Steve Redmond's steel skipjack?!

[Steve Paskey]

Okay, so it's not a wooden boat. But here's another surprise from Steve Redmond, newly added to his web site. This one is NIGHT SCRAPER, a beautiful 26-foot steel skipjack he designed for a welder friend.
www.sredmond.com/nightscraper.htm (http://www.sredmond.com/nightscraper.htm)

[ 01-31-2003, 11:54 PM: Message edited by: Steve Paskey ]

[johnw]

I like it, but I can't read the specs. How much sail does it have?

[Alan D. Hyde]

A pretty vessel.

Alan

[Steve Paskey]

Re the sail area: I can't read it either, even after I saved the image and enlarged it in photoshop.

[ 02-03-2003, 07:48 PM: Message edited by: Steve Paskey ]

[WWheeler]

umm, not to be negative (love Steve's designs and I do have secret hankering for a steel hull, argh now that's a work boat), but there's something not quite right about her, compared with other skipjack pics i've seen. Is it because the sail area is too small?

[Steve Redmond]

Sorry about the lack of sail detail. The sail area was 336 square feet on 4700 lbs displacement. Which is a good amount of canvas for the weight.

The boom overhangs the stern in the as-drawn sailplan. It's not visible in the photo. The boom is swung out away from the camera so it looks foreshortened. The foot looks a little higher than designed in this view -- I'm missing a couple of really good photos I used to have -- maybe they'll turn up.

Another traditional characteristic of the mainsail is the lack of roach (and the necessary battens to support it) That also makes the sail look a little smaller to modern eyes.

Of course this boat is half the length of the larger class of skipjack and a tenth the volume -- the big ones needed a lot of power to scrape and carry oysters in light airs, and benefitted from the stability of the additional payload weight.

The sail proportions are suited to this particular small and narrow class of boat, and are probably a little large for a pleasure version, rather than too small.

Best Regards,

--Steve Redmond

[johnw]

For a low-aspect rig like this, 336 sq. ft. is not very much area. There's a skipjack this size in Chapelle's catalogue of the National Watercraft Collection and in Sucher's Simplified Boatbuilding: The V-bottomed Boat that carries 525 square feet. Remember, this isn't one of those IOR boats with the tiny main and much of the sail area in the jib overlap. 336 sq. ft. is all you get. Of course, this is an easy problem to solve. You just make the rig bigger and add more reef points.

Those old workboats carried a lot of sail because they didn't have engines to get home in light air. You could just take the view that when the wind gets light, you're going to start the engine. I admit I'm a little hard-headed about that and probably waste a lot of time struggling with zephyrs when I could be putting along. The rig shown wouldn't have to be reefed as often, so it would be less work the sail the boat, and in the pictures the boat seems to be making good progress without a huge amount of wind. I just think the 19th century standard for the size of the rig would have been different, and in some conditions would have out-perofrmed our modern yachts.

[ 02-13-2003, 10:32 PM: Message edited by: johnw ]

[WWheeler]

Steve: Your new pics and the sail plan on the web site show much more sail than I originally thought. She's a beauty alright.

[Steve Redmond]

Please don't put 525 square feet sail on this boat. I've actually done displacement, weight, and stability calculations for it.

If you intend to oyster under sail, it would be a good idea to build something else.

--Steve