Can a nautical someone explain why the crossing is estimated to take 3–4 months? I thought a crossing from the Canaries to the Caribbean was just a few weeks under good downwind sail.
> Though the term "hull speed" seems to suggest that it is some sort of "speed limit" for a boat, in fact drag for a displacement hull increases smoothly and at an increasing rate with speed as hull speed is approached and exceeded, often with no noticeable inflection at hull speed.
Which makes it sound like Hull Speed is not very relevant to look at, but later it also says:
> This very sharp rise in resistance at around a speed-length ratio of 1.3 to 1.5 [where hull speed is reach] probably seemed insurmountable in early sailing ships and so became an apparent barrier. This leads to the concept of 'hull speed'.
The page on Wave-Makign Resistance is related [2]. So it sounds like hull speed is not a hard limit (and is surpassed easily in powered boats or in specific boat designs like racing kayaks) but would be a reasonable upper bound for how fast this particular yatch could go even though nothing truly specific changes right at hull speed. Can anyone elaborate?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-making_resistance
There's many other variables (weight, beam, etc.), here's a fun one: we once rented a 25 footer mostly because it was incredibly cheap (something like 150 EUR for a week). It was surprisingly slow for its size, even in fairly involved wind where we needed engine help to tack it had trouble breaking past 5-6 knots, to the amusement of not-much-larger yachts that overtook us like a German traveling salesman on the Autobahn. I took a dive under to see what was up with the hull and was faced with a scene not too different from the rocky bottom of the sea: barnacles, algae, some of them trailing foot long appendices...
The OP "yacht" is very strange to me as it looks like the guy put a keel and a sail on a buoy. The sailing dynamics appear to involve pitching forward instead of heeling (leaning sideways). I'm amazed he can do as much as 2.4 knots.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CbJS_ZHs6g (Formula windsurfing)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ie5C1-b3w (Mirabaud LX: foiler, without hull)
The photos on this [1] page make me think of a keel welded to a sandblasting cabinet...
The shortest path is from Cape Verde to Brazil, around 1350 nm, but doldrums (area with not wind) is there, so not the smartest place to sail.
The solution for this vessel was to heavily ballast the vessel. With this comes a large sacrifice of speed.
It's notable that the prototypical ocean-crossing monohull could be said to be the Volvo Open series, which are used in the Volvo Ocean Race (a triannual race around the world). The LOA (full length) of these boats is 72.6 ft.