SKETCHBOOK: "Seabrook"

John C. Harris, CLC Managing Director,

Commentary

We mill miles and miles and miles of bead-and-cover cedar strips for kayak building. This led me to ponder what sort of small, lightweight sailboat could be built from those strips. I came up with this beamy 10-foot catboat. It would depend on carbon fiber sheathing to stiffen the hull. The centerboard is set forward to open up room in the cockpit, and the rudder is larger to compensate. (This geometry is nicked from Phil Bolger's "Cartopper" design.) A boatbuilding school in the Midwest built one, but either it was never finished, or I never got a performance report. The slot-together mold is slick, but a requires a LOT of CNC machining: eight sheets of particle board!