10-08-2006
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1. Never watched Animal planet so I don't know,
2. Properly formulated and cast, cast iron is a reasonable form of ballast. In the early 20th century, seen as being stronger than lead, cast iron was the preferred keel material for offshore sailing. In a grounding the cast iron keel was seen as less likely to be damaged, and so is often the keel material of choice for a charter boat.
On the flip side, lead is more ductile than cast iron and so can absorb impact by deformation, therefore transfering less impact into the hull and supporting structure of the boat.
The Europeans still seem to prefer cast for many applications, using on a lot of their boats including some pretty expensive ones. Cast iron is less expensive as well, but that savings is somewhat offset by highter costs to fair and finish the keel. Cast iron is also showing up in race boat keels for the foil portion of the keel, and then lead is used for the bulb.
When you talk about maintenance on cast iron, you need to ask whether this is a bolt on or encapsulated keel. Beneteteau uses bolt on keels. In my opinion cast iron should never be used in a encapulated keel. Leakage into the encapsulation is almost always inevitable and the surface corrosion that forms will cause more repid wide spread delamination of the ballast from the encapsulation.
It is a little bit different story with bolt on keels. The fairing materials used on both lead and cast iron keels have a limited lifespan. With lead that lifespan is generally longer than that of the same fairing materials used on cast iron. At minimum, as a part of routine maintenance small nicks in the fairing material should be patched with a zinc rich epoxy, covered by a barrier coat. With cast iron repairing the coating at haulout becomes much more crititical to the long term condition of the fairing material. When it comes time to refair the keel, the process is considerably harder to so as the casting tends to be much more irregular. Opinions on technique vary, but my favorite is some variation of sandblasting the iron 'white' and immediately coating with a zinc rich epoxy. Then build up an epoxy based fairing material to the proper contour, final fair, and barrier coat. That should be a 10 to 15 year solution if done well.
From a yacht design point of view, cast iron is substanially less dense than lead. In modern designs this typocally translates into more drag for a given stability. Beneteau uses cast iron predominantly on their shoal draft boats perhaps figuring that a person ordering a shoal draft keel is less concerned with drag and stability than someone who orders a deeper draft keel. In some ways I think they have it backwards.
Cheoy Lee is one of the more highly respected Asian Yards. This is a very old company based in Hong Kong (not Taiwan). Their build quality is difficult to categorize as it has changed greatly over the years and from model to model. Thier boats often have extremely high quality elements mixed in with items that are of dubious quality. I like some of their designs, (I once worked on drawings for a 53 footer that they built).
4. From what little I know, the listings for boats that I have looked at that were in Hawaii tended to be more expensive than mainland boats. It used to be that there were very cheap prices for boats in New Zealand and Austrailia but that seems to have changed dramatically.
second post,
1. That looks like it might be either a Murray Peterson Coaster series, which were mostly built in the 1940's to 1950's or it is Angleman which were built as late as the 1960's. Of course it could be something completely different. The photo is not clear enough to tell.
2. I suppose that it is possible to build a Mega Yacht for 300 million, but I would suspect that most megayachts are well below $100 million. Who Knows.
Jeff
Last edited by Jeff_H; 10-08-2006 at 09:15 AM.
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Trivial Persuit for sailors
Oops!
Guess I'm a little late getting back about this with a little egg on my face here, but I finally heard from someone at the Stockton Yacht Club and it turns out that the pic I posted was of nothing more than a prop built for a Hollywood movie. The present owner bought it to convert it into a real sailboat and supposedly got nowhere fast. It's been sitting there in the water for more than the last ten years. 
