Sailing the Apocalypse: A Misadventure at Sea

I've written much here over the years about Wharram catamarans, and my regular readers here know that I'm a big fan of all of James Wharram's designs.  I have built a Hitia 17 and a Tiki 26 from plans and restored and sailed a Tiki 21. I've also been involved in the professionally-built Wharram catamarans coming from Boatsmith, Inc. in Florida, and no doubt will build or buy another Wharram cat at some point in the future.

So, even though I'm not building another Wharram catamaran at present, they are obviously on my mind a lot as they keep coming up as the featured vessels in my fiction projects.  For those of you who may not have seen it on my main website or other blogs, I have a new book out that was just released this past weekend.

Sailing the Apocalypse: A Misadventure at Sea, is the story of a man who is obsessed with the idea of building a big Wharram cat (Tiki 46) to get his family away from what he believes is a country on the verge of collapse. Terry Bailey has done his research and knows the advantages and virtues of a Wharram for his purpose. He greatly overestimates both his boatbuilding and sailing experience, however, and the story becomes a series of screw-ups and misadventures as he forges on with more determination than good seamanship. This book, at 304 pages, is the first in what will be an ongoing series that follows this family's adventures. I think most Wharram enthusiasts, as well as boatbuilders and sailors in general will be able to relate. The full description is posted below the cover image. You can get a copy of Sailing the Apocalypse in either ebook or paperback from the links at the bottom of this post.

Terry Bailey is convinced America is doomed, and the last hope for his family is to escape to sea. 

How far would you go to protect your family if you were convinced America was in imminent danger of collapse? Would you build an underground bunker and stockpile it with weapons and supplies? Buy a cabin in the woods and start growing all your own food? Sell everything off and move to a survivalist’s stronghold in the mountains of Idaho?

None of the above would be enough if you were obsessed with boats the way Terry Bailey is obsessed.Terry has an escape plan to sail to the very ends of the earth; the only real option left to survive what’s coming, according to him. Convincing his new wife, teen stepdaughter and preteen stepson that time is running out, he sells his recently-acquired family on the necessity to build a boat. Two years of hard labor later, Terry has his ship—a huge ocean-going catamaran sloppily cobbled together from plywood and epoxy in their backyard in north Mississippi. 

When the ship is ready to launch, Terry christens her the Apocalypse, and the four of them move aboard for good, bidding farewell to life on land along with everything and everyone they had known before that day. There is no need to wait for a disaster to strike, because Terry Bailey has created his own. Now he is about to drag his entire family over the horizon with him. Sailing the Apocalypse is the story of a man who is about to go too far, and is told from the perspective of the twelve-year-old stepson who watches it all unfold as he is swept along for the ride.

Sailing the Apocalypse is available in ebook form from Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.  

You can get the paperback from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  

Both formats are available in the various Amazon stores worldwide as well (UK, France, Germany, Australia, etc.).

Art on The Water Video

Here's a pretty cool video compilation I found on YouTube of Wharram catamaran photos from around the world.  Just about every model from the JWD Design Book can be seen here:

Wharram's Fiberglass Tiki 8-Meter Now in U.S. Production

Fans of James Wharram's catamaran designs will be interested to know that his fiberglass version of the popular Tiki 26 - dubbed the Tiki 8-Meter - is now in production in the United States. The prototype of the design, shown in these photos, was built in the U.K., and production was planned there, but never got underway. Now that Boatsmith Inc., of Jupiter, Florida has become the only official Wharram professional builder in the U.S., the company has acquired the molds for the Tiki 8-Meter. Two boats are now under construction from these molds, both custom orders from a south Florida resort hotel that will use them in the day charter business.

Like her wood-composite Tiki 26 predecessor, the Tiki 8-Meter is designed to be trailerable, and is light enough to tow even with an average-sized car.

