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• Sailboat Reviews

Funny-looking to some, innovative to others, the Freedom 33 is certainly an unusual boat.

When a restless 40-year-old advertising executive with a background in one-design sailing (1970 World’s Sunfish Champion) went shopping for a cruising boat some years ago, he could not find one that made him happy. Conventional cruisers he found poor performers, needlessly difficult to sail shorthanded with their big headsails and complicated rigs, and with hull forms that demand auxiliary power any time the wind is forward of abeam.

It was in 1972 that this sailor, Garry Hoyt, set about developing an alternative. His alternative was the original Freedom 40. Discarding conventions one by one, he came up with a long-waterline, quasi-traditional hull form and a wishbone cat-ketch rig.

Then, to prove he had something, he took his prototype to Antigua Race Week and decisively out-performed the cruising boats with which he had been so unhappy. Granted, his talents as a sailor were considerably better than those of his competition and granted, his prototype without an engine had no propeller or aperture drag; nevertheless his concept gained a qualified validity.

In the intervening years Hoyt refined his rig and developed a whole line of boats: a 21, 25, 28, 39 (express and pilothouse models), and the 44. The Freedom 33 is no longer in production, having been replaced in the line by the 32, which is a single masted “cat sloop” with a self-tacking jib and gun mount spinnaker. More rig innovation.

Hoyt’s natural ingenuity produced the innovative boats, basic good luck led him to Ev Pearson of Tillotson-Pearson when he went looking for a builder, and his background in advertising let him create attention-getting explanations of his concept. His one notable weakness has been in marketing; until recently he tried with little success to bring potential buyers to the boat rather than putting together a dealer network that takes the boat to the public.

The US builder, Tillotson-Pearson, has been one of the most successful low-profile boatbuilders, putting together such popular boats as the J-Boat line and the Etchells 22 one-design. The firm has been a leader in the development of balsa coring for hull structure and carbon fiber for light, stiff laminates.

Unlike the situation with more conventional craft, selling the sailing public on the concept behind the Freedoms is a stiff challenge. The rig in particular is unfamiliar to most cruising sailors and for the concept to gain acceptance they need to be educated. Not only must they be convinced that the stayless masts, wishbone booms, and wrap-around sails are durable, they must be literally taught how to use them advantageously, For this reason reception to the idea has been mixed, and the appeal of the Freedom has been to sailors outside of the mainstream.

Construction

Basic construction of the Freedom 33 hull and deck is, in our opinion, among the best in the production boat building industry. From our observation as a result of examining boats both finished and under construction, we can detect no serious cost cutting or scrimping in the way of materials or techniques.

The Freedom 33 (as with other boats in the Freedom line) has a balsa-cored hull and deck. There are advantages to this type of construction—hull rigidity, thermal and acoustical insulation, reduction in hull weight—that we believe recommends it for hull structure provided it is properly engineered. In the case of the Freedom 33, we believe it is.

Lead ballast, 3,800 lbs, is cast in wedge-shaped pieces and fiberglassed into the bilge. The aluminum fuel tank (25 gallons) is also deep in the bilge. The centerboard, a combination of lead and fiberglass, is a hefty 1,200 lbs, also contributing to stability. The centerboard is the product of perhaps the most thoughtful design and engineering on the boat. It is pivoted in a channel, eliminating the need for a pin that breaches the hull.

Hoyt, with his eye firmly on performance, adopted an idea of designer Jay Parris for a centerboard configuration having a triangular profile and a constant chord. The design permits a centerboard with a shape that gives lift at any angle and, more importantly in reducing drag, a centerboard that fits its slot closely.

If the centerboard is not the most extensively engineered feature of the Freedom 33, then the spars are. Initially the Freedom 33 had two-part aluminum tubular masts that were heavy, reducing stability and increasing pitching moment. To help cure this weakness, Tillotson-Pearson undertook a research program into building one-piece spars using a carbon-fiber laminate.

The result is an approximately 30% saving in weight and considerably stiffer spars. The saving translated itself into markedly better performance, so much so that we suggest any buyer considering one of the increasing number of boats available with stayless spars should look into spar weight and stiffness.

