Part 7: Building Our Trailerable Dreamboat

Taking on a Dreaded Project: Not Fun, But No Incidents & One Nap

Note on This Series: We’re covering start-to-finish design and construction of a trailerable, displacement-speed 20’ cabin cruiser that’ll keep an aging couple (the two of us) on the water in some comfort—out of the rain and sun in a pilothouse and sleeping cabin, with fuel-efficient 9.9 hp outboard, cabin heat, small galley, dinette table for two in the pilothouse, and minimal electronics. A simple, beamy little boat that should be seaworthy, built atop a bare Welsford-designed sailboat hull. The cruiser conversion will be named TATOOSH, after a rugged island at the northwest tip of the Washington coast.

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When we last visited, the project looked like the photo below, with a crude doorskin mockup of cabin and pilothouse plopped on top of the Welsford sailboat hull. And yes, I might have optimistically said something about next steps involving construction of the actual cabin and pilothouse, once the mockup had suggested standing headroom in the pilothouse and room to sit erect on the forward cabin berths.

That was the plan. But plans can change during a design-as-you-build project, so hours after posting the last installment, we realized it was time to confront the upside-down stage I’d been dreading: Squirming around on the underside of a heavy, propped-up hull, plugging the gaping centerboard slot, adding depth to the keel, figuring out where the waterline might be, sanding and painting the whole bottom while on my back, and then…finally, maybe getting on with cabin and pilothouse construction.