The boat I designed doesn’t outright suck! Yay!
I spoke to the people on boatdesign.net and the comments were mainly about details. So I was very pleased that my little piece of egestion would go somewhere.
Of course there is a however. It was a half decent boat, however only really useful for lakes or protected waters. This was due to several of the design aspects including it’s long straight hull. I designed it like this because I can’t get my head around how to design curves that curve in two planes. I want to sail in the sea, and my boat would not have been able to cope with probably even average sized waves, or have been able to ride surf onto a beach.
Luckily for me a very helpful chap who runs the website tacking-outrigger.com pointed me towards a few excellent designs. I had lots of fun designing some (awful) boats, and I feel that thinking about all of the various aspects of design will undoubtably help me when it comes to the build. However I will leave the design in this instance to the pros.
In the end I chose this design: Salmo 19 by Andrzej Książyk. Here are some photos of it in action. Click for higher resolution.
As the name suggests it is 19′ long, weighs 185 kg and is a tacking outrigger. That means no shunting and no worrying about having to reverse the rig.
I will be making a few modifications. Firstly and most importantly for me I will be adding a ‘sacrificial’ keel to the underside so I can hit rocks and drag it up the beaches without too much worry.
Secondly I will be using a junk rig instead of the Gunter shown in the photos.
Thirdly I will be increasing the potential displacement of the outrigger by making it a bit taller. The benefits will be that I can carry more weight, and the crossbeams will be horizontal so I can attach a nice wide platform for chilling out.
Those are the ‘simple’ modifications and the ones that are guaranteed to happen.
After that I am considering raising the deck so it is more of a ‘sit on’ boat rather than a ‘sit in’ boat. This will give me more storage and less time bailing water. Plus then I can have ‘scuppers’ and a ‘poop deck’!
Finally I really do not like the idea of a keel stepped mast because it necessitates a hole in the deck, so I will see if there is a way for me to attach the mast to the forward crossbeam. This will be the most dificult thing to accomplish properly so I will spend plenty of time getting it right.
I bought the plans yesterday, and I bought a book about designing junk rigs for a bit of light reading.
One step closer.
