New Ariel Speed Record !!!

[ebb]

Thanks Jack for the lead to those Pearson numbers.
The number of times Bill Shaw's name is on that list shows us that Alberg's designs were the transitional datum for boats changing from wood to frp. The Ariel could have been designed for wood but while the topsides might remain the same (except for that amazing eliptical cabin front), the underbody would have had to have much less sculpting than what we have in the Ariel. Alberg designed a beautyful hybrid shape for the in-the-water part of the Ariel that may not have been surpassed by anyone since.

But Alberg's easy driven slack bilge designs were over taken by the Shaw wider beam, harder bilge, fin keel, spade rudder designs. The engineers and the techs stepped in to make lighter less wetted surface structures suited to glass and oweing little to past wood boats except that their impetus obviously came from rowing dinghies.
If you could make the keel and rudder more pliable and bendable you'd maybe get more speed, like whale shark and dolphin tails. I feel that the hard planes of modern sail dinghys actually limit speed by creating eddies. Of course we now have new generation sleds that are not really boats, but water-surface speed machines. Surfboats.

I wouldn't know, but has anyone read of a Bill Shaw sailboat exceeding its W/L rating? Well, surfing a swell, maybe.

I don't know how it goes, but engineered shapes are linear shapes to me, boxes with curves. Now if you took an ideal marine speed shape like a great white and translated that to a hull, you might have something. Might have something that relates to what Alberg came up with. Alberg's form is the SOFTEST hard form imaginable. Know what I mean? I bet that a bendy rudder/tail on an Ariel would make them go even faster. A little bendy, OK?

A good comparison of Alberg and Shaw is the Pearson Ariel and the Pearson 26. Alberg was the transitional designer - he put Pearson in the frp boat business. Shaw designed marketable leisure products for them. Not knocking it, there just is no accounting for taste.
Alberg never forgot that a boat should look like a boat.

There is a story of a transAtlantic race in which an Alberg 35 in a raging storm ended up taking all its sails off. While other boats freaked and struggled and broke things, the crew on the Alberg 35 went below and played cards while the boat lay a-hull.

You've seen this picture. A mighty storm, the whole world's coming loose, it's all gone to hell... but there's a gull bobbing UP and DOWN in the waves, waiting, maybe a bent feather, no problem.

Is the word Sea-kindly?