Small blue water boat?

PAR's actual time at sea shows in the sobering and realistic scenario he paints of small boat motion in bad weather and the effect it has on the crew. I too once had to tie myself to a wheelbox on HERMANAS Y HERMANOS, a lapstrake SPRAY, off the Oregon coast in a night time gale because I would have been washed over if I hadn't.
When a SPRAY takes steep spilling breakers covering the boat, filling the bulwarks over and over, that's a bad sea state and "why are we here Captain? Because the Owner was in a hurry to get North and ignored the weather report, oh dear, here COMES - SHUT THE HATCH QUICK".....
We had lost all electric power, but the diesel engine and stove were running and we had spare kerosene lamps. Luckily one crew member had an iron stomach and actually cooked and kept all cheerful for a difficult night. This made survival into fun adventure for the dispirited bunch, because of his infectious cheerful attitude. It's not so bad lashed to the helm when you are handed a cup of really good coffee every once in a while.
Note from Tristan Jones: In a gale eat canned peaches because they taste just as good coming up as they do going down.
I love to go to big boat shows and look at the production yachts from the various manufacturers. Going down below in a 30-35 foot typical sloop it's breathtaking how big it feels and cozy with the wine bottle and flowers on the table. As prospective owners ooh and aah at the 'cute kitchen' and 'little bathroom' I want to say, "Imagine you haven't slept for 3 days, everything you own is on the floor, broken and wet, you are puking over and over into the bucket between your knees.... now you're a sailor."
Any reasonable small boat can be made into a corked bottle and could survive really unimaginable conditions, but the crew will be unable to do anything other than hold on and wait in panic.
Bigger is better, and the Cherubinis and other really lovely designs of 39-55 feet with a sensibly proportioned modern underbody really make a world class yacht able to shelter her crew through most anything and sail out of it often enough to avoid the situation in the first place.
Fat antique old fashioned BERTIE, when stupidly caught in the most vicious west coast gales with which she is too familiar with, uses her Darwinian-derived shape and 23 tons of displacement to make her interior a quiet, calm place where things don't fall off shelves much, the food stays on the stove which is at the center of rotation pretty close, and one can sleep, read, cook, eat, and generally wait in reasonable comfort until it passes.
The crude and ancient style rig is manageable in all conditions and makes a nice trysail combined with the reefed staysail giving a usable storm rig when needed. It can be repaired with 2/4s and string, and has been. Holes in the main matter little due to the panel construction.
She also cost, complete for sea, what a good high-tech set of sails from a top sailmaker for the Cherubini would cost, if you include drifters and a couple spinnakers, about $30k.
"You pays yer money an' takes yer choice".

 

My uncle sailed 20,000 offshore miles before he got his first real gale in the Tasman sea, in his case in a 20 ton Colin Archer. He never regretted his choice of boat after that. You can take your chances but there is always the chance that you will get yours tomorrow.
I still think if you cannot afford the 40 odd footer then a good 20 footer can do it, well found boat with a knowledgeable seaman (seaperson??)for crew. Trekka sailed twice around the world with no substantive damage due to weather. Going bigger may actually place financial strains on the adventure, that the boat ends up being less fit to weather the extreems than a smaller boat, where more money could be spent on survivability.
Perhaps there should be a graph with lines crossing in different directions. You enter with the total available money for aquireing the boat, and preparing it for the trip, and then making the trip/adventure. Where the lines cross is the best, biggest boat you can afford....

 

John Guzzwell, 80+ today and still racing, built a second improved TREKKA. That is one very small boat type, but from what it has done, a very, very good one, with a real sailor at the helm.
Original TREKKA and second time around ENDANGERED SPECIES and same kicking butt in racing. Last time ES was hauled in Port Townsend JG graciously answered my questions about the evolution of the design from TREKKA to ES.
His cold molding is very light but such lovely and simple engineering that holds up under great stress.
Here are some relevant small boats. This url is worth a long evening.
http://www.microcruising.com/famoussmallboats.htm

 

