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Friday 18 November 2016

Benford Design Group "Happy":

Happy was designed in 1978 for Howard Wayne Smith for an attempt on the record for the smallest boat to make a circumnavigation of the world. Construction was timber with a cold moulded hull. Plans are available in a book published by the designer.

Length overall 13'-10" 4.22 m
Length designed waterline 13'-8" 4.17 m
Beam 6'-3" 1.91 m
Draft 3'-7" 1.09 m
Freeboard: Forward 3'-1" 0.94 m
                     Raised deck 3'-35/8" 1.01 m
                      Aft 2'-4½" 0.72 m
Displacement, cruising trim 2,240 lbs. 1,016 kg.
Displacement-length ratio 392  
Ballast 750 lbs. 340 kg.
Ballast ratio 33%  
Sail area, square feet 180 16.72 sq. m
Sail area-displacement ratio 16.82  
Wetted Surface 84.4 sq. ft. 7.84 sq. m
Sail area/wetted surface ratio 2.13  
Prismatic coefficient .55  
Pounds per inch immersion 285 50.9 kg./cm
Entrance half-angle 28°  
Headroom 4'-10½" 1.49 m

Here is the story of the attempt on the record from the designers web site:

After a slow trip across the Gulf Stream for a shakedown cruise to the Bahamas, and a holiday there, Howard sent us another report: "The trip back across the Stream was a very quick one, just under 12 hours. We were surfing about half of the way back, and averaged a little over five knots!"...

After sailing 10,000 miles from Miami, Florida, through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific, touching at the Galapagos, Marquesas, Fiji, Tahiti and on towards Australia, he touched a little too hard on a reef off Noumea, New Caledonia. There, towards the end of November 1982, the beautiful Happy was lost, an hour before Howard was due on watch in the early hours before dawn. Howard was able to scramble into his dinghy and surfed his way over a number of treacherous reefs (spending the night on the overturned hulk of a steel wreck), landing in Noumea the next day. Friends he'd met in the Marquesas took him back to Happy to salvage all possible gear, but she was otherwise a complete loss.


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