Additional construction details of note on the Freedom 33 include a hull-to-deck joint through-fastened with 5/16″ stainless steel bolts and bonded with 3M 5200 adhesive sealant, a technique we recommend. Bulkheads are tabbed to the inside fiberglass skin, leaving the core intact to prevent hard spots from showing up on the topsides. The interior joinerwork, fetchingly of oak, ash, and spruce, is done to a high quality; our only serious reservation is discussed below.

Performance

Our evaluation of the performance of the Freedom 33 is in part the product of having spent a week sailing aboard the boat during Antigua Race Week. For comparison with that experience on the prototype, we recently sailed a production version, as well.

For those sailors used to masthead headsails and conventional mainsails with their sheeting, reefing, and halyard systems, the rig of the Freedom 33 does require some re-education. Initially one has the impression that the boat is under-rigged and that the sailplan is inefficient. That impression is, however, deceptive. The boat does have speed and liveliness that exceeds that of most out-and-out cruising boats of her size and in many conditions can rival the performance of the many so-called racer-cruisers or “performance cruisers.”

The mainsail and mizzen are efficient in that almost all their area forms an effective airfoil. The wishbone boom permits a longer luff than a conventional boom and does not interfere with the draft at the foot. The wishbone does create windage, though. Draft control is easier with a wishbone boom through either outhaul tension (the Freedom 33 mizzen) or adjustment of the effective length of the wishbone (the mainsail). Similarly the wrap-around sails are more efficient aerodynamically than sails set on a mast track or groove which are in part blanketed by the spar section. Given the greater diameter of stayless spars versus conventional spars, the wrap-around system is important in this type of rig.

For performance, proper sail shape, adjustment, and trim are as vital for this rig as for more conventional rigs. There are still some aspects of the Freedom rig about which we have reservations but from our experience we believe the Freedom line has come closer to perfecting the system than any of its rivals boasting similar rigs. Incidentally, Ulmer Sails (in particular Ulmer sailmaker Bob Adams), has worked hard to develop Freedom sail shape plus reefing and trimming systems and we therefore urge buyers to order the sails offered as “factory installed options” rather than trying to find another sailmaker who will have to go through the extensive design exercise needed to provide suitable sails.

The Freedom 33 is stiffer (and, we think, foot-forfoot, faster) than her sisters in the Freedom line. Her sailplan gives optimum performance in a mid-range of wind strengths, say 10 to 15 knots. In winds below 10 knots, especially to windward in any chop, the stubby hull, with a centerboard and plenty of wetted surface, is sluggish. In fact, no Freedom is as lively as we would wish in lighter winds, a factor to consider in such areas as Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. For such conditions we strongly recommend at least one mizzen staysail. Moreover, although we are not sold on poleless spinnakers (i.e., Flashers) for conventionally rigged cruising boats, we think they are superb as a mizzen spinnaker on a boat like a Freedom 33.

The wishbone booms and stayless masts combine to make the Freedom a delightful boat to sail with the wind from astern. The absence of shrouds lets the mainsail (and boom) swing forward of thwartships, encouraging her to sail wing and wing with the wind as much as 25 degrees or so off the quarter. Moreover, the sail stays out to windward in light winds without a preventer. Nor does it need a vang; the angle of the wishbone boom off the mast eliminates any tendency for the boom to lift. On a run almost any sailor accustomed to wrestling with blanketed or poled out headsails, cringing as his mainsail chafes on shrouds, and paranoid over the threat of accidentally jibing, will have to appreciate the Freedom rig.

Closewindedness is a relative term but a major attraction of the better modern designs. The Freedom 33 is not closewinded, as much as a result of her hull shape as her rig. However, she does not give away anything upwind to boats with shallow hull forms and long keels. Boat for boat she will sail by Morgan 41s, Irwin 44s, CSY 44s, Westsails, and their ilk.

The Freedom rig uses a slab or jiffy reefing system. Moreover, instead of the reefed portion gathering above the boom as with conventional sailplans the excess material gathers at the wishbone in aerodynamically messy folds. It is just not a rig that lends itself to simple, uncluttered reefing and we think finding combinations of reduced sail using staysails would be a better solution than trying to reef main and mizzen. Yet the present rig seems to have proven itself in offshore sailing. Several boats have made long passages without difficulty and weathered severe storms at sea with no breakdowns or crises. In fact, we sailed a Freedom 33 that a few days before had beat her way up Long Island sound in an easterly gale with gusts as high as 60 knots.

