Watery Escape

Desert shakedown sail on an owner-designed and built small sailboat

Article by Kitrick Nielson

---

The crowds at my local docks are uniquely troubled by hangovers, gambling losses, and a reduction of launch lanes necessitated by a water level 160 feet below full pool. My wife and I live in Las Vegas, and the party stretches to the more accessible areas of our local sailing grounds, Lake Mead NRA. Last year I avoided these crowds by throwing together a little 90 degree chine punt that gets cartopped down dirt roads to remote launch sites. It has no reserve stability, is easily pooped, and my wife refuses to take the helm (which consists of an oar through a notch in the transom). I needed a boat that could cartop like the punt but more seaworthy, more load bearing, and friendlier to operate. I became painfully aware of another hole in my fleet.

My understanding only scratches the surface of the complexity in designing and building boats, but I pore over work by contemporary masters. They were crudely copied. SCAMP’s high freeboard, short length, and sweeping, parallel hull planks, the sheer footprint like something Vivier does on bigger boats like Ebihen that, with spacered inwales on an open hull, contributes to a traditional workboat appearance. Michael Storer mentions his love of a plumb bow, and I’ve been impressed with the way my Goat Island Skiff cuts through water instead of stamping on top of it. The plumb bow also keeps weight and overall length down. The choice of a daggerboard also came from the Goat, allowing more space than a centerboard but avoiding breaking up the look with a board over the side. A cassette rudder would come from Storer’s design, complicated by a hinged tiller. Bits and pieces of this more versatile cartopper started to come together.

While I fantasized about a new boat, my life in Las Vegas changed a little. A neighbor’s house sold and the new neighbors played music at all hours that was so loud we could feel the bass. Even a dirt road to a reliably hard to find beach transformed into a spring break boozefest. Silicone-injected burnouts made idling donuts on Sea Doos, twerking while a friend stood at an arm’s distance in knee-deep water filming the middle-aged influencer wannabe. Twenty cars and trucks turned Placer Cove into a block party with polka bass blasting into the wee hours. The new boat required that my wife and I didn’t camp at the launch site. It needed to carry us two, our dog, and a night’s supplies out of range of car stereos. 400 pounds of living creatures, 100 pounds of gear, and 200 pounds of boat meant 700 pounds displacement. This was a mistake in my design I’ll go into detail about later, and I should have aimed for 100 pounds less displacement. Anyways, I settled on a waterline 4’6” by 11’ and 7” draft and the math worked out.

Materials were to be cheap and available. Plywood is 11/32” ACX fir from the hardware store. In the dry heat of Las Vegas, a boat stored at home under a tarp is less threatened by rot. PL Premium to hold it together without melting in our 120 degree summers. Egg crate on a strongback makes it easy to piece it together as you go. Stringers and gunnels and some other bits are quality fir, ash, and oak from a real lumberyard. After moving the hull out of the house it got fiberglass on bottom up to the waterline and two coats of epoxy in areas that would keep water. Paint is mostly oil based which has proven durable on other builds, but areas that got alkyd enamel show the experiment was a mistake. Rowing hardware came from Home Depot. Through-bolts sandwich galvanized strap to the inwale with holes drilled for simple tholes made from construction spikes. A cotter pin half way up and another at the bottom of these spikes makes it simple to transition from use to stowage. 

In the drawings, the sail is 77 square feet with the center of effort at the front edge of the board, but I had a 68 square foot lug sail made from Harbor Freight canvas tarp that would fly until I made a final decision on how much sail area to carry. Though it has proven a versatile size, it is starting to show the weakness of the material and lose shape. Lately I have been rigging the downhaul from the tack to a cleat low on a mast and running a spar (attached to the mast about where a spritsail’s spar would attach) to the clew of the lug sail. On the wrong tack, a straight spar can really interrupt the shape of the sail though, so I make a simple curved spar from the best douglas fir at the hardware store by scarfing pieces at an angle. Getting the curve right still evades me, and I think this spar needs only enough shape to ride on the opposite side of the mast to the sail. I like being able to adjust outhaul tension from the mast instead of from a boom like on a balanced lug because the sail can be anywhere when you do it. Eventually I sewed up an 85 square foot sail of Dacron with guidance from Sailmaker’s Apprentice. This new sail has two rows of reef points and it’s the first sail I’ve made that has a pretty good shape.

