Thread: Fishing Smacks racing

Yes I agree about it being a nice video, but what makes it even more special is that these are work boats and you can see by their motion and lack of wake that there has been hundreds of years of design refinement gone into these boats. There is not a scrap of energy being wasted here, no huge wake, no rooster tail, just pure clean motion through the water.

Harry

Originally Posted by HaroldS

Yes I agree about it being a nice video, but what makes it even more special is that these are work boats and you can see by their motion and lack of wake that there has been hundreds of years of design refinement gone into these boats. There is not a scrap of energy being wasted here, no huge wake, no rooster tail, just pure clean motion through the water.

Harry

Harry
You hit the nail on the head especially "no energy wasted" and "just pure CLEAN motion" I reckon all woodenboat sailors should get carbon credits.

Paul

hello friend

Howdy,

Fantastic video.

I have rather an interesting book in my collection. It is a history of the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) in the UK - formerly the starchiest yacht club in the world and also where many of the developments for ocean sailing occured.

It's written by Adlard Coles, who pioneered a lot of the post war developments in boat strength, speed and safety.

Until the 1920s and 1930s there were few purpose built ocean racing boats and most boats were adapted workboats or higher class racing yachts.

The surprising thing to me was that the whole ocean racing fleet of that era used to anchor when the wind got up above about 25 knots from on the nose. The boats were not able to make effective headway upwind against waves and wind.

There were some types that were well known for windward ability - such as Falmouth Quay punts (operated inshore ferrying goods from larger boats into harbour) and Revenue Cutters, but it was against a rather low general standard.

Post World War 2 the boats that started to be able to sail were heavily influenced by the square metre classes from Scandanavia, which were able to keep moving to well windward in these slightly rough conditions as well as much rougher conditions.

Boats from Knud Reimers and general square metre class boats. The other heavy influence in creating boats that could keep going upwind in the rough were the International rule boats - 6 metre and 12 metre (as the most well known ones) which strongly influenced Olin Stephens to produce ocean sailing boats that excelled in rough weather, particularly to windward.

But, hell, forget all that, I'm going to watch that video again!

MIK