender RORC-style hull similar to the C32, lost multiple crew in a knockdown in '79 but that was largely ignored. Cole 43s, a boat with an extremely high LPS, have rolled more than once in the Hobart and Solo Globe Challenger was lucky to survive. A very good S&S 34 inverted in the Hobart. One of the most stable boats in the race was badly knocked down and lost a man overboard and could not recover him - miraculously he was saved by a helicopter that was overhead on its way to another mission. A heavy Swanson 42 sank. So in the real world, the actual safety advantages of a boat like the C32 can arguably be said to be a heck of a lot less than the Wolfson Unit states.

It's arguably like saying that a certain Mercedes car is safer in a 120kmh roll-over than a certain Hyundai. It may be true, but it's also an incredibly minor risk among all the other risks in life and in driving. There's a known human tendency to over-rate the potential danger of exceptional risks, and under-rate the potential danger of more mundane risks. In the real world of other trade-offs, the average person is almost certainly safer if they buy a Hyundai and spend the price difference in going to the gym/getting less work stress/a health check up/etc, and it could well be the same in sailing.

PS - it's also interesting that the highest death rate by far among sailing craft around Fastnet during that storm came from cruising boats and a multi, yet for some reason the '70s IOR boats were singled out despite the fact that they statistically had fewer deaths than older boats.