42' and 50' Cruising Yacht Designs

Mental Boxes of Sailboat Designers and Owners

 Mental Boxes of Sailboat Designers and Owners

 Professional boat designers work inside a set of mental boxes from which they seem unable to escape.

The most influential box limiting their ability is “what the customer wants. The problem is that many customers do not know what they want. Generally, they classify themselves as race sailors first and as cruising people secondly. This confusion of the customer is fed by the propaganda that surrounds racing and the myth of virility that is attached to cruising in a sailboat and is also influenced by the money the customer is willing to put up for his boat.

A person that is willing to put all he/she has in a sailboat wants it all. He is going to get the very most that his money can buy. Therefore, he wants a racing/cruise sailboat, or a cruising/race sailboat, depending where the emphasis lies in the individual. The super-rich who have money to burn want to show off. Many insist on being the fastest – to be the ‘bliddy’ winner! The modern boats concocted to please these people are floating monstrosities that can be obsolete before the race is finished. Most of them are losers.

The next mental box comprises the prevalent, major racing rules categories. This box makes any intelligent freedom of design impossible. Most of the boats manufactured in sizes over thirty feet that are scattered in the marinas of Europe and America look like carbon copies of each other, in sloop configurations only; all showing characteristic modern racing features.

Most  concepts for new designs progress around a table filled with people trying to defeat the rules, and coming up with graceless shapes and appendages that can endanger the life of the boat and her crew in attempts to get an unfair advantage in ocean racing.

 The problem with racing rules is that it makes a game of monopoly out of the art of sailboat design. When the racing designs are produced the owners are stuck with a sailboat that will be obsolete within a year or two; and if it is a hybrid racer/cruising sailboat, it  is a silly compromise of 2 contradictory classes of boat design. Such boats cannot live up to their promises and spent most of their days tied to the dock up for sale.

Let us face it, if a boat does not win the race it is a loser. Most people that want a cruising boat really do not want the racing features and, generally, such people are incapable, or unwilling to master the full use of its racing gear. Why sell him a hybrid racer/cruiser?

Conversely, if the person wants a racer, he will be disappointed with a slower boat. Why sell him a hybrid design?

The committee-approach of design forces the naval architect into other boxes called ‘convention’ and ‘intimidation’.

 Research and development is the third box that locks designers in a box. Customers demand R & D based on the rules that govern race boat designs. What a waste of research when the concepts are restricted to certain capricious rule restrictions.

Then there is the box of routine, previous education and experience. Professionals crawl eagerly into this box. The mind follows greased, grooved tracks of routine - governed by what was done previously and what proved ‘successful’.

The worst box to be forced into, however, is hype. Sports and racing are so hyped up that all sanity has left the readers, designers, crews and the owners. Sports hype is sure proof that we live in a propaganda driven society; reality went right out the door. America is a society of blind mice following blind-mice authority into a hype trap. The trap is a society fenced in on all sides, outwardly and internally, by rules, intimidation and constant betrayal from each other and the governing authorities. The US at one time was a country priding itself in unabashed liberty and freedom of choice. Now, because of massive shady dealings by unscrupulous authorities, we became a herd of mindless, domesticated animals.

We have become an effeminate society.

We have been hyped to death! There is no umpf left in most of us.

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