a quick thought on tools and toys...

A cost of bad policing, something you need to read, and NASA doing it right...

The other day I was looking at the interior of a nice yacht with a lot of beautiful interior wood, lush fabrics, and a lust inspiring media center focused around a 66" ultra-HD 4K video screen and it inspired two cascading thoughts...

"Boy, I'd love to hang out in this boat"

and...

"What a horridly unseamanlike interior for a cruising boat"

Sadly, I find this is pretty much my reactions to most newer designs I look at these days which all seem great on comfort to the Nth degree but are sadly lacking in the practical needs of someone cruising in the real world.

Maybe it's the fact that today cruising boats are thought of as toys rather than tools while a generation ago it was all about being a tool and not a toy...

Listening to Lydia Loveless

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A family oriented sailboat...

Some seriously nasty corporate welfare, a ration of expected stupidity, and an interview of sorts that some folks really need to read...

All of a sudden we're surrounded by Morgan Out Islands. It's like being in the middle of a frelling convention.

While I've never been a big fan of Charlie Morgan's "Out Island" series (I think it has something to do with the look of the bow and the fact that I simply do not like center cockpits) but I'll be the first to admit that they make a lot of sense for someone looking for a big bombproof boat on a budget.

Especially the Out Island 41...

For me the main attraction of the boat is that they were well built and seem to be able to survive even the worst sort of abuse... There's a lot to be said for workboat solid. Better yet, as there were over a thousand built, finding a cheap one that needs a little TLC or a fixer-upper is pretty easy.

That said, the OI-41 is a bit more boat than a couple actually needs but it really is just the sort of thing you might want to stick on your shortlist if you were a family...

Then again, most of the OI-41's I seem to come across are crewed by grumpy retired single guys using them like trawlers so what do I know?

Listening to Carolina Story

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Of course, you have to see it in boat terms...

On the demise of the bookstore, something from the interesting/worrisome file, and an interesting look at health care in the US of A...

A print ad that speaks volumes.

Listening to Joseph

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Looking at a boat not a reputation...

Not exactly a surprise, just the same old same security theater, and there seems to be a lot of disappointment going round...

Of late in the neighborhood there seems to be a plethora of Hunter 33 & 34's for sale at fairly reasonable ($10-15K) prices...

Now, I'll go out on a limb here and mention that while all the hip folk would never be seen dead in a Hunter that, by and large, they really are not a bad boat at all.

Which is not to say that I don't think Hunter made some bad or iffy decisions design-wise over the years but, then again, I could say that about just about any company building boats over the last few decades has had more than their fair share of "Seemed like a good idea at the time" episodes.

I know that my saying Hunters are a boat you might want to consider will unleash a lot of mail recounting horror stories about poorly built sailboats coming to grief and dire warnings that Hunter's are just not "Blue Water capable"  mostly from folks who'd never actually sailed a Hunter but did have a friend who once talked to a guy who had a friend who met a guy with some problems...

The thing to keep in mind is that while Hunter's somewhat negative reputation is not really deserved, neither are some of the wonderful reputations of some boats because they're based on the same sort of misinformation, hearsay, and opinion little of which has any resemblance to the truth.

Which brings us to the bottom line where in the current used market a truly trashed, beat to hell, and cosmetically challenged Hallberg-Rassy fixer upper will sell for more than a Hunter in excellent condition.

Listening to Twin Brother

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The scow at Crystal River...

Needful reading, the Wisconsin idiocy spiral continues, and some seriously bizarre stuff concerning the "most progressive trade agreement in history"...

A cool scow...

Some more serious scow goodness to check out with your Sunday brunch...

Listening to Sons of Bill

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Some cat rigs with a French flavor...

A good way to spend a day out on the water, politicians in France unanimously doing the right thing (think about that for a minute), and just in case you have not been paying attention...

Over at Voiles Alternative there's a great discussion of the fabled "Punch" catboats from the design office of Phillipe Harle that you might want to check out.

Listening to Ingrid Michaelson

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She had me at small and simple...

Donkey Mountain may be on to something, some seriously bad news, and the Retirement Project (a good cruising blog) makes a good point...

Hanneke Boon doing the Pecha Kucha.



Listening to Shelby Lynne

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a quick thought on length...

A good point, still ZERO, and the sort of person we need more of...

Size, where boats are concerned, is at best something of an odd duck and, as a result, I hear a lot of people making statements like "I need a forty-foot boat" and suchlike.

The problem is the given length of a boat is only one factor of size and within that 40-foot envelope you have all manner of boat sizing...

Take the CAL 40 for example...

...compare it to pretty much any boat built in the last ten or twenty years and you'll see that length on deck is a very poor way to categorize sailboats in terms of useful space aboard.

