"were you motoring" ?

[Peter Cockerton]

Whilst de-rigging yesterday after a pleasant few hours on Rutland water an old boy wandered up and without a "hello, came straight out with "were you motoring".
He was sailing a Drascombe Lugger it turned out and I do remember seeing him some distance in front of me when I came about onto a run/broad reach. I quickly made inroads into the gap and passed him with 2/3 extra knots under our hull. The wind was only about 10 mph.
I assured him that I was not motoring and the performance was probably due to the soft foot sails on his type of boat, not sure if he fully believed me but we had a fairly lengthy discussion after that including answering questions on the SY range.

Simple pleasures

Peter Cockerton

[Graham W]

Poor chap!  It's always good sport to show off the BR's superior sailing performance, especially upwind.

If you look at the boat metrics of the two boats (the Lugger is towards the bottom of the .pdf attached to http://www.swallowyachtsassociation.org/?p=433), you can see that the BR has a significantly larger and higher sail area, in addition to being rigged in a more efficient way.  The extra waterline length also helps.

Drascombes can be modified to sail quite well and some with booms have been impressively fast (compared to the standard boat) during past Sail Caledonia raids.

If you've ever been lucky enough to sail (or row) in a SeaRaider, you will know that it can discomfit BayRaiders with an even more impressive performance.

[Jonathan Stuart]

This isn't limited to Drascombes. Some years ago I overtook a BR20 sailor on a particularly long beat such that I completed the race and he had to be towed home. He later asked if I had switched on the motor! I was so taken aback that, while trying to work out if he was serious, I just said "no" and forgot to add that what I had done was simply noticed the wind was stronger on one side of the lake and I picked the windy side!

But, seriously, it is always interesting to sail alongside other types of boat. It serves as a reminder of just how well Swallows perform. I find that on the whole the only boats that out-performed us in our BRe were larger cruisers and boats more overtly designed for performance, e.g. racing dinghies. I enjoyed sailing past a Crabber 26 in the Carrick Roads (as a BRe will with any Crabber/Shrimper) to looks of "why is that little thing sailing past us?".

[johnguy]

I was admonished by a Crabber sailor recently when I passed him on Cardiff Bay in my Bre. "Will you please stop showing off?".....

Last week out in extremely strong gusts with extremely calm crew we were able to outpace the only two other boats out there, both 35ft plus yachts. Two reefs in the main, half a jib and full mizzen, ballast in, over 7 knots most of the time.

It is a real pleasure.