The sails are two-ply loosely connected at the leech. Furling is easy; the sail gathers into a basket formed of shock cord stretched across the wishbone. More shock cord across the top keeps the sail secured The convenience of this system, obvious as it may be, is one of the major recommendations of the rig, doing away with the onerous chores of conventional mainsail furling or headsail folding and bagging.

In all, we have been favorably impressed with the performance of a boat that experience and instinct tells us should be poor. The wrap-around sails take getting used to, but the more we played with them, the more effective they seemed to be.

Deck Layout

Other than to handle ground tackle or docking lines, there is no reason why anyone has to leave the cockpit of a Freedom 33 under sail. All halyards, sheets, outhauls, reefing pennants, and the centerboard pennant lead aft to the cockpit where they are handled by a pair of self-tailing winches (Barient 23s) and an array of sheet stoppers. Moreover, the cockpit is short enough so that anyone handling these lines can also keep one hand close to the steering wheel, a boon for shorthanded or singlehanded sailing.

The cockpit seating is deep and the coamings are unobstructed perches on the Freedom 33. Best of all, the cockpit space is entirely usable. In fact, because the mizzen traveler is mounted aft, the Freedom 33 is a distinct rarity among production boats—a boat in which the traveler does not threaten to squash one’s legs or the mainsheet garrote the crew. The feature alone makes the cockpit of the Freedom noteworthy.

The steering wheel on a pedestal is mounted well aft, the helmsman standing (or sitting on a fold-up seat) on a teak grate under which, uncommonly accessible, is the steering cable and quadrant for the outboard rudder. The grate also serves as the cockpit drain with scuppers through the transom, a most effective arrangement for quickly draining a flooded cockpit. A sliding door at the after end of the cockpit houses propane fuel bottles.

The decks and house top are uncluttered sundecks and lounging platforms. Sailors used to gingerly stepping around a conventional deck may feel disoriented—missing are chainplates and shrouds, headsail sheets and blocks, and a spinnaker pole.

The anchor sits in an optional fiberglass bowsprit. Man-sized chocks on either side of the bow and amidships are integrally fitted into the teak toerail.

Garry Hoyt’s forte as a designer is clearly in his ability to develop performance. It has not been in his ability to design an interior. The Freedom 40 originally appeared with a midships cockpit and an interior so broken into segments as to be a disaster. The public understandably could not accept an accommodation plan in a 40-footer that was best suited for a chummy young couple (that to go with a rig that already took a vivid imagination to comprehend). Marketplace pressure dictated an alternative version with an aft cockpit and more versatile layout and the present Freedom 40 is a more successful product.

Similarly the Freedom 33 was first designed with an aft cabin that reduced cockpit space and a main cabin that succumbed to, rather than accommodated itself to, the centerboard trunk dividing it. The present production version does away with the aft cabin, locates the galley conventionally at the base of the companionway, tucks a dinette (convertible to a double berth) to port of the trunk, and has a settee berth to starboard. The result is a main cabin laid out much like other production boats of comparable proportions.

By having her waterline stretched out to virtually the overall length of the boat, the 33 has exceptional roominess for her modest length on deck. Moreover, with her mast stepped close to the stem, her hull fullness has to be carried well forward to support the weight. The forward cabin with its V-berth is the beneficiary. Farther aft the roominess is deceptive, however, because the main cabin is broken up by a 5′ long, waist high centerboard trunk running down the middle and the mizzen mast rising at the after end of it.

Had Hoyt not had his eye so fixed on performance, he might have opted for a longer, narrower centerboard permitting a lower trunk that could be located where it would intrude little if at all into the main cabin. As it is, the centerboard does offer minimum drag, does not “thunk” annoyingly in the trunk, and is rugged. It also needs a trunk that makes casual conversation awkward and it makes the dinette a cul-de-sac, leaving the person on the inside no convenient way to get out.

The aesthetic impression created by the interior joinerwork is among the best we have had about any production boat. All the wood below—and there is plenty—is a combination of oak, ash, and spruce (plus the teak and holly cabin sole). We have long been critical of interior decor relying on dark woods such as teak and mahogany. The warmth and illusion of spaciousness imparted by these light colored woods will appeal to many sailors. It certainly does to us.

