We Found Our Dreamboat Project!

After Three Months of Doodling & Discussion, a Happy Ending

At last, patient reader, we’ve come to a decision on what to build, buy or restore, ending our eight-installment, three-month search for an ideal outboard camp cruiser—a boat that’ll check all of the boxes we outlined back in October:

• Fuel efficient and easily driven motorboat, ideally powered by a four-stroke outboard in the 9.9hp range.

• Capable of an all-day cruising speed of 5-6 knows, and able to be pushed a bit faster when punching into currents or foul weather…but definitely not a planing hull.

• Seaworthy and salty-looking, with a traditional appearance.

• Comfortable for an aging couple, with side-by-side seating in a pilothouse, a small galley, comfy berth down below in the cabin, and place for a porta-potty or composting bucket.

• Maybe based on a classic sailboat hull.

• Trailering weight, all in, of not more than 3,000 lbs, so we can continue with our beloved old Toyota Tacoma and avoid the spectre (and horrific expense) of a larger tow vehicle. (The boat we’ll create, illustrated below, will not weigh more than 1,000 lbs, so including trailer and outboard motor, less than a total trailering weight of 2,000 lbs.)

• Easy to launch and retrieve.

• Probably in the 16-20’ length range.

As many of you will recall, we started by traipsing through a variety of stock designs for home-built camp cruisers, moving on to also consider modifications we could make to existing outboard cabin boats, and more recently sampling half a dozen vintage fiberglass sailboat hulls that might serve as foundations for the cabin and pilothouse we envisioned.

We were close to picking something like an older 18’ catboat hull, when a good friend came up with a brainstorm: Why not consider the available 6-Metre Whaler sailboat hull he’d come across, 20’ overall with a 7’ beam, since its handsome glued-lapstrake hull might look terrific with the kind of cuddy and pilothouse we’d been doodling.

After looking at the hull last week, then imagining what it might take to turn the Welsford double-ender into a base for the outboard cruiser of our dreams, we knew we had a winner.

The Welsford-designed 20-foot Whaler hull with its fulsome stern, nice beam and load-carrying capacity. All it needs is removal of its current decks, centerboard and other sailboat elements, and addition of one more plank to improve freeboard and help the hull visually support the new cabin and pilothouse.

Designer Welsford already had incorporated an outboard well into the sailboat hull, placing it just off-center at the aft end of the cockpit. The hull featured a nice, beachable flat bottom amidships (draft of only 10 inches) that’ll help with stability, and a gorgeous, fulsome transom reminiscent of beautiful Scandinavian fishing boats. So, lots of excellent load bearing aft—more than most double-enders.

In side profile, the sailing hull was reminiscent of Welsford’s best-selling Navigator design—really beautiful, but proportionally low-slung for the cabin and pilothouse we envisioned…and not making it easy to have sitting headroom down below. So, after sketching options, we decided to add a full-length plank to the hull…raising the deck level and also boosting visual height in the bow area with a bulwarks.

The 20-footer, viewed from a slight bow angle.

By designing the cabin so it would flow seamlessly into a cockpit coaming, we achieved enough added height to hide the outboard’s powerhead beneath deck level. (And, speaking of the outboard, our plan is to carefully do surgery on the existing closed-box well, opening it to the stern with a “mousehole” so that the lower unit can be raised just above water level when not in use…avoiding the growth of mussel clusters, barnacles and other critters we deal with in the Salish Sea.)

Our sketch of a cabin, pilothouse, additional hull plank, bulwarks and steadying sail added to the already-built Welsford 6-Metre Whaler hull.

While we haven’t yet detailed interior arrangements of the cabin or pilothouse, we know they can be made to work for our basic needs: Comfort underway and at anchor during cruising adventures that’ll typically last one or two weeks before trailering to other locations in our Northwest waters.

At a glance—and this is no accident—the design resembles traditional Northwest Coast salmon trollers and gillnetters…workboats we’ve restored in the past and have always loved. But instead of 30-40 feet, our little 20-footer will be easy to drag to cruising grounds at the north and west extremes of Vancouver Island (British Columbia), or to different areas of the Salish Sea, the lower Columbia River, or lakes in Eastern Washington, Idaho or British Columbia.

You’ll see that we’ve added a mast and short boom to host a small steadying sail, a boom tent over the cockpit, along with anchor light, VHF antenna and steaming light.

Not shown on the attached drawing is also a small, classic butterfly hatch I’ll build on the forward cabintop, along with a low-slung “escape hatch” on the foredeck, which might come in handy when deploying or retrieving our anchor.

So, that’s it for now. Because we’re still completing work on our 14-foot gunter yawl, we won’t begin work on SCOUT, the 20-foot motorboat, until later this year…planning to write about the project during the 2024-25 winter months and begin cruising the boat that summer.

Many thanks for your earlier comments, suggestions and varied brainstorms during out multi-column search for an outboard Dreamboat. You can add your latest response below. And thanks for reading. - Marty