I didn’t arrive in Alabama until about 4 hours after the fleet left– I had stuff I needed to do that morning. But once launched, and after beating out the narrow entrance to the bayou into the teeth of a 15 to 20 knot breeze from the SE, I set off to catch up.

Even though the course was dead to windward, I was lucky. Because of the delay, I had the tide under me when passing through Perdido Key bridge. The fleet had to fight the tide and the wind, and a few boats had to break out their motors to get through. This wasn’t an option for me, so I was grateful that my timing was good. Sailing without an engine is usually not a problem here along the NW Florida coast, since winds are pretty reliable and tides are modest. But at choke points like bridges and inlets, the currents can be intimidating, and those big rough fender walls can do a lot of damage to a sailboat, if you get pushed up against them.

Later in the weekend I had some fun showing folks my GPS tracks through the narrows by the bridge, because the track looked like I was tacking at a thoroughly amazing angle to the wind. The smart sailors quickly figured out that I’d had the tide with me, and I’d have to admit that Slider was pretty good to windward, but no sailboat is that good.

I made it to the campsite on Sand Island at sundown, waved at the fleet camped there, and anchored across the gut in the Schooner Hole below the ruins of old Fort McRee, where we used to anchor when the kids were young and we had a big cruising boat. I remember one evening when we were sitting out in the cockpit, watching a heron stalk along the shoreline. To our astonishment, and slightly horrified fascination, he grabbed a four foot snake out of the reeds and swallowed it right down.

A heron came by while I was sitting on my cot on Slider’s center deck, but the best he could manage was a couple of minnows.

I was tired, and sleep came quickly.

The next morning the wind was still howling out of the SE, and the tide funneling through Pensacola Pass made for some weird chop. Almost everyone had a rough day beating to windward. Dean Pacetti in Honu, Slider’s new sistership, took off fast and built up a pretty good lead on me. Dean is a much better boat builder than I am, and it looked for a while as if he was also a much better sailor as well.

I eventually caught up with him, more by luck than skill and passed him just east of the Pensacola Beach bridge. I’ve never been very interested in even the idea of racing, let alone actually doing it. But being in a field of small boats awoke some weird competitive impulse in me, and I paid a lot more attention to my sail trim and helmsmanship than I usually do. It added a new dimension to the sailing that I’d really never fully appreciated before.

My wife Nancy was quite amused by my sudden transformation into a competitive sailor. She found it especially funny when I explained my theory on how to evaluate your boat’s performance in the fleet. I said something like “well, you count the number of boats you pass, and subtract the number of boats that pass you, and that’s your number.” Nancy didn’t come aboard until Saturday morning, so she was with me on the great downhill run we had that day, where we passed a half-dozen boats, and were not passed. I hate to admit how much pleasure I got out of this.

Some folks have been concerned about the quality of my sailing experience, due to my claim that Slider is a very dry boat and we hardly ever have any spray come aboard. Evidently they feel that if you don’t occasionally get wet, you never go out in winds over 5 knots. These folks will be glad to know that on this day, I got wet. Not soaked, but damp– no water made it into the cockpits, fortunately. However, once in a while the bows would dig into the back of a wave and toss a little spray back onto me. It was about as rough as I’ve ever seen it in protected waters, and it was tough on the boats that didn’t go to windward well. Scott Widmier, on his tiny scow, had to accept a tow from a boat with a motor in order to get to Navarre.

Dean in Honu got tired of bashing into the chop and turned back to Sand Island. I should have followed his example, especially since I’d discovered a patch of rot in my rear crossbeam a couple days previously and the repair had not held up to the constant crashing through the big chop. But the boat was holding together, despite the fact that one bolt on the beam had broken out completely, so I pressed on, and eventually arrived in Navarre. The damage was pretty bad, as can be seen in this photo.

