Stylish Cruising for Two

The A64 originally appeared as a design article on the pages of Duckworks Magazine. When the boat was shown at the time, it was designed as a request from a friend of mine for he and his wife.

Since that time, I have revisited the design and taken a fresh look at the boat, its potential and the wide range of uses it might see while in use. There are more than a few revisions to the design in this iteration and I am very happy with the outcome

While it would seem from outward appearances, that this boat would be a perfect fit with a modern rig like a Marconi, the truth is, I’ve been playing around with more traditional setups for the A64.  Even though the A64 is capable of some pretty quick sailing, I was looking for a bit less of a hotrod, while very much wanting versatility in rig setup and handling. The boat has had its displacement potential enhanced just a bit so that it could easily carry the gear for a well-equipped camping and cruising scenario. I see the boat being used for long, extended weekends on the water, so the extra capacity is a welcome change.

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Posted: July 5th, 2008 under Single Outrigger.
Comments: 4

Over the past couple of years, as I’ve been drawn into the world of boat design, I’ve made a concentrated effort to confine my work to both sail and human powered vessels. I’ve been a multihull sailor and canoe/kayaker for a long time and have found most of my experiences in that part of the boating world. My design portfolio reflects that background.

Recently, after successive readings of the exploits of many different guys and their construction of the nearly legendary Tolman Alaska Skiff, I was pulled into the potential of designing a multi-purpose power boat. It wasn’t just the Tolman form that enticed me so much. It was the complete enthusiasm for the design and the potential that the design represented to the user/builders in the pursuit of their boating dreams, that got me all caught-up with the fever.

Like a moth circling a back porch light, I searched the web and found dozens of references to the classic skiff form that were available as finished boats, as well as plan sets for homebuilders. Gosh, there were ultra deep vees, asymmetrical catamarans, mislabeled party barges, pseudo bass boats, flat bottom ski boats posing as off-shore hulls…Wow!, the parade of hulls being offered as suitable for near offshore conditions was bewildering.

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Posted: July 5th, 2008 under Power Boats.
Comments: none

One day I was driving around the industrial area near my boat shop and happened to pass the local power boat center. Sitting out front of the store were two, rather homely looking aluminum skiffs that are typically used around these parts to hunt ducks and geese and perform general boating duties for outdoorsmen.

 I had never really taken a good look at the type before as I had more pressing matters in front of me trying to finish the build on a sailboat. For some reason, I pulled over to just get an idea as to how these metal boats went together and to understand the shapes that went into the hull. Most folks refer to the form as a Jonboat, although I’ve also seen it as Johnsboat and Flat-Bottomed Skiff, by various other sources.

Jim Michalak’s version of this simple skiff has been a real hit with homebuilders and there’s a bunch of good reasons why that’s so. They’re easy to build, provide hours of trouble free operation with the simplest of outboards and can do just about anything you could ask for a utility boat.

I went home that night and dialed-up the design software and started fooling around with a few ideas as to how I would design one of these boats for my portfolio. The result is that I came up with two versions that are very much alike except that one is a bit longer than the other for added carrying capacity.

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Posted: July 5th, 2008 under Power Boats.
Comments: none

I grew-up just a couple of miles from the Palos Verdes peninsula along the coast of Los Angeles County  and would often snorkel in those waters for abalone and lobsters with a group of my friends. One of the first “boats” I ever worked on, a leaky, 12′ paddleboard rescued from the heap out behind the main Lifeguard station in Redondo Beach, was used to explore the area with my buddies. 

Guarding the northernmost entrance to Lunada Bay is Rocky Point. The waters around Rocky Point can be anything from totally benign and calm, to a full tilt, out of control melee of oceanic surges and thundering waves. When I started to design boats, I instinctively drew upon locations from my boyhood watery exploits and the name for this sea kayak, Rocky Point, came from this familiarity.

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Posted: July 5th, 2008 under Sea Kayaks.
Comments: 1

A modular approach to SOT kayak sailing and paddling

Sit-On-Top (SOT) kayaks are easy boats on which to learn to paddle. They have none of the “get inside the coffin and drown” psychological identity that one finds in the Sit-Inside boats and they’re amazingly adaptable to a wide range of paddling activities. It also doesn’t hurt that they are pretty straightforward boats to rotomold, which makes them very cheap to produce in large numbers.

I didn’t envision just one boat for this niche in the home-built kayak market. Instead, it came to me that there would need to be at least three models that could address the wide-ranging styles of boating interests in this area of the kayak world. The result was a couple of very clean, SOT models at 14’ and 16’ called the Corona and the Back Bay. The third model was going to be called the Wahoo, as it was specifically designed for the folks who spend a lot of time fishing with their SOT’s. I’ll get to the Wahoo in the next article for Duckworks.

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Posted: July 4th, 2008 under Kayaks, Sit On Top Kayaks.
Comments: 4

Solo Tripping in a very responsive package

Right up front, I’m going to give a full tip o’ the cap to John Winters, Canadian boat designer, for the inspiration to design this particular canoe. John’s Osprey II S&G design is a beautiful example of a designer bringing his enormous skills to the worktable. I wanted to draw a solo, tripping style canoe for 4mm marine plywood construction, so I took a long look at the Osprey to see if there was anything I could do differently with the form.

In Winters’ design, there is a very nice, tumblehome chine along the shear to give additional paddle stroke clearance. I have built boats before that used a similar tumblehome panel and it turns out that they can give the builder some interesting problems when it comes to constructing the hull.

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Posted: July 4th, 2008 under Canoes, Paddled.
Comments: 2