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Planing or surfing downwind on a F33 cat jetch

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:09 am
by whimsy
I just had a heck of a sail yesterday. In the Intra Coastal Waterway, an area that was pretty straight, and not *too* narrow or shallow, between Wrightsville Beach, and the New River Inlet. I started out motoring to get through the first two opening bridges quickly and predictably, but turned around after my second bridge and raised the main before turning downwind and sailing. I had my full 500 square foot junk main up, and it was blowing 10~15kt true, mostly ~150 degrees off the wind, sometimes dead downwind. I was sailing fast enough to not bother with my mizzen, averaging about my motoring speed of around 6kt.

While I waited for the Surf City bridge for half an hour motoring into the wind (hard to slow down when dead downwind under sail!), winds had built to 15~20kt true, so I reefed one panel of my main. It is still bigger than the stock mainsail of a Freedom 33, however. I motorsailed through the bridge (I was wanting to make that extra knot since traffic is waiting, and the bridge tender had the nerve to tell me I wasn’t supposed to sail through the bridge!?!?!)

Then I killed the engine, and my fantastic sail continued. I was soon going as fast as I had been under full sail, wind was the same direction, and building. Soon my knot meter (not well calibrated; I think it underfeeds by almost a knot) was telling me that I was going over 6kt, getting close to 7kt.

As the wind started building to 25kt, I started to notice that when it gusted or built up a bit, things felt different. It felt like Flutterby was climbing up onto her bow wave, although I’ve not done that on a sailboat (keelboat anyhow) before. The waterline at the transom got up almost to the top of the tiller arm scupper, although water didn’t splash up through the grate. I saw speeds (on my poorly calibrated and likely underreading knot meter) climb up to 8.0kt occasionally and was spending a lot of time up over 7.5kt. This was very narrow and thus protected waters, with at most 1-2 foot chop, so I cannot imagine that there were any waves big enough for Flutterby to surf down.

Is this normal sailing when the wind gets up like this? (Perhaps a little higher with standard sails, or perhaps with both sails up; I’ve got extra sail area, even with one panel reefed) I'm pretty sure I remember somebody mentions a really fast reaching passage on an F33 here or in the yahoo group.

I’m also wondering if I should worry about my main mast in these conditions? I did see it flexing some, as the sail twisted and moved a bit.

Re: Planing or surfing downwind on a F33 cat jetch

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2016 5:55 pm
by marno
I have a 39 Express and while heading for Panama, about 200 miles off the coast of Colombia in a large following swell, we were steering with the wind vane. Everything went quiet while I was on watch and I looked up and found that the GPS showed around 18 knots as we surfed down the waves. The main mast does flex, but nothing really out of the ordinary.

Re: Planing or surfing downwind on a F33 cat jetch

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2016 2:11 pm
by whimsy
Well, I had another day of doing something similar. This time it was in Bogue Sound, approaching Morehead City, and the winds were a bit lighter (at least at first!), so I was sailing with full sails up, both main and mizzen. It was fun and comfortable in 15 knots. As the wind built, and I got a bit more exposure to waves, I started feeling a bit out of control, and started reducing sail.

This time I only hit speeds of 7~7.5 on my (dubious) knotmeter, but I did feel the way the boat was moving through the water start to change again. I also noticed that I hardly slowed down as I reduced sail, so perhaps this hull only gets to the semi-planing stage without a wave to surf down....or a tolerance for feeling less in control than I currently have!