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The following story was written some years ago for 'Sail' magazine. They pulled it at the last minute because a competing magazine sprang an article on the same Dashew's. I still got paid, but the piece has been languishing, waiting for an airing, so I dusted it off and polished it up. It describes how Steve Dashew evolved what remains, in my mind, the ultimate displacement-hull sailboat: maximally fast, but also completely tractable, comfortable, and safe.
Since this piece was written, the Dashew's have moved on to a completely different type of hull, their renowned ketch Beowulf. This is a planing machine, more than twice as stiff as Sundeer, even though it has the same displacement. Beowulf will be the subject of a follow-up on the Dashew's. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this gem from the archives.
Sundeer
Steve Dashew began talking the moment we met. About wiring harnesses and orange groves, as I recall. The world cruiser and successful yacht builder (the inovative Deerfoot series) continued to talk as we drove along the freeway. He segue'd seamlessly from Chinese food to beam/length ratios, to surfing in survival conditions, and somehow back to Chinese food ("Surfing can be kind of scary when it's happening, but an hour later you want to do it some more.").
Not to say that he hogged the conversation, just that he knows an attentive ear when he finds one. Whenever I had something to say, he would listen intently, carefully, then unload an essay of a reply. It was like playing volleyball with a volcano.
Dashew was conceived aboard a Friendship Sloop, and has been on the water ever since, in everything from racing catamarans to classic schooners. He shows no signs of having exhausted the possibilities for innovation, synergy, and technical detail in the desgn of world-cruising yachts. His ketch Sundeer was the reason fro my visit. I knew that it was 66' on the water, only a foot longer on deck, had an amazingly shoal draft, and that its waterline beam was just 11'3". That's something like half the beam of a typical boat of that lenth, so I was ready to see something unusual. I just didn't understand how it could stay upright, or how there could be any room below.
Steve continued to talk as we walked down the dock at the marina, past scores of boats ‹IOR-ish to faux salty to capable cruisers. After a bit, through the forest of masts ahead, I saw the masts of a big ketch. They were distinctive enough to stand out among all the others, partly because of their graceful proportions. And partly because, in the midst of hundreds of painted or varnished sticks, they were a bare DeLorean gray.
We rounded a corner, the boat under those masts came into view, and Steve's voice faded away to a low hum. For there, sitting in an end slip, was a long, low, skinny, businesslike-yet-rakish, nearly flat-sheered, dull gray aesthetic challenge of a hull. It was dramatic, unlikely, like a sailing destroyer designed by Enzo Ferrari. It was so full of speed that I was surprised that the mooring lines were slack. But despite its air of urgency, of impatience, it was also somehow implacable, and curiously reassuring. It was an off-the-wall-yet-grounded paradox of a hull.
After a moment the volume came up on Steve again: "A balanced spade rudder draws less autopilot amperage, so we can make the rudder really big, for low-speed maneuvering, without draining the batteries under sail. Since the rudder is so large, it provides a lot of lift at speed, so you don't need as large or deep a keel for the same total amount of lift. With a ketch rig we can really load that rudder up, putting a lot of force on it from the mizzen. This in turn takes some of the load off the main, so it can be lighter, less stressed. The whole rig can be lighter and lower overall, with the forces more evenly distributed. So the boat is easier to steer, which further helps reduce the amount of work that the autopilot has to do."
At that point it began to occur to me that Dashew didn't just talk about a sequence or cluster of things ‹ instead, he was always trying to paint a picture of the integrated whole that lives in his head. So is conveerstaional style is one of interlinking and augmentation, and his stories tend to wind up where they started.
Another example: Early on, I asked him, "Why unpainted aluminum? Just to save money?"
"I don't mind saving money," he commenced, "but by not painting the deck and topsides [Sundeer does have bottom paint] we also save 600 to 750 pounds in paint. That simultaneously lowers the center of gravity and lightens the hull, so the boat is that much more stable, and more easily moved by a rig that is that much smaller. I also get some leeway in accomodations, payload, hull scantlings ‹ I can put in more of what the boat really needs. Of course, that costs more, but by not painting I save about 20 grand every 4 to 5 years; I can afford to take advantage of the weight-saving benefits of not painting."
And so on. During my stay I heard many such cycles, covering every aspect of yacht design from six different directions. It was disorienting, but in time I boiled the Dashew Design Priorities down to the following maxims:
The sun was setting, so a first-hand analysis would have to wait for the morning.
We drove off, Steve going on about refrigeration and prismatic coefficients, until we reached a long, low house perched on a hill above the orange groves of Ojai. There I met Linda, the other half of the Dashew design and sailing team. As gracious and reserved as her husband is voluble, Linda is involved with Sundeer's engineering, but focuses more on the semi-empirical aspects of sailing, ones that can be grouped under the heading of "lifestyle". For Linda, passages are fine, but the main point is to arrive, to explore, to be part of the community at anchor and ashore. As she notes, "Weather patterns tend to herd people along together, so voyaging usually isn't some lonely, random adventure. You might fall in with people while cruising down the coast to Mexico, then gather with them in some port to brace for the jump across the Pacific. And meet to congratulate each other at the other end. We've spent up to 3 years in fairly regular contact with friends, cruising. There's lots of time to devote to friendship, so your boat really has to be more than just a sailing machine. It has to be a place to live, and to receive others into. And for us it has to be a place to raise a family in. We have two daughters. They've grown up afloat, and you don't just try to fit them in among the sailbags.
