Plane Afraid ?

The RORC have been terrified of it for years, and done all in its power to restrict ordinary sailors from it. Designers of handicap racers have followed suit by avoiding it like the plague. By in large, when nav' architects came up with one design cruiser-racers, they steered clear by using mile long barge poles!

Even owners of such fearsome boats, often choose to avoid this frightening experience.

Yes we are talking about planing - flat aft sections and high power to weight ratios which promote 'hydroplaning' in fresh to moderate wind speeds.

Why all the terror?

Firstly it relates to the RORC handicapping systems which have by in large been very punative towards planing boats. That is to say there is an unusual high handicapping for comparable boat lengths between hull types and increases in sail area to displacement. This is maybe because of vested interests - owners of existing, displacement vessels not wanting to have egg on their faces as the wind picks up, and the planing crowd disappear over the horizon at indecent, non waterline speeds. Also with tonner designs, there was consideration for sailing in the Channel which can get very bumpy indeed.

In dinghy sailing, even under handicapping, there are very few non planing designs still sailing. In part because planing surfaces were so easy to make in ply, and with chines, render light glass fibre lay-up stiffer than round section. Readily planing boats rated on Portsmouth Yardstick, are not as penalised as yachts on IRC for example it can be argued.

The  safety consideration is also a bit of a red herring when you consider either inshore boats or if people set canvas with a degree of seamanship. To my mind, there is nothing more dangerous on a cruiser-racer than a dose of weather roll in a steep sea when you either have to gybe or drop. This gets worse as the boat approaches hull speed when the bow wave and quarter wave tops are far apart , nearing the ends of the boat, and the hull begins to be unsupported - you are sailing more on a knife edge then that in a broad sterned planing machine!

Many racier cruiser-racers manage to surf rather nicely which resolves this issue and is natures way of helping mankind out. But  between catching waves, the boat can be unstable and prone to lee roll and chinese gybing, especially if they are generously canvassed. Cruiser racers generally cant sustain the speed of the wave train and ride each wave for a limited time, before the brakes come on a bit as you either wait or luff up a bit to get the next. It can be exhilierating to free up a normally docile cruiser riding literally on the crest of a wave, where hull speed is surpassed for some seconds. Indeed quarter tonners used to regularily catch rides on the quarter waves of their bigger cousins, where they could actually maintain enough power to keep on the crest.

Planing though is the ultimate joy in sailing, be it gently on the Thames in a classic flat hulled skiff, or out in the North Sea with the wind a good force five. Why is it so maligned and avoided by the keel boat fraternity?

I will concede that once you get the bug for planing, it is tempting to go our completely overcanvassed and try to hold the big spinnaker or even a spinnaker at all over 30 knts of wind. The relative wind is reduced enough that the pressure on the sails is often markadely less. However if you lose balance and let the rig fall off to one side or other from the centre line, then extra sail area above the 'hounds' will serve to pin you down in the water, and often the relatively bouyant qaurter top sides of broad sterned  planing machines, aide and abet this by lifting the centre of gravity of a 'capsized' keel boat. With crew on the drink side and any other shift of loose materials down below also, then a modest keel ballast doesnt help. You have to get the spinnaker in, with everything 90' the wrong way.  This has become much more the norm these days though, with simpler, open cockpits and layout, mean that crew can work almost intuitively over on a broken wing so to speak. Many displacement boats of top IRC nature went over to mast head spinnakers in the late 90s too, so it is a common skill at the thoroughbred end of sailing these days, in shore and increasingly off shore.

Where to Start for a Helm who is Plane Afraid??

The very best place to start is in a sailing dinghy. A humble wayfarer, or laser offering , vareo or what ever with an instructor on board or as part of a course with one of your erstwhile yacht crew, be they spouse or slave. The key learning points here are

1) How to pop up on the plane in differing conditions
2) How to keep the boat under the rig
3) How to balance weight and sail trim
4) How to come off the plane and harden up or stop.

Popping up on the plane in some of these heavier, sail school boats is a bit of a skill in marginal conditions as the wind reaches about force 3. You have to ease the boat up from a broad reach, or bear away from a beat softly onto a beam reach. Some light boats, like the Tasar or B14, actually plane to windward in skilled hands and good wind, and will suddenly pop up on the plane on the 'fetch' quite alarmingly under less experienced hands, and shoot off!  In lighter, marginal winds the heavier boats will need to pick up speed at a beam angle before they plane, and may need a quick shift of crew weight backwards to pop the boat off its stern wave and onto its bow-wave. This is for most, the definition of planing- that the stern (quarter) wave has detached from the transom and like a motor boat is now departing further behind you. In a sea it can be harder to see of course than in a 40 hp motor boat, but you will see it and of course see the bow out the water and spray bubbling midships where the wave has now travelled back.

