The Denney Inquisition Part 3: Jzerro; She's All Wet by Steven Callahan

posts by Steven Callahan to proa_file forum:

Part 2(b): Jzerro, that miserable dog
"your logic defies logic", May 10

comments: May 24
a disservice to those really interested in proas, Stay tuned for more, stiffening of the beams, the hull flying, Jzerro did not fail as a boat, overtake waves when running, water ballast, solid water on the deck, anything but academic, "constantly" meaning regularly

Part 4: Those Islanders; What Where They Thinking? May 24

comments: May 25
did not have to shift ballast frequently on Jzerro, method of determining RM, adding to higher levels of normal stress on the beams, excess RM can be as much of a problem as too little, it is futile and is simply to reply to utter nonsense

repetitious and conscious deceptions
Sep 8, 2011

Rob, get real. 18 point reply Sep 8, 2011

beam loads Sep 10, 2011

freedom 20 masts Sep 26, 2011

so long ProaFile Sep 26, 2011

www.stevencallahan.net

Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about getting wet. If you like the water, you shouldn't mind getting some of it on you now and then. Some of the best watches of my life have been while sitting in exposed cockpits in rain and/or spray. I've often left the comfy confines of a pilot house or dodger to roam the boat as it careens over large waves. That's why God invented foul weather gear. And maybe it should be up to the individual to decide whether to go the conceptual route of the Inuit who insulates and protects his/her body with efficient clothing, or the more wasteful Euor-American who prefers to burn up way more resources heating a large space so he/she can roam about in winter in his/her undies.

That said, I have extolled in print and otherwise, the numerous virtues of inside steering and control stations, which offered shorthanded crews so many advantages since 1960 and the early days of OSTAR and other adventure races. Since then, efficient pilot houses have thankfully become more popular, protecting crews from hypothermia and fatigue while new deck layouts and devices have allowed them to operate the boat from a protected position. Even my smallest designs, including a 12-foot micro-voyager and 6.5-meter pocket cruiser feature such protection, though the former was within the hull and cabin itself. One can fit a protected exterior control station—Doghouse, pilot house, or hard dodger–on any type of craft, pacific proa included, if that is your bent. Like everything on a boat, each has its advantages, and drawbacks. Had Jzerro really been designed as an offshore craft, perhaps it would have been prudent to build a dodger on her. But short of building it with unobtanium, any such shelter is going to involve cost, complication, and weight. And that does not suit Jzerro's particular purpose. She just happened to find herself out there, where we asked her to go. And frankly, that was part of the charm. It was like camping on the sea to a degree I had not felt since bobbing around the Atlantic in a life raft. Only the life raft was quite miserable while aboard Jzerro we could do lots of miles quickly while living well.

But whether or not the crew stays dry has nothing to do with the type of boat or whether the boat itself is wet or dry, as Denney implies when he says his boats are completely dry because the crew never gets wet. Frankly, I find that claim way too hard to believe, although there are some boats dryer than others, and I would not claim that Jzerro is particularly dry. This is no real fault of the type of boat but of the chosen design compromises. The boats that are dryer would, I believe, be bigger, higher sided, slower, or some combination of these.

Over the last 40 years, I have sailed a number of boats capable of doing 10 knots or better upwind, and none have been particularly dry in the typical choppy conditions that allow them to do so, particularly boats as small as two tons or less, like Jzerro. Offshore, they've included such boats as Moxie (winner OSTAR 1980), City of Birmingham (winner Round Britain), and other multihulls, as well as some open-class monohulls and ULDBs. When you're clicking upwind, there will be spray. Further, on a close to beam reach in decently large ocean seas, I don't know any boat immune to waves smacking the topsides now and then and sending showers of spray aloft. I suppose Harryproas are fit with some kind of force field to make them the one exception in the world. But I will confess that there was spray on Jzerro in all these conditions. In fact, we spent a good deal of time sailing upwind on our trip, and at least twice through several days of really gnarly seas. En route from the Marquesas to Tahiti we met near-gale easterlies (opposite the usual trades, and opposing the current), which drove a number of boats aground in the Tuamotos. Yes, it was wet. But we made headway steadily and efficiently.

