The outrigger is a hollow cantilever box beam swept slightly forward built of spruce timbers and mahogany door skins with Fiberglas overlays. It weighs 11 pounds and is secured to the hull with lashings of 3/8” line as are the floats which are constructed of door skin material throughout via stitch and glue construction, epoxied inside and out. The floats weigh 4 pounds each. These floats are four feet long and are fine for paddling but not for sailing.  I am currently building new floats eight feet long.  They are skin covered items to keep the weight down.  As it is I can sit in the boat and lean radically to either side and submerge a float but it is in no way in danger of rolling over, however  the forces generated by a sailing rig may very well bury the float hull enough to simply cause it to drag through the water. Sometimes bigger is better.

When I retired, the boat was not finished, so I slapped a coat of primer (from Lowe’s) on her and we took off for our long awaited, finally we are free, trip. Our trusty old Riverside Fiberglas, weighs a ton canoe, went with us too, both boats on the roof of the truck, travel trailer in tow.  

I found out that I did a real good job on the drawing board. The cockpit fits my wife real well. I can barely paddle the boat without banging my knee caps to a bloody pulp. That is with a double paddle kayak stick. Trouble was even a short kayak paddle would hit the floats every once in a while, but I had a couple of canoe paddles and that did the trick. A little J stroke and you don’t even need the rudder much!

The ugly water of California’s Sacramento Delta drew first blood and I was startled by the almost total instability of the hull without the outrigger. I should not have been, now that I think about it, and I even think given a little time I could tame the beast, but I want to try it in warm waters and away from prying eyes. I think it will be very fast paddled this way, and a lot of fun but it is not what SHE wants so that project will have to wait.

I’m glad I got to try the boat “unfinished “ so to speak as I found numerous small things that needed fixing and now that we are home again I am working on those items and finally getting after the installation of the rig. The mast step and partner are now installed along with some other small items of hardware.

The rig will be 52 square feet of Marconi rigged mainsail and a jib of undetermined size. Both sails will be cut from Tyvec.  It is cheap and easy to work with and I figure I will need to run through a few iterations to get it right. I’m still working out sheet routing and hardware requirements.  The jib requires a backstay be installed on the otherwise unstayed 2” aluminum mast.

It was my intention to follow this boat up with one of my own out of aluminum. We’ll see. The other thought I had along these lines was a composite structure that consisted of cut out parts from sheet foam that had been bonded to a fiberglass layer. That ‘glass layer would end up on the inside of the structure. All the bulkheads would be glassed on both sides, of course, but the outside surfaces would be left without skin to be shaped to final contour and then glassed and finished. It would be an extremely strong and light structure that any surf board shop could build if they had the patterns. Just a thought.

By the way, momma likes her boat.

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