Boat Design

New designs from our drawing board, and assorted thoughts on boat design in general.

Lifting keels and the loss of "Bayesian"

Imagine, for a moment, that you are aboard a 56 metre luxury yacht anchored off Sicily. It is before dawn, there's some wind but the crew aren't worried, and you're coming up to take a look around. Suddenly, the yacht is knocked about as all the windows explode around you. Confused, startled, and scared, you run for a muster station, managing to get aboard a life raft moments before the yacht disappears beneath the waves. The whole event took longer to write up than it took to happen.

Lithium Charlatanism

It's great to see electrification taking off, as was definitely evident at a recent boat show. It's a little less great to see how much charlatanism and huckstership have tainted the nascent field of marine lithium batteries and the equipment that uses them.
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This 1100 W electric outboard is equivalent to a 3 hp gas engine!
1100 W is 1.475 hp, by the literal definition of horsepower which is 1 hp = 745.7 W. Stop lying.
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VMG to windward

I've come across a few boats recently that, while they had tempting layouts and nice equipment lists, seemed to be sorely lacking in their ability to make real progress to windward.

Here on the Great Lakes, that's a deal breaker.

What's up with the Starwind?

Welcome back, folks. I hope you've had a merry Christmas. Or a merry last few Christmases, for that matter.
So, whatever happened to that weird, radical power trimaran we were working on? The one that filled these pages, oh, seven or eight years ago?

Well, life happened.

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