The Organized Chaos in Design This is the second in a series of articles describing the process our family is going through to build a new boat. In the first article, I covered choosing Jim Antrim, our architect. In this installation I’ll talk about developing a design. We originally planned to use the interior of our current ILC40 to kit out the new boat, saving time and money. As many of you know – and for those of you who don’t it’s an important fact – that option no longer exists. On July 25, on the return trip to LA after finishing Transpac, Tera’s XL was rammed by a sperm whale and sank about 550 miles from Honolulu. I won’t belabor the story here – it’s available in detail in the archives at (link to archive.) May she rest in peace. However, our loss may indeed be our gain. With all crew safe and insurance money in hand, we’re now over the initial shock and ready to move forward. Hey, we were already planning to build a new boat. This new state of affairs simply changes the box we were working in. Without the constraints of trying to rework the existing interior to a new boat, I find myself with a blank slate from which to design a truly spectacular vessel. It could be argued that the sheet isn’t truly blank. For example, we’ve already decided that we’ll have a hard-chined hull. More about that at (link to archive.) And early on, we’d discussed IRC, Americap (now ORR), PHRF, Weekending, Transpac, and the rest. But now we had to start making some concrete decisions on our goals for the boat. Designing a boat is a challenging, exhilarating experience. For an owner, it is neither as simple in theory, nor as complex in operation, as it appears. It is a process that finds every decision based on compromise. These decisions are driven by the desire to find the boat that best suits your individual needs and is heavily influenced by the realism, experience and insight of the designer and everyone else you have around you. Rather than spend a ton of time writing emails and having a plethora conference calls, I bit the bullet and decided to get our core group, including Jim, together for a day and really work through what it was we wanted. It was also an opportunity to re-confirm everyone’s responsibilities. Our core group consists of my father, Nick Barran, Jim Antrim, Harry Pattison, Mike Hanna, Todd Best and me. We bring a range of experience to the table. Obviously Jim and Harry lead the pack in that category and Todd and I are at the other end. I grew up in Marina Del Rey with Mike and a few others at Windjammers’ Yacht Club. Mike has wealth of experience and is our primary driver; so his input is critical. Todd is the least experienced of our core, but is smart enough to be unafraid to ask questions. I think it’s important to have a couple people in a group who are not shy about asking basic questions. It makes everyone think a bit more carefully. Of course there is a limit to that before the questions are just, simply, eye-rolling frustrations...but Todd hasn’t reached that point, yet! I wanted to leverage everyone’s day as best I could, so I created a PowerPoint presentation that would hopefully focus our discussion and provide some perspective for it. That presentation is attached. You will notice that it focuses on looking at the pure race-boat market. And, as you will recall, I wanted a boat that was of a similar speed to our previous ILC 40, but with an interior. As a result, all of the racer/cruisers, bar a rare few, were excluded from the discussion. We knew that a Farr 395 had an interior, but we weren’t interested in a boat that heavy. What I wanted was something akin to a modern Santa Cruz 40 or Ross 40. Light, fairly nimble and fun to sail. I like sailing in the 18-27 second range and wanted a boat that, in a breeze, might surf. We also knew that we wanted to add an interior to the boat because ‘weekending’ at Catalina is a burgeoning priority for our family. Our previous boat did not ‘weekend’…at all. It was about as comfortable as a Melges 24. So we needed to fit an interior into the new boat without getting much slower than the previous one. As you page through the presentation you’ll find an analysis of our previous 5 years of racing. I felt it important, as it gives a general indication of the types of racing we’d done and where we had succeeded the most and least. Most importantly, it provides a landscape of experience from which we could draw more conclusions that were based on fewer assumptions. The next section of the presentation is a very brief analysis of the current landscape of racing. By now, we had discounted the ORC GP 42 concept as a ‘non-starter’ on the West Coast. This left a couple of options: pure racer/cruiser, IRC racer/cruiser, or a middle ground somewhere half way in between. So we sat around a conference table in my office and worked through the available options. Initially, we looked at a skinny boat (10’6”) with an interior. We also had a fairly long, open cockpit. I love big cockpits. But without any seats we sacrificed a lot of interior volume and lost some of the utility while sitting on a mooring, at the island or back at the dock. We also had a tremendous amount of discussion on a few issues:
I am a firm believer in having a good discussion on an issue. I’m also of the mind, and I think most on our team know it, that if someone believes in something strongly enough to continue arguing for it, I will probably realize I missed something when I made the original decision. The keel is a good example. Jim, early on, said he would rather build a new fin. I said “no, the current one is good”. He continued on after I had felt the decision had been made. But each time he did so in a way that caused me to think “you know, he’s really convinced a new keel fin is critical to our success.” So we changed fins. The wheels were a bit trickier of an issue. I know that Harry has a firm conviction that double wheels would be a benefit (if nothing else he could have more control over Mike’s driving…you know the old, sly foot on the bottom of the wheel). But I can’t see that it is going to add anything to the boat. If I’m wrong they are easy to retro-fit; so it’s not critical to the process. But everything kept driving at the real question we needed to answer: “what kind of racing did we want to do with the boat?” In the end, our priorities fell in the following order: The boat would be 80/20 racing versus cruising.
I also sat down with my wife to gather her thoughts on what she wanted in a boat to be comfortable at the island for a weekend:
With respect to the interior I also had a couple of requests. The first was that the nav station be forward, by the mast. I wanted this for a couple of reasons: less pitching, more room and closer to all of the mast electronics. I also wanted a couple setees (that could double as pilot berths on either side of the companion way. Originally, they were short benches (4 feet), but we changed them to pilot berths. I wanted them there because I suffer from sea sickness and there are times that I want somewhere to sit and doze off. With those priorities in hand, Jim was now able to focus on the development process. He went home with his notes and gave it a few weeks to let all of the ideas percolate through his mind. My thinking through all of this has been that I would rather take a few extra moments now than rush into a decision and come back to it later thinking “gosh, we really missed on that one.” Several weeks later he came back with a boat that was quite different than the original design. She was about the same weight (10,220), but had more beam (12’ versus 10.6) and slightly more freeboard. Additionally, she had cockpit seats. The seats would give us somewhere to sit on deliveries and a place to dine while at the island. Additionally, the aft end of the seat combings provided a higher platform for the primary winches and allowed them to be set inboard from their normal position. Finally, it increased the interior volume aft. Yes, she was less of a racer and more of a cruiser. But that was ok with me. There were also some moments of levity in the process. One night my wife walked in and noticed I was still on my computer. She asked if I was still working, to which I replied “no.” Quickly, she retorted with, “You CAN’T be looking at the drawings again? I doubt that other guys stare at centerfolds as intently or for as long as you’ve stared at those drawings.” “But I am!” I replied. That’s the moment it dawned on me, I had my own personal boat porn. And how cool was that. Soon I’ll have the boat, but for now the porn will have to do. So that’s a little bit about the design process. It sounds quite basic, but I had never considered how much detail was required beneath the drawings themselves. Our next step is to pick a builder. This requires producing an RFP, and to do that Jim has to put on his engineering hat to create the laminate schedules, etc. I have now learned that the actual process of drawing the boat is only a small part of the entire picture. Next up, I spend some time on the process of selecting a builder. 09/20/06 |