Luc,
QUICK ANSWER
Beam-mounted Speer section bidirectional kick-up retractable rudders, preferably using tillers with long extensions as shown in the solitarry and woodenboat designs, either a round or flat bottom, schooner rig, non-rotating round masts, with one of the following sail designs: Wharram soft wingsail, swing-wing junk-rigged wingsail, junk sail.
MEDIUM ANSWER
There is no medium answer. Any complete answer explains the reasoning behind each choice, starting with a specific risk-mitigation philosophy, and then applying it to the selection. Otherwise it's just one guy saying "daggerboards are fine" and another guy saying "tell that to my friend who had to have his catamaran towed when the crash box failed".
---
LONG ANSWER - BACKGROUND
You've definitely opened up a can of worms there. Safety is definitely a subjective issue, largely depending upon your view of risk.
Most of the sailing community is happy to accept risks that are built into most designs, even if those risks are no longer necessary. Take heavier-than-water monohulls rigged with diamond stays and shrouds, fin keels with spade rudders.
Dismasting is quite ugly in the best case scenario and catastrophic in the worst case. Why accept 50+ different points of failure, many of which either can't be inspected, or if they can, could have stress fractures and crevice corrosion that won't be seen?
Losing your keel, either due to the failure of keel bolts, or to hitting a submerged object or grounding, probably means either sinking, living in a life raft, or living sideways in a boat that hasn't sunk for some reason, with no good way to make landfall under your own power.
Losing that spade rudder due to a manufacturing defect in the stock, stresses that weren't anticipated, or a submerged log, could sink the boat or render it unsteerable.
And it's always a really bad day when you sink a very heavy boat simply because of a leak.
Why accept any of those risks?
Because they don't happen often? Because they're "normal"? Those might be responses, but they aren't logical answers.
For a long time it was normal not to wear a seat belt, and yet I've always worn one. Not because I'm a good boy, or because I'm scared, but because I can do simple math. Reducing the risk of death by 80% is worth having a strap of cloth across my body. No matter how tough you are, you're not tougher than steel, glass, asphalt, and telephone poles.
To me, here's the general logic for safety: If a risk is potentially catastrophic (lose a life, limb, entire boat, life savings, whatever), and you can eliminate it through good design, and that choice carries a low penalty in terms of cost, performance, and/or aesthetics, you do it.
I don't care that less than x% of cruising boats with in-mast furling ever get stuck in a storm with a jammed furler -- I will simply not spend huge sums of money to buy a boat with in-mast furling and then take my family to sea on it. Not when mast track with lazy jacks looks better, provides better performance, is much less likely to fail, and if it does fail, is much more likely to allow me to get the sail down. A wharram soft wing sail, or a junk rig, would be even safer.
So: if we can substantially reduce the risk through good design, we go for it.
Part of that is eliminating a risk, such as making sure bearings can't fail by getting rid of them entirely. Part of that is maximizing your ability to recover from failures that do happen, such as resetting the fuse in a kick-up rudder instead of trying to figure out how to fix a spade rudder that has broken its crash box and jammed diagonally while water comes in the boat.
---
LONG ANSWER -- HARRYPROA
The first big step is to go with a boat that won't sink, which basically means either a well-designed multihull with plenty of floatation or an Etap monohull.
The next is to go with a harryproa for the many reasons explained on the web site and in magazine articles.
Highlights:
- As Rob points out, a boat that is easier and simpler to sail results in a more well-rested crew making better decisions, skips the emergency-inducing laziness and fear involved with tending to a foresail in a massive storm, and also allows less experienced crew to man the boat if the skipper is lost or incapacitated.
- Shunting is infinitely easier than either tacking or gybing in huge winds, and just as important, far less likely to result in a dismasting or capsize.
- Beginners can learn and perform a shunt, even if they are weak and the weather is heavy.
- The entire boat depowers, on any point of sail, when you release the mainsheet, allowing you to handle an emergency.
- The bidirectional boat lets you claw off a lee shore, with obstacles, without blowing a tack or losing ground to a shunt.
- Fewer strings to pull mean less confusion, fewer chances of bad choices that lead to a disaster.
