Between checking off projects on Wind Horse, working on new designs, the holidays, and a  myriad of other details, the camera bag has not seen a lot of action the past six weeks. But we can only go so long without a visual fix, and the past few days has seen us dreaming, with the help of our photo files.

On the assumption that the winter blues and an absence of color, contrast, and water in your life may have had similar affect, we offer as an antidote a few of our favorite images from the past year.

Our favorite photos from 2011.

While our usual fair is more extreme weather than this video depicts, there are some lessons for us here as well, not the least of which is the efficiency at work you are about to watch on your computer screen. The video was shot by Brian Rickard on a recent cruise with the Henrys aboard the FPB 64 Sarah Sarah, in British Columbia.

Sarah Sarah has a full payload of the Henry’s gear aboard and half tanks. She weighs around 80,000 pounds / 36,000kg, and is running at nine knots through the water (net of current). This is a speed length ratio of 1.15, on the low side of where the FPB 64s normally operate in smooth water.

There are a series of views, almost all from off the boat, taken in smooth water so we can study the wave patterns. Brian, who also edited this video, has used slow motion and cropping to enable the viewer to get a feel for the magnitude of the disturbance as Sarah Sarah goes about her business.

There are three immediate, and familiar items that we noticed. The bow wave is almost non existent, there is a very slight hollow in the area of the stabilizer fins, and the stern wave is well suppressed for a yacht of this displacement.

Lest  you think we make too much of the importance of efficiency, we point out the following:

• The more efficient the vessel for a given speed length ratio, the less power that is required and the greater than range from a payload of fuel.
• Lower power equates to quieter running with less vibration (Passage Maker former editor, Bill Parlatore, wrote of his sea trial aboard Wind Horse she was “the quietest yacht he had ever measured” and this at eleven knots).
• Lower smooth water power requirements leaves more engine for fighting headwinds and big seas. The recent example of Avatar’s passage with gale force headwinds, on her way from Fiji to New Zealand, with a 100% power margin, bears witness to this benefit.
• Sarah Sarah’s trip from Hawaii to Puget Sound, averaging ten knots for the entire voyage (a speed length ratio of 1.28), is another example of what efficiency can do.

We have put together a high res slide show of some of the photos from Penobscot Bay.

Click here to join us in Maine. Press the letter F for full screen and ESC to go back to smaller images.

As promised, we have a short but sweet video to share of our recent visit by a pod of humpback whales.

Over the last six years we have been looked over by many pods of whales. If we turn off the electronics and shut down the engines our visitors will swim around and under us, checking out the hull shape’s distribution of volume no doubt.

Click here for a two minute video.