Posts Tagged ‘Slipper’

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 [...]

I’ve been desperate to try out my new little 14 foot cartop catamaran, but not desperate enough to tempt fate.  For a first sail in a new sailboat (and particularly in a new design) winds should be fairly light.   If you take a new boat out into even moderately heavy air, you’re asking 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 [...]

Slipper has made a bit of progress toward completion lately. The scraps of cheap lauan underlayment I used are falling apart where they lie on the dirt, so I thought I’d better get some paint on the hulls before they fall apart too.

I think the hulls are modestly graceful, and I might even leave [...]