This is my old post from an earlier discussion:
I will warn everyone in advance that I know this is simply my personal opinion, and I aready know that I am probably the odd man out on this, but I have never found dodgers all that useful, and frankly, unless the boat was carefully designed to use a dodger, I have found them to be a real pain in the butt. I must admit some of my strong dislike for dodgers results from the type and size of boat that I prefer to own, my personal experience designing and sailing with them, the region in which I sail, and the type of sailing that I do.
When I worked as a yacht designer it became immediately apparent that on most boats under 40 feet, (the size that I prefer to own) a dodger ends up being a serious compromise between restricting access to the companionway and deck from the cockpit, restricting visibility from some key sailing positions (i.e. steering from the slot), limiting gaining access the
winches and control
lines lead to the aft end of the house and being able to stand in a proper position to use and swing full length
winch handles, being able to see out of the cockpit at all angles of heel, windage, and allowing the boom to be low enough to allow adequate mainsail area without raising the vertical center of effort. And frankly the gains from having a full width dodger (vs a scuttle for offshore work) really seem minimal compared to their liability.
I am not a fair weather sailer. If there is a breeze, and the water is not frozen, I am likely to be out there. My working rule is that I try not to sail in temperatures below 40, but often do sail down to temperatures approaching freezing. I also sail in summer temperatures which in this reason can, but rarely approach 100 deg. I sail in rain and snow (but like most folks prefer not to). I routinely beat into a short chop in high winds. Even with that in mind, I find dodgers next to useless, (They really make the cockpit hotter in summer, (blocking cooling breezes) and colder in winter (casting shade on areas that might be warmed by the sun) providing little real protection in any condition).
Perhaps, because I am a single-hander that believes that it is necessary to run all control
lines back to the cockpit, the aft end of the cabin top becomes a critical area for
winches and stoppers. To me, being able to stand full height, with your body in a position to efficiently swing a full-sized
winch handle through a full circle, when using these
winches to raise halyards, or reef on the fly requires is a safety issue. I extremely prefer my mainsheet and traveller to be located in the cockpit, and consider cabin top travellers an unsafe structural and operational compromise so at least I am not trying to operate the mainsheet from under the dodger as is so often the case on modern production boats. But most dodgers for under 40 footers are designed so that there is no where to stand and swing a full sized
winch handle. If they are tall enough to allow a normal human being to stand and swing a handle, they are typically too tall and wide to make sense on a sub-40 foot boat.
When I look at the potential advantages, I see few. Again, this partially results from my belief that if a boat routinely throws spray back into the cockpit in normal heavy air sailing conditions, it is a defect in the design of boat that would discourage me from buying that model. In my mind, and in that case, the dodger becomes a bandaid for an inferior boat design and one that I would not purchase. But even in a boat that has a spray problem, a properly proportioned dodger, generally does not deflect enough spray to really keep the cockpit all that much drier than without the dodger. (I suggest that you look at your dodger at the end of a hard day of beating into a chop, as I have been doing on a variety of boats. You will be amazed how dry they are
Of course you can oversize a dodger to get more room below and protect from spray but at that point, you have begin to compromise sailing ability, especially at the heavier wind end of things.
In the end I prefer to 'get real', meaning dress for the conditions and live out in them.
All of that said, I like a properly designed hard dodger, or at a fixed winshield better than the typical soft dodger mainly because the better visibility through lexan vs eisenglass. But a properly designed hard dodger needs to be properly engineered so that it won't be a liability. They deck needs to be beefed to take the huge loads imposed when a wave comes aboard and tries to take out the bolts that hold the dodger to the deck along with a piece of the deck. A properly built hard dodger for a small boat needs to be very light and yet very strong. From my way of thinking, coring and carbon fiber are not out of the question. Lastly to be of any serious use, they should have a windshield wiper of some kind, and so the windshield itself should be laminated safety glass so it won't scratch.
Jeff
Linear Mode
