A couple of thoughts regarding ballast...

Follow the money, a good point, and someone doing good...

So, here are a few numbers to play with;

• A cubic foot of water weighs 62 pounds
• A cubic foot of concrete weighs 150 pounds
• A cubic foot of iron weighs 491 pounds
• A cubic foot of lead weighs 709 pounds
• A cubic foot of gold weighs 1206 pounds

Like a lot of people I like the idea of water ballast. What's not to like... it's free, you can lose it when you don't want it around, and it works. Of course, there's a downside (there's always a downside to anything) in that it takes up a lot more room than most of us care to give up within the interior.

Case in point: Phil Bolger's take apart three piece schooner that I've often considered building as a non-take-apart boat which has often been on my shortlist for the next Loose Moose. Of course replacing the water ballast with other ballast types would gain a lot more room...

That said, somehow the idea of a 47-foot boat has lost a lot of it's allure for me but would still make a certain kind of sense due to its 1.5-foot draft and enough room and stowage to be able to work on rigging jobs and build self-steering gears/dinghies/surfboards as a nomadic shop/business model.

Listening to Bob Dylan covering Frank Sinatra

So it goes...

Yeah, this boat would certainly work for me...

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...

Short lists and Strat clones...

It's not that I'm paranoid it's just  that I read the news, this will surprise you, and, it would appear, we're in a really bad place...

So, about that short list...

The other day it came to me that current guitar fashion and boat design have an awful lot in common... And yes, the operative word in that sentence is "awful". In the current guitar market there is a cornucopia of guitars but, when you look at them closely, it really boils down to mostly clones of the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul with maybe 10% something a bit different. What that means in real terms is you have a real bugger all chance of any real innovation creeping into the mix.

Been to a boat show lately? Last time I crawled around boats at a show I found myself often wondering what boat I was actually on as they were all so very much of the same design brief you really couldn't tell and the best you could ascertain was that you were on a 30-foot something or other. An experience not unlike going to a guitar store and picking up a Strat clone off the rack and playing it. It might be a very good guitar but, when all is said and done, it is simply a rehashed copy of a guitar that Leo Fender cobbled together in his garage in the 50's...

Which, I guess, is the world we live in.

That said, there are a few exceptions which give me hope like the Souriceau and Aviateur designs by Eric Henseval which seem to be doing quite well both as home buildable designs (there are already finished home built boats sailing and more in the pipeline) or a boat you can buy ready to go at the boat show.

Which brings us around to the short list and the idea of a scow design (bet you thought I'd never get here) because every time I think about the scow in my head, I keep coming back to the interior of the Souriceau.

Which, I expect, is as far away from anything you'd expect if someone whispered scow schooner in your ear...

Listening to Dolapdere Big Gang cover the Animals

So it goes...

Another cool design from Chris Morejohn...

I have been a fan of Chris Morejohn's designs for like ever... His Hogfish Maximus continues to hold the top spot on our next boat short list but the catketch of a couple of days past reminded me of another Morejohn design along the same lines.

As you can see it is a junk schooner and while the junk rig has many admirers it also has a rather vocal group who really hate it... The funny thing about both of these groups is that most of them have zero experience with junk rig in an up close and personal way... Just something to keep in mind.

For the moment, just accept that there are quite a few sailors with junk rigs who are very happy campers...

Now this thirty-four foot shoal draft (2') boat has a very livable interior for a couple, lots of stowage space and it will sail well enough to get you wherever you want to go in safety and comfort. The fact that it is an easily built boat of common affordable materials (spelled plywood/epoxy/polyester) and rigged with free-standing masts (spelled flag/light poles) means that you can build the sucker and be cruising with some spare change in a reasonable amount of time. There is a LOT to be said about an affordable, easy, and fast to build boat.

If I were to build the Hogfish Maximus I'd ask Chris to pencil in this rig but I would not run it as a junk but opt instead for a balanced lug sail as it would both perform a bit better and be simpler and cheaper than the junk sails. Using Matt Layden's roller furling system for the balanced lug rig would make life very simple...

Listening to Weezer

So it goes...

A catamaran design I'd build...

Some of our readers seem to have a difficult time understanding how someone (me in this case) who was a passionate advocate for multihulls back in the day is mostly lukewarm on the subject in 2010...

It's not that I'm anti-multihulls these days, it's simply that as far as I am concerned, a lot of the promise of multihulls has been squandered in pandering to the greed factor, resulting in much of what passes for cruising multihulls not making a lot of sense.

In the not so long distant past there were a lot of designers who saw multihulls as a way of doing more with less, as opposed to how to get the maximum income and hype out of a project. I'm pretty sure in the late 70's if I told James Wharram or Jim Brown that the average fifty-foot cruising cat would now cost nearly a million dollars, they'd have pointed me to the nearest facility with padded rooms and a detox center... How times change!

An oft repeated reason for losing the ballast in those days and going with a cat or a tri was that they were more easily driven and you needed less sail or horsepower to drive them, which in my mind still makes a lot of sense... Fast forward to today and I notice that a forty-foot cat is more likely to have a taller rig, more sail area, and more HP than a forty-something monohull that they are anchored next to. Kind of makes you think...

