I've been on some of those "sailing" excursions where they motor out of
the harbor, hoist a sail or two for show, motor around for an hour, then
pull the sails down and motor back.




Charlie Morgan wrote:
It's actually a function of how many passengers the boat is legally
allowed to carry, and how that much all that moving weight up on deck
will affect stability in a boat that was originally designed and built
to carry non-moving cargo down lower.

If you're talking only about original surviving vessels,
then they're not designed for a big deck load of people, sure.

OTOH if you jammed the deck solid with people, that still
wouldn't weigh as much as the ballast in most such boats
(human flesh is less dense than iron, rock, or even
sandbags). And the leverage of a few tons of people is not
going to be the same as several thousand square feet of sail
in the wind, fifty or more feet up a mast.

Then there are the very large number of such boats that are
modern replicas of working craft. They are designed from
scratch as such, often substituting modern materials (such
hi tech stuff as lead ballast) for improved safety & stability.


... I thought you and Bart claimed
to know something about boats.


Yep.

DSK