formosas?

[jbarros]

So shiver me timbers, this is damn near a pirate ship. I heard they make these things with a glass hull, which would ease my mind greatly, as I have a lack of knowledge about wood boats, and a million planks sounds like a million points of failure to me. Wood decks could be a maintenance issue, but I think the look, and built in non-skidness (new word?) may make up for it. and they apear from the pictures to have a ton of room down below which leaves only one question....

Do they sail?

If anyone has any info on these beautifull beasts, let me know. Also, any resorces online where I could find out about them would be apreciated. Thanks.

-- James

[Jeff_H]

They occasionally sail, but not usually and not well. These are fashion statements, and poorly built ones at that.

Jeff

[KenD]

Have you seen the 41 foot formosas with the carved doors and the hand carved bird of paradise and dragon each about three feet long on the bulkhead just forward of the companionway as you go below you have to see them to believe it.They will cause a crowd to stop and look in any port. That''s the good part,the bad part is they draw about six feet don''t use space very well,and of course they aren''t built very well as jeff pointed out.

[jbarros]

so, are there other boats of the tall, almost pir8 ship looking, and beautifull line that I can fantasize about? personaly, I''m looking at getting a little triton, but I still like to dream big. Thoughts on boats of that style which are good sailers?

-- James

[hicks]

Jeff, what speed standards do you use, in judging sailing performance. I ask because my boat will only get about 175 miles a day.130 to 150 a usual average. The other voyagers I meet almost universaly plan for a 125 mile average .Shurly those Tiwanise boats will do that? We are talking 10 to 20 knot trades.

[Jeff_H]

When I talk about a boat being comparatively slor I think about how boats behave in a wide range of conditions. There are a lot of boats that will sail at close to their hullspeed reaching in 20 knots of breeze but unfortunately, what goes down must come up and sailing the venues (mostly up and down the US Atlantic coast) that I have spent my time means dealing with beating in light and heavy air as well as sailing on all points of sail in a wide range of windspeeds.

It is not just the top speeds that a boat can achieve but the consistency with with these speeds can be held. I can give the example of a sistership of my boat (which I don''t think of as being all that fast) that made a single-handed passage from South Africa to the Carribean about a year or so ago. The top speed that was hit was 16 knots and stayed above 10 knots for much of the time. Dispite these high speeds the boat averaged 175 miles per day for the first 10 days while in the South Atlantic and managed to average 150 miles a day including sailing through the doldrums. He reported using roughly 17 gallons of fuel and did almost no motoring except to charge batteries.

He left Capetown with a more traditional boat that completed the same passage but took weeks longer and used substantially more fuel.

When I think of most modern coastal cruisers and the more modern offshore boats as being moderately fast, I would expect a moderately fast 42 plus footer to have a PHRF rating somewhere down around 50 to 60 or so with a rating over 100 being pretty slow. So when I see the Formosa 45 with ratings between 111 and 153 that strikes me as slow. But more to the point, in the kind of variable conditions that are typical on the US Atlantic coast, boats like these would have very limited opportunity to sail. I remember talking to a fellow with a CT41 who came back from the Bahamas saying there was almost never a day that he could actually sail from place to place. While that is too small a sampling to be meaningful, and we weren''t there ourselves to see what he encountered, that still seems more likely with these high wetted surface, low sail area per pound boats.

Respectfully,
Jeff