08/05/2001 - Contrary to the belief of many aspiring students the math involved in yacht and small craft naval architecture is not very complex.  Most people will probably need more help in learning to be careful with their calculations and check their work, than actually needing much math instruction.  Of course we are always here to teach anything you didn't get in school at no addtional charge and our "Basic Math Primer" can be emailed to you free.  However for those who want to learn math from the simplest of addition problems up through quite advanced subjects, we recommend the Khan Academy www.khanacademy.org  This fully endowed distance learning institution is absolutely free and amazingly good at teaching from the simplest concept to the most advanced.  Though they started with math they are well on their way to providing a complete university education without charging you a cent.  We sure wish we could build an endowment like that to pay our instructors so we could teach for free!

06/12/2011 - Here is a picture from our daughter's wedding to Rob Campos on June 4th.  We've created another page with more photographs of the wedding.  These are just a sample of hundreds.  The team of professional wedding photographers is called Pasion and their web site is www.pasionphotography.com  Once you see their website you will have a feel for how lucky anyone would be to have them do their wedding and I'm sure you better book your dates early.  We were fortunate in that we had an inside track with them because Pasion is run by Rob's brother Eddy and sister-in-law Jennifer with assistance, at least for this wedding, of their daughter Mekaela.  We never could have gotten a June 4th date with such a top wedding photographer without family "pull" I'm sure!  The wedding reception was at Clewley Farm Restaurant www.clewleyfarm.com  They did a great job with the meal and really got into the occasion. .... We've just gotten another design project for our Order Book.  This will be a 30' cutter on Colin Archer Redningsskoite lines rigged for single handed sailing and laid out below for a couple to live aboard.  Of course we've got several designs we have to finish up before we can get to her, but we are looking forward to this project. .... We want to say a special word of thanks to our custom design clients.  For well over a decade and a half now we have had more work offered to us than we can handle.  This is not the usual situation for design firms and I'm afraid we were slow to realize that we had to be much more careful not to take on too much work.  This has meant that our Order Book has gotten to the point where clients have to be quite patient waiting for us to complete their designs.  We have been very appreciative of their understanding that to produce extremely high quality of work on each design just plain takes time.  We continue to train the very best draftsmen we can find, but we cannot train enough people fast enough to keep up with demand.  We assure you we are trying hard to be realistic on the time we will need to complete these designs and therefore when we can start work on any new project.  We are catching up and we believe that we'll have all projects currently in the Order Book completed by the end of next year.  We will try very hard not to get more than a year to a year and a half's worth of work in the Order Book from now on.

05/31/2011 - All the buttons are done for our new PayPal based shopping cart system.  We will be adding them to the site as rapidly as possible over the next week or so.  Of course our current order forms based system will remain operational for those who prefer it for the foreseeable future.  Presumably it may be phased out eventually if you, dear readers, do prefer the shopping cart system. .... On our YDS Enrollment Form you will now see that our students can order the quite fabulous Brazil photorealistic rendering plug-in educational license for Rhino.  For most yacht design work the Flamingo photorealistic rendering engine is just fine.  After all there you primarily want to produce beautiful pictures of immaculate yachts.  However if you wanted to do some images or videos in hyper-realism to portray a yacht entering port travel stained, with worn spots in the varnish, streaks of stain from a fitting, etc. and set the scene as though taken from a battered dock with rusty steel drums, etc. in some tropic port, you might well prefer Brazil.  This is rendering for the full time professional who might want to produce movie sequences to fill in views for a DVD of a voyage that show a scene from a perspective the actual sailors could not film and have it indistinguishable from the rest of the film.

04/29/2011 - Some might be interested in this picture of Tom in his formal attire.  Nannette says since most people only see Tom in work clothes we should post a picture here and another in Tom's biography page.  We promised our daughter Heather that he would be decently attired to walk her down the isle for her wedding in early June.  For those with Scottish heritage you might be interested in Tom's tailors Rocky Roeger and Kelly Stewart-Roeger of www.usakilts.com .  They are very kind and careful and did a good job of tailoring the kilt to make Tom look presentable.  We recommend them very highly for Scottish attire from the most casual to the most formal.  Nannette's dress for the wedding is almost as much a secret as the bride's.  In early June look for a picture of Nannette as well and hopefully a few pictures of the wedding. .... Tom did do a practice run for the Windsor & Middleton wedding this morning! .... Every day Tom is creating about ten more "buttons" for our new shopping cart system, which should be up and running soon. .... We are working on incorporating Finite Element Analysis (FEA) into the latter part of our curriculum so that our students will be able to do detailed stress and strain analyses as another check on structural parts in addition to normal structural calculations and materials testing.  This is of enormous benefit in making sure that parts do not have stress concentration points or unanticipated areas of higher stress in certain conditions.  In the past FEA has been so high priced and complex to operate as to only be cost effective for "grand prix" racing boats.  We are now entering an era when modest yacht design offices can afford to use FEA and it is cost effective for structures on even the smallest yacht.   This has been a long time coming, we've paid a massive amount for FEA software in the past only to find we could not recommend it and had to drop the idea of teaching it.  We are very pleased to see a new era in which FEA is now cost effective in our industry.  As soon as we are thoroughly conversant with this software, you will hear more about it. .... Many of you have been asking about our live aboard voyaging home & personal office "Dunnechtan" and what our plans are this year.  As many of you know we worked hard last summer to get her ready to go south in the fall.  However what with Nannette having to virtually rebuild our fiberglass dinghy and having to do several repairs to the glass on "Dunnechtan", Tom having to build a new rudder, and both of us with the kind aid of our friend Kent having to work to install an entire new exhaust system we found ourselves into the latter part of September.  We decided to start south anyway in hopes of having really good fall weather even though we knew we should have been underway for some time at that point.  Unfortunately we lost the weather, as a number of other late starters did, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor.  So we stopped part way down the Maine coast where we could lay up the boat at the very nice Knight's Marine in Rockland, and winter over with our daughter.  This trip was enough time to give us a good perspective on what we needed to do to for improved office functionality.  This winter Tom designed a new dinghy to store better on the cabin overhead and a series of shelves and lockers for our office gear and computers.  We'll be trying to get as much of this done before mid-summer as possible, but then we will start South again.  Our shore office will handle plans printing and shipping of products, but everything else will be handled from our home/boat office and the home offices of other staff members.  These days that all works so well that most people will never know we aren't all in one office.

04/01/2011 - In the interests of making buying decisions easier for our Stock Plans and to save many customers money on shipping we have changed the way we handle selling Complete Plans and Study Plans.  Because we like to keep our Stock Plans affordable, we've always priced them just to cover the costs of printing and and packaging, plus a built in amount to cover shipping, and the estimated average support time.  As general costs of the business have risen we found two things.  We needed to increase what we charged for the plans if we were going to continue our policy of unlimited advice and explanatory sketches for plans holders.  Also there was now enough disparity between shipping costs to different parts of the world that if we charged enough to cover anywhere in the world it would mean overcharging domestic customers and some international customers.  Even if we took an average it seemed that some people would still be overcharged in relation to actual shipping costs by enough to not make sense.  Therefore we have divided the shipping out and as we implement our new shopping cart system, developed in partnership with widely trusted PayPal, shipping is being divided into a "domestic" region and several international regions to make sure that everyone pays as close as possible to the actual shipping cost and still get a firm figure in advance before confirming the order.  The same will be done for the rest of our products.  At the same time we found that, since more and more people were requesting that publications be sent as email attachments, that it made sense to switch to selling Study Books instead of Study Plans.  These are priced almost entirely by sending time and support time as Study Books are very quick to send but usually result in lots of questions.  Using Study Books instead of Study Plans will vastly reduce what the customer pays to get a package of information on the design and consultation time with the designer.  We are doing PDFs of the drawings normally set with Study Plans and will include them with the "design article" which has always been part of the Study Plans package.  So you will be getting exactly the same information at a lot lower cost and much faster.  These are not just readable or your computer or e-book reader.  They are also printable so you can put them on your bed side table and dream for a few minutes before you go to sleep.  Because our costs are reduced we'll be likely to make about as much money as we did on the more expensive Study Plans.  A win for everyone.  We are also adopting a policy of taking all the questions asked about a given design and our answers and collecting them to add them either to the body of the Study Book or to an evolving appendix of Frequently Asked Questions.  So the questions you ask will end up helping others who didn't think to ask them and each Study Book will evolve to be more and more tailored to the needs of the customers for that particular design, instead of being in plain "magazine article" form.  There will be a transitional period.  We've made PDFs of a lot of drawings but will need to do some more.  All the articles have been written but we will be looking for ways to improve them.  Anyway it looks good to us here.

02/21/2011 - We are happy to say that YDS is running more efficiently than ever and we are working on major revisions to various lessons which add fascinating material that often has not been available to naval architecture students before.  We are finally catching up on our custom design work, and thank our clients for their extreme patience.  We will try not to get so overloaded again.  ....  Many of you will remember that awhile back we mentioned that we would have to raise YDS Lesson pricing again.  We've kept these very low, but still we hoped that our increased staff and more efficient organizational structure would allow us to delay increases further.  However even students were beginning to suggest raising the lesson fees and we have to admit that we do need to go up a bit.  Because we hate raising rates in the middle of the process for students we are limiting this to a $25 rise at this time, effective today.  Thus the new lesson pricing will be $225, except for the lower cost introductory lesson and the higher last lesson, as described in the Yacht Design School Brochure.  We held this down by switching to a system of normally sending lessons as email attachments which saves a lot of money.  Shortly we will be introducing a shopping cart system which should make us even more efficient and we will not contemplate any further rises until we've had a good shot at seeing how well that will do at keeping costs down.  Nevertheless we do want to say that we expect that sometime later this year we will have to raise the lesson costs another small amount.  Many of you, realizing how much less expensive it is to study with us than with our competitors, will no doubt kid us about our caution in raising rates.  We've gotten some clever emails along those lines.  However you must remember than in some developing countries ambitious young people very badly want to study with us, but cannot afford to.  This breaks our hearts as we believe a good education is important to everyone and especially to the yacht and small craft design field.  We will always keep the cost of this school just as low as we can.

01/08/2011 - We've got a lot to tell you about our adventures and that will be added to the site at some point.  At present we are in winter quarters and are working furiously to make sure everybody gets lesson corrections and design work done as fast as possible. ... We've updated a few things on the school portion of the site to make sure that people understand that, while most students these days are finding it most efficient and least expensive to take our CAD Course first and then proceed with the main curriculum, the "CAD Course" is not a formal prerequisite to the Main Curriculum.  If, for instance, you have reason to believe you already are skilled in the Rhino CAD software, or are so skilled in other CAD programs that you are sure you can learn Rhino on your own efficiently, we would not want you to feel you had to take it just to get to the Main Curriculum. ...  Dan is working hard on developing the new version of this web site, which will have a lot of marvelous capabilities which we will all enjoy. ... This coming year should be a very exciting one.

