Matt used a lug sail that you could manually roll/furl around the boom. Because the boat was so small it could be easily rowed or sculled.
For Paradox Matt invented a very simple rig. A lug sail that could be furled around a boom with the help of a drum. Everything could be done from inside. He only used three lines to control the sail, a reefing line, a halyard and a sheet. There is a fourth line for controlling the rudder running inside on both sides of the boat.
Matt and me sailing Enigma, me under canopy. The drum for furling at the forward end of the boom.Me and Matt sailing Enigma. Detail the furling system.Close up of Matts furling gear. In Matts hands it works very well.
In 2005 built Enigma a small 3.6 (12’) sharpie weighing only 80 kilos (180 pounds). In March 2006 Matt sailed Enigma for 1200 miles around Florida in the Watertribe Ultimate Challenge race to finish first in her class and third overall.
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I wrote this on my blog May 17, 2008.
It was when I lived in a little Japanese fishing village, learning how to use their yuloh that they call “ro” (and which, by the way, I think is far superior to the Chinese) that I realized that the strong flat bottom they use for their traditional boats would also give the cruising man many advantages. It can take the ground without getting damaged. It gives a lot of initial stability. It gives greater interior floor space, and of course, it gives very shallow draft.
Later, back in Sweden, when I was brooding over the topic of draft, I remembered I had gotten two letters from America, one from Dave Bolduc and one from Mickie another friend. Both of them contained drawings of Matt Layden’s 14-foot coastal cruiser Paradox. Once more I got out the drawings and looked at them. Paradox has a strong flat bottom and a draft of only nine inches. At first look one gets the impression that she cannot go to windward as it seems that she has no means of preventing leeway. A closer look reveals her chinerunners, small two-inch wide horizontal winglets sticking out from the chines for about a third of the boat’s length. But was that enough? Intrigued, I phoned Dave. He had sailed with Matt for a winter in the Bahamas and confirmed that they worked very well. He gave me Matt’s phone number. I called Matt and he told me that he could sail Paradox better to windward than Dave in his slightly bigger centerboard boat, and he invited me over to see for myself. In October 1997, I sailed Paradox for a month.
I was very curious to see how well the chinerunners on Paradox worked so when Matt asked me where we should sail I said to windward. She certainly sailed as close to the wind as my boats, probably much better.
It certainly is one of the smartest inventions in the history of yachting, simple and cheap, easy to build and it does allow the boat to sail to windward in very shallow water.
Matt had confidence in me and let me use the boat whenever I liked. It was a rare opportunity to learn something special. I took full advantage of it and was out sailing everyday, in the weekends Matt came along.
In 2003 I returned, and again in 2006 and 2007. Each time I stayed for about a month, sailing and discussing boats with Matt. We continue to exchange ideas once a week over the phone, which is very enlightening, as Matt is always one step ahead of me. I am now convinced that the chinerunner concept, created by Matt in 1982, is the greatest innovation for small cruising boats in the last century. The reasons why very few people have realized its advantages are that Matt does not try make his voice heard above the din from the egos in our conservative, self-centered society to promote his idea, and that the principles behind it are complex and subtle, and have been subject to little research and experiment. After a decade studying Paradox, and talking to Matt I have come to understand that the boat’s leeway-resistance comes from a combination of three sources, the chinerunners, the lifting body shaped hull and the large rudder.
Unlike the ordinary cruising boat, Paradox has no heavy ballast keel making her stability obvious. Matt uses less obvious means, like her cruising load kept low and her flat bottom that, a bit like a multihull, moves a lot of buoyancy to lee at small angles of heel. At large angles of heel, Paradox’s righting moment comes from a good height-to-beam ratio and the buoyancy of her superstructure. This shape gives Paradox positive stability at up to 165 degrees of heel. Better than most conventional keel boats
YRVIND.COM 2008
Yrvind.com was a boat inspired by Matt’s chinerunner series. The idea with the name was that when passing ships saw it on their AIS-displays they would search the Internet and find out something about me and hopefully report me as I had no means of long range communication.
I have written about her elsewhere in this blog I only like to mention that besides being somewhat obsessed by broaching-to (besides shallow draft and a few other things). During a test sail in the Stockholm archipelago a friend gave me a tow back to port. As we came back to port he let go the towline instead of going straight Yrvind.com healed over and made a very sharp turn, like a broach-to. Matt says that this has never happened to him. It did not happened to me either, later spending two and a half months in the Atlantic sailing from Ireland to Martinique via Madeira.
As I have written in the Manifesto I now prefer a variable lateral area that is something like a centerboard or leeboard because sailing downwind that gives you one more way to control the boat. The disadvantage is the complication. Coastal sailing like Matt does chinerunners is fine.
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