Which, I might add, does not mean that I find the CAL 40 lacking in any way but forty-foot boats today are a lot "bigger" than they used to be.

Listening to Those Darlins

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a matter of seaworthiness...

In the "hardly surprising" department, this really says a lot, and some needful reading...

I was recently looking at the study plans for one of Reuel Parker's boats, a scow as it happens, and there was a comment by Reuel that got me thinking...

"Scows are not considered seaworthy types, although they can make coastal trips and island passages." 

The thing about seaworthiness is it's a pretty fluid concept at best and, in most cases, something of a gray area being dependant on many factors. Which means that one person's seaworthy vessel may seem like a floating death trap to another. Having crossed seas with an internally ballasted shoal draft sharpie that drew eighteen inches, I used to have this pointed out to me on a regular basis...

That said, scows of the traditional sort are not seaworthy in the same sense as a keel boat with external ballast. For starters internal ballast is not very good at righting a fully capsized hull and if that's going to be your main criteria of seaworthiness a scow may actually seem somewhat lacking...

Just like a modern catamaran. 

Seriously, if you applied the same thought process that makes a scow unseaworthy to just about any production cat currently being built today you'd have to come to the same conclusion... Catamarans are unseaworthy.

You might want to think about that for a moment or two...

Which does not mean that I think all modern production catamarans are unseaworthy (just some) or that a traditional scow is either. Just that they are both different in ways you should be aware of.

Like I said before, seaworthiness is a pretty slippery notion and depends much more on the person sailing a boat rather than the actual design. Sailing a traditional scow has a lot more in common with sailing a catamaran than it does with an externally ballasted monohull...

So, would I consider sailing Reuel Parker's scow across an ocean?

Sure I would. Then again, before I did I'd sail it a lot, practice deploying a parachute sea anchor/heavy weather tactics, and sort out the best way to hove to with the board up because I'm not real keen on surprises further offshore than I care to swim towards land. Of course, anybody considering a trans-oceanic passage would do the same no matter what sort of boat they intended to cross with.. 

Right?

Listening to She & Him

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So, if a guy tells you your chosen rig sucks why listen to him about your keel?

Hitting the nail right smack dab on the head, thumbs on the scales of justice, and an apt comment...

There's a discussion over at the JRA forum discussing a possible junk rig sailboat design that I find rather irksome but it's a great reminder about how there is so much bad information floating around about how boats work.

Especially where shoal draft, forms of ballast, and lateral resistance are concerned...

I think what bothers me is junk rig advocates should know full well how much misinformation there is about their rig of choice and so it would seem they'd be a lot more cynical/skeptical about other areas of boat design or suchlike.

Which, I suspect, is why the junk rig is nowhere near as successful as it could be. They're not designing junk rig sailboats but adapting junk rigs to existing Bahamian sloop thinking and there's a difference.

A big difference...

Listening to Ben E. King

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a pretty cool project...

A show you might want to watch, some not so good news, and since the NRA is so big on cheer leading indiscriminate gun ownership maybe they'd like to pick up the tab for gun violence in the US of A...



Listening to Mina Tindle

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about that boat in my head...

Rivers at threat, Krugman getting it right, and some needful reading...

I'm pretty sure all of us have couple of boat designs floating around in our heads that pop up when daydreaming about sitting at anchor in some out-of-the-way harbor, drying out in some French fishing village, or lazily sailing towards someplace you've never been before...

This boat is one of mine.

Not exactly the sort of thing most people would choose I suspect.

Half the attraction is the great deck space which is something you get when you limit yourself to standing headroom to where you actually need it. Plenty of deck space for a good sized dinghy and two-person kayak stowage while passage making and, when in port, a huge space for those keen on outdoor living in pleasant climes. Plus, as an added bonus plenty of space for the cats to chase each other around the deck with the added security of full length bulwarks for our peace of mind while they're doing it.

The interior makes sense but for us I'd make a couple of changes. A double transverse berth in the aft cabin and a redo of the salon for starters (I really hate center line drop leaf dining tables on a cruising boat). The other change would be to convert the forward cabin into a hold/workshop separated from the rest by a watertight bulkhead.

I like the rig but have a sneaking suspicion that I'd like it even more as a schooner with a handkerchief sized jib set flying off a small bowsprit. As long as we're making changes I'd also lose the water ballast and replace it with a mix of inside/outside ballast in lead. Lastly I'd lose the outboard on the transom and move it into an off-center well while moving the rudder to the transom.

One nice thing about the resulting boat in my view is that its workboat heritage lends itself to good quality workboat construction/materials and it would be both cheap and fast to build with not a whit of temptation to turn it into a "y-a-c-h-t" or try to impress the neighbors.

