great boat in a great location...

Here's a boat I've always liked.

It's the Chris Craft Pawnee and it is a very cool little cruising boat. Sadly they only built them for a year so did not make a lot of the excellent Sparkman & Stephens design.  

As it happens there's one for sale in Hawaii if anyone's interested.

A boat I was once looking for...

Every once in a while I'll see a Bristol 26  (aka Sailstar 26) for sale for a good price and it gets me thinking. Back when I was in Paris looking for a boat to buy. The sailboat in my head that I was looking for was a European facsimile of the Halsey Herreshoff Bristol 26.

It's a good design and packs a lot of living space into a small envelope.

 

As it happens there's a Bristol 26 which appears to be in reasonable shape in Annapolis going for $2.5K which is the current street price for a Bristol 26 in reasonable shape. that I find more than a little interesting. Certainly worth checking out.

and in the "Because not everyone wants to build a fifty-foot catamaran" department...

An important point, the sort of project we need more of, and P-22 is no longer with us...

Tad Roberts (one of my favorite designers) currently has a catamaran review in the new Wooden Boat Magazine which you might want to check out. It certainly got my attention.

The cat in question is Mike Waller's 880 catamaran and it certainly helps fill a niche that needs filling.

Listening to Xenio Rubinos

So it goes...

In case you can't find an affordable Origo stove...

You know this stove...

 

Since Origo has quit marketing the Origo marine stoves the prices for old stock and used stoves have become extremely pricey. Which, considering how simple the stoves actually are, is something of a conundrum.

Here's a pretty nifty DIY alternative that's affordable...

Of course, the stove in question is not gimballed but sorting out a gimbal is fairly simple and easily dealt with.

Not a project you should be looking at...

For about a year or so I've been rowing by this Maria vintage hurricane catamaran and wondering how I'd go about sorting out it's issues. Of course, that was before it sank...

Again.

Bringing such a boat back from the dead is a lot easier than most folks think but a lot harder and more expensive if you don't have a plan, needful skills, and the time/money to complete the boat in a timely manner. Success on such a project is all about money and time.

The thing is your plan tends to shape the cost of the project while your skill-set defines the time and together they all add up to whether a project is viable or not.

The guy who owns the boat told me he'd paid $15K for the boat which in my mind was way too much for a hurricane boat that had been holed in a few places, sunk, and without a rig. While repairing the beast was pretty straightforward the time and costs involved made it just too expensive to be flippable for a profit which pretty must killed any interest in the boat for me. However, the owner had plans to rebuild it as a houseboat/hangout zone so it sorta/kinda made sense.

Of course, time being a factor, the fact that damaged boats will continue to degrade until they're fixed, and boat left alone afloat is an evil cocktail that tends sneak up quickly and ruin your whole day/week/month/year before you have a chance to say WTF!

That said, I'm sure a lot of folks would look at such a project and think it's a VolksCruiser just waiting to happen with a little sweat, a few gallons of epoxy, and some paint.

I'll delve into the why it ain't VolksCruiser material in a couple of days.