CL Seattle: 18.5ft fuel efficient PT SKIFF

[wharf rat]

Well, for those that really want--REALLY want a Port Townsend Skiff all ready to go:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/kit/boa/2936957430.html

Not mine, btw.

[BrianW]

Nice! With the engine and trailer, it's really not that expensive.

[James McMullen]

No, that's a good deal. Someone will enjoy that.

[Tom Lathrop]

If you are willing to put out $25,000 for an open 18' skiff, would you care if its fuel efficient?

[Bill Perkins]

Yes Tom ;it would be part of the status of owning it ;like buying one of the current electric cars.

[James McMullen]

Man, that's pretty short-sighted of you guys. There's an awful lot of good reasons to be efficient even if you are someone who can afford to be extravagant and wasteful. Seriously, what is wrong with your generation? Not being very good stewards for those to come.

[Bob Smalser]

Seriously, what is wrong with your generation? Not being very good stewards for those to come.

Odd.

I don't recall from the many Seagull threads in the past dozen years that responsible stewardship is a generational thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've even found myself directing youngsters to Wiki because they don't have a clue what an estuary is and does.

Cosmo Lengro’s Boatbuilding Voodoo Hall of Fame
One-liners taken from a decade+ of reading boatbuilder’s on-line forums.

19) The best outboard ever is the vintage Seagull. (You too can be part of the puzzle of why the same folks who would stop their car on a freeway to pick up their kid’s gum wrapper have no qualms at all about leaving fuel and oil slicks in the sensitive estuary their marina is built atop of.)

PETA Corollary: Antifreeze intended for car radiators is a great wood preservative. (Especially if you’re the kind of guy who used to sprinkle DDT on house cats.)

And of course this lack of understanding Mother Nature isn't just limited to clean water:

Plywood Mafia Talking Point #2: It takes a lifetime of practice to master the problems inherent in building with lumber instead of sheet goods or glassed strips. (Or at least a half-hour of reading to understand why a frame-and-panel doesn’t crack.)

1) Old-growth wood is much stronger than modern, plantation-grown wood. (Those strength tables available for comparison in the pre-1940 editions of the USDA Wood Handbook used in Bureau of Ships reprints from Toad Hall Press are all really works of fiction.)

2) The quality of boat wood is directly proportional to its trouble and expense. (The best woods come from illegally-logged endangered species in threatened ecosystems 6000 miles away.)

The Grass is Always Greener Exclusion, West Coast Edition: That you can’t walk to your car in the morning without being showered with needles from woods of equal or superior properties, doesn’t apply.

The Grass is Always Greener Exclusion, East Coast Edition: That local arborists haul more good boat wood to landfills annually than Constantines of New York imported in almost two centuries, is equally irrelevant.

3) The older, larger and prettier the tree, the greater its value. Hence residential yard trees are great sources of free lumber. (All those knots, nails, cables, chains-and-padlocks, concrete and electrical insulators embedded in the wood merely make milling it more exciting.)

Free Lunch Corollary: Free Tree (Noun): 1. The result of an owner choking on an arborist’s estimate for the costs of removal without damage to adjacent structures and utilities. (And is willing to have you risk it sans appropriate knowledge, experience, license, equipment and insurance.) 2. See also: a) Scams. “Swapping $2000 worth of arborist work for $200 in firewood.” b) Idioms: “When two fools meet…”

4) Girdling trees is a great method to dry the wood quickly. (Unless it’s the part of the tree not directly connected to the leaves you’re interested in. Like the heartwood.)

5) Girdling trees is a great method to dry the wood quickly. (Especially if your other hobby is entomology.)

6) Douglas Fir lightly kilned to 19% moisture content for structural use (from 35% moisture content on the stump) is permanently ruined for marine use by the heat. (In turn, Honduras Mahogany hard-kilned for furniture to 7%...from 80% on the stump…is wonderful boatbuilding wood.)

Nonsense–on-Stilts Corollary: Only green or partially-dried wood can be successfully steambent. (Of course all the large chair and musical instrument manufacturers keep both green and kilned stock on hand, absorb the additional procurement/storage costs thereof, and tolerate the resulting warping and finishing problems caused by mixing moisture contents in the product.)

Better-Living-Through-Chemistry Corollary: Ammonia makes wood bend easier. (Just insure your oxygen supply, face mask and rubber body suit are all well-sealed, and that you turn off all pilot lights/igniters/incandescent bulbs when you open that insulated container of anhydrous ammonia.)

7) To produce the driest wood off the saw, trees should be harvested in winter. (That’s why those 70,000lb-limit log trucks carry so many more board feet in January than they do in July. Or do they? )

Ned Ludd Corollary: Wood reclaimed from the Mount Saint Helens blast rotted quickly in marine service because it was blown down during “high-sap season” in May. (That it was the inland variety having lower rot resistance, was exposed to sap-boiling heat, and then lay on the ground for up to ten years before logging crews could reach it had nothing to do with it.)

9) Port Orford Cedar is the ideal planking wood. (That its weight and stability are more akin to heavy Douglas Fir than light Northern White Cedar make it perfect for your smaller boats and canoes.)

10) Alaska Yellow Cedar is too unstable for use as planking. (Those thousands of commercial salmon trollers and Navy minesweepers, gigs, cutters, whaleboats, barges, torpedo chasers, surfboats and lifeboats were all planked with a mystery wood masquerading as Yellow Cedar.)

