Pegasus Open 50 Raceboat Tour: Carbon Fibre Mast, Rigging, Sails

@Christian Rohr:
In my experience, sailors might call anything anything as long as it gets the point across (and doesn't get them keelhauled), except for one thing. Rope is never called rope on a boat, because it's either a line or a sheet. Anything else is open to interpretation, even when they get it wrong.

@Brian Lam:
He did, but he also called the bilgeboards "daggerboards" (if you watch it again, he mentions five "fins" in the water, with one canting keel, the two bilgeboards, and two rudders that apparently match the angles of the bilgeboards so you'll have one vertical bilgeboard and rudder on either tack). The canting keel isn't visible in the video because it's all below the waterline. It's like a ballasted fixed keel, only it's mounted in such a way that it can pivot (or "cant") from port to starboard. Still a single keel, still permanently attached to the underside of the boat's hull, and not in any way, shape, or form resembling those bilgeboards that are clearly sticking up from the deck of the boat in the video.

At a glance, a bilgeboard setup looks just like a double daggerboard, but they're actually constructed differently. A single fixed keel, a centerboard, or a daggerboard will be constructed somewhat like the vertical part of an airplane's tail. The cross-section will be symmetrical because it has to work equally on both tacks. A leeboard or bilgeboard, if you have two of them and don't have to swap a single board from one side to the other as you change tack, will be shaped more like the wing of an airplane. This will actually generate sideways lift towards the centerline, actively pulling the boat's hull back into the wind, instead of just providing more surface area to resist side-slippage. Also, daggerboards are typically only found on very small watercraft. Since a single daggerboard would need to stay inserted whenever you're under sail, the only point in being able to remove it is to prevent damage when it's _not_ under sail (e.g. when beaching it, putting it on a trailer or boat ladder, or portaging it). The point in having removable bilgeboards is that while the on-tack bilgeboard will provide greater side-slip resistance, the off-tack bilgeboard will counter some of that effect by pulling the hull with the wind.

Purple Dave

@Purple Dave: Very informative comment, Dave, but I think the guys on the boat called the canting keel a canting keel, too.

I understand feedback, I do. But its too late to reshoot, and i've been apologizing in the posts for the quality. So, anyone bringing up the quality of hte video (again, admittedly poor) is getting it.

very interesting. I actually understood some of the things he was saying. Now if only i can get a sailboat.

natemevo

I am loving this series. Most of the tech stuff is over my head, but what I am understanding is way cool. The best posts on Giz (to me) are the ones I learn from.

Best of luck to the team as they get under way, smooth sailing and great winds to you.

@Purple Dave: I <3 sailing and you just earned yourself a heart.

@Purple Dave: that's all great, but *sailors* call them canting keels and daggerboards.

Christian Rohr

@jawzzy:
Those aren't keels. They're bilgeboards. A keel is a permanent fixture of the boat's hull, even if it's nothing more than a spine on the inside of the hull's skin.

Fixed keel: What you typically find on pleasure sailboats that are large enough to have a cabin. They don't move at all, and can get you in trouble in shallow waters, but they give you a lot of surface area to resist side-slippage.

Centerboard: Basically the retractable version of the above, it's just a single metal or weighted wood/fiberglass plank with a line attached to it and mounted on a pivot point so you can pull it up in shallow waters.

Daggerboard: Removable, but they only go in and out (what you see in the video, but there's only one in the center). If you hit something, they're toast, where a centerboard will get knocked back up into the hull as you pass over the hazard.

Leeboards: Sorta like centerboards, only they look more like flippers because there's usually two of them, and they're mounted to the outside of the hull. Sometimes there's only one, and you have to move it from one side to the other when you tack.

Bilgeboards: Sorta like daggerboards, only there's two of them (or, as with leeboards, one of them and two places you can mount it, depending on which tack you're on). They're mounted off-center, but they still go through the hull. And that's what you see in the video above (though I agree that they're very rare, as I've never actually seen them outside of schematics).

Oh yeah, and Me: Used to work for a small traditional wooden boatbuilder in high school. He had an 18' cedar-plank, open-hull Mackinac boat that could pull around 15 knots in a strong cross-win, but that was because it had two masts running gaff-rigged sails, so he didn't heel over as much he would have with the same amount of sail area if he was running the typical traingle sail on a single mast. He once told me of a time when he was blowing past all these expensive pleasure boats because they all had to be reefed down to half-mast or less so they wouldn't get swamped, while he had both sails at full-mast, plus the jib.

Purple Dave

Woah. That boat is crazy advanced. I've raced on boats with Kevlar sails and such, but canting keels are only for really, really serious racing boats.

20 knots is hugely fast. Every bit above around 15 or so knots is amazing.

jawzzy

Set a damn poster frame! How hard is it? (trick question, not hard AT ALL)

@Purple Dave: I think you're missing the (pedantic) point. Jawzzy said "canting keels are only for really, really serious racing boats." then you came in to correct him, saying "those aren't keels, they are bilgeboards"

But when jawzzy said "canting keels" he wasn't referring to this boat having multiple keels which are canting keels, that are mounted abovedecks and I saw them with my eyes on the video. Because as we all know, those are bilgeboards. He was saying, in effect, "this boat has a canting keel, that is very impressive to me, as boats outfitted with a canting keel are so totally serious, wow. Even though they did not show the canting keel, they talked about having one, and that is what has struck me about the video." and he was making no reference to the bilgeboards.

I also think that the canting keel is a very cool bit of tech.

Stitchopoulis