by Bob Perry
Sailing

Bill Shaw and the Pearson design team have come up with another conservative design, but this time there is a little bit of the predator look to the boat and some touches that show that Pearson is updating its overall approach.

Unfortunately, Pearson's factory design team has never spent much time producing fancy drawings so the material presented here really does not do the design justice. Drawing technique criticism aside, the photo I have of this design shows the boat to be very handsome with a carefully crafted, crisp deck and very pleasant hull lines.

When you free yourself of IOR, MORC or any other measurement oriented handicap system, you open up a world of possibilities for the designer. Should the boat have a flat bottom, high deadrise, V-ed forefoot, flat run? Should you go for light weight and speed at the expense of stability and interior volume, or should you make the boat with heavy displacement for the added volume and stability? Some of these questions can be answered by targeting various boats produced by your competitors, then trying to go them one better.

The creative designer can combine the basic proportions in endless varieties that will all prove to be "good boats," but each will have its own strengths and weaknesses. So the design problem for a company like Pearson becomes a struggle to produce a boat that will appeal, i.e. sell, to a lot of people because it is comfortable, stiff, fast in heavy air, fast in light air, sleek, has 6 and a half feet of headroom, and will have subtle enough lines and styling so that nobody is offended. This isn't a problem as long as you are ready to accept a rather bland design and modify your concept of speed in light air vs. speed in heavy air. Pearson has avoided the bland trap this time and given us an all-around boat that is very good-looking, especially when you consider the less than glamorous appearance of some of its ancestors.

The hull form shows 13 degrees of deadrise at station 5 with moderate flare to the topsides. Station 3 still has deadrise and judging by the rocker in the profile, I would guess that there is no flat part to the bottom of this design. Deadrise has the advantage of giving you a bigger bilge and a bilge that you can drain easily. If you maintain the same displacement and move volume out of the bilge by flattening it and putting that volume at BWL, you can get a boat that is initially stiffer, but pay the price of less comfortable motion. The D/L ratio of this design is 246, so this is no lightweight, but I have played around with cruising designs with D/L ratios ranging from 49 to 409 and more and more I gravitate towards the low to mid 200s.

Looking at the rig, I see that the designers have chosen to go with fore and aft lower shrouds. Then I check the photo and see that there is a forward lower and an inline lower. Hopefully used with a relatively stout section, this will eliminate any need for a babystay, however, it's tough to get forward lowers to do the job of a babystay. The forward lowers are certainly easier to tack around but they don't allow the same degree of bend control you get with a babystay. This design has an I dimension of 52.5 feet and a SA/D ratio of 18.1 so there is plenty of horsepower available. This boat looks like a rewarding PHRF racer.

I suppose there are good reasons to have two heads in a boat under 40 feet, but I can't think of any right now. The rest of the interior is pretty standard. Note the big galley with the icebox in a center leg. This makes for a big icebox. The aft stateroom is big enough so that you can get dressed without assuming any yoga positions.

The new Pearson 39 should give American owners a boat they can easily race or cruise and do it with the confidence that they are looking good.

Boat Specifications
LOA 39'3"
DWL 31'3"
Beam 12'5"
Draft 4'8" (centerboard up) or 6'10" (keel)
Displacement 17500 lbs. (centerboard) or 16,800 lbs. (keel)
Ballast 6800 lbs. (keel)
Sail Area 742 sq. ft.