KEEP YOUR KEEL ON

FROM SAILING SCUTTLEBUTT

Keeping Keels Attached in the Future

Published on March 14th, 2016

Stan Honey, chairman of the Oceanic and Offshore Committee at World Sailing, is excited. Too many boats are losing their keels, and he is eager to share some of the progress being made to reverse this trend. Scuttlebutt editor Craig Leweck met with Stan for an update, with additional comments added by Dr. Jason Smithwick, Head of Technical & Offshore at World Sailing.

What are some of the initiatives about how we’re going to keep keels attached?

stan1

Stan Honey

Stan: The first initiative which has now been approved and budgeted by World Sailing is to have a report writing committee that gets launched to write a report summarizing what happened in any particular incident that World Sailing determines may provide useful information to the sport.

For example, it might provide useful information on ways the Offshore Special Regulations (OSR) could be improved, or may provide useful information in whether the plan review process is working, and whether plan reviewed boats have keels with adequate structure.

The model for that is really the report that Rear Admiral (Rtd) Chris Oxenbould, Chuck Hawley, and myself did for the Vestas Wind grounding during the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race. We were asked to write a report and only state on what happened. Our task was not to assign any blame, but just to simply lay out the facts on what occured so that our sport could learn from it.

Of course, what we’re all thinking about is the aviation model. Aviation has more tools to use to encourage information to be made public, but aviation does an astonishingly effective job in how whenever there is a major accident in aviation, there’s always a report that becomes public later. It may be a few years later but there’s always a public report.

Jason Smithwick

Jason Smithwick

Jason: When World Sailing determines a report is needed, we would initiate that report on the basis that no other outside body is already conducting an investigation. For example, if the US Coast Guard is already looking into a loss of life then World Sailing will await the outcome of that report before initiating our own work.

Public reports are a big step.

Stan: The entire industry benefits from this kind of information. As a result of that, in addition to other things, aviation has just achieved a staggering level of safety. Sailing has fewer mechanisms to deal with in terms of the rules and certifications, but, nevertheless, we’re trying to get to the point where when the keel falls off or when there’s a major accident, there’s a report that does not seek to assign blame but rather just to lay out the facts so that people can learn from it.

We will be making a rule change to the OSRs. There’ll probably be a submission at the 2016 World Sailing Annual Conference in November that will put in a requirement as part of the OSRs, that by participating in an event and by holding an event, a competitor and the organizing authority agree to cooperate with the report should an important incident happen and should a report get written.

Sounds like a rule requirement is needed, but also a culture created wherein this kind of information is shared.

Stan: Yes, and it’s the culture that’s the most important one because it’s certainly true that it’s difficult for the rule to be that effective because most rules are designed to influence our behavior during a race, and these are rules that seek to influence our behavior after a race. Many people argue that such a rule is unenforceable and it can’t work. On the other hand, such a rule can help set the culture of the sport in an appropriate direction.

Additionally, such a rule can help owners do what they want to do anyway, which is to help the sport. If an owner is involved in a major incident, they may get encouraged by their builder, their designer, or their insurance company to keep the report private. But this rule would give the owners the ability to say, “No, this is a race boat. I insured it to race and these are the rules of racing, and it says I am to cooperate with a report. That’s what I’m going to do, and that’s the understanding.”

So the rule may not be binding, but it may help to change the culture and it may help the owners to do what they want to do. The insurance companies deny ever encouraging somebody to keep something quiet, as they would. And when you ask the insurance companies about these kinds of changes, they’re hugely supportive. They said, “Hey, wait a minute. Has there been a misunderstanding? We don’t make money when keels fall off.” They’re saying that they’re huge advocates of anything the sport can do to solve the problem of having keels that aren’t adequately attached.

Jason: World Sailing wants to engage the insurance companies within our framework to make plan review more cost efficient. For example, a boat that has had plan review and in-build inspection may have a lower premium to offset the cost of such certification.

Explain the plan review process.

Stan: Yes, we have a plan review process. A plan review is required on any new boat to be built that’s going to race under the OSRs under Categories 0, 1, and 2, although Category 0 frankly isn’t really used. The races that would use the Category 0 basically do their own derivative requirements. Examples of Category 2 is the Fastnet Race and Sydney Hobart.

ABS used to be in the scantlings definition and plan review business some years ago, but they chose to get out of it for smaller recreational boats, so World Sailing now has a new plan review process in partnership with Classification Societies and Notified Bodies which has been a requirement from January 1, 2010.

