Forks in the road... a couple of thoughts on boat design

Way back when we asked Phil Bolger about designing Loose Moose 2 for us, the process was we told him what we wanted and he asked a few questions then a couple of weeks later a few "cartoons" and misc plan bits showed up in the mail with what he thought we wanted...

This one was the one that resonated the most for us. I liked the look and the interior seemed to give what we desired more or less. Not perfect, but a great place to start from.

At the time we had Phil's Jessie Cooper design (Loose Moose) and, as much as we liked the balanced lug rig it sported, I had a lot of reservations about Phil's favorite rig the dipping lug. I wrote back to say that  we liked the cartoon mostly but maybe we should change the rig and how about going with a gaff rig? This, of course, was the first of several forks in the road that took us to what would become the actual Loose Moose 2.

The adage that hindsight is 20/20 is really only partly true, but in this case I'm pretty sure that the decision to go with the gaff rig, while not a mistake, was just maybe not the best of all possible decisions on my part.

I still don't think dipping lug was the way to go for us but what sort of boat would Phil have designed for us if I'd said instead of "let's try a gaff rig", I'd said "Let's try a balanced lug"? Sadly, it is no longer possible to go back and see where that line of thought would take us...