09/16/2010 - We are just about to set off south in our 30' double ended pilothouse sloop which now contains Tom and Nan's personal offices.  Our shore office is now run by Tom's brother Dan whom many of you have already been working with for some time.  This change has allowed us to reduce our costs quite a lot which should hold down price rises for a while.  It should also provide more people to answer questions that need not be answered by Tom.  This will hopefully mean faster design work and faster correction times on lessons, which has been a problem as the school has grown.  .... We now want to give a special thanks to our design clients and students who have been very kind and understanding when this transfer, which was originally supposed to be complete in May ran on through the summer resulting in unconscionable delays in getting work out and lesson corrections.  They have understood that this move should ultimately be to the benefit of all of us and that we have been working as hard as we can.  Unfortunately Tom's estimates of how long it would take to rebuild the rudder and the sudden discovery that the entire exhaust system really needed rebuilding to be safe took way longer than we anticipated due to Tom's poor estimating of how much his heavy duty arthritis would slow down this work.  Indeed all fiberglass repair work, and the exhaust system rebuild became largely the province of Nannette working under Tom's rather annoying supervision. ... Thank you all for your support.  We also thank a wonderful gentleman named Kent who has a larger version of our vessel and helped out a great deal when tricky jobs needed a lot of strength or work in confined spaces.  Our great friend, former student, and head of another design firm in town, Sven Oftedal and his wife Pat also showed up frequently to offer assistance and encouragement. ...  We will keep you all posted on our progress down the East Coast.  Tom will be using his off watches, which amount to full time hours, and in port days to catch up on work, so you should all be seeing advancement on your projects and lessons soon.

06/02/2010 - Tom and Nan have received their cast iron Shipmate 211 stove, which has bronze trim, a bronze deck iron, and a stainless steel Liverpool type smoke head.  The second shipment containing the heat shielding for the stove recess plus the stainless steel stove pipe should arrive soon.  We will put some photos of the unpacking, set up and final installation on the site as we proceed.  Then we will report on how we use the stove and any little hints and recommendations we have.  We are very enthusiastic about having these fine solid fuel stoves back on the market.  We used to specify these stoves in many of our designs and were very disappointed in the early 90s when we could no longer obtain them.  The “Shipmate” stoves have been known for lasting for many decades.  60 years of use was not uncommon before needing replacement parts.  It has been well known for a long time that the secret to being happy on a cruising boat is to always be able to get warm and dry and have good food.  With the “Shipmate’s” easily regulated radiant heat the first two are taken care of very neatly.  With a sizable cooking surface and an oven for cakes, bread, cookies, et cetera the “Shipmate 211” is a prime element in keeping the crew well fed.  These stoves are the key to comfort in temperate to cold climates.  Even in the tropics you can need a little heat at times and we’ll be giving some hints on how the old timers were able to cook without excessive heat on these stoves even in the hottest areas of the world.

04/29/2010 – Students will note that we’ve finally had to raise our prices on the Yacht Design School main curriculum by $25 per lesson.  Rising costs and the troubled economy have just made it impossible to hold the line any longer.  In actual fact a cold analysis would suggest we should have raised the prices more, but we don’t want to raise prices much for people in the middle of the curriculum.  Naturally we still compare favorably with tuition at other schools.  We left this a little long.  Even some students were suggesting that they felt we should raise rates!

04/28/2010 – Many of you who have been interested in Tom and Nannette’s new home/office, the double ended 30’ pilothouse sloop Dunnechtan, may be interested to hear that the rugged and reliable Shipmate solid fuel heating and cooking stoves and ranges are back in production.  We are ordering one of their “211” ranges with a nice oven just right for baking bread, biscuits, cakes, and chocolate chip cookies.  Not to mention cherry pies, shepard’s pie and everything else that Tom is mesmerized by and Nan likes to cook.  You will very likely see a lot about these stoves on our site, fairly soon as we have had many people ask for good heating and cooking stoves of traditional model and we want to be able to supply them with reliable stoves and good advice on how to install them and use them.  These stoves sure bring back memories.  There is nothing so cozy as a cabin heated by a “Shipmate” stove.  It is the boat with a “Shipmate” that everyone wants to gather in for a gam in the evenings.  There will be more on the site on these stoves soon.  …. All of us are working hard to work down the back log of custom design work.  Also we are training another instructor to take over some of the lesson correction work on the earlier lessons to speed things up for students and give Tom more time for research and lesson revision.  As we continue moving Tom and Nan’s personal offices afloat again, with Tom’s brother Dan handling more of the routine work at our shore office, we hope to have much more time to work on drafting, research, and writing.

02/25/2010 - On the publishing order form in the section Cruising, Living Aboard, & Voyaging we've added Frank Mulville's very insightful book Single Handed Sailing.  No other book so perfectly communicates what single handed sailing is like.  You don't have want to single hand to make this an important book to read.  Much of what Mr. Mulville has to say applies very well on the family yacht where one person is on watch alone for a number of hours and must in some senses think like a single hander.

02/22/2010 -  See the publishing order form for a new article by Dan MacNaughton about a practical sliding galley stove device you can easily build yourself. This is nicest system we’ve seen for small boat galleys when you need a one or two burner stove to slide out of the way when not in use.

02/17/2010 - We've finally gotten a brief biography of our new Associate Designer Cliff W. Estes linked to our Designs page.  We are just finishing up the first project on which he has worked with us and are very impressed with his the set of drawings he has worked up.  With the addition of his help we have great hopes we finally can keep up with the demand for our work.

02/16/2010 -  We have added the latest edition of Lin & Larry Pardey's brilliant Storm Tactics Handbook to our marine publishing order form.  Be sure to read Dan's review on this book.  This is without doubt the best book on handling all types of sailing yachts in heavy weather.  All serious cruising sailors will want this book. .... Tom and Nan are working weekends on the 30' double ended pilot house sloop they are restoring as a home and office.  This will allow them to have their personal offices afloat again as they used to and with the help of today's improved communications they will be able to do design work, writing, YDS lesson correction, and management functions from the boat, with the rest of the functions of the business handled by the shore office.  Nannette will be able to do her painting from the vessel as well.  We have always felt that the more time a designer spends on the water, the better their designs will be.  Probably our previous 17 years of living aboard has a lot to do with the success of our designs.

01/06/2010 - We are happy to announce that the well known West Coast designer and Rhino expert Cliff Estes is now working with us as an Associate Designer.  This will help us speed up our progress for the very patient clients with projects in our Order Book.  We will be adding a biography for Cliff shortly.  This is wonderful as in the past year we have been  badly overloaded. Instead of having to tell people that it will be months before we can get to their project, we should be able to start working on Concepts as soon as we get deposits.

12/10/2009 - We've just added Surveying Fiberglass Sailboats to our Fore and Aft Publications section of the web site.  All reviews are linked to the name of the publication on the publishing order form.  Everyone interested in a new or used fiberglass boat should learn everything they can about surveying them, even though this would be no substitute for a professional survey when a boat is eventually selected for purchase.

12/07/2009 - This week Fore and Aft Publications, our new division, is pleased to announce three new titles in our selection of books for sale. The first is Sailing the Big Flush, by Eileen Beaver, an account of a fascinating cruise around the head of the Bay of Fundy to the Minas Basin, in a small boat equipped to take the ground at low water--a necessity in an area with a 50’ tidal range! The second is Trekka Round the World, by John Guzzwell, a classic account of the author’s circumnavigation in what was then the smallest boat (20’) to have done so. It is a great story of a well executed voyage. The third is Dinghy Cruising, by Margaret Dye, an informative How-To book about cruising in very small boats. Full of technical detail and interspersed with cruising anecdotes, it is the best book we know of, on the subject, and a fascinating read. Fore and Aft manager Dan MacNaughton reviews each of these books in detail—just click the link appearing with each title. ....  Also reviewed this week is Phil Bolger’s book, Boats With an Open Mind, a collection of fascinating designs and design commentary by one of the designers we admire most.

10/18/2009 - For a little over a week starting Monday October 19^th, you will have trouble communicating with us as the office will be only intermittently manned.  This is because Tom and Nannette are going to survey a vessel which they hope to purchase as a home and office to allow a more mobile business environment again.  For 17 years we ran our business from one of our previous boats.  This will hopefully allow us to visit more of our students and people building our designs.  Our draftsmen will continue to work from their own home offices as they do now.  …. This year has been tough with the death of Tom and Dan’s mother, the on-going very time consuming problem of re-working this web site to be more modern, and a great deal more design work than we’ve been able to handle as efficiently as we’d like.  ….  However with Dan handling Publishing and most fulfillment work, Nathan Shawl teaching our CAD Course and doing more and more drafting for us, and other draftsmen being trained to expand our custom design capacity we are headed toward a time when we’ll be able to do everything more efficiently.

07/06/2009 - We are in the final stages of preparing a new macnaughtongroup.com website using more up-to-date software which will enable us to more easily maintain and update the site. While the appearance of the new site will be slightly different, there is only one major change to our business: the new site will include our new and revitalized publishing division, to be known as Fore and Aft Publications. The new division will be managed by Tom's brother, Dan MacNaughton, a widely-known writer on yachting subjects with considerable professional experience in the use, maintenance, and repair of boats. Fore and Aft will continue to emphasize cruising, voyaging, and living aboard, as well as technical information of all types, and will include a shopping cart system so as to make your ordering easier. Until the new site is up and running you will still be able to order books at Eastport Marine Press, the page you will reach by clicking the "publishing" button above.
    To follow up on the previous entry, our mother, Naida MacNaughton, did pass away a few days after that entry was written. A brilliant, humor-filled woman of staunch integrity, she was an expert sailor and navigator who contributed greatly to Tom's and Dan's colorful and exciting childhood with boats. Those of you who enjoy this website owe her a little bit of thanks. She, and our father Donald MacNaughton, are the foundation upon which we stand.

02/19/2009 -  Tom's mother, who is 94, appears to be in her last illness.  Nannette, with the help of others, is with her 24 hours per day.  Tom is working about 12-1/2 hours per day trying to keep up with our clients and students requests but finds he is falling behind.  We apologize for this.  Every indication is that this is not a long term situation, but for the moment there will be delays in responding to lesson questions on the main curriculum, custom design inquiries, etc.  Do keep sending your questions, lessons for corrections, etc. as we are dealing with everything as far as possible by date, which means that delaying communication will just delay a response further.  Thank you for the support that has been expressed to us by so many of you whom we've talked to during this troubled time.

