Next boat speculation

I should be finishing up Slipper, my little 14′ cartop cat, but lately I’ve been spending too much time doodling up a new boat for the next project. I’m scratching away at a design for a 23.5 foot microcruiser, a trailerable cat with a 16 foot sailing beam and lots of sail. My first two catamaran designs compromised speed to a large extent. I gave up speed for comfort, with Slider, and with Slipper I’m giving up speed for simplicity. Naturally, the idea of a fast cruiser has a great deal of appeal, as long as it’s safe and comfortable.

Here’s a cartoon of the boat in profile, showing a split rig with bowsprit and sprit main and mizzen.

I doubt this will be the final configuration, but it would have its advantages. The masts would be easy to raise at the ramp, compared to a conventional single-stick rig. The spread-out sail plan would contribute to course stability, and consequently, self-steering, an important consideration for cruising boats. The rig would be under far less stress than would a tall Marconi rig, and be much less expensive. With so much beam, longitudinal stability becomes more of a concern than transverse stability, and the divided rig would help in that regard.

(Added July 7th) Okay, that’s just silly. I don’t buy the whole “only Marconi rig works for fast multihulls” mythology– principally because there were fast multihulls over a hundred years ago that didn’t use Marconi, and also, the definition of what a Marconi rig is has changed a good bit in the last few years. But The rig above has a couple of problems. The worst problem is that the main and mizzen are so close together that they will interfere with each other. Additionally, catamarans are less appropriate for a divided rig than trimarans, because cats don’t heel. So here’s another idea:

In brief, this is a sort of hybrid sprit rig, designed to approximate a more elliptical planform. Instead of a gaff, the peak of the sail is supported by a sprit with a snotter hung from the main halyard, in the same manner that Slider’s sprit is set up. But because this is a very high aspect ratio sprit, the base of the sprit is well up the mast, and must be set up prior to raising the mainsail completely.

This would be one way of bypassing the expense and complications of a fully battened main.

One concern I have is with the esthetic effect of the large cabin. It doesn’t look terminally ungainly to me, but I may be overly influenced by the ergonomic aspects of the design. I can’t get any more freeboard out of three sheets of ply; the topside panels take maximum advantage of a ply sheet’s 4 foot width… even though more freeboard would make the cabin look a little lower, by comparison. The cabin needs to be about that tall to give sitting headroom on the double berth, which for reasons I don’t want to explain just yet, must be raised to gunwale level. Unfortunately the cabin height does not quite give standing headroom to a tall person, but a tall cook will be able to stand in the galley with the top of his head out the hatch.

Okay. In my next post, I’m going to have to report that my lashings for Slipper did not work well enough, and I had to go back to the drawing board. But now they work really well, are very quick to lash, and are remarkably strong and tight. I’m also putting together a removable table for the cockpits, with a built-in fixture for a single burner propane stove. I’ll be able to use it both for cooking and for the little netbook I recently bought in order to have the ability to write while cruising. Last fall when I was cruising to the west, I had to write down the pieces later published here in little notebooks, and then they had to be transcribed. Of course, the new netbook has a pretty high toy factor, I must admit. On the advice of Chuck Leinweber of Duckworks fame, I ordered an inexpensive GPS receiver to plug into the netbook. If it ever gets here, I’ll have a chart plotter. I’ll be able to watch movies and play Go. Whenever I find an open wireless network, I’ll be able to update this blog, get my email, and browse the web.

I can’t wait to take it sailing.