Pete Hill ........... Hall of fame

[Owly055]

     Pete Hill is a well known voyager, we probably all know at least something about him.   His ex wife Annie of course wrote a few books including Voyaging on a Small Income, but Pete himself does not seem concerned about sharing his adventures with the world.   Having sailed the world for 40 years more or less, he's built a few boats, including his first catamaran, and the Benford Dory Badger he and Annie sailed in, as well as his current catamaran Oryx.  He's been pretty much of a "junk rigger" since Badger.  The current boat Oryx has been through a number of iterations including soft wing sails, and now an aerojunk rig, and was originally built with Vortex plates, which were replaced with more conventional keels.   His experience being dismasted on his Freedom 33, where the carbon fiber mast just snapped at deck level is enough to make me question carbon as a mast material, though that is probably not fair, every mast has a failure mode.
     Below are 3 links.  The first is to the Hall of Fame article on the Junk Rig Association site, a PDF file.    The second is a blog by Carly, Pete's second wife, who was tragically lost two years ago off the coast of Africa from Oryx.   Pete woke up for his watch to find Carly missing.    No trace was ever found.   The blog is excellent reading.
The third link is an article in Duckworks magazine with some photos of Oryx's interior.   Oryx is a sensible cat design to my eye.   Not the typical absurd high windage or low clearance seagoing condo that seems to popular these days, or the bare bones Warram with no bridge deck structure whatsoever.   It has a biplane rig with low aspect ratio that looks almost stubby, but to my eye looks extremely well suited to it's mission, which is serious voyaging.  Pete seems to think no more of sailing from Africa to Brazil to Australia, and most folks would of driving from San Francisco to LA.   

     Enjoy the links!!   They are worth checking out.

http://www.junkrigassociation.org/resources/Documents/Hall%20of%20Fame/HoF%20Pete%20Hill.pdf
http://junkoryx.blogspot.fr/2014/07/brazil-football-mania.html
http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/13/projects/oryx/index.htm
http://junkoryx.blogspot.com/2012_10_01_archive.html

[Frank]

Thanks for posting!!

I thought everyone here was hibernating....BUT ITS SPRING!!
Time to wake up 😄😄
Great pictures and yes...Well worth the time reading the notes.

[CharlieJ]

Yeah. Me too. Three days and two posts. But hey it was easter weekend:)

[Owly055]

    I got things backward apparently.   Oryx transitioned from the aerojunk to the soft wing sail.  It is obvious from the photos that Oryx is not carrying much sail.  The masts are rather short, and this obviously accounts for the poor light air performance Carly speaks of.   I would guess that the Aerojunk rig was selected in the expectation that it might provide enough drive to compensate for the small rig to some extent.  Presumably the small rig was chosen to make the boat more "seaworthy", as Pete and Carly are inclined to do a lot of very long ocean voyaging.  The last thing one wants on a multihull in the southern ocean is a huge rig, unless you are a racer.  Sails on a small rig are also easier to handle.   It would be very interesting to know if the soft wing sail provided significantly more light air drive than the Aerojunk.  It looks to me like a game of squeezing the most from the least.   
     I'm looking at more or less the same challenge.  I want a fairly small boat that rides fairly flat, a single mast low aspect ratio junk rig of some sort, minimal maintenance (small size and minimal hardware).   The object is to arrive safely after long passages of weeks with minimal fatigue (junk rig & multihull).  The junk rig reefs virtually instantly, and tacks and jibes effortlessly and not violently.   The lack of standing rigging means elimination of a huge percentage of maitenance.   The junk rig also does not require winches, travelers, vangs, preventers, running backstays, tied in reefs, head sails.    Deck work is fine when racing, or day sailing / coastal sailing, where you are sailing in a selected weather window, but mid ocean when a violent squall blows up, or a significant storm, and one is single handed, it entails significantly higher risk and stress.
                                                                                    H.W.


Here's what Carly wrote in her blog in July of 2013:


Whilst sailing across the Atlantic, Pete had pondered over ?Oryx?s? light air and windward performance and had decided to extend the keels, but once we were safely ashore he decided to tackle all the issues at once. We can?t really afford to haul out every now and then to make the necessary changes, time or money wise. So he removed the anti vortex panels. They seemed to work once ?Oryx? was doing over 5 knots, but when we were going slowly we were sometimes sailing sideways. Pete then extended the low aspect ratio keels, so that we now draw 0.9m. Having looked at the other boats in the yard Pete also decided to enlarge our existing rudders. He added a tiller bar, repaired the self-steering attachment, which we ripped off when hauling out and then redesigned the sailing rig to ensure that the rig is now fully balanced. The other rig worked well, but the horseshoe fittings around the mast were taking excessive strain, so Pete returned to his original idea for ?Oryx? ? a wing sail with articulating battens. This proved to be a mammoth task. There were also alternators to repair, the engine to coax, the kiwi prop to adjust - the jobs seemed endless.