The Sea-gypsy start-up manual

[This is a guest post from Ray, who sailed off from San Francisco some years ago and has been living as a sea gypsy ever since. Sea gypsies have a lot going for them: relative self-sufficiency and self-reliance, camaraderie, competence, mobility and plenty of free, open habitat where they can roam freely. Part of the impetus behind designing QUIDNON is to provide a cheap and viable alternative to the rather overpriced and inadequate offerings of the commercial recreational sailboat market, making the sea gypsy lifestyle accessible to more people.]

In my last essay, I proposed an unusual response to the possibility of global societal collapse that previously has not been suggested.  My core message was summed up in these 30 words:

“I believe that if there is a near extinction catastrophe, a sea gypsy tribe has the best chance of both surviving and replenishing the human population in the wisest manner.”

For those of you who may not have read that article, I encourage you to do so before continuing with this one.  THAT piece provides the “why to” background information for my belief that economic, energy and ecological disasters are very possible in our near future.  It then suggests that various sea gypsy tribes scattered about the planet provide an excellent survival and re-seeding option.  THIS article provides the basic “how to” information for anyone who was inspired by my message, and would like to join our movement.  My sense is that there are three potential types of candidates.  I refer to them as Seekers, Converts and Recruits.

Small boat voyaging for the accident-prone

[On weekends this blog takes a break from designing QUIDNON. Here is a recycled article of mine from some time ago.]

The world is full of stories of success, mostly because successful people like to tell of their victories rather than expound on their defeats. This is self-serving of them and a loss to the rest of us, because we only learn from mistakes. The best kind are small, non-fatal mistakes; these are also the most common. Disastrous, fatal errors are rarely the first ones to be made, because it usually takes a compounding of errors to give rise to a fatal situation. And so here is a little object study of a series of small errors, the problems they caused, and the solutions they necessitated.

The Cabin

The cabin layout is designed to work with lots of people milling about. A representative scenario is as follows: a bunch of people have shown up and want to party; they have brought children who have to be put to bed at some point. Some people want mingle, others want to sit quietly in a corner and chat. Some people are hungry, and there is food being prepared. Some people don't mind at all that the boat has a sauna/steam room, and wish to avail themselves of it. Some people want to sleep; some other people want to have sex. There is a pole-dancer in the crowd.

Referring to the illustration, the black dot near its center is the mainmast, which can be used for pole-dancing. Directly aft of it is the companionway ladder which leads from the pilothouse and deck (where there is a completely separate keg party going on) down to the cabin. Directly aft of the companionway ladder are the two aft cabins. Between them is the engine well which is well insulated against sound; aft of the engine well, against the transom, is the propane locker holding two 20 lb tanks of propane used for the galley range, and the water heater when shore power is unavailable. Forward of the engine well and between the aft cabins and the rest of the interior are very substantial, soundproof partitions. This takes care of the people who want to sleep, and the other people who want to have sex at the same time; they won't hear each others' snores and moans, or the noise made by the revelers, nor will the revelers have to listen to them.

Directly to starboard of the companionway ladder is the galley, equipped with a sink, a three-burner propane range with a stove (most likely a Camp Chef) outfitted with a fume hood that exhausts outside (I am amazed that most boat designers neglect this key feature!) a refrigerator (most likely a Dometic 3-way) and some lockers and shelves.

Directly to port is the heads, equipped with a sink, a marine toilet and a shower/sauna. Aft of the shower/sauna compartment is a compartment that holds the water heater, the holding tank and various other bits of equipment.

Forward of the mainmast is the main salon. There are two settees, one on each side, with a drop-leaf table between them. This takes care of the people who want to sit down and eat. With one leaf of the drop-leaf table extended, they can sit on that side of it and eat, while people can still get past them on the other.

In the back of each settee is a pilot berth, which is quite generous. The pilot berths take care of the children who need to be put to bed at some point. There are curtains in front of the pilot berths, which are drawn to give them some privacy.

In the bow is a small sitting room, with room enough for 4-6 people. That takes care of the people who need a quiet corner to chat, work on a laptop or watch a movie.

That rounds out the experience. In all, QUIDNON can be used to host an impromptu gathering of 20-30 souls, and they won't particularly interfere with each other unless they all want to do the same thing at the same time (but this is unlikely). If the weather isn't bad, lots more people can hang out on deck, which is flat and can be set up with deck chairs and an awning.

