Yacht designer Chuck Paine’s take on Arion

July 2023

By Chuck Paine

I grew up on Jamestown, and I love to go back there in the summer. It is a magical place. A couple of years ago I was visiting Jamestown, and had almost the same experience Don did. I spied Arion there, and went over and talked with the then owners. I didn’t get to sail on her, though.

I love the look of Arion. She is unusually narrow of beam. Summing up my life’s experience as a yacht designer/naval architect, I have learned that boats that fall outside the normal envelope usually have an attendant flaw. That is, the spectrum of normal proportions was formed over time by undesirable characteristics that accompanied the extremes. Hence, the “plank-on-edge” narrow beam types fell out of favor (after loss of life on one), and, likewise, the sandbaggers at the other extreme.

The bell curve of length-to-beam ratios (L/Bs)would have the vast majority of sailboats of, say, 20 to 40 feet in overall length at L/B of 3.00. Any boat with L/B of 3.5 or greater would be considered unusually narrow. Any boat with L/B less than 2.5 would be unusually beamy. The fact is, that any boat that falls outside of this range (2.5 to 3.5) is unusual, and will have some unusual characteristics.

A very narrow boat like Arion (L/B of 5.2) will, invariably, lack stability or, as Don calls it, power to carry sail. But, on the other hand, such a slender hull will be very easily driven, so can carry a very small sailplan. And no other hull form is more easily steered than a narrow, double-ended hull. It will roll easily and, dead downwind, will get into rhythmic rolling like a metronome.

Don has seen a lot of sea miles, and he quite rightly would add a foot to her beam if he built a sistership. He would be heading in the right direction, and the L/B ratio would still be remarkable: at 42’/9’ = 4.67. I believe she would still look great, and unusual in a good way, like an unusually beautiful woman.

There is a phenomenon called serendipity. Arion benefited from this I suspect. Given that she is extremely narrow and, adding to this, has a canoe stern – which further reduces stability relative to a hull with a flat run – what rescued her from white-elephant status?

The answer: I suspect that she is quite a bit heavier than Sidney designed her. Arion was built before anyone knew what the scantlings of a fiberglass hull ought to be. I suspect her laminate was done by guess and by gosh. I believe someone told me that her hull was over an inch-and-a-half-thick solid fiberglass down near the keel, but only a quarter-inch thick at the sheerline. If so, this is roughly triple the thickness that the old Gibbs and Cox [a naval architecture firm that designs surface warships] Rule stipulated down in the bottom, and a tad more than half what that rule called for at the sheerline.

So I suspect Arion floated two or three inches deeper in the water than Sidney expected her to. And because so much fiberglass was used down low, and so little up high, her center of gravity is probably unusually low. Which, for this shape of hull, is a very good thing. The large amount of glass used in her bottom increased her stability (stability increases more than linearly with displacement). Don once again rightly suggests that if one were to build the hull itself lighter, one could increase the amount of ballast. Again, this would go in the direction of increasing her power to carry sail.

The only thing Don suggested that fell short of doing all that could be done to improve her was the use of aluminum masts. True, aluminum masts properly engineered are lighter than wood, but today we have carbon fiber, which is much lighter still than aluminum at the same strength and stiffness, and a narrow hull like this begs for it to be used. So Don came up with a number of ways to modernize Arion if he won the lottery. It will be a shame if someone doesn’t step up and do it.

I would take the speed readings he gives with a grain of salt. I suspect these were speed over ground readings (GPS) with a favorable current, not speed through the water. A hull like Arion’s will not – except briefly, when surfing down a wave front – exceed its theoretical hull speed of 8.26 knots. When heeled, this will increase to around 8.5 knots, but that’s pretty much the upper limit.

I once invented a saying: “A yacht is like a woman: If she’s beautiful enough you will forgive all her flaws.” This certainly applies here because I find Arion exceptionally beautiful. I suspect she heels a bit more than I would like, and that she rolls impressively downwind in a seaway, but she is absolutely lovely to look at – and that is worth a heck of a lot.

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