Urs Hauenstein/Alamy
Bertie MilneBOATS
‘With modern design, small, tough sail boats
can be made much more comfortable’
Big boats look more solid, but size is
deceptive. A big supertanker looks very
solid, but if you could lift it at one point at
its centre, it would bend like a soft piece of
spaghetti and also crack in two. I own a
Folkboat which has an eye-bolt in the centre
which we regularly use for lifting the boat.
The problem when boats get bigger is
that the dimension that most contributes
to stress on a yacht is related to volume
and weight, while the dimension that
holds the parts together is related to area!
A typical example: if you double the
diameter of a shroud the strength gets four
times bigger, but if you also double the size
of the yacht, the weight which the shroud
is attached to, is now eight times bigger.
So the shroud is now only half as strong!Why builders go bigger
‘Bigger is better' seems to be the norm
today. This development is bad for the
sport. Fifty years ago a typical family boat
(like the Albin Vega) would cost one year
of an ordinary salary. Today a typical
family boat represents a couple of years’
income for an average Swede. This locks
a lot of people out of yachting.
So why are yachts tending to becomebigger and bigger, when small boats,
according to the laws of nature, are much
easier to make seaworthy? Well in my
opinion it is because as boats get smaller,
the comfort decreases by the same
amount, or more, which puts more
demand on the crew. In a really small boat
the crew has to be made of steel, while
the push-button sailing crew on a modern
40-footer can be made of much softer stuff.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the golden age
of boat production, small boats were often
made just like big yachts, only smaller,
with lack of comfort as a result. An
exhausted crew is not as seaworthy as a
crew in comfort, which often led to the
misconception that small boats were less
seaworthy.
Pioneers such as Robert Manry with his
boat Tinkerbelle and Patrick Ellam with
Colin Mudie in their Laurent Giles design
Sopranino safely crossed the Atlantic in
their very small yachts. But these boats
still had the problem with comfort and the
need for the crew to be made of steel.
With modern design, small, tough sail
boats can be made much more
comfortable (see some examples
overleaf).Sven Yrvind has sailed a series of micro
cruisers, criss-crossing the oceans, even
taking him round Cape Horn, and Roger
Taylor has cruised far and wide aboard his
comfortable junk-rigged Corribee
MingMing. But the industry does not seem
to be interested in this type of boat –
comfort is king, which means size and
more size, but also makes the builders
more money.
I tend to judge a boat's price by figuring
out how much the builder is charging by
the kilogram. And what that typically
shows is that price increases with weight
rather than area. Well, business is
business, but my own solution to the
equation of boat size, seaworthiness and
comfort is Snowflake, a Folkboat adapted
for ocean sailing.Can you trust a
modern yacht?
Yes. I think there are lots of yachts, both
big and small, that you can take directly
from the shop and sail to the Caribbean.
But it is harder to make a big boat strong
than a small one, due to the forces being
much bigger as the boats gets bigger.
This follows the same physical laws that
created the problems for the giants
Gulliver visited.
Picture a boat falling sideways down a
big wave, or being slammed into by a
wave (same thing, it's the relative speed
between boat and water that matters).
Like the weight on the giants’ feet, the
weight per area on the side of the boat
that hits the water will be bigger on the
bigger boat. When you increase the size
of the boat the projected area grows with
the square, while the weight grows with
the cube.ABOVE Tales of
crossing oceans
in small boats
RIGHT Swede
Sven Yrvind
crosses oceans
in his own-design
small boatsWhy doesn’t the wind blow these
high-sided ships over? And how
can such small anchors hold their
enormous weight?