what do you think my boat is worth? NY-36

[Jeff_H]

Originally Posted by davidpm

Thanks Jeff, as always I enjoy your comments.
I personally have raced on a Farr 395.
I was on the delivery return from Bermuda to CT after the Newport race.
I never had such a painful experience.
It sounded like someone was smashing the boat with a sledgehammer. You could hear the fiberglass breaking.
Most of the time in the bunk we were in zero G, airborne.
It was a really rough ride and that was with a crew of 7.
My take was that the hull is shaped like a big surfboard, flat on the bottom.
Taking the waves that were coming our way we were slamming something terrible.
It does has a nice grid system for strength however. The asim pole was gulping down a significant amount of water as it was not meant to be used underwater.

Do you have any rules of thumb you go by to evaluate a boat for a particular purpose based on specs or is it mostly personal experience on the boat?

Usually when I comment on a boat, I have either sailed on one or helped someone sort one out (purchase, or repairs) enough to formulate an opinion. But there are times when I have raced against that model enough to have some sense of how they sail and I ususally try to say that when this is the case. There are also times when I will comment based on a boat's specs or reputation, but again I will usually say something like, "looking at the numbers" or "These boats have a reputation" rather than provide a first hand comment.

I am disappointed to hear your comments about the Farr 395 since they have almost always looked like a nice boat. My comment above was mainly directed toward their relative performance. I have almost no time on a Farr 395 (hitched a ride back from St. Michaels on one in moderate conditions that died and we ended up motoring). My sense of the Farr 395 was conjectural based on the similar hull form but older- less aggressive Beneteau 40.7, which I probably have a couple hundred hours on in a very wide range of conditions and feel that I really know very well and like how she sails.

My only comment on your experience is that, with some (many, if not most) of the boats of that era, in a breeze they can close reach at very high speeds. In a chop this means hitting waves at very high speeds. With a full crew weight aboard, and on her lines, these boats (meaning boats ith similar hullforms) knife into the waves with a comparatively gentle ride, even at these speeds, but in the right wave frequency, and/or off trim, boats of this typeform can get off stride, and out of sync with the wave train, in which case they can hit very hard. (I never heard anything that sounded or felt like fiberglass cracking.) For a delivery or cruising, this means slowing the boat down a little, changing trim, and/or changing course slightly to alter the frequency and severity of the impacts.

Again, the Zero G thing sounds like the boat in question was being pushed very hard, or you were in the forepeake. On similar designs, amidships, and in the quarter berths, I found these boats surprisingly comfortable even at speed in a short chop.

That said, I really don't have enough experience with the 395 to know whether there is something uniquely uncomfortable about them nor was I there to see the conditions you experienced and so all of my comments in this particular post are speculative based on sailing similar boats.

The retractable assym poles (and canting keels for that matter) is one of those items for which I am conflicted. There is no doubt that we will be seeing assymetrical racing chutes for a long time to come. But I really question how they will play out for cruising and whether we will have to live with retractable poles. More recent Wind tunnel testing suggests that these long retacting poles really do not add that much speed to the boat relative to their rating hit. As a result we are seeing a lot more of the shorter 'prod' type sprits on race boats and these ideally solve the gulping water problem.

But more generally, I really am not a huge fan of assym chutes for cruising and I feel that poles that retract into the hulls are not the best choice if you plan to spend a lot of time thrashing into a chop or going offshore.

Jeff

[davidpm]

Originally Posted by Jeff_H

I am disappointed to hear your comments about the Farr 395 since they have almost always looked like a nice boat. My comment above was mainly directed toward their relative performance. I have almost no time on a Farr 395 (hitched a ride back from St. Michaels on one in moderate conditions that died and we ended up motoring).

Again, the Zero G thing sounds like the boat in question was being pushed very hard, or you were in the forepeake. On similar designs, amidships, and in the quarter berths, I found these boats surprisingly comfortable even at speed in a short chop.

Jeff

I was in the port upper birth when not on deck. I was probably the least or second least experienced of the the crew. Total sailing years was probably over a couple hundred with everyone added together and they all said it was the worst crossing by far they ever had.
The boat is fast really fast. I've spent enough time with 400 grit sandpaper on the hull to have a feel of the shape and all I can figure is that it was coming off waves and dropping and hitting the water every few seconds.

So do people ever really cruise a boat like that? It never occurred to me that it could be done.
It has rod rigging. Have to add furler for jib and jacks or something for the main. Get Dacron sails made. It is a very simple rig but the way it is it takes six of us to sail it and some of the guys are 40 years younger than I.
Also I worry that a boat like this that was heavily raced may have something really sprung that might be a boat killer.
I have a very active imagination and don't know how real it is but when I heard those sounds!! The way I imagine it is that a panel of fiberglass when new has a certain strength but when it has been flexed to certain limit some internal fibers are broken and it can flex even further with the same stress breaking even more fibers. Eventually the whole boat is more water balloon like than coconut like. Sitting at the dock or in 10 knots it looks great. Kick it up to 40 knots for about 3 days and the boat just falls apart.
That's how my imagination goes when I think about a race boat a bunch of years old. The farr 395 has a hydraulic back-stay with a meter on it. Maybe stringing a line from the bow to the stern and checking the deformation of the hull under different tensions would prove I'm full of it.

[SloopJonB]

Originally Posted by davidpm

The farr 395 has a hydraulic back-stay with a meter on it. Maybe stringing a line from the bow to the stern and checking the deformation of the hull under different tensions would prove I'm full of it.

That's an old trick. I can remember seeing IOR boats that had strips of measuring tape permanently affixed to the mast at the height of a piece of string stretched between the bow & stern pulpits - the amount it moved up the scale was watched when the hydraulic backstay was pumped up to ensure the boat didn't banana too much.

I was always scared to try it on my quarter tonner which, believe it or not, had hydraulics on the backstay AND headstay! Talk about reeedickulus - a tackle the size of the mainsheet setup would have been more than enough but the boat was custom built at a time when the more hardware you had on deck the better. It was just another status game. "Wow, he's got a self tailer on his flag halyard".