hello paul madden at the yacht channel today i'm going to do a report on a really interesting
aspect of shipbuilding and operations and that is the bow of the vessel yacht builders are
quite careful not to show you pictures of their vessels out in seas like these but I can assure
you that any seasoned captain whether they be on a yacht, a military vessel, or commercial vessel or
sailors that have crossed oceans have seen seas like these and these pictures
hit you right in your stomach because you know what it feels like to hit a wave
and you know what the ship's motion is how a ship will rise off a wave and then dive off the far
side of the wave just in time to catch the next one and start the roller coaster ride and here's
how Hollywood depicted a particularly bad bow entry into a wave from the Wolf of Wall Street
I covered this in my podcast with Captain Mark Elliott
and so where to begin in a discussion about bows because there's all kinds of chatter about
the different superiority of different bow designs, the aesthetics of them, the efficiencies
the economies and and and just, you know, what looks cool and what doesn't look cool so going
back to the early ships when the front of the vessel was just the pointy end they jazzed them up
with these rather elaborate figureheads and they have I'm sure lots of messages built into them and
i've been studying them a bit and trying to understand what the themes are or the
messages - don't mess with me, obviously some of them are quite aggressive, predominantly though
they are women some are a little mysterious, I don't know what this woman's holding in her hand
and some of the women are you know a little bit aggressive um they like to show some skin I don't
know if this is politically correct anymore here's a sort of a flying pinup motif here and this is an
interesting one um a very angry woman and looking a little bit closer in her left hand she's holding
somebody's scalp so this could be a message for the crew members that could be an angry wife
and the message might be don't mess around in foreign ports getting back to the subject
at hand we are going to get into the science and the engineering of bows but before we do one more
step into the past lest anybody think that some of these design ideas are very radical and completely
original and modern we've got to pay homage to the French the British and the German dreadnoughts
going back over a hundred years really there are a number of really interesting
and significant bow designs that were developed for warships not so much in the commercial fleet
but definitely the warships had some radical looking boughs and they were shaped that way
perhaps not just to cut through the waves but also for the purpose of ramming other vessels
and sinking them and i'll leave it to others to comment uh if any of the yacht owners have
had used that criteria in designing their bows as well and check the bow on this American built
257 foot yacht the SS Delphine that was built in 1921 in the United States for the Dodge family and
so why all this discussion about boughs when you look at yacht videos they're always in flat seas
perfect conditions it's sunny it's wonderful no champagne glasses are falling over and no water
is slopping out of the jacuzzi but sooner or later all vessels are going to be in some severe weather
whether intentional or not and this is where the shape of the bow has a lot to do with how the
vessel rides and the sea keeping capabilities also about how fast it's able to pass through
the sea because the vessel is getting knocked straight up in the air by every wave and digging
up tons and tons of water across the foredeck it's not operating in its optimal capacity
this is aside from safety factors and safety considerations and also the comfort of the crew
when a vessel is pitching like this there's going to be a lot of people puking let's be
honest about it this is very uncomfortable so anything that can make the vessel
go through the water with less pitch and less abrupt slamming in and out of the waves and
giant waves going across the deck and smashing the tenders and going through the windows of the boat
and this is why you see naval designers architects and builders in the commercial and the military
sector in particular innovating uh as fast as they can and building new fleets of vessels
with better bowels and radically different bowels two biggest players in the bow wars if
you want to call it that are Ulstein in Norway who have uh have developed patented and built
over a hundred x-bow ships in the last 10 to 15 years and in the Netherlands the Damen
shipbuilding group has developed and patented a bow that they call this sea axe
which again is a very unique and well-tested bow and both companies make very convincing cases
about why their particular bow is superior in one video you can see this axe bow offshore supply
vessel eating the launch of another offshore supply vessel with a traditional flared bow
of course without knowing the horsepower and the load factor in each of the vessels it's hard to
make a direct comparison and maybe the slower boat just had to throttle back because they were
getting beat up by the waves so the argument is that the x-bow has sharper angles at the bow it
splits the wave and distributes the forces in a more even way and also further back from the bow
into more towards the center of gravity for the vessel and i like the fact that Ustein refers
to the orca as part of the inspiration for this bow the orcas can weigh up to six tons and reach
32 feet long and they also achieve a speed of 35 knots which is quite phenomenal and here's a side
by side comparison and a tank test you can see the vessel on the left is throwing a larger bowel wave
that's going to be more sort of smashing more pitching and it's going to slow the boat down
because it takes energy to throw that wave out of the way here's a very cool tank test for the Damen
40 knots 2 meter waves and you can see that this hull is slicing through the waves very nicely
you'll also notice that it's a pretty narrow hull
and so that seems to be a defining feature of the dominant holes is that they are a narrow beam
um they're they're fast so they don't have a ton of volume but you can make up for that by getting
a longer one and they are very cool looking much sexier than the axe bows i would say
having grown up racing on sailboats like these sitting on the windward rail and basically getting
not that bad but getting knocked down by every wave I mean every wave that you see you feel it
and it's gonna come on board and you're gonna you're gonna get hit by it so I'm acutely aware
of the pitch and the motion of boats going through heavy weather and getting slammed so anything that
can make that experience a little less jarring I'm all for it and on these larger vessels uh
to be able to cut through a wave rather than slam into it and rise up and then go crashing down the
other side that's all got to be good all of these i think are really positive innovations and i
think that anybody that's going to build a yacht should be looking at these different alternatives
and studying them seriously I think that they're between the X-bow and the Sea-Axe I think that
there are pluses mostly pluses but some pluses are greater for one and greater for the other I
think in terms of a big volume vessel that this is the way to go probably vessels over 70 meters
whereas smaller vessels that want to go faster I would think that the Sea-Axe is the way to go
but again you're going to have less volume and you're going to have less stability on a hull that
is that narrow so you're going to have to have stabilizers and if you get into stabilizers
you know that's also cutting down the efficiency so it's an interesting topic to study and there's
a lot more to learn but check it out there's a lot of stuff on youtube there's some very interesting
videos that you can find if you scratch around a little bit please subscribe to our channel if you
like these little reports and I look forward to seeing you here again soon on another topic you