Why I can't vote for the President of the US of A, some needful reading, and the death throes of anchoring in the sunshine state...
So, a while back I was talking about a scow schooner that Tad Roberts was working on and, lo and behold, it's no longer vaporware and it even has a price... This, my friends, is some kind of goodly thing.
The new design goes by the name of Laura Cove and it shoehorns an amazing amount of livability into it's 28 X 8 foot envelope... A scary amount as it happens because, comparing it to my CAL 34 (33.5' X 10'), I'm pretty sure it has as much usable space and stowage with somewhat better livability.
Just think about that for a moment...
I won't even go into the fact that with it's draft of 15" (yes inches) you can almost always find an out of the way place to anchor which is something I see as an important feature with the growing anti-anchoring mind set in a lot of places.
Then there's the rig (which I'll be going into some serious depth on in the near future) and you know how I feel about balanced lug but the short form is it's cheap, simple, and powerful so makes all kinds of sense. For those enamoured of the junk rig (not as cheap, simple, or powerful but it does reef easier) that works as well.
As far as costs go, a boat like this would not cost a lot in materials ($8-10K) and labor would work out to somewhere between 600 to 1200 hours of industrious productive work (we don't count the time you sit staring at your pile of fifty sheets of plywood or daydreaming as productive work). So, a finshed boat ready to leave the dock to go cruising for $15K would be very possible... Possibly a lot less if a group of builders got together and went the co-op route for needful stuff.
I'd color that affordable.
The only area I find a bit problematic is the size of the cockpit which is only four feet long. That said, our Jessie Cooper and LM2 both had cockpits that were right around four feet long and I don't recall ever having an issue at the time but, compared to the uberlong cockpit of the CAL 34, it would require a bit of readjustment.
This boat would make a great cruiser for a lot of people... I could certainly live with it.
More about it over at Tad's website.
Listening to a bunch of Paul Simon covers
So it goes...