Sailing
A boat underway reveals itself. It may look racy or comfy or bizarre at the dock -- Sundeer looked all three -- but once it starts working, its complete character will present itself, good and bad.
Virtues are harder to notice than vices. For me, the best boats are characterized by an absence of noticeable phenomena underway: The wheel or tiller is calm, predictable, light; moving around on deck requires no acrobatics; no lines foul or chafe; stoppers stop; engines start. And from the moment the big electric winch on deck began raising the main halyard, the most noticeable thing was the brief flapping of sails before they were sheeted in. The boat got up to speed so smoothly that I hardly noticed it.
After a while, Steve asked, "How fast do you think we're going?"
Judging mostly by the smoothness of the ride, without looking around, I said, "Oh, about six knots."
"We're doing a little over nine."
The wind was a steady seven and a half. We were close-reaching. A smooth, uneventful nine knots through the water.
Steve left the wheel and gave me a tour of the deck, pointing out niceties like the double trap-door access to the forward watertight compartment. The jibstay and forestay both run into this chamber, and the jib is furled and stowed there, still hanked to its stay, completely out of the way and protected from the elements.
He went on for a while about bow entry angle, beam/length ratio, and mast compression. I nodded, looked aft, and said, "I don't recall your turning on the autopilot."
"Oh, my goodness, we forgot to steer."
And indeed the whole time this skinny, short-keeled (6'2", fully loaded) dart had been easing through a 3' to 4' sea, absolutely unattended, straight as a rail, even in puffs. Steve explained this in terms of a balanced canoe body, somehow relating this to battery stowage, 3" of foam insulation inside the hull, and the scantlings of the doghouse. Because the breeze was rising we did turn on the autopilot as our conversation continued. I must confess that I missed some of Mr. Dashew's subsequent points; I was watching the autopilot, waiting for the LED to blink to show that the unit was working. Mostly it stayed dark.
Sundeer
None of these ideas is novel. The trick lies in maximizing numbers 2, 3, and 4 without vaporizing number 1, and vice versa. Dashew maintained that he had managed to wedge all four ideas into one skinny aluminum creation.
"The product of an arithmetical equation is the answer to an equation; it is not the solution to a problem."
G.O. Ashley
Steve Dashew's technical dazzle is rooted in, of all things, humility. He knows, and freely admits, that no boat is truly ocean-, land-, or collision-proof; that domestic niceties mean performance-reducing weight; that strength and stiffness figures are often shots-in-the-dark-to-the-fourth-decimal-place; that while his computer-aided design concepts are sound, their real-world execution must always be compromised; that a life under sail has provided him with more answers than solutions.
Sundeer's bottom planking is 2 1/2 times thicker, and about 15 times stiffer than the American Bureau of Shipping's recommendations for offshore yachts. The Dashew's carry no insurance, and they cruise as a family. Is 2 1/2 times thicker, thick enough?
Or is it too thick? Have they fallen into the classic cruising boat trap of sacrificing boatspeed for security? This boat came uphill from the Marquesa's to the West Coast in 17 days. It is seaworthy enough to ride out storm systems, and fast enough to skirt them. But the Dashew's fret at every pound they put aboard. The only way this no-form-stability hull can sail upright is if they do fret. And even after fretting, they figure that they pay a 15% speed penalty to achieve reassuring integrity. Worth it?
Most designers and sailors seem to assume that you can have either speed or security, thus the solid-but-slow/fragile-but-fast polarization in cruising designs. Sundeer, through an artful, agonizing blend of tradeoffs, transcends this polarization. It's hard to believe it could go 15% faster.
At one point during our sail, we were doing a steady 10 1/2 knots, in 18 knots of wind, 35° apparent. The boat was heeled just 17°. The only other boats I'd been on that could match that had a dozen bodies on the weather rail, a sure hand at the helm, and no creature comforts below. But there we were, lounging in cushioned helm seats, waiting for the autopilot to blink. The conversation came around to the great clipper ship designer, Donald McKay:
"The clippers were designd to carry a moderate amount of cargo, as fast as possible. They were long, lean, and stable, with quite fine entries. They were relatively easy to handle, considering the ridiculous amount of sail they carried, and how hard they were driven. They set records, not simply because they were fast, but because they could be controlled at speed."
At about the time of our conversation, Warren Luhrs was arriving in San Francisco, having just broken Flying Cloud's round-the-Horn record in the long, skinny Thursday's Child. Luhr's boat was a stripped-out, deep-draft sloop, and it had to be patched together en route, but its hull form is similar to Sundeer's. And analogous to Flying Cloud's.
"Long and lean might not make sense for daysaling or short cruises," Steve continued. "Not enough room for a crowd and a little slower in light airs. But it's the only shape that makes sense for an oceangoing vessel. All I've done is to make the shape livable, and capable of getting into more anchorages. We had to run over 600 design variations through the computer before we came up with this one."
He pondered for a moment, and then a gleam came into his eyes, the gleam of a clipper ship captain, dreaming of a record run.
"It's been awfully hard, making it all work. But we'll be making passages, on a regular basis, of well over 300 miles per day. Comfortably, just the two of us. And then it will all have been worth it."
Fair leads,
Brion Toss