Day 1, Skin on Frame Shearwater build. 5hrs
I can’t tell you how happy I am to be starting a new design project! (unfortunately most of my time is spent doing administrative stuff for the business) I’ve built a handful of rowing and sailing boats in the past but I’ve never been able to quite crack the nut of creating something that is easy to build, light enough to put on a car, and performs really well on the water. 2 out of 3, easy. 3 out of 3 not so much.
It’s always good to have a reference point for any design project so I figured I would start by building the Joel White Shearwater in skin on frame. Being heavy and complicated this boat will only fulfill one of my requirements, but it will be a great teaching tool to show people some of the challenges you run into if you try to just adapt a normal boat plan to skin on frame construction. It will also just be a fun boat to have hanging around for a while.
Once I finish this shearwater, next I’m going to build a St. Lawrence River Skiff, but this time adapting it from the beginning to work better with skin on frame construction. I’m hoping that this boat will meet all of my requirements and I can either release a plan for how to build it or use what I learned from the first two boats to design a third.
I’m hoping we can get each boat done in three weeks and then take it on a small trip to check the performance. It’s definitely going to be a pricey design project and as usual it’s dubious that I will ever be able to recoup the cost in plan sales, but it should be a really fun project and I’m looking forward to sharing the results. I’ll try to post daily here on Instagram and every week I’m going to be releasing a YouTube video showing our progress in more detail.
Enjoy the build!
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