On one tack, the beam looked okay, but on the other, the beam rose up about an inch. That the boat didn’t break up was probably due to her extremely rigid construction, with the double girder system formed by the seat risers and side decks. That one inch of misalignment was all that the hulls would twist, so they couldn’t put as much pressure on the beam attachments as a more limber construction might have allowed. I’m busy this weekend replacing the rear beam. The new beam cost me $3.79 at Lowe’s, and all I have to do is shape it and re-attach a few bits of deck hardware. The old beam rotted because I failed to bed the bolts that attached it to the beam web. I neglected this because I thought I might have to remove the beams, and then I forgot I hadn’t bedded them. I won’t make that mistake again.

Though the beam gave me some anxious moments as we crashed through the chop at speed, the fact that the boat stayed together in those conditions has given me a great deal of confidence in Slider’s construction.

Slider was among the first half-dozen boats to arrive, and some of those had gotten there by motoring along the windward shore– a much more peaceful way to make the distance.

One of the big surprises to me was that Slider was faster to windward, by a large margin, than the two Windrider 17s in the event. I’d never have guessed that this would be the case, even though I like to brag about Slider’s windward ability. One left the previous anchorage before I did, and I passed him a few miles before reaching Navarre. At this point, the chop was lying down, and the course became a close reach. I expected the Windrider to pass me then, but if anything, we increased our lead. The Windrider 17 is a rotomolded plastic trimaran with a modern fractional rig, complete with rotating mast, designed by the great trimaran designer Jim Brown. I found it completely amazing that Slider, with her greater weight and low-tech sprit-sloop rig, was so much faster getting to weather.

I spent a peaceful Friday night at Navarre, pulled up on the beach. I was too tired to pitch the deck tent, so I just snoozed on a cot set up on deck. I’m told that I slept like a baby, if babies snored like buzz saws.

I found this picture on the Florida 120 Facebook page, taken by Gary Hirsch. I hope he won’t mind if I post it here.

In the morning, my wife Nancy joined me for the downhill run back to Sand Island. We had a great run, surfing on the little waves that developed on Santa Rosa Sound, often hitting 8 knots. Once again, we were faster than the Windriders, though perhaps the outcome would have been different on a reaching course. It’s also possible that the Windriders were a little overloaded, carrying camping gear and supplies for four days and three nights.

The sun was pretty fierce Saturday, and we were running before the wind, so not much wind was crossing the decks. We were grateful for the little biminis I installed. These biminis are not very pretty, because I made them from chopped up sections of bimini frames I’d found discarded along the curb in our neighborhood. My right angles were made with PVC pipe fittings, and my sewing is lousy. Still, they kept the sun off and later would break the force of the rain we had Sunday morning. This was a good thing, because Nancy had forgotten to bring her hat. I had to loan her mine, because her pale skin is much easier to burn than my swarthy hide.

Dean had spent the previous night at Sand Island, and it was great to finally get a look at his boat. He’s done a beautiful job of putting her together, and I hope to steal a number of his improvements. I took some pictures of Honu and Slider sitting together on the beach.

Dean really put a lot of thought into Honu. I wish I’d taken more pictures. For example, as an experienced waterman, he’d painted his decks and interior an eye-pleasing gray, which cuts down tremendously on the glare. He’d built a really well-organized chuck box, with an easily accessible place for everything. He’d built little drawers under his seats, so that snacks and other needed items were easily to hand. He had a very good system for supporting his mast and boom when they were down for trailering. Later back at Pirate’s Cove, he showed me his trailer, which had begun life as a narrow johnboat trailer. This allowed Honu’s hulls to be outside the wheels, so that she could be a lot closer to the ground than Slider is on her trailer. Consequently, he can use just about any ramp, and Slider has to find a fairly steep deep one.

Nancy and I pitched the tent up on the ridge line above the anchorage, where we had a panoramic view of Perdido Key and the Gulf beyond. We had a campfire gathering, where the participants told stories about their experiences, which was wildly entertaining– some of those guys are truly funny. We all told some little thing about what we’d learned, our biggest mistake, and so on.