01/24/2009 - We've added another nice quote from a client to our MacNaughton Yacht Designs page. ....  We've been working weekends on finishing up our book "Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions".  We've sold quite a few drafts of this book and are pleased with how helpful people have found it to be.  We found that people wanted a section on specific designs we can recommend.  Most of this is done.  The last major thing to do is a set of drawings of our own small voyaging yacht Charis.  She is number 4 of the famous J. Laurent Giles Vertue class.  The Vertues aren't very big vessels but they have proven to be excellent small liveaboard voyaging yachts.  A great many of them have made extensive voyages and circumnavigations.  Hopefully we'll get this book published in hard cover this spring.

01/12/2009 - We're a little behind on posting to the Idea Designs page.  We've got one concept design that Nathan Shawl did up, which we really must post but remains on the list.  Today we have posted an idea for a 33' version for the Sovereign 30.  This would give good choice for people who want a bit bigger vessel in the Coin Collection without going all the way to the Crown Jewel 36.  We've also added an idea on doing various sized aluminum and steel versions of the general Coin Collection concept. ... We're now well into custom designing a very nice 20' canoe yawl named Clarsach, which is the Gaelic word for the Celtic harp.  She will be great for anything from day sailing through coastal cruising and is ideal for a young couple, older couple, or a young family with up to to two small children.  The client will be building them in series and we expect they will be quite a good seller.  ... Once Clarsach 20 is done we will speed up the work on our Shining Moon 36 which David Buckley and I are working on.  David is also doing a very good job of lofting our Farthing 15 design and producing patterns for the building jig and all the parts.  Eventually people will be able to order kits for this little design because of his work.

12/03/2008 - As you can see from the infrequency of posts, we are very busy.  We are particularly pleased with the latest enhanced version of our Sovereign 30 design.  With the financial support of a gentleman on the West Coast who is building a very nice version of Sovereign we added a highly developed pilothouse and a subtly redesigned interior which manages to take a very functional interior and improve it an amazing amount by playing with inches here and there so that the great cabin aft now has dedicated function settees with pilot berths outboard.  The pilothouse is very roomy and has two super comfortable easy chairs for the watch or for just sitting and reading in ultimate comfort.  The galley and the navigation office have been subtly reworked so that both are much improved.  The head is now usable without closing off the passage to the forward cabin and is generally very comfortable.  The double berth forward is slightly bigger.  The forward office is both simpler and more efficient and we have added a sitzbath forward in the small storage cabin so that showers ashore are no longer anything you would look forward to.  This is Nannette and Tom's favorite design.  We hope that someday someone will set up a shop to build these boats as we believe that there will always be a steady demand for a modest number of these boats, each built for specific owners.  She is ideal for living aboard and voyaging for a couple or a family with up to two children.  We know of no other 30 foot voyaging yacht which combines uncompromised ocean sailing capabilities with the extraordinary amount of room we have fit into Sovereign.

09/17/2008 -  The baddies continue to go to some lengths to post nasty stuff to our discussion group.  As an emergency measure we've finally put in a password or validation code that you can't work out from the site.  If you want to post to the discussion group, email your message to us and we'll post it.  If we are confident you are OK we may get you a password so you can post directly.  Whenever the baddies figure out the password we'll change it and update everyone.

09/16/2008 - It has been pointed out that the Lesson One Summary linked to the school page still showed only a list of manual drafting tools and did not show the CAD option.  We've corrected that.  Now may be a good time to mention that these days the best single option is the all CAD route starting with taking our CAD Course and then taking the YDS Main Curriculum using CAD.  Ultimately it is also the least expensive option.

08/22/2008 - On the Design page you will see a link to David Buckley's biography.  David is a very talented gentleman who has worked for several design firms.  We are fortunate to have him working with us.  It makes our work load easier to have him doing drafting for us.  These days with virtually all our work being done in the computer our draftsmen can work from about anywhere.  Mr. Buckley is no exception.  He and his wife Kristen live aboard their 38' boat and travel, working on drafting for us as they go and transmitting files to us over the Internet. .... To attempt to make YDS Lesson Two a little easier for some students we have added some more material to the second half and divided the Lesson into Lesson 2a and Lesson 2b.  We hope that will make things easier for students by making this material clearer and easier to excel at.

05/23/2008 - Important: When emailing us try to always use the email address supplied by clicking on the email button on the navigation bar at the top of this page.  Some of you have gotten emails from us with a return address at "hypernet.com".  Please don't use this any more as it is no longer operating.  You can use the regular address.  Also if you get mail from us using a email address at midmaine.com you can safely reply to that.  However it is always safest to use our primary email address as that should never change.

05/01/2008 - We have added an illustrated biography of Nathan Shawl who is now acting as our principle CAD Course instructor and doing some work for us as a Yacht Draftsman and on some smaller projects as an Associate Designer. 

04/22/2008 -  We are slowly catching up on a back log of YDS main curriculum lessons, thanks to the help we are getting through having the CAD Course lessons corrected by Nathan Shawl.  Despite rewriting the tests for Lesson Two earlier this year and adding material to help the students make the lesson quicker to correct we find that this lesson is still a bottle neck both for students in the amount of time it takes them and in the great many hours it often takes to get one lesson totally corrected and graded, especially when some students are making several submissions before we find they have gotten everything correct.  We are therefore going to do further modifications to the test and possibly divide the lesson into two lessons to make things go quicker for the student. ....  A British gentleman has kindly written us to provide expanded information on the lengths of locks which has caused us to modify our material on narrowboats and other canal cruisers in the Idea Designs page.  We thank him very much.  .... Our Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions publication is now up to 260 pages.  We have also incorporated our Living Aboard - Figuring the Costs article as an appendix so that you can order only the single publication.  The next major enhancement of this very popular work will be adding more information on more examples of suitable designs for family living aboard and voyaging.  We will have to raise the price of this publication soon or find a way to print and bind it more economically.  Probably we'll have to do both.

02/25/2008 - We are pleased to announce that we have enlisted Nathan Shawl, a CAD expert, who is also one of our advanced Yacht Design School students, to work with us on teaching the CAD Course.  Nathan has been working with us over the last 5 months going over the CAD Course and making many valuable suggestions for improvements to the curriculum.  These have been incorporated as we have agreed on them and I'm sure many of you are already benefiting from them greatly.  Dividing the teaching burdens should help speed lesson correction times for all students a great deal.  We are always trying to have the best possible experience for our students and we are sure that Nathan will be a big component in that this year. .... In other news our draft of Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions has now been frozen at 240 pages in 8-1/2 x 11 format and we are now editing it and refining it to produce a regular 6 x9 edition that can be sold through book stores as well as through our site as the evolving draft has been.  ....  Our work on the Miss Congeniality 38 Sportfisherman Cruiser is proceeding well.  We are getting close to a complete Concept Design on our Clarsach 20 canoe yawl.  We are looking forward to completing our Shining Moon 36 Chinese style liveaboard and voyaging yacht, which should start soon.  Our plywood construction drawing for the Osprey 30 cruising tug is looking very good and we hope will be done shortly.  All this would go faster if we had more draftsmen, but with the industry in desperate need of additional design personnel it is getting harder to find enough staff to take on all the work we could get.

01/24/2008 - We have been tremendously busy in both the design area and at Yacht Design School.  All last year we were way behind on design projects.  That now seems to be under control and we hope will remain so.  Growth has been the norm for Yacht Design School but I'm afraid last year growth was too fast.  The normally required lesson correction times have not allowed us to keep lesson corrections as timely as we want.  We are re-writing "bottle neck" lessons that take many hours to correct, such as Lesson Two, to allow more rapid corrections.  This is a long process, especially when added to our efforts to make major revisions to lessons and train additional instructors.  I hope that those for whom lesson corrections have been slow will forgive us.  We simply failed to anticipate that the school could grow as fast as it has.  As of now it looks like we should be able to get an additional instructor on line within the next week or so and will have the test process more standardized for Lesson Two to speed correction times within another week.  From there on we have great hopes that for the foreseeable future we should be able to eliminate delays.  I would like to personally thank all the design firms, boat builders, students, and many others who have sent students to us.  We have always tried to be a very personal very high quality school.  We have made sure the schools was "scalable" so that it made money whether small or large.  We never aimed to be the largest school that taught yacht and small craft naval architecture.  It is your insistence that potential students should come to us which has made us one of the two schools with the most students.  This is both nice to know and a challenge!

10/21/2007 - We are still adding to our publication Living Aboard -Frequently Asked Questions.  We now have 180 pages in 8-1/2 x 11 format.  We've been adding to this in order of the most frequently asked questions and the most complex ones to answer.  As soon as it looks like we've got a reasonably stable publication which we don't need to add much too we'll typeset it for publication and get a hard bound edition printed up.  This still looks like it will be awhile, but perhaps by the end of this year we'll be ready.

10/08/2007 - We would like to acknowledge the generous gift of a large number of marine books to our Yacht Design School library by Larry and Verna Heimbinder.  Most of these books will provide more research materials for students and others working in our library.  Some which duplicate works of which we already have sufficient copies, will be donated to the library at The Boat School, the oldest operating school of professional boat building in the nation, which is here in Eastport.  Thank you very much Mr. and Mrs. Heimbinder.

08/25/2007 -  We've added another question and answer to the CAD Course FAQ.  We were spending a great deal of time each week explaining that the RhinoMarine plug-ins and add-ons were not produced by the folks who produced Rhino and were not necessary to use Rhino in marine design, nor desirable in taking our CAD Course.  Hence this long detailed standardized explanation. 

06/04/2007 - We've updated our Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions publication again and note that it is now 155 pages.  We have a fair amount more material to add but sometime this year we hope to come out with a hard bound version.

05/25/2007 - We've updated our Yacht Design School Frequently Asked Questions to cover our latest thinking on the relative importance of Computer Assisted Design (CAD) versus manual drafting.  As you might expect CAD continues to become more important and an increasingly good idea to learn early on.  We've also found that occasionally people ask us to let them acquire the YDS lessons without out taking the tests.  Sometimes they even ask to buy the lessons and a diploma!  As you can imagine we won't do this, as it would not be right, and we hope that saying so in the FAQ will make it less necessary to try to come up with polite ways to refuse these requests.

