Slider

I have a mostly completed hull for a 23 foot cat and great hopes for the design. But unfortunately, I have another idea that seems to me to be a more generally useful idea, and it’s the kind of thing you can’t stop thinking about.

If you click on the tiny fuzzy image above, a better image of what I can’t stop thinking about will appear.

Nancy and I took Slider out this afternoon, and we sailed over to Destin on a perfect October day. Winds were light at first, and we tacked slowly across the bay, maybe touching three knots occasionally. The winds freshened a bit as we came back along the island, so we made it back to Fort Walton pretty fast. We decided to extend our sail a little and sailed under Brooks Bridge into Santa Rosa Sound.

This turned out to be tricky sailing, because we were in the lee of two rows of gigantic condos, which blanket the beach until you reach Air Force land. The seabreeze really swirls through the canyons between them. The wind was clocking around every few feet, sometimes heading us a bit, sometimes giving us a broad reach. We meandered up the Intracoastal, which on this Monday afternoon was practically deserted. We didn’t see a single barge the whole day.

Going home, we were able to close reach back to the bridge, where the only tense moment occurred. The tide was running against us in the narrow Sound, and under the bridge we lost the wind completely, as often happens. We’d just about made it out when the wind ceased. We coasted down to a knot or so through the water, and we soon began to lose ground to the end of the bridge bulkhead. These are made of jagged timbers and giant bolts, and can chew a boat up pretty bad if you get up against them when a wake goes through. It’s only in moments like these that I ever really wish for a motor.*

But my gloomy speculations, as the timbers and spikes got closer, were interrupted by my pragmatic wife. She grabbed a paddle and with a couple of mighty heaves shot us out of that wind hole and into a nice fresh breeze that took us swiftly back to the ramp where Slider’s trailer was waiting.

Small boats are a lot of fun, as well as actually attainable for those of us who aren’t wealthy. A Slider can be put together– with a little creative scavenging– for a couple thousand.

Small boats have a lot of other advantages, too. It’s nice to have a boat that can be gotten out of difficulty with a couple of paddle strokes. It’s also nice to have a fast boat, and though Slider shows a surprising turn of speed compared to most open beach cruisers her size, she’s not really multihull fast. She doesn’t have enough sail area to be really fast, because she is all one piece, for ease of launching. As a beach cruiser she needs to be stable and forgiving, and that’s why she has such a conservative rig.

For real multihull speed, a cruising cat needs enough beam to carry a big rig safely. Unfortunately, I’ve reached the sad conclusion that the big new boat is a little too big for the beach cat rig I bought for it– it’s only 220 sq. ft. and I think a bigger rig is needed to take full advantage of the boat’s size and beam.

For a long time I’ve considered a small step up from Slider– a slightly larger boat with greater sailing beam and a fast rig. Super Slider is the child of this thought. At 19 feet and built simply and lightly, she will be driven very well by the beach cat rig. She’ll give me an opportunity to try out my new folding mechanism, and she’ll be the perfect boat for events like the Texas 200 and the Everglades Challenge. Small cabins will offer some protection to the offwatch crew and she’ll have self-draining footwells for seating comfort and hull integrity. She might not be an ocean crosser, but she’d be fine crossing to the Bahamas, in the right weather window.

So when I get back from Detroit– a trip I look forward to with the same anticipation as I look forward to a root canal and a mugging in the dentist’s parking lot afterwards– I’ll get right to work on Super Slider. I’m going to use everything I’ve learned about building cats using stitch and glue to make the job as simple and intuitive as possible.

If Super Slider turns out to be Super, I might even go into the kit boat business– that’s how enthusiastic I am about the design.

*But about that motor… you know what would happen? I’d have to be prudent and always start my motor when approaching a bridge made iffy by wind or current. Pretty soon, I’d be starting it for every bridge, and then for other reasons, and then I might as well be driving a motorboat. Sometimes I might go out and never raise the sails. You may laugh, but I often see sailboats motoring along without a scrap of sail up, even on fine days like today. I’ll bet those guys started out with the best of intentions.

Still, the next boat will probably have a small outboard, because I’d like to take the boat to the Bahamas. When you get a weather window, you should probably zip across the Straits as expeditiously as possible, even if the wind is too light to sail fast.

