When Larry inquired about plans, etc. I realized I had forgotten to put in the appropriate health warning, which I add now: ************************************************** WARNING Boat building is addictive. Boat design is vastly more addictive. ************************************************** Proceed farther at your own risk. You have been warned! (John and Nick: perhaps you should confirm to the others that this apparently tongue-in-cheek warning should be taken seriously. The problem is that if one is sufficiently obsessive to make a half-decent design, you'll see what you should have done differently, and not be comfortable until you've made the change. And that leads to another warning: every serious paddler needs a big garage. ) Back to Larry (and Bob). There is some more info on my web site, and I'm offering to sell plans. However, a sordid story follows. About two years ago I had a disk crash, with no backup. My design program, and all but one of my boat data files, vanished. I have bought a Zip drive, and rewritten the program, so it more or less does what it used to, with some improvements, but I have not yet drawn a set of forms with the new program. The problem is called "feature creep": it would be a better boat if I could ... I have been a few days away from a new design for several months now, averaging perhaps 2-3 hours/day of work on the program. Anyway, I'm not happy about selling plans at the moment. Bob asks about waves. John made two points that apply: 1:add a cover. 2: it doesn't take long to build one (that slippery slope again -- see warning above). Try it and see. However I would not deliberately take one of my boats into short foot-high waves without a cover. In response to an earlier comment or question in Bob's note, my boats are not flat-bottomed, but rather rounded, so thay are not like a dory. For a given wetted beam, the more rounded it is, the less stable, and the faster. Also, I have the feeling, or prejudice, that the rounded , i.e., chineless, bottom is a bit more predictable in response, besides, of course, having slightly less wetted area. I think I should enlarge on the difference in the two boats on Rhode Island Sound, with a very small chop. In the less-stable boat I was conscious of balance; in the more-stable one I was not, and could concentrate on looking around, or cranking out some speed, or whatever, with the feeling that the boat was able to accept full responsibility for staying upright. I recall a few years earlier paddling the more-stable boat down a small lake with a stern-quarter wind and corresponding small chop, a couple of weeks before freeze-up, and suddenly realizing "My god, this boat feels solid!". I like the other one because it is more responsive. Thus the choice is one of taste, and of circumstance. I thank John for his kind words, but I do think he is exaggerating a bit. Bruce Bruce Winterbon bwinterb_at_intranet.ca http://intranet.ca:80/~bwinterb A non-indexed pension is a fraud. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Sun Jul 19 1998 - 05:14:41 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:29:58 PDT