My first launch was solo. The hull is more easily driven than I expected, and loaded to the waterline it is enjoyable to sail in light and medium winds. As the air picks up, the sparse reserve stability is unnerving. In a chop, loaded lightly, she rides on top of the water and rocks on every axis. This must be the result of too much displacement on a small, flat-bottom boat. When I sail her solo the motion can be uncomfortable. The distance between the rudder and the daggerboard is short and the rudder is mounted on a vertical transom. These work together to make the helm so responsive that you could easily throw the tiller to one side and capsize trying to carry your momentum through a tight turning radius. She isn’t spacious, but it's easy to stretch out across the thwart or on the sole just aft of it. With almost no experience rowing, I’m happy doing so solo, but often my wife sits beside me on the center thwart and takes an oar. Rowing in parallel like this works ok, but it’s more about goofing off with my wife than making distance. Under sail I often lie across the main thwart while my wife sits windward, aft. Our dog might nap under the center thwart, and with big circles cut out of the bulkhead, she can easily keep an eye on my wife at the helm. The tiny deck is a perfect fit for an anchor, chain, and 100’ of line. Reserve flotation was an afterthought with a handful of gallon jugs tied up under the deck and rear seat. Loading enough gear for her to sit on her lines leaves little room ahead of the thwart. Stowage aft has been conveniently arranged for gear whose easy access makes things a little more comfortable.

Maybe it’s just that there are bigger crowds where I launch these days, but I’ve never had this many compliments on other builds. My uglier builds find only a few do-it-yourself types striking up a discussion. Even with Las Vegas nearby, there are plenty of considerate people whose presence is overshadowed by the drunk and disorderly. This boat gives these types a reason to share a kind word. The hull ended up weighing 165 pounds which is about all I can get on the roof of my car by myself. More often than not I get a compliment paired with an offer to help. 

Even though my local beaches have more noise than they used to, my wife’s first sail on this boat, launched from Placer Cove, ended well. Winds were light enough that we rowed as much as we sailed. Instead of aging influencers on jet skis, we returned as the sun set to, amongst the small crowd, a group of four twenty-somethings blaring contemporary music from a black sedan. As my wife and I unloaded, one young man spoke for the group and asked if they could take pictures of themselves with the boat. I responded, “Sure. I’ll even take you for a ride if you turn off the music for half an hour while we load up.” Last time I asked a stranger at Lake Mead to turn down his music he threatened to shoot me. This time I watched a flash of realization wash across his eyes as the young man happily obliged. Another man from the group, timid and with limited English, came aboard while my wife spoke with the group in their native Spanish, her bragging about the boat being home made. Aboard I spoke to the timid man in my own crude Spanish. He offered to help row, but I declined. He asked if I wanted to be in one of the slew of selfies he was taking, something I don’t get asked often these days, so we took a couple photos together. Placer Cove is at the bottom of an eroded wash, making it walled in until you get out into the main channel. The view of the lake opens up quickly. My new crew’s eyes lit up as we came out onto the cold path of the Colorado River separating Arizona from Nevada. This desert, at dusk, is magic. Especially from the water. Pink and blue skies get ripped clear by miles of dark mountains, stacking hilltops on ridgelines all the way down to the water where the whole expanse gets reflected again. The view struck him hard, and his phone sat motionless on the seat. I rowed us back in while he thanked me profusely. He said he had never been on a boat. I told him he should build one. I lied and said it’s simple. •SCA•