Switching from sail cruising to power passagemaker

Hello everyone,

My husband Wayne and I have been cruising the Pacific aboard our 52' steel motorsailer, LEARNATIVITY, and we have decided to make the switch to a fast passage maker.

Some of you may know of Dennis Harjamaa of Artnautica, designer of the LRC 58. Dennis is in the process of designing a new big sister to the 58 for us. It's early in the process, but she will be a fascinating boat. We have some early renderings. I'll attach one view. This is all subject to change at this point as we continue to work with Dennis.

We are currently in Fiji with our current boat LEARNATIVITY listed for sale. If she has not sold by the end of September, we intend to take off and sail her to the Med. via the Red Sea. In spite of recent events, it remains our first choice to build the new boat in Turkey, partly being built in a yard in Antalya and partly built by us. If anyone here has experience with building a boat in Turkey or with building in aluminum, I'd be especially happy to connect with you.

I hope to learn lots here. So happy to have found this forum.

Christine

Welcome to the forum! Best of luck on your new build. Spent several weeks in Fiji on two separate trips, helping setup the scuba station at the research lab on Dravuni 25 years ago. Have fond memories of area while doing coral and mollusk mapping studies there. I'm sure it's a nice place to cruise.

Ted

This is the bible of aluminium boat building ; my son is bringing a copy over to me next week, so I'm looking forward to a good read : The author is the owner of the famous Alaskan Specmar boat designs.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0071443185/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile

From what I've already read about alloy welding and how hard it is achieve a good weld, you have to ask exactly how good the professional you are going to hire is at his job!!!!!

Its that difficult.

Christine:


Isn't your attached picture of Steve Dashew's Wind Horse or similar FPBs, and the link is to a different NA's design.


Either would be really nice blue water boats, but with heavy price tags.


David

The Dashew comparison

Of course, there is a similarity to Dashew's Wind Horse and the FPB line of boats. However, this is not one of his designs. If you look more closely, you will see the differences. For me as a sailor, most trawlers look alike. They have the same design parameters, i.e. wide beam displacement vessels with lots of interior volume and very high bows. In the under 60 foot range, they mostly have a split interior with the salon aft, the pilot house amidships and the cabins in the forward section. But no one says that Kady Krogan is copying Nordhaven even though the boats often look very similar.

The thing is we are long time sailors like Dashew is, and we have very similar design requirements. We want the longer waterline to achieve faster hull speed in a displacement boat, very high efficiency, only two staterooms, and a 360 degree view in the main salon/galley area. We want to knife through the water with a full stand-up engine room, tons of storage, and a minimum 4500 range at 11 knots.

We admire the FPB's but there is lots we don't like - like the price tag. So we are designing a similar long, slender displacement vessel and hoping to make our boat even more efficient and keeping to the KISS principle. I also think Dashew's boats lack a certain aesthetic quality, while Dennis has a more artistic eye.

I believe the day will come when this type of boat will have a name. They aren't trawlers. Perhaps VSV - Very Slender Vessel. Or maybe they will be called pilot boat style. I don't know. But we are not the only ones looking to build a long lean fast boat. Here are a few others:
Black Swan
Ned 70
Archer adventure 72
LRC 58

So, no, the pic I posted was not a pic of a Dashew boat, but I understand how you might have assumed it was.

Christine

Welcome aboard. Artnautica`s US representative LRC58Fan keeps us updated on these boats.
You might find Cruisers Forum a more effective for selling the sailboat

Thanks for the suggestion

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the suggestion. I know I should be more actively out there trying to sell LEARNATIVITY but to be honest, I'm really looking forward to the sail to the Med. We have put so much work into this refit of the sailboat, I want to get a chance to sail her myself before we turn her over to a new owner. Real serious long range cruising folk are few and far between. I think the actual market for our current sailboat is only a few people. I'm confident one of them will find us. In the meantime, we have spent a year in the boatyard getting this boat into pristine condition. I love this boat. I would really like to put a few thousand more miles on her.
Christine

As someone looking at one of these LTBs (Long Thin Boats), I'm curious how you view the "great room" layout arrangement, i.e. single large room encompassing the salon, galley, and helm, vs a pilot house layout where there is a separate and dedicated pilot house?