The most active of the notified bodies that does plan reviews is DNV GL. One of the things that we look at every year is if it is working. Meaning are keels falling off boats where their design had gone to plan review? And the answer prior to two Novembers ago was, “No, it had never happened.” But now the answer is, “Yes, it has happened.” In fact, there were two Class 40s that dropped their keels just before the 2015 Annual Meeting. World Sailing is working with the French authorities to discover the cause of these failures.

So we asked David Lyons, a structural engineer and naval architect, to review the plan review process to determine if it was working. And he confirmed that obviously as people learn more, you change and evolve the plan review process to address new kinds of construction practices and so forth. While he felt that overall the process was working, he pointed out something that’s kind of an obvious omission, which is in almost everything else that humans do.

He found that if something is important enough to be plan reviewed – whether it’s an elevator, an airplane, a building – it’s important enough to do an inspection, an as-built inspection, or an in-build validation is the other term that’s used. David pointed out that this may be something we’d want to consider.

The immediate reaction of our whole community is, “We can’t make this sport any more expensive.” There’s a lot of aspects of the plan review that doesn’t kill people, meaning if a hull comes delaminated, or a deck comes delaminated, or a rig falls over, or a rudder breaks, for the most part, it’s not an instant catastrophe where people die. But when keels fall off, that can be an instant catastrophe leading to immediate loss of life. So what comes to mind is, if we’re going to do an in-build inspection, could we do just one inspection, and can we focus only on the keel attachment since that’s the thing that kills people.

So David’s going to consult across a broad range of the industry experts and look at whether it would be affordable for our sport to extend the plan review process to include an in-build inspection, and as part of a plan review, you’d have to pick when should the inspection take place, at what point in the build, so you can still see what you need to see. As we all know, the beauty of having an inspection process is by nature it can improve things because of the heightened attention by everyone involved.

So the project to come up with a proposal for an in-build inspection if it’s viable, it may not be, turned out to be too big a task to ask David to do as a volunteer. We’re all only human. So we asked for a quotation, and we got a quotation for $40,000 US. For the past month or so I have been trying to raise funds for that.

World Sailing initially committed to fund $10,000 of that. Matt Allen, who is the president of the SOLAS Trust, which is an assistance organization founded by the CYCA following the 1998 Sydney Hobart Race disaster, has offered to cover half of the project – $20,000.

Then RORC and ORC both committed to cover $5,000 of it as well as contribute technical expertise. And both of those organizations have substantial technical expertise in this area, embodied in guys like James Dadd who did this kind of review for the Volvo Ocean Race boats and of course the ITC of the ORC which is a broad strong group of naval architects. Sailing Yacht Research Foundation (SYRF), which is the American sailing and research foundation that also has strong technical people involved like Dina Kowalyshyn and Jim Teeters, has also agreed to pay for $5,000 as well as provide some guidance input.

So overall I was delighted to discover that there was a number of organizations throughout our sport that almost overnight agreed that this was a good idea to consider and agreed to help pay for this initial feasibility study.

Along with the feasibility study there’s a go or no-go decision point. If it looks like it’s feasible and that this will make sense, then there would be a proposal for in-build inspection that will be done by October so we’ll get to review it at the next World Sailing Annual Conference in November.

If it gets approved, we’d probably take another year after that to put it in place, but nevertheless I’m delighted that we’re starting the process to both gather more information about these incidents and get it public where it can do some good, and then also see if we can directly address the problem of these keels falling off.

– See more at: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/2016/03/14/keeping-keels-attached-in-the-future/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Scuttlebutt%204539%20-%20March%2015%202016&utm_content=Scuttlebutt%204539%20-%20March%2015%202016+CID_e7a122f20d7ac7cdc8b3ec3a2b3c3243&utm_source=Email%20Newsletter&utm_term=click%20here#more

LARRY HUNTINGTON

 

 

 

No-one deserves to be nominated more than Larry Huntington. Sailor of the Month really does not justify the lifetime of Love of the Sea. Few have demonstrated a stronger commitment to sailing; particularly offshore long distance racing. His career spans wooden schooners to the latest carbon yachts.

