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Our VCG (vertical center of gravity) was two feet
too high as a result and the boat was very tender. This coupled
with almost 200 sq ft of wing mast surface area, made for difficult
handling.
When motoring in a windy harbor, a wind shift could
instantly accelerate the boat to five knots under bare poles as
the wing mast tacks its way through the harbor. Grabbing a mooring
required some very fast footwork.
Another extremely annoying and at times dangerous feature
of the Aerorig was the tendency of the heavy boom to oscillate fore
and aft in a heavy sea. We've broken blocks, pelican hooks,
half inch nylon tie-downs, and the wheel hub on our starboard wheel
that got caught by a slack tie-down when the boom was deflecting
a couple feet up and down in an ten foot chop.
Everything else about Barbara Ann made her our perfect
cruising boat so it became clear by July that we need to just bite
the bullet and get rid of the damn Aerorig. I chalk it up to
a stupid mistake in buying a bad rig from a totally non-responsive
vendor.
So in August 2002 we were back to the drawing board
to re-engineer the Barbara Ann to meet her original design goal of
being a fast cruising boat that can be sailed single-handed.
The task of shaving 2000 lbs from the mast and converting
to a different sailplan appeared almost overwhelming at first. I
starting contacting experts like Robbie Doyle, Dennis Caprio, and
Tom Wylie to get recommendations on a designer/builder for the new
rig. The name Ted Van Dusen came up over and over as the leading
expert on free-standing carbon rigs.
Ted runs Composite Engineering in Concord, MA, and
produces masts for some of the leading race boats including Ocean
Planet, the only US built entry in the Around Alone race.
At Ted's suggestion, I visited Bruce Schwab on Ocean
Planet. The comparison with
Barbara Ann is amazing. Both have 85' masts and comparable
righting moments and sail area. Ocean Planet has a fractional, self-tacking
jib and can fly a chute. It has two rope running backstays
for downwind sailing.
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The entire rig can be handled by one
person with no electric or hydraulic assist. Ocean Planet is 60'
long and weighs only 17,000 lbs. While
crossing the Atlantic it has been clocked at 29 kts. It is
somewhat lacking in cruising amenities.
Barbara Ann weighs in at double the weight and a little
less waterline. Barbara Ann lacks no cruising amenities.
The rig on Ocean planet weighs less than 1000 lbs.
It's rotating and free-standing and produced by Van Dusen's unique
weaving process (I'll post
more about that later) that
creates the carbon fabric by "weaving" it directly onto
the mast. The mast has a round section and is manually over-rotated
to reduce turbulance over the luff. I am sensitive to this issue
since I was never able to get good luff flow with the Aerorig. The
wing is always at the wrong angle to the sail so that there's always
turbulence for several feet back on the sail.
This is the way we're going and I'll be back in the
next couple weeks to report on the progress. ETA for the new rig
was late November, that's the following May in boat time.
Although the Aerorig was a very painful lesson, we're
going to be far better off with the new rig. We'll be shaving
a ton and a half of weight aloft and, by increasing roach and the
jib size, adding 300 sq ft to the sail area (for a total of 1520
sq. ft.) By the numbers (D/L of 167 and SA/D of 22), it should perform
like a different boat.
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S/V
Barbara Ann