I ask because to me one of the distinguishing features of an ocean going power boat is a dedicated pilot house. With one, you can be underway at night with a dark helm, yet have the rest of the boat open for business. People can be using the salon, watching TV, cooking in the galley, all without compromising helm operation with unwanted light.

The great room concept strikes me as directly conflicting with needs of a passage maker, requiring lights-out in the key living spaces in order to preserve night vision for the helmsman.

How do you see this issue coming directly from a sail boat?

good point!

Hi twisted tree,

You do bring up a good point about the "great room" vs the traditional dedicated pilot house.

We've found that 99% of the time we are a two person boat. We invite family and friends to join us but no one ever does - and certainly not for passages. Even if we did have additional crew, when on passage, the rest of the boat is not "open for business." We don't watch movies on passage. On passage, the off watch is always trying to sleep when not on duty. If for some reason we had a larger crew, the individuals off watch could always watch movies in their bunks via tablet thanks to the wifi cloud on the boat.

On our current motorsailer, the galley is down below and the helm/pilot station is out in the cockpit. When I prepare dinner underway, I am isolated from the one other person on board. We would rather have that time as connected social time. For us, the "great room" or as we call it the "grand salon" is an improvement. We will have a complete helm station up above on the fly bridge deck and a complete helm below in the grand salon. Weather will determine where the night watchman is. Hopefully, my husband will come below and keep me company as I prepare food. I enjoy cooking underway and I would rather be close enough to the watch to have a conversation.

We tend to split the night watches into two 6 hour terms. I never wanted to do this back in the days when I was standing a wet watch in a sailboat and often hand steering with a tiller (I've been around a while). In those days, we did 2 on 2 off and passages were exhausting. But with our dry cockpit on LEARNATIVITY, my husband does the 7-1 and I stand the 1-7 and we are fully rested during every passage. Passages have become far more fun!

The one thing that would make them better for me is if the helm and the galley were closer together.

Christine

I'm glad you found us too. Welcome to TF!

What an awesome project you have, with an equally awesome plan. Please keep us updated on the progress of your next dream.

ChristineKling said:

Hi twisted tree,

You do bring up a good point about the "great room" vs the traditional dedicated pilot house.

We've found that 99% of the time we are a two person boat. We invite family and friends to join us but no one ever does - and certainly not for passages. Even if we did have additional crew, when on passage, the rest of the boat is not "open for business." We don't watch movies on passage. On passage, the off watch is always trying to sleep when not on duty. If for some reason we had a larger crew, the individuals off watch could always watch movies in their bunks via tablet thanks to the wifi cloud on the boat.

On our current motorsailer, the galley is down below and the helm/pilot station is out in the cockpit. When I prepare dinner underway, I am isolated from the one other person on board. We would rather have that time as connected social time. For us, the "great room" or as we call it the "grand salon" is an improvement. We will have a complete helm station up above on the fly bridge deck and a complete helm below in the grand salon. Weather will determine where the night watchman is. Hopefully, my husband will come below and keep me company as I prepare food. I enjoy cooking underway and I would rather be close enough to the watch to have a conversation.

We tend to split the night watches into two 6 hour terms. I never wanted to do this back in the days when I was standing a wet watch in a sailboat and often hand steering with a tiller (I've been around a while). In those days, we did 2 on 2 off and passages were exhausting. But with our dry cockpit on LEARNATIVITY, my husband does the 7-1 and I stand the 1-7 and we are fully rested during every passage. Passages have become far more fun!

The one thing that would make them better for me is if the helm and the galley were closer together.