Oh, and it bears mentioning that all of these activities are quite possible with the boat under way. There is just one spot that's reserved for sail handling, steering and navigation, and that's the helmsman's seat in the center of the pilothouse, directly behind the console. I will discuss it in a future post.

The dark grey areas along the sides are various kinds of storage: shelves, lockers, hanging lockers, cabinets and so on. The space under the pilot berths is occupied by the water tanks, but everywhere else the space under the settees and the berths is also used for storage. This adds up to about 500 cubic feet of storage space, most of it close to the waterline. If used to store water (not recommended) it would weigh 30,000 lbs. If used to store a library of books (slightly more reasonable) it would weigh 8,000 lbs. That is, by most standards, plenty of storage space, especially for a boat.

Fresh water and anchoring

Water tanks; chain locker

Water is what makes life possible, and salt water doesn't work too well for humans. Drinking it is a very bad idea, limited amounts of it can be used in making soup, it's useless for doing laundry because salted clothes never really dry, and although some salty dogs do wash in salt water, most people prefer fresh.

Most sailboats are quite limited in the amount of fresh water they carry, and when they are used as houseboats outside of a marina (where they can be hooked up directly to shore water) this translates into some amount of discomfort for the residents. When living at a mooring or at anchor (the most economical way to live aboard) it is reasonable to pull up to a fuel dock once a month to pick up water; more often than that, and it becomes a repetitive chore.

QUIDNON has plentiful room for tankage in the awkward, otherwise useless space between the centerboard trunks and the hull. It adds up to 184 cubic feet of space, which equates to 1380 gallons (5225 liters) of tankage and 11,600 lbs of water ballast. A typical shower uses 17 gallons of water, and this means that QUIDNON's water tanks will be sufficient to provide 80 showers.

To be useful as ballast, the water tanks have to be kept full. This, it turns out, is quite easy to arrange by using fresh water bladders made of weldable nylon floating inside tanks that are kept full of salt water, and at “boat pressure” (20 psi or so, much lower than house pressure) using a demand pump. The demand pump is turned off when filling a tank, and the bladders are sized to be somewhat larger than the tanks in which they sit, so that they are never under any pressure. This will make the bladders last a very long time, but spares would of course be carried, so that a new bladder can be swapped in if a tank starts to taste brackish. The tube that taps into a bladder will come out the top, to bleed off the gas that results when the tanks are filled with chlorinated water.

A secondary, fresh water pump would need to be provided for when the boat is drying out during low tide and salt water is temporarily unavailable. The switch-over between the two pumps can happen automatically using a float switch. This will help eliminate the spectacle of annoyed naked people covered in suds running from the shower to the switch panel and back when the tide goes out (and, of course, forgetting to flip the switches back when the tide comes back in and then wondering why the boat is listing to one side).

In addition to the water tanks, another source of “free” ballast comes in the form of anchor chain. A boat of QUIDNON's size requires 7/16-inch chain, about 300 feet of it, which weighs 675 lbs. Well, it's not exactly free; the cost is $2,250 last I checked; but it is otherwise necessary. Nylon rode is quite a lot cheaper, but far less reliable, and for a houseboat that spends most of its time anchored all-chain anchor rode is recommended.

Many sailboat designers find it fun to put a quarter of a ton of chain right at the bow of the boat—the part that's supposed to be especially buoyant. And then they wonder why their designs pitchpole, broach and snap off their masts. By doing so, they create a number of problems. First, obviously, is the weight issue all the way forward: adding weight there increases the angular moment of the boat, causing it to build up angular momentum when bounding up and down waves. Secondly, it is rather difficult for a single-handler to both steer the boat and work the anchor winch in a crowded anchorage, running back and forth between the bow and the helm. Third, while this arrangement makes it possible (if not easy for a single-handler) to anchor from the bow, it makes it almost impossible to anchor from the stern, which is what you want to do when you are heading toward a beach and want to leave open the possibility of getting off that beach again unassisted. This is known as “throwing out a kedge”: the anchor is let go from the transom. Question is, how do you winch in the kedge if the anchor winch is all the way at the bow?