The night was fine, and it only rained a little. But the morning was gray and ominous. We’d all had enough of banging into the wind, so the possibility of west winds later in the day caused everyone to pack up and sail out early, us included. The rain held off for a while, and the sailing was very pleasant, broadreaching down Big Lagoon toward Perdido Key bridge. But before we made it through Big Lagoon, the skies ripped open and the rain poured down. It killed the wind just as we reached the bridge, but fortunately the tide carried us through and the wind returned, so we were able to make Pirates Cove before noon.

We parked Slider on the beach while other folks were hauling out, and had a breakfast sandwich in the bar– very tasty. There was one mishap– one of our fellow sailors hauled out and forgot to put down his mast until he’d hit a power line. I heard the bang and other folks told me a fireball had traveled down the shrouds and exited at the left hub. But fortunately no one was hurt.

We put Slider on her trailer and attended the final meeting of the cruise, where we distributed some booty according to the poker hands we’d earned by reaching each of the destinations, sailing without an engine, and so forth. I contributed a hardly-used gaff to the pile. My hand was garbage, but I did have an ace high, so eventually I got my gaff back.

Anyway, we had a terrific time, and I was very glad to see those beautiful familiar waters one last time… before the oil arrives.

When last I talked about Slipper’s deficiencies, I was planning a couple of “improvements.”  Over the last few days, I cut back the length of the rudders by four inches, and put fences on the bottoms.

I had great hopes that this would improve steering and (most importantly) tacking, by making the rudders more efficient.  My feeling was that by slightly shortening the chord, I would be providing a better experimental protocol– by taking away a small amount of area, if the rudders still improved noticeably, I could feel confident that the fences had significantly added to the rudder efficiency.

Rats.

When I took her out for a test sail on Saturday, it was obvious that I’d made a big mistake.  The helm is heavier than it was with the longer, unadorned rudders.  On the other hand, tacking was a little better.  Unfortunately, I think that was due to the other change I made, which was to strengthen the Ackerman geometry.

I measured Slider’s actual angles, and realized that her Ackerman geometry was a lot stronger than I remembered.  So I decided to duplicate the angles on Slipper’s linkage.  The photo below shows the position of the old pivot points, and the new– I moved the pivot points inboard by three inches.

At any rate, tacking was improved, though it’s still not satisfactory.  The terrible news, alas, is that windward ability deteriorated significantly.  We made so much leeway that we could make only minor progress to windward.  It was like a flashback to Gribble, my first build, which couldn’t go to windward at all– except that Slipper is more comfortable, and we were going nowhere at a much greater speed.

I can’t figure out why windward ability declined so much.  The wind was blowing a good bit harder than on our first couple of test sails, but usually more wind is better for windward ability, if the water is pretty flat, which it was.

The sad contrast between Slipper and Slider was made even more obvious yesterday, when we took Slider out for a fishing trip on the bay.  We reached down to Destin and then sailed back to Brooks Bridge hard on the wind through a pretty big chop.  I had my new GPS with me, and looking at the relatively square corners on our track, I got a little gloomy whenever I thought about how poorly Slipper had sailed to windward the day before.

Just before dark, the wind fell very light, and Slider tacked up the bayou under main alone, very slowly, never missing stays, and the corners of that track were perfect right angles. We were able to carry sail all the way to our slip up the canal, making for a stylish arrival unmarred by paddle flailing.  Mr and Mrs. World Famous Multihull Racer were sitting on their balcony, and he waved and said, “Looks comfy!”   Someday I hope he’ll forget about the time he had to loan me a paddle when we were becalmed in front of his house.

Anyway, the whole experience has left me not only with doubts about my ability to design boats, but also doubts about at-the-edge-of-the-reality-envelope technology, like rudder fences and horizontal foils.  Maybe that isn’t the direction for me.  Maybe someone else can make that stuff work on hulls like Slipper’s but I’m more than a little discouraged.

I’m sure this is just a temporary setback, and as my father used to say, “in a hundred years, no one will care.”  My highly intelligent wife has advised me to put Slipper away for a while, but I probably won’t be able to follow that excellent advice.  When I fail, I can’t stand it, and if there’s a chance I can remedy the situation, I can’t make myself give up.