05/03/2007 -  The addition of our daughter Heather to the team as an Administrative Assistant is helping a lot.  She has taken much of the routine communications off Tom's shoulders and is doing most of the fulfillment work that Nannette has been doing.  In Tom's case this has about doubled the amount of productive design work and YDS lesson correction and revision work that Tom can do.  This will make a big difference over last year, when we were disastrously overloaded with design work.  We should be able to move projects along much faster now. .... We've accumulated quite a lot of interesting questions that students have had on drafting techniques when they are just starting out and are working on adding a number of illustrations to the lessons, especially lesson one, which should be helpful both to new students and to those further along in our curriculum.

04/20/2007 - We have added some nice photographs of the Blue Moon yawl in the brokerage page. ...Happy Birthday Luke!

03/30/2007 - We have added card identification numbers boxes to all the order forms.  CIDs are the three or four digit numbers printed after the card number on the back of your credit card.  By getting those we ensure that the person placing the order has physical possession of the card and thus help protect your credit card account.  I should mention that this is precautionary.  We do not believe anyone in the last 18 years has actually used a card that they were not entitled to use.  However it doesn't hurt to be careful.

03/23/2007 - A number of potential students have asked us to put summaries of the contents of the later YDS Lessons on the web site.  Even though we are still revising the later lessons in the course frequently, people seem to prefer to have summaries of the lesson contents on the site even if they may be outdated by revisions frequently.

03/15/2007 - We have just been revising the YDS Frequently Asked Questions and the CAD Course Frequently Asked Questions which touch on learning Computer Assisted Design (CAD) and whether you should learn CAD exclusively, manual drafting first, or both CAD and manual drafting.  We notice that every time we revise this material we seem to put a bit more emphasis on the benefits of CAD.  Tom still has a manual drafting table next to his CAD workstation and probably always will, given that we have a large number of stock plans that were originally manually drawn and will always need some manual updating.  Still we notice that in planning offices for our own boat we no longer make provision for drafting tables but only for a CAD workstation. .... We have also revised the main YDS page to more fully explain the character of the later lessons which seems to confuse people.

03/05/2007 - We are now supplying Rhino Version 4.0 to all students (educational license) and professionals (commercial license).  We have been very happy with the previous version of Rhino and could do all the necessary functions of yacht design and drafting perfectly well in it.  We did make some suggestions to speed certain drafting functions which would make the actual drawing time quicker.  We are very happy to report that every single one of our suggestions were incorporated.  While we aren't so egotistical as to feel that this was done solely at our suggestion, it does mean that we are extremely happy with Version 4.0.  All the pricing for the educational licenses available to our students are on the YDS Enrollment form.  Commercial licenses may be purchased through our Marine Publishing Order Form.

03/02/2007 - We often get students from other schools asking if it is alright to ask us questions.  We've added a question and answer to the Yacht Design School Frequently Asked Questions page describing what kinds of questions we can answer and what kinds we can't.  We want to assure our "competitors" that we don't use these contacts to try to recruit students.  We do our best to help them but we have plenty of students and while we will take people who want to transfer from other schools it is not something we are trying to do. ...

02/14/2007 – We finally had to admit that we could not stop the automated posting by spammers on our Discussion Group.  We shut it down, deleted it, and built another one with a “gimmick” which should keep the automated postings out at least for awhile and gives us a mechanism for altering the way people post slightly every time the spammers figure out how to by-pass it.  Human beings should be able to post to it just fine, but computers should have a harder time.  We hope this works! .... We have made some changes on the Yacht Design School main page and in the Yacht Design School Brochure to make it clearer that most students take our course on a distance learning basis, though we usually have had a few residential students as well. .... We have also noted that an increasing number of students, especially those outside of North America, are first taking the Computer Assisted Design Course in using Rhino as your primary design tool and then taking our main curriculum using Rhino without using any manual drafting.  While this may not be as good as learning both manual and CAD techniques, today it is certainly a viable approach.

02/02/2007 - On the Farthing page we've added some great pictures of a model of the vessel being built by Eric Crossen in Alaska.  I hope that Eric will send us many more pictures both of his model and of his full sized boat.  This is one person "backpacker" style voyaging yacht is the smallest of our Coin Collection ultimate voyaging yachts of various sizes.  They are very popular vessels which are always being built all over the world.

01/30/2007 -  Our Careers page has been modified a bit to give more information on the skills that we wish people to have who are working with us.  This page has a huge list of job functions.  Remember if you'd like to work with us it is perfectly permissible to combine several of these jobs until they get so big and time consuming that you have to split some of them off for others to do.  We feel that this allows everyone to eventually focus on what they like to do and are the best at.  This page makes it look like we are a huge outfit.  Actually we are not but these are the areas in which we could use more people or in which we see opportunity for others to develop profit centers for themselves by working with us.

01/27/2007 - For those of you interested in custom designs, we've added an interesting page defining what we mean by various styling types.  This is linked to the Custom Design Quotation Form.  You may find it a useful insight into how we think about these things as we develop at style choosing between form follows function, traditional styling, classic styling, or "starship" styling.

01/25/2007 -  We've added another page with the equipment list, some comments and lots of pictures on the Ampibicon on the brokerage page.  She really looks nice. .... Also we've added a much better profile view of our Crown Jewel design to the site.  You can now see what she looks like a lot better.  This is one of our favorite designs.

01/19/2007 - In the Brokerage section you will find a new listing for one of the really nice 25' trailerable Amphibicon sloops.  These are great boats for a couple or small family for anything up to coastwise living aboard.  .... We also have added an Equipment List for the 23' Blue Moon cutter posted in the Brokerage section last time.  Watch for pictures of her and more information on her soon. .... Our publication Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions is now 96 pages and we are still adding more pages.  These are 8-1/2 x 11 pages and it is getting to be far more expensive to print these on nice paper, comb bind them and send them out than it would be to have them printed and bound.  The problem is that we are still adding to them all the time.  We will have to come up with a solution that reduces printing costs and raises the price a bit. This will be some sort of printed and bound edition with updates available until the next edition comes out.  We are trying to find the best solution for you.

01/05/2007 - In the Brokerage section you will find a new listing for a nice little gaff rigged liveaboard cutter.  This has been the home of Tom and Nan's daughter Heather for the last decade.  This is a chance to acquire a fabulous liveaboard yacht in essentially new condition for a fraction of the cost of a new vessel.  This modest investment will allow you to try living aboard and doing anything from a little coastal sailing to a circumnavigation with confidence. ...  By next Friday we hope to add a really nice small coastal cruiser to the site as well.  Look for more then.

12/05/2006 - Our publication Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions is now up to 95 pages.  We've added information on the basic principle behind seamanship, evaluating how comfortable you will be at sea, attitudes toward living aboard, and avoiding the need to exert a lot of effort in handling your vessel. ... We've added two more of our favorite books to the marine publishing order form.  Both of them are by Hervey Garrett Smith.  One is The Arts of the Sailor in which each chapter instructs you in something done with line plus sometimes canvas work or a bit of wood working.  The other is The Marlinspike Sailor in which each chapter is a useful project using line or making something nautical, useful, and fun out of wood.  I've used these two books in the past to do all sorts of useful things for our boats, and have also found that many of the projects and techniques in them can be used to make very interesting gifts.  Get someone to give you these inexpensive books for Christmas and then next Christmas give your whole family useful gifts with a nautical theme which they will love.

12/04/2006 - Joseph Delgado cadcam7@hotmail.com has again asked us to let our CAD Course students know that he is looking for two (2) additional graduates of our Computer Assisted Design Course in the use of Rhino for yacht and small craft design. Naturally the most desirable candidates will be graduates of both our CAD Course and the main Yacht Design School curriculum, and the second most desirable would be those CAD Course graduates part way through the main curriculum, but even those who have done substantial work on the CAD Course may be able to get a job as there is a great shortage of Rhino operators for the marine industry.  Ideally candidates would be willing to relocate to Louisiana but telecommuting may be possible if your skills are sufficient. The firm he represents will pay well in proportion to your knowledge.

11/25/2006 - Our Living Aboard - Freqently Asked Questions publication is now up to 90 pages.  We just added some basic material on boat and medical insurance. .... We are gradually building up our team of people to handle the tremendous increase in business in 2006 in both our MacNaughton Yacht Designs work and our Yacht Design School, which we had not anticipated.  Training is the thing that takes the time.  I think we will be able to get work out to people much faster in 2007.

10/22/2006 - Our publication Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions, which is available through our publishing order form, continues to grow.  We thank the large number of people who are buying copies for helping us make this a better publication all the time.  We just added quite a lot of material on anchoring.  The total number of pages just hit 75 today [80 as of 10/30/2006].  We are pleased to be able to provide this help for people wishing to learn more and turn their dreams into a real way of life.

09/28/2006 -  Our deep apologies for being out of the office for three weeks without providing someone to keep things running for you!  We felt it would take us 6 days or a little longer to bring a small cruising sailboat up the coast.  Unfortunately it took nearly a week just to get her launched and reasonably safe to sail.  Then combinations of amazingly light and fluky winds for this time of year, unusual amounts of fog for September, etc. slowed us down.  Even so we had to leave the boat about two harbors down the coast because Tom cracked a rib helping with the anchor, which he really shouldn't have been doing, and needed to come back and heal up where he could get work done!  We'll have to prevail on family members or friends to take her the rest of the way.  This trip was a example of why we have always said that on a boat you should, "Never have a schedule, and never travel anywhere outside of the ideal season."  .... Important points:  If you've placed orders with us, you can be sure that we haven't charged your credit card on anything that hasn't been shipped.  We are downloading our mail as we type this and note that there are 2,380 emails waiting to be dealt with.  We will get to them just as fast as we can.  Also there are lesson corrections, and custom design work that has been delayed.  I assure you that we will be getting to these just as soon as we possibly can.  We will put a log of our little trip on the web site as soon as possible so that our readers and customers will get at least some good out of these delays! .... Next summer we'll be using this boat a lot but by then hope to be able to do lesson corrections, writing, and concept design work on the boat.  Then a few weekends won't be a problem for customers.  If in future we are off sailing for a week or more we promise we'll have the office better manned or arrange to at least answer email from the boat.

09/05/2006 - We will be leaving today to deliver a boat up the coast, which should take somewhere around 6 days. During that time there will only be minimal and intermittent staff in the office. Design quotes, email, order confirmations, etc. will not be attended to in this time frame. It doesn't mean that we don't care! We normally work for you seven days a week, but just at the moment we need these few days. We apologize for the inconvenience. We will be taking existing emails, quotes, etc. with us to work on evenings as we go.

08/23/2006 - We've just added a review for our new publication Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions.  We wrote this review ourselves, which is a little odd but at least gives our thoughts about the publication and its value.  This publication is very popular and obviously there is a big demand for it.  If you've read it, we'd love to have anything from a one sentence comment to a full fledged essay on it to put on the site so people can get some varying opinions.  .... Look for some news and essays on inexpensive living aboard adventures which we hope to be adding to the site periodically through this fall.