There is a place for teak below. Grab rails, companionway treads, the framing around hatches, and the trim in the head—all areas liable to wear and getting wet—would be better in teak than in woods like ash and oak which are subject to staining. Moreover, oak is less dimensionally stable than teak, so moisture may eventually affect the structure as well as the finish.

We have some further observations about the interior. The comfortably wide quarterberth to starboard has little overhead foot room. The pilot berth to starboard is accessible only to a person shorter than 4′ and weighing less than 40 lbs; it is either a luxuriously cushioned shelf or a berth for an agile ship’s cat. Both the chart table and the clever dinette table need removable fiddles, and the hinges on the chart table lid would be better recessed.

And we have some incidental compliments. The stowage capacity of the Freedom 33 is by far the best we have seen in a boat of this size. In particular, the huge galley drywell, incorporating a sliding section for seldom used items, is nonpareil. The engine (Yanmar 3GM diesel) under the companionway is well above average in accessibility. The forward cabin can be completely closed off from the rest of the boat, including the head, by its own door.

The Freedom 33 thus offers an intriguing dichotomy—impressive and innovative decor and layout offset to a disturbing extent by drawbacks that may justifiably turn off many buyers and give owners things they will “have to live with.”

Conclusions

The Freedom 33 is an interesting boat. She is, however, not a conventional boat and the concept behind her rig takes getting used to, especially for someone born and raised in the tradition of headsails, standing rigging, mainsails that ride on tracks, hulls with overhangs and aesthetic proportions, and other quaint qualities.

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No Visible Means of Support – Freestanding Rigs

Posted by Rob Mazza | Boat Reviews , BWI Award-Winning Articles , Monohull , Reviews

Freestanding rigs offer an intriguing comparison to traditional, stayed masts.

I n 1985, when I joined the office of Mark Ellis Design , Mark took me sailing aboard a Nonsuch 30 called Lotus . He wanted to demonstrate the Nonsuch and the advantages of its unstayed, freestanding rig. With Mark sailing the boat entirely on his own, we charged upwind in a nice breeze, tacking at will with just his simple turning of the wheel. Then we went off on a reach with the main eased but with just a comfortable amount of weather helm. But the real revelation came when we turned downwind. Mark simply eased the main out beyond 90 degrees, with no shrouds getting in the way, allowing us to sail slightly by the lee with no real threat of an accidental jibe.

That day on the water made clear the ways in which a freestanding rig could make sailing easier–hence, more accessible—to many. There are really only two ways to hold a mast upright: support it with wires, or bury its base soundly below decks and build it strong and flexible enough to support itself. The former is the stayed mast, the latter is known as the freestanding mast. And while the freestanding mast has been around for a long time (think junk, lug, or cat rigs), daring innovators of the 1970s, including Mark Ellis, began to mate a freestanding mast to modern hulls. The result was a rig that offered benefits (and a few drawbacks) compared to boats with stayed masts. But there’s more to understanding freestanding rigs than weighing the pros and cons—lots more .

What’s Old Is New

While both freestanding and stayed masts have been around as long as there have been sailboats, stayed rigs have vastly outnumbered freestanding rigs throughout western and European history. The only boats that have consistently used freestanding masts are those on which the mast was placed so far forward in the hull that there was not enough beam to allow the installation of chainplates and shrouds. That applied specifically to catboats, on which the mast was located as far forward in the boat as possible to set one large single sail—think Gloucester , the subject of Winslow Homer’s famous oil on canvas, “Breezing Up (A Fair Wind),” which he painted in the 1870s.

One hundred years after Homer’s lovely work, along came Gary Hoyt’s Freedom 40 in 1976, rigged as a cat ketch using two freestanding rigs of almost equal height. Other Freedom designs followed, and then in 1978 came the Nonsuch 30, a boat with a mast so far forward that its design is predicated on the same criteria as Homer’s Gloucester : lack of beam to install chainplates. (The 30 was soon followed by the 26, 36, 22, 33, and the cat ketch Nereus 40, all originally with spun-tapered aluminum masts.)