The other day, someone posted a short biography of Lock Crowther, the late great Australian multihull designer.  Lock got a much earlier start than I did in his design career, building his first boat when he was a teenager.  It was a modest success, but his second design was a failure as complete as Slipper currently is.  I take some small comfort from that; even geniuses can screw up.

Now I’m worrying about the direction I should take Slipper.  I could continue down my current path, and add Bernd Kohler’s anti-vortex panels to the hulls in the hope that they would remedy the tacking and windward ability problems, but as I say, I’ve lost faith a bit in these unusual approaches.

On the other hand, the whole point of Slipper, aside from being cartoppable, was to have simple, carefree sailing.  No kick-up foils, a cat rig so there’s no jibsheets to worry about, and so forth.  It’s occurred to me that I could probably cure most of the difficulties in tacking and windward ability by adding low-aspect-ratio keels to the hulls.  This would add a few inches of draft to the boat, which is unfortunate, but it would still sail in kneedeep water, which is pretty shallow draft compared to many small boats.   The rudders could then be a little deeper, which would add to both tacking ability and windward ability.  The additional draft might prove to be a decent tradeoff for those benefits.

So, I’ve got a lot to think about.

In more pleasant news, Slider was recently featured on the My Wooden Boat of the Week blog, sponsored by WoodenBoat Magazine.

My first time sailing Slipper, I was somewhat discouraged by her reluctance to tack, or at least, her reluctance compared to Slider, my 16 foot open beachcruiser.  So, my first attempt at making her a snappier tacker was to cut a lot of area from the big skegs I installed to support the barn door rudders

Here’s what the skegs looked like when I was done:

Much better.

Still, I can’t report yet that the problem is solved.  She tacked quite a bit better last night when we launched her from the neighborhood ramp, but she needs more work.  We sailed across the Sound into a modest breeze, and I put Nancy on the dock at a local waterside park, so we could get some sailing pictures.

Unfortunately, it was getting late when we launched,  and I had to re-tie the shrouds at the ramp, and my guess was not good.  As a consequence, there is too much rake in the mast, which increased weather helm slightly, and didn’t look so good.  By the time I landed Nancy on the dock, the sun was nearly down.  I was so busy sailing back and forth, trying to get pictures while there was still enough light to sail back to the ramp and load the trailer, that I didn’t notice that the sprit tension was off, which is why there are wrinkles in the sail.

Still, it was a beautiful evening, and I picked up Nancy and sailed back to the ramp just as the sun went down.  Putting the boat on the trailer took about five minutes and we were home before dark.

Another problem is that the brailing line went up the mast in a wad when I launched, and I didn’t notice until we were out on the Sound, so it’s pinching the leech, as can be seen above.

But all in all, another pleasant outing.

After I cut down the skegs, I weighed the various pieces as I put them back on the trailer.

Each hull weighs  54 lbs.–  108 lbs. total

Front crossbeam–               26.5

rear crossbeam–                 18.5

Center deck–                        40

Both rudders–                       11.5

Boom, tillers, tiller bar–         15

mast, sprit, sail, rigging–       35

Total lightship weight–           255 lbs.

Of course, this doesn’t include various necessary items, like life jackets, paddles, anchor, and other safety stuff.  But Slipper weighs about half what Slider does, and this is probably one reason why she doesn’t tack as quickly.  The extra weight of Slider carries her through the tacks better.

I’ve ordered a new GPS, so next time I’ll have some performance figures.

Just one more photo:

We arrived at the ramp at about 5: 30 pm, which gave us a good hour and a half of decent light for a few pictures and a little video.

Slipper, of course, was designed to be cartopped, but as  with any other good-sized cartopper, a trailer is a great convenience.  I decided I’d better see if she could sail well before I invested time and energy into working out the details of a roof rack.

From the trailer, it took only a few moments to raise the mast.  The sail is permanently laced to the mast, and the sprit is attached to both and brailed up to the mast.  We parked the rig, shoved off from the shore, and paddled Slipper out onto the flats.  I anchored there while I unbrailed the sail, sorted out the lines, and attached the boom.

