The Way to Weather | Upwind Cruising from Fair to Survival Conditions | FPB and Sail | Mother Nature

This video is about our 40-year search for the perfect yacht on which to explore those faraway destinations we all dream about. We previously discussed surfing, which is fast as well as great fun, but limiting yourself to destinations that are downwind greatly reduces the options for where and when to go. In this chapter we're going to take you through the process that has led to our ultimate cruising yacht, one which makes uphill passages almost as comfortably as downwind. For the first time we will divulge the logic that underlies the design of our wave-piercing hulls, and we will give away some of the secret sauce that makes our sailing designs perform so well in a shorthanded cruising context. Finally we'll make some comments on the ultimate storm tactic, the one you want to use when you run out of options. When the speed, comfort, and range recipe is just right, amazing things are possible. The three FPB-78s put a cumulative 47,000 nautical miles behind them early in their cruising careers. Much of this was upwind. Cochise went Fiji, Rayatea, Panama in less than a month. Grey Wolf and Iron Lady crossed the Pacific, cruised Hieratofuego, and then Antarctica before returning home to the Channel Islands off the coast of France and Beaufort, North Carolina, respectively. Of course there are lots of trade-offs involved in all this, of which draft is the first consideration. For the FPBs our target is five feet, the sailing yachts five and a half to eight feet. As little as six inches difference in draft can have a big impact on where you can go. The basics of upwind comfort are straightforward. Does the odd hobby horse go into weather or does it dampen that motion quickly? When the bow drops after the passage of a wave, does it land comfortably or with a loud bang? What sort of average speed can be maintained? How far from the pitch center do you keep watch, cook, and sleep? The layout of the early 1980s Deerfoot 62 and the recent FPB 78 both have their working areas and sea cabins near or on the pitch axis. From a comfort and safety standpoint, we like to have our interiors laid out so the furniture tends to hold your body in place with lots of handrails close by. A few real world examples of what we're talking about. We are aboard the FPB 64 Iron Lady. She is exiting the Whangarei River with a sea stacking up against the outgoing tide, so we have some nice deep waves in which to play. Let's switch to the open ocean now aboard the FPB 78 Cochise during sea trials. So you guys might be wondering why we keep going uphill. We're testing the boat in all sorts of configurations. Right now she's very light. We're less than a thousand gallons of fresh water, about 800 gallons of diesel, and we're trimmed by the stern. See how that works in this light configuration. It's working pretty well. You'll see she's nice soft motion, no banging, ten and a half knots through this stuff. This is the FPB 64 Buffalo Nickel, Fiji bound from New Zealand in a nice stiff northwestern. Buffalo Nickel is averaging better than nine and a half knots. It's blowing 18 to 25 knots in the gusts. Seas are anywhere from one and a half to two and a half meters, and they're about 35 degrees off the bow. Now a few comments on how we got to the hull shape of the FPB 78 shown here running uphill from Panama towards Fort Lauderdale. Our search for the perfect cruising yacht started back in the mid-70s with the design of the 38 foot Catamaran Beowulf 6. She was the first true wave piercer, and you could drive her leeward hull right through the crest of a wave and wouldn't feel a thing until it hit the main beam. Yet when pressed downwind, as she's shown here on her way to breaking a 15 year old lapse time record, she had no problem keeping her bows up. Although the hydrodynamic needs of a modern cruising yacht are totally different, the goal is still the same. We want to get that bow into the wave uphill far enough so that the lifting forces are minimized. For us, the main difference between the sailing designs and the FPBs is the fact that the FPBs do not require hull form stability to offset the sailing loads. This makes it possible for us to draw finer forward sections and their related sterns. The computer image on the screen now shows a comparison of the FPB hulls. Although these may look similar, each has a distinct set of characteristics which sets it apart. This series of photos by New Zealander Ivor Wilkins illustrates several key aspects of our design philosophy. The first is moderate beam and balanced hull ends. Note how the bow and stern are well immersed, but neither is overpowering the other. There should be just enough dead rise forward so the hull lands softly, but not so much that the bow locks in when steering. Now comes the tricky part. There needs to be sufficient reserve buoyancy forward to provide lift in sea states like these, but not so much that it slows the boat down significantly when it drives through the wave. The FPB 64 is doing exactly