Spray is not the sailor's enemy, really, anyway. It is a nuisance, and one relieved by a good protected control station. On Jzerro, that was below, as on my micro-cruiser. The cabin's ports provide a 360-degree view of the outside. The self-steering control line to tillers (actually more like fore-and-aft whipstaffs) runs totally exposed so you can drive the boat from there by either self-steerer or grabbing the line. Also, you can reach out through the companionway when the wash board is removed to nudge the helm should you want.

Jzerro is hardly wet all the time, though. More often than not, we stayed on deck relishing the environment without getting wet at all. Reaching in brisk seas, we often steered outside all day doing 8 or more with nary a drop on deck. Even in 10 footers, broad reaching or running, the deck remained virtually dry. Designer Paul Bieker recalled how he once watched an apple happy to rest on Jzerro's foredeck all afternoon one day as they sailed down big seas. In fact, in those times when it was truly wet on deck it was while going upwind or close-to-beam reaching in conditions that would have thrown prodigious amounts of spray all over any of the dozens of boats I have sailed offshore.

If she had wave-piercing style ends, Jzerro might not throw so much spray, but more solid water would board her ends, and that's the bitch. You can dampen motion by slicing through waves, but it's hard on crew if they find themselves in the way. I have sailed on boats, mostly conservative and stout monohulls of size, which routinely scoop up solid sea. When you're getting literally picked up and washed down the deck, a bit of spray begins to seem, well, a trifle. And though lighter, higher performance boats of pretty much any stripe are going to stir up quite a bit of the light stuff, it's solid water on deck that is the real challenge to both crew and gear.

There certainly is a place for wave-piercing shapes. They have very much succeeded in dampening motion while cutting through seas. And if confined to portions of the hull(s) on which no crew is likely to tread, there is no reason not to exploit them. In fact, if I were to design a proa, it might maintain the general main-hull shape of Jzerro, but would revert to a more traditional form for ama with much less volume and wave-piercing shape. As it was, Jzerro's hulls worked just fine and are still working fine.

Brown has followed Dick Newick's lead in hull shapes, which provides generous arcing of the sheer to the bow and flare forward to provide lots of reserve buoyancy near the deck and dynamic lift as the water rises. This allows a finer entry closer to the water, for speed and to soften the motion when the bow encounters a wave, digging deeper in and slowing the boat as it also reacts and climbs, keeping the deck above water. A drawback of such a shape is that it peels the water away and shoots it out as spray where the wind picks it up and blows it off downwind. If the boat is cranking along, by the time it lands, it may be right in the cockpit. In Jzerro's case, you sit further forward in the boat than in a trimaran, and you do get spray especially from the windward side of the bow. Also, even reaching/running the leeward side's flare of bow wave can be partially picked up on the top of the pod. I never saw any make it aft to the middle of the pod before sliding off to leeward. The lee canvases help to deflect some spray, but are small and have some big gaps around them. They serve more as light expansions of deck on which to work, temporarily park an anchor or rode, or similar. One could expand the deck area in such a way to enhance spray deflection, but it would weigh more and cost more, etc. In any case, Jzerro's proportions for the "Newick-style" of bow appears pretty perfect to me. I have never seen her bury her head downwind or up, which includes conditions that would have buried many other bows on boats with which I've had experience. Sometimes you swear she must bury the nose as she drops down some precipice or heads into a five-foot wall of chop, but she never significantly slows and her hull rises before solid water reaches the deck, and the water peels away where it ends up . . . you guessed it: spray.

So again we see Denney's highly flawed logic in claiming a boat is dry just because it has a doghouse, and that another type of boat is inferior because one design does not have such crew protection. Crew protection and dryness of boat are almost totally unrelated issues that he tries to make identical, and neither has any direct relevance to a general type of boat but to the specifics of the design, particularly of the hull shapes, displacement, and performance envelope. And just because Jzerro can be wet doesn't mean it is always wet. Far from it. As always, he picks and chooses and takes out of context to purposely torture the truth, which is more laced with shades of grey and complex details tied to specific conditions and other context than is convenient for his manifestos. It does not serve actual knowledge, but it does extol the supposed virtues of his own designs which evidently are the only boats ever created that do not entail design compromises but, like the fairytales of our childhoods, contain only sugar-coated superlatives.

