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Board » Technical Discussion » LP and the Le Cirque du SOL-eil.

Posted by
JB


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2013-03-07 08:54:34
2016-05-13 11:23:41 - LP and the Le Cirque du SOL-eil.
This is an old SOL issue to which many miles of words have been written, but I felt I had to make some further comments on this subject.

In a brilliant article in this Forum - as always - my friend Jan/”bonknhoot” explained the SOL imposed LP (Loss of Performance) on boat maneuvers and the processes to minimize it Performace Loss.

The real problem here isn’t the “LP” figure itself, i. e., the percentage of Boat Speed (BS) you lose after making some boat maneuvers - in that respect it’s like the real world at work - but, the enormous amount and unrealistic time you take for recovering the full BS boat potential (according to the boat Polar).

The LP problem is strongly aggravated as the BS increase. The faster you go the bigger the time penalty you get after the maneuver. It ruins all good gybing/tacking tactics you may want to use.
When the BS is slow (one example: Tall Ships races), you can still tack/gybe forever without any especial penalty, if not, any at all. We have here a clear exception to the sought effects of the LP rule.

Forgive me Jan but, I can’t resist concluding: with some acrobatic moves and the same number of boat pirouettes, you can in fact “elude” to some extent the LP monster.
With tons of good reasons I’m hearing now the crowd shouting:
Circus comes to water!

I speak for myself as being also part of these fast growing “artistic movement “.
Using all this plethora of tricks, or better, acting “performance”, we are clearly outside one of SOL goals: to get as close as possible to reality.
At the present state, all we have is an obvious invitation for doing bad sailing and, if you don’t believe what I’m saying, please see the attached picture of a “square root” (!) gybe from one of the top boats on the ongoing Iceland TR.

Trying to solve a problem - to penalize the extra boat maneuvers (only) in certain conditions - SOL created a bigger one, IMHO.

Hence my suggestion to SRC.
Stop that frustrating rule and enforce good sportsmanship behavior for the faulty ones.

Sail Fair.
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