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Comment by dguest | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to understand how a sailing yacht has a pool on the aft deck. Do boats this size not heel much or is there some clever way to prevent all the water pouring out?

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When sailing, you more or less choose your angle of heel (subject to trade offs of speed and heading). In any kind of respectable wind you do not “slosh”, the angle of heel affects the effective area of the sail to the wind and forms a sort of stabilizing feedback loop. You go up and down over the waves, and sometimes have a lateral oscillation across them, but rolling is minimal.

Now, once you anchor, if there are waves coming from a direction other than the bow (because they refract around whatever is sheltering you), and those waves are roughly the natural period of oscillation of your boat’s roll… then you get things flying out of cabinets and trying to sleep while clinging to your bunk. Scaling up to a mega yacht makes your roll period long enough that it isn’t so much of a problem.

All that said, I’m sure they have tanks for the pool water, since it is probably fresh water.

They have stabilisers to stop them rolling side to side

That prevents the rolling, but do they use those to prevent the constant heeling that sailing cross-wind causes?

I edited my comment since I guess "sloshing" was the wrong word for a constant incline.

Maybe it is drained to a holding tank down near the keel to add stability. And when at anchor, they pump it back into the pool.

I shouldn't mention this probably but I watch Below Deck on the Bravo channel which follows the crews of charter yachts. One of which is a sailboat with a hot tub. I think you are right, when it's sailing (which seems to be rather infrequently), the hot tub is drained somehow.

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