Questions about paravanes

We are fine tuning the paravane system for our under-construction 24m aluminum powerboat. We are former sailors and neither of us has been on a boat with paravanes. We've studied designs and talked to folks we've encountered cruising, but I thought I would reach out to this group to start a discussion.

I'm looking for people who have blue water experience running with paravanes.

How deep do you run your fish?
How difficult is it to launch and retrieve your fish?
Could you post a picture of your actual paravanes?
If you could redesign your system, how would you do it?
What words of wisdom can you pass on from your experience?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Christine
Blog: Mobius World

At rest, the fish are 15’ below the water. The design was to keep the fish from hitting the running gear in any sea condition. Once we leave the dock, the poles go out. When we want to put the fish in the water, we stop and drop them in. To bring them in, we stop and have a retrieval line that brings the fish along side and I lift them out. It takes minutes to retrieve them.

As far as the design goes there’s nothing I would change. We have 12,000 plus miles with them in the water. Our design was taken from a commercial boat and fine tuned by Tom Davenport.

We use the paravanes the same as when we sailed. If one of us says, “should we put the fish in the water”? It’s usually time, the same as asking about putting a reef in the main.

There has been lots of discussions about paravanes on the Forum. Try the search function for more info.

For design on a new build, I’d enlist a navel architect since the loading is huge.

I was a commercial fisherman. We called the paravanes "flopper stoppers" on the US West Coast. Picture is a common design. If you like that design, they're probably available from a good gear store.
I had the largest made and they were heavy. About 3' across and probably weighed 75-100 pounds. If I made new ones, I'd make them out of aluminum. Mine were set about 10' below the water and about 10' out from the boat side. They were rigged with 3/8" chain to the pole. The holes in the top are for adjusting the angle they hang at. Back hole is flopper nose down for drag to slow the boat for trolling. Other holes to balance to neutral position. The round piece at the bottom is a piece of steel shafting about 4" long and is there for weight so when rolling toward a flopper, it dives and keeps slack out of the rigging. When used to run at speed, a 5/16" stainless wire was rigged between the chain at the water level and the bow to take the strain off the pole and pole rigging.
The further out from the boat, the greater the effect. In my opinion, they work better than commercial built in stabilizers. They make a big difference at anchor, too.

You need to talk to Richard on Dauntless. He crossed the Atlantic both ways in a realitively small Trawler with paravanes.

Lepke thank you for confirming that they are sometimes called Flopper Stoppers.
When I was a kid I remember adults calling them that but when I mentioned it on TF I was corrected that the term only applied to devices used at anchor.

Used them offshore on many boats for years. One thing worth mentioning is where they're mounted, the closer the pivot is to the water the more tendency of the boom to lift if you hang one up. If they lift the fore stay from the outboard end of the boom slacks and you can bend the boom backwards. The solution is to either have the pivot on the same plane as the fore stay attachment or above it. I know this is counterintuitive but I ran one boat that a lobster pot would lift the 32 foot steel boom and I had to be quick with the engine controls to prevent a problem. I don't use them anymore as they create drag, add weight and complexity while a steadying sail works almost as well. In reality a proper seaboat shouldn't require addons. Here's the last fishing boat I owned, note the absence of paravanes, you can see the seats on the tips of the crosstree where they used to set when up, I never missed them after I took them off. Please take my comments as my own opinions and make your decisions based on your own research.

Don’t mean to hijack the thread Is that picture Port Clyde?

Easting said:

Don’t mean to hijack the thread Is that picture Port Clyde?

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It is, on a much nicer day than today.

As I said, my floppers were some of the largest around. I could be sideways to big swells and still walk the deck easily. But the floppers and their chain were heavy. Trolling for salmon, they were set to drag, so I pulled them to run. If I checked several spots for fish in a day, I remember it being a real effort on the last pull.
I miss the fishing, especially the late season good weather. And the tuna fishing, that was mostly good weather, 60°+ water. And fun. I once poled a ton of albacore before breakfast by myself. About 90 fish.

