About 15 years ago I built a Payson
Canoe and used it for several years before selling it.
I replaced it about 10 years ago with my Toto
double paddle canoe. Toto has the same multichine cross
section as the Payson Canoe but I tried for a long lean
bow which would be better in rough water and more forgiving
of bow down trim. I still have that Toto, unchanged in
any way since new, and still use it all summer.
The Toto shape worked so well that I
used it in other designs like Roar2
and RB42. I tried
it also in a sailing boat, the 20' Frolic2
(the original Frolic was narrower, more of a rowboat
than a sailboat). Frolic2 was unballasted with a small
cuddy and I hoped it would be a good daysailer and one
man camping boat. Two were built that I know of. They
both went well but the design wasn't popular enough to
stay in my paper catalog, although plans are still available.
Bill Moffitt had built my Woobo
design and funded a 20% enlargement of Frolic2 that would
have a cabin, water ballast, and a yawl rig for cruising
near the Gulf Coast.
The 20% enlargement idea went very well
except that I had to deepen the hull more than that to
give some serious headroom in the cabin, but it doesn't
have standing headroom. Great emphasis was placed on ease
of use and rigging. The main mast is short and stepped
in a tabernacle. There is a draining anchor well in the
bow, a small storage segment under the front deck. The
mast tabernacle is bolted to the bulkhead that forms the
front of the sleeping cabin. There is a utility room aft
of the sleeping room. Water ballast tanks are under the
bunks and in the sides of the utility room floor, about
600 pounds of ballast as I recall. Aft of the cabin is
the self draining raised cockpit with storage volume under
the deck. Finally there is a self draining motor well
across the stern. Construction is taped seam plywood.
Bill couldn't start his Caprice right
away but Chuck Leinweber of Duckworksmagazine
gave it a try. He has the room and tools and smarts to
tackle a project like this with no hesitation. There weren't
many changes from the plans that I know of, the main one
being adding a conventional footwell to the aft deck which
is designed to have a hatch type of foot well as with
the Bolger Micro.
Chuck trailered his Caprice up from
Texas to our Midwest Messabout this June and I had a chance
to go over it, sail it for a couple of hours, and watch
it sail from other boats. Wonderful!
Chuck tells me it takes less than 15
minutes to rig the boat to as you see here. As shown the
boat has its ballast so you see it beaches very well indeed.
I asked about the ballast. He can flood the tanks without
power, just open the access plate, reach in and pull the
fill plug and let the water rush in. Since the tops of
the tanks are about even with the normal waterline he
has to move his weight around to keep the tank depressed
long enough to completely fill. Then you reach into the
filled tank, replace the plug in the bottom, and then
replace the access plate in the top. There are two tanks
to fill.
Are the ballast tanks worth the building
effort? On a multichine hull like this the tops of the
tanks form flats that give places for bunks and storage
so that is good. When full the boat should have a very
good range of stability. Chuck's boat has never been in
rough going as I'm writing this so the effect of the ballast
remains to be proven. It has been capsized in a practice
but the ballast tanks were empty and the boat was empty
with no crew, etc.. But the ballast is a success from
the standpoint that Chuck is able to tow his Caprice behind
a four cylinder pickup truck. My idea was to pull the
boat up the ramp and drain the tanks afterward by simply
pulling the drains plugs. But Chuck has found it best
by far to empty the tanks before recovering the boat at
the ramp. So he uses a bilge pump in each tank to pump
them empty. I'd be worried about water ballast tanks on
a wooden boat from a rot standpoint and would be careful
to open all the plugs and access panels when the boat
is stored.
(I should add that I think an empty
Caprice will weigh about 900 pounds based on the plywood
sheet count (eight sheets of 1/4", nine sheets of
3/8" , five sheets of 1/2" and one sheet of
3/4"). But any boat like this can hold an awful lot
of gear and junk.)
I took this picture to point out three
features of Chuck's boat.
First, you can see here the upper leeboard
guard. The guard braces the leeboard to take loads in
both tacks and only one leeboard is used. The leeboard
pivots on a bolt near the waterline. The leeboard is under
the upper guard with a small eye protruding through the
slot. A lanyard is tied to the eye so you can pull it
down. Once down there leeboards like to stay down until
they hit something, then they will pop up and you must
pull them down again. Chuck's set up has a shock cord
that will pull the board down and so it can rub the lake
bottom but it will release when the leeboard meets a serious
obstacle. allowing the leeboard to retract all the way.
Second, you can see Chuck's custom port
window. He made patterns for the frames and had them cast
at a foundry in aluminum. They have screens on the outside
and a matching watertight frame hinged on the inside with
lexan on the inside. You would have no idea they are homemade
and you need to bug him about putting up the details on
his Duckworksmagazine website.
Third, you see his solar array for charging
the two 12V batteries he keeps under the aft deck. I think
he said it puts out 50 watts, about 4 amps of charge to
the batteries in good conditions. He says it is plenty
to keep his batteries charged and he has needed no other
charging. He has lights inside and out but also has a
120VAC inverter for powering conveniences like a shaver
or food blender. All very civilized!
Caprice has the tabernacle setup that
I first saw on Karl James' sharpie. The mainsail is 190
square feet, balanced lug. The mast is fairly short, stowing
within the length of the boat when lowered. Chuck demonstrated
putting up the mast, maybe a 15 second operation. I've
been drawing these for a while on different boats but
this is the first one I know of to get built and used.
I'm greatly relieved that is all works so well. Before
you decide to tack a tabernacle like this onto your boat,
be advised that the tabernacle posts go clear to the hull
bottom with big bolts all around a beefy bulkhead.
The sail you see is polytarp made from
one of David Grey's Polysail
kits. It was made by Sandra Leinweber who has
written an essay
about the subject posted at Duckworksmagazine. It is a
blend of Grey's technology in that it uses a rope around
its edge with taped edges. The tapes are sewn down as
Grey advises (don't trust the adhesive very long). But
it has the radial shaping darts that I've been touting.
Chuck figured out the dart size using the
essay I wrote about the subject a while ago. You
can see the small dart near the sail's throat. There is
a much larger one near the tack. The darts are sewn in
place.
Normally I don't advise polytarp sails
for boats that weigh more than about 500 pounds loaded
and Caprice is way heavier than that. It will be interesting
to see how it holds up! As for the shape, Chuck told me
it sets perfectly no matter what he does to it.
I thought Caprice sailed very well in
the light winds we had that weekend. Tacked very smoothly
through 90 to 100 degrees which is all you can ever get
with a low tech rig. Very smooth and quiet compared to
the sharpies I'm used to. It didn't seem at all sensitive
to fore-aft trim. In the light winds it went 5 knots on
the GPS which is certainly fast for the conditions.
Well, all in all I thought Caprice was
everything I was hoping for.
Here is a video clip taken by Kevin O'Neill at the 2008 Texas200