- Fewer strings to pull mean fewer chances of equipment failures that lead to disaster.
- The unstayed rig lacks dozens of points of failure.
- There's a large, safe working area, to leeward, on which to handle problems with sails.
- The harryproa has onger waterline for the money/weight invested.
- Etc.
---
LONG ANSWER - SPECIFICS
Beam mounted kick-up rudders.
The beam-mounted rudders can kick up in both directions. That doesn't matter 99.9% of the time, but the other 0.1% it's a big deal.
As the saying goes, the only sailors who claim they've never run around are either liars or those who have never gone to sea. There are forces at sea that break rudders, even well-designed ones. Perhaps there's a flaw in the material, perhaps you hit a log, whale, or container that you can't see because it's stormy and dark.
With a kickup rudder, the best failure case is that you reset your fuse and get on with your day. The worst case is that you can't use the rudder any more, but at least it's out of the water and there's no damage to the boat.
Sure, you can make spade rudders strong, but everything can fail. In the event of that failure, the likely result is that you can't steer properly because either all or part of your rudder is stuck at an uncontrollable angle, and given the location of the rudder, you may not b able to fix it at sea. A worse case is that there's also now water flowing into the boat.
There's a slight performance penalty for having surface-piercing foils, which may end up requiring a few inches more depth and a touch more wetted surface area.
So if you want to set an ocean crossing record, have infinite funding, can access rescue services at will, and don't mind the boat blowing apart, this matters. It also matters if you do coastal racing and you don't care about the cost or boat damage penalties of running a spade rudder into something hard.
However, if you don't have an unlimited budget, and/or are concerned about being able get the boat back to land, the performance penalty is negligible.
Since the beams are the strongest part of the boat, that's the best place to mount them -- there's just about zero danger of breaking the structure or introducing a leak. Any force that damages the boat at that point is so great that all bets are off for risk-mitigation.
Retractable rudders.
Being able to adjust depth is great for getting into really shallow water (particularly if you can help steer with a schooner rig), and being able raise the foils entirely is great for beaching.
Granted, you can make a strong spade rudder, But strong enough to survive bouncing on the beach when that one rogue breaker sweeps in? Maybe. But that's several tons of boat that gets jammed down and forward, perhaps on a single rudder, when the boat lands, and yet still needs to have working bearings that allow for smooth steering afterwards. And if the rudder is actually strong enough to take that, it may be so strong that it won't fail before causing hull damage.
Plus, why introduce another point of failure?
Also, with the rudders fully retraxted, you can't trip over the rudder on a steep wave.
You could argue that an untended spade rudder should feather as needed, but will it feather in time? What if it jams? Small risks, perhaps, but regardless, it's even safer to have no foils in the water.
Bidirectional Speer sections.
Since you don't have to rotate them 270 degrees to shunt, you get the following advantages:
- Quicker shunt off a rapidly-approaching lee shore (particularly if you're hemmed in by either islands or boat traffic).
- No one, such as inexperienced crew filling in for an incapacitated captain, can forget to rotate them during an important shunt.
Tillers instead of wheels.
Feel free to say I'm full of BS on this one, particularly since I vastly prefer tillers to wheels. I always feel like I'm driving a bus when I'm at a wheel, not sailing a finely-tuned instrument that's in harmony with the sea and wind. It's possible that I rationalize this choice because it's my preference.
In any case, there's just about nothing to fail with a tiller an a hard extension, and not much more to fail if you have a hard linkage to a second tiller.
But with wheel steering, there are a number of points of failure with the quadrants and drive cable. I've had a cable-based steering system fail more than once on a power boat, and I know others who have suffered similar fates.
The tiller, on the other hand, is about as simple and reliable as it gets.
Round or flat bottom.
Either round or flat should be fine. Both will let you slide a bit on waves, and neither has a keel to trip over.
Round might provide a touch less lateral resistance, but in the end, it may not matter. Since at least one Wharram catamaran, with its sharper V-shaped bottoms, has survived a hurricane/cyclone beam--on to the wind, the argument between round and flat could be moot.
However, I'd probably skip the V and go with something more slippery anyway.
Schooner rig.
