SLAM DINK, 7-1/2' X 45", 60 POUNDS EMPTY

Slam Dink was presented earlier this year as a prototype design and was quickly built by the Moffitt gang in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Here Sean and Lauren contemplate boatbuilding on a picnic table:

Slam is a pretty straight forward building job from two sheets of 1/4" plywood, which includes the sailing bits like the rudder and leeboard. No jigs needed. It's built by wrapping the sides around three temporary forms and going from there. The only hitch reported in building came when installing the chine logs. They bend in two planes and on a boat this short the bending is pretty sharp. Several chine log candidates broke before getting good ones on. That is a very common problem with short curvy boats, the common solutions are laminating the logs in thinner more pliable layers, steaming the logs to the bend, and bending slowly and carefully with good stock. This is a nail and glue boat with epoxied glass only on the outer chine corners to provide some armor. Yes, it could also be done with taped seams inside and out to eliminate the chine log.

This is the only boat I've ever drawn with a traditional spril sail. I used both a sprit yard and a sprit boom to keep good control of the sail and I was impressed with the photos of the boat sailing. The sail shown is made from a white polytarp sail kit available from PolySails. It has most of Poly Sails' technology in that it is taped together (temporarily, eventually you need to sew it together) and uses poly rope edging. But it uses my radial dart shaping technology that you can find in the back issues of this web site. At least in these light wind photos the sail looks to have none of the extreme twist that ruins the set of a lot of sprit sails. I think the key here is stiff spars, stiff sail edging, and the use of two sprits. If you omit the sprit boom you will need a different sheet location for each point of sail and probably will have no way to control it well on downwind.

These little dinks have problems with carrying a lot of weight, they are just too small to do so. Slam will have good flow lines up to a total weight of about 300 pounds. It will weigh close to 100 pounds empty and ready to sail so you aren't going to sail two adults in this little one, or any little one. It will float that much weight easily but the stem and stern will be immersed and it becomes a clumsy "through the water" boat instead of a fast "over the water" boat. Not that anything this short can really be fast. Also any boat this small and light will be dominated by the weight of the skipper and he will need to be somewhat nimble.