Looking for love or hate. Give me your opinions on this design

I thought you didn't want any opinions...

 

I'd suggest you find a living designer with a track record of drawing good all around boats, that develops designs with ease of construction and practical build strategies an amateur can accomplish in mind. It may sound simple but it is a short list.
Look at Dudley Dix's catalogue and contact him.
You will end up with a much better all around boat. You can hang prints of narrow (and questionable) focus clam crushers on the wall.

 

Vineet,

What is it you're trying to ascertain here?
Ignoring members is not a good way to make friends.
A longer boat will serve your purposes better BUT,
if you want to build your little boat then do it.
Who are we to tell you otherwise.

What is the proposed completion date,
or are you waiting on funding?

 

This boat comes in at 14,000 lbs?

What does this mean?

Does it mean when fully provisioned? Or does it mean just the bare boat and rig?

I suspect that the 35 footer's displacement number is just the boat with no provisions.

I also suspect that this number for the 26 footer includes the full provisioning.

But even if the two are the same, is the 35 footer really no bigger than the 26 footer?

 

I'd say the 35 footer is the bigger boat even if both the empty and loaded displacements of the two boats are the same.

The 35 footer probably has greater rigging loads on account of it likely having a larger Beam. It also likely requires a bigger anchor because it has greater bulk. It may need a bigger engine for the same reason.

Yeah, it has a greater potential speed speed than the heavy 26 footer. But, without an attentative crew, how likely is it to reach that speed?

A spinnaker may be better than a single Chinese lug, but it is a temperamental beast.

I have read numerous stories of a slower boat making a faster passage, because it is easier to manage, and thus ends up performing closer to its potential speed.

Because of its Chinese lug sail, reefing (and un-reefing) will be so easy that there will be far less temptation to carry either too much sail or too little.

Also, on the shorter boat, things will be less far away from one another.

And finally, the 35 footer was likely designed for short and moderate passages, which likely don't include ocean crossings.

The 26 footer is clearly designed for them.

 

The higher rigging loads must be a reflection of greater stability, which is generally considered a good thing.

The 36 footer may not need a bigger engine at all for similar speed, because to achieve the same sort of speeds the smaller boat will be operating very close to its hull speed where drag increases dramatically.

The 36 footer will be dramatically faster and therefore, all else being equal, do far less motoring for a similar passage time.

A typical 36 footer will be dramatically faster than an extremely heavy 26 foot junk rigged boat. Take, for example, an excellent heavy 25/26' long keeler like the Contessa 26, SCOD, Folkboat or Stella. Even fully equipped racing versions of these 25/26ers are about 15% slower than a typical conservative 36 footer like say a Sigma 36, C&C 35-2, Ericson 35-2, or Jeanneau Sunshine 36. The gap between a very well equipped and very well sailed boat on the one hand, and a poorly sailed boat with ancient gear, roller furlers and a bad bottom is normally far less than that. And then add in the fact that according to the Junk Rig Association itself, the junk is about 9% slower than the sloop and you're looking at the huge margin of 24% - and that's assuming that the designers of the Contessa, SCOD, Folkboat and Stella are complete incompetents who somehow managed to make their 25/26 footers slower than a 6 ton cruiser. Surely we should not hold designers like Holman and Nicholson in such utter contempt as that!

Put it this way - that's the same speed difference as there is between a Folkboat and a J/35, or between a J/24 and a Swan 56, J/125 or Farr 40. It'd be almost impossible to make up anything like that difference, no matter how much difference in attention the crew paid.

Sure, some people sometimes make faster passages in small boats, but a speed difference of way over 24% (after allowing for the fact that the Penny must be far slower than the lighter SCOD, Folkboat, Nich, Vertue etc) is not the sort of difference you can often make up.

With modern gear, a 36 footer can be very easy to manage. Nor does anyone actually seem to prove that a good modern rig is actually harder to handle than a junk rig. Something like my 36 can go from zero to 25 knots or so without reefing at all, because all you need to do is just pull on some backstay and ease the traveller and inhaul to flatten the rig. Reefing takes less than a minute, from the cockpit. And of course a decent 36'er could be sailed just under reefed mainsail and still sail a heavy JR 26' over the horizon quickly. You don't need a spinnaker to sail straight away from a heavy 26' junk rigger.

Who said a 36'er isn't designed for ocean passages?

 

You can safely assume it's lightship displacement, without anything. The sheated strip version, the Penny, is quoted at 10500lbs, so it's no wonder the Al version is 14000lbs, especially if they optimized for amateur construction with thicker plate for easier welding. About 40-50% of the quoted figure is ballast.
They explicitly compare the design with the Giles Vertue, and wooden Vertue's are reported at around 11000lbs, while the fiberglass ones are around 9000lbs. The Penny's are slightly bigger boats, beamier and taller (more headroom under a full flush deck).

 

In the comments above, I don't mean to disparage modern boats. But I do mean to point out that they can come with certain disadvantages which are not all that obvious. And that the tubby slow slug of a boat may actually be the better deal, once potential speed performance is not a top priority.