The Joy of it All

Choosing a Boat Design

- Ian Kirk

Sometimes a design is chosen because of familiarity, or in the case of sail, as a boat to participate in class racing. Some folk choose a design seen in a magazine such as Small CraftAdvisor because they admire its looks. Others may choose a design because they’ve been on the water in one owned by a friend. Then of course there is the Internet with its huge array of designs and general information. Sometimes large numbers of a particular design convince us they must be good, or because they have an active class association or builder/designer with excellent marketing skills.

Is the above criteria sufficient or should we carry out further research before committing to the building?

I had never built a boat but had owned and sailed Australian VJ’s, 16-foot skiffs, trailer sailers and keelers. I always felt that maybe I didn’t have the woodworking skills to build a boat from scratch. But then I’d always managed to greatly improve all the boats I’d owned, so there was some acquired skill in place. My wife Robbie and I had cruised the Queensland, Australia coast in a 25-foot Tophat keelboat. We then repeated the trip in a different manner in an 18-foot Investigator trailer sailer, covering a section of the coast, then backtracking on land to collect the car and trailer. The simplicity of little Sherlock resulted in Rob’s book, Keep It Simple, Sailor: Easy recipes for small boats without a fridge.

One of the benefits of the book to me was the realization that one could cruise in even smaller boats than trailer sailers. We live on an island in Moreton Bay, Queensland, so we continued to cruise locally for a few more years. But the ongoing desire to build a boat and to downsize even further led to the sale of our last trailerable, Bliss, a Clifton 23.