07/31/2006 - We notice that our newest publication Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions is proving very popular.  It has the advantage that it will not only probably answer most of your questions about living aboard, but will probably answer questions that you hadn't thought of yet will recognize as important to consider.  As people continue to read this and ask further questions we will keep adding to this publication. .... We've made a couple of minor modifications to the Careers page, which might be interesting if you've been following that page.

07/26/2006 - Important message for CAD Course alumni:  Contact Joseph Delgado cadcam7@hotmail.com if you are a graduate of the our CAD Course in the use of Rhino for yacht and small craft design, or are otherwise qualified in the Rhino 3D design software.  Naturally the most desirable candidates will be graduates of both our CAD Course and the main Yacht Design School curriculum, and the second most desirable would be those CAD Course graduates part way through the main curriculum, but even those who have done substantial work on the CAD Course may be able to get a job as there is a great shortage of Rhino operators for the marine industry.  Mr. Delgado is looking for three people to start work immediately. Ideally candidates would be willing to relocate to Louisiana but telecommuting may be possible if your skills are sufficient.  The firm he represents will pay well in proportion to your knowledge. .... As a general note:  Rhino skills are very highly sought after these days and demand heavily exceeds supply.  If you want a really good job in marine design instantly you need to take our CAD Course.

07/16/2006 - We've updated our Living Aboard page I hope people continue to find it as helpful and inspiring as they have to date. .... We've also added to the YDS Frequently Asked Questions a new policy that we will no longer accept very large "deposits" against future lesson purchases.  We ask that you pay only as you order the lessons and restrict yourself to having no more than two lessons on hand at a time. Given our very liberal refund policies large amounts, which may need to be refunded, can be a financial strain.

07/11/2006 - We've updated our information on Computer Assisted Design (CAD) in both the YDS Frequently Asked Questions and in the CAD Course Frequently Asked Questions.  This reflects the increasing emphasis on CAD in the industry.  We have also added two more questions to both of these which relate to deciding whether you personally will put more emphasis on CAD during the learning process and when you should begin to do this.  This is still an individual choice.  Nannette is down the coast today surveying a boat that we might acquire for something to sail while continuing our restoration of "Charis" our much loved 68 year old voyaging yacht.

07/09/2006 - We've finally added to the marine publishing order form the publication Living Aboard - Frequently Asked Questions.  This was originally intended to be an online FAQ but it just got to be too much information to be practical in that context.  Right at the moment this is 58 pages [95 pages as of 12/07/2006] of thoughts on living aboard.  We kept holding off putting it on the site formally for sale because we kept adding to it as people brought up more questions.  However we finally realized we just had to make it available and just keep adding to it.  We would assume that this publication will continue to evolve.  Whenever the number of pages rises significantly over the version you have I would suggest that you order another copy.  This publication allows us to answer more inquiries, more promptly, and thus help more people to a happier life on the water.

07/05/2006 - Design clients, students, and general readers of this site should be aware that from today through sometime Friday of this week we will not be available to answer questions, though of course email and the answering machine will continue to take messages.  We will still be correcting lessons and collecting orders but nothing will be shipped out until early next week.  We are sorry for this but a minor medical procedure will take up a lot of time this week and we don't have enough staff in the office to keep everything going.  With any luck this will be the only time this year during which we don't have someone available to answer your queries.  We are adding to the staff as fast as we can and hope that such delays won't occur in the future.

06/04/2006 - We  revised the careers page again this week to show that we need more instructors for YDS.  If you are a real solid expert in any of the subjects we teach and are willing to take additional training let us know.  This teaching likely to be part time initially but makes a very rewarding source of both income and a sense of doing something worthwhile.

05/26/2006 - You will note that we have revised the careers page to indicate a heavy demand for yacht designers and draftsman at MacNaughton Yacht Designs.  We want to stress that, provided you are Rhino proficient, you can be located anywhere in the world and work with us using collaborative software over the Internet.  Further if you run a boat building or yacht design firm and periodically have under utilized Rhino proficient design personnel you probably don't need to lay them off.  It is likely that we can put them to work.  We pay you and you pay them.  They get increased job security and you don't permanently lose valuable workers.

05/21/2006 - People often ask whether they should take the Rhino Level One Course before taking the Computer Assisted Design Course, which teaches you how to use Rhino in yacht and small craft naval architecture.  We've added a short explanation on the YDS school page under the Rhino Level One Course training section and another question in the CAD Course FAQ.  If you normally would teach yourself any new program using the manuals and tutorials, it probably will suffice with Rhino to read the manual, do all suggested tutorials, review the Level One and Level Two manuals on the disk and review the command list.  You can then go directly to the Computer Assisted Design Course.  If, however, you would normally go to your local continuing education program, community college, university, or training specialist to learn any new program then you probably should take the Rhino Level One Course before starting on the "CAD Course".

03/25/2006 - We've now added an enormous amount of much more detailed lines development material to Lesson 4 of our Yacht Design School curriculum and divided it into three lessons 4a, 4b, and 4c.  Some of the material in these lessons is not yet available anywhere else in the world.  We are very proud of these new lessons. .... We've updated areas of the site which mention our telephone number to encourage people to call between 8am and 5pm Monday through Friday United States "Eastern" time.  It is really helpful if you can call between these hours.  Remember that while our business is highly international, we aren't really in a position to keep a complete staff here 24 hours per day, much as we'd like to make things as convenient for our customers as possible.

03/10/2006 - We have received a number of requests recently for a comparison with another school, which we feel chose the name of a program unfortunately.  This has created an impression that you can attend this school and get an education as what we call a yacht designer or a naval architect specializing in yacht and small craft naval architecture.  Viewed as a program limited to yacht styling and interior decorating the curriculum is impressive but unfortunately our answer in the Yacht Design School section on Frequently Asked Questions as to whether people wishing to be yacht designers should attend their school has had to be in the negative.  It would only take a name change for them to clear up this confusion which we believe would be better for them, their students, and the industry as there is nothing wrong at all in teaching what they are actually teaching.  I hope people will understand that our concern is that students will not be misled into choosing either our school or theirs through a confusion about what the two schools are teaching. ....

02/24/2006 - We have noticed that occasionally people inquiring about Yacht Design School ask why our tuition is lower than the other schools.  The reasons are pretty straight forward and have been added in the YDS Freqently Asked Questions.  I think they make interesting reading. .... We have also answered the frequently asked questions in which practicing designers ask if they can take the course and some potential students have asked if we teach multihulls.  .... We've also added a quotation of a phrase of mine that someone said should be preserved to our page on the individual stock plans. .... Unfortunately volume of work is forcing us to use our weekends to catch up on custom design work and YDS Lesson revisions, so we ask the you bear with us as we postpone answering any email we receive on the weekend until the beginning of the week

02/17/2006 - We've added individual pricing for the educational license plug-ins for the wonderful Rhino CAD package that we use to our YDS enrollment form.  This enables students who have already purchased an educational or commercial license for Rhino to learn these plug-ins without having to buy a bundle which includes Rhino. .... We have also added commercial license pricing for networked office versions of  the various bundles of the Rhino package with plug-ins and the individual package pricing to our publishing form.

02/04/2006 - These days we've been getting some students signing up for our CAD Course, which teaches the use of the Rhinoceros(r) or "Rhino" program in yacht and small craft naval architecture and boat building, who want assurance that they can take the course even though they are students at a school other than our Yacht Design School.  Of course they can.  It is our job to teach yacht design not to worry about "competing" with another school.  So if you are a student of a school which requires you to use CAD in your studies but does not teach it, you are most welcome to learn from us.  There is no reason for other schools to reinvent the wheel when you can take our CAD Course separately from our main curriculum.  Many large ship naval architects and practicing designers and builders also come to us for the CAD Course. .... Those interested in working with us or who are looking for a location for a new or existing marine business should look at our revised Careers page.  Recently we have found that our business has evolved toward a model that is international in human resources as well as customers.  We find there is now no reason why many of the opportunities with us should not be available to people anywhere in the world.  At the same time Eastport is a wonderful place to locate many types of marine businesses and we have included brief information on some of the businesses that we find are needed for this area and some of the resources you might be interested in. .... In the YDS Frequently Asked Questions and the CAD Course FAQ we have added some questions at the bottom that relate to helping out students at other schools.  If you need help with remedial math, are having trouble learning marine drafting, need to learn the use of Computer Assisted Design using the Rhino as mentioned above, and find the school you are attending expects you to learn this material elsewhere, we want it to be clear that you are welcome to learn these subjects from us without quitting the other school.

12/24/2005 - I write this early on the morning of the Day Before Christmas.  For many all over the world this is a very special time of  year in which we particularly hope for peace and understanding among the world's peoples and the wisdom to see how to promote it.  For our own part we earnestly hope that all of us here at the various businesses that make up macnaughtongroup.com are helping our readers, customers, and students have better lives.  To us life around the water can be the saving of many a person's happiness in life.  .... We are very pleased to announce the addition to the list of books that we supply a most wonderful volume by our friend Lucia del Sol Knight and Tom's brother Daniel Bruce MacNaughton called The Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers.  This is a truly enormous volume of great weight both physically and from the point of view of the scholarship involved, which has been many years in the researching and writing, and has been recently published in a stunningly physically beautiful volume with a quality of photo and drawing reproduction which we have never seen equaled by W.W. Norton.  We are very proud to know Lucia and be related to Dan as we are sure that this book will be considered to be one of the great works in the history of marine publishing.  The Encyclopedia will clearly be a major and essential work for the true marine bibliophile.  We are very pleased to be able to sell copies to you.

11/17/2005 - The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction is back in print with a new 5th edition with a lot of updates and about 20% more material.  If you are interested in wood and epoxy boat building you are definitely going to want to get this one.  See the review linked to the title on our marine publishing order form.  ....

11/11/2005 - We have moved our prediction of when we'll have courses in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) as shown on the YDS main page to mid-2006.  Even so this may well be optimistic.  When we'll get time to develop these courses I have no idea. .... Maybe its a little premature but we've made mention on the Brokerage page of our upcoming kits for various designs, which we are working on at present.

11/06/2005 -  It has just been pointed out to us that one place in the information on the CAD Course it refers to version 2.0.  I've corrected that to the current version 3.0.  In any case it would always be the current version that you would get on any software that we sold.  However you should always check frequently to make sure you have the current free service release.