This skill translates well into sports boats and larger planing boats because it is simple physics - there is a barrier of resistance , a hump in the drag/speed curve which has to be bumped over by more power and the trick of moving weight back, over the new planing surface so that the bow rises out the water. I saw the hunter 707 Blue Funk nearly new, sailing on a white sails reach in a good blow towards Rothesay from the Cumbraes  and she so was champing at the bitt to get up and go, but the reigns needed to be pulled on a wee bit to get her to 'gallop' - she just needed to be hardened up and born off. Planing is often sustained because the drag bump is climbed and more power is converted to forward motion and hull lift than in displacement mode.

Keeping the hull under the rig is the really big skill and one that takes mastering when winds reach force 5 and higher in a performance machine. For some it is a bit counter intuitive - you must always bear away to spill power when the gusts or speed build. You should luff only to correct the worst of windward heel, and avoid following the heel by steering to fill the sails hard again. Luckily for me, it came pretty naturally, like riding a bike.

Balancing weight was less easy for me and it took a couple of seasons of Tasar sailing to have the confidence to have crew and me on opposite sides of the boat on runs and broad reaching. The same is true of bigger boats like the Melges or in symmetrical racer cruisers, the Laser 28 for example. Weight on both sides evens out the amount of effort and roll from the waves and wind, and although you may be tempted to load up the winward side, this can make for rolling and the boat flicking over on its hull to a broach or backwards to a chinese gybe.

Sail trim involves a lot of active work all the time, on of course spinnaker sheet (and pole or tack line) but also main sheet and most importantly on all high, powerful rigs, with the kicker. The kicker becomes 50-50 to the main sheet. The traveller too can be used to help set up correct twist - all the telltales should fly when planing off wind, most of the time- and also you can use the traveller to dump power out and close the slot a bit in gusts, quickly back winding the main without allowing the top of the mainsail to roll round the mast top and induce nasty roll in the boat itself. I quite often take the kicker out the cleat and lead it to a cabin top winch and have been known to trim both main and kicker from the windward rail, one in each hand, just using friction to hold and release the kicker when on a tight or beam reach.

Another very overlooked control for the spinnaker is the police/men aka by some as the barberhaulers or inhaulers, which train the sheets to a point around midships. These act very like the kicker on the main, reducing twist as you haul them downwards by locking the top. If you dump them off, the often you can vent out the forces of a gust and avoid healing. In some boats, like the Laser 28, you can do a great deal of heel and depower control on just the kicker and the police men lines, before you either have to dump the sails or bear the boat off its desiired current heading.

The final really pretty vital technique is being able to come off the plane. In many boats like the melges 24, this usually is seamless to rolling out the jib and dousing (retreaving) the spinnaker. In marginal conditions on say that laser 28 (turbo nitrous camper van of the racing world, not nearly enough built!!) then the crew moving around on the foredeck to get things done for the hoist and drop can be enough to push the boat off the plane before the spinnaker comes in.

A good technique which will follow you through all boats, and indeed displacement boats in high winds with the spinnaker up, is to learn in a spinnakered dinghy to bear off onto a dead run, or even a little on the lee, to slow the boat down and get the spinnaker in the lee of the mainsail enough that it has less pressure  on it as it is pulled down in tot he shadow and stowed. It is a very good discipline to plan ahead for either a return to harbour, or the leeward mark rounding by planning a line which allows you to run DDW towards your imaginary target that is a spot with a boat length to windward and sideways of the mark. In the old days when assymetrics were not reinvented, we seemed to spend a lot of time fishing spinnakers our the water while sailing upwind again. This was in part due to there being far more triangular courses wherre you often approached the leeward mark on a reach, but mostly because sailors were a bit daft and gung ho. What you made in a later drop, you inevitably lost twice over in the first 100m of the new beat to windward.

On that point, going back to hoisting the spinnaker, or deciding if the boat will plane just on white sails. With relatively big assymetric or symmetric mast head spinnakers then you may want to follow the dinghy practice of doing the same as the drop, going more or less dead down wind after the windward rounding. However there are a few issues with doing this right away. Firstly you will most likely not be going anywhere near the wave train speed (which if i remember right builds to 2/3rds wind speed after an hour or two of blowing) so as you round and fall deeply off, you will be subject to pretty much the same roll and disturbance as a displacement boat. This can broach you, gybe you involuntarily or just make life rolly-polly for the foredeck crew and their best efforts to hoist poles and kite.