what we want it to do in these conditions. Consider what would happen if the boat had more volume in the stern. Volume would have to be added to the bow to offset it, or the bow would be driven underwater. The bow would pitch up more, the boat would slow down, begin to hobby horse, slow down more, and then you're hit by the next wave. Pretty soon you're not making any progress at all, you're just bouncing around. It's not easy, and there's a little bit of luck involved, but when you get it right, the boat will drive smoothly through the wave with little change in speed. About now you're probably wondering about the windows. They are sort of large. The FPB 64, 83, and 97 have three-quarter inch solid windows forward and on the sides. The 78s and 70s, with their even larger window frames, have a laminated glass that's as strong as the topside plating. Although we are set up to carry storm shutters, and the boats are supplied with them, to our knowledge they've never been needed or used. We are often asked how we decide what a hull shape should be like. We've used velocity prediction and hull design codes since the 70s, starting with Baywell 6. In the mid-1980s we were amongst the first to employ George Hazen's fast yacht suite. The FPB era began with extensive CFD modeling, tank testing, and BPP work. But in the end, making the right choices comes down to offshore experience and the gut instincts derived therefrom. The ability of the FPB 78 to cut smoothly through these three to six foot Gulf Stream waves and surf under control at high speed in confused seas can be traced all the way back to the 1975 design Baywell 6. FPB 70-1 Buffalo Nickel 2 in the Sea of Japan. Now we get to the steering control. This is critical for surfing, important for close quarters maneuvering, and plays a vital part in heavy weather, particularly upwind where control is exercised at slow speed, making steering even more difficult. For good control you want a big efficient rudder close to the prop for powerboats. A fast acting autopilot with a rate compensated compass is part of the program. The pilot needs to be smart enough so that it does not oversteer when you're using high gain settings. This is particularly important under sail. Dual autopilot pump systems are recommended both for backup and to double rudder speed when faster rudder travel is required. We always fit a massive array of spot and driving lights on the forward mast to illuminate the sea state in heavy weather. Under normal conditions it's convenient, but when it's really blowing, absolutely critical. Our sailing designs typically draw between five and a half and eight feet of water. By working hard on rig efficiency we have been able to reduce keel area if you hold draft constant at the same time. The aspect ratio of the fins improves. Induced drag is geometrically proportional to aspect ratio, so this is a really big deal. There are several concepts we have used to significantly improve performance. That can help with other designs as well. Going from a triangular sail to a more efficient distribution of area pays big dividends. Where backstays are in the way, a strip of UHMW tape sewn on the leech of the sail, together with a piece of slippery pipe over the backstay, and in all but the lightest of winds, we've been able to get our mainsails too clear. We were sealing our racing cat mainsails to the trampoline by 1970. The partial end plate so created increased effective aspect ratio of the sail, thereby reducing induced drag, but it wasn't until 2002 that we sealed Beowulf 7's main and mizzen. This gained us five degrees to weather and a half a knot of boat speed reaching. Note the vertical battens in the foot and leech of the jib. This allowed a rounder shape compared to the hollow, otherwise necessary. Another easy gain. The shallower your draft, the less efficient your keel, the more important are these rig modifications towards efficiency. Before we go on to this next section, let's stop for a minute and remind ourselves why we're doing this. It's to cut those lines and go cruising. Now we get into the good stuff. How what we've been discussing plays out when you are heading into big seas. Keep in mind that the wide-angle lenses used by the video cameras make the waves look much smaller than they really are. Direct experience and research for our book, Surviving the Storm, which you can get as a free download on setsail.com, has convinced us that there comes a time when running off is no longer safe and the tactic of choice becomes heading into the waves. This point will occur much later if you have the ability to surf under control, which is often the best choice dealing with tropical storm systems. Rudder force is proportional to the square of your boat speed, so slowing down when you head into the waves has a huge negative impact on steering responsiveness. Watch these next two sequences, which occur in less than 30 seconds. First a set of waves from the port and then another from the starboard, although in this case it wasn't necessary to take corrective action as both