Deck and cockpit layout is much the same as the Tiki 26. There is seating for eight in the cockpit, an outboard motor in a well, trampoline forward, and sitting headroom and space for two single bunks in each hull. Subtle changes from the original version include more rounded corners, cambered coachroofs and updated portlights. The Tiki 8-Meter retains the classic Tiki lines but looks a little more contemporary and refined. Note the canvas dodger in the photo below:

This dodger is one of the best designs I've seen on a small Tiki, and I plan to incorporate a similar one on my own Tiki 26, which is under construction. The dodger itself is made of Sunbrella, and can features two positions: one that is low and can be left up while sailing, as seen in the photos at the top of the page, and a raised position that protects and shades the entire front half of the cockpit.

In the drawings below, one can get a better idea of the versatility of this set-up.

The really neat thing about this dodger is that it was designed with the idea of attaching a zip-on tent to the aft edge, allowing the entire cockpit to be converted into a comfortable living area when the boat is on the hook.

Screened-in, with removable storm flaps aft, this deck tent allows for a comfortable double berth in the cockpit in addition to the berth space below.

David Halladay, of Boatsmith, is expecting that the Tiki 8-Meter will be a big hit among sailors in Florida, as it offers shallow draft for poking around all the thin water surrounding that state, and the seaworthiness to cruise over to the nearby Bahamas. Lots of boat buyers are wary of wooden boats, even of modern composite construction, simply because they may not be educated about the improvements of modern methods and materials. Having the option to buy one of Wharram's boats in foam-core fiberglass will ease their minds a bit. Boatsmith also plans to offer other designs in Wharram's line-up in this construction. Find out more at: http://www.boatsmithfl.com/

Boatbuilding with Non-Marine Materials

Below: Joubert Marine Plywood - an example of some of the finest boatbuilding plywood you can buy. This is 6mm Okoume plywood manufactured in France to the BS 1088 standard. Each sheet has the Lloyd's of London stamp of approval.

I was recently involved in a discussion on the Wharram catamaran forum regarding the cost of building a boat and the question of whether or not it is necessary to use "marine" grade materials in the construction. (View discussion here)

This is something I've been meaning to address here anyway, as the cost of most boatbuilding materials are going up and probably will continue to do so. In the often long and difficult decision making process that proceeds the beginning of a new boat construction project or the refitting of an old one, cost is certainly an issue for most of us. Although we would like to be able to nail down a number before ordering the first piece of wood or gallon of epoxy, accurately estimating the cost of a project is difficult, even for professionals, as there are so many variables. This is especially true for boat projects larger than canoes, kayaks or the simplest of skiffs. Cruising boats with interior accommodations, auxiliary power and sailing rigs can vary widely in cost depending on the care and thought taken in the selection of each and every component.

Since the hull (or hulls in the case of catamarans and trimarans) is usually the first part built in a new boat construction project, many builders are tempted right from the beginning to save money on hull materials. Plywood and epoxy composite is perhaps the most common type of wooden boat construction chosen by first time builders, especially since there are so many intriguing designs available for all types of vessels using some form of this construction. Many new builders incorrectly see the plywood as a major component of the boat, (after all, it is a plywood boat, right?) but the reality of it is that in most modern designs that rely heavily on epoxy for the assembly, sheathing and fairing of the hull, the plywood cost is a small percentage in relation to other materials. In fact on a boat like the Tiki 26 catamaran that I am building, the plywood cost is in the range of 10 to 12-percent of the the complete boat, in sailaway condition. And this percentage is based on using the good stuff - BS-1088 Okoume marine ply from Joubert, as pictured above.

The temptation to save money by purchasing non-marine plywood can be quite strong, especially when a new builder prices marine plywood for the first time. But the cheaper alternatives are, unfortunately, miserably inadequate in most cases, depending on the design being built. The Tiki 26 is a good example, as it is a cruising size boat, but being a catamaran, depends on strong but lightweight materials for good performance. The hulls, decks and cabins are all built of just 6mm (or 1/4-inch) thick plywood to keep the total boat weight in the range of 1500 lbs. Yet, this is a sailboat designed to go offshore and cope with the conditions that can be expected in that environment. The design is well proven for its intended use, and of course, the thin plywood is reinforced with well-engineered interior stringers and the epoxy joinery and sheathing methods employed in its construction, but still, 6 millimeters is a thin skin. It would not do to have core voids or cores with lots of knots or partial panels of a lesser grade wood in the interior of a plywood hull skin that thin. To get the full strength required by the design, a quality marine plywood with cores as good as the face veneers is clearly the best choice.

