Prologue: Brief history of Bill Lee Yachts

 
In the early 70s, Santa Cruz, CA was the center for radical sailboat design with a co-mingling of ideas and construction techniques by amateurs and professionals alike.  Sadly, during this time lives were lost when some designs either were far to crude or went too far.  Trial and error eventually yielded a reputation for simple but superbly crafted boats.

During this time, Bill Lee Yachts began producing fiberglass sloops that changed the direction of sailboat design.  One of the very first hulls Bill Lee Yachts produced was Magic, a 30’ sloop displacing 3,000 lbs and capable of carrying 450 sq ft of sail area.  Being the skipper, Bill Lee garnered the same attention during the Monterey Bay races in the summer of 1970 as did his radically designed boat.

Soon after the 1971 Transpac (a bi-annual race from Southern California to Hawaii which is the longest of the two oldest ocean races in the world), Lee was commissioned by San Franciscan yachtsman Art Biehl to make a 36’ ultra-light sloop weighing in at 7,500 lbs and named Witchcraft.  Witchcraft’s design was then duplicated for Honolulu yachtsman Stu Cowan and he named his boat Chutzpah.  Chutzpah entered the 1973 Transpac, and attracted a lot of attention, along with the ultra-light Spenser 53 Ragtime, a narrow hard-chined sloop of racing pedigree from New Zealand.     

                                                                                  

S/V Ragtime

Designed by John Spenser in 1965, Ragtime effectively was eliminated from racing south of the equator due to her radical lightweight design.  Ragtime’s unique appearance can be credited to the long, low, all-black wood hull, aluminum mast, hard-chines and varnished wood cabin top.
  

“Chine” refers to a sharp angle in the hull; hard-chine is associated with plywood and soft-chine with fiberglass.  A chined hull built out of plywood keeps most of the joints between the plywood sheets at the chines and makes the building process easier.   Many fiberglass hulls are built just like plywood hulls are, using sheets of a core material joined together to form the shape of the hull with fiberglass applied to the outer sides of the core; in this case the hull shape is determined by the core material.   Most fiberglass hulls are molded with just about any shape since the fiberglass and resin used have no inherent shape.

A: S-bottom hull B: hard chine hull C: soft chine hull

S/V Ragtime

In the 1973 & 1975 Transpacs, Ragtime took the fastest elapsed time honors but Chutzpah received overall corrected honors in both races.  The Pacific Handicap Racing Fleet of the Northwest administrators were paying close attention to the ultra-light design trend and decided to modify the current set of ratings to account for the anticipated extra downwind speed of this new breed of racing yachts.  The PHRF maintains the handicap ratings of member boats and supervises the rating system used by yacht clubs and other sponsors of sailboat races, in order to keep it fair and equitable throughout the fleet .  Each boat's time to complete the race course was adjusted to reflect how long it should have theoretically taken.  The adjusted time is then called a corrected time and the corrected times determine the places.  Given equal skill of skipper and crew, a boat with the longer waterline can sail faster.

Sailboats are unique in that the sail in the wind is an airfoil (the shape of a wing or blade as seen in a cross-section); and while moving through a fluid produce an aerodynamic force.  The hull in the water is a hydrofoil (creating lift identical to an airfoil).  Unlike aerodynamics, which set a maximum speed for a 'subsonic' airplane, regardless of its fuselage length, hydrodynamics for a displacement boat sets a maximum speed based on the waterline length of the immersed hull. 

  

Water flowing past the hull creates a bow wave termed the ‘captive’ wave.  Lesser waves are produced along the hull until they meet the stern wave.  The boat reaches its maximum hull speed when you increase the speed of the water and there is only a trough between the captive and stern waves.  A longer waterline length allows more room for the trough to develop.  Nevertheless, a sailboat displacement hull cannot break its captive wave’s trough similar to the fact that a subsonic airplane cannot break the sound barrier.  The wider the hull the more the boat must push against the bow wave making it very difficult to increase the speed through the water.  It is with hydrodynamic theory in mind that set apart Bill Lee Yachts from the others.  He managed to break the water barrier with a new design.

Bill realized that building a limited number of custom yachts was not very lucrative and he decided to start building 27’ sloops that were within the financial means of most sailors.  With a 27’ boat on his design board he moved production more than a mile inland from the shoreline to a larger facility in Soquel, four miles south of Santa Cruz.  At the end of an often muddy road, Bill Lee Yachts found its new home in a 200’ long converted chicken-coop.  This huge structure was built on a 10,000 sq ft concrete slab that had housed the laying stock of a big poultry firm.  An unpainted wooden staircase led up to the hen-house door from the parking lot 30’ below.  Along the way was a small crude sign on a telephone pole, which said, “Bill Lee Yachts”; on the front door was another sign that said, “Bring a six-pack”.