Christine

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I can see that with two people. We too are 2 people 90% of the time, and also do 6hr shifts and prefer them for all the same reasons. I obviously prefer a pilot house, and find that even grabbing a simple meal or making coffee requires light in the galley, so we prefer separation from the helm.

I love the shape of those slim long hulls , but are you aware of the drawbacks ( there are always some) of the design?

A sailboat hull works well with sails because the driving force steadies the boat both in the rolling and the pitching axis. When you remove the sails ,because the hull is fatter in the centre, the boat rotates around that fuller mid section and produces severe pitching.

Roll is easy to control in a slim hull with stabs, but how do you control pitching ? MBY magazine tested the Dashew boat at the needles in the Solent which is notorious for steep seas and remarked on this unusual hull behaviour. There was a YouTube video showing a Dashew in Australia ' hobby horsing' just like a catamaran, but its been taken down off the internet. Nearest thing to a long slim Hull is a Submarine on the surface ; take a look how they behave in steep seas.

Most people on the Boat design forum est. That fuel burn would be in the same ball park as a standard displacement LRC, maybe 10% better on a good day.expect about 1.3-1.5 mpg at 6 kts for a 50'-60' boat. Why? There's a world of difference between results in a boat testing tank and the real world, and long slim hulls suffer from a lot of wave induced drag from the bow digging into the front of waves.

Suggest you go on a test trip to evaluate, before you build one.

I talk to many sailors who are thinking of coming to the dark side. There are two points that seem to come up over and over and I'd challenge you to deeply consider both of these things:

1. You're very used to using your current boat in a particular way - long distance, ocean-crossing cruising. If you move to a power boat, will you be using it in the same way? For example, if you're done crossing oceans and just want to bop around the Caribbean for a decade, make sure you're not creating a vessel for a different purpose.

2. Sailors coming to trawlers are often fixated by fuel costs and reducing fuel usage. Trawler owners are rarely concerned about fuel cost (of course it matters though) because we realize that it's not the major cost. Make sure you're not overly consumed with fuel. This plays into #1 above too in a big way because if you won't be crossing the Pacific, chances are your real fuel needs are well reduced.

Hmmm, these look like 1/2 of a catamaran.

folivier said:

Hmmm, these look like 1/2 of a catamaran.

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Imagine what it would cost if it included the other half.

I like these long slender fast passage makers, or whatever you want to call them. I like the idea of being able to go 10-11 knots instead of 6-7, but still be able to take big seas safely and recover from a knockdown, unlike a power catamaran. Plus, I think they look cool. If I was rich I would get myself one! But I like "different".

And just because it's different and strange looking doesn't mean it's a bad design. To me, it makes sense to reserve any criticism that it's a bad design until you have had some actual time on one.

I don't know sh&t from Shinola, but I like learning about new things.

Interesting article:

http://www.kastenmarine.com/ideal_passagemaker.htm

cardude01 said:

I like these long slender fast passage makers, or whatever you want to call them. I like the idea of being able to go 10-11 knots instead of 6-7, but still be able to take big seas safely and recover from a knockdown, unlike a power catamaran. Plus, I think they look cool. If I was rich I would get myself one! But I like "different".

And just because it's different and strange looking doesn't mean it's a bad design. To me, it makes sense to reserve any criticism that it's a bad design until you had some actual time on one.

Click to expand...

+1

FPM,
Acronyms are definitely in and FPM seems the obvious.

Re the recent remarks about fuel consumption consider the huge difference between the usual trawler and the FPM that frequently needs to cross an ocean befor getting more fuel.

I have no interest in the Dashew type FPM or similar boats. But it shows how valuuable forums can be as I can read along evaluating along w those that have much more knowledge and motive for learning. Kind of a little adventure I can pick up and drop at will only to get involved in another. I'll bet there are hundreds of others following along. And when I get too old to go boating these forums and the people that post will be a wonderful blessing.

