20160711

Marinus Meijers sent me a photo of his presentation of a garage-built sailboat. A maintenance-free boat on a trailer ready for daysailing. And overnighting on a hot summer night. Despite its looks this is a state of the art design with a cloud of sail. Its construction should be uncomplicated. Light weight due to using carbon where it matters most. For Marinus weight is the enemy of fun. Not only when sailing but also when building, handling the boat onshore on maintaining it later on.

This forced me to rethink my own ideas. I replied to Marinus: my criteria for a cruising dinghy are governed by self-sufficiency. For that you need a rig which is very simple to set up and reef: one sail on a short mast. You need form-stability to move through the boat without capsizing. Also the hull, centreboard and rudder should be robust and easy to repair. With 100kg per person and 100kg for rigging, anchors, oars, navigation instruments and water supplies, you end up with 300kg excluding the hull, centreboard and rudder. In that case a high-tech hull is pointless.

Last weekend while rowing on the Lauwersmeer I wanted to rig the sail. It was blowing Bft 4-5. Before setting sail the outhaul broke. The waves made the light hull very unstable. So I could not fix the problem and drifted quickly downwind. It took more than an hour to get back to where I had started. In these conditions stability is much more important than light weight.