The thing is, as long as you're honest with yourself, hind sight really is 20/20... So, in essence, I've just described a Loose Moose 2 with hindsight.

Listening to the Black Cadillacs

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a couple of boats I'd love to have...

A fracking waste, some scary reading, and in the "still not over it" department...

I happened to see over on Orcas island in the great state of Washington that someone there was selling a pair of CAL 20s... You even get a discount if you buy them both.

I have to tell you that if they were here I'd be all over them in a flash.

Just think what a great opportunity having two identical hulls to test out clever and cunning ideas of the rig sort with the advantage of having a control model in the mix, Wouldn't it be nice to actually test various rigs like junk (and junk variations), crabclaw, balanced lug, and so on in a real honest-to-goodness scientific manner?

I get excited just thinking about it...

Listening to Couer de Pirate



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Running back stays...

A very interesting lecture, some important reading, and the best concise riff I've read on the Indiana stupidity yet (though BadTux comes close)...

The other day someone mentioned to me that they'd never have a boat with running back stays. The reason given was that they were an accident waiting to happen and it got me thinking. Mostly about how so many attitudes regarding the practice of sailing have changed and not all for the better.

Running back stays make a lot of sense. They're really quite simple to use and add a big safety factor to a rig. That said, folks who don't like running backs think just the opposite and suggest they add a lot of difficulty to the sailing workload (apparently akin to doing calculus in your head while juggling a mixed fruit bowl) and, more importantly, that they are inherently unsafe and the cause of many lost rigs.

Admittedly running back stays do add a couple of lines to deal with but, difficult? Done right it is less work than a jib sheet and set up with a modicum of intelligence hardly worth talking about. So, I just don't see the difficulty.

As for running backs being responsible for lost rigs and suchlike. I've yet to hear of a single case of a running back stay being the cause of a lost rig. Point of fact the cause of every instance I've come across is someone doing something stupid. Case in point an uncontrolled gybe is not caused by a running back stay but by someone not paying attention. So, hardly fair to blame a stay (or the boom for that matter).

I still think something like the publication "Accidents in North American Mountaineering"
geared to sailing would be no bad thing in sorting out the nuts and bolts of why things go bad on boats and people get hurt. If we did, I suspect, running back stays would have a much better reputation and we'd all be a lot safer...

Listening to Mr Elevator & the Brains Hotel (and getting my Farfisa/Iron Butterfly groove on)

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Not a 1.5 million dollar boat...

A modest proposal (I'd be in favor of), the high cost of the food on your table, and that sound you're hearing just might be Teddy Roosevelt spinning like a top...

One thing I take comfort in is that once you've shed the docklines and headed off to some distant shore it's a whole different ball game because the sea is a great equalizer. It simply doesn't care if you're on a 1.5 million dollar boat or something like the Django 7.70.

Offhand the fact that the Django dries out makes me think the smaller cheaper boat is a whole lot hipper...

... and, maybe it's just me, but I think sailing one around the world (like this guy) would be a lot more fun as well.

Is this a happy camper or what?



Listening to Fly Moon Royalty

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two hulls, two masts...

The main attraction of Cuba, greedy bastards, and in the "Yeah right" department...

Bernd Kohler has a new design up his sleeve that is well worth checking out.

Color me interested...


Listening to Michel Colombier

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a damn near perfect boat...

I'd call this something of a success story, one can only hope, and, in the "Where have the best & brightest gone" department, proof positive that there are clueless idiots running the US of A...

A pretty exceptional refit of the sailing vessel "Atom" that will teach you a lot...





For those wanting more check out Atom Voyages (a site you really should have bookmarked).

Listening to and watching Taarka



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Why yesterday was a great day...

A rather good point, something about rich people & suckers, and, I suspect, this was not what Jesus would have been in favor of...

Yesterday I learned something about boatbuilding and sailboat design.

Truth is, I tend to learn stuff about sailboat design and boatbuilding on a pretty regular basis. I do a lot of research and I thrive on input so it's not exactly an unusual occurance for me to learn something. That said, every once in a long while I come across something that rocks my world and completely expands my horizons...

Yesterday, was just such a day.

The fact is I'm not sure exactly what I'll do with said piece of knowledge and new expanded horizions but my head has been humming like a wasp nest after the application of a Louisville slugger and it's only a matter of time till something busts out...

It might even get messy.

So, color me doing the happy, happy dance!

Listening/watching Jackson Browne play that dead band's song

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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

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Is this the death knell of pointy fronts?

A good read on ethics/morality (yes, there is a difference), about that "discriminatory intent�, and an obviously compassionate politician's heartfelt solution to the homeless problem...

Did someone say scow?

Be sure not to miss the vitrual tour...

Listening to a proud father's son

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