What is it ?

[J. Dillon]

Saw this little FG beauty this afternoon at the local boat yard. She appears to be about 15'LOA and has a deep cockpit and two bunks.

[Donn]

Don't know what it is, but I know how it got it's name.

[Donn]

Here's a wooden one:

[Todd Bradshaw]

It's a Nordica 16 and if it's for sale - buy it! What a great little boat. I rebuilt one a few years ago and then sold it because it seemed that we simply had too many boats sitting around here, which was a mistake. It has a pretty standard sloop rig which is nothing to write home about, but is easy to launch, trailers very easily, makes way through big chop without a fight even though the LOA is really not even a full 15' (I never did figure out why it was called the 16, not the 15) and is both very secure and a lot of fun to sail. The cabin is quite tiny and bare, but two friendly people could overnight in it now and again without a problem. Big cockpit for a boat that's only about as long as a Sunfish.

This is the only photo I can find of mine after the refurbishing job at the moment - someplace I must have more. The green paint, by the way, is a roll and tip job done out in the driveway with Brightside. The bottom paint is Hydrocoat.


More info here:
http://www.nordicaboats.com/html/nordica-16.html

There are a couple structural things which need upgrading when you buy one (like the hull/deck seam) but it's pretty well built. Of all the old boats that I have bought in bad shape and re-done, this one was the obvious crowd pleaser. Complete strangers would stop their cars when I was working on it in the driveway and walk up to ask what I wanted for it. I could have sold it to three different people on the day when I sold it.

[rbgarr]

I looked seriously at one a number of years ago that was for sale hard by LL Bean's. I was on a Murray Peterson and Aage Nielsen little double-ender jag at t he time, but wanted an open daysailer without a cabin. The price was right and I was trying to determine if I could remove the cabin and extend the cockpit without making a hash of a nice boat. Then it sold before I could make a bid on it. Probably just as well.

[J. Dillon]

Thanks Todd for the fill in on that boat. Sure like to try her out.

It would seem that 4 people in that little cockpit would pull her stern down.

JD

[Todd Bradshaw]

Found the other pics. Here's the story that goes with them. It's long as hell, but hopefully interesting Saturday night reading.

This one was quite a project. I found it at a dealership on consignment from an older couple. It had a rather interesting dark gold-colored gelcoat with a white bootstripe and looked rather woody from a distance, but the gold was in really bad shape. It also had a waterline INSIDE THE CABIN AND COCKPIT about 18" above the floor where it had been allowed to fill with rainwater and sit.

To make things worse, the big raised, V-berth-style bunk platform (which takes up most of the inside and was foam-filled) had a hole cut in it. Somebody had opened it up, thinking they could put deck plate there to make a storage area. When they got it open and found foam, they just screwed a chunk of plywood over the hole. This hole was below the interior waterline and the foam was soaked. The carpeted plywood pads on the trailer's hull stands had rotted off and the weight of the water had forced two of the four metal bases for the pads (about 10" square) through the hull.

The deck's white gelcoat was decent as were the spars, sails and most of the hardware. The trailer was pretty bad, but luckily they had needed to replace the bearings and wheels just to get it to the dealership. I'd never heard of the boat, but bad as it was, it had that look. The other big factor was that there was almost no coring (plywood, foam, etc.) which would have deteriorated. It was almost all solid fiberglass construction (much easier to fix). I paid $800 for it.

Sometimes you hook up the trailer and very quickly find that the boat just doesn't ride very well. You know it's always going to be a pain to tow. This one was the exact opposite. The load probably weighed 1500 lbs. or more, yet it was extremely well behaved and towed like a Sunfish on a 100 lb. trailer.

Step #1 of the recovery process was to dig out a whole bunch of wet foam through the hole, cobble together a temporary ventillation system for the bunk platform and let it work for TWO YEARS while I worked on the rest.

The hull would sit OK with two pads removed as long as I was careful, so next I fixed the holes in the bottom and rebuilt the pads and trailer while the boat sat on it. I found that they hadn't connected the deck to the hull in the cockpit area. It was seamed inside the cabin area and at the very stern through a hatch, but not along the cockpit seating area (I guess they couldn't reach that far). I made a spatula on a stick and kind of a rubber finger on another and used them to apply a big epoxy fillet to make a hull/deck seam about 5' long on each side.

The gold gelcoat was too hard to match and too chewed-up to bother with. I disk sanded the entire hull, taking off about half the gelcoat thickness until I got down to solid stuff and then filled and faired any remaining dings. The hull was then barrier coated with six coats of WEST 105/205 and their barrier coat additive from the top of the bootstripe all the way down to the bottom of the keel. This was then sanded smooth. I had two moorings at the time and was considering putting this boat on one of them so I gave the bottom a couple coats of Hydrocoat ablative bottom paint, which is good stuff. The topsides were painted with a mixture of dark green Brightside and black to make it even darker. We called it "Loon's Head Green".

We were renting a house at the time and had a small garage and a gravel driveway. We had a trimaran, my Starboat, a Speedball dinghy, the Mini-12, a Hobie 14 and the Avon sportboat, all on trailers, along with a couple canoes and an iceboat. The garage was jammed, so all the work on this boat had to be done in the driveway.