occurred after we passed through the area. They could easily have required a 20 to 30 degree course adjustment within a couple of seconds. Of all the reasons that responsive steering is at the top of our priority list, this is the most important. There are those rare occasions when you want instantaneous control. For example, when a sneaker wave comes at you from the That's what this helm console is all about. We have an autopilot steering control on each corner in close proximity to the steering hand of each watchkeeper. In the starboard corner on the vertical face is the emergency steering control. One button push and you have direct control without electronics of the steering system. The FPBs are fitted as standard with safety belts, two on each bunk and one at each seated position. These hold you in place, allowing your body to relax and if the boat is popped by an unexpected wave, you'll stay in place. If we were building a sailboat today for serious offshore cruising, we would certainly fit these belts. Let's see how the FPB series prototype windhorse does going uphill. We're going uphill. We've just left the Bahamas and are headed towards Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. We're in the Gulf Stream. We're averaging about 10 knots in 18 to 20 true on the nose. Watch how easily these seas slide under our stern. That's one of the keys to our soft upwind motion. We're going to spend a couple of minutes and show you how we heave to with the FPBs. It's the technique that we've used for years under sail. It's very common for slowing the boat down or waiting for the weather to change. Welcome aboard Cochise folks. We're out in the Gulf Stream heading north with the current against a northerly breeze. Engines are turning about 1350 rpm. We're making about 11 and a half knots over the bottom. Got a knot and a half current pushing. Of course that's stacking the waves up. So we're going to do a couple of experiments. Slowing the boat down in a heavy two position and then just putting her find her natural position of being to the seas and see what happens. We're going to bring the degrees off the seas here. We'll make it six knots, six and a half knots over the bottom. 600 rpm in here. Pretty comfortable. We've been chasing upwind comfort from the very beginning of our search for the perfect yacht. Even so we were surprised by just how comfortable the FPB 83 Windhorse proved to be. To the point where we put many more miles on her per year than any of our long-legged sailboats. Faced with leaving Windhorse for a few weeks in Hawaii while flying to the coast for a friend's wedding or bringing Windhorse 2,000 nautical miles dead to weather, we chose the latter without hesitation. The combination of northeast 20 to 35 knots with a crossing northwest swell was by far the worst long passage sea state we have ever encountered. Nine days after leaving Hawaii we were in the lee of the Channel Islands. Having grown used to Windhorse we became soft so the search for upwind comfort continued. Culminating in the FPB 70 and 78. You can tune hull shape polar moments and longitudinal stability to a point but there's always going to be some conditions which are disagreeable. This is a worst case sea state given Cochise's payload which is light and the fact that she was trimmed by the bow when she's optimized for being trimmed by the stern. After an experience like this even though we're on board we'll come back and study the videos in slow motion and freeze frame. What we're looking for here is how the hull reacts to the seas and how quickly she dampens out even though she's out of trim. There's always something new to learn. That was fun. We want to end this chapter putting the subject of upwind capability into perspective. We have concentrated on dealing with adverse conditions because these experiences are what often dominate memories and so tend to hold everyone back, ourselves included, from what otherwise would be wonderful destinations. Upwind efficiency coupled with fast average speed works synergistically to reduce exposure to the very sea states about which we have been discussing. FPB 78-1 Cochise's backward passage from Fiji to Panama against prevailing winds and current was a spur-of-the-moment decision at dinner one evening based on the knowledge that the trip would be enjoyable. The only stops we made were four days in Rayatea in French Polynesia for diesel fuel and some fresh baguettes and then a day in Fatuhiva to pick up some pampumus, not because we were in a hurry but because we enjoyed being at sea as much as or more than being at anchor. It was done quickly and so comfortably that we arrived in Panama well rested, relaxed and ready for the next leg. You cannot ask for more than that. If you enjoyed this we have a series of new videos coming out in the next month so hit the subscribe button if you'd like to be kept up to date and visit Setsail.com for all sorts of details on the various designs and several thousand posts on the science of cruising. Thanks for coming out with us today. We'll see you out there.