Sails & Trailer ~ Houseboat Design Boat Plans

Some good progress to report since my last post. I installed the centre board having applied several primer coats to the inside of the centre board case and 2 coats of antifoul. Some smaller jobs were finished such as installing the traveller on the transom. Next up was to make new mast tangs for the shrouds.

Then a call came for the sailmaker, Yannick Lemmonier, to say that my sails were ready and he could come to fit them, to make sure they fitted correctly.

Yannick had already sent me a sail design viewer with his designs for my boat, which were very interesting:-

And here they are in real life:-

Here is the jib with Yanick Lemmonier from West Sails in the background. Yannick took great care in every detail to make a beautiful suit of sails. I was curious to see the batten in the jib and apparently a small roach cut in as well.

Here you can see the mail sail being hoisted - a very satisfying moment!

Spurned on by this progress, I set about enlisting my friend Brendan to help build a trailer. We had looked at a number of commercial designs but all need some modification and our local galvanizing company will not galvanize any metal which has already been galvanized, so if modifications were made they would leave the structure susceptible to rusting. So nothing for it but to order up the steel and trailer components. We used some of the original molds to allow us accurately site the hull supports. Having the boat plans to hand was very useful in deciding dimensions.

Here are some photos of the trailer nearly completed - just needs to be fitted to the boat to make sure it works and then off to get galvanized.

We designed the trailer with an extendable tongue which consists of 60mm box section sitting inside a 70mm section, and secured in place by two removable pins. The bunks are adjustable and the rear bunks are designed to be removable so that they are clipped off before launch and retrieve.

In this next photo you can see where the extension tongue is held inside the larger box section for on the road towing and when these pins are removed you can extend the tongue to various lengths to suit the launch ramp - hopefully this will allow us launch without launching the tow car as well!