10/28/2005 - A really nice example of one of our Crown Jewel designs has just been launched in Sweden as a "power away" bare hull and deck.  We've put a picture of her on the Crown Jewel page.  I'm counting on these Coin Collection designs to get me into Heaven.  I just love them and they seem to make such a difference in people's lives.  Hence our continuing work to develop kits for them.  Right now we are working on a kit for the Miranda sailing life dinghy which makes a great tender for most of these boats and a great practice project for those who want to do a larger sheathed strip kit.  Next will be Shilling, then Penny, and then probably Sovereign.  Since it looks like these kits of pre-cut, milled, and pre-cast parts with all other materials and gear will save at least half the labor in building and cost about the same amount as the average person would have to pay just to get the raw materials, it should be a pretty good deal.

10/14/2005 - We have added a quote from a traditional song to the Loch Fyne Marine Hardware page. ....  Recently we noticed that we had in one week communicated with clients in so many countries around the world that we put a somewhat cheeky quote at the bottom of the design page. .... We've put another quote in a couple of places [these are the good old days, explain why important], [note on needing listings for various vessels in the brokerage section]

10/05/2005 -  We have added a quote from one of our CAD Course graduates to the course page.  Thank you Ian for permission to use this quote.

10/02/2005 - On the YDS main page you will see that we've divided Lesson 6 "Flotation & Stability" into 6a and 6b.  Thus there is now a separate lesson on Flotation and one on Stability.  As we ran more students through Lesson 6 we found that the most common comment was that the lesson had too much information and took a long time.  Several students have suggested it be divided up.  We also found that we were taking an excessive amount of time correcting this lesson. We finally decided to make things easier on everyone and divide the lesson in two.

09/27/2005 - On the Idea Designs page you will find a new addition with a color rendering, the canal cruiser Eventide, which has been styled after the British narrowboats and European powered canal barges.  Like these vessels the bow and stern sections have all the shape and the center portion of the vessel is completely wall sided.  Therefore you can build them any length you desire or can afford up to 65' and even cut them in half and weld in another section when you get more money.  These vessels have incredible versatility of interior design at very little cost.

08/01/2005 - We have added a web page and information form on The Boat School which is Eastport's school of boatbuilding.  This school grounds the students well in traditional wooden boat building, modern wood and epoxy boatbuilding, fiberglass and other composites, electrical and other marine systems and repair of all these materials and systems.  This school has been here a long time and has been very important to the Maine professional boat building industry.  We expect this school to continue to expand in coming years and will be very likely to continue to have a growing influence, not only in Maine and the Northeast but world wide.  If you want to learn boatbuilding this is a great place to strart.

06/03/2005 - In the left column on the home page you will see a new link called Promotion by Our Friends.  This page on the site describes why our readers, clients and students are vital to making sure that the widest possible number of people find us.  It also suggests ways that you can play a very important role in helping us provide more happiness to as many people's lives as possible.  The benefits to us our obvious, but the benefits to customers and students are that we can continue to expand while avoiding an advertising budget beyond this web site.  This spreads our fixed costs over a larger volume, thus keeping costs down.  It also helps us provide more and better services to everyone and provide more jobs both here in Eastport and for those in supporting businesses, and those working with us collaboratively, around the world.

05/20/2005 - We have made some minor revisions to the YDS Frequently Asked Questions. .... We have updated the Yacht Design School Brochure slightly.

05/13/2005 - Well, dear friends, it has been a tough few weeks.  Our former Internet service provider decided to move our web site to another server, without regard for the fact that the server did not have resources that this site needs to operate properly.  This meant that suddenly many of the advanced features of the site were crippled and we were unable to even update the site ourselves.  We were able to get the forms working on the new server but not the discussion group.  Unfortunately the contents of the discussion group were also lost when the service provider without our permission tried to fool with its functions and get it working again.  Some of the discussion history will be condensed slightly and restored over the next week or so.  Or at least we hope so!  We are now with another service provider who has carefully and patiently set everything up so that it should all work.  At the same time we have had them add some capabilities which should, over the course of the rest of the year allow us to expand the functions of the site greatly so that we can provide you with many more services.  There will be more on this later.  .... I imagine that you will also be interested to hear that over the next two years we expect to be doing a lot more with more fully developed online courses with many more functions to help you in learning and will be bringing in more design experts both to teach and to allow us to take on more of the custom design projects offered to us. Both YDS and MacNaughton Yacht Designs are expected to continue to expand considerably over the next two years. .... We are also very pleased to announce that at the request of Sarah Devlin, who heads up Professional Boatbuilder's online training and with the enthusiastic support of their publisher Carl Cramer, YDS will be developing and teaching a 6 week course entitled "Ensuring Excellence in Hull Lines" which we hope will premier in July.  This will be taught as often as there is demand.

03/18/2005 - This week we've added yet another area of responsibility to our careers page.  Yacht Design School has an educational site license for some very powerful Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software from Algor.  We hope with the help of this software to become the first school of yacht and small craft naval architecture to offer courses in these fields.  However we are very busy these days and expansion seems to be continuing.  This has kept us from developing our FEA/CFD program.  We need a director with a solid technical background to come in, learn the software thoroughly, develop courses  for our own undergraduates, graduates, and for people already in the industry.  They will also head up a research and publishing effort which will conduct studies in marine structures, in aerodynamics, and in hydrodynamics with a goal of developing a series of papers that will contain guidelines and formulas that will allow design firms world wide to design better structures and produce vessels of all types with better performance.  This is a tall order.  However there is someone out there who would like to come, live in a small coastal Maine town, and have a real influence on the future of yacht design. ....  We have updated our Future Plans page.  There's a lot more information that's a lot more up to date. ....

03/13/2005 -  We've added another of Dan's great reviews.  This one on Lin and Larry Pardey's  book The Capable Cruiser.  .... Our advanced student Mark Evans came and visited us for a couple of months just to spend some fun time around the office.  While here he pitched in on a lot of projects that we otherwise probably couldn't have gotten to.  He did a lot of updates on the Silver Gull 19 and the Silver Gull 28 drawings.  He did a complete sheathed strip construction drawing for the Freedom's Song 90 which is described on our idea designs page.  Most interesting and intriguing of all, at least in my book, is that he started the process of putting our Shilling 22 into Rhinoceros(r) format so that we can work toward producing her as the first in a line of very high quality kit boats.  During the process we went out of our way with Mark's help to refine the design for the last fraction of a percent of minimum resistance and maximum performance in a boat which would require the minimum hours from the owner to assemble.  Mark not only did wonderfully with this but contributed several innovations of his own to the lines fairing process, which I'm sure have improved what is already one of our best loved designs.  We all want to thank Mark a lot for visiting and for helping out while he was here.  We are growing so fast that it is hard to find enough people.  I only wish we could have put him on paying work while he was here, but of course the government wouldn't let us pay him because he's from Britain.  We couldn't even have had him work for free if he'd been displacing any US candidate for work  Mark was just learning Rhino, imagine how hard it is to be innovative while working with a CAD Program you haven't taken the course on as yet.  Mark's only about half way through our YDS course but I would have him work with us here in Eastport in a minute if I could.  I imagine the lucky British design firm that gives him an interview and sees his work.  I'm sure he's going to be snapped up by someone pretty quickly.  If you look at the Shilling page you will see some of his basic renderings of the hull. .... On the careers page we have indicated an eventual need for a librarian.  This will be an unusual service for our students, whereby they can look things up in the books in our library both in print and out of print.  This will be available to bona fide students enrolled in any of our Yacht Design School programs.  We believe that this will not only operate exactly as any other library for research purposes but will make it much easier for students to decide for themselves which books are the most urgent for them to acquire.  This is a long term project.  As is true of so much that we want to do, the scarce resource is people.  Top people and top supporting firms and suppliers, who also revolve around the people involved, are always the hardest resource to find enough. ....

02/18/2005 - On the careers page, which you will notice is growing all the time, we have added the job of Virtual Reality Developer to handle very detailed renderings and animations..  We are all getting more into this and all we are really sure is that we need more breadth and depth of expertise in this.  Our whole industry does as well, so I would expect YDS will be adding more courses in this area too eventually.

02/11/2005 -  A number of our students have asked where they can get more experience around boats and practical knowledge about their structures.  Obviously we have a number of standard suggestions on what you should do to acquire knowledge outside the course but many have asked if there is something that they can do to tap our knowledge in these areas.  To help with this we are starting a very informal Boatbuilding and Restoration Internship. Students who wish to participate in this will work with their instructor on one or more of our projects.  Time spent on these projects will generate a credit against the YDS main curriculum tuition. .... On the school page we've added another one of the little quotes from our own teaching which students have told us they really like. .... We've also very slightly changed the layout of the Discussion pages.

02/04/2005 - If you click on the title The Cost Conscious Cruiser on the marine publishing order form, you will now get a good solid review by Daniel B. MacNaughton.  If you plan to live aboard and voyage, you should have this book.  Aside from some remarks that indicate the Pardey's have insufficient understanding of and experience with choosing and using epoxies we agree we virtually everything in this book, which is very rare. ....  We have some favorite quotes and some phrases of ours that people tell us are particularly helpful or give new perspective.  We've started to scatter these throughout the web site as seems appropriate .... We have added a new page explaining a little more about the wonderful Rhinoceros®  CAD software which many of our design students use and around which our Rhino Introductory Course and CAD Course are centered.  Our students are very fortunate in that they are allowed to acquire a full working version of this software at a very special educational price.

01/28/2005 - We've added one of our favorite quotes to the lead page for the Live Aboard Catalog, ,,,  We did a major revision of Lesson Three last year adding a large amount of material on developed surface hulls to solve problems that people seemed to be having with perceiving how to do this.  Students who have taken or who have acquired but not yet finished Lesson Three should email us for updated material at no charge.  Since doing this we have found that it makes far too much work for one lesson, as people really need to get some feed back before going too far without seeing our comments.  Therefore we have replaced "3" with two lessons.  For convenience in maintaining the numbering system these have been named "3a" and "3b".  They are now separate lessons, giving at the moment 21 lessons in our complete program in yacht and small craft naval architecture.  There will be other adjustments of this type soon.

01/21/2005 - On the Yacht Design School page you will note that the Rhino Introductory Course pricing has gone up substantially. We have so few people in this course as yet that we cannot be sure whether this is the right pricing or not but we can be reasonably sure that the introductory price was well under what it should be.  In any case it is still a bargain as it is roughly comparable to the cost of three day seminars done by some dealers for Rhino with the advantage that you don't have to pay travel expenses, motel rooms, meals, etc. and you are not "hurried" through the exercises.  You can take your time and ask all the questions you want without worrying about holding anybody else up or running out of time to complete level one. .... We have quite a number of CAD Course students and quite a long track record on the amount of time it is taking on the average to do this instruction.  There we have also had to raise tuition.  We believe the course to still be a bargain in that this is absolutely the most complete course available anywhere for marine use of the Rhino CAD package.  Rhino is the most sought after CAD skill in the field of yacht and small craft naval architecture.  Even large ship naval architecture firms are sending people to us to learn Rhino .... Since these courses are paid for up front students already signed up are not affected by these rate changes.

