pics

Many Thanks

Boy I'm into it now!

First off thank you Gary, Tom, Mike, and Will for your kind comments.

I'll try to take your comments in order but there may be some overlap.

Gary; you are correct, the wheelhouse is ladder central. There is one down forward, one down aft, and another up directly behind the helm chair on the starboard side. There is still room for an L seat & table to port but it's a high traffic area. If we remember she is designed around two people it gets less crowded.

Tom: Greetings and I'm glad your boat worked out as expected, that's what it's all about. Many thanks regarding your kind comments on recognizing my work.

The bulb doesn’t extend the waterline as such. It does extend very slightly forward under water, 3" on the PL46 and 6" on the PL56. These are minimalist bulbs, I call them "Squirrel Cheeks". The shape is veed on the bottom to ease re-entry and reduce slamming. My thought is that they will provide extra buoyancy to lift the low freeboard over big waves. I'm very leery of what might happen at 14 knots with anything larger. This one's effect on the bow wave will remain conjecture until we run the hull in a tank. Another problem with the large/long bulbs is anchor line hang-ups.

Mike: Thanks for your thoughtful commentary. The hull form is closer to a navel Frigate than a typical displacement passagemaker. As such she is designed to run efficiently at a higher speed/length ratio, a narrow band at 1.4-1.9. So she has fairly deep immersion at the transom and little rise to the bottom aft. The John Deere 4045 at 75HP will push her up to 11.5 knots at her designed weight of 51,000 pounds. A pair of 150 HP engines will push her up to over 14 knots.

Engine Placement; this is a big one and part of the reason for the design. I agree that if she were mine there would be a 6LW in a Plexiglas case in the middle of the main salon. However she is not my boat and my solution would not be acceptable to most folks buying a vessel of this type. Actually the 12,400 pounds of liquids is the major weight in this boat. One of the problems with light displacement hulls is lack of space for tankage. The space under the wheelhouse is full of fuel tankage. Water is under the sole aft. The engines and their gearboxes weigh 2000 pounds. The stern has lots of volume to damp pitching. The major idea was to remove the engines from the living space. I would fit a double window in the aft bulkhead so you could turn on the light and have a gander. The fact is most of these boats are used alongshore and most passages are two or three days. The ability to rebuild or change oil without disturbing the liveaboards has some merit.

The small twins are for a couple of reasons, the first is draft. The smaller props behind heavy skegs and in hull pockets will be far shallower than a single large wheel. This is a big deal in the Bahamas or the Mississippi. The second reason is redundancy, I have recently read of two incidents where wing engines were needed. These were both relatively new boats and the problems were not fuel related. Finally I have a hair-brained idea about using these small engines as generators as well as propulsion.

As there are only two crew, the forward stateroom would not be used at sea. The offwatch will sleep on the pilothouse seat or the settee in the saloon. The hull windows should be as strong as the hull, on my boat they will have storm covers of aluminum.

On dingys; The boom will take good management but they do work, all functions will be hydraulic. A deployable launching ramp would be great. Professional charter crews have all moved back to outboards because of lack of parts/service for waterjets in this vital piece of gear.

Will; If I was building one for myself I would have both flopper-stoppers and active fins. The fins work better the faster you go, the paravanes still work when the boat is stopped at anchor. Yes, handling the fish is a lot tougher than many expect.

Again, thanks all. See more on this in August PassageMaker Magazine.

All the best, Tad

 

As suspected, there is rhyme and reason for all of your choices - and it just goes to show, there are many ways to skin a cat - and there's no such thing as the compromise-free boat.
I always look forward to reading PMM - more reason to do so now. Thanks for expalining your thinking to is Tad.

 

I see Tad's designs and article are featured in the latest issue of Pro Boatbuilder on page 58 (Feb/March 03) - when I flipped it open and saw the article I immediately remembered the image from reading this thread a long while back so I thought I would post in case anyone doesn't subscribe to pro boatbuilder, and to say congrats on a great article and drawings - now back to reading the article for any details I missed