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shaggybaxter said..garymalmgren said..I wonder if the bluff bow will ever com back into fashion.
Plenty of buoyancy up forward.
Gary

You might be onto something Gary. The Mini's are one of those most innovative classes in sailing, and a scow bow mini won the Transat back in 2011. Since then their love affair with the scow bow seems to have continued.
Speaking with the owner of Pogo Structures one day, he mentioned he would prefer scow bows on all his cruiser and racer models, but the aesthetics are too radical for most customers.
Hopefully that changes, they have a lot going for them.

Edit: Ha! LooseChange beat me to it, apologies for the double up!
The old square riggers had bluff bows because their construction was weak, with no diagonal stiffness until Steppings introduced diagonal braces. The anchors were in the bow and therefore had to be supported by buoyancy directly underneath. If the heavy weights were not supported by buoyancy underneath, the boat would sag. These days boats are stiff so we can put weights up front and compensate by putting more weight aft, and it won't all bend.
The Minis seem to be largely a product of a rule that means that are in some ways inefficient; the rig is very big for the length so (as in 12 Fot Skiffs, International 14s, etc) the design is partly about packing a lot of volume into a short length. It's got the beam, sail area, foils and cost of a much bigger boat but it's got many of the performance limits of a short boat. If you took the same boat and just stuck 6ft on the front it could be faster, more seaworthy and IMHO immensely better looking, with no real increase in cost.
It's interesting to see the effect of the way we measure boats is reflected in their design. Many of the Euros measured their boats by sail area, so they had tiny rigs and long hulls so you would have a 42ft long 30 Square Metre that would beat the other guy's 38 foot long 30 Square Metre. Before that, we measured by LOA so people had boats that were short, fat, had big crews and huge rigs, and the Minis are sort of like a modern version of that. Both of those extremes end up with something that is slower, more fragile and more expensive boat than something that is a more moderate design by other measures.