Most who did step inside were greeted with no foyer, carpeting, secretary or even a chair.  It almost appeared that no one was home.  What did greet them was an enormous loft-like room littered with hulls and forms and the tools of the trade used for building sailboats.  Next to the chicken-coop was a trailer-office.  There was a similar structure nearby which was formerly a milking shed that now housed the welding operation.

He began building ULDBs (ultra-light displacement boat) commercially in 1972 by carefully engineering weight out of the boat.   As one of the hottest yacht designers of all time, he was instrumental in designing the speedy ultra-lights; and actually created several new racing classes.  Despite handicaps written into racing rules to penalize his designs, he has built many yachts at his boatyard on a windy hill just outside Santa Cruz, CA.

Bill has distinct opinions and ideas about yacht design with respect to the nine conditions of sailing; beating, reaching, and running in weather light, medium and heavy.  Sailboats can potentially sail in any or all of these conditions and it is with that in mind that boat designer’s make major or minor design improvements over previous designs.

  

Prior to building boats and fresh out of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo with a degree in mechanical engineering Bill went to work for the defense industry as an engineer in Southern California.  He was a member of the personnel carrier prototype design group.  Here Bill learned about the practical side of stress analysis and the critical importance of weight.  

Lee is a trained engineer who knows exactly what he is doing, both in matters of design and construction.  He is one of the very few designers who also built his own boats relying on his engineering background and intuition.   However, in reality he specialized in taking the conventional sailboat designs of the time and making them longer and lighter.

In 1975 Lee sailed Panache, his first 40-footer with a relatively wide beam, to Manzanillo, MX and while partying with his crewmates on the deck of Ragtime he decided to build a big boat.  Admittedly, Bill first came up with the idea back in November of 1973 to build a narrow hull with a rounded-off bottom but it wasn’t until early 1976 that he committed to the project that would eventually produce the sleek new 68’ sloop named Merlin.

In the process of building Merlin, Bill disregarded complying with the constantly-changing International Offshore Rule rating system.  "It took four of us about 10 months to build Merlin”, Lee said.  Bill’s primary focus was to make this boat fast enough to break Windward Passage’s existing 1971 fastest elapsed-time Transpac record.  Windward Passage, an Alan Gurney-designed 73’ sloop built in 1968, has the distinction of being the first big ULDB built to be extremely strong and light.  Windward Passage is one of only a few that have taken both fastest elapsed-time and overall corrected time winner in the same Transpac.  Even more impressive, she is one of only four vessels in the 103 year Transpac history to achieve a clean sweep; first to finish, first in class, and first on overall corrected time. 

George Olson, crewman, boat-builder/designer said at the time, “Building a 70-footer was just beyond me or anyone else in Santa Cruz at the time.  Merlin stands alone as an effort to see how fast we can really go.”

S/V Merlin

Intuition also played an important role in the construction phase of Merlin.  His friend, insurance agent and Transpac veteran commented, “…Bill had the keel on a dolly under the boat, moving it back and forth to where it looked right”.  That keel weighed somewhere in the range of half the overall weight of the race-ready condition of 22,000 pounds featuring a 73’ aluminum mast, 62’ waterline and 12’ beam.  The standing rigging carried 1,850 square feet of sail including a spinnaker attached to a 25' spinnaker pole.  She weighed less than one-fifth of some of her contemporary competitors.  Her long narrow hull to some gave the appearance of half a catamaran and earned her the nickname, ‘one-hulled catamaran’.

It is noteworthy that a boat’s beam size was dictated by the 12’ inside ceiling height of the building.  Bill knew that the hull had to be rotated while being constructed and made sure she would roll before they started.  The construction techniques were standard for the era and the use of a balsa-core for the deck and hull was common.  Exotic materials were not used because Bill preferred to reduce risks by using known materials, methods and building techniques.

Lee says, "I was interested in going fast, but in a boat that would be structurally sound.  Most boats are made of glass, wood or aluminum.  The weakest hull forms are sprayed glass; and while the average stock glass boat is strong enough, it is heavier and slower.  Some builders use chopped fiberglass put on with a gun, but it's not as strong as the woven fiber glass we use.  We do a hand lay-up, paint the glass with thin resin for additional stiffening, then add the core—it can be either foam or balsa wood, but I think balsa's better—and then add the inner weave."  Lee also said, "I didn't originate the sandwich hull," but he has used this technique ever since.