Many years ago I was the engineer on an 83' trawler that had paravanes/flopper stoppers fishing on Georges Bank in winter. It started to blow and eventually got quite fierce, bad enough we stopped towing and layed to. The seas got rather large, it was snowing and at night so I can only guess at this late date the height, perhaps forty or so feet. We still had the birds in the water and I was in the wheelhouse with the mate when we heard this tremendous crack and the boat immediately took a slight list to port. The crack was the chain to the starboard bird which had parted and snapped back to strike the side of the wheelhouse leaving a nice chain impression in the steel. I started to get my oilgear on to go out and cut the other bird free to even us out when she rolled hard to port and the forestay to the paravane parted as the boom went into the water with the boom and dangling wires hanging limp bent back against the side of the boat. The only thing to do was to cut the starboard boom off and then the port to clear us from the mess and not get anything in the wheel. I crawled out with the torch and after a bit the boom, which must have weighed several thousand pounds snapped off with a bang and disappeared into the dark water. A few minutes with the torch and the other boom left us also. This is why I've never been a fan of paravanes.

Fish53 said:

It is, on a much nicer day than today.

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Ha. I woke up there back in August to almost the same scene. Ran a GB 36 back from Thomaston to RI.

Easting said:

Ha. I woke up there back in August to almost the same scene. Ran a GB 36 back from Thomaston to RI.

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I live just a little north of Thomaston, I have moorings in Port Clyde and Rockport. I was down to Marshall point light the other day walking my dog.

Christine, just wanted to say I have enjoyed reading your books! We don't have paravanes and I can't add to this thread but I couldn't resist saying thanks...

Thanks Waywego, that's very of kind of you.

Fish53 said:

Used them offshore on many boats for years. One thing worth mentioning is where they're mounted, the closer the pivot is to the water the more tendency of the boom to lift if you hang one up. If they lift the fore stay from the outboard end of the boom slacks and you can bend the boom backwards. The solution is to either have the pivot on the same plane as the fore stay attachment or above it. I know this is counterintuitive but I ran one boat that a lobster pot would lift the 32 foot steel boom and I had to be quick with the engine controls to prevent a problem. I don't use them anymore as they create drag, add weight and complexity while a steadying sail works almost as well. In reality a proper seaboat shouldn't require addons. Here's the last fishing boat I owned, note the absence of paravanes, you can see the seats on the tips of the crosstree where they used to set when up, I never missed them after I took them off. Please take my comments as my own opinions and make your decisions based on your own research.View attachment 84469

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Thanks Fish,
I was bedeviled by the problem of the pole going vertical for too many miles. Finally, a few days still from Martinique, I found the perfect solution, a fender wedged under the cap rail and pole, works perfectly.
We did the next 5,000 miles that way and never had another problem.

I will look for my blog post on the subject. I also emailed a few folks last year with more details.
If the OP emails me, I will find him that email.

I love my setup and at this point wouldn't change a thing. While I used to run them at 14 to 15 feet below water surface, that turned out to be too shallow in bigger seas, >12ft.
I now run them at 18 feet and have them rigged so that i could deepen that to 35 feet in really big (>30ft) seas. :lol:
That's also the advantage of Amsteel, in that it's easy to adjust rigging and it makes virtually no noise.

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in here. That story that Fish53 told is certainly a scary one. I have heard of fishing vessels capsizing when losing one paravane, but then there are other vessels that fish with only one paravane deployed. Interesting to hear the different depths mentioned here. Our designer has designed us A-frame booms which should make it somewhat easier to rig, but because of our boat's size, the paravanes will be big. We've read the designer Michael Kasten's work on roll attenuation, and we are considering buying his design to try to achieve a fish with less drag. I did search on this forum for posts and comments about paravanes, and I didn't find many. Perhaps I wasn't using the correct search terms. Anyway, I really appreciate you all sharing your experience.

I found this draft, that I never published until now.

https://dauntlessatsea.com/

Wxx3 said:

I found this draft, that I never published until now.

https://dauntlessatsea.com/

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Thanks very much to all of you for your quick responses to Chrisine's original request for experiences with open ocean crossings with paravanes. I am the fortunate man building this new boat with Christine and even more so being married to her and we are most interested in learning from you about the actual use, setting, retrieving and handling of paravanes as we have not used these on our previous boats as they were all sailboats.

Richard, thanks for this link to your previous article and I'm putting together a PM to you now to learn more.