And so, on QUIDNON, what I want to do is locate the chain locker closer to the stern than the bow, so that the anchor winch can be placed right next to all the other lines and controls. There will be two anchor rollers at the bow, tipped down so that the anchors will fall as soon as the anchor chain is given some slack. The anchor chain will drag clear across the deck, through a secondary roller in an aperture at the front of the pilot house, and down into the chain locker below. The reason the anchor rollers are spaced far apart is that QUIDNON will ride much more quietly to anchor when anchored at an angle, so that it presents a V to the waves, cutting through them, instead of slapping into each one with its blunt bow. Anchoring at an angle will also cut down on the noise and put less wear on the mainsail if it is used as a riding sail while at anchor, because then, sheeted in tight, it will always be drawing to one side instead of slatting back and forth.

What all of this adds up to is 15,000 lbs of “free” (or, rather, multipurpose) ballast, enough fresh water for 100 showers, and easy anchoring off the bow or the stern for the single-hander.

The Rudders

QUIDNON's rudders will be set up similarly to the centerboards (off-centerboards?)—one on each side—because the same reasoning applies. They will be similarly cambered out, to improve the effectiveness of the leeward rudder when heeled over. And they will be set up with rudder blades that kick up using a similar technique: a slug of lead embedded in the trailing edge of each blade will be sufficient to cause it to descend due to gravity and come to rest against a stop, but will not be so heavy as to preclude it from bouncing off the bottom in the shallows without sustaining damage.

The blades will not hang all the way down, but rest against a stop at a 30º angle from vertical. If they are allowed to hang all the way down, then the lead slug weighing them down becomes less effective, and they are bound to become deflected by the stream of water rushing past, resulting in erratic steering. On the other hand, if they doesn't hang down far enough, then the angular momentum they would build up from the stern of the boat moving up and down will be enough to cause them to bounce up, again resulting in erratic steering. The angle of 30º is a good compromise between these two extremes, and will be further tuned to produce neutral steering, so that the rudders trail in the water, and produce a small amount of feedback to the helm, but so that moving them takes minimal effort.

Neutral steering is produced by placing the horizontal pivot point of the rudder blade forward of the rudder's vertical axis. This will place enough of the entire rudder's surface area ahead of the vertical axis to balance the forces.

The vertical axis of each rudder will consist of a bronze pipe fixed within the rudder assembly. The top end of each pipe will pivot within two very substantial brackets bolted to the transom. The pipe will be designed to be sacrificial: if the rudder hits something underwater, it is this pipe that will be bent. Spare lengths of pipe will be carried on board, and it will be possible to replace it with the boat in the water.

Each rudder blade will be bolted to the rudder body using a ½-inch bronze bolt with large fender washers, and two disks made of polyoxymethylene (Delrin) sandwiched between the rudder body and the blade to provide friction-free action. The rudder body will be constructed of solid fiberglass (roving and mat covered by cloth) while the blade will be made of two pieces of ¾-inch plywood screwed and epoxied together and covered in 3 cloths of fiberglass. A puck of lead will be embedded in its lower trailing edge.

When running downwind in heavy weather, with the centerboards pulled up, it will be possible to toe in the two rudders to slow the boat down. Not only will they add drag, but, because the blades are cambered out, toeing them in will force the stern down, making pitchpoling or broaching less likely. A typical unpleasant situation involves a storm that makes heaving to difficult, with ample sea room, so that running downwind under bare poles is a good choice, but the boat is too fast even under bare poles. The usual procedure is to deploy a sea anchor or to trail warps off the stern. QUIDNON will offer another choice: apply the brakes by toeing in the rudders. Of course, this requires the rudders to be built very heavily.

When motoring, both of the rudders will be well out of the way of the stream of water from the prop. This, based on my experience, adds about a knot of speed given the same throttle setting when motoring at slightly below hull speed. I have never understood why designers place the prop directly in front of the rudder and incur a speed penalty when it is so easy to offset it slightly. Love of symmetry?

The Centerboards

On most point of sail QUIDNON will sail just fine without using a centerboard. The chine runners will trap enough water along the almost vertical sides to prevent leeway. This was my experience with HOGFISH, which did a fine beam reach with the boards up, with barely 10º of heel. However, when sailing close-hauled, the chine runners become overwhelmed, and hard on the wind with the centerboard up HOGFISH could only manage a course about 60º to windward. This was still useful in tacking out of shallows, where the centerboard could not be deployed. But it wasn't possible to make good progress to windward out on the ocean without lowering the centerboard.