The inspiration behind the Nonsuch 30 was noted Toronto yachtsman Gordon Fisher, who worked closely with Ellis to realize Fisher’s vision of a boat that was simple to sail with minimum crew. Fisher had owned several CCA and IOR racers and had become disillusioned with their complexity, cost, and difficulty to sail. He sought a simpler approach.

While Freedom started with an innovative, cat ketch, freestanding rig atop a hull with a shoal-draft, full keel with a centerboard, Nonsuch perched a traditional East Coast catboat design atop a modern hull with separate keel and rudder. As with all catboats, the freestanding mast for the single sail was located well forward. The primary improvement on the traditional gaff-rigged catboat configuration was to introduce a more flexible, tapered aluminum mast to support a single high-aspect-ratio sail, combined with a hull shape and keel configuration that did not build weather helm with heel angle, so prevalent in the traditional, wide-beam, centerboard catboat. A wishbone boom meshed with the desire for simplicity, self-vanging as it is. (The wishbone angle was increased on all Nonsuch models that followed the 30 to take greater advantage of its self-vanging characteristic.)

My sail with Mark aboard the jib-less, stay-less Lotus was eye-opening, and when we came off the wind, I realized that if the mainsheet were long enough, we could ease the main until it was streaming directly downwind. But surely, jibing such a large single sail would be a handful?

Yes and no—and again, history provided a guide.

The 19th-century sloops on the Hudson River, sailed by a man and a boy, developed a jibing technique that involved turning the boat over 90 degrees through the jibe so that when the main came around, it would have a soft landing and even luff slightly on what was now slightly closer than a beam reach. Once the main was on the new jibe, the course could be adjusted to downwind.

This maneuver is not for the faint of heart, but we performed the Hudson River jibe several times without incident. It was quite a demonstration of the ease-of-sailhandling advantages of the freestanding rig.

With the feasibility and success of mating freestanding rigs to modern hulls and sail plans established, other designers and companies followed Freedom and Nonsuch. Designer Yves-Marie Tanton drew his take on the freestanding rig for Offshore Yachts, a line that began with the 44 in 1980, all built by Ta Chiao in Taiwan. Eric Sponberg also designed many boats with freestanding rigs, parlaying the engineering experience he derived from working at Tillotson-Pearson, builders of the carbon-fiber masts used by Freedom.

Design Considerations

To deepen our understanding of these fundamentally different philosophies in rig design, let’s start by understanding the primary difference between a modern freestanding mast and conventional stayed mast. To be freestanding, a mast must be stepped through a substantial collar at deck level and be seated in an equally substantial mast step beneath the cabin sole. In this way, the mast is essentially a cantilevered beam, subjected to bending loads only. To withstand these loads, the mast must be broader at the deck, tapering towards the top, and made of materials that possess the necessary strength and flexibility characteristics.

Stayed masts, on the other hand, are held upright by stays and shrouds. Stays support the mast fore and aft, while shrouds support the mast transversely. Unlike freestanding masts, stayed masts can be either stepped on deck or through the deck on the keel, although keel-stepping the mast provides better lower column support. A stayed mast is subject to compression loads—a downward force on the mast column—induced by the tension on the shrouds and stays. If not designed properly, these loads can lead to the column buckling between the support points at the deck and spreaders. Unlike a freestanding mast, on which width tapers with height, the profile of a stayed mast remains essentially uniform over its length.

Sailboat designers have varied means of managing the potential loads on a stayed mast. For example, they can widen the base of the rig by moving the shrouds and chainplates outboard, reducing the total compression load on the mast proportionally. They can introduce more spreaders and shrouds to reduce the length of each unsupported section of column—greatly reducing the risk of buckling (the critical buckling load is inversely proportional to the squared function of length). They can sweep the spreaders aft, inducing some fore and aft support from the shrouds. Those are a lot of factors to consider and balance.

The designer of a boat with a freestanding rig faces fewer such factors, and they are primarily material choice (aluminum or carbon fiber), mast diameter, and mast wall thickness. For example, to reduce the weight of a freestanding mast of a given material, a designer has only to increase the mast diameter and reduce the wall thickness. However, this decision has the detrimental effect of increasing windage—both the overall windage of the mast, as well as the windage that disrupts the clean airflow as it meets the sail luff. In fact, the weight-or-windage dilemma is the reason there are few racing boats, other than one-design dinghies, with freestanding rigs.

