{"id":532,"date":"2003-01-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-01-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/?p=532"},"modified":"2009-04-15T09:00:39","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T14:00:39","slug":"s_logs-dashew-dashew210","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/s_logs-dashew-dashew210\/","title":{"rendered":"The Next Boat"},"content":{"rendered":"
What to do for "the next boat".<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

We’ve been boatless now for three long weeks. BEOWULF is in Mexico with her new Owners, and we’re wondering what to do next. The original plan was to hang out for a while, work on some land-related projects, and give boats a rest. Linda has a list of house projects she’s been wanting to pursue, and I’ve been planning on taking the winter months to get my private pilot’s instrument rating. <\/p>\n

Sounds good in theory…but now we’ve both decided we need a boat. The question is, what sort?<\/p>\n

There are all sorts of possibilities. But to know what type of boat we need, we first must decide on what type of sailing we’re going to do. And that’s a tough question.<\/p>\n

Several years ago we thought about doing another boat. At that point the two of us sat down and made a list of what we’d change. The list was pretty short, and centered around what we’d do design-wise if we were going to spend more time cruising with a base in Southern California. One part of the theory was to do a simpler, lighter, and less costly interior. Lighten the boat up in the engine room, give her more draft and better performance. At the time we had someone hot to buy the boat. But in the end, we could not bring ourselves to part with her, and so the successor design went into storage.<\/p>\n

Three years later and the question is the same. Our first thought was to drag out the design from the recent past. We looked at it closely, but decided if we were going to sail locally, with occasional cruises to Mexico, maybe another approach would make more sense.<\/p>\n

As some of you know, Linda and I courted on catamarans and went on to design and build a series of high-performance boats in the 60s and 70s. These were all day sailors, although to us, once we had babies, they were our “family cruisers”. We’re not fans of multihulls for cruising offshore, but a modern fast cat, with modest accommodations and lots of boat speed sounded like an interesting approach for local sailing. <\/p>\n

We spent a few days sketching and talking about what we wanted-a boat optimized for day sailing, with the ability to go away for a week or two, and maybe the odd six-week trip to Mexico now and then. We figured the quickest way to sort out the preliminary design was to contact Gino Morelli and Pete Melvin, who have been doing all sorts of interesting cats.<\/p>\n

We spent a fair amount of time with them talking about materials, and working with their computer performance prediction software (the software we use for monohulls does not work for cats). With a lot of back and forth we settled on a boat of 68′ in length, and just 30′ of beam, with no accommodations in the hulls, except for storage. There would be a small cabin between the hulls-one large room with a separate head. Like an efficiency apartment. Great for spending short periods on. The boat would weigh in around 14,000 lbs in day sailing trim, and in ten knots of breeze, 16 to 17 steady ought to be easy to maintain without pushing the rig to extremes. <\/p>\n

Cats are much quicker on one hull-wetted surface drops 20 to 25%-and the rig was designed to lift a hull in around nine knots of true wind. And when it was not nice…there were two 75HP Yanmar diesels aboard, which would give us a 16-knot cruising speed.<\/p>\n

Gino Morelli turned us on to the concept of hydraulic sheet and traveler controls, with emergency “dump” valves placed strategically around the cockpit and cabin-just in case the boat were to get “light” on the windward hull. Way cool! OK, this is not a boat for the faint hearted, but it would be great fun to sail.<\/p>\n

The one problem with this approach is that we were saying in effect “no more serious cruising”. While the concept of ripping up and down the bay on this multihull machine was appealing, especially considering that one of us will soon be eligible for Social Security, we’ve decided we are not ready to swallow our big Bruce anchor.<\/p>\n

So what is next? We’re working on it…Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What to do for "the next boat".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dashew-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}