catzooks.com

...in wood

Woodenboat came out today with a cool cover story: "High-Performance sailing - in Wood". Inspired by Bethwaite, a designer in Seattle has created a single-handed skiff with all the trimmings to go fast. 500 square feet of sail area, in three sails. It's a rocket. He sails out of Shilshole; a little searching on the web found his website and a lot more details. The boat is strip built, which appears somewhat easier to build than cold-molding, and has that very high-performance look about it...

Performance

I've been reading High Performance Sailing by Frank Bethwaite - he was the designer of the 49er and a number of improvements to the 18-foot skiffs they sail in Sydney Harbour. Bethwaite basically takes you through his entire thinking process as he designs these boats, tells you the experiments that he ran to learn more about various components to make the boats faster, and relives the experience of the coming of age of these 18-footers. It's fascinating reading. You gain an excellent understanding of why things go fast, and what you can do to make your boats go faster. The book is technical, but not so technical that you loose focus on the bigger goal: going fast.

The K12, and cold-molding

An interesting choice appeared on the Woodenboat forums: the K12 by Northwest Marine Design. It's not a racehorse, but definitely has racehorse leanings. It's a single-hander, but not unwieldy, and it's large enough that I could take one of the kids along with me without any problems. Woodenboat ran a review of the K16 which sounded good, and with that I bought the plans. There is a builder in Vancouver who is putting one together; he is cold-molding, and suggested the definitive reference Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction by Meade Gougeon. I'm not sure if cold-molding is any stronger than strip-building if the boat is glassed afterwards; however, there is a certain obvious strength to having the boat built as interlocking shells rather than strips laid next to each other.

The book itself is very good - clear exposition and it walks you carefully through all the steps necessary to get a boat built using West System epoxy and cedar veneer. One of the most interesting parts is the descriptions of material fatigue. Gougeon has taken wood and pitted it against resin-impregnated foams, plastics, synthetics, and metals to try and determine the point and method by which all these materials fail. Resin-impregnated wood does very well. Be sure to get the 5th/revised edition, it really does have a number of changes and updates.

Plans, plans

I've been researching plans. There are tons of them, amateur boatbuilding is a large cottage industry. I started out by getting out all the Woodenboat catalogs of boat plans (e.g. here) and photocopied the plans which looked interesting, although Woodenboat tends towards very classically designed and built boats. Building a clinker hull is what most of the plans talk about - the best reference I found for these kinds of boats is Building Small Boats by Greg Rossel (which Rob Ah Yong sent me a copy of from my Amazon list in exchange for software. It's an excellent book and describes the process of building clinker boats very well).

I looked in the Woodenboat forums here and here and then slowly continued searching, mostly on the web.

There's a Glen-L 10 which is a light (88 lb) 10-footer that could probably be car-topped. It's flat-bottomed, and would likely be a pretty nimble boat. Glen-L is one of the larger plan designers, so support would be there.

From Duckworks (something akin to Glen-L) there's Daniel's Boat. This one seems like a plywood built multi-chine with a classical look about it, more for puttering around the lake with.

There's Arch Davis Design's Ace 14, a much heavier and more substantial boat, single chine with plywood over frame.

From the Stevenson Projects, there's the MiniCup which strongly resembles a Laser. The plans are free, and the Minicup is mostly plywood, so it would be simple to build.

There's the Moth -- a very lightweight, long fast sailer. Supposedly this boat is pretty tricky to sail, but it certainly looks like an interesting project. Having a class to sail under would be good as well, as there would be a fleet to sail with.

There's the Optimist class, from which you can buy plans for around $45. These have been sailed a lot by a number of professionals, and they are really easy boats to put together - a couple of pieces of plywood, and you're all done. They're small, though, only one crew.

I also strongly considered building a Geodesic Airolite Blivit 13 - this is a plywood floor with ribs and a sheath of Dacron skin. The sail is Tyvek, and the mast is a sailboard's mast. It's light, only 60 lbs. But I just didn't like the entirely different look.

The vision

I've always wanted to build a boat. This is probably the mix of having taken dinghy sailing classes when I was a kid, and having watched dad build all kinds of things around the house as I was growing up. My Dad's father also built boats - two small rowboats (called "Pootzy" - the first one blew off the top of the car on the way to the water, and was rebuilt again), a 12' pram (the boat my dad learned to sail on), and finally a 17'6" sailboat "Loon" which is now in safe keeping at my uncle's house.

At first, I wanted to build a great big cruiser and go around the world. This is even less realistic than just building a boat in the first place, and I eventually just dropped the whole plan.

But then I talked Tamara into taking a Laser sailing class (this was in 2000), and the fire was lit again. Once we decided to move into a house that had enough room in the garage to be able to accommodate such a project, the dream really started to take ahold. I started looking at plans.

[Update 2006 Oct 8: In retrospect, the fact that I quit rowing in the fall of 2003 allowed me to spend the time on this project. I'm not as fit as I once was, but I do have a boat mostly built. Most of the time I'm building in the evenings, time which would otherwise be spent rowing or exercising (or watching the tele).]