"Capt. JG" wrote:


But your making all sorts of assumptions about monos! On the one had, you're
making the assumption of a freak wave with no preparation or warning - on
the other, you're assuming that all the hatches, etc. on the mono are closed
and ready for battle. You can't have your cake and eat it too.


My point is that if you close your hatches and prepare your boat properly,
you have a good chance of coming through a bad storm. Naturally, if you
don't, you decrease your chances of keeping the boat afloat.

watertight compartment with my boat floating upside down. The problem
with
taking a multihull on an
extended voyage, say an ocean crossing, is that the chances of running
into real
bad weather increase.

Actually, they decrease, since you won't be out as long as with a mono. Now,
if you want to argue that way, you could say that SINCE multis go faster,
then people would be tempted to select smaller weather windows, and thus
open themselves up to greater danger. :-)

What I meant was that any boat is exposed more to bad weather possibilities
on a long voyage. Actually you can get stung on shorter hops. I left Key
West
once to go up the back country of the Keys, where there are no ports, on the

advise of the weather forcast that called for reasonable winds, with a small

disturbance over Cuba. That next day, it had turned into a hurricane and I
was
lucky it only passed me by within 100 miles, so I rode it out at anchor.
You
never know.



In the very extreme, one can take down all sails in a monohull, batten
down the
hatches, put out a sea
anchor and ride things out. If for some reason the boat is rolled over,
it will
right itself. Can't say the
same thing for a multihull. Granted this is an extreme case, but if I
were
planning an ocean crossing,
it would certain cross my mind as a possibility.

Again, you're making the assumption that NOTHING can be done to get a multi
to get through the situation. This is far from true.

OK. What do you do if your multihull does flip over? I hear about crawling
into
one of the watertight compartments, but I wonder about the practicality of
this,
and where do you go from there?



Please describe your offshore, extreme weather sailing on a mono that causes
you to have these views!

You can find some of them in my recent posts to this thread. I have no first
hand
experience sailing multihulls, but am basing my thoughts on how sailboat
behave,
in general, and what I know about Fluid Mechanics, Stability, etc., from an
engineering point of view.