Unfortunately the design that is proposed is not the one above but this one on the right, with an old looking bow!
The Grand Soleil have been visually handicapped by a designer that has insisted in shaping transoms and bows the way he has been doing for more than 12 years, ignoring all evolution of the past decade, that has been huge.
Now Grand Soleil changed designer for the new 44 Performance and chose Matteo Polli. I thought that they were on the right way since Polli has been designing yachts that are winners on the ORC championship, like the M37 or the racers from Italia Yacht and certainly the hull looks nice, the transom looks effective and modern but the bow.....
Giving just a tad more buoyancy to that bow making it slightly inverted will just result in adding a little bit more LWL to the boat, it is not going to undermine its performance and it even may help a little in getting the bow out of the water under geenaker at planing speeds and certainly will make the boat look much, much better.
Well Paulo, I am not sure the standing on "new" design really improve the sailing
ReplyDeleteI said that on the post. Even if it improves a bit due to a bigger LWL and more buoyancy at the bow (downwind) the improvements would be minimal.
DeleteIt is not about performance ir is about "looks".
It could not improve the performance but certainly would not make it worst and for sure the sales would be improved LOL.
Paulo, While I usually agree with most of your comments, I respectfully disagree with this write up. In terms of sailboat design, beauty largely derives from the function of the boat and the functional purpose of the element being examined. Hatchet bows (i.e. bows with tumble home) only make sense on very high speed boats. A hatchet style bow does nothing useful on a performance cruiser or a dual purpose cruiser. Raking the bow aft means that the boat will take a lot more water over the deck and will have harsher wave impacts upwind, in exchange for an immeasurable reduction in pitching.
ReplyDeleteWith that in mind, putting a hatchet bow on this boat, would be reminiscent of the affectation of adding tail fins to automobiles back in the 1950's and 1960's.
Respectfully,
Jeff
Then we agree in disagreeing LOL, at least partially.
DeleteBeauty in a sailboat, except if it is a classic beauty (that is something that has some nostalgic ideal from the past as a model) has to do not directly with a better functional purpose but mostly with a trend that is set by the fastest sailing racing yacht’s shapes.
For many years that trend had to do with the shapes that performed better on handicap racing, IOR and then IRC/ORC and today mostly with offshore open sailboats, or being more precise, box rule offshore racing sailboats.
And today most of the new designs among those boats have inverted bows. The reason has to do with increasing buoyancy in that area and their design has nothing to do with the bows of motorboats even if both are inverted. I am not discussing here the design (not the place) and the important fact is that they become new design main trend in what regards open boats for good reason.
Regarding an inverted bow taking more water only if they are designed like the ones of the motorboats and it is not the case, taking more water or not has to do with the design of a particular bow and I remember Alex Thompson saying that the inverted bow of his boat (the previous one) made it drier.
As to being kind of an affectation, like the tails on American cars on the 50's and 60's, obviously not because they are used on top racers where everything has to do with a better performance including the bows.
Regarding the particular case on the Grand Soleil, if you have read the article you would have seen that I said that on that case was more a question of looks than efficiency. In fact the GS 44 is not a top performance boat and even if the raking of the bow towards the front, performancewise, does not make any sense, the advantages of raking on the other sense, without a complete redesign of the bow are probably inexistent.
In this case as in the case of most cruising boats that have assumed the looks of offshore racers, in what regards bow design or transom design the advantages are very few, if any, but makes them look good, aesthetically speaking.
Nothing new about that, as I have pointed out beauty in sailboats has always been related with the shape of the fastest sailingboats. Pascal Conq has done a very nice article about that.
And that is why the GS 44 Performance looks bad with that bow that is not associated, not even with modern IRS top racers (that have straight bows due to rating) even less with new top open ocean race performers that have inclined bows.
That makes that bow look old and displaced on a new performance design, because it refers to the past, not to the present, much less the future.
Still this is a fine looking boat and very exciting one. The transom and the lines are gorgeous, the interiors seems functional. Nicely done Mr Polli and good move from Del Pardo. I wish Italia didnt revert to Cossuti for the 14.98...
DeleteAfter an interesting exchange of views with Mark Mills it seems to me that I have to clarify that I call an inverted bow to any bow that has a rake aft, meaning that on a lateral plan the top is more aft than the bottom.
DeleteIt seems that there are many, including Jeff amd Mark that associate exclusively the term inverted bow to the ones that are used on high speed motorboats or on the amas of high speed trimarans, the ones Jeff calls a hatchet style bow and because we are not talking about the same thing confusion is inevitable.
When I say that an inverted bow is used to maximize buoyancy and at the same time reduce the weight there I am talking about contemporary bows used by some of the fastest sailboats, for instance Charal or Hugo Boss IMOCAs, that have what I call an inverted bow serving those principles in an extreme way.
https://www.imoca.org/mediacenter/uploads/xl/190804_lloyd_hugoboss_051.jpeg
https://www.vendeeglobe.org/medias/05/01/50145/image-r-1680-1200.jpg