For example, once we encountered a big, steep sea on the Forth near the famous bridges - a sea breeze had established itself from the plains of the central belt sucking in the North sea air and the tide was ebbing. The sea was steep and  the wind was way too much I reckoned as we were only three up. Rather than hoisting in a panic, we bore off a little lower and waited for the boat speed to build, and I called the hoist once we had a good speed on and we could feel the relative wind was tolerable. We planed at over 14 knts under the famous rail bridge and caught all the cruiser racers and ton designs who had got ahead up wind. They literally looked like they were going backwards as we planed off up the river estuary! If you manage to get planing on white sails at this point, and a high reaching course is favoured to the next mark or home port, then dont bother hoisting the kite. It even says this in the Laser 28 manual! Enjoy the ride and dont over cook it. You can admirably hoist on a plane, remembering to bear away though once up on it, just dont try to hold as high an angle as you did to get planing on the white sails only.

On a displacement boat, I saw Sir Keith Miller call a pause to hoisting in his big bermudan in a force 7 at Scottish series in the late 90s (the first year they started getting wet and windy!) The crew didnt hoist for a good couple of hundred meters when the boat must have been doing 15 knts on white sails anyway. I had only read of this in books before, so it was great to see an expert tackling the big wind and daring to hoist, all in a seaman like manner. I have since called this on several boats, but in the M24 you tend to just want to bear off and get the darned thing up and hold on for dear life in a force 6, which is is the highest we care to sail in.

Once you fall off the plane at the other end of the roller coaster ride, then you need to have a jib up and all ready to haul in on all gear, because upwind is not going to be a picnic in planing winds  conditions. You ideally want to then have a boat lenght or two to deccelerate and round up. On boats like the Melges, rounding up can often in itself spill off a lot of speed, but on other boats with longer chord keels, like the laser 28, you risk not having pressure on the keel due  to your COG still following the wave train, or you detaching water flow too quickly, or a combination of both. This can result in the boat making very big leeway as you attempt to harden up, The shorter chord keels tend to loose grip quicker but also "bite" quicker as you turn the corner. You can see this in overhead pictures of Mumm 30 races. The boats momentarily track sideways and then bite as they round the leeward mark and begin a new beat.

Gybing is an issue for some folk when planing, The simple rule is do it fast and do it both on the crest of a wave and when a gust has just passed. However for some it is too hairy when a pole must be gybed too, so you can avoid foredeck work by either sailing a longer way before you drop and gybe, coming in at a hard angle to the leeward mark OR you can do the reverse and reach away from the weather mark, gybe carefully on white sails  and then aim down to the mark under spinnaker. Another out way which is easiest in assymetrics is to douse and chicken gybe ( a cow turn) where you whip the boat through a tack and out the other way rather than a gybe, and choose to either  follow the convention about of leaving this to a moment when you then come out aiming on a reach to the leeward mark.

If you want to gybe a symmetrical rigged spinnaked while planing then the rule of thumb above constitutes your biblical commandments. In detail though, you want to sail as DDW or slightly by the lee, get used to the sea, check the speed is good, and have a watch on gusts. Both police men/barberhaulers are tightened down, which will help pin the spinnaker down when the pole is off for those few seconds. The foredeck guy then gybes the pole as early as possible and dives for cover, and then the helmsman pushes the helm over and the mainsail gets pulled over. Some boats like the mumm36 make a big show of this, and have big gloves wetted for the bear away. What is important is to centrre the traveller and lock it, and sheet the main sheet in just a bit before the gybe such that it does not slam over into the spreaders on the new side, risking taking the rig down. In marginal planing conditions, as mentioned above, even one crew member  on the bow may dump the boat back into displacement mode, or allow the bow to dive which is catastrophic sometimes, An answer here is as with light airs, to centre the main as you sail DDW before the pole is gybed. This allows the spinnaker to pull all the way through the gybe and most likely pop the boat up in the plane either DDW or just after the main goes over. You then ease the main out with good gloves on and avoid it rounding you up to a broach with a good trim on the kite and pull on the tiller.

In big seas of over 2m height, then really you want to think about avoiding planing in a boat under 30 feet because you will begin to bang over the tops of some waves, while others lift you up unexpectedly as you ride a true roller  coaster in a failry unpredictable way.  Here it is better to keep to surfing by holding the course and power to keep oin wave crests or faces of waves for as long as possible, without escaping forward into a 'ballistic' condition. Progress, most often without spinnaker, will be fast and predictable. A spinnaker may need to be hidden round the back of the main a little and over sheeted there in order to keep it stable and allow the helmsman to steer the boat up to a new wave without having to call on both pole and sheet trimming.