jjtctaylor wrote:
> Which so yo think is the bigger problem blowing into or away
> from the dock ?
> My mono blowing away is usually no issue. A hard blow into the
> dock is a disaster.

For myself, I'd rather have the wind blowing onto the dock, but that's
with a much smaller F-27. As long as the fenders are out and the boat is
close to the dock before stopping, there's not too much force when it's
blown on. The other way, it's a frantic race to get lines on before the
boat blows away.

> As far as lever arm, the current drawings show about 13 ft
> spacing between OB's. (not very much for this kind of lenght). A
> bow thruster according to the gurus pivots off the stern. I don't
> believe that applies directly to a cat so lets say it pivots about the
> aft rudder. That would put the lever arm at about 30-35 feet.

I'm not sure that's right. The boat is fore-aft symmetrical, so the
resultant force of the drag opposing a bow thruster must go through the
centre line of the boat. So the lever arm is the distance from the
centre to the bow thruster. IMHO, anyway.

> Maybe as some of you have pointed out we
> should place the OB's in a fore/aft arrangement along the LW
> hull and have the forward OB steerable. What say ye ?

Make them both steerable :)

Seems like it might be worth trying some experiments on a smaller
harry-type boat first to see what works and what doesn't.

BTW, there's an article in the Sept/Oct issue of the American
'Multihulls' mag by Claus Plaas called 'Low Draft Propulsion Systems for
Multihulls'. The 360 degree rotable HÜBNER-BRAUN Propeller from SPW
seemed like it might be interesting.
<http://www.spw-gmbh.de/en/hb/index.html>

Cheers, Dave