The plans flutter out on the dining table and quickly there arise intertwining shivers of heady anticipation and well-founded fear. If there are 10 pages of plans promising breathtaking beauty, within them are things the prospective boatbuilder does not know how to do, ranging from water-sealing the deck hardware to somehow turning a 25ft spruce mast.
Beyond the technical issues, the awestruck amateur rightly wonders: Do I have the character�the perseverance, the capacity to surf the waves of elation and despair�for the year or three or 10 this magnificent creation will demand?
As many production builders have evaporated from the underft class, a tide of professional designers and naval architects has flooded the void with sophisticated plans for amateur builders.
Modern materials�plywood, fiberglass and epoxy�make it possible to build lightweight, rotproof and prodigiously strong composite hulls through several techniques, most of them simpler than traditional plank-on-frame. In just the last few years, many designers have also started producing kits consisting of a building jig and all the hull panels and bulkheads through the technology of CNC computer numerical controlled routing. The jig guarantees precise alignment, and the panels are perfectly cut to plan.
That said, the logical and practical arguments against building your own are hard to beat back. An inexperienced builder probably will not end up with a boat whose functional details are as well executed as those of a production boat that has undergone years of design refinement. A used fiberglass boat in decent condition can be found for a third to half the cost of parts and materials for a comparable home-built boat.
Building a boat from plans or a kit is well within the scope of a reasonably competent DIY-er. I am a serial boatbuilder, however, with enough experience to know better if knowing better would enhance my life. This is my sixth build; preceding it have been three other sailboats and two kayaks. I never expected this would happen, but what started out as an experiment in building a complicated toy became a life-changing experience. So it is for many amateur builders. With the dream, of course.
And then whack it down to realistic scale. While there are inspirational stories like that of Roy Jackson of Bainbridge Island, Washington, an advertising executive who began building a 43ft schooner in and finally launched it in , at the age of 78, there are many more where the overambitious dream ended as expensive firewood.
Some designers post expected building times for various boats in their catalogs. These are, without exception, laughable. For an honest estimate, multiply by two or three. For the record, my first boat, a 13ft 6in sailing dinghy, required hours. My second, a 19ft gaff sloop, consumed about 3, A friend in British Columbia took 6, hours for a meticulously crafted 23ft Bermuda sloop.
The amateur will be surprised to find how many different skills have to be learned to build a sailboat. For a composite hull, you also learn fiberglassing and filleting sculpting coves of thickened epoxy to strengthen joints such as bulkhead-to-hull , and good fiberglassing is not easy.
When I arrived at this final step on my complicated gaffer Nil Desperandum I was lost in the woods�the plans provided little illumination�until I phoned Sam Devlin, the designer, and told him I was about to turn the job over to a professional. I digested a book on rigging and spent days prowling marinas in the Seattle area, camera and notebook in hand, studying how boats in my size range were rigged. Finally, I visited a chandlery where an extraordinarily helpful associate combed through the plans with me for two hours, patiently advising which block, shackle, eye, cleat and line was appropriate for each job.
It took a couple of seasons of sailing to fiddle the rig into top form and reliability, but it now works admirably�and I have only low-grade trepidation for rigging the next boat. The step from dinghy to cruising boat is not to be taken lightly; new complexities present at every turn. How does one execute the corners of the trunk cabin? Taking this extra step cut against the grain of my impatient nature, which was another benefit of doing it: vocational rehab in learning patient and methodical work.
For example, if your dream is a compact cruiser in the 19ft to 22ft range, the designers listed in the sidebar offer 30 different options, including Bermuda sloops, gaff sloops, yawls, catboats, a cat-ketch and even a trailerable schooner. Construction regimes include traditional plank-on-frame, plywood stitch-and-glue, plywood lapstrake and cold-molding. I have built hulls using various methods, and in my opinion, stitch-and-glue is the most amateur-friendly.
Its only drawback is that seriously curvaceous shapes are not possible, and some designs�certainly not all�look a bit slab-sided. The most beautiful small boats may be lapstrake: the parallel flow of sweeping lines creates a visual rhythm that makes the boat seem like an organic creation.
