guide to make boat

The Metal Boat Festival is a gathering of people who are involved with steel and aluminium boats and takes place annually in the Pacific Northwest. It has moved around this beautiful area and this year it takes place at the Cap Sante Boat Haven in the Port of Anacortes Marina from 19-21 August.

This year I will be one of the speakers at the Festival. I have participated four times since 1998 but have not been there for about 5 years. I look forward to returning and renewing old friendships.

On the Friday evening I will be the dinner speaker, with a PowerPoint illustrated talk about growing up as a surfer/sailor/amateur boatbuilder in South Africa, how it affected the development of my career as a yacht designer and the subsequent path that I have taken.


On Saturday afternoon I will talk about developments in boat design through the years. This will be partly historical and partly current trends and will also be a PowerPoint presentation. It will cover such issues as hull, keel, rudder and rig design and the effects that decisions have on the behaviour of the resulting boat.

On Sunday morning I will be one of the panel in the Designers and Builders Forum. This is an open discussion with people from the floor asking questions of the designers and builders on the panel. From past experience, this leads to valuable and very interesting discussion, with the members of the panel offering their solutions to problems posed.

The program includes interesting presentations by boat builders and others from the boating industry on a wide range of subjects related to building, owning, maintaining and cruising boats generally, with a strong leaning toward metal boats. A highlight will be a talk by Charmaine Lingard about their voyages between Canada and Antarctica, over the barbecue dinner on Saturday evening. Their boat is "Vlakvark", built in South Africa to my Vickers 45AC design. See the full festival schedule .

Berthing will be available on the marina for metal boats associated with the Festival. One of them will be the aluminium centre cockpit Dix 43 "Namo", owned by Ian Clark and built by John Dearden in Gibson, BC.


So, if you are interested in metal boats, or want to learn more about them, Anacortes could be the best place to be on 19-21 August.

The 20th Annual Wooden Boat Show was a great success. Attendance was at a record high and the visitors seemed to be serious about boats, not just tourists passing through Mystic Seaport. We had visitors at our booth and Paper Jet most of the time, sometimes lined up waiting to talk.

To those guys who told me that I get them into trouble, I sympathise with you for your predicament. It seems that they spend too much time in my website, which gets them into trouble with their wives. At least it is not porn or drugs taking their time and hard-earned money.

Special visitors to our display were Bill Conner with son Spencer and father Bill Snr. They are building a Didi 40cr in Boulder, Colorado and are turning the hull this week. Another special visitor was Eric Thesen, originally from Knysna South Africa and now living in New Zealand. He worked on a Vickers 45 in Knysna and is now working in New England on a large rebuild project. Thanks guys, for coming by.

The Paper Jet attracted even more attention this year than before. We expect to sell a few more of them before the 21st Annual Wooden Boat Show. We hope to be there with the Paper Jet and another new plywood dinghy, which is currently being built in North Carolina.

Regards,

Dudley
Visit our website for info on our designs.

We are heading into summer and our annual boat show road trip is approaching. The destination is the very beautiful Mystic Seaport, Connecticutt. The show is the 20th Annual Wooden Boat Show.

We will have the prototype of the Paper Jet sailing skiff on display, as well as information on our many other designs, for building from all materials. We will be at Booth 13A in Tent A, with our boat set up just outside the entrance alongside our booth. In 2007 we received the Outstanding Innovation Award at this show for the Paper Jet.



Paper Jet numbers are growing worldwide. This week we have shipped plans to a builder in Thailand, who has sail #55. A Paper Jet Forum has been started recently for exchange of ideas and tips for building, rigging, sailing and tuning the Paper Jet.

Please drop by the booth or boat to see what we have, ask questions or just chat about what new designs we have coming soon.

Robert Christinger is the man behind  Alumar Yachts. His first experience of our designs was when he bought plans for the Dix 43 Pilot, to have one built for himself. He converted our 2-dimensional paper plans into a very detailed 3-dimensional computer model, complete with every piece of metal that was to go into the boat structure.
Then he converted the entire structure into interlocking pieces, nested them onto aluminium plates and had them cut by a metal supplier with CNC equipment. That is the process of creating a kit that can be built by a professional boatbuilder, or any suitably experienced amateur.

The pieces were delivered to the builder and the boat in the photo below was the result.


That was the first of a series. Since then Robert has designed similar CNC kits for a few of our other designs. Alumar Yachts can supply cutting files for a kit to be cut by a supplier near to the builder or can arrange for supply of a pre-cut kit to be delivered. Robert can also customise the model and cutting files to suit the owner's needs.

One of the people for whom Robert supplied cutting files is Brian Russell in Tennessee. Brian is a very skilled metal sculptor who has taken to boatbuilding. He is building the Dix 43 Pilot for himself and producing a high quality boat.