But re the FPM in general crossing oceans takes so much time the advantage of speed is questionable .. IMO. The only need I can see for 11 knots is to minimize the transit time. And if it's objectionable enough to require a special boat as radical and single purpose as the present FPMakers are why not get a bigger and heavy typical PM and take your time crossing. Why minimize something you enjoy .... unless you don't enjoy it? But I have'nt done this and never will.

Peter - Thanks for the comment and the warnings. I agree with you that all boat designs have drawbacks and every boat is a collection of compromises. We have talked to several FPB and LRC owners and Wayne has gone out on the LRC 58 Broadsword. We are well aware that there will be an entirely different world of motion from what we know on sailboats. But among the people we have spoken to are those who previously owned traditional trawlers, and they far prefer the sea kindliness of the FPM (thank you Eric) designs.

I refer you to the designer Michael Kasten's paper on "The Ideal Passagemaker." He writes, "Thus, if a boat is shaped so that she is slender; pushes up as small a bow wave as possible; does not have a marked "shoulder" in the forward waterlines which would then encourage a secondary bow wave; and does not pull along a big stern wave, we will have done the best job in terms of reducing resistance under power. The ideal passagemaker will therefore have a long waterline; an easy entry without creating a hollow forward; there will not be a 'shoulder' forward where for example a chine may cross the waterline; there will be as long and straight a run as possible; and the boat will not be overly wide or tall."

Every boat can encounter seas of just the right frequency that will make her pitch mercilessly. I wouldn't write off a boat design because somebody caught it on video hobby-horsing. Every boat does in certain conditions.

Christine

Jeffrey S said:

I talk to many sailors who are thinking of coming to the dark side. There are two points that seem to come up over and over and I'd challenge you to deeply consider both of these things:

1. You're very used to using your current boat in a particular way - long distance, ocean-crossing cruising. If you move to a power boat, will you be using it in the same way? For example, if you're done crossing oceans and just want to bop around the Caribbean for a decade, make sure you're not creating a vessel for a different purpose.

2. Sailors coming to trawlers are often fixated by fuel costs and reducing fuel usage. Trawler owners are rarely concerned about fuel cost (of course it matters though) because we realize that it's not the major cost. Make sure you're not overly consumed with fuel. This plays into #1 above too in a big way because if you won't be crossing the Pacific, chances are your real fuel needs are well reduced.

Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

You know me as Christine Kling. I'm the thriller author, and I used to blog about iPad apps on the WriteontheWater blog. We've exchanged comments there before.

Thanks for the challenging questions. We are not going over to the "dark side" because we of age or infirmity. We do want to continue to use our new powerboat to make long ocean passages. We will be crossing oceans and while we are concerned about cost, we are more concerned about range.

One of our big goals in this change is also to get speed. We would like to do some high latitude cruising but we're wimps when it comes to cold. Wayne is Canadian, and we would both love to go up to Alaska, for example, but in our current 6 knot boat, we'd have to winter over up there. In a 10-knot boat we could go up and back in a single season. We also want to be a be better able to outrun bad weather.

We arrived in Fiji in May and met up with the FPB64 Atlantis in Savusavu. We left and cruised out to the Lau group and along the south coast of Viti Levu, ending up in Vuda Marina 5 months later. There we ran into Atlantis again. We had covered about 300 miles of cruising. We asked where he had been. He'd gone up to Micronesia as far as Palau and back. He'd covered more like 4000 miles. We want to be able to do that.

Christine

There is/are reasons(s) for conventional boat design. It could be sheep following one another, or it could be because long experience shows that is how it is best done.
Then something novel comes along. Is it "different" for the sake of being different, or is it a great advance in boat design?
If you plan to invest a large number of boat dollars in a new boat, especially a novel design not generally constructed by mainstream builders, be sure it is what you want it to be, and does what you want it to do.

I agree w Bruce,
I'm afraid a lot of trendy boats sell because they are cool. Cool in the middle of the Pacific dosn't hold much water.

