by Rogers Winter
LOA 24', BEAM 8', DRAFT 3', DISPLACEMENT 500 LBS.
Water skiers and speed demons, look away. However, if you’re interested in space, operating economy and sea-kindliness in a 24’ day cruiser, here’s one.
There is a class of salt-water sailors who don’t care a hang for spit and polish; who value comfort, safety and economy over speed; who wear dungarees frayed at the cuffs; who bang out the hours on the botom of a dishpan and who have a wife and four kids who love sailing about as much as the captain of the ship. These sailors are water gypsies—and there must be a lot of them, to judge from the inquiries a designer gets for a boat to meet their specifications. They want a boat with an easy motion, 6’ of headroom in the cabin and under the standing top, berths wide enough and long enough furnish reasonable sleeping comfort, ample foot room on the cabin sole, a cockpit large enough for four people on day trips, a decent galley, ample toilet room and side decks wide enough to let them go forward with some hope of arriving. Above all, they want a boat thats simple and easy to construct—though experience indicates that no boat is “simple to build.” Such a boat is hard to design—epecially when you try to do it in only 24’ overall. After considerable search and thinking, however, this signer has developed Sea Star. Sea Star is quite a boat. She has 6' 1" of standing room under the pilothouse roof, 5’5” of headroom in the cabin, two full-size bunks, plenty of galley space and a sizable toilet room (fully enclosed), and her construcon is cross-planked, Chesapeake Bay—skipjack style—one that most nearly meets the requirement “simple to build.” She is no speed demon. Maximum designed speed is 8½ to 9 mph, with fuel consumption on the order of 1½ gallons per hour at cruising speed, which makes her a wonderfully economical boat to operate. She also goes along without dragging in a heavy sea; rolls and pitches moderately, with an easy motion, and does not pound. She behaves more like a Rolls-Royce than a Tin Lizzie. And you can forget about the spine-jarring pounding you get from the average runabout; with Sea Star you don’t need a chiropractor to get the kinks out of your back after an afternoon on the water.
As he looks over the plans, two questions will immediately come to the mind of a prospective builder: 1) Can plywood be used? 2) What about more power for more speed? The answer to the first is yes. Instead of the 1” side planking specified, 5/8" plywood can be used, in which case the intermediate frames are omitted and a 1¼”x2½” stringer is run fore and aft, halfway between chine and sheer, and let into the main frames. The bottom is better cross-planked as specified. The answer to the second question is no. Adding extra power to a boat of this type is a pure waste of money. She will go just so fast and no faster, so 25 hp is ample for the purpose.
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