There are some very special days attached to building a boat big enough to live in and call home. Most of them sort of sneak up on you like the day you step into the hull and it "clicks" and you realize that it really is a boat and it will carry you to far away places...
There are, of course, a few of those days which are special for bad reasons: the "how could I have been so bloody stupid to build this thing" and "what was I thinking of" days. But on the day you actually launch the boat, all of the bad stuff becomes faint memories. It is a special day and anyone who launches deserves a bit of time to enjoy the feeling that comes from building a really nice boat.
Jean and Gaby just launched their new boat, Anemone, which is a bit of an evolution of the Loose Moose 2 design Phil Bolger drew up for us (sometimes referred to as "AS-39" as dubbed by Bernie), and by all accounts they did a most excellent job. You have to love the color scheme and, am I the only person who thinks about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the word YELLOW comes to mind?
The new interesting bow design purports to solve problems that we never ran into with our Loose Moose 2 while sailing in the Med, East Africa, across the Atlantic, and in the Caribbean, but it does seem to have that "NEW" Bolger look I see pervading the newer designs. Whether it really is an improvement remains to be seen. The boat will work just fine just like our Loose Moose 2 did. Just my take, but the only problem we did have appears not to have been addressed as the rudder still looks a little small... but hey, that's what sea trials are all about!
Here are a couple of photos taken by Peter Lenihan who helped with the launching of Anemone. He's a fellow boat builder up there in the frozen north. Anemone's a pretty cool boat and just for comparison purposes, here's a couple of photos of Loose Moose 2 (not yellow)...
Click on photos for larger image.
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