Strum
A 50 foot Paul Bieker water ballasted, carbon fibre racer/cruiser - designed to go fast easily and effortlessly!
Strum was built for a Vancouver based family and their goal was to have a boat that was competitive on the racing circuit in the Pacific North West and in events such as the Vic. Maui race.
Strum will be campaigned by family members and their friends and by early performances indications she should have little trouble finding her way to the front of the fleet. This has been achieved with a smart combination of water ballasting, cockpit simplicity and all round smart and simple yacht design principles.
The Paul Bieker Riptide 50 design is a true racer/cruiser in every sense of the word using a combination of state of the art composite technologies mixed with all the creature comforts you'd usually associate with a top line cruising yacht.
Construction
The hull is a combination of Woven and uni-directional carbon fabrics incorporating Kevlar in the impact zones and is constructed over a male mould and faired with a minimal amount of lightweight epoxy filler.
The deck is of similar construction incorporating Woven and uni-directional carbon and closed cell foam, however the deck is built in a female mould and laid up into a high build epoxy resulting in a very smooth fair exterior finish.
Both the hull and deck are heat cured to ensure the laminate achieves it's optimum strength.
Deck lay out
A key feature to the Riptide 50 design is the cleanliness of the deck which is achieved by running all control lines under the deck. To ensure the smooth halyard travel Bieker has placed Harken turning blocks at all apexes of these control line runs. This results in the tubes being able to be dead straight eliminating any chaffing of the lines with in the tube. This below deck system incorporates the:
• Mainsheet • Pole centering line
• Running Backstays • Headsail furler control lines
• Tack line
In keeping with the clean decks the headsail furler drum and associated equipment is also fitted below deck which allows the gap between headsail and deck to be kept to a minimum.
The Riptide 50 features a fully articulating 3m bow prod. The advantage of the articulation is when running deep one can drag the the pole aft and square back the spinnaker. The prod can be brought aft to lie flat along the gunwale which is convenient while berthing etc.
The mainsheet is run under deck to where it exits on the outboard side of the cabin house just aft of the mast in a 2:1 German style set-up. The traveler is situated in the cockpit just forward of the helm pedestals. The traveler setup is a 2:1 x 4:1 cascade system giving a total purchase of 8:1. This is rigged in an endless line type fashion so as the cockpit stays free from excessive clutter caused by line tails. The mainsheet is trimmed via two Harken 3 speed self tailing winches.
The Riptide 50 features two 40” lightweight carbon wheels the starboard helm station has a chart plotter, VHF radio, deck and foredeck lighting switches and each pedestal is fitted with an easy read compass and the controls for the water ballast system.
Water ballasting plus lifting keel
The main ballast is in tanks port and starboard and they extend from the gunwhale to approx 400 mm above the water line allowing them to be drained when on the leeward side. Each aft cabin features a clear inspection hatch so you can visually check all drain and transfer tube connections. Water is transferred to either side of the boat via a 8” transfer tube. You open the valve of the transfer tube on the windward side prior to the tack and the windward tank drains in to the leeward tank.
Her lifting keel with bulb foot gives good stability in the light when not so heavily water ballasted with the added advantage of access to shallower anchorages when lifted.
Paul Beiker's originality in design and engineering concepts are refreshingly different from some of today's design expectations. At Franklin's, we find his designs a pleasure to work with.
Use the slider below to view a range of photos. Click on any image in the slider to see enlarged photos.
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Comments from Paul Beiker:
Photo Below: Paul Beiker on DarkStar
This yacht continues the development of a concept that I first developed with Jonathan and Libby Mckee about 12 years ago. The idea is for a yacht which is a modern interpretation of the high performance racer/cruiser. This concept is very appealing to me in that it is both progressive and anachronistic. It is progressive because we are trying simply to get the most performance and fun for a fixed quantity of money without regard to the constraints of any rating rule. It is anachronistic in that we are trying to produce a dual purpose yacht for both racing and cruising which can be sailed by a moderate sized crew. This has more in common with the type of keelboat sailing thirty years ago than it has with the type of sailing common at this time, often on relatively light boats requiring quite a few extraneous people for live ballast. Ultralight displacement with some form of shifting
ballast is a given in order to meet the requirement for maximum performance with a minimal crew. After considering both water ballast and canting keel design solutions, water ballast was chosen for several reasons. The first was simplicity - ballast fill, transfer and draining can be accomplished from the weather rail using stock pumps and large lightweight line-actuated valves of my design. Designing the systems and structures (especially for grounding) is relatively simple for a water ballasted yacht. The second reason for choosing water ballast is that it results in a yacht with a minimum displacement in light air upwind, downwind and when motoring (allowing a yacht such as the RT50 to power comfortably at 11 kts with a moderate amount of horsepower). That said, I believe that the basic Riptide racer/cruiser concept could be applied successfully in a canting keel yacht, especially with the technical development which has occurred in canting keel systems over the past decade.
With careful reasoning, a comfortable cruising interior can be fitted in a yacht without a serious weight penalty. This is achieved by keeping the interior simple, building the interior using modern composites and wherever possible, designing the interior components to serve structural purposes. That said, for serious racing I would expect owners of these sorts of yachts to remove the windlass, extraneous cushions, hot water heaters, cabin heaters, etc..
I believe that yachts of this type offer an owner better value than many new yachts, especially in parts of the world with great cruising grounds such as the Pacific Northwest where I live. They are truly dual purpose, they do not require a large crew to effectively race them, and it will be a long time before they will be considered slow in any fleet of similar sized yachts.
