2006 World PDRacer Sailboat Championship Race - Capsize Testing

By Doug Day (retired) #1 "DUB"
At messabouts, we love to do knockdown testing !!

Tim Cleary built a take apart hull so that it fits inside his car. The white air tank uses a few thru bolts to hold it onto the main hull.

With this configuation, he only has emergency floatation on one side. Since he hasn't installed decks on the rest of the hull, it is a very wet ride and prone to easy swamping in choppy water.

To test to see if he could recover it, he first went over to starboard completely swamping the hull.

With a little help (cheating), the hull came upright again and was full of water. Tim could then wiggle back on and start to bail.

NOTE: He raised the boat on the wrong side. Single side floatation is supposed to work by rolling the boat so that the floatation is on the bottom and makes the hull rise up, so when righted there is nothing left inside to bail. After this experiment, I pushed the hull out into deep water and re-did it righting the other way, and there was no water left inside when righted.

This is a seperate experiment, 2 years previous I had dove Bucket Ears into a wave and completely swamped her. I found that I could lean over to dump out a majority of the water without having to completely knock the boat over. I asked Tim to stand on the floatation tank and try to lean it over enough to dump the water out.

He was doing fine for a bit...

Then the nose went in and the entire hull was swamped again.

Scott's turn, he has a "Shoebox" type hull which has air tanks running down both sides.

After this photo, we made him open his sail all the way and go into deep enough water that he wouldn't touch the ground.

He pulled on the daggerboard, then when the sail rose just a little higher than this picture, he kicked the lower chine which flipped the hull upright !

And no water was inside the hull.

To reboard, he let his body float horizontally, then with a quick thrust he pulled himself board. It was more of a horizontal slide into the boat, not a climb up into the boat.

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