Experience starts when you begin - Pete Culler

Kuai Le

This is Kuai Le, a chinese like junk of my design and which I built over three years, it shouldn't have taken that long but life happens. My purpose here at Small Boat Design for Beginners is to take you through the steps that led me to this place and to show you that you too can design your own boat and build it if that is your desire.

Pete Culler said that experience starts when you begin so we will begin at the beginning.

In the beginning

Aspiring beginning small boat designers should start by studying the successful designers, those with following and fans, Phil Bolger comes to mind, no longer with us sadly, but his small boat designs are classics and sometimes whimsical but the majority of his small boats followed a particular credo. It is this sort of focus that a beginning designer needs to develop.

When I started designing I was in the Navy and designing small boats began as a way of filling time. Mostly they were doodles, ideas for boats rather than fully developed design concepts. This is the beginning.

A small pencil cartoon of a dory type boat but laid out in the classic way on a grid of waterlines, stations and buttocks, (really not needed in this type of boat but good practice). Barely visible at the top left is the scale 1"=2'. After I fully developed this concept, several years later, I built two of them for the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets in Prince Rupert.

Doodling boats is a great way to begin, you get feel for the type of boat you want to design and what looks good and what is down right ugly no matter what you do with it. As we go along we'll go from doodling to the bones and all the practical things that you need to consider and learn. But don't start with the big "How to design a yacht" books, you'll go crazy. Begin small and if you are satisfied stay small, some of the best small boat designers do only that and they're very very good at it.

So start studying other designers, start doodling and if you can do it, do some every day.

So endeth the lesson for today, more next week on setting up the grid and deciding where to go in small boat design.