In addition, HOGFISH was impossible to dock or to maneuver in and out of a slip with the centerboard up. This was a mistake I made on multiple occasions, and at one point I even wanted to make a little brass plaque, to screw to the dodger right above the companionway; something along the lines of “Remember to lower the centerboard, you idiot!” With the centerboard up, the rudder would quite effectively alter the orientation of the boat, but not its direction of drift. Luckily, dropping the centerboard only required ripping a line out of a jam cleat and could be done in about 3 seconds, so the embarrassment was generally short-lived. With the board down HOGFISH happily pirouetted within its overall length.

And so QUIDNON has to have a centerboard—the same kind I had on HOGFISH, since that design worked so well. It was a kick-up centerboard: when it hit things underwater, it bounced up. It was ballasted with a slug of lead embedded between its layers of plywood, and the amount of lead was calibrated so that the centerboard was almost neutrally buoyant when immersed in salt water. It descended through gravity, was reasonably easy to haul back up using a 3-part purchase, and didn't get damaged when it hit something underwater even when moving at hull speed.

In addition to providing lateral resistance and good tracking, the centerboard also served as the depth sounder of last resort: by keeping the centerboard purchase under a bit of tension, I could get a warning of an impending grounding. When it started to droop and jingle, it was time for a quick 180º course correction. Working together with the kick-up rudder blade, the centerboard also made for very responsive steering when being dragged through mud or sand. Thus, even when I found myself in barely 4 feet of water and heading for 0, I did not lose hope, because I could still execute a 180º course correction and head for deeper water.

The design of the centerboard on HOGFISH had the following major shortcomings:

1. The centerboard trunk took up the entire middle of the cabin—the most prized piece of real estate in the entire boat. Going from the v-berth to the heads required a circumnavigation of the entire boat—all the way to the galley and back again on the other side. The centerboard trunk made the already narrow cabin feel even more cramped.

2. Having been made of 3 layers of ¾-inch plywood screwed and epoxied together and sheathed in fiberglass (3 layers of cloth) and suspended on a pivot made of 3-inch bronze pipe, the centerboard was relatively indestructible—except for its forward edge. Coral heads were especially hard on it, taking big chunks out of it, which I had to fill in with thickened epoxy during subsequent haul-outs. The obvious solution is to screw a stainless steel rub-rail to the leading edge of the board. The screws have to be long (3 inches) and bedded in epoxy, so that they don't pull out even if the rub-rail takes a big enough hit to crimp and drive it into the plywood.

3. The centerboard was quite difficult to service even with the boat hauled out. Fully extended, it protruded by about 6 feet out of the bottom if its trunk, and blocking the boat at that height is not possible using standard jacks. Dropping the centerboard and putting it back in would have been quite an adventure. And so the top of the centerboard, or the inside of the centerboard trunk, was never serviced in any way or even looked at. This didn't seem to matter much, but in general it would be better to make the centerboard easy to service. This I intend to do by making the top of the centerboard trunk into an access hatch, so that the centerboard can be hoisted out for service with the boat in the water. The lid of the access hatch can be made sacrificial, so that if the boat hits something underwater while sailing fast and the centerboard goes flying into its trunk, the resulting damage will be confined to heads sheared off a few bolts that hold the hatch in place, which will be easily replaced.

On QUIDNON the design of the centerboard poses an additional challenge: given its wide hull, a single centerboard hanging down from its center-line will be rather ineffective when the boat is heeled over, because only part of it will be submerged. My solution is to have two centerboards instead of one—one on each side of the hull. Note that this solves Problem 1 above: the centerboard trunk will no longer take up the prime real estate in the middle of the cabin. Instead, each centerboard trunk will sit off to the side, making a comfortable 2½-foot-high foundation for a pilot berth and forming one side of the fresh water tank (because everything must serve more than one purpose).

Problem 3 will be solved by providing an access hatch at the top of the centerboard trunk, with hoist attachment points screwed into the cabin-top above for lifting the centerboard out for service with the boat in the water. Since the bottom of the boat will be surfaced with copper sheet, it will never need to be hauled out, and so the ability to service the centerboards in this way will be essential.

An additional problem remains: with the boat heeled over, the centerboards will not be at an optimal angle. The optimal angle is at 90º to the surface of the water, but if the boat is heeled at, say, 30º, then its effective surface area is reduced by some 15%. The solution is to camber the centerboards out by a small amount—10-12º.

Both centerboards will be lowered for maneuvering in tight quarters, but when sailing to windward on a given tack for any great length of time, only the leeward centerboard will need to be deployed. This will cut down on drag somewhat. Of course, this is not something one would want to do when short-tacking through a channel or out of a crowded harbor.

