skiff or no skiff

What's the big deal about describing a boat as a skiff or not????? To someone who doesn't sail do you think the wording "skiff" means anything to them? I'm quite happy calling my boat a high performance racing craft because that is what is, no grey area in reffering to it as that.

This post was in response to someone who posted that a skiff was something that planes upwind and gybes downwind.

The problem is that (to quote Julian Bethwaite) planing is “virtually impossible” to define, and "the more you look into it the more impossible it is to define”.

Modern design in skiffs is often about blurring the whole planing/displacement divide, so it's hard to make a case for upwind planing as a skiff characteristic. Julian for example tries to keep the bow low, and pretty much make the boat go bow up (which is what many people call "planing") as late as possible; so maybe a 49er isn't planing upwind much in light winds. He said his Prime Mk2 18 (45kg hull, 2 crew, mast about 38' tall, wingspan of 8.8m I think) was a semi-displacement boat upwind, yet it was damn quick.

Paul Bieker says that the 14 "spends a lot of time at transitional planing speeds upwind". Cherub guys have called the RS800 "marginal" at planing....which means that we'd just have arguments about whether a boat was planing or not. Some 12 guys refer to their boats as "displacement" shapes because like many skiff designs they are now aimed at reducing wavemaking and wetted surface drag, not planing early. Look at the latest 12 Foot skiff - very much Moth style.

So it's not as if we can just look at a boat and go "oh looks its planing upwind it must be a skiff"; it's very hard to work out whether they are planing. As Moths and the "humpless" style hulls indicate, planing upwind is not the only (maybe not the best) route to speed, and planing upwind is NOT a keynote in skiff design.

As early as the '50s, John Westell noted that his 505 rewarded angles downwind, and it planes upwind, so that would make it a skiff under your definition. Tasars can plane upwind and you sail angles (very low) most of the time, and they aren't skiffs. Certainly old skiffs didn't plane upwind, yet they are skiffs.

There seems to be a simple way of working out where "traditional" racing skiffs physically differ from dinghies. They have always had more sail and crew-induced righting moment for their length than a dinghy. When you plot the skiffs in terms of SA and RM for length they stand out distinct from any dinghy of their era and just about always have. These two factors drive the rest of the design to a large extent.

So it's easy to work out the physical characteristics of the traditional  skiffs.....whether that is enough to work out what makes a skiff is a different story.

PS anyone bored by this thread, the simple answer is not to read it!


Edited by CT249