We have a discussion on that subject coming up. In cats under 60 feet you give up a lot of forward deck storage and either lose some salon living space or some aft cockpit space. On cats under 55 feet it is hard to have athwartships berths, so you end up with the narrow single bedrooms you find on shorter performance cats and have to have your decent sleeping bedrooms aft, with the pros and cons of that. There are also pros and cons to sailing vision and operations. Anyways, we discuss this in the segment on helm stations. We did add a forward cockpit on our 75. Plenty of room to have a forward cockpit, but we also kept a Versahelm on the starboard bulkhead and added a fixed helm to the port bulkhead. Go well.
Yes- some boats have that. For example, Mumby catamaran has a rudder that can have a sacrificial sheer pin break when the rudder is hit so it then swings up (eg Sailing Jupiter youtube videos showed this many times). Some Seawind catamarans, eg 1600, have a rudder that swings up to lower draft. So this is done one some boats, but as always, there are tradeoffs and in some cases one balances simplicity (but perhaps not as good) with complexity that might be better in some respects.
Lots of efforts have been made to do retractable rudders on cats over the years, mostly with what are called Cassette rudders that lift up and down inside a rotating hub. Sadly, they have mostly proven to be problematic and break easily. And often you cannot design a truly higher performance rudder with them. They tried these on the Alibi 54 cats and most all the owners had to bite the bullet and pay to get new fixed rudders installed: $40,000! Ouch. The thing is, on most daggerboarded cats, the rudders will still only be about one foot or so below the bottom of the hull, give or take. To do a retractable rudder so you can go into 3 feet of water instead of 4 feet is a hell of a lot of effort and cost for a marginal benefit you may never even use. The juice is not worth the squeeze in added cost, complexity, and value. For someone who wants a more shoal draft cat you are better off just asking us to chop off the bottom of the rudder, even though it will tend to cavitate a bit when turning down under load and will not be as performance oriented when sailing to windward.
I really like listening to the clever parts of the discussion, but like last week's discussion I reckon that USA multi sailors miss out on the input from amateur builders and racers. Here in OZ we have lots of pivoting cassette rudders - I have two on my cat. They are great and not very hard to make. They certainly are not in a drum - those are awfully pricey. Cassette rudders allow you to have daggerboards and go up on the hard. They are super easy to use, really strong and are just the same as underhung rudders when sailing - there is nothing that should stop everyone using them, if you can use shaft drive diesels and get the prop closer to the hull. When Phil Berman says it is better to hit a rudder than a daggerboard (my cassette rudder just breaks a sacrifical fuse and I am off again with no damage in seconds) I shook my head. Ozzy daggerboard cats hit their rudders all the time and don't need to go to a repair shop. It also shouldn't cost much if you hit the bottom with your daggerboard. Last year I hit the bottom (a rock) at 7 knots with my daggerboard at fully down position. There was a huge bang and I thought I had hurt my boat. I pulled up the daggerboard, swam and looked at the case and there was no case damage, a small amount of damage to the aft edge of the board and no more damage - apart from the totally missing bottom 300mm. When I worked for one of Australia's best multihull builders he told me a trick. Make the board and then cut off the bottom 300mm and glue it back on again - with no glass, just glue. For 23 years and many thousands of miles it held on and then when needed it broke off, protecting the hull and board. I built an extra couple of tips when building the boards. So a day or two in the shed and the board was back in the boat for almost no cost. I think most US and Euro builders would do well to come to Australia and start talking to the clever designers and builders who could show them a few things and save clients a huge amount of money. There are things I learn from with this video and many things the experts could learn from Australian cats.
As builders, we really prefer to do robust, underhung rudders. Most retractable rudders tend to be stern mounted. Over the years, as a broker, speaking with a lot of customers, the occasion when they felt they needed a foot or more less draft, was seldom. It's just a feature we felt did not add enough value to pursue.
I'm interested the technology you use to raise the daggerboard when hard on the wind? On my Pescott cat, it was pretty much impossible to move the daggerboard when hard on the wind-- to move it, you'd steer briefly up into the wind, alter the board and then bear away.
That is correct. A daggerboard points loads at the keel and deck join, so if you are sailing hard to wind it is pushing against the keel and deck. You briefly feather up to reduce load and winch it up. Ditto putting them down.
as a leader in the cat sailing industry, can you share some knowledge about electrolysis to this couple in need? --> ua-cam.com/video/Bd8etSI68AE/v-deo.html
This video was produced by the Wynn's, very popular social media influencers, who own an HH 44. Many have forwarded this video to me asking the same question. I do not wish to engage in the public criticism of a competitor. And must confess I am not deeply familiar with what they do at HH on the 44 builds, exactly how they fabricate them. I try to keep my head down, do not follow social media influencers, and focus solely on our products, our designs, our quality, our customer experience. What I can say is that if this HH 44 has any carbon content in it, and that carbon was not bonded properly, that could well be the problem.
I'd love to hear an episode on the pros / cons of forward cockpits, as seen on Gunboats.
