Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by creeble 431 days ago
Racing isn’t what used to be, but sailing very much is.

There are roughly two kinds of sailors: those who care about speed, and those who care about comfort. They have almost antipodal design requirements, but both kinds are very much sailors.
3 comments
seabit 431 days ago
Agreed that these are almost antipodal design requirements, but there is also a category in the middle - described as either 'performance cruisers' or 'racer/cruisers' designed for either dual use, or for sailors like me who believe that speed combined with good use of modern forecasting techniques are safer at sea than a traditional slow heavy cruising boat. Basically, be comfortable enough to be livable, and fast enough to avoid the worst weather. The design tradeoffs in that category are really interesting IMO. See most X-yachts designs, some of the larger J boats (for monohulls) or Gunboat, HH, and Outremer in the multihull space
link
mlhpdx 431 days ago
One recent example (and there are many): The FIRST 30 (former Seascape) isn’t a race boat, it has a sink and fridge.
link
mmooss 431 days ago
Do you know of any good technical / physical comparison of the two, or just of the comfort designs?
link
creeble 431 days ago
Well, there's speed and then there's _speed_. As the OP says, very fast designs today are like the Sail Gran Prix [1] boats, 15m long foiling catamarans that go 3x the speed of the wind, up to around 50 knots.

They bear nothing in common with a typical monohull cruiser, or even racer-cruiser like a J-109[2]. Let alone compared to a comfortable cruiser like a Hallberg-Rassy[3]. These are all displacement hulls, whose speed is fundamentally limited to waterline-length.

There are monohull sailboats that can plane (most dinghys under 20' for example[4]), and there are large catamarans that can go much faster for their size than monohulls[5], but there are many tradeoffs in cost, dockage availability, and (somewhat subjectively) weather comfort.

[1] https://sailgp.com [2] https://jboats.com/j109/why-j1093 [3] https://www.hallberg-rassy.com/yachts/hallberg-rassy-370 [4] https://www.beneteau.com/en-us/first/first-14 [5] https://www.catamarans-fountaine-pajot.com/en/sailing-catama...

link