Our Cal 34 “So It Goes” was bought because, having lost our Loose Moose 2, we needed a boat in a hurry to use until we could build a Loose Moose 3. As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time to have a temporary boat. Being a temporary boat, it gave …
We live in a society where people put great store in the idea of perfection especially where sailboats are concerned. I mean, who would not like to have the perfect boat? So, what makes a boat perfect? Does anyone out there have a list of the required bits that makes a boat perfect? My problem …
A friend dropped me a line asking why I might be considering a Catalina 30 and pointed out that the Catalina would be smaller and slower than our CAL 34. He pointed out that we’d miss those four feet. Well, not exactly. Here are the important numbers… CAL 34 LOA 33.24′ LWL 26′ Beam 10′ …
There’s a Catalina 30 for sale in Hawaii that I’ve had my eye on for a while as it was selling for $5K and appeared to be in decent shape, and would not cost a fortune or too much time to sort out. The Catalina 30 is by its very nature an excellent contender for …
It’s been pointed out to me recently that my interest in buying an old classic plastic catamaran could be all sorts of problematic. The fact that a small cat is small, has less room for stuff, and is disadvantageous in terms of carrying weight, is not something I was unaware of. The funny thing was …
Here’s a boat I’ve mentioned before both here and over at Boat Bits… It’s Roberto Barros’s Pop 25 design which is a pretty neat boat of the VolksCruiser persuasion. I’m putting it up here today because I’ll be talking about some construction details that might apply to another design tomorrow and you might want to …
No discussion on scows could overlook David Reards’ accomplishments in bringing attention to the performance of non-pointy designs…
So far I’ve only been pointing to “interesting” scows worth checking out in a pretty non-critical manner. All of the boats/scows in my files have strengths and weaknesses and at some later date I’ll, more than likely, get down to brass tacks and issues hiding under the hood. Anyway, be patient, and if you have …
I’ll go out on a limb and say the driving force behind designing a scow is getting the most useable volume possible within a small envelope while cutting costs in the process. So, here’s a very interesting 28-foot scow. The l’Optimum 28 by Gildas Plessis shows how you can sorta/kinda put the accommodation of a …
Back when I was living on a non-mobile peniche on the outskirts of Paris (1985) I really wanted to build a small cruising sailboat just about the same time that Tad Roberts got a mention in Cruising World for his Harry design. It was love at first sight. A scow with an LOA of 26′, …
