The politics of projection, that sanction thang, and did somebody say scow...
The problem with trying to fit a lot of needs into a small envelope can be both crazy-making and very, very difficult...
Then again, easy has never exactly been a territory I've been enamoured with.
One reader wrote a rather long and impassioned email suggesting that I steer my friend over to the Adventure 40 for a variety of reasons but the ones that I want to talk about underline a whole lot of misconceptions disguised as fact...
Building a boat is stupid...There are a lot of very good reasons to build yourself a boat and, while it is no longer a way to save yourself a lot of money, it still makes all kinds of sense.
For one, building a boat is a great experience and soul satisfying in a way that you'd have to experience it to fully comprehend. Secondly, it is the only way of getting certain types of boats... How many extreme shoal draft sailboats do you see for sale these days?
Plus my friend really wants to build his boat and the process of building is just as important to him as the voyaging.
Wood is simply not an acceptable material to build a boat from...Anytime I see someone mention that they are thinking about buying a wooden boat, folks crawl out from miles around to advise against it with cautionary tales of rot, extensive/crippling maintenance issues, and other unfounded horror stories. Mostly all spouted by folks who have never owned a wooden boat.
Just a quick note: the Teredo worm quit being a problem back in the last century when chemists formulated better more effective bottom paints.
The thing to keep in mind is that wooden boat construction/design is a moving target and over the years a lot of very skilled boatbuilders and designers have come up with a lot of ways to build wooden boats better. Sure all boats need to be maintained and the truth of the matter is you're more than likely going to be spending the same amount of time to maintain a wooden, steel/alloy, or plastic boat.
Me, I've never been into chasing and chipping rust...
Bigger boats (like the Adventure 40) are safer than smaller boats...This is so wrong on so many levels I just don't know where to start. Sure a longer boat may be more comfortable in a seaway but comfort and seaworthiness are not the same thing.
It's a lot easier to make a small simple structure strong and watertight than a big complicated one... The more complication in a design or build the easier it is for something to go wrong. It's just the nature of the beast. A lot of my French friends in the small boat crowd are fond of using the phrase "small boat, small problems" whose logic is pretty impeccable.
A while back an older couple on a big cruising boat with electric everything were marooned in the anchorage because they'd had an electrical meltdown of some sort... They could not launch their dinghy which was in davits and serviced by an electric winch nor could they up anchor as their anchor was too large to be manually retrieved without the aid of their electric windless and so on. A real clusterfuck. Which goes a long way to make up my mind about the safety of having boats larger than the crews physical abilities...
Listening to Jim Pepper
So it goes...
