Building Our Camp-Cruising Dreamboat

Part 1 in a Series: “Where’s the Sawzall?”

Last winter and into late Spring, we published a series of stories on our search for a trailerable cabin cruiser to build or restore. As you may recall, we mused about vintage sailboat hulls that might become donors, to be converted into camp-cruising motorboats. We also dabbled with scratch-built designs, along the way getting lots of helpful advice from readers.

In the end, we were thrilled to find a recently-built John Welsford 20’ sailboat hull, the 6 Meter Whaler design, that was for sale. The builder had originally planned to complete the project as a sailboat, but something changed and we were able to acquire the bare hull, minus sailing rig.

The future motorboat was dragged to our shop this past summer, but we only recently got to work on the project, since we wanted to do some cruising with RAVEN; sailing with our recently-built gunter yawl, MOUSE…and then some topside finish work on RAVEN in September and early October.

Now, with other boats put away for the off-season, it’s time to get cracking on the build-out of TATOOSH, our next dreamboat.

ABOVE - This is strictly a starting-point doodle, not a finished design, so please bear with us because we’re designing as we build. But for now, the pilothouse includes a dinette table with two seats; there’s a galley counter with sink and room for our small butane stove, and a helm seat whose backrest folds down to make room for an extension of the galley counter. The forward cabin will have a standard v-berth arrangement. Additional details are below…with a lot more to be covered in following installments.