More than just a book about sailing, Go for the Green is a clarion call to bring sailing out of the doldrums and into an expanded role as a catalyst for the more environmentally sensitive enjoyment of the sea. As a former Coast Guard Officer, active racer, cruiser and yacht designer, author Garry Hoyt combines a lifetime of sailing experience, with a weather eye to uncover the new challenges of global warming and the need for energy independence. His prediction that carbon based fuels will eventually draw the same degree of social scorn that smoking now receives, creates an automatic need for ingenuity in the harnessing of sail and solar power as better alternatives for water based recreation. To encourage readers along that path, Hoyt presents a philosophy and a variety of new design solutions to stimulate more creative design development. He makes his case in a simple, readable style that will interest all those who love the sea.

GO FOR THE GREEN

By Garry Hoyt

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Garry Hoyt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-4809-5

Contents

Part I New Considerations........................................................................xiIntroduction.....................................................................................xiiiChapter 1-The Evolving Fortunes of Sail Power....................................................1Chapter 2-Single Handed Sailing Skill............................................................16Chapter 3-Wanted-A Small Boat That Adults Can Quickly And Safely Single Hand.....................20Chapter 4-The Sail Resort........................................................................25Chapter 5-The New Nature of "Day Sailing"........................................................29Chapter 6-Bring Back the Reach...................................................................32Chapter 7-A Better Way for Olympic Sailing.......................................................34Chapter 8-The Computer Assisted Atrophy of the Mind's Eye (CAAME)................................37Chapter 9-The High Cost of Low Price Petroleum...................................................40Chapter 10-What Need For Speed?..................................................................42Chapter 11-The Cascading Connectivity of Things..................................................45Part II Design Solutions.........................................................................49Introduction.....................................................................................51Chapter 1-Back To The Future-The Square Rig Returns..............................................53Chapter 2-The Hoyt Off set Rig (HOR).............................................................60Chapter 3-The Nantucket Bay Skimmer..............................................................71Chapter 4-The Quadrilateral Staysail Rig.........................................................75Chaper 5-The Caravel.............................................................................79Chapter 6-Multihull Applications of HOR..........................................................82Chapter 7-The Hoyt Jib Boom (HJB)................................................................86Chapter 8-The Balanced Hoyt Jib Boom (BHJB)-(Patent Pending).....................................93Chapter 9-Solar Electric Power As The Natural Ally Of Wind Power.................................100Chapter10-The Solar Cell Sail As New Dual Purpose Power..........................................105Chapter 11-Reprise...............................................................................108ABOUT THE AUTHOR.................................................................................112

Chapter One

The Evolving Fortunes of Sail Power

This is not a detailed history, but rather a conceptual review of where Sail has been with an eye to where it needs to go in the future. Technical points will be made in non-technical terms.

For perspective, it is important to recognize that for roughly three thousand years, sailing represented the preeminent technology of its day. Because sailing was the exclusive means of distance travel, trade, exploration, and military power. There is probably no other technology that matches sailing's sustained impact on the course of history and the spread of civilization. Sail ranks right up there with the wheel as a vital link in human progress because sail was literally the prime medium of discovery that opened up the modern world.

This then is a legacy of serious importance, and it is instructive to follow how sail technology has progressed and also how it has been slowed and distracted. Persistent market decline, particularly in the U.S., needs to be addressed. Here it is necessary to note that sailing technology cannot realistically be separated from sailing commerce because the two are highly interdependent. And so when markets fail or falter, it is often because technology has not fully kept pace with new circumstances and new competitive alternatives.

When we talk of sailing it is also important to separate sail from other more frivolous recreational diversions such as golf, or tennis, or bowling or basketball or baseball. All of these are artificial activities devised purely for amusement or exercise, they have no practical roots, nor do they aspire to any. Sailing, in contrast, is a very natural endeavor that sprang directly from practical need. From the earliest days man needed to get across large bodies of water as rapidly and reliably as possible for the business of fishing, of commerce, or warfare or exploration or carrying people and news.

Speculating about origins, one can reasonably suppose that wood's inherent power of flotation and the ability of flotation to lessen the carrying load, was easily and early observed. Lacking was something to add propulsion and mobility to flotation. Sail emerged as the best, indeed the only means to accomplish this, because it combined an abundant, free source of power, the wind, with an ability to function with a variety of the crudest shapes made with the simplest materials.

Thus the early cave man, seated astride a floating log, discovered that by spreading an animal skin, he could be blown in the direction of the wind, with more speed and less effort than by paddling. We can also imagine that these early cave man sailors rather quickly tired of the frequent tip overs that were the inevitable price of spreading sail atop a rolly log. A log is the prime example of a hull form with no form stability. Form stability is the stability that is derived from the shape of the hull, as opposed to stability derived from the weight of ballast. Resolving this issue of stability was an early on sail problem, and remains so today.

By way of solution, these early sailors figured out that lashing together two or three logs made a crude but stable raft that could carry more people, or a slain deer or whatever. Of course carrying more weight sank the log raft lower in the water, which increased the drag of wetted surface, which made the raft slower and quickly established the need for more sail power. And so they had to spread more animal skins to the wind via supporting sticks. And since holding up sticks with skins was hard hand work, they figured out how to tie vines to the sticks to hold them in place, and so rigging was born.

Of course crude log rafts with crude skin sails could really only go dead downwind, which was not necessarily where you wanted or needed to go. So somebody got smart, stuck a paddle vertically between the logs and discovered that by creating lateral resistance, the raft could be made to sail at right angles to the wind with reduced slipping sideways. That opened up another 180 of the compass. Not perfect, but markedly better than the hard work of constant paddling.

The critical, remaining problem was how to go against the wind, a move that defies logic. When you can take a strong natural force that's blowing against you and convert it to a drive force pushing you forward the other way, that's pretty neat, sort of like defying gravity. That's was sailing does quietly, naturally, with no cost and no pollution, a considerable feat that sets sailing apart from any other form of propulsion.

It can be seen that right from the very start that all the basic problems of sailing had to be faced and to some degree solved. These problems still exist for the most sophisticated designs of today, and they can be...