Brian's company is Odyssey Yachts, with a great blog illustrating every step of his building process. Odyssey Yachts is also the agent for Alumar Yachts in North America, able to supply pre-cut kits for our metal designs.

If you are considering building a metal boat, contact Robert or Brian via the contact pages on their websites. They can help to reduce the time and effort needed to build a quality boat.

See our full range of designs at http://dixdesign.com/ .

The WOOD Regatta is approaching fast. It will be sailed on 20-22 May at the  Rock Hall Yacht Club in Maryland, just across Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis.

This looks like being a memorable racing and social event. A wide range of wooden boat types have already entered and the Rock Hall Yacht Club has a reputation for laying on excellent racing, with good facilities both on and off the water. Organisation is by Carl Cramer and his able staff at Wooden Boat Magazine.

You can read more about the regatta at http://www.woodenboat.com/woodregatta.php and keep up to date on developments through the WOOD Regatta thread on the Wooden Boat Forum .

Wooden sailboats up to 30ft on deck are eligible, so whether you have an Argie 10 or a Didi 26, you are able to sail in the regatta.  I have entered my Paper Jet #001 and hope to meet owners of some of our other wooden boats there as well.

Don't wait too long, entries close on May 5th.

With my apologies to the late great William Shakespeare, we have just come through a trying time. Those of you who have tried to visit our website and instead found error pages or error messages will have felt some of the frustration along with us.

It started with reports that some visitors from South Africa could not access our website. Try as we might, we could not find for certain where the problem was. It only affected some and not others but we knew there was a problem to sort out. Internet techs and computer geeks on both sides of the Atlantic tried to find the problem without success. My conclusion was that there was a breakdown in connection between a router in Northern Virginia and our ISP, not too far away.

For those who don't know these things (and probably also don't care), your computer talks to websites on the other side of the world with signals that travel at the speed of light and pass through up to 20 routers and the cables, microwaves etc that connect them. Each of those routers can be identified by IP address, owner, location etc so that we can find where a problem is, if we are lucky. So, I identified that my problem was probably with a particular router machine at a particular company in Andover, VA.

However, that bit of info did not solve the problem. Before I was able to arrange a fix, my website disappeared from the face of the earth, to be replaced by 404 Error Page messages where previously we had all those pretty pictures and lots of text to help you fall asleep. Its disappearance also sent 18-24 hours of emails flying off into cyberspace at a speed so fast that even the Hubble Telescope has no chance of spotting them, let alone ugly witches staring into a bubbling pot.

So, if you sent us any emails in the past day or two and have not had a response, please send them again. If you tried to visit us and have been concerned about the error pages, please visit again. We are still at the same address, although that address has magically moved from Virginia to Massachusetts, courtesy of the wonders of the web, some deft fingerwork on my keyboard and much head scratching to get it all to work properly. I have moved it to a company that is able to offer proper support when I need it.

If you see anything that is not working properly, I apologise. I cannot visit every page of my site to check that they are all working as intended but you guys will spot any problems. Please tell me if you see anything that I need to correct.

Thank you all, for staying loyal to us.

Dudley

The Didi 26 has to rate among our most successful designs. I designed it in 1997/8, so it has been around for about 13 years. In that time we have sold plans for 250 boats, so about 20 boats per year. They have been built by amateur builders on all continents and in far-off corners of the world.

I have no idea how many are on the water because only a small proportion of owners send me their launch and sailing photos. I am very grateful to those owners of our boats who do send photos of the build process and sailing once completed.

The most recent sailing photo that I have received for a Didi 26 was from Bill Richards on South Island in New Zealand. He has sent me a few sailing pics over the past year or two but the new one is very nice, showing his "Panic Knot" at speed under masthead asymmetrical in strong winds.

Bill added the following commentary to his photo.

"The conditions where extremely testing with a southerly wind that ranged from 5 knots to 30 knots. So we put up as much sail as we dared and went for it. We did wipe out several times both using the fractional and mast head kites. We tried very hard to break stuff but didn't succeed. max speed was 15 knots in flat water. And everything was under control on a good deep run, unfortunatley the course then called for a reach to the finish so we had to turn and try and carry kite, we managed very well until the gusts built to strong and then couldn't control it, ( the other boats wiped out before us) recovery was quick and I can now prove that the boat has a good righting moment, as we managed to have the mast head kite up and full main up with the top of the mast in the water!

What helped us was that the oppositon were flying conventioanl spinnakers and when they lost it they didn't recover as quickly as us. When we rounded up we didn't ever get as far as head to wind or worse as the oppositon did. The crew didn't even get wet feet as the boat on its side sits very high in the water. There is no chance of any water getting near the companion way.

The photo shows us doing about 12 knots."
 
We also have a 23ft version of this concept, the Didi 23.
 
Please visit our website to see our other designs.