Tall Ships Down
by
Daniel S. Parrot
As a yacht designer one of my pet peeves has always been that despite massive
regulation passenger carrying vessels tend to remain inherently unsafe for very simple
design reasons. The really horrible thing is that the US Coast Guard collects all the
information needed to judge sailing vessel safety properly and it certainly costs no more
to design and build a safe vessel than an unsafe one, yet the regulations to this day
encourage boats with high initial stability but tend to not look at ultimate stability or
dynamic effects. Thus every few years more regulations and more safety gear are imposed on
the passenger sailing vessel industry because vessels continue to get into trouble.
However most of this would be unnecessary if we had a set of rules which really encouraged
safe vessels instead of unsafe ones. It is actually easier to get a good performing unsafe
vessel approved by the Coast Guard than a good performing safe vessel at present This book explains some of the reasons for these unnecessary tragedies. Written by the Captain of the "Pride of Baltimore II", which was built to replace a vessel taken to sea as a passenger carrying vessel against the wishes of her designer and lost with several of her crew, this book is a very important testimony by a very intelligent man which lays out the basic science and histories of various losses well. If anyone wishes to design, build, or work aboard passenger carrying sailing vessels they really ought to read this book. (tm) $24.95 |