Actually I'm not here today to rant about what is wrong with cats and tris but to point out a neat project that Eric Henseval has on his drawing board and a cat design that show great promise...

Mr Henseval, obviously influenced by the great Phillipe Harlé (can you spell PUNCH?), lays out a very neat catamaran that just says to me "Let's go sailing". Like all of Eric's plywood designs, this looks like it would go together quickly and with a minimum of waste and there is nothing un-needful in its make up... Which in my opinion is the difference between an OK design and a great design.

This design is sensible in packing in what you need in an eight-meter envelope and for a couple with simple tastes would be a magic carpet both willing and able to take them wherever they wanted to go... Kinda says it all!

Sadly, there is no rig shown and this is an area that I usually find problematic on designs vectored at home builders, as the designer after drawing a great hull and interior throws it all away by designing an expensive higher-tech-than-needful rig that winds up making the homebuilt boat simply unaffordable or impractical for the sort of people who'd actually build one. Hopefully Mr Henseval will not follow suit and come up with a reasonable and simple rig that such a simple catamaran cries out for...

The question I know I'll get in the mailbag tomorrow is would I build and cruise one of these? The short answer is if there was a 10-meter version (we need the space for guitars) with a simple, sensible, and able to be self built rig, it would be right at the top of my list...

Some folks say I'm simple minded... A couple of cool rigs!

Actually we had a bunch of people who asked about just what a  proto-Simplicity rig actually is. Short form, I guess, is that I'm doing a bit of beta testing for Mark Smaalders on the rig he has planned for his new Simplicity design series to help sort out any wrinkles...

On "So It Goes" it will look something like this... 

 While on the new Simplicity 42/43 it will look like this...

Kinda cool...Huh?

It gets better, check out the gaff version of the Simplicity 42/43...

Yeah... Seriously sexy! Truth be told if I thought our CAL 34 could pull off the gaff rig and keep some street cred in the process I'd be all over it! A gaff rigged CAL 34 would certainly surprise some folks who think gaff sails don't go to weather and we'd be showing a lot of transom to a lot of Bendytoys on all points of sail...

Fun stuff!

A Pinky of note... "Time of Wonder"

I've always liked Pinky schooners and Ted Brewer's  "Time of Wonder" is one which I keep coming back to...

It's a great design and avoids the "looking-like-a-theme-park" problem which some full dress schooners fall prey to in the under fifty-foot bracket.

At under fifty-foot, it is also quite handy for a couple as no one sail is more than I'd care to raise with a bit of simple mechanical aid whether block and tackle or a manual winch, which is one of the great advantages of a split rig.

Pinkies are the stuff of legend in terms of sea-keeping and heavy weather going and you'd have to look long and hard for a better go anywhere boat...

Way back when, when I first looked at this plan I was not so enamoured with the interior but as time goes by the living arangement has really grown on me... It makes a lot of sense when you consider that you could really LIVE in a boat like this.

For me the only drawback of this design is just that kiss too much draft at 6'3" making the waterways of Europe a bit problematic. I'd be all over this design if the draft could get down to 5'5"! That said, since most of the ballast for "Time of Wonder" is interior it would be no great problem to make part of it fluid ballast (water) and for a canal stint simply pump the excess overboard till back in open water...

Hmmmm...

Another short list Schooner...

Another boat from the short list Jean-Pierre Tutard's aptly named "Jolie Môme" (which translates loosely as a fine bit of stuff) is a boat that resonated the minute I saw it...

An interesting design on several levels it is a more modern hull form than most schooners sport as well as twin rudders, twin keels and other "modern" ideas mixed with a very Gallic interior arrangement with a serious dash of "out of the box" thinking that makes for an interior that simply makes all kinds of sense. At 12.80 meters (42 feet) this just may be the best interior for its size anywhere...

One of the big problems ... NA's don't get, since almost none of them actually live on boats or even in a lot of cases sail them very far, is the ergo dynamics of actually living on a boat. Not that they don't do all sorts of clever and crafty new ways of doing interiors but most simply don't work for voyaging and living aboard. Which is what I call the "lots of beds, no storage and no livable space tango". Tutard is not one of those guys... He is the real deal and his boats make sense.

Case in point... Just look at this interior plan!
Its accommodation is on two levels and includes a dining area below as well as a dinette on the upper level which makes for a great place to navigate from and do the watch out of the elements... Who needs a wheelhouse?! But the real beauty is the ergo dynamics are spot on... Sure I'd lose a bed in there somewhere and do something else with it but as a builder that is easy and the spaces available unlike some designs (the DIDI 38/40 comes to mind) are actually of a size and location that you could do something with them... Instead of coming to the conclusion that the only thing that actually fits is, well... another berth!

One of the other things you will find in French designs is that the French are into cooking and entertaining and that this is a core part of life so there is actually space to have a bunch of friends over for drinks and a feed, with space to pull out a couple of guitars with the brandy and play music. Sounds kind of nice, sort of like home!

For those with rig issues... Well the rig is well thought out and a lot easier to sail than most people would think. Easily single handed and a breeze for a couple... No rocket science involved!

For a smaller boat of Tutard's you might want to check out is his P’TIT HOM (Little Man) which packs a serious amount of boat into 36 feet!