Those things are to sailing what Formula One is to a nice drive in the
country. The big race here is the Sydney-Hobart at Christmas. The
death and injury rate hasn't been too bad lately but the serious
players are plain nuts. I had a friend crew on a couple of those runs.
He once showed me how to pee over the side in bad weather without
taking your waterproofs off (basically, down the inside of your
trouser leg).
The boats are stripped down to the point of lunacy. They are required
to carry a motor in some cases but don't have any fuel for it as
that's not in the regs. I did enjoy sailing with him though - it's
quite a rush when you catch a breeze and the boat takes off. But the
cost....
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 09/03/2010, at 1:13 AM, Ken Norton wrote:
> I used to crew once in a while on a big racing sailboat. The owner
> said that
> each and every time the boat was sailed, the repairs were no less than
> $2000. Just the usage cost of the carbon-fiber sails were around
> $200 per
> hour due to UV degradation. But, of course, we're not talking about
> your
> typical sailboat. The last one I sailed of his was built on a hull
> designed
> for the Whitbread round-the-world race. Once this guy had modded the
> boat
> sufficiently to be the fastest boat on the Great Lakes, the mast was
> somewhere over 125 feet. On a downhill run the boat would actually
> start
> planing like a powerboat and got incredibly unstable as the waterline
> decreased so much. We always had to drop sail before turning
> otherwise it
> would dig in and submerge. He used to own "Intrepid" at one time,
> and he
> claimed that both of these boats had the uncomfortable trait of
> wanting to
> sink every time it was raced. Yes, they were WET boats too. One of the
> problems was that both boats were designed for salt-water, and the
> density
> of fresh-water changed the characteristics of the boats. Oh, and the
> fact
> that the waves on the Great Lakes is of different frequency and
> slope so the
> boats tended to punch through waves instead of riding them.
--
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