I flew ultralight aircraft for years and after flying one high performance brand for a long time I bought an UL with a very low climb rate and was worried I would'nt like it. A friend told me you just adjust and fly differently. I did and flying the low climb rate UL was a great and fully satisfying experience.

One drives any vehicle within it's limits. My present 6 knot boat included. Trying to cruise in SE Alaska in the winter was not practical .. no problem in the summer but in the winter there just wasn't enough daylight hours to get to where we needed to be because of tides and other limitations. But otherwise the 6knots hasn't been an issue.

BruceK said:

There is/are reasons(s) for conventional boat design. It could be sheep following one another, or it could be because long experience shows that is how it is best done.
Then something novel comes along. Is it "different" for the sake of being different, or is it a great advance in boat design?
If you plan to invest a large number of boat dollars in a new boat, especially a novel design not generally constructed by mainstream builders, be sure it is what you want it to be, and does what you want it to do.

Click to expand...

Hey Bruce,

Thanks for the warning. And you are right, we are really taking a huge risk here and investing lots of boat dollars in a design that is not generally constructed by the mainstream builders. It could all go pear-shaped, but we are trying to be smart about it. And change never happens if everybody always plays it safe.

When Wayne first started talking to me about building a powerboat, he had me read the classic, Voyaging Under Power by Beebe. Now I am a lifelong sailor. I did my first 1000 mile delivery in 1974. And I've done lots of miles on different boats throughout a lifetime of sailing, including 9 years as a singlehander. The thing that most struck me about that book was that real long distance voyaging under power is in its infancy. Folks have been crossing oceans on small sailboats for centuries, but only a handful of "small" boats have crossed oceans or circumnavigated under power and it has been a very recent phenomenon. And when I read the Ken Williams book about the Nordhaven rally that crossed the Atlantic, it was crazy the amount of support they thought they needed to take their boats across an ocean.

To me, this is a whole new and exciting challenge. I'm having to challenge my own biases and open my mind in ways that are thrilling. Many years ago, together with my first husband we built a 55-ft. fiberglass sailboat in CA and sailed it down through the canal and chartered in the Caribbean. At the time of launch, I swore, never again will I build a boat. I know first hand how we started with the best of intentions to build the boat of our dreams and in many cases all we did was learn another way that didn't work. That's the nature of innovation. But this challenge of crossing oceans under power has hooked me. I'm ready to jump in there and try it again. Eyes wide open.

Christine

Re. The difficulty of welding aluminium, here's a recent short post on the boat design forum: welded and unwelded strength of Aluminum? - Boat Design Forums

The actual heat of welding reduces the strength of 5083 marines grade alloy by nearly half!

Could you get a professional job done in Turkey? What controls do they have on who can weld up your boat ( trainees )? Where do they buy their marine alloy from ( Russia)? How clean is the environment where the welding is done?

Imo aluminium is a very high tech product requiring very carefully controlled manufacturing processes , and I would only consider alloy made in a first world country like Europe or the States.

Summary: Aluminium welding should take place under laboratory conditions. (Not quite, but nearly!)

ChristineKling said:

He'd covered more like 4000 miles. We want to be able to do that.

Click to expand...

That's an important spec right there. It generally causes a jump to something like a Nordhavn or lately these Dashew types of boats. You'll find other trawlers that have made long passages but they are the exception, especially with 4,000 miles of range. Just for fun, you should examine a Nordhavn 46 as a possible off-the-shelf alternative to challenge your thinking about the Dashew type.

I came across the Dashews themselves in Maine a few years ago with their 60-something foot version. It definitely caught my attention. It's a very beautiful design with a lot of open space above the water line making it a wonderful liveaboard environment.

Christine, sure, I knew it was you!

Rustybarge said:

Re. The difficulty of welding aluminium, here's a recent short post on the boat design forum: welded and unwelded strength of Aluminum? - Boat Design Forums

The actual heat of welding reduces the strength of 5083 marines grade alloy by nearly half!