What remains is a very, very minor problem: the problem of “clunking.” On HOGFISH, when tacking, or when temporarily lying ahull with the centerboard down, it would clunk back and forth in its trunk. This wasn't dangerous, but some people found it unnerving. It also interfered with sound sleep while underway. I would like to solve this problem by providing packing along the pipe that serves as the centerboard pivot, restricting the motion of the top of the board, and by surfacing the board with a strip of HDPE plastic (cutting board material) on each side at the point where it contacts the aperture at the bottom of the centerboard trunk. This should reduce clunking to a sub-audible level.

Concrete slab bottom

Ballast is what allows sailboats to carry sail, by keeping their masts more or less vertical in spite of the forces generated by the sails. Keelboats carry ballast in their keels, and the usual high-end material for keel ballast is lead, which is 17 times denser than water. Lead is a grey, weak, toxic metal. Some sailboat builders cast an entire keel out of lead with some bolts sticking out the top, and bolt it onto the underside of the boat with a backing plate and some nuts. Treating lead as a structural material always seemed like an odd choice to me. On such boats, when the keel snaps off and sinks the rest of the boat floats upside-down, trapping the crew, who then spend however long it takes for rescue to arrive, soaking in salt water polluted with diesel fuel and battery acid.

Such prospects never appealed to me, so when circumstances forced me to buy a production boat (a yacht, if you will) I opted for one that had an integral fiberglass shell and a steel slug in the keel for ballast. At least the keel isn't made of extra-heavy putty and won't snap off. An additional feature of lead-keeled boats is that the keel has a tendency to gradually disappear. When immersed in salt water, lead gradually turns into lead oxide, which is a light, fluffy material that easily washes away. Although some lead keels are covered with a fiberglass skin, some are simply painted, and many a marine surveyor, tapping around the keel, has seen his hammer go right through the paint and the fluffy white powder underneath. This is all very profitable for the recreational boating industry, I am sure.

On my previous boat, HOGFISH, the ballast consisted of lead bricks which the builder cast into precise shapes that fit between the frames under the cabin sole. They were certainly very effective as ballast, and since the bilge was usually dry, they did not deteriorate at all over a 30-year period. But with QUIDNON the choice of ballast is completely open (as is the quantity of it, which will be determined experimentally using a model). But supposing I used lead ballast, and used, say, 10,000 lbs of it, at about $2/lb for reclaimed led shot (which then has to be cast, generating toxic fumes in the process) that would be $20,000. So if the construction budget is $50,000, 40% would be spent on ballast? No, thank you!

Lead makes good ballast because it is compact, but QUIDNON, which will have around 3000 cubic feet of interior space, is not exactly cramped, and so using lead ballast because it is more compact than other options would be a false efficiency. Steel scrap embedded in concrete would work just as well, and many a backyard boatbuilder and cost-conscious ocean navigator has used it with great success.

But there is another consideration: one way of saving money is to make sure that each element in the design does more than one job, and as many jobs as possible. So, for instance, on QUIDNON the boom gallows will not only hold up the booms, but will also provide ventilation (they will be hollow and have openings for air), hold sheet blocks, provide attachment points for a deck awning, support an engine hoist and maybe even house some electronics.

With ballast, the situation is similar: why just use it as ballast when it can do other things as well; such as, for instance, form the entire bottom and bow of the boat—out of fiber-reinforced concrete. Fiber-reinforced concrete is portland cement with sharp sand as aggregate (something like 1:3 ratio, details TBD) with short-strand glass and polymer fibers mixed in. The result is a very tough substance, with good abrasion resistance, very resistant to cracking. It can be sealed with a penetrating epoxy sealer to be completely waterproof. The hull will still be classifiable as a fiberglass (FRP, or fiber-reinforced plastic) hull, but its core will be concrete below the waterline and plywood above.

In case you are thinking that this will make QUIDNON a ferrocement boat, it will not. Ferrocement boats were popular at one time, because of the extremely low cost of materials. They were constructed by making a “basket” out of steel rods and mesh held together by staples, which was then “plastered” by using a very dry cement mix. The cement has to be carefully skimmed to just barely hide the basket, or the end result is too heavy. What's worse, the entire plastering operation has to be done at one go, in a single marathon plastering session, so that the cement sets as a unit. This is too much know-how for most backyard builders, and so results varied from OK to awful. Nobody builds ferrocement hulls any more.