One thing we noticed right away is that paddling Slipper is easier than paddling Slider.  This makes sense, because Slipper weighs about half what Slider weighs, and has much lower freeboard.  This will probably make Slipper a wetter boat than Slider, but we don’t know how much wetter yet, because conditions were perfect for a first sail– winds from 5 to 10 knots, and in the lee of the island, smooth water.

Once we started sailing, one of the biggest questions I had about the design was quickly answered.  The long barn door rudders are not heavy to steer.  In fact, the helm was actually lighter than Slider’s high aspect, NACA section kick-up rudders.  I don’t know the explanation for this, but though Slipper had a modest amount of weather helm, in that she would slowly round up if the tillers were released, holding course upwind was effortless– a single fingertip suffices.  The great advantage of these rudders is that they require no attention at all.  On the flats where we anchored to get organized, there was less than a foot of water, and we sailed over even shallower areas without touching.

In the light winds, she boiled along pretty well, though my GPS died on the way out, so I don’t know how fast we were going.  My guess is that we bettered 4 knots a few times, in the puffs, but these were pretty light puffs.  One interesting thing about the sensation of sailing Slipper was that we accelerated more noticeably in the puffs than we would have in Slider, a boat that’s twice as heavy, but doesn’t have twice as much sail area.  I suspect that a single crew could have a very lively sail on a breezy day.

As you can see from this picture, Nancy is sitting a bit too far aft, so that the transoms are slightly submerged, but that didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference in the speed.  Sitting on the center deck with feet in the hull was pretty comfortable, but even more comfort would be possible with a movable seat.

The boat goes through the water with remarkably little fuss, and the bow wave is almost non-existent, as far as I could tell in the light conditions we had yesterday.

The double line you see running from U-bolt to U-bolt is for winching the boat onto the trailer, and I left it on because I knew we’d only be out an hour or so.  Sloppy, I know, but there was no chop to catch the line, and get us wet, so it was okay.  In the above picture, you can see the Dyneema lanyard that tensions the forestay and which cleats to the tabernacle.  Tension is not high, because Slipper has no jib, and so doesn’t need a tight forestay.

She goes to windward okay, though I didn’t have a GPS track to look at to determine her tacking angles.  The wind was from the southwest, so we tacked across the Sound, going upwind almost to the channel.  I can tell you she did a whole lot better than Gribble, my first-ever build, whose sad story I told in my last post.

Not all the news is good.  Slipper was somewhat reluctant to tack, and this must be fixed before I can declare the boat a success.  She had to bear off a bit, get up some speed, and then be carefully nursed through the tack.  Turning the rudders too abruptly stopped her before the sail would fill on the new tack, and then we’d have to back up and reverse the rudders to get her onto the new course.  In this respect, she isn’t much different from a Hobie or other boardless beach cat, but Slipper doesn’t have a jib to backwind and get her around.

I think the explanation is probably to be found in the big skegs I gave her to support her rudders below the transoms.  Several kind and knowledgeable persons warned me about these skegs and their potentially evil effect on tacking, and though I came to agree with their analysis, I thought I’d go ahead and try them out anyway, just to be sure.  I took the boat apart this morning and set the hulls back on their sawhorses.  I plan to cut away about two thirds of each skeg and refinish the hull glassing before I try the boat again, and I’m hopeful this will make a substantial difference.  I’m admittedly spoiled by Slider, a snappy tacker by any standard, let alone that of small catamarans.  I want Slipper to be similarly well-behaved, since I see her as an entry-level beachcruisng cat, for those who may not have the room to park a trailer, or the money to buy one.  This purpose implies good behavior as well as simplicity of design and operation– attributes that are very valuable to a beginning sailor.

Slipper has the same wonderfully smooth motion as her bigger sister– we crossed a couple of big speedboat wakes while we were out, and she glided peacefully through them, making no fuss at all.