As Christine has mentioned, we are well looked after for the design and building of the mechanical aspects of our passive stabilization system thanks to our NA and Naval Yachts who are our builders. Our system has a large A-frame style for the booms on each side which are hinged via massive CNC cut aluminium base plates welded integrally to the hull framing and length from deck hinge pins to pole end holes is about 4.23m/14' and the bases are about 2.1m above the WL at half load.

My primary interest for those of you with first hand experience doing passages with paravanes is the rigging and systems involved in using them. So things like Launching and retrieving the paravanes/fish/birds, connections between paravanes and end of booms, adjusting depth under water, keeping boom ends down and steady, etc. And then any basic geometry and dimensions for this rigging, clutches, winches, blocks, etc.

We have both spent many years as single handed sailors so working with rigging is something we have considerable experience and confidence with, but specifically dealing with paravanes is all new and hence our desire to tap into all the first hand expertise and experiences here on the TF.

My sincere thanks in advance for any additional information, recommendations and suggestions you might be able to offer based on your previous experiences with paravanes on passages.

-Wayne

Rich aka Wxx3 chimed in with a lot of good info. I would also contact CruisingSeaVenture here or on youtube. They recently underwent a refit and added a custom one-off paravane set up on their cruiser.

We have them on MOJO and use them anytime the boat is rolling. They work great. Easy to launch, just push the poles out, run the down wire back to the flopper stoppers which are stored on brackets on the aft rail, shackle it on, slow the boat down and drop each bird overboard. They go to work immediately and are somewhat fascinating to watch! Ours hang 16' down, but when underway are probably running about 12' under the surface. Retrieval is by stopping the boat, pulling the poles up to near vertical then hauling each bird up over the rail and walking it back to it's storage bracket. What would I do differently? I'd rig a way to raise each bird out of the water (probably with a small winch) while the poles are fully extended, and have some sort of bracket a the top of the pole to hold the bird so it wouldn't bang around on the pole. This would make it faster to get the birds up, and also allow me to bring the poles vertical with the bird up at the top. I could then lower the birds down and store them at my convenience. This is not something difficult to rig, just one of those "round tuits". We don't do much offshore cruising anymore so it hasn't bubbled to the top of my priority list yet. You can see pictures of the A-frame rig, the birds and their storage braclets on our web site, www.mvmojo.com on the exterior tour page.

In our area, paravanes are often connected via stainless steel rods at an optimum length. (This means that they can't be adjusted, as Richard mentioned.) The fishermen who run these claim that the advantages are that boom and rods can be sized so fouling any part of the ship is not possible; there is little sound and no vibration from the system, and retrieving is safer/simpler.

Kit_L said:

In our area, paravanes are often connected via stainless steel rods at an optimum length. (This means that they can't be adjusted, as Richard mentioned.) The fishermen who run these claim that the advantages are that boom and rods can be sized so fouling any part of the ship is not possible; there is little sound and no vibration from the system, and retrieving is safer/simpler.

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Thank you for posting these infos. My dutch architect, Jan VISSER, didn't help at all to try retrofitting paravanes on my North sea Trawler 57' BALDER VIII. And here, in Canary islands, I am quite lost in the bush to find a local company able to understand this technical matter. I have hydraulic stabs KEYPOWER, running well with only one minor issue ( solenoid Parker stop working). As well, preparing my passage to Caribean for next winter, I WANT a back up system to prevent the kind of horror story who happened to a Nordhavn during the 2004 atlantic rally.

On this forum, considering my broken english, I found a lot of fantastic advices with many very usefull pictures or vids ( thanks to MOBO owners or SEA VENTURES). But I am still wondering if this is the best approach for my 60 metric tons trawler...

A Canadian organization compared recently two systems on fishing boats in Québec, Gaspesie: paravanes VS wings, sort of folding arms fitted on each side of the hull underwater. These wings used in Australia looks better, with less weight and windage in the heights, and no risks of injury with the fish going out from water etc. But what about the drag, I do not know.
( this canadian report is written in french but I will try to find the american version for users of this forum).
Anyway, I will call the boatyards who are installing these wings in the north of Quebec.
Here a picture of a canadian fishing boat with these wings.

nb: again apologize about my basic english...

picture missing

Here is the picture of this canadian fishing boat with wings

Those wings don't look like they can be that effective, but possibly the added surface area compensates for the lower moment arm.