Unless I get filthy rich, I never plan to own another boat that can’t be put on a trailer and hauled out for maintenance and safety. This was partly a lesson learned after Hurricane Opal, in which our 27 foot keelboat was slightly damaged. I sailed Dilvermoon over to the Shalimar Yacht Basin, where she was hauled out and set in an adjoining gravel parking lot on jackstands. I was assured that the fee for storage while waiting for the insurance adjustor would be reasonable. After a month I decided to have a guy with a big hydraulic trailer set the boat in our side yard where I could do the repairs myself, and was presented with a storage bill for over a thousand dollars, not counting the haul-out, for which I was charged another few hundred. For a month of sitting on a gravel parking lot. Their excuse was that the low rate they’d quoted me was on the assumption that they would be doing the repair work. They didn’t mention this when they hauled the boat.

Now we have laws against hurricane gouging, but we didn’t then.

Anyway, now that I have returned to the multihull fold and fallen in love with catamarans again, I have a dilemma. Trimarans can be designed to fold fairly painlessly, and Ian Farrier has become the designer with the greatest number of cruising multihulls afloat as a consequence. But my opinion is that trimarans are inferior to catamarans as cruisers, particularly in the smaller sizes. And catamarans that can fold quickly and easily for narrow slips and highway-legal trailering are not as easy to design as folding trimarans are.

There are many clever cat designs that allow folding or sliding to fit on trailers, but most of them have drawbacks, from my point of view. Most require that the mast be unstepped before folding. Some fold by rotating the hulls under a central pod. My particular situation is that I have a very generous neighbor with a slip that he allows me to use. But the slip is not wide enough for a 23 foot cat of reasonably modern beam. So my boat must fold in such a way that keeps the antifouling in the water and the mast up. Continue reading →

Slinger is coming along.

As regular readers will know, I tend to change my mind a lot in the course of each new design, trying always to optimize the design for its primary purpose. When last I talked about the boat, I was gung-ho to have comfortable little cockpits, in attempt to emulate the very comfortable seating in Slider, which is one of her greatest virtues.

However… I’ve thought a lot about this, and I now have the additional experience of working inside the first hull, so I have a clearer picture of how the interior space lays out.

Slider, an open boat, is primarily a day sailer, although much thought went into making her more suitable for short cruises. Still, cruising on Slider is much like camping out– in order to be comfortable in bad weather, I have to pitch a tent on Slider’s deck. The idea with Slinger is that we want to live aboard for several months at a stretch, while making extended cruises, such as to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. The functions are very different.

So here’s a view of the new cabin profile:

Continue reading →

I’ve finished building and setting up Slider’s yuloh, that Asian sculling oar used by ancient grannies to move huge sampans around the harbors of the Eastern world.

I’ve only had Slider out with it once, and I have no idea what I’m doing, so this report will have to be revisited later.

Above is a photo of the yuloh with the lanyard wrapped around the shaft to hold the blade out of the water. One drawback to the yuloh is that it can’t really be used at the same time the boat is sailing , as is the case with paddles or sweeps, because it takes up so much real estate on the deck. Notice that the boom is tied over to the starboard side with a line from a cleat at the end of the boom to a cleat at the end of the beam. Continue reading →

I have to report a serious hiccup in the build of the new cat.

But first some pleasant news. We took Slider out yesterday evening. We sailed across the bay in a pretty steep chop, and then anchored behind the island to scrub the slime off the bottom paint.

Pretty picture, I think. Continue reading →

I’ve discovered that stitching up a hull almost 24 feet long is a little more complicated than stitching up Slipper’s 14 foot hulls.

For one thing, I could reach down inside Slipper’s hulls, which had topside strakes only 2 feet wide. Slinger uses most of a 24 foot by 4 foot panel for each topside strake. So I couldn’t reach from the sheer down to the chine– my arms just aren’t long enough by about 18 inches. Also, you can’t just duct tape the strakes together until you get the wire in.

To begin, I cut out a couple of female molds from cheap 1/2″ ply. These I made a couple of inches wider than the hulls at the stations I planned to place the molds, since these were just to corral the strakes while I wired them together. Using the strongback, which I leveled on the ground under my temporary hoop house shelter, I screwed uprights to the strongback, and then screwed the molds to the uprights. It would have worked just as well to screw the molds to posts set in the earth, but I had the strongback, so why not?

Notice that the level is set at the design’s base line– the lowest point of the hull. This was the mold 8 feet aft of the bow, so the actual cutout was about 9/16″ above the base line, since the hull curves upward a little going forward. The aft mold was 8 feet further back from the bow, and the cutout was a little more than 2 inches above the base line. If you look closely, you can see that there is a notch cut out of the base cutout, down to the baseline. This allowed me to level the molds in relation to each other.

Continue reading →