We have a centre board design yacht design where the classes are 16, 18, 22 and 24 feet. Built for fishing in shallow tidal estuaries they had a generous sail plan for a downwind passage to market with the fish.
They are keenly raced today.
That excerpt seriously misrepresents the evolution of racing yacht class rules. The early history of the rules is covered in the classic 1933 book “Men Against The Rule” which ends with Herreshoff’s Universal Rule. I’ll try a tl;dr version of the history with the caveat that I am doing this from memory because my library is boxed for donation.
The first impetus for rules was handicapping. The idea was that you would measure various dimensions of a boat (typically sail area, LWL and displacement) and apply a formula which would yield the relative performance of the boat, typically called its “rating.” Races were held against the clock and times would be adjusted by each boats rating. The formulas were driven by a desire to produce “proper yachts” and avoid “freaks.” Good luck with that. Designers were motivated to find corner cases of the rating formulas where actual performance exceeded the estimate given by the rating. Eventually the use of rating rules evolved into the idea of classes defined by rating values. The US class rules in the heyday of rating rules were the aforementioned Universal Rule and were designated by letters of the alphabet, A being the largest and Z the smallest. Hence the famous J Class. European classes were typically defined by the International Rule or “Metre Rule” and designated by artificial lengths: Six Metre, Twelve Metre and so forth.
Post WWII saw the growth of other forms of rules: One Design, in which boats are (supposedly) identical, and “box rules” where a list of maximum and minimum dimensions are enforced.
As far as the final paragraph of that excerpt is concerned, my response is “true for some rules and false for others.”
Cheers,
Earl
“Once upon a time” makes it sound like nobody races “normal” sailboats any more! Nothing could be further from the truth. As they say, “All it takes is 2 sailboats going the same direction and in sight of each other.” But more formally, there are thousands of cruising and pleasure day-sailing boats that go out and race every week. Serious racers like one-design because there the guy you beat (theoretically) can’t blame his boat or his handicap. But cruising boats have been influenced by and racing to various handicaps for years. Used to be that the “latest” cruisers had shapes obviously influenced by some “rule” (IOR, CCA, etc), but nowadays, since many “corinthian” (amateur) sailors compete under local association PHRF rules, they tend to have the look of “what’s (thought to be) fast”. PHRF is probably the way to go because PHRF racing associations modify ratings according to real local experience with the actual design (or its close cousins). Still generates a lot of “sea lawyer” rating arguments in the pub, but probably better to argue about what the committee decreed about a particular design than accusing each other of cheating when the handicap measurer came around! What the rich people are doing way up at the top of the sailing world, building expensive boats that are only good for a year, if that, is not a concern of the majority of racing sailors in this country!
Makes sense. The “Interlude”, with that opening line, reminded me of the yacht Bayesian which was apparently designed to simulate a racing yacht while providing a luxury yacht experience for the guests.
“Once upon a time…”
That strikes me as way oversimplified.