Balder, in the Canaries, besides the best steaks, you should be able to find a good sailboat rigger. That's who did my paravanes, though i told them the lenght of the poles and the size of the birds.

I'll add one more clarification.
The basic difference between my paravane system and those with an "A" frame, like Hobo, another Kk42, is that both systems are designed to keep the stress OFF the mast, since the mast was never designed to have much of a load.

Mine use compression posts and stays to accomplish that and to transmit the force the bird is putting on the end of the pole to the gunnel.
A frame boats use the A frame for the same purpose.

Also, i agree with Balder, his hydraulic stabilizers will not make it to the Caribbean.

I'd like bring up the issue of overdamping, there are times a boat needs to roll to respond to sea conditions, it can make the difference between riding over a sea rather than shipping a deckload of water. it seems odd to me that a designer would design a boat that lacked proper stability and required attenuation.

Here is a picture of the setup on my boat. It works super good. the difference between having them deployed and not is night and day. We have not crossed any oceans with them, but we did the west coast of Vancouver island I couple years ago, and they worked great. They have 5/8" three strand nylon from the end of the pole to the waterline, for some stretch, and originally had cable about 15' long from the waterline to the fish. A broken strand on the cable cut the heck out of my hand when I was retrieving them and I replaced it with amsteel rope from the waterline to the fish. I also like the thought that I could cut the rope loose easier if I ever had to if I became entangled with a big log, which I am always nervous about in the PNW. The small yellow line hanging slack is what I use to retrieve them, it just has a clip that attaches to the shackle between the Nylon line and the Amsteel. I use it to pull it in so I can get ahold of the main line, then just manhandle it up out of the water. My boat is only 40' and if the fish was much bigger, manhandling would be too much, but I like the simplicity of it. I really like the way the central support mast is put together on my system. I wish they had mounted all the radar, spotlights, horns, etc, up there.

Here’s my setup. You can see the birds in their rack, red color.

Fish53 said:

I'd like bring up the issue of overdamping, there are times a boat needs to roll to respond to sea conditions, it can make the difference between riding over a sea rather than shipping a deckload of water. it seems odd to me that a designer would design a boat that lacked proper stability and required attenuation.

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I don't understand your concern. My boat still rolls. In a beam sea the paravane stabilizers reduce the roll by 80%
In a following sea, by 50%.

I've never had any green water over the cap rail in any part of the boat.

Snapdragon III said:

Here is a picture of the setup on my boat. It works super good. the difference between having them deployed and not is night and day. We have not crossed any oceans with them, but we did the west coast of Vancouver island I couple years ago, and they worked great. They have 5/8" three strand nylon from the end of the pole to the waterline, for some stretch, and originally had cable about 15' long from the waterline to the fish. A broken strand on the cable cut the heck out of my hand when I was retrieving them and I replaced it with amsteel rope from the waterline to the fish. I also like the thought that I could cut the rope loose easier if I ever had to if I became entangled with a big log, which I am always nervous about in the PNW. The small yellow line hanging slack is what I use to retrieve them, it just has a clip that attaches to the shackle between the Nylon line and the Amsteel. I use it to pull it in so I can get ahold of the main line, then just manhandle it up out of the water. My boat is only 40' and if the fish was much bigger, manhandling would be too much, but I like the simplicity of it. I really like the way the central support mast is put together on my system. I wish they had mounted all the radar, spotlights, horns, etc, up there.

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I don't understand the purpose of using a line with stretch. All that will do is increase your roll with no reduction in the shock load on your system.

Wxx3 said:

I don't understand your concern. My boat still rolls. In a beam sea the paravane stabilizers reduce the roll by 80%
In a following sea, by 50%.

I've never had any green water over the cap rail in any part of the boat.

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That's why I used the word "overdamped" some roll attenuation is probably a good thing from a comfort point of view but in reality that's all it is the boat doesn't need it, you do. Paravanes don't make a boat more seaworthy, they make a seaworthy boat more comfortable for it's crew, but the roll damping can be overdone and limit a vessels ability to respond to sea conditions in a safe manner.