Posts Tagged ‘Design’

All is not howitzers and roses on the boat design front.  My little cartop cat, Slipper, is proving a tough nut to crack.
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 [...]

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 [...]

I’d been waiting for over a week to take Slipper on her first sail, but the weather hadn’t cooperated at all.  Yesterday afternoon, the winds dropped unexpectedly, and as soon as Nancy got home from work, I hooked up the trailer and away we went to our neighborhood launch ramp.  Our sons were both away [...]

A young man in Costa Rica recently bought a set of Slider plans.
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 [...]

Slipper proceeds toward completion in fits and starts. I must admit that my second attempt to design an original kind of boat has been a bumpier road than the design of Slider.  With Slider, everything was very conventional, except for the in-hull seating on a boat that small.  Even the unusual sprit-sloop rig was [...]

Okay, this is sort of silly, but I couldn’t resist lashing the new 14 foot cartop cat together and paddling it around the bay for a few minutes, a couple of days ago.

I put her together on Slider’s trailer, even though she’s really a cartop boat. The trailer is a more convenient way to [...]