Arne Kverneland wrote:
What was the argument in the first place for designing the JSD? I can't help feeling that a not too complicated problem has ben solved in a maximum complicated way. People often get impressed by complicated designs, and mis-interpret them as 'good' or 'high quality'. The JSD appears to me to be quite awkward both to store and to handle.
BTW, the drag of any object towed through the air or water, rises not with the speed, but with the square of the speed.
Arne
I agree with you, Arne. Admittedly, modern boats are very different animals from those that were common 50 years ago, but for all that, thousands of boats have successfully crossed oceans and survived gales without the help of a JSD.
Two things worry me about these JSDs.
The first is that I have never met anyone who used one in earnest who didn't have a sorry mess at the end of it. Even the ones built to spec seem to self-destruct to a certain extent. In most cases, this won't really matter, because you should have time to rebuild the thing before the next severe weather hits. But unless you are sailing somewhere where you are likely to end up in really severe weather, do you need such a device? We sailed 110,000 miles in Badger and never dragged anything behind us and we didn't stick strictly to the Trade Wind route.
The other thing that concerns me about them is that while they are not that difficult to deploy, they are a bit of a nightmare to retrieve. In my experience, the worst of the waves come at you as the wind starts to take off, so that they start to lose their stability and topple all over the place. This is when you get slammed by a wall of water that tries to knock the boat off her feet. The best thing you can do is get her moving again so that she's no longer a sitting duck, but we might still be talking about winds of F8 where it's going to be both very difficult and potentially dangerous to haul the drogue in.
Another thing that makes these discussions terribly difficult is that either I hopelessly underestimate wind strengths or everyone else overestimates them. I can't tell you how many people I have met in recent years, who tell me that they have sailed to windward in 50 knots of wind with their jib partially rolled up and 2 reefs in the main, or carried sail in 55 knots. I'm sorry, but their boats don't look so substantial that this would have been possible. I don't believe that in over 40 years of sailing, I have ever been offshore in sustained winds of F10 (thank god), which is 48-55 knots and don't think I have been exceptionally lucky. Hardly anyone uses the Beaufort scale these days (which has very good descriptions of sea state) and nearly everyone has instruments, which are showing the reading from a wildly gyrating recorder, 50+ feet in the air. How accurate are these readings, I wonder? I have seen weekend sailors turn away with a smirk from a dyed-in-the-wool ocean voyager, who stated that in his couple of hundred thousand miles of sailing, he had never encountered sustained winds of over 50 knots. You could see them thinking that obviously he had never sailed in their back yard where such winds are common.
I understand why people worry about heavy weather (I'm terrified of it, until I get to trust a boat), but really, I do think we tend to dwell on it too much. As the Fastnet race of 1979 showed so clearly, it's generally the people who let the boats down, not the other way round.