 

CLICK HERE TO CAST A VOTE FOR LARRY.Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 10.10.24 AMScreen Shot 2015-10-19 at 10.08.56 AM

LARRY WITH HIS SEXTANT
LARRY WITH HIS SEXTANT
COMPUTER NAVIGATION
COMPUTER NAVIGATION
PAPER CHARTS
PAPER CHARTS
LARRY AND STEVE COLGATE 1969
LARRY AND STEVE COLGATE 1969
FINISH OF 2003 TRANSATLANTIC
FINISH OF 2003 TRANSATLANTIC
HARD RUNNING 2015
HARD RUNNING 2015
BLOCK ISLAND RACE
BLOCK ISLAND RACE
BREAKFAST TRANSATLANTIC 2011
BREAKFAST TRANSATLANTIC 2011
RUNNING TRANSATLANTIC 2003
RUNNING TRANSATLANTIC 2003

another look at the 2015 transatlantic race:

SCOWS WERE ALWAYS MY FAVORITE BOATS

I think there must be some irony here. The trend has been for narrower and narrower bow sections as designers looked to reduce wetted surface. Crews ware stacked further and further aft both upwind and down. With the success of the mini transat boat that is an ugly duckling, will the trend land in our playground? The following was written by Elaine Bunting.

The inland lake scows have long been a favorite. I owned an “E” scow which I sailed on Narragansett Bay in the early sixties and subsequently sailed quite a lot in Barnegat Bay with Henry Bossett. That’s us capsized.

Ugly – but fast?

The latest hot trend in ocean racing design is the scow bow. But it’s ugly and it looks as if it’d be brutal upwind

Scow

I’m torn when I think about the latest trend for ocean racing, the scow bow. On the one hand, it’s a fascinating development. On the other…cripes, these new designs are ugly.

Round bowed scows have been well proven; the skimming dish designs have long been popular in the US, though less so in Europe. Yet the design principle made no major inroads into offshore design until last year, when French engineer and solo sailor David Raison won the Mini Transat in his self-designed mini 6.5m Mini Magnum/Teamwork Evolution.

This round bowed, push-me-pull-you 21-footer beat the 2nd placed prototype Mini to the finish in Brazil by 130 miles – a huge margin in such an evenly matched fleet – and recorded an average across the entire Atlantic of 6.8 knots.

He nicknamed his wide-bodied design ‘le gros porteur’, the jumbo jet, in reference to its max beam, carried as far forward as possible.

Now there is a proposal from design group Reichel/Pugh for a 90ft scow (pictured above) designed to attempt to beat the Transpac record. We’ve got a full report on this intriguing design in our May issue.

The basic principle of the scow design is to maximise hull righting moment. The beam is carried well forward which means that, when heeled, the hull lines are further outboard than with a conventional bow. This makes the scow design very powerful when reaching, obviously important on races such as the Mini Transat or the Transpac, which have a predominance of reaching conditions.

It has the added advanced advantage of large reserve buoyancy in the bow to prevent the bow from burying or nosediving when driven hard off the wind.

Put that together with a canting keel, as is the case on David Raison’s boat, and you have a potentially very powerful yacht indeed.

However there are two snags with this design.

The first is that, upwind, the rounded bow slams, even when well heeled. This means it may not be that versatile a design or particularly comfortable in all-round conditions.

And in view of what are seeing in the Volvo Ocean race, which has suffered multiple structural problems in the harsh seas of the Southern Ocean, it would be a very brave designer (and sponsor) indeed that plumped for a scow design round the world or more general racing conditions.

Secondly, let’s face it: these two new extreme scow designs are not pretty. Would you want a yacht that looked like this? I wouldn’t. If your boat was jarring as this, you’d have to win.

But since Raison’s dramatic victory, I suspect designers everywhere have been playing around with the scow idea. In classes whose rules don’t place a restriction on maximum righting moment, it’s an obvious idea to explore. If it takes off, clever minds may even find some creative ways of softening the brutal front end.

RATING RULES

The book about the three “Carinas” written by Richard B. Nye came out a few weeks ago. The saga of “Carina” continues as she having sailed to Australia to participate in the Sydney-Hobart race from England after having completed the 2011 transatlantic race and now sailing home to the East coast of the United States where she will sail in the Bermuda Race this June. Follow her story HERE.

The story of “Carina” is interesting from many points of view. Her conception was the culmination of years of experience of ocean racing by the Nye family. She was launched in 1969. This is where the story is so interesting as we look back. At the time two racing rules dominated the world: the CCA in the United States and the RORC in the rest of the world.

I have added the photo of “Outlaw” to illustrate the RORC rule. Anyone wondering where the pinched ends under the IOR came from. This was one of the compromises in order to achieve one rule.

Back to the “Carina” story. In 1968, the Nyes had won class in the Bermuda race with the old yawl, but wanted a new boat. The new rule was still being negotiated, no one knew what the final rule would offer, so Jim McCurdy and Bodie Rhodes were tasked with designing a boat that would rate well under any circumstances. The result was a boat that is still winning races 40 years later