01/07/2005 - On the marine publishing order form we have indicated that the Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction, one of the most important books on boat building available today is out of print.  How this can happen beats me.  We have been promised that it would be back in print soon for months and have been buying up copies from every source we could find all over the country.  However it is still not in print and we are now forced to find good clean used copies.  Fortunately this is not yet hard to do.  As always we will find you the best price we can and are happy to advise you before you commit to the particular price.  We apologize for this and assure you we have called Gougeon Brothers on this several times. .... You will also find on the publishing form the first of a new series of reviews by Tom's brother Daniel MacNaughton, who is a well known marine writer, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Yacht Design, and a project manager at Rockport Marine. .... We also want to advise you that on the YDS drafting tools order form the price of a set of ship's curves has had to go up by $9.  We try to keep these prices as low as we can.  So far as we know we are the only regular retailer of Copenhagen Ship's Curves in the world which I guess explains why we sell so many, but still it is not enough volume to be able to get the pricing down any further.

12/24/2004 - Today most everybody is out of the office planning for Christmas.  Here in the office, which is also our home, Nannette is spending today largely in cooking for our holiday tomorrow.  Tom will wrap presents, and make cranberry sauce and a salad for Christmas eve dinner at his mother's house just up the road.  Nevertheless in the middle of this we are reflecting on the tremendous increase in all our interconnected businesses this year and the large number of very kind things that people have said to us this year about our work.  We have always said that our ultimate product was always intended to be increased human happiness.  That's what we aim for and you can only hit the target you aim for.  I am gratified that despite our imperfections and occasional missteps it appears that we are delivering that product pretty well.  I want particularly to mention that two of our most advanced students Michael Chudy and Sven Oftedal who also work with us on design projects and advancing the school have done extraordinary things this year both in their studies and working with us on design projects.  Clearly these gentlemen could go anywhere they wished with their drafting skills and we are very gratified that they have chosen to work so closely with us.  To our clients, students, and customers all over the work we wish to say that we thank you for the opportunity to be part of your lives this year and we hope that we may continue to work with you in the coming year.

12/17/2004 - We have added a plate expansions drawing to the Bufflehead 22 tug drawings. ....

12/15/2004 -  We have updated the Rhino Level One Training information to better explain that an Educational or Commercial version of Rhino is necessary to access files used in the course. .... On the CAD Course page we've added some renderings showing the instructor, Michael's, work on our Sagittarius 60 design, and two nice renderings by Lesson 6 CAD Course student Leo Huang of Taiwan. .... We have also changed the Sagittarius 60 rendering on the idea designs page to allow this page to render a little faster.

11/26/2004 -  We have finally added our Maddy 18 to the stock plans.  This was drawn up by Sven Oftedal working from sketches by Tom.  Poor Sven may have been nearly driven to distraction by Tom's insistence that Maddy be just as she had evolved in Tom's head over the 20 years since she was originally sketched up.  Nevertheless she came out to be a nice little pocket power yacht of an older type and Sven retained his sanity while avoiding doubtless strong temptations to stab Tom with a drafting pencil. .... In the idea designs section we have just added information on a partial design for a 90' clipper bowed passenger carrying schooner we call Freedom's Song.  If you have an interest in running a business based around a good practical vessel that most passengers will think of as romantic and traditional, here is an opportunity to save a bit on the development of the design. .... For our Computer Assisted Design Course, which teaches the use of the Rhino, in yacht and small craft naval architecture, we have developed a CD which contains all the lessons, supporting texts, and sample files.  This is now automatically mailed to every student so that they have all the course materials in a permanent form immediately.  Students who are part way through the course and want a copy of this disk should email us.  We will get you one at no charge.

11/11/2004 - We have just enough people helping us right now to allow us to begin to catch up on maintaining and adding to this web site.  While we should be updating the site every week, you can see that months have passed.  We really do want to train enough people so that we can keep this site lively and we apologize that we aren't keeping our friends updated as much as we should. .... This time we have updated the stockplans:  We've addded Lake Sailor, a small car top canoe yawl suitable from modest adventures.  These adventures may be all the better for their modesty.  Do we really need to treat sailing as though it had to be arduous or scary?  To us the art seems to be in leading an adventurous life without danger and fatigue.  Lake Sailor is a good choice for simple happy times.  On the other end of the daysailer scale is Aruna 33 a narrow tandem cockpit light displacement pure daysailing schooner.  Not everyone's cup of tea, but if she's what you want this is about the only place you'll find a boat liker her.  Finally one of our favorite new stock plans is Island Girl 24 a nice simple Bahaman sharpshooter.  This is sort of the "Shaker furniture" of boats.  She is bone simple and very lovable.  The sense of how simple and straight forward life can be that you gain from spending plenty of time on a vessel like this is extremely compelling.  A little vessel like this can change your life.  The working drawings for Island Girl were done up with wonderful care and detail by Michael.... We have also updated the idea designs page.  We have added a nice little 23' twin keel motorsailer called the Anglian 23.  She is actually a partial design intended for your choice of plywood, aluminum, or steel.  Complete Lines & Offsets are available, along with patterns for all the hull, deck and wheelhouse panels.  To complete the design you need only commission a construction and accommodations drawing and a rig.  Our Bumble idea design now has grown to 28' and has a nice color rendering of the vessel with tanbark sails.  In the section on Colin Archer types we have shown a rendering, done by Michael, of the 60' version of this series, which we call the Sagittarius 60.  This is a very large version which we are just finishing up for a very charming Turkish gentleman.  If anybody wanted a nice business they could set up a boatbuilding shop in Eastport and just build various sizes of the Sagittarius.  I think we could supply them with enough people who wanted to have a real Colin Archer type to keep them busy and happy forever   Michael has already done up lines for a nice 32' version.... Finally this time we have updated some pricing on educational CAD software bundles on the YDS enrollment form.  This reflects the addition to the Rhino/Flamingo bundle of the Penguin plug in.  While we do not teach Penguin, and do not find it particularly compelling for our students, this is now the only way the bundle is available to us and it does amount to getting the $95 Penguin plug in free.  We have also added some notes to this form on how orders for software from outside of North America are filled by ordering through the distributor for your area of the world.  .... We now have Pat working fairly regularly on site updates so you should see more interesting stuff soon.

06/12/2004 - Comparing this date with the one below it shows why one of our friends refers to this as the what's new this millenium page!  We have a great many things we want to add to the site and talk about here.  Time is the problem. .... Last year at about this time we raised the rates on the YDS degree program in naval architecture with a specialty in yacht and small craft design.  At that time we warned that we had neglected the pricing for quite awhile and said we would be raising it again the first of the year.  As it happens when the first of the year rolled around your author could not bear to raise them again.  However a review of pricing in late May shows that the increasing number of students on advanced lessons and the larger staff needed for the steadily increasing student body have actually shown that we are losing ground on the tuition fees.  In any case we have had to raise the price of all lessons by $25 per lesson.  Since this puts us at about 38% of the cost of attending the competitor closest to us and even if we raised our rates all the way to the ideal we would be at 58% of our competitor's nominal fees, why are we so reluctant?  The reason is that we have always envisioned ourselves as a school accessible to everyone and have tried to keep our rates down accordingly.  I think it is clear that even if we raised our rates all the way to the ideal rate at one time we would be one of the most affordable educations that anyone in most of the highly industrialized democracies could imagine.  However we have recently had two students in Asia who reluctantly decided that they could not take our course because the cost would be equivalent to having a really nice house built where they lived.  At the present it is obvious that we really must raise the rates again at the end of 2004 by a similar amount.  We promise that we will keep these rates just as low as we possibly can.  .... Having given the bad news above, we are happy to have some really good news as well.  Our Yacht Design School as made an agreement with Algor, one of the leading providors of both Finite Element Analysis software and Computational Fluid Dynamics software to license their packages that are appropriate to naval architecture under a license to teach our advanced students both of these subjects.  They will be supplying us with a curriculum which we will initially use to teach our staff here and will then add to and enhance specifically for naval architecture for the benefit of those Yacht Design School students who want to learn these extremely advanced subjects.  It also allows our advanced students to do research under our direction which will hopefully advance the field of naval architecture as it applies to small sailing and power yachts and allow them to publish papers that will both be good for the school and for their careers.   However our custom design clients should realize that the commercial licenses for these programs are still very expensive.   Until they come down we, like other firms, would only acquire a license and do paying work for a customer for really expensive grand prix yachts where the extra 1% to 3% improvement in performance that we might be able to extract would be worth the large fees that a commercial license would require.   In other words this benefits the school and our students directly but is only indirectly of benefit to our design clients in that studies done under our direction by our students, although they will be made public for all designers to use,   will be available to us earlier and will increase our general knowledge sooner than the rest of the design profession.  The acquistion of this software and the training of our school staff in its use will make us, to our knowledge, the first school of yacht and small craft naval architecture to provide  FEA and CFD training to the industry.  We were also the first school to provide training in the Rhino design program which is now sweeping the industry.   We certainly know we are not perfect and we try very hard to push to be the best, but we are proud that we can be industry leaders in these areas.

02/20/2004 - Custom design work continues to increase. For the first time in about six years it looks like our training of additional people to help us and our acquisition of additional equipment are beginning to actually catch up with the increasing demand. Right now, as well as overseeing all the projects, Tom is working on interior sketches for approval by the clients for which we are designing the Passage 36 steel full power cruising schooner and the Sagittarius 60 Colin Archer style cutter.  Hopefully we'll get something about these designs on the site sometime soon. Michael is dividing his time between some refinements on the Aruna 134 and the great work he is doing on the Sagittarius 60. Both of these are very special projects. The Aruna deserves special mention in that she is designed for people with various accessibility issues up to and including wheelchair use. With two of us having some of these issues ourselves this is close to our hearts. Sven is increasing our collective experience with CAD quite a bit at the moment and doing a very in depth weight study and special ballasting for a particularly good example of our Crown Jewel 36 design which is being built in Sweden by a very nice family .... Kathi is in the process of developing an entirely new accounting system specifically for our design firm and helping with the refinement of this web site. When the accounting package is complete it will be made available to our advanced students and graduates who contemplate running their own firms some day and to other design firms. .... Nannette continues to divide her time between painting, which too often gets neglected due to the press of other business, and continues to run most of the business end of the firm. .... In the idea designs section, you might want to look at the description of the Magic. She is a very shoal centerboard coastal and intracoastal cruiser along the same proportions as Commodore Ralph Munroe's vessels, but taking advantage of our increased knowledge of design and excellent modern construction methods. If you want a 33' cruising sailboat that floats in 2'2" of water you might want to think about Magic. ....Price changes for 2004. We are happy to report that the price for set of Copenhagen Ship's Curves in a wood box has been lowered from $400 to $369. We are also passing along a price reduction in many of our triangles. The price for individual curves has risen by a few cents. .... On the Marine Publishing Order Form you will now find a link in the Cruising, Living Aboard & Voyaging section to a review of Robert P. Beebe's wonderful book Voyaging Under Power.   If you are interested in living aboard powerboats while doing some serious cruising this is the most important single book to read and own.