A huge advantage of the freestanding mast is its ability to bend, both to absorb forces and control sail shape. The use of mast bend to control sail shape came to the fore in racing dinghies. The Finn, OK Dinghy, and Laser have all shown the benefit of mast bend to flatten a sail in heavy weather, as well as the benefits of the mast falling off to leeward in gusts to spill wind, relieving stress on the boat (and on the hiking helmsman). These dinghies also demonstrated that a single sail could go upwind very well, thank you very much. A jib was not essential.

Of course, mast bend also became popular in stayed rigs to control mainsail fullness, but the desired bend must be induced with equipment and crew, whereas it happens automatically on a freestanding rig. And mast bend in stayed rigs can be induced only fore and aft, not transversely. Finally, inducing mast bend in a stayed rig immediately takes the mast out of column fore and aft, requiring the use of running backstays to prevent buckling of the column. Compared to a freestanding rig, mast bend in stayed rigs is a complicated affair.

As well, a freestanding mast exerts an entirely different set of forces on the hull it’s attached to. While a stayed mast transfers a tremendous compression load to the mast step and a huge lifting force on the windward chainplate, a freestanding mast exerts none of those forces. Being a cantilever, the freestanding mast is supported in bending by the mast collar (at deck level) and the mast step. Because the mast is essentially a lever (picture a crowbar), with the fulcrum at the deck partners and the sail heeling forces acting at a point well above deck, you can see how great the “prying load” would be on the mast step.

While these forces are intuitive, there is a less intuitive and equally significant force that can be exerted on the hull by a freestanding mast: torsional loads. And the hull of a boat with a freestanding mast must be built to withstand them.

Thanks to its hull shape and low center of gravity achieved with a ballast keel, a sailboat resists heeling. This resistance is called the righting moment. When wind pushes on a sail and that force is transferred to the mast and to the hull, that force is called the heeling moment. If the wind is strong enough, the heeling moment will exceed the righting moment and the sailboat will heel. (As the sailboat heels, the righting moment increases; when the two forces are in balance, the boat will cease further heeling.)

A sailboat’s total righting moment can be considered roughly centered fore-aft, adjacent to the center of gravity and center of buoyancy, in the vicinity of the keel. On a sailboat with a stayed mast, the mast is usually located about the same place, where the hull is beamy enough to attach shrouds. This works well, because the mast is exerting its heeling moment at roughly the same place that the hull is countering with its righting moment.

In the case of the Nonsuch, the mast is stepped well forward of the hull’s righting moment. All good, except that when the forward-positioned mast exerts a heeling moment, that torque is resisted where the righting moment is, which might be, for example, many feet aft of the mast. That torsional or twisting load has to be absorbed by the hull. Nonsuches have a full bulkhead installed immediately aft of the mast to help transfer these torsional loads as well as to prevent hull distortion from the opposing mast collar and mast step loadings.

From an engineering point of view, a freestanding mast is a simpler design problem than a stayed mast with one exception: fatigue loading. Without question, the Achilles heel of aluminum freestanding masts has been metal fatigue, caused by the constant repetition of alternating loads. Compared to their stayed counterparts, freestanding masts are always in motion. With any structure subject to oscillating loads, be it an aircraft wing, bridge, or road sign, the ultimate life of that structure is a function of the loading experienced, the number of oscillating cycles encountered, and the stress concentrations involved. The higher the loading, the fewer cycles can be absorbed before fatigue failure. This inter-relationship between loading, stress concentrations, and the number of cycles all has to be taken into account in designing for fatigue. The key is to keep the working load below what is known as the “fatigue limit.” If that is done, then a long life of well over a million cycles is pretty well assured.

On a heeled Nonsuch, where the mast is a cantilever beam in bending, the weather side of the mast is in tension, while the leeward side is in compression. When the boat tacks, the forces reverse. As the mast pumps in a seaway, the loads fluctuate. Over time, the sides of the mast alternate from tension to compression hundreds or thousands of times depending on how and how often the boat is used. This is classic fatigue loading.

