Boat Plans Bolger | 2014 Calendar of Our Designs

Boat Plans Bolger

Our 2014 calendar is now at the printers and we will have the first stocks ready for shipping in a couple of weeks. Get your orders in and we will ship as soon as they come in, well in time for you to use as Christmas gifts or to hang on your wall come January 1st. Order here.

We have a nice selection of photos again this year. Here are the cover photo and a few months as samples of what it contains.

Cover of our 2014 Calendar

January

May

July

September

Thank you to all who have allowed us to use your photos. For other builders who are not featured, we have already started to collect photos for our 2015 calender. This is a good opportunity to show off what you have achieved, so please send them to me by email.

We have changed suppliers this year, in the interests of keeping the price reasonable. The supplier that we used in the past has hiked their prices way up and would have necessitated a considerable increase. With the new supplier we can hold the price at the same level as the past two years.

To see our range of boat designs, please go to http://dixdesign.com/ .

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Boat Plans Bruce Roberts | Americas Cup Value to Sailing

Boat Plans Bruce Roberts

I have recently been quite active on the LinkedIn forums about Americas Cup. It is not in my nature to participate in forums because I have found that it is all too easy to get drawn in and become embroiled, fending off attacks by Internet trolls whose great ambition in life is to be destructive to others. LinkedIn is a more closed community and less apt to show this nastiness and aggression. If I feel strongly enough about an issue then I will have my say and keep up with the rest of the discussion.

Just such a discussion came out of my last blog entry, about Race 13 exceeding the time limit. You can read that entry by scrolling down the page or go to the blog archive on the left of this blog. The response was that races should not have time limits and should just continue until there is a winner. It referenced baseball as a comparison. Discussion then progressed to the format that is being used for this current edition of Americas Cup, AC34. Some of my posts have been well received and it was suggested that one post in particular should be read by a wider audience.

I responded to the following question. I dont want to name the poster, I dont have his permission.

"So I am going to go back to my question on the cup. Forty minutes time limit for an Americas Cup race? I would like to see the last race ground out for say 2 hours of excitement vs. just 40 minutes. Are we an ADHD society that if it goes longer that 40 minutes we loose our audiance (sic). I dont care. Its the Americas Cup. It should be raced with sweat and tears to the end. It should go as long as a football game or basketball game(including time outs and media breaks). Shouldnt it?"

Here is my response.

"We all have our own ideas on what should be and what shouldnt be. Whos to say which is right? I agree that 40 minutes does seem too short a time limit but I understand the aim of the organisers to popularise sailing competition with the non-sailors and the parameters within which they were working.

Sailing is its own sport and it is evolving rapidly with technology. Do you really want to watch these two boats sailing back and forth upwind and downwind for 3 hours or more each race and potentially for 17 days (19 days including the 2-race penalty) in a row? That will drive the TV viewers back to whatever they were watching before AC34 came along.

I grow thoroughly bored watching football and baseball. They are stop-start games and they hold the attention of the audience for very short periods of action. The players get to rest for much of the duration and only work in short bursts. They can go on all night if needed, without burning themselves out. The crews on these boats are working hard the whole time, every race.

I think that it will work to compare AC racing with cricket. Test cricket takes 5 days of play, broken into 4 sessions each day. With no limits aside from the 5-day time limit, it often ends with no winner. It bores most people to tears. Then one-day international cricket was introduced, featuring 50 overs (300 balls) bowled by each team against the other batsmen. Suddenly cricket became interesting to a much wider audience. Now they play international 20-over games and the games are very exciting to watch, with massive viewership.

Rugby was always an exciting running game but it has also gone the same route of short, very fast and exciting games with the Rugby Sevens. This is what is needed to hold the attention of the modern world, where there is always something else trying to grab attention. Why should sailing not be right there in the fray also grabbing attention with short, fast and very exciting races.

Sailing is a sport of ageing players and needs new and young blood to survive. This event is likely to attract new people to sailing in one form or another. We can watch yacht racing as we knew it 20 years ago until it goes the way of the dinosaurs or we can embrace the new world and regenerate sailboat racing as a viable sport.