Massive sail area for light wind, lower center-of-effort for bigger winds, lower center-of-effort when under bare poles.
A telescoping unarig would be even better in terms of windage during a storm, and in catching light air up high in calms, but there's the chance, however small, that it could jam in the up position. Ruh-roh. That would not be good in a survival situation.
The ability to steer with the sails is another plus for a schooner rig in the event that both beam-mounted kickup rudders have failed (which in itself is hard to imagine), or if only one rudder is lost and you want to balance the sailing/steering forces.
In fact, if you had a schooner-rigged harryproa you could potentially sail up to a remote tropical beach, beach the boat, perform repairs, and then sail it off the beach, all without the use of any rudders.
Finally, with sealed masts, a schooner rig may have enough flotation to stop a capsize, at least on flat water.
Round non-rotating masts.
A fixed round pole represents the best failsafe average windage in a gusty situation where the wind direction changes. Plus, there are no bearings to build, jam, or fail, so the mast is never at the wrong angle. You also don't have to worry about damaging the bearings when inserting and removing the mast, nor about maintaining them to ensure there's no salt or grit that could introduce additional friction.
A rotating wing mast do better than the round pole due to its much lower windage when properly aligned, but there are too problems with that: a) it may not feather in time to prevent capsize or structural damage if one of those weird powerful gusts comes out of left field, and b) if the bearings fail, or slow down due to salt deposits, the system doesn't work as intended. That's the key to the phase "failsafe average windage". If the wing mast fails perpendicular to the wind, or doesn't feather in time, it's a lot worse than the round pole.
There are also no worries about a fixed mast getting stuck when actually sailing, preventing you from feathering the sail or moving to the opposite shunt. That could make for a very ugly day.
Sails.
The reasons for either Wharram-type soft wing sail, the swing-wing junk rig, or the traditional junk rig, are:
- All three can be used with round non-rotating masts.
- All three skip the use of sail track and bolt ropes, skipping a point of failure/jamming.
- All three can be patched or rebuilt from just about any type of soft cloth imaginable, even in a remote village.
Water ballast (not mentioned above).
I'm not sure I'd go with water ballast because of the sheer amount of wind required to capsize a low-windage 48' x 32' proa under bare poles. Long before the wind gets that high, it's time to put out one or more long series drogues to keep the poles in line with the wind, keep the windward bows in the water during gusts, and keep the boat from surfing down waves. Once the drogues are out, the water should be unnecessary.
The reason I'd be on the fence is risks in the system failing. While it would be nice to add a a thousand pounds to the boat's weight, what can go wrong with the ballast system? If one of those tanks breaks free, it would be a bad day for anyone inside the boat. If the system were to dump it's water, you wouldn't sink, but you'd risk having all the water run downhill on a steep wave, reducing the boat's stability instead of increasing it.
I suppose if you kept the water in a number of well-secured independent tanks mounted under the floorboards...
Not being able to decide on this one by the merits alone, I'd probably skip it in order to make the boat simpler.
---
CONCLUSION
The boat described above is not only about as safe as you could make it, but would also still be very fast, reliable, and inexpensive to build. All of those are good things.
The telescoping rotating rig with in-hull rudders would probably beat this boat if raced on-on-one, but that's of little consequence to me.
If I'm racing, there aren't many boats under half a million dollars that will beat a 48' ultrasafe harryproa in elapsed time, so no worries there. And if I care about corrected time, the performance gained by a slightly faster proa would be meaningless.
Remember, I'll be the first to admit that most of this could seem like overkill. Case in point: every ocean passage made to date has been done without the full combination of features involved, and yet the vast majority of people have no problems.
But if you can make a wicked-fast boat even safer through good design choices, why not?
- Mike
lucjdekeyser@telenet.be wrote:
A newly built Alpha 42 catamaran was abandoned a couple of days ago in heavy seas. It had broken both rudders and was leaking apparently. The truth or the details are not important for this thread. It serves here as a reminder for cruisers to take such conditions very seriously.What is the safest HP design in these conditions? I would venture this design would feature round bottom hulls and retractable rudders & boards. Would water balast be a factor in general? Clearance of the beam? What would be musts and what just nice to have?Thank you.Luc