As a designer myself, however, until actually shown it works better than other approaches, I would never consider mating a totally wave-piercing hull on the side of a proa with the mast to a wave-resistant hull on the other, as on the long slim leeward hull of a Harryproa matched to the short, voluminous and comparatively stubby hull to weather. Seems to me, in a seaway, you've got all accelerator on one side and all brake on the other. Just doesn't look right. But hey, if it works cool, that's fine by me. I do find Rob Denney's report on the one time he encountered some gnarly chop of interest. Let's listen in to message 20245 posted by Mr Denney on 12 April 2008:

"Rare Bird (the boat in the video) crossed a bar with 3m/10' standing waves. It went through one of them with no damage or loss of control. We know the waves were 3m high as the open topped boom was full of water and it is 10' above the waterline.

You mean, the entire main hull was buried under solid water up to the booms? Wow! Is it just me, or does that sound scary to anybody else? Guess that is an advantage of putting that wave-piercing hull down there under the rig. Then when your crew becomes a nuisance, you can send them down there to reef or tend to some other rig problem.

And what was the main hull doing while all this was happening? When you've got that egg slamming into vertical walls of water, don't tell me it cuts through them like butter.

In any case, we're talking about a good deal of solid water on the deck, as well as spray. By Denney's own description, this hardly denotes a dry boat. Maybe passengers stay dry in the pilot house, but again, this is a separate issue from whether or not the boat is dry, and what kind of water it routinely and even rarely lets aboard.

In my next post, I will run down a brief list of the issues about which I disagree with Rob Denney regarding Russell Brown's Jzerro and other boats. It is a far longer list than the one or two he acknowledges, as anyone who has followed these posts can easily see. In fact, I agree with him about virtually nothing as it regards Jzerro and only some of what he concludes about many other aspects of design. But to tackle them all would take a very long time because the issues are not as cut and dried as he would like. Generally, he will conclude something as absolute and pertaining to all conditions. If I say we shifted ballast in Jzerro constantly (NOT continuously as he claims, but rather on a regular basis) to suit shifting conditions during a 4,000-mile voyage, he wants me to have said we were doing nothing but lugging back and forth tons of equipment all day long. Although the article makes this clear, and my explanations since in these posts have had the space to explain this in more detail—that the ballast we're talking about is usually a small anchor and that we shifted such ballast regularly but not more than ten times during that voyage—he refuses to let it go, but continues to bash Jzerro for something I supposedly wrote. One really can't effectively deal with such an onslaught, and as much as this group may deserve better than either Denney or I can offer, going on about it serves little purpose.

Basically, I have slowly tried to fill out the story about Jzerro and my experience with proas, including how I reference features and experience with other boats I've sailed. I haven't done it for Denney who is obviously so taken with his zealotry that no reason or further explanation or copious correction of facts will even get him to stop repeating the same old crap again and again. He relies on the backwards logic that I am the original source, so knew what I wrote, but when I point out that his quotes are not real quotes, that he has eliminated essential context, and that many conclusions are just outright wrong, then suddenly I become an unreliable source. Such a zealot will never acknowledge he is wrong about Jzerro and pacific proas in general, nor will he even confine himself to writing about stuff he knows about and just stop repeating the same disinformation again and again. He would be more accepted by folks like me if he would spend half the time he has on this site spilling out his propaganda and spent the energy instead on proving his own boats, saving up the very few bucks it really does require to go off voyaging (if this is wrong, I'd better tell several dozen friends of mine who have been voyaging on shoestring budgets for many decades), to actually DO something other than selling plans. But then again, that would require more than just talk. No, Denney is unlikely to ever want to hear anything other than what he needs to hear. Instead, I have offered these notes for those still with open minds, who can see nuance and possibility. Whether one believes in the Harryproa approach or Brown's, there still is a lot of opportunity out there. I for one want to seize more of it, and since summer is coming and building a house and sailing and such from the real world calls, I will only sporadically contribute to this site, save my upcoming last long missive. Good luck and fair winds to all.

The Denney Inquisition Part 3: Jzerro; She's All Wet by Steven Callahan, May 10, 2008 - (#20614) posted to Proa File International (groups.yahoo.com/group/proa_file)