Although one can occasionally find good-looking exterior plywood at Home Depot or the local independent building supply vendor, the quality is never consistent from bundle to bundle and even varies a lot with individual sheets. Cut into most of this plywood and you will find even greater inconsistencies in the cores. Having built many cabinets and other residential carpentry projects over a period of years, I have seen the quality of almost all commonly available plywood decrease - from cabinet grade birch to exterior BC yellow pine. It's hard to find plywood that is adequate for even the roughest construction these days, much less any that would be good for a boat hull.

But having said this, there are exceptions and there are types of boats that are designed to allow for a margin of poorer quality materials. A type that comes to mind are the shallow draft cruising designs of Reuel Parker. His cold-molded construction method is designed to allow layers of lesser grade exterior plywood to build up the hull to the required thickness. There is a margin for these poorer grade laminates in such hulls because of the much greater overall thickness of the hull skin, particularly on the bottom.

This drawing below, scanned from Parker's book, The New Cold-Molded Boatbuilding: From Lofting to Launching, illustrates the layers used to build up these heavy hulls. In this case two opposing diagonal layers of 3/4-inch thick plywood strips are laminated over a longitudinal layer of 5/8-inch solid tongue-and-groove planking. Used this way, good quality exterior construction grade plywood of Doug fir or Southern Yellow Pine can be perfectly adequate, as the hull is not depending on one thin sheet for all it's strength. Cutting the plywood into the 9 1/2-inch wide strips as shown here also allows you to easily see if there are any huge voids in the core and allows you to discard the worst parts of a given 4 x 8-foot sheet.

The other case for non-marine plywood is in the construction of small, simple skiffs that are inexpensive in terms of both time and money invested, and can be viewed as somewhat disposable after a few years of use. In this case you might want to save some money by using a good exterior grade plywood, sealed well with epoxy. If the boat is maintained and kept out of the weather when not in use, it could last a very long time. I've built two Phil Bolger dinghies this way, using exterior grade 1/4" Luan plywood, the type sold as "underlayment" for flooring in my local building supply. At about $10 per sheet, it's cheap and can sometimes be of surprisingly good quality.

Here's one of the dinghies - the Bolger "Nymph" design - which makes an excellent rowing tender for a cruising boat. I built this one with cheap Luan right from the plans given in Dynamite Payson's Build the New Instant Boats. This particular one, built for a friend to use in his fishing pond, has not seen much hard use. My other one spent several years stored upside down on the deck of my Grampian 26 and was used extensively as a dinghy the entire time I owned the boat. It's a little beaten up and rough, but still sound and seaworthy.

What it comes down to in choosing construction materials for a boat is the intended use of the vessel and also the size of your investment in time and materials. For a dinghy like the one shown above, it's optional as to whether you want to use BS-1088 Okoume at more than $60 per sheet or exterior Luan for about $10-15 per sheet. The time to build the dinghy is only a relatively small investment of evenings and maybe a couple of weekends. If you get a few years of service out of it, your time and money will be well spent.

If you are considering building a cruising-sized vessel from wood composite construction, however, especially a lightweight multihull, the time and hard labor required will more than offset the difference in plywood costs. Not many people can look at such a boat as "disposable," so consideration must be given to insuring the vessel has a long life and retains a decent resale value throughout that life. The best way to do this is to use high quality materials throughout and to document this use for a possible future buyer. The ease of working with top quality marine plywood is another factor that makes the whole project more pleasant and saves a lot of labor on fitting and finishing plywood parts. A well-built and properly maintained wooden boat built this way of excellent materials can be expected to last a lifetime and beyond. Anyone willing to put a couple thousand hours of their life into the construction of a cruising boat should expect nothing less.