Eric, I am not surprised that you used the airplane wings example like I did. We would sail the F35 next to a Seastream 34, a decent boat, and the F35 had to stall one of its sails to lower speed through the water to match the Seastream. I used to say sailing a F35 or F40 was like driving a Porsche amongst a bunch of ordinary Ford autos.
It’s a pity that no one is building boats with the rig of the original Freedoms any more. Did you ever sail the F39 pilothouse schooner designed by Ron Holland but with much input from Rob James, John Oakley, Anton Emmerton and me? The original version had wrap around sails and wishbone booms. Ron was delighted with the result. I tried to buy one in 2021, missed out by a day.
Chris, the closest I got to sailing a F39 pilothouse schooner was walking through one after she left the production line. Earlier, I was in a meeting with Everett Pearson, Garry Hoyt, and Ron Holland as the agreement was made to build the F39. My role was to design the masts for the F39 and stay apprised of her tooling up and production.
After nearly 40 years in the business, I am not surprised that there are no other builders of free-standing rigged boats, other than WylieCat. First, production boatbuilding is a mere shadow of it’s former self having shrunk so much. Second, the number of sailors and buyers has also shrunk tremendously. Third, building the masts requires special expertise for design and engineering that few people have, despite my efforts to keep it alive. In addition, manufacturing the masts requires a dedicated production line which requires special knowledge to set up and run, All that adds to the investment required to produce it. Even Wylie cat does not build their own masts. They come from a builder who uses the production line to produce other things. Fourth, with a shrinking market, it is exceedingingly difficult to amortise the investment in rig design and production over what would be a small number of finished sold, boats. And fifth and finally, as I said in my thoughts on the state of the art:
The boats just look funny.
A builder is faced with continually having to educate his potential customers on the advantages of the rig. It’s an extra effort that is required over and above just convincing a customer to put his leisure dollars (or pounds sterling or Euros) into buying a boat.
The F39 pilothouse was a schooner so the foremast was smaller than the mizzen. I assume that the one you walked through. Our intent was to have the wraparound wishbone as standard (on both masts) with the option of the more conventional track up the mast with fully battened sails (like the Gary Mull 45 and 38). I don’t know what was produced by Everett, Gary and Ron in the US versions. The design with both inside and outside steering drew from Fairways’s considerable experience with the Fishers. Considering that it was in the 1980s when the Oyster range was just starting to take off, we were ahead of most others. The idea was that you could see all around like on a Fisher when the weather was cold or wet but have the sailing ability of a Freedom and be self tacking.
The Fisher designers were Wyatt & Freeman. The model range was 46, 37, 34, 31, 30 and 25 We added bowsprits and twin foresails to the 46 and 37 enhancing sail performance. The Fishers had more powerful engines than pure sailing boats so you could both motor sail and punch into a head sea. The year was when a F35 sailed by John Oakley won the Round the Island Race with consummate ease starting an hour behind the OOD34 class of Jeremy Rodgers, at the time a hot design after the classic Contessa 32 (designed by David Sadler), and catching and passing every one of that class (I think about 20 racing that day). I put both a Fisher 37 and 34 in the race. It was wind against tide and Force 7 at the start. Our French dealer skippered the 34 and finished 4th out of over 1,800 participants helped by Jean-Luc never reefing and the strong winds. He and his crew of 3 sat in the wheelhouse, never donned wet gear, drank the good wines and ate the cold meats, saucisson, pates and cheeses J-L had brought over from France.
I have been on board a F39 pilothouse but never sailed one. The owner had changed the rig to a junk from the Freedom with wraparound sails and wishbone booms. He was a fan of junks. So I never saw one rigged as intended but I was impressed with the layout and space. It was intended to be our best seller after we had win the Whitbread with the 70. Frankly, we saw the future building Freedoms from 39ft LOA to 70ft LOA withe F70 as the three masted flagship. We would have gone down to 35ft perhaps. The bigger the boat, the better the profit margin. We need to remember that in Europe most marinas were designed to have 12m berths back then and a 40ft LOA was considered big. That has all changed.
You are right that the boats look funny. However, we would have reduced that “funny” with more and more Freedoms on the water and inevitably other large builders would have started to offer unstayed mast sailing boats in time. I used to call conventional boats biplanes and Freedoms monoplanes.
I am afraid that our monoplanes will gradually fade away if no one builds them any more. Nigel Irens, who became best known for his racing multihulls and wave piercing hulls, motor and sail, is another who embraced free standing masts. Roxanne and her smaller sister were examples, both yawls. He designed Roxanne for his own use and then had people who wanted one too. Nigel also designed larger monohulls with unstayed masts.
Chris, from what you describe I think the US version of the F39 pilothouse schooner was identical to the Fairways version. I had always thought that Garry had approached Ron Holland for the design, but it appears that it originated with you Fairways guys and Garry bought into it.
After Paul Petronello bought Freedom and Yachts shifted production to a different factory (an old C&C Yachts plant), he had the F39 pilothouse schooner redesigned to a conventional-looking F39 Express cat ketch. Link: https://sailboatdata.com/sailboat/freedom-39/
I don’t know the reasoning behind the changes, and I don’t know if Ron Holland was involved in the changes. Knowing Freedom, they likely did the redesign all in-house on the shop floor–little to no drawings or naval architecture.
Paul Petronello went onto develope Legacy Motoryachts in the same factory. I guess the Legacys were more profitable over the Freedom sailboats because the Legacys expanded while the Freedoms eventually halted production.
Which is reflective of the buyers market–people wanted more turn-key experiences with the motoryachts rather than have to learn how to sail. Certainly, the Freedoms were more turn-key and easier to sail than any other sailboat, still, they did not survive.
But we do have a devoted following as wittnessed by this Forum. Who knows what the future could bring??
I know Nigel Irens and am familiar with his free-standiing rigged boats. But I don’t see any production models coming from his design office. I haven’t heard from him in a long time, he’s probably retired by now.
A lot of sailing people graduated in later age from sail to motor. PAE, builders first of the Mason range of sailing boats and then Nordhavns, discovered that many of their buyers started with sailing but, when retired, bought a boat that could take them voyaging in comfort. Until someone sails a Freedom, they do not appreciate the benefits. I was trying to overcome the initial reaction to the unconventional looks by winning the coastal races and by winning the high publicity Whitbread. The 70 would have won the Whitbread and shaken up the sailing world.
The Freedom 39 pilothouse combined our knowledge of Freedoms with our knowledge of Fishers. I saw it as the best seller and we would have expanded the range upwards to fill the gap to the 70 in stages. Fairways built Fishers to a very high standard (as we did Freedoms). We could match Nautor’s Swans and the likes of Hinckley for quality of build. Proper sea-going vessels. My stepfather was a leading surveyor for insurance companies and he would tell me the horror stories of poorly built craft. Len had raced classic J boats in his youth before designing motor boats as Cox & Haswell.
I had in mind too to enter the market that Nordhavn occupies today later. Profits are made with larger boats. Gary wanted a Freedom that would compete with J24s in volume production.
I arranged the sponsorship for Nigel Irens to race his first trimaran in the Round Britain & Ireland race. Winning his class in that event put Nigel on the map for multi-hull designs, not my stunt to have him sail under an open Tower Bridge in the morning rush hour so IT82 featured on the front page of every national newspaper and on all the TV news channels with the spinnaker flying in the gentle breeze framed by the open bridge. The minister who came from the advertising world claimed that I had generated £1 million worth of publicity. May be. For Nigel’s career, his race performance with Tony Bullimore was what put him in the mind of the French ocean racing community.