We have a discussion on that subject coming up. In cats under 60 feet you give up a lot of forward deck storage and either lose some
salon living space or some aft cockpit space. On cats under 55 feet it is hard to have athwartships berths, so you end up with the narrow single bedrooms you find on shorter performance cats and have to have your decent sleeping bedrooms aft, with the pros and cons of that. There are also pros and cons to sailing vision and operations. Anyways, we discuss this in the segment on helm stations. We did add a forward cockpit on our 75. Plenty of room to have a forward cockpit, but we also kept a Versahelm on the starboard bulkhead and added a fixed helm to the port bulkhead. Go well.
Touched on in this video ua-cam.com/video/AmpqFFMTrq8/v-deo.htmlsi=vYIzj-HuurVwJM35
love these chats very informative and gives you an idea to the design depths and the engineering to achieve this.why not have a retractable rudder?
Yes- some boats have that. For example, Mumby catamaran has a rudder that can have a sacrificial sheer pin break when the rudder is hit so it then swings up (eg Sailing Jupiter youtube videos showed this many times). Some Seawind catamarans, eg 1600, have a rudder that swings up to lower draft. So this is done one some boats, but as always, there are tradeoffs and in some cases one balances simplicity (but perhaps not as good) with complexity that might be better in some respects.
Lots of efforts have been made to do retractable rudders on cats over the years, mostly with what are called Cassette rudders that lift up and down inside a rotating hub. Sadly, they have mostly proven to be problematic and break easily. And often you cannot design a truly higher performance rudder with them. They tried these on the Alibi 54 cats and most all the owners had to bite the bullet and pay to get new fixed rudders installed: $40,000! Ouch. The thing is, on most daggerboarded cats, the rudders will still only be about one foot or so below the bottom of the hull, give or take. To do a retractable rudder so you can go into 3 feet of water instead of 4 feet is a hell of a lot of effort and cost for a marginal benefit you may never even use. The juice is not worth the squeeze in added cost, complexity, and value. For someone who wants a more shoal draft cat you are better off just asking us to chop off the bottom of the rudder, even though it will tend to cavitate a bit when turning down
under load and will not be as performance oriented when sailing to windward.
I really like listening to the clever parts of the discussion, but like last week's discussion I reckon that USA multi sailors miss out on the input from amateur builders and racers. Here in OZ we have lots of pivoting cassette rudders - I have two on my cat. They are great and not very hard to make. They certainly are not in a drum - those are awfully pricey. Cassette rudders allow you to have daggerboards and go up on the hard. They are super easy to use, really strong and are just the same as underhung rudders when sailing - there is nothing that should stop everyone using them, if you can use shaft drive diesels and get the prop closer to the hull.
When Phil Berman says it is better to hit a rudder than a daggerboard (my cassette rudder just breaks a sacrifical fuse and I am off again with no damage in seconds) I shook my head. Ozzy daggerboard cats hit their rudders all the time and don't need to go to a repair shop.
It also shouldn't cost much if you hit the bottom with your daggerboard. Last year I hit the bottom (a rock) at 7 knots with my daggerboard at fully down position. There was a huge bang and I thought I had hurt my boat. I pulled up the daggerboard, swam and looked at the case and there was no case damage, a small amount of damage to the aft edge of the board and no more damage - apart from the totally missing bottom 300mm.
When I worked for one of Australia's best multihull builders he told me a trick. Make the board and then cut off the bottom 300mm and glue it back on again - with no glass, just glue. For 23 years and many thousands of miles it held on and then when needed it broke off, protecting the hull and board. I built an extra couple of tips when building the boards. So a day or two in the shed and the board was back in the boat for almost no cost.
I think most US and Euro builders would do well to come to Australia and start talking to the clever designers and builders who could show them a few things and save clients a huge amount of money. There are things I learn from with this video and many things the experts could learn from Australian cats.
As builders, we really prefer to do robust, underhung rudders. Most retractable rudders tend to be stern mounted. Over the years, as a broker, speaking with a lot of customers, the occasion when they felt they needed a foot or more less draft, was seldom. It's just a feature we felt did not add enough value to pursue.
I'm interested the technology you use to raise the daggerboard when hard on the wind? On my Pescott cat, it was pretty much impossible to move the daggerboard when hard on the wind-- to move it, you'd steer briefly up into the wind, alter the board and then bear away.
That is correct. A daggerboard points loads at the keel and deck join, so if you are sailing hard to wind it is pushing against the keel and deck. You briefly feather up to reduce load and winch it up. Ditto putting them down.
as a leader in the cat sailing industry, can you share some knowledge about electrolysis to this couple in need?
--> ua-cam.com/video/Bd8etSI68AE/v-deo.html
They were operating in a super shallow channel between two islands.
This video was produced by the Wynn's, very popular social media influencers, who own an HH 44. Many have forwarded this video to me asking the same question. I do not wish to engage in the public criticism of a competitor. And must confess I am not deeply familiar with what they do at HH on the 44 builds, exactly how they fabricate them. I try to keep my head down, do not follow social media influencers, and focus solely on our products, our designs, our quality, our customer experience. What I can say is that if this HH 44 has any carbon content in it, and that carbon was not bonded properly, that could well be the problem.