Page 329 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

weather. Many cruisers would have accepted this ting so far forward, where the hull narrows, means
as the price you pay for ease of handling (and Ellis adequate staying angle for the shrouds is hard to
has designed the line of Nonsuch unstayed catboats come by. Moving the mast aft would help this prob-
for them). But Scheu is a racer. No longer interested lem, but that would just mean more area cut out of
in the physical challenge of running the Stars and the mainsail by the backstay. The stick’s final loca-
Concordia yawls of his younger days, he was by no tion was a compromise between staying angle and
means eager to forgo the joys of passing other boats. sail area.
So, just as Bubak had wanted an efficient but
low-sweat, heavy-duty cruising boat, Scheu wanted Rig Details The rig is a three-quarter fractional,
a languorously attended racing catboat. Accord- with an extra bit of rigging in the area you’d usually
ingly, this ultimately simple rig was fitted with a expect to find a forestaysail: a removable forestay
whole raft of sail controls: adjustable jumpers and strut controls mast wobble below the forestay. If
backstay (the mast can be deflected fore-and-aft 20 a forestaysail were ever installed, this strut would
inches [508 mm]); high-powered vang and sheet have to be permanently removed and replaced with
traveler systems; a Cunningham; and single-line running backstays. In other words, removing a
reefing. All of this makes Otter more work than a labor-intensive sail made possible the elimination of
Nonsuch but much less work than any comparably a set of labor-intensive running backs. This leaves
efficient staysail-equipped boat. only one set of runners, at the top of the forestay, to
reinforce the diagonal jumper stays.
Two Design Challenges As originally designed, Otter had two sets of
Good designers seek to mesh rig and hull qualities, shroud spreaders, with the upper shrouds reaching
but they usually tailor the rig to a given hull or rac- to the height of the forestay, and diamond jumpers
ing rule. In this case, though, the hull was largely for lateral and fore-and-aft staying from there to the
molded by a single piece of standing rigging: The masthead. But do you see how long the mast sec-
backstay. tion above the forestay is? It’s a lot of mast for skin-
Otter’s main has to compensate, in size and ny-angle jumpers to control (compare with Trouba-
aerodynamic quality, for the missing staysails. But dor). Too much, in fact, since in initial sailing tests
the size of the main is limited by the presence of the the masthead sagged to leeward.
standing backstay, a piece of wire crucial not only Returning briefly to the drawing board, the Ellis
to rig integrity but also to mast-bending sailing effi- office moved the upper spreaders to the level of the
ciency. The obvious response is to make the mainsail forestay, added a third set of slightly longer spread-
very, very big, and Ellis has done this—note the high ers where the upper spreaders had been, ran the
aspect ratio, and the generous boomkin length that upper shrouds to the masthead for improved lateral
increases the backstay angle as far as practicable. staying, and beefed up a bit on the strength of the
But even with a heavily roached, full-batten main- standing rigging. In other words, having pushed the
sail filling every possible square inch of the resulting design envelope as far as they could with this novel
space, there’s just not enough area to move anything configuration, they grudgingly added weight and
but a notably light hull. And because of the hefty windage rather than compromise sailing efficiency
righting arm of such a tall rig, that hull also needs or rig integrity.
to be stiff. So Otter is almost three tons lighter than
a cruise-oriented Nonsuch 33, and has a deep keel The Freedoms
with all the ballast in a bulb at the bottom. Because of its standing rigging, Otter makes the
The first challenge was to modify the hull to most efficient use of its one big sail—at the price
accommodate limitations imposed by the rig. The of a considerable design challenge, focusing on the
second challenge is the hull’s revenge: The mast sit- relationship between standing rigging and hull. A

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