Lee notes that in high school, “I drew boats instead of studying.  My Dad didn’t approve”.

February 23, 1977 Merlin was loaded on a flatbed truck and driven 20 miles south to Moss Landing where she was launched.   The initial sea-trials surprised those who already expected her to be fast.  No one expected her to sail impressively upwind due to the narrow beam and somewhat flattened bottom but off the wind and downwind she was expected to perform very well.  The crew was more familiar with heavier boats of this size and handling this boat was a new experience.  In certain situations off the wind, she created tremendous apparent wind and according to Steve Taft, an early crewmember and the boat’s sail maker for many years, “…if the true wind died, we’d experience these incredible apparent wind crashes.”

All sails convert wind power from any direction into forward thrust by the interaction of wind moving across the sails.   In the 18^th century the pulling force or thrust, was identified as lift and was discovered to be generated by fluid flow over a curved surface, an airfoil.  The pressure forward of the sail is lower than the pressure aft which creates a lifting force; so it can be reasonably deduced that, sailing sucks (air).

Sailboats typically cannot sail directly into the wind or head to wind since the leading edge of the sail must be oriented to allow the wind to flow over both surfaces of the sail.  A boat falls off the wind when it points its bow further from the eye of the wind (the sail might be pushed or pulled by the wind force, allowing the pull to become stronger than the push).

True wind is the speed and direction of the real wind blowing over the water.   Generally, apparent wind is the wind that you feel when you are moving; it is a combination of the true wind and the wind caused by your forward motion.  For example, if the wind was approaching from the side while you were stationary, you would feel the wind on your side.  But, when you began moving forward the wind would begin to feel as if it was coming from more forward.  The faster you go the more directly the wind feels like it is coming from ahead.  That is apparent wind; it is always forward of the true wind unless the true wind is dead ahead or astern.  A small change in true-wind direction makes a large change in apparent wind direction and apparent wind is vitally important when determining the points of sail.

An apparent wind crash can be a minor event, or it can cause big problems if the crew is not quick enough to respond to the situation.  It does not appear that Taft meant a ‘crash’ in the sense of a broach (an unplanned and uncontrolled turning of a vessel so that the hull is broadside to the seas or to the wind and capsizing or nearly capsizing).  The performance characteristics of Merlin were fairly well known for upwind conditions and it appears that the challenges came about while sailing well off the wind, flying spinnakers (which are often called a kite or chute; a type of sail designed specifically for sailing off the wind and balloons out in front of the bow when deployed).

S/V Merlin flying a spinnaker

If the true wind from aft of the beam suddenly drops to zero, and the boat is still moving forward, then the apparent wind will come from directly ahead; the kite will collapse and you won’t be able to get it to fill.  If you turn away to fill the spinnaker, the apparent wind just follows the direction the boat is going and will appear to be coming from the direction the bow is pointed, until the boat comes to a stop and the apparent wind drops to zero.

One common opinion is that ultra-lights have to be sailed similar to grand prix boats.  They take far more effort on the part of the crew and do not reward inexperience or laziness.  Things can happen very quickly and in many cases the speed can increase or decrease in seconds.

The crew learned how to sail Merlin when the boat ran over one wave and down into the next, covering the foredeck with a couple feet of water.  ”We were all pretty scared at first,” recalls crewmember Phil Vandenberg.  “The bow would be three feet underwater but the boat didn’t slow down or load up and the speedometer didn’t go down.  After awhile, we’d just shrug our shoulders and keep going.”  While testing some sails, however, sail maker Steve Taft was treated to some eye-opening sailing.  He once said, “With the bow under water we pegged the speedometer at 30 knots, which is the fastest I’ve ever gone on a sled before or since.”  She has a hull-speed in excess of 30 knots which is amazing for a racing yacht of its time.

During pre-race inspections for the 1977 Transpac a race safety inspector wanted to see the boat motor at 8 knots.  Dave Wahle, a regular crew member, cast off the dock lines with the inspector aboard and motored down the Santa Cruz Harbor at 8 knots; backwards.  When Merlin reached the end of the harbor the wheel was spun and she turned on a dime and motored once again in reverse back to her slip.

In the 1977 Transpac, Bill Lee skippered Merlin to first-to-finish honors in a record eight days, 11 hours, one minute and 45 seconds.  It was a wild Transpac in ’77 with five yachts dismasted in the heavy winds.  Nevertheless, despite the conditions, Merlin logged 302 miles in one 24-hour period during the race and set a Transpac record.

That's S/V Merlin finishing the 1977 Transpac, not a submarine with a sail.