Ken Barnes says "Don't do it!"

[camaraderie]

Those of you who remember Ken Barnes ill-fated voyage last year at about this time may have someone new to follow shortly!
This guy met with Barnes...and Barnes advised him not to go! You gotta be really out there not to take THAT advice!! The story is incredible...read it here:

http://www.esquire.com/features/sailing1207

This is the guys LAST Boat!!

[bestfriend]

They're both idiots.

[Tartan34C]

After reading the article I don’t find a lot of reasons to believe this will go well. I don’t think you can scrimp on some things and get away with it. But I wish him well.
All the best,
Robert Gainer

[Valiente]

Wait, between two guys, they've sunk three boats?

[sailingdog]

It is also very worrying that the guy says:

Ken was well prepared and knowledgeable, and he had the proper equipment aboard to survive the conditions. But he was also getting impatient. He was catching the edge of a storm to ride it around Cape Horn, sailing at fourteen knots, surfing past his hull speed, which means his very heavy fifty-thousand-pound boat was coming up out of the water like a surfboard. He was sick of the slow sailing, of not making any progress, so he wanted this speed. Sailing around the Horn, at the tip of South America, is the most famously dangerous passage in the world. Whalers and other ships tried for years to get around, only to be stopped over and over.

Spending three years getting a boat and loading it up doesn't necessarily mean that you are well prepared or knowledgeable. Ken Barnes admits he had to think about how to change a setting on his autopilot... didn't have the supplies aboard to secure the broken hatches... which appeared to have been broken open from the interior during the knockdown. The list goes on...

While I think it could be done in a boat that costs $25,000....I don't think it can be done in a home built 50' boat built for that amount. A 50'x30' boat requires a minimum amount of material to be seaworthy, and I don't think that you can get the material needed to build it, much less build it in a few months for that price.

Boats can generally be fast, light or inexpensive... with a balance between the three things... you can have two at the cost of the third... A fast and light boat is generally expensive... When you have a short time-frame to build it, the costs usually go way up. I think that building an inexpensive boat that can resist the ocean trying to use the 50' LOA and 30' beam to tear the boat apart.... is very unrealistic.

Finally, this guy sounds like he's making the boat out of metal—aluminum and steel... I don't think he really understands how difficult it is to build a 50' x 30' trimaran that can withstand the forces exerted on the akas and amas while keeping the construction light enough to keep the boat fast.

[bestfriend]

I think I could have better luck lashing together the pile of pallets out back of the Home Depot and leaving on Friday the 13th.

[sailingdog]

Another point... the guy says he plans to sail 11,000 miles in the Southern Ocean in just two months... that means he's doing close to 200 NM per day... I find that to be a pretty optimistic estimate of a home-built boat's capabilities. Granted, that's only an average speed of eight knots VMG... but this has to cover days where there is little wind or if the winds are coming from the wrong direction...

[Sailormann]

200 mile days are very good days indeed, for a homebuilt. Matter of fact, it's not a bad pace for the Vendee.

There is a thread about this person on the Cruiser's forum as well. It really makes you wonder. At what point should there be some kind of regulation stating that if you are going to go out and do something that is so close to impossible that your likelihood of succeeding is basically nil, that you have no right to expect that hundreds of thousands of dollars will be spent searching for and rescuing you.

Perhaps there needs to be some kind of mandatory insurance for idiots... but then we would encounter the issue of some beaureaucrat deciding that it's idiocy to go cruising on a well-found 28 footer...

So, here's hoping he makes it, and if he doesn't, that he has the good grace to sink without raising too much fuss and bother. It would be unfortunate if there were other, more sensible folk that were denied help because the Coast Guard was busy trying to find this person.

[jerryrlitton]

Originally Posted by Sailormann

At what point should there be some kind of regulation stating that if you are going to go out and do something that is so close to impossible that your likelihood of succeeding is basically nil, that you have no right to expect that hundreds of thousands of dollars will be spent searching for and rescuing you.

Because we cannot draw the line consistently where common sense stops and stupidity begins. How many of us ride without helmets?

Jerry

[bestfriend]

If you will all send me five dollars, I can buy twine for my raft. The pallets I can just steal after dark.