Hi Doug:

Perhaps I should not admit this, but I have  no formal technical education. I do have a bit  of real world experience however. I was a philosophy and history major in college and dropped out my senior year to work full time running a small boat yard I had started. I got into a lot of difficulty with the formal education establishment with too  much questioning of orthodox matters. But this approach helped in the business world, both in the construction industry and  later in the yacht business.

The technical aspects of yacht design and construction are actually quite simple, even for the math challenged. It is the thousands of trade offs and how these are made, and defining the design goal that are the hard part. In these area, nothing helps like time underway and cruising.