The short answer is yes: The design is constrained by physics, not by price. That said, the 26M is not necessarily the ideal trailerable power sailor.
I'm going to limit my discussion to monohulls because trimarans and catamarans have to be gigantic to be Ocean rated and even then they can be flipped by a wave. I don't consider them to be seaworthy for long term oceangoing. The only way to make them small enough to trailer is to do what Ferrier/Corsair do, and they have no cabin space to speak of.
dustoff wrote:Would it look much different than the 26m?
The lower hull shape cannot vary much from the 26m and still perform well as both a power boat and a sailboat. It must be a semi-planing hull, and it has to be relatively flat aft and relatively v-shaped forward. This is one of the very clever things about the mac: They plow bow down when sailing, so the forward more sailboat shaped hull dominates, and when they plane at speed the bow comes out of the water and the hull shape is dominated by the flatter stern. Also, all boards must come completely out of the water or the boat will not transition to the roll dynamics required for high-speed operation when planing or semi-planing.
The upper hull can look like whatever you want, within architectural constraints.
I seems to me that none of the more expensive powersailor designs really offer substantial improvement over the Mac/tattoo 26. However, they are also attempting to mold what they design based off of what it marketable. They seem to add costs in fit & finish which they pass on to the consumers, but it doesn't seem to substantially improve the sailing or power performance of the boats.
This the quite true: The physics required of a trailerable sailboat make it very difficult to improve performance over a 26m. There are two ways to improve the performance of a boat: Add things that make speed, and remove things that subtract speed. While that sounds obvious, the Mac excels at removing things that subtract speed, like heavy interior furnishings.
To be trailerable, a boat has to be extremely light. At the same time, all sailboats must have enough displacement to loft the necessary sail to reach its hull speed quickly. Imagine lofting full sails without ballast on a Mac: It'll tip over. You have to have the weight below the waterline to balance the power created by the sails. Ultra-light displacement boats alway suffer in pointing to the wind for this reason, and this is the most common complained with trailerable sailboats across the board. MacGregor's innovation of seawater ballast is the best possible compromise, but the boat still doesn't point as well as a full keel boat by any means.
The retractable boards also contribute to this problem. The keel is limited in size, length, and weight in order to accommodate trailerability, which limits its ability to balance sail power and thus limits the amount of sail you can loft. You cannot put a lead bulb in the bottom of the daggerboard because it would cause roll instability when powering.
Seaward/Hake solves this problem my simply making the boats heavy and requiring a hull of a tow beast. Their 32 and 46 are not trailerable, they're transportable by boat movers.
In my mind the perfect powersailor would be 32 to 38 ft long, 2 staterooms with berths for 8
Trailerability limits a boat to a practical maximum of about 32 feet. That's a bit too short for two complete cabins, but you could probably pack eight people into it. It would be tight.
safely off-shore capable
This is not really possible for an ultra-lightweight displacement boat. You need a relatively heavy boat to be seaworthy, as lighter boats have movement characteristic that are exhausting in heavy weather even when they aren't unsafe. Size is also a practical matter: The bigger a boat is, the bigger the seas it can survive. The smaller you are, the more likely it is that a storm can overwhelm a boat. The biggest problem is that the smaller foils below the waterline cannot compete with a full keel in terms of seaworthiness. They don't track straight with a light helm and they remain tender, being tossed about by seas that a full keel boat could ignore. Finally, the flatter stern required for powering increases tenderness and the tendency to broaching in following seas.
be able to motor at 26 to 32 knots, max power cruising range of 800 to 1200 NM
The speed you could make. The range you can't get anywhere close to when "power cruising". A boat of this size is going to consume at least 10 gallons per hour at 25 knots, so you're making 1 gallon per 2.5 nm. This means 1200NM of range requires 480 gallons of fuel, which weighs 2880 lbs: That's somewhere between 25% and 50% of total displacement for a boat like this, and the tankage would be impossible to accommodate with the berthing requirements you've outlined. A practical WOT maximum range would be 250NM. This could be increased to 1250NM at 5 knots.
and sailing performance no worse than an equivalent length cruising sailboat like an Island packet.
Again, these seaworthiness characteristics require a full keel, a deep draft, and a heavy displacement. You won't match them with the compromises required for trailering and powering.
Is such a design physically possible? would it have a retractable weighted keel like the Hake boats with a modified deep V hull form? Sail drive or Volva penta pod mounted low in the hull? Does trailerability force undue design compromises?
Or does the balance of weight, power, and hull form lead you to the rough parameters of the 26M?
It's not possible to make a trailerable power sailor that performs equally as well as a designed-to-purpose sail passagemaker, and yes, the 26M is pretty close to ideal for the purpose. Most changes you make (even a lot of the mods we do) take it farther from ideal.
Now, that's not to say that the 26M is ideal: I'm quite certain that a Gaff rigged boat would make a superior power sailor. The mast can be forward enough and short enough to simply fold down without unstepping to the pulpit while lifting more than sufficient mainsail, which would resolve the biggest rigging issues power-sailors face and the largest cause of injuries on and damage to these boats. Furthermore, the forward weight will help keep the bow down when powering to get on a plane faster. Gaff rigs don't point as well as a bermudan rig, BUT ultralight boats don't point anyway, so you'd do just as well with a gaff on these boats as a bermudan. Furthermore, gaff rigs perform better on all other points of sail, which are the points that these boats sail on. This is a "no downside" design that I'm very interested in.
Dual daggerboards (really leeboards) could be asymmetrically shaped to reduce heel and improve performance, and could be linked by a cable so that they counter-weight one-another, which means that you can make them heavy and still easily move them up and down when tacking. You could even put a weight on deck with a track between them to automatically swap board when you tack: As the weight falls towards the heel, it lowers the leeward board and raises the windward board. Furthermore, while it wouldn't be pretty, you can make these boards longer and you could potentially put weights on them that would be out of water when powering and both boards are up because they're beside the boat not under it. Finally, without a centerboard or daggerboard trunk dominating the interior of the boat, you open up cabin space and open up the interior design possibilities.
Dual props would improve maneuverability and provide redundancy, and allow a larger center rudder more appropriate for the boat size. It would also allow a truly open transom, and even a "tailgate" transom that drops down in port or at anchor to become a swim platform and brow.
Dual ballast tanks located at the port and starboard extents would allow you to (when safe) dump the leeward side ballast to reduce heel and wetted surface. In any kind of seas, weather, or when beating you'd keep both tanks full. But when you're going to be on the same tack for hours in steady weather, you could pump-out the leeward tank and dramatically improve performance. When it comes time to tack, simply open the gate and flood the tank before tacking, and then pump out again once the tack is complete. It's a simple performance optimization that would be available when it's safe to use (and the new 70' MacGregors will do exactly this). Finally, in weather or seas, you'd flood both tanks, increasing displacement, roll resistance, and lowering the center of gravity for better sea-kindliness.
Finally, modern materials like a carbon rig, dyneema stays, and epoxy core hull can reduce weight aloft and improve performance.
So some things can be done, and you may be able to get from a boat that can turn 50% of true wind speed into speed over ground up to about 70%, but you won't get much higher than that and you certainly won't get to an A-Ocean rated passagemaker.
You CAN get to an ocean rated boat if you're willing to give up planing speeds, which is exactly what Seaward/Hake does.
