Sketches

These are some of my yacht design sketches. I latched onto a few different ideas throughout my designs. The 1st down, left, is a sketch of a wishbone hull concept. The idea is that when the boat is heeled over, most of the surface area around the stern isn’t used. Instead, that weight could be push outboard, and the new hull shape would create a more pronouned foil section for greater lift to windward. However this displacement, low apparent wind angle hullform isn’t as popular now as the high velocity planing boats.

An architectual idea I latched onto was the idea of the poop deck or stern viewpoint. While working as crew delivering a yacht up the east coast, I spent a lot of time offshore looking at the wake behind us. This put me in a sort of trance, watching the water burble from a foot away off to the horizon (2nd & 4th down, right). The back of the boat has always had an importance. Wake is even used in the context of human death, and for centuries the aft is where officers and the captain resided during the age of sail. Only the captain’s quarters (2nd down, left) had the beautiful stern windows which held the wake in their focus every day.

The verticality of the mast and keel is also compelling. Offshore at night, the mast floodlight is an otherwordly thing. All around for hundreds of miles is horizontal blackness, and vertically above, on this giant aluminum tree, is a light flooding you and the deck. This mast/keel axis is also the major structural area. There ought to be some architectural heaviness around this intersection (3rd down, left).