Another problem showed up this morning when I disassembled Slipper and moved the hulls into the backyard for the skeg modifications.  It took me the better part of an hour to do this, which is too long.  But this is the price that must be paid in order to get a cartop boat with this kind of size and performance.  While Slipper looks tiny on the beach, compared to Slider, she’s still a fairly huge 14 foot cartopper.  If you look at monohull cartoppers, a 14 footer will necessarily be a slender boat with little capacity, because any substantial beam will make for a boat too heavy for a single person to hoist onto a roof rack.  Slipper splits her displacement between two hulls, and gets a relatively vast amount of space for lounging aboard out of her solid center deck.  I don’t think there are many 14 foot cartoppers that can support a double air mattress and still have room left over.  Weight, of course, is another issue, because multihulls are by their nature lightweight boats that do not react well to being loaded down past their lines.  Beachcruising in Slipper would be akin to backpacking, in terms of comfort level.  In fact, it would be possible to portage Slipper in over any trail suitable for portaging canoes, though it would take a couple of people several trips to get all the pieces packed in.

It took me way too long to build Slipper– I started a year ago.  A decent woodworker willing to work on her nights and weekends could finish her up in a month or so.  She probably cost me less in materials than Slider’s loft-made mainsail.  Her simplicity and her very low cost make her an ideal testbed for anyone who wants to experiment with a multihull, and this was another part of my plan for the little boat.  If I can fix her problems with tacking, and offer plans, I hope that people will use her to make some of those experiments that I find so fascinating.  For example, a lowtech biplane rig might be a very interesting thing for someone to develop.  I myself plan to experiment with horizontal foils.

I’m very pleased that the barndoor rudders have proven to be successful, because kick-up rudders are, frankly, a pain.  But most small boats, and almost all multihulls use them anyway.  Slipper isn’t a high-performance multihull, with her modest home-made sail and no boards, and probably those rudders wouldn’t work as well for a really fast boat.  But compared to the majority of cartoppers, Slipper has a lively turn of speed, and vastly more stability.  With her single sheet, her permanently laced-on sail, and her simple sprit, she could hardly be any easier to manage.

Tomorrow I hope to take a sail in Slider, who’d been sitting in her slip feeling a little neglected these past couple of weeks.  Then I’ll take the reciprocating saw to Slipper’s skegs, and we will see!

If you’re wondering why I’m so convinced that new boats should be exposed to gentle breezes first, I’ll tell you about the first real boat I ever built.  Like any other adventurous kid, I floated down a couple of creeks on log rafts and plywood troughs.  But my first real boat was taken from a Chappelle book, and was a little scow.  I’m sure that in competent hands, this could be a fine little boat.  Chappelle gave little guidance on the sails, and I was completely ignorant about this aspect of sailing.  In fact, the only sailing I’d ever done at that point was in rental Sunfish and Hobie cats at the beach– at the time, I had a pottery studio in Tennessee, and tended to vacation down on the Redneck Rviera of the Florida Gulf coast, where we now live.

In any case, the only resemblance the sails I sewed had to real sails was that, from a great distance, they looked somewhat like sails.  I had a little sloop rig, but the sails were shapeless and tremendously undersized. My excellent girlfriend, later my excellent wife Nancy, helped me, so at least the seams were reasonably straight.

I finished the little boat in midwinter, put it on a trailer I bought from a guy who welded up utility trailers from car axles and angle iron, and hauled the thing up to Nashville, where Nancy was pursuing her doctorate at Vanderbilt.

The weather was entirely unsuitable for a boat launching, because it was cold as blue blazes, with a howling norther blowing across Percy Priest Reservoir.

The only reason I’m here to tell this story, probably, is that by great good luck, we chose a cove on the south side of the lake to launch.  Knowing what I now know about the dangers of hypothermia and rough water, I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that had I started out on the north side, I’d have been blown out into the middle on the lake, and with little ability to control the boat, I probably would have swamped it and that would have been the end.