Could you get a professional job done in Turkey? What controls do they have on who can weld up your boat ( trainees )? Where do they buy their marine alloy from ( Russia)? How clean is the environment where the welding is done?

Imo aluminium is a very high tech product requiring very carefully controlled manufacturing processes , and I would only consider alloy made in a first world country like Europe or the States.

Summary: Aluminium welding should take place under laboratory conditions. (Not quite, but nearly!)

Click to expand...

Or Australia, or New Zealand, where in fact, where the Dashew's Windhorse was made..?

SetSail » Blog Archive » FPB 83 – Wind Horse

Rustybarge said:

Re. The difficulty of welding aluminium, here's a recent short post on the boat design forum: welded and unwelded strength of Aluminum? - Boat Design Forums

The actual heat of welding reduces the strength of 5083 marines grade alloy by nearly half!

Could you get a professional job done in Turkey? What controls do they have on who can weld up your boat ( trainees )? Where do they buy their marine alloy from ( Russia)? How clean is the environment where the welding is done?

Imo aluminium is a very high tech product requiring very carefully controlled manufacturing processes , and I would only consider alloy made in a first world country like Europe or the States.

Summary: Aluminium welding should take place under laboratory conditions. (Not quite, but nearly!)

Click to expand...

Thanks for that great reference to the Boatdesign.net discussion. Good stuff there. I admit that much of it is beyond my limited knowledge. Wayne will understand it far better than I do.

But the important question there is can we get a good professional welding job done in Turkey? That's very relevant because we don't intend to do the aluminum work ourselves and we are looking for a yard to get it to the "float away" stage where all the aluminum hull and superstructure is complete and then we will install the systems and build the interior.

We were stunned when we visited Turkey in 2014 and visited the many marinas and boatyards. Lots of super yachts are being built there. Check out Sunrise Yachts and Vicem Yachts. Both of those have yards in Antalya where they have a duty free zone for boat building. The super yachts are usually steel with aluminum super structure, so we looked for a yard that does all aluminum. We have contacted a yard that specializes in building aluminum sailboats, and we are talking with them. We want to keep our hull unpainted, and have it certified, so we need to have not only structural integrity and strength, but also beautiful welds that don't need pounds of filler to make them look good.

Peter asks why don't we have this boat built in NZ or Oz. Well, the honest answer is that we don't have the budget for that. In spite of the fact that their currency is down against the dollar at the moment, both countries costs of labor and standard of living (we will be living there for at least 3 years) are too high for our budget. Turkey has a highly skilled labor force. There is a great site for comparing the cost of living between two countries.

Yeah, but didn't Turkey just ave an attempted coup? This worries us lots. Wayne is flying to Turkey in 10 days to have a look around and to talk to various boatbuilders and cruisers and to try to gauge the environment. He will be asking questions like where do they get their aluminum and are big companies like Sunrise and Vicem pulling out because of the political climate. On the one hand, they are very hungry there at the moment because their tourism has tanked and their currency has dropped. We could take advantage of the situation to get very cheap labor. Then again, it could be a disaster. We're weighing the risk/reward situation. We have contacted another yard in Tunisia that is run by Frenchmen and using it as our current plan B. We were considering Thailand too, but it seems the yard where one of Kasten's boats was being built has gone belly up. At least their website dead ends now which is not a good sign.

I really appreciate all the interest here. Having to write things out helps me to clarify my own thinking, and I'm learning lots. Thanks.

Christine

Peter B said:

Or Australia, or New Zealand, where in fact, where the Dashew's Windhorse was made..?

SetSail » Blog Archive » FPB 83 – Wind Horse

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Yes indeed!

My fear would be that a shipyard in the third world would substitute low quality materials and use unqualified welders to fabricate the hull. I suppose the OP could supply the materials for the build , and get a reputable surveyor to supervise the build.

Sueing Turkish yard for bad workmanship could be an interesting process ,unless you're a personal friend of President Erdogen!

A steel boat could be successfully built absolutely anywhere; not so sure about aluminium?