The real question about ferrocement boats...

Echoes of the past we should not be hearing, a good point, and a needful post from Moldy Chum about politics and fly fishing (it also works if you substitute "Sailing/cruising" for fly fishing)...

From time to time I get a bit of derision on my stand that ferro-cement cruising boats are starting to make a whole lot of sense. Or, to be more accurate, that they have always made sense but due to irksome fashion, the marine industry, and too much undeserved word of mouth the idea of a ferro-cement boat is so unfashionable as to make the idea of building and cruising one problematic.

I mention this particular windmill I tilt at from time to time not because I actually have anything new to say about ferro-cement boats but because, all of a sudden, I seem to be knee deep in articles about redoing your bespoke kitchen with expensive cement counter tops, super-cool high fashion furniture built from cement, and cement as the basis for a whole new trend in art...

It would seem that cement/concrete seems to be the architectural/interior equivalent of this years "little black dress". Cement is HIP! So hip in fact that I recently read an article about concrete work surfaces and counters being installed in a megayacht spare-no-expense galley.

Fashion, as I've noted before, is an interesting thing. The idea of folks in places where hipness is important, apparently, can't rip out their mega-dollar kitchens fast enough to replace their counter top with cement and spend hellacious big bucks doing it.

Which, as a result, has me thinking about ferro-cement boats...

Fact is, a well designed and built ferro-cement boatis a thing of beauty which is just as strong or stronger than any other boat building material. On the other hand, in the late 60's and early 70's, a lot of bad ferro boats got built because people got greedy or tried to just cheap out on the cheapest boat building material around with calamitous effect. Of course, I've seen as many or more bad steel, fiberglass, wood, and composite boats built the same way and yet no one has anything bad to say about them (well ... yeah, everybody does seem to love to badmouth plywood but I'll reserve that sorry state of affairs for another post). I don't know about you but it does make me wonder...

Then there's the fact that back in the golden age of cement boat building the paints sucked, epoxy was yet mostly unknown in boatbuilding circles, and cement chemistry was actually kind of crude by today's standards. The point being that if you were to build a cement boat today you's have way better materials to build it with a lot more information available about how to build it better. For instance, look up cement and epoxy trade journals and you'll find that cement and epoxy not only work well together but are cutting edge tech.

Am I the only one adding 1+1 and getting 2?

For the new boat, (providing Trump has not destroyed the world before I can get around to building it) I'll be building a ferro-cement keel taking full advantage of the products and technology available today... It will be fast to build, relatively cheap, pretty much bombproof, and with foil shape that works... What's not to like?

So, the real question about ferro-cement boats is not whether or not one can build a good/great ferro boat and cruise with it but whether or not anyone is hip enough to do it.

Listening to Tower of Power (who are always  my go to guys on the matter of hipness)

So it goes...