I thought it prudent, for example, to build positive flotation into Nil Desperandum, so I turned 14 cubic feet of hull crannies into watertight air compartments, providing lb of flotation to counter the lb of ballast.
Even a modest daysailer will force you to surf a cycle of elation and discouragement. And if you are to keep going, you have to figure out a way to manage it, building a reservoir of perseverance that may seep into other areas of your life. You learn that perfectionism is not your friend, so you let go of the vision of uncompromised beauty you held when you first spread out the plans on the dining room table. Oddly enough, this surrender will also make you happier, as you learn to separate the tasks that must be done right from those merely built as a projection of ego.
You will gain confidence in yourself at the same time you plumb new depths of humility. The detailing of Waxwing would blow any competition out of the water. The oars, for example, stash elegantly under the floorboards. A mizzen, complementing the balanced lugsail, makes sail balance and heaving-to easy. The mizzen sheet, in an exquisite innovation, runs through a hollow boomkin that Hartmann devised.
Hartmann, 59, lives in central Vermont and works as an emergency physician. It took 11 months of steady off-hours work to build the boat, starting with a kit for the hull. He commissioned Vivier to draw the mizzen�heretofore the Ilur featured a single lugsail with optional jib�and undertook extra ambitions such as designing a bronze mainmast collar for a local foundry to cast.
I give Vivier all the credit. Steve Stromberg, a year-old firefighter from Bainbridge Island, Washington, is another serial boatbuilder with half-dozen sailboats and kayaks behind him. He seems to have an innate need to keep raising the stakes, challenging himself more with each boat. The next one, he says, will be the 24ft Fenwick Williams gaff yawl, a 9,lb, plank-on-frame cruising boat. What has he gotten out of building boats?
The act of massaging wood into a functioning boat is my form of meditation. Amateur boatbuilders sometimes find it difficult to put into words, but most of us have found that in various ways, the boats build us. We build patience and focus and character through the vital tasks that involve their structure and seaworthiness. Building a boat is replete with those choices, and making them faithfully is like exercising a muscle.
Brooks Boats Designs brooksboatsdesigns. Chase Small Craft chase-small-craft. Chesapeake Light Craft clcboats. Chesapeake Marine Design cmdboats. Devlin Designing Boat Builders devlinboat. Dudley Dix Yacht Design dixdesign. Farrier Marine f-boat. Francois Vivier, naval architect English language website vivierboats.
Glen-L Marine Designs glen-l. John Welsford boat designs jwboatdesigns. Iain Oughtred woodenboatstore. Paul Gartside Boatbuilder and Designer gartsideboats. Lawrence Cheek is a journalist and sailor from Whidbey Island, Washington.
He is just about to complete the trunk cabin of his sixth boat. It was a clear, calm day far from land. The gentle wind drove us smartly along through the royal-blue ocean. Out of February 2, was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. After a few extra The sky is dark, and the air cold. Measuring 20 degrees deadrise at the It was blowing 25 knots when the inner forestay let go.
Eclipse, my Tayana 42, was screaming along on a broad reach just south of Saint Thomas. I had gone to raise the staysail, and upon putting a slight strain on the hanks, the stainless wire separated from its swagged We spend so much time with the finished product that it's easy to gloss over how much work and innovation goes into making a single sailboat.
Today, we're taking a look behind the scenes with our friends at Lagoon as they show us the build for their new There's something A few years ago, Jeanneau set about the business of revolutionizing its storied Sun Odyssey line when it introduced its SO and models, designed by Phillipe Briand.
Building on that momentum, the French builder has since passed the baton to a new designer, Marc Lombard, One thing nobody really expected when the pandemic hit last year was skyrocketing boat sales. Power and sailboats alike have sold like hotcakes in all sizes, from tiny rowboats to large long-distance cruisers. Everyone it seemed, was going to create their own on-the-water Digital Boat Show. Cruisers 30FTFT. Cruisers Under 30FT. Racing Boats. Dinghies and Daysailers.
Boater's University. Marine Services.
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