MAX EBB I
was at my favorite boatyard to set up an appointment for a slightly overdue bottom job when I caught sight of the yard manager making good time across the yard. I had a few questions for him so I followed him between some hauledout boats, around a forklift and through a small door into a very large shed. My favorite yards are the ones that don't just fix boats but also know how to build them. It seems to make a difference, and I will go out of my way to find a yard that has enough depth of talent to pull off a new-build project or a major reconstruction once in a while. If they can rebuild an old wooden boat, then I have more confidence letting them work on mine, even though it's all plastic and metal. So I wasn't too surprised at what I saw inside the shed, once my eyes adjusted to the indoor lighting: a huge wooden hull, or rather, a skeleton of a huge wooden hull, with most of the planks removed and a mix of ancient and new timbers fitting together in the yacht's innards. It looked like a project that had started years ago, and had years to go.
B
ut that's not where the manager was going. I chased him right past the rebuild project, where only one shipwright was lazily chiseling away at some obscure piece of wooden boat anatomy, to something far more modern. It was a mass of shiny white-primed laminate and black carbon fiber, maybe 30 feet long, with a half-dozen yard workers sanding, fairing, polishing and painting on various parts of the new yacht. More people were clustered around a large table on which drawings were spread out. The yard manager scurried up the scaffolding and onto the new boat, so I wandered over to the group huddled over the boat drawings and two more workers were discussing the plans.
"I
still think we're building a boat that's going to be obsolete from the day it's launched," complained one of the workers as he lowered his particle mask and pulled the paper hood off his head. "All that ballast, and no way to move it to one side where it could do some good." "You mean, you think it should have a canting keel?" I asked. "All the cool boats are canters," he said. "This fixed keel is something from the last century." "It would be. like, really awesome," suggested a female voice from behind protective gear, "to leap-frog the canting Page 160 •
Latitude 38
• July, 2007
keel fad and go straight to something even more advanced." "Lee! Since when are you a boatbuilder?" I asked in astonishment, recognizing the voice of Lee Helm behind all that protective gear. "We're signed up to crew on this boat," she explained. "He's foredeck, I'm navigator. We came by to have a look, and next thing you know, they put us in these dorky space suits and we're, like, sanding fiberglass."
"W
hat could be more advanced than a canting keel?" asked the foredeck crew. "I hate the thought of carrying ballast that has to stay on centerline." "I hate the thought of carrying extra
ballast in light air or downwind," argued Lee. "And I hate the thought of all that extra wetted surface at the wrong angle when you use an underwater appendage to move ballast outboard." "Well, I hate the thought of capsizing and not coming back up." "Thing is," answered Lee, "there are better ways to apply righting moment to a boat this size without giving up self-righting. Movable ballast should be above the waterline, not below. Much less drag that way. And it should be water, not lead, so you can dump it out for light air and for downwind. I mean, instead of an underwater contraption to swing the keel to one side, all this boat needs is a couple of water ballast pods