by Daen on Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:55 am
I reckon that Scott is right about wooden boats being fine for the first year or so, but progressively less competitive after that.
What makes a hull fast or slow anyway? The main things are the shape, weight (and its distribution) and stiffness.
It can't be the shape, since the dominant YMS is a mould off a (more than ten year old) wooden boat anyway. Glass boats are pretty hard to build down to weight (my new YMS only has 400g of correctors, not several kilos as mentioned in some other posts), so it can't be that either. Distribution might matter a little in waves, but Perth was flat anyway so it wouldn't have made much difference. Stiffness may be the issue, when the wooden boats get old. Two experiments are probably worthwhile - one would be to build a ply hull and sheath the floor in carbon (illegal - but just as a trial). The other would be to have one of the top sailors try a newish timber boat in a regatta.
There is one other thing that might make a difference, and that is stiffening the front of the centreboard case in the timber boats. Even with a new one, you can flex the front of the case quite easily. This can't be good!
I have a few other theories though. One is that all the fibreglass boats are fast, whereas there is huge variation in the wooden ones. Building a wooden boat to the right shape is a bit of a black art, and its finest proponents are either not building boats any more, or building very few. As fewer wooden boats are built, we are increasingly comparing new fibreglass boats to 10-year old wooden ones. And the really serious sailors will always have newish boats.
This is largely a perception problem. Jack Felsenthal sailed a timber boat to second in the Victorian states, beating all of this year's nationals top 5 except Scott (ask Scott if Jack was slow!), plus some other very good sailors.
Looking at the fleet in perth, there were so many things that differentiated the sailors. People starting on the third row, tacking into dirty air, not hiking properly, sitting like a pudding in the boat on the run and so on. None of these are the boat's fault. Murray Smith was probably the only person in the fleet who was genuinely held back by his equipment. I think his hull would have to be 15 years old, and struggled downwind although he was often up with the leaders at the top mark (in fact, a leg in front in one race!)