Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

But it is not done in multi rigs.

They are not designed to have a "weak link" for safety. I disagree that this could be even be accomplished, given the wide range of conditions and forces a rig will experience - along with the knife-edge margin of when it should blow, coupled with the multi-varient conditions of what may flip a boat (pure wind load isn't the only factor in play).

Would this engineering take into account wind load, heel, rotational moment, side-slip, foil flow attachment, etc all into some highly precise and complicated mathematical formula? And then have active fuses - like exploding clevis pins?

If this type of engineering was attempted, we would be seeing a lot of pissed off people with lost, or unusable, rigs because of early failure.

There are no rigs on any type of boat with engineered "safety fuses". It is just too difficult and doesn't make sense on sailing rigs. It may sound good theoretically, but it is not practical - particularly on multihulls.

Safety hatches are more for re-entry than escape. Unless one happens to be in the exact compartment of a hatch, it is usually much easier to escape from other routes than that hatch. Many safety hatches now aren't even hatches - just solid glass with a hammer located on the outside of the hull.

Mark

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