Opposite: Oracle comes from 1-8 down to defend the America’s Cup in 2013. Bieker describes his engineering involvement as ‘responsible for the highest loaded bits of the boat!’ These included the foils of course, Bieker Boats-engineered and built by Core Composites, plus the bulb/fillet (inset) at the foil intersection which Bieker introduced midway through the match to reduce ventilation. One of two original Riptide 35s (left), the design that took Bieker from Int14s to much larger yachts of every type. These lightweight water-ballasted 35-footers will keep up with 50ft ultralights in most conditions. Below: Bieker’s Eagle 53, light, all-carbon ‘daysailing weapon’. Hybrid wing rig plus the choice of C or T-foils for full-foiling
the 2001 Worlds. The class history records that ‘The Australians wanted to ban foils but the World Association voted to accept them with limitations to prevent a fully foiled flying hull, which had already been trialled in Perth, Australia.’
Spooky flutter ‘Another good one’ was much smaller and far less controversial. ‘Wild Oats, the big Maxi down in Australia, their canting keel was fluttering at I think it was 30-32kt. Which is a pretty spooky thing, you know. ‘We analysed it, looked at moving the
owned. ‘It had been put together by a novice guy and wasn’t too well built. We were out sailing, quite a ways from home, with the spinnaker up and both on the trapeze – and the whole rudder with a section of the stern came off the back of the boat… ‘I had this [very short] moment when I
was still holding onto the tiller extension and dragging the rudder with a piece of the transom, and then of course we spun out and started to flood.’ They managed to limp home on a half-flooded boat. ‘Luckily it was downwind back to Seattle. I remember my girlfriend up forward, trying to keep the bow down. I hung off the stern and used my legs as a rudder to kind of steer it towards the harbour. But I didn’t build that boat,’ he quickly adds. By the early 1990s his success on the
Int14 circuit brought more boat orders than he could fit in alongside full-time ship design. Taking a more flexible job freed up both time and creativity, and he began designing and building a few larger sail- boats as well, including the Riptide 35 for Jonathan and Libby McKee. It was the Riptide 35 that would put Bieker Boats on a much bigger map. ‘A large proportion of my boats have
been racer-cruisers; even if they’re pretty racy they’ve got decent interiors. When I grew up the boats we sailed were dual- purpose: you raced them and you cruised them. You can do both.’ Paul also continued to develop and
improve his Int14s, and Charles Stanley/Mo Gray won the 1997 Worlds in a chartered Bieker 2 (which, Paul joyously remembers, the British skipper then purchased). ‘Going into the event there was a lot of
talk about how the Aussies were going to be so much quicker, but that boat was the most mongrel of all – American hull and foils, Kiwi rig, English sails and sailors. Charles [and Mo] got second with it in 1999, and the guy who got first was an Australian sailing a Bieker 3.’ (Grant Geddes/ Craig Watkin). Which brings us to…
Paul Bieker’s most radical ideas I’d already sampled the smorgasbord of innovation that is Bieker Boats, so I ask him to name his most radical idea – think- ing he’s going to talk about the strange bumpy-edged rudder I spotted. Instead Paul mentions the hydrofoils he added to an Int14 rudder in the spring of 2000, a retrofit to the already fast Bieker 2. ‘Most other people would have done
T-foils right down at the bottom, and when you look at the rudder alone that looks like what you’d want to do. I put the foil up closer to the water surface, where it interacted with the wave pattern created by the hull and helped make the water think the boat was longer than 14ft. I thought that was pretty neat, and it made a big difference to the boats; they went quite a bit faster!’ Not surprisingly, they were also quite controversial when they made their first big debut at the 2000 Worlds. Two 14s had hydrofoils for the 116-
boat Worlds in Beer, UK, that summer. ‘One was mine, and the other was some friends of mine’ (Kris Bundy/Jamie Hanseler). ‘They won! We screwed up in the corners, but we did better than we would have otherwise. From then on all the boats had those rudder hydrofoils.’ After another foiled-rudder Bieker won
bulb on the fin, all these major changes; but we couldn’t significantly shift the flutter speed. And then I remembered when I was a kid I saw some tip tanks on an aeroplane that had little fins back at their trailing edges. At the time I didn’t know what they were for. But it just kind of came to me: that’s what you need to do. So we put a little fin like a windsurfer skeg on the tail of the Wild Oats bulb and the flutter went away. A super-cheap fix to a really serious problem – one of those when you wish you weren’t getting paid by the hour!’
Tubercles I have to ask about that bumpy rudder, but I’m rewarded by another brief glimpse into Paul’s free-thinking approach. ‘I read an article talking about the purpose of tubercles on humpback whales; basically they’re an anti-stall device. At low angles of attack they don’t have a big drag penalty. At high angles they create turbulence that mixes the flow in the leading part of the foil and delays stall.’ They also help ‘make that tur- bulence work like a fence for ventilation’. Fortunately, he explains further. ‘A
rudder with tubercles tends to not ventilate as easily; the flow doesn’t just shear off the leading edge and suck air down. On a pure raceboat you probably wouldn’t do them because there is a small drag penalty. But they give you this feedback; right before stall you feel the helm shudder. So if you want to make the steering a little bit more forgiving then it’s a user-friendly device. ‘I’ve put them on a few boats where it
seemed like the right thing.’ Added to a 65-footer with rudders too far aft, ‘it totally changed the behaviour; the boat no longer spun out on jib reaches.’ Thank you, humpbacks.
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