No holding back

Here in Norway I received your JUNE edition on 21 APRIL a whole six weeks before the beginning of June and I wondered if this is some kind of time travel experiment?

I opened the PBO May issue hoping to find my Omega 34 mentioned in ‘9 Super Swedish yachts’ but unfortunately not.

However, it did remind me that I’ve seen references in print and videos of yachts being motored at 6 knots into obstructions. Swedish law apparently does, or did, require that boats produced and sold in Sweden are capable of withstanding such an impact – perhaps Rupert Holmes could shed some light on this?

Rupert Holmes replies:

We interrupt the time travel slightly next month by inserting a ‘Summer’ issue in between July and August, but with a new issue every four weeks we soon start advancing into the future again.

I’ve always thought the Omega 34 was a lovely boat, though the output of the

Swedish boating industry is so prolific that sadly there wasn’t space to mention as many designs as we’d have liked.

It is possible to structurally engineer a boat so that it can hit a rock without damage to the structure (though encapsulated keels may still incur damage that lets water into the space between the laminate and ballast – an expensive repair), but I know of very few models where this has been a selling point.

One is the Reflex and Christian Stimson-designed racer-cruiser, originally commissioned by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston as a very robust performance boat for training teams for the Clipper Round the World Race. The effectiveness of this was proved when one ran into the wreck of the Varvassi on a Round The Island Race.

Another is a widely shared video of a Dehler 31 that was sailed into a variety of obstructions at speed, including a harbour wall: bit.ly/ dehler-crash-test