Phosphate Strip Mining

I have sailed boats, both large and small, for something close to sixty- five years now, seventy if you count the little skiff my father built for me when I was six. I find that many architects take up sailing at some time in their lives. Perhaps it is the harnessing of the natural elements, the use of a beautiful boat, and the endless variations of personal skill that are required in sailing that makes so many of us like sailboats. It is stark function and poetry, all at once, and perhaps it is this combination that draws some of us into the practice of architecture in the first place.

While my father's career was with the engineering side of the Navy, he was a designer of small sailing boats when off duty. My sloop "Annie" is one of his designs, built perfectly by George Luzier in Sarasota thirty- three years ago. We lived and cruised aboard this wooden boat a lot over those years. It is like living in a piece of sculpture. The shapes delight the eye as no building ever can for me, for they are shapes born of function. I have owned several boats in my life, all built by dedicated builders in wood, and the time I have spent sailing them has been as happy as any man has a right to expect.

I have never owned any but wooden boats. Wood is pleasant to touch and it smells good, which glass boats do not. With glass the structure is, at least on the expensive boats, wallpapered over with wood. With a real wood boat one can see the honest structure of the boat, which is quite beautiful of itself. Modern glues and building techniques have made wooden boats about the same for maintenance as glass, or better than some of the cheaply made production boats.

In the last few years I have taken up the study of the design of sailing boats. There are about a half dozen good books on the subject. The one I enjoy most was written by my father. He was a very good explainer, and although he is no longer here (he would be 111 this August) I can hear his voice when I read the book, and his lucidity leaves me no questions. Boat design is quite different from building design, and I approach the subject with considerable humility for in boat design one is not tested by building inspectors, lawyers, and clients, but by the elements themselves.

Rules of thumb

Sailing boat design has a number of mathematical parameters, really rules of thumb, which have been handed down over the last several hundred years. Ship design became "scientific" in the eighteenth century. Yet the design of a sailing boat is really anything but a science, for one must have an "eye for a boat" as well. Experience with all sorts of conditions in sailing boats is necessary too.

Unlike buildings, sailboats are not static and whether or not they are successful is not at all subjective, as it is quite apt to be with buildings. Either they sail or they don't. A boat designer sketches, checks the mathematics of displacement, stability, balance, trim and dozens of other functions and then makes the required revisions, to do the whole routine again. Design is a matter of fit and try.

Eventually when a design looks about right a half or a full model is made to be viewed from a number of angles for proportion and fairness. Most designers make only one side of the hull (a half model) for the sides are identical. The old timers did it the other way around, first carving a hull model by eye, and then taking the lines off the model. They used intuition born of experience and little in the way of mathematics. Today larger boats, ocean racers, naval vessels, cup racers and the like have large models made and "tank tested" with model performance scientifically calibrated, a very expensive operation. Sometimes several models are made and tested of variations in a design, to see which variations perform best.

It is the discipline of non-subjective performance that so fascinates this designer of buildings. One can make a fine argument for the functional delights of living, say, in a lighthouse should one like the aesthetics of lighthouses. But a sailboat that capsizes or lacks balance and runs up into the wind cannot be explained away by any philosophy of aesthetics the way that a building can.

This is a half model of Fairwind, Seibert's design that won the "Classic Boat" magazine 2004 design contest for sailboats. The boat was designed for cruising to the Bahamas and Belize from Boca Grande. "Classic Boat" is a British magazine with worldwide circulation. Furnished photo

This is "Annie" sailing out Boca Grande Pass on a perfect day. Life at its best!

Oddly, the history of aesthetics of yacht design has often been as illogical and perverse as that of buildings. Around the turn of the century fishing schooners began to have educated professional naval architects, who copied the looks of the yachts of the time. In the late twenties and thirties yacht designers, particularly John Alden, copied back the looks of the fishing schooners.

Rating for racing

Rating, or handicap rules, designed to permit boats of different sizes to race against each other, have also had an extraordinary effect on sailboat design. One older rule was written around waterline length (the function of speed is as the square root of the waterline length) and this rule resulted in long overhangs. In the rule rating the boat the waterline was measured with the boat vertical, but as a boat heels the overhangs become immersed, thus lengthening the waterline and so allowing a greater (theoretical) hull speed. Some laymen still consider long graceful overhangs as "yachty", but this feature is really the result of "beating a rule" in the early twentieth century.

In general, designing to rating rules today consists of giving up the least speed for the greatest rule advantage, and many "racers" are really quite slow on a boat for boat basis, although most laymen don’t know this. Today sailing on Charlotte Harbor one will see dozens of features on sailboats developed to fulfill rating rules which are really useless or even counterproductive if you don’t race, which relatively few of us do. A fleet of copycats! In this boat design has become like bad building design.

Since World War II designs have gotten worse as landsmen have taken up designing boats for other landsmen. The sport of sailing has increased exponentially and sailors and designers are more oriented toward the latest in the racing world than they are to the laws of the sea, probably without realizing it. I recently read of a forty foot sloop which ran aground in calm water. It had an "end plate" keel to permit its race boat inspired hull to draw less water. As the tide went out the boat rested briefly on the wide flat keel bottom, and then fell over, tearing the keel off the boat. The rising tide filled the boat, which was written off as a total loss. A highly theoretical design solution, not a very practical one!