11) Western Larch is suitable only for firewood. (Unless you happen to be in Idaho, Montana, or eastern British Columbia, where the tree grows in forests instead of just back yards.)

12) Glassed White Spruce makes a great, rot-proof hull. (Especially if your business is selling glassed-spruce hulls.)

13) Tulip (Yellow) Poplar is a rot-resistant planking wood. (Just don’t omit that hot epoxy saturation step.)

Maritime Province Corollary: Red Oak provides 20 years’ service up here in the cold, why aren’t you guys further south using it? (Hint: Does fungus like warm and humid?)

16) Because lead has a higher nobility than zinc on the galvanic charts, using red lead primer in the bilge causes galvanic deterioration of the wood. (Sure. Just like you can make a great bomb from table salt because it contains all that explosive elemental sodium.)

[James McMullen]

That's some weird axe you're grinding, Bob. What has any of that list of fallacies got to do with wanting a fuel-efficient boat?

[Breakaway]

My thing would be how much more efficient can it be? Here's the report for an 18 foot, 1300 lb aluminum skiff with 50-hp. o/b. Burns 2.5 GPH at 4000, compared to "under 2-gph" for the boat in the ad. Lets say its 1-gph less. Big percentage, but small in dollars and amount of fuel burned over the course of a season--lets say 50 hours running. Save 50 gallons or 200 bucks max. Its better yes, but worth 25K? Not to me.

Kevin

ETA-- I can see why someone would choose wood skiff over alum, but efficiency doesn't seem to really matter here.

[Bob Smalser]

Seriously, what is wrong with your generation? Not being very good stewards for those to come.

That's some weird axe you're grinding, Bob. What has any of that list of fallacies got to do with wanting a fuel-efficient boat?

No weirder than your baseless claim that sensitivity to the environment is somehow generational.

(I'm not impressed with the value of spending 25 grand on an open, 18' plywood skiff either.)

[James McMullen]

Wasn't my generation that clearcut the Tongass and sold it at a taxpayer subsidized loss to Japan, Bob. But don't worry, I'm an equal opportunity misanthrope. Your generation is too extravagant and wasteful, the younger generation is too fat and lazy, and my generation is too bitter and cynical.

[Oldad]

Put me down for extravagant, wasteful, fat, lazy, bitter and cynical, but I do like fuel efficient
Oldad

[Tom Lathrop]

Man, that's pretty short-sighted of you guys. There's an awful lot of good reasons to be efficient even if you are someone who can afford to be extravagant and wasteful. Seriously, what is wrong with your generation? Not being very good stewards for those to come.

There must be more to your sensitivity than is apparent, James. It was a humorous remark with only a bit of serious aside. Most of us here are very serious about efficiency on the water and that includes what is taken out of the family kitty to support a hobby. $25K is pretty dear for that little tiddly boat.

[James McMullen]

Sorry Tom. It's just that the very concept that it's okay to be extravagant or wasteful just 'cause you can afford to is something that sticks in my craw. I think that's the very essence of selfishness and poor citizenship. I'm afraid it made me cranky.

[Tom Lathrop]

Sorry Tom. It's just that the very concept that it's okay to be extravagant or wasteful just 'cause you can afford to is something that sticks in my craw. I think that's the very essence of selfishness and poor citizenship. I'm afraid it made me cranky.

All cool James. I am in complete agreement with you on that. I extend my curmudgeonly streak to include the expensive "green" boats that use lots of resources and are often in the news too. That does not include research projects that offer promise of a more efficient future though.

[blueridgebuilder]

The Congressional Budget Office has studied the cost of providing security for "just" the oil that passes through the Persian Gulf. It costs $12 per gallon of gasoline, that's every gallon of gasoline consumed in the US, to just provide security for the oil that passes through the Persian Gulf ... we get less than 10% of our oil from there now.

So gasoline is heavily subsidized by the US Government. If we paid the costs directly it would be something close to $15 per gallon ($12 security costs + $ 3 dollars a gallon for the actual fuel).

Note this doesn't include the costs of securing oil from other parts of the world, just the Middle East.

What kind of boat would you have (or what kind of car would you drive) if you had to pay $15 per gallon for gasoline?

Cause that's the real price of fuel ... and we're not even discussing taxes on fuel.

[wizbang 13]

wonder what the "real" cost of epoxy is?
or my horror fright sander?

[BBSebens]

The Congressional Budget Office has studied the cost of providing security for "just" the oil that passes through the Persian Gulf. It costs $12 per gallon of gasoline, that's every gallon of gasoline consumed in the US, to just provide security for the oil that passes through the Persian Gulf ... we get less than 10% of our oil from there now.

So gasoline is heavily subsidized by the US Government. If we paid the costs directly it would be something close to $15 per gallon ($12 security costs + $ 3 dollars a gallon for the actual fuel).

Note this doesn't include the costs of securing oil from other parts of the world, just the Middle East.

What kind of boat would you have (or what kind of car would you drive) if you had to pay $15 per gallon for gasoline?

Cause that's the real price of fuel ... and we're not even discussing taxes on fuel.

Uhhh... a lot more than just gasoline comes from that oil. How much of a barrel of crude actually ends up as gasoline?

About 21% to 35%. Source

So... just chill out a little.

[Tom Lathrop]

I know nothing about security cost of a tanker passing through the Hormuz straights but a quick chick with a calculator says that a tanker bringing out 50K tons of oil would cost over a billion dollars, just for security.

There's something wrong with this and unless its me, even $.12 per gallon, or $.012, is way too high.