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| CR
914s racing in the 2003 AMYA Region 4 Championship |
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A sport whose time has come
During the last ten years, when the
number of full-scale sailboats in the United States has been stable, and
in many areas actually declining, model sailing has burst from obscurity
and has been growing rapidly.
Several well-designed classes of model
boats have become readily available and, although they are not cheap,
they are much, much less expensive to buy and easier to build and
maintain than full-scale ones. And full-scale sailors have begun to
discover how much fun model sailing is.
The ponds which are the venues for model
sailing are not "polluted" by the noisy and at times dangerous
traffic of powerboats (sailors call them "stinkpots") and
jetskis (sailors’ names for them are unprintable). The ratio of
downtime spent before and after sailing, to actual time spent having fun
"on the water," weighs heavily in favor of model sailing—in
an era when it gets harder and harder to find leisure time. And, thanks
to the "scale speed time warp"
phenomenon, model sailboat racers sail ten or more races in the time it
takes for full-scale boats to race once or twice.
Thus far, most members of the rapidly
growing ranks of model sailing have come from the full-scale sport (many
of them continue to sail their big boats as well), but recently a few
landlubbers and stinkpotters have begun to take up RC sailing as well.
Radio-controlled model sailing is
virtually identical to the "full-scale" sport. Granted, you
don’t get to experience the joy of capsizing, or being drenched with
blowing spray, or spending several hours getting to the lake, launching
and rigging your boat, and then unrigging and hauling it out and towing
it home again every time you want to go sailing. But all the other fun
is still there: the exhilaration of making a boat go—remarkably fast
when the breeze is up, and ghosting along on a nearly glassy pond when
it’s not—with nothing more than the wind for power. And once you
master the art of getting the boat to go where you want it to you’ll
find that model sailboat racing is a blast, and even more exciting than
its full-scale equivalent.
An important reason why sailing model
boats is so much fun is because models are "faster" than their
full-scale counterparts. And the bigger the boats the "slower"
they are. Sounds crazy? Not when you judge speed by the time it takes
for a boat to travel a given number of its boat-lengths! Here's why.
Boats float because they displace water.
Thus all monohulls generate substantial bow and stern waves, which grow
bigger and longer as they travel faster. When their speed is such that
the crests of the bow and stern waves line up at exactly the length of
the hull, forming a single wave in the trough of which the hull becomes
"trapped," the boat is said to be traveling at its hull
speed which is the velocity at which a wave of that wavelength
propagates through the water. Longer waves propagate faster, and thus
longer boats travel faster (in absolute terms) than shorter ones.
Hull speed (in knots) can be calculated
by the following equation:
