# Summer Breeze Sailboat



## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

*Plotting and strategizing*

On the one hand, you could suggest that I've been inspired by Napaman's Stevenson Weekender build, and his Puddle Duck Racer build.

On the other hand, you could blame the Bodega Bay Fish Fest
Wooden Boat Challenge, which I got roped in to last year because the Sonoma County Woodworker's Association sponsored a team, we won, and this year Tom Segura and I worked with a team of teenagers who managed to compete and get around the course without sinking (with only a little input from us), and we won again, with a boat that was twice as long as last year.

At any rate, my sweety Charlene came to this year's boat building challenge to watch us compete. Last weekend we managed to sneak away from our other obligations for a few hours, and as we sat on the edge of the water in Santa Rosa's Spring Lake Park, watching people hang out in their small boats, and she said "I want to learn how to sail".

Us being us, rather than spend $500 on a used Sunfish, we're going to build one.

The criteria are: Big enough to carry two people. Sailable. Light enough to car-top. Small enough to store behind the workshop. A little bit eye-catching, in a good way.

My first thought was to build a Sunfish/Sailfish knock-off. My uncle built one when he was a kid, that I sailed extensively when I was a kid, and it was a lot of fun. There are various plans out there, if you look hard enough you can find a pirated version of the original Sailfish plans that I could stretch the beam on to make it more Sunfish-like, there's also the Moonfish 14 and plans for the Stevenson Projects Mini-Cup are on-line, but that form-factor is also a committed and wet experience.

We decided we really wanted more of a sedate float around and picnic on the water sort of experience. After much digging, we think we're settling on some variant of David Beede's Summer Breeze. It's quite similar to the boats we've built for competition (including practice boats, I've now built a whole lot of those, with hand tools, in a few hours each), the big difference will be that I'll use ¼" ply (probably just luan), add a chine log, and spend some real time on gunwales rather than just adding material where the CDX is cracking. So if I can clear space to do other things at the same time, this will be a few days of build time, with the days coming in only because I need to let glue and paint dry, rather than throwing it in the water unfinished and wet.

I want to stay cheap and fast on this, so I'm thinking luan plywood, and cedar or redwood for the other parts, cheap and light, but a few steps past fir in terms of durability. Yes, I do have some massaranduba and ipe in my wood stash, and it would look absolutely gorgeous, but the boat would be heavy.

So I've spent two evenings re-drawing the plans from Simplicity Boat's simplified Summer Breeze build notes and various other sources around the web, including the Duckworks Magazine - Summer Breeze page, the Flickr set of jerrycashmanoz's Summer Breeze build, with a centerboard and a decked bow, and a Woodenboat.com thread with lots of good stuff.

I was a bit concerned about the lee-board, and was thinking about reworking it for a daggerboard, but after seeing a video of a Summer Breeze sailing decided that with the right reinforcement the lee board arrangement should work nicely.

I'm starting to plot the whole build out, fitting it around the various other projects I want to move through my shop (and finish with my house), and I'll keep track here.


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## N6DSW (May 25, 2009)

DanLyke said:


> *Plotting and strategizing*
> 
> On the one hand, you could suggest that I've been inspired by Napaman's Stevenson Weekender build, and his Puddle Duck Racer build.
> 
> ...


HA! Thanks for the trip down amnesia lane.

Forty years ago I worked at the original boathouse during the Jr. High summer breaks as a teenager at Lake Ralphine next door (a good walk) - sailing Sunfishes and "borrowing" the Lasers when Mr. Botinni was not looking, and spent many hours fishing Spring Lake before it got choked up with invasive weeds.

-Dave


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Plotting and strategizing*
> 
> On the one hand, you could suggest that I've been inspired by Napaman's Stevenson Weekender build, and his Puddle Duck Racer build.
> 
> ...


Yeah, I had that Sailfish of my uncle's for a lot (and my parents had an O'Day Daysailer), but said uncle also had a cottage on Lake Sacandaga in upstate New York, where they also had a Laser. Dang, that boat was fun, you could trip it over its centerboard and end up completely upside down without releasing the main sheet, which meant that I then hand to get under it to release the sheet to right it.

I'm thinking Charlene is less enthused by those sorts of prospects…


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## shipwright (Sep 27, 2010)

DanLyke said:


> *Plotting and strategizing*
> 
> On the one hand, you could suggest that I've been inspired by Napaman's Stevenson Weekender build, and his Puddle Duck Racer build.
> 
> ...


Any thing that gets you sailing is the right boat. 
I wish you well and I know it will be a worth while effort.


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## matt1970 (Mar 28, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Plotting and strategizing*
> 
> On the one hand, you could suggest that I've been inspired by Napaman's Stevenson Weekender build, and his Puddle Duck Racer build.
> 
> ...


I am soooo glad to be an inspiration to somebody--at this point in the school year to inspire someone is a blessing! My students have checked out a bit…lol…

So glad you are going for it…looks like you will be done before I even finish my PDR!!! GOOD LUCK and I will be following this one! YOU WILL INSPIRE ME…SIX SCHOOL DAY LEFT…so get ready for an update from me…

Matt


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Plotting and strategizing*
> 
> On the one hand, you could suggest that I've been inspired by Napaman's Stevenson Weekender build, and his Puddle Duck Racer build.
> 
> ...


Grin. Yep, Charlene's counting down the school days too, I think it's one more with students, one more staff, and then she's out for the summer.

We just discovered how much it's going to cost to tape the seams. If we don't tape 'em, we'll probably have a rowboat this weekend. Milling the mast is gonna be a bit of a challenge.


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

*The build begins*

Blessed are the queue jumpers, for they fill a 3 day weekend and leave our hands covered in glue:

 

Charlene and I started construction on the hull this weekend, in luan and redwood. We think we're building a fairly robust hull, but we are going to glass the seams, and we'll probably end up building a few extra ribs to brace the bottom a little more robustly.

We got the sides cut and fitted, and the bottom glued on but not yet trimmed. There'll be a bunch of scraping to remove squeeze out, because we want to varnish or oil the inside, but the hull is starting to come together.


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## jack1 (May 17, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *The build begins*
> 
> Blessed are the queue jumpers, for they fill a 3 day weekend and leave our hands covered in glue:
> 
> ...


Looks like good progress. Remember to keep lightness in mind. ;0)


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## matt1970 (Mar 28, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *The build begins*
> 
> Blessed are the queue jumpers, for they fill a 3 day weekend and leave our hands covered in glue:
> 
> ...


is this stitch and glue? looks good…keep up the good work…


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *The build begins*
> 
> Blessed are the queue jumpers, for they fill a 3 day weekend and leave our hands covered in glue:
> 
> ...


Jack: Yep, thanks! We decided this morning we're going to epoxy and glass the corners, but are trying to keep everything else pretty clean (though we'll probably add a few more ribs).

Napaman, nope, it's got beveled chine logs, glued with PL Premium, with brass screws.


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

*Closing in*

Been 13 days since my last update, which means there's lots o' progress to report! I set up a router lathe to mill the mast. Turns out 2×4s aren't really stiff enough for a 10' lathe bed, and the mast needed to be supported in that span anyway, but I ended up with something passable after a bunch of hand-plane and sandpaper tuning.

Every year Petaluma's various small craft river users band together to have a "Day on the River" celebration, in which there is much paddling of various small boats up and down our little stretch of tidal slough that extends the San Francisco Bay, so Charlene and I took one of the boat building competition practice boats out and paddled it for a ways:

  

This weekend was all about fiberglass. We'd dropped the hull, and thought we hadn't done any damage but found a bit of a dimple, it turns out ¼" plywood doesn't take dings very well, so we decided to fiberglass the seams. After much back-and-forth on seeing if we could scrounge some free polyurethane resin from friends or whether to spring for the epoxy, and how much to apply, we decided to go with epoxy, and tape on the seams (in order to keep the hull lighther). So we glassed the seams, took all the spare epoxy resin and smoothed it all over the boat (before I realized there was more stuff we really should have glassed, oh well). And then we test fit the mast and cut out the sail:

   

I need to get another piece of redwood to make a piece down the center of the bottom, partially to support the bottom a little better, and partially to hold the skeg in place. I've got pieces cut for the rudder and lee board that need a little shaping, and I need to come up with a better rudder hinge because I don't like the epoxied webbing method that the plans show, so I may just spring for the actual hardware.

But progress marches on!


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## matt1970 (Mar 28, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Closing in*
> 
> Been 13 days since my last update, which means there's lots o' progress to report! I set up a router lathe to mill the mast. Turns out 2×4s aren't really stiff enough for a 10' lathe bed, and the mast needed to be supported in that span anyway, but I ended up with something passable after a bunch of hand-plane and sandpaper tuning.
> 
> ...


dude…you are killing me…a boat and mast in THREE WEEKS…AWESOME…I am so embarrassed at my lack of will…

Looks great and so glad you are having fun--at least it looks that way…

Matt


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Closing in*
> 
> Been 13 days since my last update, which means there's lots o' progress to report! I set up a router lathe to mill the mast. Turns out 2×4s aren't really stiff enough for a 10' lathe bed, and the mast needed to be supported in that span anyway, but I ended up with something passable after a bunch of hand-plane and sandpaper tuning.
> 
> ...


You know that old saying that behind every successful man there's a woman, pushing: "Hey, we gonna work on the boat today?" "What do you have planned this weekend? Wanna work on the boat?" "Yes, I know the shop needs the eaves painted, but we've got a friend who's unemployed who'll do it so we can work on the boat!"

It helps, a lot.

And we really could have had a third set of hands for installing the inner gunwales, but having two people made that job go by in a quarter of the time it would have taken me alone.

We're vacationing in the Sierra over my birthday weekend, in two weeks, so the goal is to have it finished by then. Means we need to get the skeg in place and the rudder and leeboard planed this evening so we can paint and varnish next weekend, 'cause every night this week is booked.


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## doordude (Mar 26, 2010)

DanLyke said:


> *Closing in*
> 
> Been 13 days since my last update, which means there's lots o' progress to report! I set up a router lathe to mill the mast. Turns out 2×4s aren't really stiff enough for a 10' lathe bed, and the mast needed to be supported in that span anyway, but I ended up with something passable after a bunch of hand-plane and sandpaper tuning.
> 
> ...


nice job so far.that's a long way to go to make a round mast. i'm proud to know that you did it. are you taking the boat to the sierra's with you?


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Closing in*
> 
> Been 13 days since my last update, which means there's lots o' progress to report! I set up a router lathe to mill the mast. Turns out 2×4s aren't really stiff enough for a 10' lathe bed, and the mast needed to be supported in that span anyway, but I ended up with something passable after a bunch of hand-plane and sandpaper tuning.
> 
> ...


It's not just the round mast, it's the tapered round mast that we were shooting for. I mean, I could have done a tapered square mast, but…

Yeah, I think we're going to take the boat. We've got a deal on a B&B in Twin Harte, and Charlene's notion is we'll spend time hanging out at Pinecrest Lake.


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

*Rigging test fit*

Charlene painted the boat this week. Today it was hotter than the hinges of Hades, but I went out and tried to put a couple of coats of varnish on the inside. I'm going to have to wait a while for it to cure hard so I can sand it down and try again, that first coat was soaking in and drying super fast, so looks like crap, but… I got to the "okay, gonna try to test rig this thing" stage, and I think we've got enough of the hardware set and enough water sealed that we can take it out tomorrow and see how she sails.


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## matt1970 (Mar 28, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Rigging test fit*
> 
> Charlene painted the boat this week. Today it was hotter than the hinges of Hades, but I went out and tried to put a couple of coats of varnish on the inside. I'm going to have to wait a while for it to cure hard so I can sand it down and try again, that first coat was soaking in and drying super fast, so looks like crap, but… I got to the "okay, gonna try to test rig this thing" stage, and I think we've got enough of the hardware set and enough water sealed that we can take it out tomorrow and see how she sails.


wow…awesome!

How did you attach the leeboard…having trouble conceptualizing this…looks like a bolt--but wont it leak…not sure why I cant visualize this…


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Rigging test fit*
> 
> Charlene painted the boat this week. Today it was hotter than the hinges of Hades, but I went out and tried to put a couple of coats of varnish on the inside. I'm going to have to wait a while for it to cure hard so I can sand it down and try again, that first coat was soaking in and drying super fast, so looks like crap, but… I got to the "okay, gonna try to test rig this thing" stage, and I think we've got enough of the hardware set and enough water sealed that we can take it out tomorrow and see how she sails.


It's a bolt, we're just hoping it's far enough up from the water line that it won't leak. This thing should draw… lemme calculate… figure the displacement at the bottom is probably 2½ cubic feet per inch, water is roughly 62 lbs/ft^3, so that's 155 lbs per inch of draft. Even with a picnic lunch, between the hull, the rigging and the two of us that's only going to draw less than 3 inches, that hole is nearly 9" up and there's a big bearing surface between the lee board and the side of the boat (we've got a big ol' plank there for support), so any water that gets in either means we're heeling way further than the rigging on this boat is designed for, or we've got other problems.

Basically: a full foot or more (at least from that rib just forward of the lee board to the bow) of that freeboard is there for splashes, not floatsies, so if there are small gaps in it (holes for lee boards), no worries.

My only concern is that the lee board, which was placed because of hull shape, is far enough back that we may have a lee helm. We may have to adjust our sail configuration aft somehow to adapt to that.

But my other guess is that we'll sail this for a little while and she'll get hooked and we'll either end up building something higher performance (like Sunfish clone, or a pair of Optis or Puddle Ducks or somesuch), or something more cruise-ish (which I don't know how we'd get out of the back yard after we built it…).


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

*Maiden Voyage*

And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".



The sail needs a lot of reconfiguration. We eventually got something that worked better than in this picture, although it's got quite a weather helm in that setup. I think we'll end up going to a fairly traditional lateen rig shortly.

The sloped transom makes the rudder funky, I'll probably build something to put the rudder gudgeons in a more vertical line, and I think I need a better rudder pintel system than ¼-20 bolts with nylon lockwasher's on 'em.

But as a way to spend a pleasant afternoon on a lake, watching the heron feed and the geese paddle around followed by their little ones? Yeah, kinda hard to beat.

Construction started: Memorial Day weekend. 4 weeks later we're sailing. There's lots I'll do different next time, but I'm kinda pleased.


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## dkirtley (Mar 11, 2010)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


Take a look at Michael Storer's website. He has a lot of good information on rigging a lugsail.

You need a lot more downhaul.


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


Thanks! He's got a lot of good stuff there! Yeah, after reading through some of that, if we stay with the lug sail I think I'm going to need mechanical advantage on the downhaul.

My personal blog entry on yesterday has an embedded map, or you can view the track on Google Maps, in which you can see that we had one burst of wind in which we were doing over 6 MPH, so apparently she planes fairly nicely. We thought that lake was going to be perfect size, but now I want to head up and explore Lake Sonoma, and probably Richardson Bay down off Sausalito, and maybe Tomales Bay…


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


Oh, also realized: Redwood spars may not be stiff enough to take the sort of downhaul pressure that the lugsail needs… I may have to move beyond redwood 2×2s.


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## dkirtley (Mar 11, 2010)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


How big is the sail?

You might could just beef it up with a bit of glass.


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## jack1 (May 17, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


neat


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


The upper spar is about 11' long, the boom is 8', the overall mast height is 10'. Right now the mast is a 2×6 cut semi-diagonally, glued back together reversed, and then turned on the router lathe. This has the advantage of distributing the knots. The other spars are just 2×2 con heart redwood planed mostly round. If I took two pieces of 1-by and put a layer of epoxy and glass in between them, cut that resulting 2-by into 1×2 strips, and glassed those together, I'd have knots well distributed with a cross of fiberglass in the center, which would get me a relatively cheap light wood that looks awesome with a glass core.

Or I could break down and buy ash or spruce or somesuch, or just spring for some aluminum or fiberglass structural tubing, but what fun is that?

Rigging-wise, I think I need to do a few things: Shorten the sail by about a foot. In the configuration that finally worked the top spar was pulled down so that it almost became a mast extension. The shorter sail will let me move the suspension point for the top spar forward, which will let me reduce the tension on the front of the top spar, which will reduce the flexing, aaaand… Have multiple attachment points for the boom (rather than just the ends now), which means that a downhaul on the boom will mean that not only is the sail pulled tight at the luff, it'll be pulled tight along the foot and not just at the clew.

I'm starting to think that there'll be another sailboat in my woodworking future, the question is: will it be bigger, and if so will it be large enough to get outside of the continental shelf so we can go whale watching in it? But I suspect that decision will wait for a year or two of sailing this around before we either get totally excited by the idea of building a cruiser (and the logistics of getting that out of our back yard would have to be addressed…), or build another day play boat. Either way, next time we build it out of something harder than redwood (still okay with cheap luan plywood as the hull skin material), because the gunwales are already showing wear.


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## dkirtley (Mar 11, 2010)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


Waste of time. You don't want glass at the core. That is not where it will give you any strength. You could probably stand to make a new boom. The yard looks ok. The mast looks a bit short. Don't feel bad. My mast ended up about a foot short on mine that I have in my garage right now. I will need to whack off the sail at the first reef point.

My last build was one of Mik Storers OzRacers. With the lugsail, it has a terrifying amount of sail on an 8' boat. 
Looking at the page for Summer Breeze, it has 63 sq. ft. on a nearly 12ft hull. The OzRacer lug comes in at about 80 sq. ft. on an 8ft hull.  Trimming it down will still leave me with plenty of sail for our wind here.The mast is a hollow box construction about 3in square at the partner.

You have already doomed yourself. The first one gets you hooked. They are just so much fun to build. I have not even gotten my last one in the water and I am anxious to start on the next one. I have plans for 2 that I might build or maybe I will do something else. I have the plans for a Welsford Truant and a Bolger Oldshoe.


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## DanLyke (Feb 8, 2007)

DanLyke said:


> *Maiden Voyage*
> 
> And at some point you take a deep breath and say "I've figured out everything I can on dry land".
> 
> ...


Grins. Yeah, I haven't looked at the compressive strength of redwood to figure out how increasing the tensile strength at the core would change things, I really should engineer out something like that before I try it. Or just buy some prefab spars.

re: 80 sq. ft. on an 8ft hull… Yikes! I was thinking about building a Sunfish knock-off at first, but we decided that sedate traipsing around the lake at 2MPH was really the desired use case. We don't have flotation in this hull, if we capsize it's gonna be a long swim to drag the thing to shore. Given that we were able to hit 6+MPH in the moderate winds we had, we can lose a lot of sail area.

And, yeah, now that I'm hooked… I'm also starting to look at and think about cabinetry and furniture making in different ways: There'll definitely be more veneered bent plywood in the interior of my house in the future.


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