Five Candidates for Sail-to-Power Surgery?
Dreamboat Episode #6: Hulls We Could Transform Into Camp-Cruising Motorboats
We’re finally winding down our search for a sensible, easily-driven, maybe even affordable camp-cruising powerboat for two aging sailors—this time presenting five vintage production sailboats that might be solid foundations for surgical addition of a wooden pilothouse and cuddy cabin.
Why not just sail? Because after decades in an open cockpit—too much sun, cold and rain exposure—our creaky bones want to lounge comfortably in a small pilothouse, sipping coffee and enjoying the view as we putt-putt from one sweet anchorage to the next. Not in a hurry, not exceeding 5-6 knots as an all-day cruising speed, and not spending a fortune on fuel.
Each time we’ve written about trailerable powerboat designs, several astute, budget-minded and eco-groovy readers have brought up the concept of finding an affordable old sailboat whose hull could serve nicely—and guarantee that our original quest for something with modest outboard power would be achieved.
In the last episode, following a reader suggestion, we tested a cabin design on a Montgomery 17 sailboat hull. The sketch looked fine, but as many of you pointed out, “if you’re going to do this crazy thing, why not go bigger,” as long as the towing-weight goal remains intact. Why settle for 17 when, for about the same price and boatshop effort, you could select an old hull in the 19’-22’ range?
Good point!
So, trolling through descriptions of old sailboats, we eliminated any designs with sharply raked stems, transoms that leaned forward (too modern for our salty pilothouse), or hulls that lacked aesthetically suitable freeboard to host the somewhat tall pilothouse. Generally, any design that looked too modern was ruled out, and we turned our back on others that weren’t semi-antique, affordable production models.
With each sailboat hull selected for conversion, we assumed total replacement of original cabins so that the cuddy design would match our new pilothouse. In the process we sharply increased sitting headroom down below in all examples. We also added bulwarks in the bow area of each stock sailboat hull, creating a bit more swoop to the sheerlines. Finally, standing headroom in the pilothouse remained in question—maybe yes, maybe not quite, but we’d be okay with almost-standing headroom at the helm seats.
Here, then, are the first five candidates we came up with. By cutting, pasting and scaling each of the drawings, we’ve tried to suggest how the same traditional pilothouse and cuddy cabin, sketched by our friend Kees Prins, might look on each of the hulls. You’ll note that in some cases our pilothouse and new cuddy flow into cockpit coamings of the original sailboats—namely in the Halman/Nordica 20, and the Herreshoff America catboat. First we offer original drawings of the sailboats, then our sketches of the hulls with pilothouse, cuddy and optional steadying sail…and finally a photo of each boat under sail, Pre-Sawzall.
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