The deck polished-up pretty well, but the heavy vinyl rubrail which covered the hull/deck seam had pulled loose at the ends where it was screwed-into the stems and both the port and starboard pieces were now about 4" short. Failing to find a source for the stuff, I tied lines to the ends, hooked one to a tree, the other to a 6:1 Harken Catamaran mainsheet system and another tree and stretched it just as hard as I possibly could until it was about 6" longer than needed. I left it there for a couple days. Then I attached them to the proper spots on both ends, screwed them in and went along tapping them over the hull flange as they shrank to fit tight and screwed the center areas back down.

I cut new Lexan windows, replaced the running lights, re-wired everything (the old wires were glassed-in, which is great at protecting them, but not so good for making repairs) refinished the handrails, polished the chocks and hardware, rebuilt the shrouds, spreaders, halyards, motor mount, and chainplates, added a bilge pump and ran it out the stern and built a new mahogany rudder top section and an S-shaped tiller with a claw holding a ball on it's forward end and about 12" of french whipping.

I made a big cockpit cover, a tiller cover and handrail covers. By this time, my registration had expired and I hadn't even had it in the water yet. About that time we bought a house and moved. I now had more room, but the house wasn't in much better shape than the boat had been, so it took prority. The next season we decided to thin the fleet and since we weren't using this one and since it was so easy to sell it, I did.

The first time we put it in the water was a shakedown cruise for the new owner. It was a really nasty day with high winds and about 3' waves coming across a five-mile wide section of Lake Mendota. I was a bit nervous as we were heading to a mooring about two miles upwind and had three people in a pretty small, untried boat. It's pretty funny when you stand on deck to release the bow line or hoist a jib. The entire deck is only about three feet long. The buyer is a good friend and I'm glad he got it, but I was mentally kicking myself all the way there for selling it because it just sailed like a dream and didn't mind the waves and wind at all. It floated like a cork and climbed over anything that came along like it was no big deal. It's a little boat, but it thinks it's a big boat! Luckily, we can borrow it for an afternoon just about any time we want, so it's not that bad.

The moral of the story, my friends, is never buy a wooden boat because owning one is too much work! Always buy a fiberglass boat. As you can see from this tale, they almost maintain themselves.

here are the pics

[Figment]

Very cool find, JD! She's at P66?

I took a troll through the Bruce and Johnson yard yesterday on my way home. They had nothing nearly as interesting. Unless you count a CD Typhoon supported by NINE jackstands....

The name is familiar. She might be a Thimble Islands boat.

[Figment]

Todd, I don't suppose you have a pic of that claw-holding-a-ball tiller?

[J. Dillon]

Yea Mike, that's where she is.

Todd got any idea if they sell just the hull up there in Canada ? That is a nice boat but they try to pack too much in that hull. I can see it as a nice day sailer maybe decked over to the mast , Then open with deep seats.

That's quite a tale Todd. Still wish ya had one ?

JD

[ 05-09-2005, 07:29 PM: Message edited by: J. Dillon ]

[Todd Bradshaw]

For some dumb reason, I took plenty of pictures of the boat where the tiller had the cover on, but never bothered to take one of the tiller itself....duh... Next time I'm over that way in the yak I should get one for posterity. I did find the original concept drawing that I made for it though. Due to my somewhat limited carving skills, the real one isn't quite as fancy as the drawing with the scales between the whipping and the ball, and my claws aren't that good, but one of these years I'll make one for some boat when I have a whole winter to fuss over it. The ball is about the size of a billiard ball and makes a pretty nice hand grip when your steering. The tiller motion on the boat is really cool. Rather than just swinging port and starboard like most tillers, the angle of the front of the rudder blade and the gudgeons causes the tiller's inboard end to make an arc as it moves from side to side (it's at it's highest point when steering straight) - pretty neat. Here's the drawing. If there ever was a tiller that instantly makes you feel like a Viking as you hold it and steer the boat, this is it!


Jack, the company went out of business a while back and I don't know what happened to the molds, design rights, etc. I thought at one point about cutting off the entire deck and cabin and replacing them with some sort of cool wooden structure shaped kind of like a Cape Dory cabin. I also thought seriously about replacing the entire rig. The stock sloop rig works fine, and one has to appreciate the efficiency of it, but I've spent a lot of time sailing sloops and am rather bored with them unless they are extremely tweak-able. I figured I'd rig it as some sort of cutter-type with a standing lug main. It's such a fun and distinctive little boat that I wanted a fun rig on it as well, even if it probably wasn't as practical as the original.


Then I figured out all the reefing permutations and fiddled with the rig design until I could keep the balance close to normal whithin a pretty broad spectrum of sail combinations. The pink C.E. marker is the combined total for each plan and keeping it from wandering around too much was an interesting exercise.

First reef:


Second reef:


Third reef:


I still keep an eye out for used Nordicas. If I saw one at a good price, I might bite. We looked at an old Hallman 21 last year (basically a modified Nordica 20) but it would have been another marathon rebuild to get it really looking good and we didn't have the time or energy to mess with it. The 16 is probably more fun, too.