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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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 chance missed...

Badtux has a bad dream, a Senator making sense, and in the "wonders never cease" department Sarah Palin says something I actually agree with...

Last year a friend mentioned to me that there was a stretched Herreshoff Meadowlark for sale up in Maryland...

A different Meadowlark but you get the idea...

I've always loved this particular design and the fact that it had been built by Allan Vaitses made it all the more attractive. Add in the fact that it was selling for less than the cost of the lead contained aboard as ballast made for a pretty unbeatable combination...

Of course to buy it I'd have had to jump on a plane and fly up to Maryland and I'd promised myself never to get on another commercial flight...

So, I hesitated and someone else got the boat. I'm pretty sure there's a lesson to be learned here somewhere...

Listening to Marcus Mumford & Justin Hayward-Young

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a question you have to ask yourself...

About that triangle of doom, somewhat nervous making, and something happy making...

Way back when, I seriously considered building a Bahama Mama. It's a cool boat.

It's a pretty simple build and, at a cost of somewhere around $50K, it's a a lot of boat for the money as such things go.

Of course an older, classic plastic boat like a CAL 29 (this one for sale is a good example) pretty much ready to go would only cost you 20% of that...

Something to think about.

Sadly, these days, building a boat is really no longer a way to save money so, you have to ask yourself if the great pleasure and satisfaction of building your own boat from the keel up is worth the price.

Listening to Richard Thompson

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