But luckily, all that happened was that I’d push the boat out into the chop, jump aboard, try to tack out, get blown back, and end up washing ashore at the back of the cove.  Nancy, being smarter than me, watched from the shore as I made a fool of myself, over and over.  She did pitch in and help me drag the boat back to the launching area through the mud a couple of times, an unpleasant task that almost convinced her that I was an idiot who didn’t deserve the company of an intelligent woman.  I really wanted to show Nancy that my new boat wasn’t a complete disaster.  This caused me to keep trying to sail it until I was on the verge of hypothermia, so cold I had difficulty figuring out how to get the boat back on the trailer.

After this discouraging beginning, we named the little scow Gribble, after the boat-eating sea louse.  We sailed her one more time.  Down in Florida to attend an arts and crafts show, we camped at a KOA on Santa Rosa Sound.  We sailed happily down wind over the flats for a couple of hours, admiring the sea life slipping past, and had a great time– until it was time to turn around and beat back to the campground.  Gribble was completely uninterested in going upwind, and after several hours flailing back and forth across the Sound, losing ground with each tack, I finally beached the little boat and hitchhiked back to the campground for the trailer.

After that, I converted Gribble into a manure hauler for the garden, and I didn’t build another boat for some years.

Naturally, I’d like to launch Slipper when my wife and children could attend the event, but I’m beginning to think I’ll have to take her down to the water early in the morning, when winds are generally light.  We seem to have fallen into the summer pattern of gusty afternoon winds already.

On the positive side, the delay has allowed me to complete a few small projects that weren’t entirely necessary to take the boat for a test sail– for example, I carved a tiller exension, and made a movable seat for the helmsman.  And I made one major change: I decided I needed a boom.  I really wanted to sail boomless, so that brailing up the sail would be uncomplicated.  But the foot of the sail extended too far aft, and so I couldn’t get the leech tight enough, even though I attached the mainsheet tackle to a line running between the transoms.  So it was either a boom or some sort of extension to move the sheeting angle back far enough.  Since the watchword for Slipper is “simplicity” I went with a boom.  It’s a light T-spar, with a cam cleat to fasten the outhaul, making it easy to detach the boom from the sail.  The tack is not attached to the boom, since the boom is held to the mast with jaws, and the jaws are trapped between the tabernacle and a cleat.  The tack attaches to a downhaul line and the sail is permanently laced to the mast.

It will be interesting to see how this all works.  I’m using a bamboo sprit, for example– lighter and stronger than the timber sprit on Slider.

But I’m not going until I get winds under 10 knots.  I learned that lesson a long long time ago.

He tells me that there are few sailboats there, and wondered if Slider would be a good boat for learning to sail.  I told him I thought she would be very good for that purpose, since she has no vices.

Any boat intended for novice sailors should probably be stable– not too easily capsized, and multihulls with modest rigs are wonderfully stable.

Slider also has a little weather helm, so when you release the steering lines, she rounds up and sits with sails luffing until you decide to go on.  This is a very good trait in a learner’s boat, because if you get into trouble, you can just stop and think about things for a while without the pressure of controlling a boat that doesn’t want to wait for you.

Her wide flat decks make working at the mast easy and comfortable, and since she rolls very little, she doesn’t try to throw crew off the deck every time she hits a big wave.  She’s a reliable tacker, so there’s much less danger of getting stuck in irons in an inconvenient and dangerous place.  She’ll tack well even under mainsail alone, so a novice can sail her without even hanking on a jib.

Huascar can’t immediately start his build due to space problems, but he tells me he’s going to cut out and glue up some of the smaller parts, like bulkheads, frames, and foils.  Meanwhile, he’s occupied himself by converting Slider’s plans into AutoCad files and building exquisite little models.

I greatly admire this careful approach to knowing the boat prior to building it.  I built a sailing model of Slider, but it was crude indeed, compared to Huascar’s efforts.  It also had a balanced lug sail instead of the sprit-sloop rig I ended up with.

I was very impressed with Huascar’s technical expertise.  He tells me he studied architecture at university, which explains his AutoCad skills.

If he can do such good work with his models, I can’t wait to see what kind of job he does with the actual boat.

Nice job!