FASTER THAN THE WINE

New Zealand Mail, 22 January 1902, Page 29

FASTER THAN THE WINE

During the recent yacht trials in An.—'c the Constitution was more u ■ ' ported as sailing at a greater’svetj'--that of the wind preva-mg at\„<e this (says “The Bun”; was pr-bumy iogarded incredulously by the jay reauer. .it, is a weL.known fact, however, tiiiu .sailing yachts or the itigner trpe, when tue wi'iu is lying just right, may at times actually exceed the speed of the propeumg viinj. This is especially true of racing machines like the Cup yachts, constructed on tho finest lines of the very smoothest material, which has been polished until the resist! anc-e to the water is the slightest possible. Of course, such a result cannot he attained ill beating to windward, nor even in running before the wind. It occurs on the point of sailing known as a broad reach. This can best be illustrated to the lay mind by placing a billiard ball in a groove cut diagonally across a table, and .sufficiently deep to prevent the ball from readily rolling out of it. If a billiard cue or a flat stick be taken and pushed squarely down the length of the table, the hall will | he shoved along from one end of the table !. t? the other, reaching the further end | simultaneously with the stick. Assuming the table to have been three feet by four, the length of diagonal groove—according to j the well known theorem that the liypo- | thenuse of a right angled triangle is equiva. I lent to the square root of the sum of the 1 squares of its two right angled sides—will i he five feet. In other words, the billiard I bail will have travelled five feet, while the j propelling force —namely, the stick—has only moved four feet.

Now, if the billiard ball were a Cup yacht instead, aud the propelling breeze blowing eight miles an hour, it may be readily seen that the yacht, with its tre. mendous sail area and with its smooth underbody offering the minimum of resistance to the water, could easily cover ten miles in covering a course diagonally across the direction of the wind. That is just what happened i;i the case of the Constitution, and is what happens in some degree with every yacht on the point of sailing, the excess of speed over that of the pre. vailing wind depending, of course, entirely upon the spread of sail, the non-resisting lines of the model, and the smoothness of the hull.