CONCEPTS!

The concepts the thing

Practice safe design: Use a concept.

Petrula Vrontikis

So what was the concept for Kuai Lei? What I wanted was a small boat capable of carrying me around the Gulf Islands and possibly doing an overnight. As I mentioned last time it all started with this.

If you compare the sweep of the sheer in the above picture and the sheer of Kuai Lei here you'll see that they're almost the same. Further inspiration came from Jonque de Plaisance. The JRA magazine which featured Kuai Lei erroneously said that the sheer came from Jonque de Plaisance when in fact it came from this old picture.

With the sheer determined then came the question of square or round boat. The Jonques are round but I'm a fan of Phil Bolger so square was it.

Next question - how big? She need to be trailerable so nothing much over twenty feet. In fact she's twenty feet LOA but only 12 feet on the waterline not including the deadwood. From the stern post to the leading edge of the daggerboard she's 15 feet.

I wanted a small cabin long enough to sleep in with sitting head room and a large cockpit so essentially she was to be divided into two spaces.

So we had a concept, now came the work of actually designing the boat.

First came the lines.

Then once that was done it was on to what cabin height, what sail configuration. Should the masts be canted forwards as on most junks, can we cant the mast forward even if we wanted to? All design questions that need to be answered.

First and foremost form must match function. Lets look at cabin height. I'm 5'6 and a half (I used to be 5'7” but you shrink with age), the height of the sheer at midships is just short of three feet so another three feet on top of that would give me standing headroom but the boat would look clunky and boxy. At most another foot would be suitable. But taking that height out to the gunwale would also produce a boxy look.

Here is the main bulkhead as drawn and as built,

The left side is as drawn, the right side as built (the builder always knows better than the designer). The height to the top of the hatch is just over 4 feet which means that you cannot have sitting headroom except at the centre line. Them's the breaks.

To see what I mean by boxy, here's the bow of the boat as designed,

And here it is with the cabin taken to the gunwale without any slope.

Ugly ain't it?

We'll explore this concept thing some more next time.