Small high-speed craft are the most vulnerable to the severity of the sea: achieving a design which pairs good performance and acceptable levels of safety is not a trivial task. The seakeeping and manoeuvrability of these vessels play a crucial role in following sea conditions: dynamic instabilities, namely broaching-to and surf-riding, are more than a rare eventuality and threaten the survivability of the vessel and the life of the mariners. This study investigates the effects of the steering qualities on the broaching-to behaviour of a high-speed craft when it is sailing in following and stern-quartering waves. The motions and loads of the vessel are simulated by means of a 3D time domain blended potential flow boundary element method (BEM), validated using captive model tests in regular waves carried out at the Seakeeping and Manoeuvring Basin (SMB) of MARIN. The hull directional stability and turning ability of the high-speed craft were artificially modified, showing that an increase in the directional stability as well as in the effectiveness of the steering can be beneficial to avoid the inception of broaching-to, but they have different consequences on the dynamics of the vessel's loss of control.

The manoeuvring characteristics of high speed craft are greatly influenced by the hydrodynamic loads generated by the asymmetrical underwater hull shape when the vessel heels. In order to provide an insight into this aspect of the manoeuvring of high speed craft, captive model experiments were conducted in the model towing tank at the Delft University of Technology. The experiments were divided in two main phases. In the first phase, the heel-sway, heel-yaw coupled linear coefficients and hydrodynamic heel moment were measured using static heeled model measurements over a range of speeds. The second stage of the experiments examined the influence of different running trim attitudes on the values of the manoeuvring coefficients. The results from three running trim conditions were compared.