That graph is so very true, but most deeply ignored by many prospective voyagers.
Every time someone hammers me on-line about BERTIE's antique obsolescence, I try to point out- it is not economically obsolete for me but then 'aspect ratio', 'ballast ratio', and the rest comes out like a barrage of knives... but the facts remain the same, economics have always decided boat ownership in the real world, not desires for the perfection of the science and craft in going very fast in something very light, any more than most cars or trucks are Ferraris. They're not wooden wagons but the power to weight ratio is not ideal, they could be more efficient, go farther with less fuel, be very much lighter etc... yet we as a society put up with pitiful antique car designs and obsess about our sailboats' modernity instead.
My fat old 18th century derived hull with its far older Chinese main is an extremely successful design for its intended use and owner because the durability and cheapness and absolute seaworthiness proven many times mean far more to me than jockeying for social position over how cool my hi-tech boat is or getting to windward one percent quicker than your competitor (why is life all competition these days?) in a race so you can 'win' recognition as being 'best'.
The ocean recognizes good boats by not sinking them or pounding them to bits in a hissy fit. Nothing else really matters in the end.
I don't race much so we have a 30 hp SABB topsail under the galley table which makes up the difference.
30+ years in boatyards showed a pattern in owners and on a regular basis appeared a starry eyed new 'captain' of some inappropriate vessel babbling maniacally about south sea islands and taking (insert book of choice) to the ignorant islanders or teaching them how to fish or sail and further disconnects with reality. Fortunately the graph above soon halts the project, the boat gets a red tag and is moved to the back of the yard. After a few years of gathering trash and unpaid bills and finding no interest at auction, we yard boys get out the chain saws and call for a dumpster to haul it away. The ballast keel is forklifted over onto the pile of ballast keels from lovely, well-engineered, great-to-windward yachts awaiting scrapping along with the dreams of the boats they once were part of.
Meanwhile, the fat old antique is still around, for the reason that the graph was closely studied before a design was settled on.
How much/what type boat do you need? (here is where self-deception must be confronted)
How much/what type boat can you afford?(Again you will lie to yourself here)
When do you need it? (hopefully before you die)
After seeing projects in build so long they were rotten before launching due to overreach in design/vessel need I knew BERTIE had to be cheap, stable, shallow draft, large displacement, did I mention cheap?, very comfortable under all conditions, warm in cold, cool on hot days. Room for children, not easy in any sailboat, room for lots of food and water without changing the performance much and on and on.
It had to sail well under all conditions from zephyr to strong gale and be so well balanced that she would steer herself while doing so on all points, without a vulnerable vane gear but from inherent good sea-going design, which includes so much more beyond the always desired aerodynamic and hydrodynamic perfection.
That graph designed BERTIE.
She's certainly wrong for most owners who have different needs and sail maybe two weeks a year total, and for whom high performance is part of what they need from their boat, for the emotional satisfaction it gives of a job well done.
Some blind-to-the-past sailors in a big hurry would hate her, but then maybe they're the ones who commute for hours every day and work in cubicles like hamsters in a pet store so I don't respect their opinion much, unless it's about commuting or cubicles, or hamsters.
Those who have spent more than one time with the puke bucket between their knees while being terrified of the gale crashing on the deck will recognize her comfortable, human ways.
But she is very much a 'big boat', and different from the thread, sorry.

 

John Guzzwell also said when he re-designed Trekka and built Dorothy for his wife that he would not entertain the yawl rig, not worth the effort. And Bataan, I once was given a sack of beautiful apples while loading my barge, that night on the hundred mile tow home I puked up apple cider all the way. moral of this storey--don't eat apples before sailing.

 

Apple stomach cider, I feel for you, shipmate. Once I was served shrimp curry before crossing a rough bar in a 90' topsail schooner. It's lucky we didn't lose the ship as the entire crew was projectile vomiting for far too long.
BERTIE's yawl rig makes the main a lot smaller and works in this instance to control steering very well, while being as large as possible for light winds. I can see why he dumped a mizzen from TREKKA, being so small a boat and the sail so tiny. I once had a fore-and-mizzen punt, an English beach fisherman with an enormous dipping lug foresail and a small standing lug mizzen. Loved it, and it wouldn't be controllable any other way.

 

May I suggest two harle design:
the cognac, 24 foot

http://laflottille.chez-alice.fr/fiche_cognac.htm

the muscadet, 21 foot



These are proven ocean going boats, many still use them today.
I wouldn't recomend anything smaller. mostly due to human proportions as explained earlier, you will with certainty be handicaped by the size in daily essential activities (you will hurt your head, you will have back pain and you will want to jump overboard).

 

agree

The whole endeavor can be expensive enough to mortgage years of life in its pursuit if you don't have the readies.

I have seen too many half finished large hulls sold off by widows I suppose.

"strapped to the helm"?

Take care that the helm is at sea.

 

Again, if remotely considering this type of passage making, you need to take a 20' boat into 11' seas. A Flica is a great little boat, but getting slapped around like a ping pong ball, in conditions a 30'er would shrug off as a bit of nasty weather, just isn't reasonable for 99% of the folks thinking they have the stomach (literally) for it.

 

Par , I agree . Here is a dory that I assume is based on a Benford 30 .
About 10,000lb disp. The main advantage of building it yourself , is that you know how it is put together . I like this one the best of all the iterations of small dories .

 

That's a real boat, and heavy enough to be endurable.

 

Yes, but I really like this. Angleman Sea Spirit 31 .

 

I have known the various small Anglemans quite well in the repair yards. Philippine Mahogany seems to have been used by some builders for planking and we replaced miles of it.
We used to call this and others like it a "boat in a bottle" because the designer included so many unnecessary details like the clipper bow and trailboards, which just add weight where you don't want it, and small prop in huge stern aperture you could drive a VW through. They are roomy and have cruised the world for 50 years and are well known for being low performance, reliable, basic boats with few bad habits.

 

So , you are saying she is a wholesome girl tarted up for Saturday night ?
Its what dreams are made of .

 

Yes, she is a charming tart.