There is still a place for 5-day test cricket, for a much smaller audience than the other forms. Likewise, there is also still a place for the longer duration sailing races. I will be skippering a 38ft sailboat across the South Atlantic in January. We will be racing flat-out for 3 weeks from Africa to South America. There will be exciting times for me and my crew far away from the eyes of any TV audience. I enjoy that racing immensely, as a participant but I dont expect our slow progress across the ocean chart to keep anyone rivetted to the edge of their seat the way that AC34 is doing to us right now.

I think that with AC34 they have hit a winning formula and I am enjoying every short minute of it."

Thank you for taking the time to read my viewpoint. It is often a bit off the beaten track but I think that it is valid.

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Boat Plans Butler | Hitting the Nail on the Head with CC19

Boat Plans Butler

We all know what it means to "hit the nail on the head". Taken literally, it is so satisfying to hit a nail so square and hard that it drives a long way into the timber. Just a few such blows and it is home, securing whatever its destiny in life was to hold in its given place. Taken figuratively it means that we have expressed an idea very clearly and in a way that resonates with others.

In just the same way, it is possible to design something that is just perfect, that we would not like to do any differently if we were to start again from the beginning, even if armed with the experience that came from the use of that product. A designer can and should get tremendous satisfaction from his/her involvement in the process whenever that nail is so squarely struck on the head. I have been lucky enough to find that nail a few times.

The Cape Cutter 19 is just such a design. I really would not change anything at all about that little boat. I have not sailed them enough and hope that I will get many more opportunities to sail them. The sailing that I have done has always impressed me with the extraordinary speed, handling and ability of this little boat.

Two Cape Cutter 19s drying out in UK.

 It is not a racing boat, so dont expect it to plane downwind like a sportboat. It is a little cruiser that can sometimes make you feel like you can take on the sportboats. Take it out in light conditions and it will sail past virtually any other cruiser or cruiser/racer of similar size, as well as taking out many much larger boats that should be a whole lot faster. It is oh so satisfying to sail past a boat that looks much faster but isnt.

It is not only a light-weather boat though. Remember, I grew up sailing the waters of the Cape of Good Hope and spent most of my life sailing there. Most circumnavigators tackle the Southern tip of Africa with great trepidation because of the often violent wind and sea conditions. For those who live there, those are the conditions that are given, so they have to be dealt with. I designed the Cape Cutter 19 to sail those waters safely, with due diligence by the skipper, of course.

There is a really nice independent review of the CC19 and its bigger sisters on the SA Yacht Blog . It includes observations by the author of boats to these designs that he has seen in action around the Cape of Good Hope and how they have managed in those conditions.

These boats are loved by their owners and they are very sad to part with them. One such owner is Russell Eden in UK, who sold his CC19 this past weekend. I received these messages from Russell, repeated with his permission.

"I sold my Cape Cutter 19 today after three years of ownership.

She was number 47, built in SA. I wanted to personally thank you for creating such a beautiful craft. Each and every day I sailed her I had people approach me to talk. People would sail/motor over to take photos and video. People offered me money for her, there, on the spot.

Ive only sold her because my wife says she will come sailing with me more often if we had a boat with full standing room and a heads. I would have kept her forever otherwise.

Im sitting here now wondering what Ive done; Ive let go perhaps the most wonderful piece of property Ive ever owned. No doubt Ill get over it in time, but I doubt Ill ever own anything quite so easy on the eye, or so wonderful on the water.

Thank you for designing her."

Russell followed up with:-

"I really meant it too. You designed something which grown men cry after.

 That said, it was only ever the white ones I lusted after. I think you need to be able to see the lapstrake, which you cant always do on the darker hulls."

Russell Eden sailing his CC19 "Zephyr".

Thank you Russell, for your kind words. I get great satisfaction from them.

The Cape Cutter 19 is a GRP production boat built in UK by Honnor Marine . It can also be built from plywood from plans that we supply at http://dixdesign.com/ . There you can see our wide range of other designs as well.

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