What I intend to do is pour the entire bottom and bow of the boat as a slab, using a mold. A cement truck will deliver a load of the right mixture, with the right ratio of cement to sand, and the fibers already added. This will be poured into the awaiting mold, which will already hold a structure made of rebar. I intend to be generous with the rebar, since it won't add much to the cost. The pour will be done upside-down, since the bottom of the slab will be very easy to smooth by hand, whereas the top of it will be very detailed, and include the following features (which would otherwise have to be built up out of other, more expensive materials):

1. Mast steps
2. Bottom half of the water tanks
3. Foundations for fuel tanks
4. Bottom half of battery compartments
5. Bottom half of the chain locker
6. Foundation for sewage holding tank
7. Chases for plumbing pipes
8. Chases for electrical cables
9. Ventilation ducts to draw in cool, water-chilled air for solar-powered air-conditioning
10. Drainage paths for condensation (a.k.a. “limbers”)
11. Compartment to hold the bilge pump
12. Foundation for cabin sole (floor)
13. Foundations for bulkheads and partitions
14. Lexan window for an in-hull depth sounder
15. Apertures for through-hulls (raw water in, sewage out for sanitation lines)
16. Aperture and foundation for the engine well
17. Bottom attachment points for the rails that hold the engine bracket
18. Shower sump and a well for its pump
19. Sockets for the rudder posts
20. Foundations for the centerboard trunks ...and, last but not least...
21. All-around lap joint with pre-cast perforations to hold the bolts which will make the concrete core of the bottom and the plywood core of the topsides and deck into a single, integral piece.

All of these intricate details will be drafted out using CAD, rendered in particle board using an NC mill, and then snapped or screwed together to make the mold, which will be back-filled with sand to make it hold the weight.

Once the concrete is poured, smoothed along the top and sets, it will be “hydrated” over a period of some months by keeping it covered with burlap and sprinkled with water. During the hydration period the concrete works up to full strength and stops absorbing moisture. The concrete slab will then be completely dried out and sealed with penetrating epoxy concrete sealer, making it impermeable to water. Then a fiberglass skin will be applied to its exterior surface, in effect making the concrete act as the core of a fiberglass boat.

Finally, the entire bottom surface will be covered with copper plate. This will keep it free from fouling by marine organisms for the life of the boat, so that it will never require painting. The plate will be attached to the concrete using self-tapping stainless steel screws. I do not plan to plate the sides below the waterline, because there the plating would deteriorate much more quickly and require periodic replacement. Instead, I will keep them painted with ablative paint, and scrape and paint them periodically when the boat is drying out at low tide. In this way, QUIDNON will never need to be hauled out, and will never need to have its bottom painted, eliminating a very large category of expense.

Finally, the slab will have a cage built around it, and flipped over using a crane. After that, the topsides and the rest of the hull will be built up, by bolting plywood pieces along the lap joint that will run just above the design waterline. Once the hull is built, the lap joint will be covered over with fiberglass along with the rest of the hull, faired to make it smooth and painted.

This approach achieves cost savings in the following categories:

1. Eliminates the need to form the bottom using several layers of plywood screwed and epoxied together, saving a lot of time and a lot of materials.
2. Eliminates the need to separately build in ballast: the amount of ballast is simply “dialed in” by adjusting the thickness of the poured slab.
3. Eliminates the need to separately form out of (expensive) plywood and glass in the 21 features incorporated into the bottom, which are listed above (and there will probably be more). The disposable plywood used to build the mold is only $2 for a 4x8 sheet.
4. Eliminate the need to ever haul out the boat and repaint its bottom.

In addition, this approach eliminates the problem of pounding. On certain points of sail, and sporadically whenever the sea state is boisterous or there are cross-seas running, square hulls have a tendency to pound. If the bottom were made of plywood (as it was with HOGFISH), the pounding would produce a resounding base drum-like sound that would reverberate throughout the boat. This is not dangerous, but it is not all too pleasant and interferes with sound sleep. With the bottom and bow made of a concrete slab, however, the pounding will be virtually unnoticeable. It will be like a rock hitting the water, and the only sound will be a loud splash.

Finally, the concrete slab surfaced with copper sheet would make QUIDNON go aground extremely well. Copper is quite tough, and, as Dave Zeiger's Triloboats have proven, is tough enough even when backed with just plywood, but is especially tough when backed with a slab of concrete. Thus, QUIDNON should have no difficulty with going aground and floating off again.