Fatigue loading becomes especially problematic when there are holes drilled in the lower section of the spar. These holes introduce stress concentrations—or stress risers—that can result in fatigue cracks that then emanate from the holes, especially if they have rough edges or sharp corners. A number of early Nonsuch spars failed due to this problem, with fatigue cracks emanating from either the hole drilled for the mast tiedown pin at the mast collar or from the halyard exit. The fasteners at the mast splice were another source of problems, requiring a variety of remedies. Designers eventually figured out that the solution to fatigue failures involved avoiding holes in the mast and ensuring the mast wall thickness was sufficient to extend the fatigue limit. It took a while and involved the redesign and replacement of a lot of mast lower sections, but now aluminum freestanding rigs can be assured of many years of service.

Ultimately, the Nonsuch adopted carbon-fiber masts that had their own stringent requirements for the fastening of hardware and drilling of holes.

Almost 40 years after Mark Ellis impressed me with a sail on Lotus , the majority of sailboat masts are still held upright with wires. Despite their benefits as extolled by their devoted followers, we still don’t see many sailboats with freestanding masts in our marinas. I’m not sure this situation will change anytime soon.

A Term is Born

Eric Sponberg, a naval architect who designed the masts used on several of the boats built by Freedom Yachts, did not like the term “unstayed” applied to these spars. “It sounded too negative,” he says on his website, ericwsponberg.com. “I adopted the term ‘freestanding’ to describe these rigs with no wires holding them up because it sounded like a much more positive term.”

Why Marconi?

It is ironic that the term Marconi rig is used to describe the high-aspect-ratio, triangular sail attached to a tall freestanding spar, such as that on the Nonsuch. The term Marconi rig was introduced in the early 20th century as sail plans transitioned from the traditional gaff rig to elongated higher-aspect-ratio “leg ’o mutton” or Bermuda rigs on tall, single-piece masts. People thought that the large numbers of wires required to support these slender masts resembled the wires supporting the Marconi radio towers springing up all over North America at that time. The term began to apply to the sail shape that these masts could support, rather than the mast itself. The irony is that a sail configuration owing its designation to a large number of supporting wires actually has no wires on the Nonsuch and other freestanding masts. But the designation persists.

The Marion, Massachusetts, Marconi array, circa 1914. Photo courtesy Sippican Historical Society.

A Single-Sail Precation

In a boat where all or the majority of the sail area is in one sail only, any loss of that sail due to a major tear, headboard failure, or loss of a halyard can be catastrophic—especially when sailing offshore. The primary source of propulsion is lost, with the engine now the only option. That single sail really is putting all the eggs in one basket. When considering the importance of the sail to a freestanding mast, a sailor should think also about the failure points that could affect a crew’s ability to fly the sail, such as the halyard, mainsheet, sail track, and topping lift. In addition, some owners pull their freestanding masts annually to inspect hardware and look for stress cracks.

Freedom 40: The First

The Freedom 40 was the first boat to take real advantage of and popularize the bend characteristics inherent in the freestanding rig. But in addition to its freestanding masts, the Freedom 40 was a platform for other innovations—some successful, others not so much. Among these was a wraparound sail rather than sail tracks to mate the sail with the mast, as well as a wishbone boom straddling the sail and spar, rather than a conventional boom and vang. It soon became obvious, however, that when the wraparound sail got wet it was difficult to lower, raise, or reef. Some earlier Freedoms also experimented—briefly—with rotating masts. Freedom eventually abandoned the wraparound sail and wishbone boom and adopted fully battened sails on tracks with conventional booms. Although the use of the carbon-fiber freestanding rig was, without question, Gary Hoyt’s inspiration and execution, Freedom went through a variety of hull designers including Halsey Herreshoff, Jay Paris, Ron Holland, Dave Pedrick, and Gary Mull (as well as Gary Hoyt himself in the earlier models). The hulls evolved from shoal-draft, full-keel configurations with centerboards to the separate keel and rudders of their IOR sisters. In fact, in Freedom Yacht’s long history under various owners, the only real constant was the commitment to the freestanding rig, with ketches giving way to sloop rigs even in the largest models.

About The Author

Rob Mazza is a Good Old Boat contributing editor. He set out on his career as a naval architect in the late 1960s when he began working for Cuthbertson & Cassian. He's been familiar with good old boats from the time they were new and had a hand in designing a good many of them.

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