01/21/2004 - We've added a couple of more reviews to the publishing section. The publishing section is most easily navigated at the moment by going directly to the order form and accessing reviews by clicking on the links there. .... I'd especially note the revised review on "Cruising In Seraffyn" by Lin & Larry Pardey which is now available in a very nice hard cover 25th anniversary edition which now has a lot more photographs including a generous color section and revised material in the back on the financial aspects of affordable living aboard.

01/16/2004 - In the discussion group you will find a thread headed silver gull 24?.  In it a client of ours is asking for people to share the cost of custom designing a Silver Gull in this size range. If anybody's interested respond there. This is already a very low cost project and if it happens to be what you are looking for here's a chance to save some money over one person paying the whole design fee.  We've included some information on this potential design on the Idea Designs page.  .... There are a few minor changes on our Careers page.   .... We've also made some revisions to some of the stock plans pages.

01/01/2004 - We hope that everyone has had a good holiday season.  The office is short handed over the New Year's holiday weekend.  This along with the flood of emails, custom design quote requests, and orders we've been receiving from those with extended vacations since Christmas is delaying responses.  We should be able to catch up by Tuesday.   In the mean time our apologies for delays in replying.  .... You'll note that our little Lake Sailor design has moved out of the idea designs page and into our list of stock plans. If you need an inexpensive little yacht that you can carry to the water and still do some pretty serious coastal exploring in, Lake Sailor may be the one. .... You will find a few changes and updates for our Idea Designs page.   Quite a number of these are becoming reality. .... In our continuing effort to keep costs down and productivity up, we will be acquiring a faster blueprint machine, more CAD workstations, and some software and special CD production equipment to allow us to bring you more publications, more efficiently. This should be in place and working hard for you sometime in early February.

11/28/2003 - We just noticed that we did not have metric hand scales on our Yacht Design School tools order form.  This is pretty stupid considering that we have design students from all over the world.   We have corrected this.  We also want to emphasize to students that we have found two students this year who were not using scale rules.  All our design students should note that they will need scale rules to get very far in the course.  Trying to multiply dimensions lifted by a full sized ruler is just not going to be anywhere near accurate enough.

11/21/2003 - Please note that we have updated all the pricing on stock plans on the site.  You will find that these plans are still very reasonably priced.  We try to keep the costs of these plans down as much as we can.  To this end we will be purchasing a new and faster blueprint machine shortly which should help us hold down printing costs. ....

11/02/2003 - As many of you know there has been increasing demand for quite awhile for us to find and stock all the books we recommend.  As a first step in this direction our publishing order form is now organized much differently with a lot more items added and everything divided into categories.  Those books and article reprints for which we have reviews have links linking to the reviews. We have ordered an initial stock of these items using estimated reorder points.  You may find that until we learn what books are the most popular there may be occasional out of stock situation, especially on the used books.  We are aiming to get to about a 90% fill rate within three months.  However even the in print books which we don't have in stock should be available within 5 working days at worst.

08/21/2003 - You will note that the name of the publishing section of the site has changed to Eastport Marine Press. You will see many more changes here in coming weeks and months. .... One of our plans holders mentioned that there was a typographical error in the web site description of the Silver Gull 19 and the article that comes with the plans that mistated the planking thickness. All hull panels are 5/8" plywood as stated on the plans. We're sorry about any confusion. ....

08/20/2003 - We have added the ability for our students and others to order all the books both in print and out of print that we recommend for the design course through us. Contact Tom or Nannette in our office. You can expect much more on our publishing endeavors shortly. .... The Beetle Cat listed for sale in the Brokerage section has been reduced in price to $8,000. .... We now offer twin keels as an alternate on the Silver Gull 19 and Silver Gull 28 sailing dories. We were able to use the twin keels to get the ballast center of gravity the same as the single keel but with a bit shoaler draft. That gives us the same stability as with the deeper single keel. .... We found that costs dictate that we needed to raise stock plans prices again by a modest amount. We believe we have one of the best combinations of stock plans pricing and support.

07/07/2003 - Over 4th of July weekend along with the Navy ship, the parade, and all the other activities we had a powered parachute fly-in here. The chief designer here would LOVE to have one of these. If anybody would like to trade something like a two seat Six-Chuter powered parachute for all or part of the design work of a boat let us know! This is about as close to a "corporate aircraft as we'll ever get! .... This week we've added some items to the YDS Drafting Tools Order Form and updated some prices. We are one of only two suppliers we know of who are stocking marine drafting equipment these days. The big drafting supply outfits have, sadly, gone from selling complete lines to dropping all the low volume special items. Given the small number of yacht designers in the world all marine drafting equipment is in the low volume catagory. Rest assured with will continue to supply everything for design firms and students. We hope to gradually expand our offerings as well.

07/01/2003 - In the Brokerage section you will note that the Rhodes sloop has sold. Please send us your listings. Our listings keep getting sold. .... Some of you may be aware that a local outfit is building the 90' schooner Halie & Matthew to our design here in Eastport.  She is being built of fiberglass, which was the owner's choice and a tough way to go for a one off vessel.  While we have nothing to do with the building project, we hope they will have a good time and get a great vessel from the process.  .... In about another two weeks you should start to see activity relating to the arrival of our new Publishing staff.  Look for a number of announcements in the coming months.

06/03/2003 - We are happy to be able to say that a gentleman working in the Bahamas has commissioned us to design a 24' Bahaman Sharpshooter style sloop. We are well into this design project at the moment and are finding it enormous fun. She should be a very pretty and, we think, rather fast little vessel. She will be kept very simple and very much in the Bahaman tradition aside from modern wood and epoxy construction and outside ballast. .... Yacht Design School students should note that we have finally, after several years, had to raise tuition a modest amount. We have made this rise absolutely as small as possible, I assure you. We are still, and will remain by a very large margin, the least expensive school of yacht and small craft naval architecture as well as being the best bet for those wanting to work for or start independent design firms. .... On the idea design page you will find we have added a little discussion of what a wonderful set of designs could be done by sticking to the original lines of the Colin Archer "Redningskoites" but scaling them to several sizes from roughly 20' up to the original 47' size. The largest size would be awfully big for a family yacht but would make a good small school ship or a super nice charter vessel. .... In the Brokerage section you will notice that the Amphibicon Lichen has been sold. These are great little coastal family cruising boats. We'll try to find some more to put on the site.

05/10/2003 - I've added some to our brief biography of Philip L. Rhodes, including a reasoably good photograph. .... You will note that the 22' canoe sterned sloop on the Brokerage page has been sold. .... We have also added a nice Concordia built Beetle Cat. .... Do remember that we are always looking for more good listings.

04/22/2003 - In the Brokerage section you will see that Ed has added another classic cruising sailboat, a Rhodes 26. for many years one of these moored near us. I have always felt that they were a true yacht in a modest size. Just right for a small family cruising vessel capable of plenty of fine adventures. .... To avoid inconsistencies in quoted design tools prices we have taken the prices off the recommended tools list on the Yacht Design School page. If you want to know what the most current pricing is that will be on the order form. Of course as always these prices can change. If you order something while we are in the midst of changing prices we will notify you before filling the order.

04/07/2003 - In the frequently asked questions section for the Yacht Design School we have made a slight change in our comparison of YDS to other schools. We feel that if we didn't teach the student to draw boats, they would never get a job. Apparently one of the other schools is now telling students that it is not their business to teach drafting at all. I have seen a letter that they wrote to a student to this effect. This is of course their business, but I want to emphasize that we introduce drafting immediately and keep refining student's drafting abilities throughout the course. .... You will find a new listing in the brokerage section. I fear we have very little information on this little sloop rigged canoe yawl but she looks very pretty. I would bet anyone would be proud to own her.

03/21/2003 - Many frequent visitors to this site will have noticed some intermittent access problems many of which last several hours and for the past several days the forms and discussion group wouldn't work.. This was due to a faulty server at our Internet service provider and the problems attendant to transferring to a new server and getting the server configured properly. . There should be no further interruption in service. If you placed an order, you can be sure the order went through properly as long as you receive the confirmation page which appears automatically when you press the submit button.  These things happen occasionally. .... We've made a couple of additional modifications to the Yacht Design School material. Nothing major. .... On the Idea Designs page we have added two types which we want to design and would love to get some interested clients for. The first of these is the British Narrowboat. These vessels are great canal, river and intracoastal waterway cruisers which have the marvelous advantage that they are basically built by the foot. One design will be enough to build any boat from a very short one to a 70'er. This makes construction extremely inexpensive and opens up the marvelous possibility of building whatever length boat you can afford and then adding a section in the middle later at very low cost if you want more boat. A young couple could start with a 26' version and add cabins as needed for children, offices, workshops, studios, even greenhouses if they wished. You could spend a lifetime having one of these boats shipped to various countries and then going and living aboard and traveling there. A lot of people have asked about this type in recent years. I hope we can do one up for them. The second type is a new Voyager Series. We get frequent requests for marconi rigged (Bermudan rigged) ultimate liveaboard voyaging yachts of various sizes. Our Chinese rigged ultimate voyagers are proportioned to take maximum advantage of the unstayed rig. To gain length for staying and getting more sail area for the given wetted surface it is a good idea for us to use a larger proportion of length to beam for a marconi rigged vessel. Hence the new Voyager Series will be marconi sloops and cutters with flush decks, except for the hatches and a small pilot house. These should be beautiful solid vessels that will take their crews anywhere they wish to go. .... Long time friends of our site will be interested to know that we have recently acquired all the software necessary to do a complete shopping cart system. We also will have the ability to market article reprints, and other publication by down load directly from the site. This may eventually extend to audio and video files as well. Don't expect to see all this too soon as this will be mostly the province of our Publisher who will not be here to start work for about three and one half more months. Once this system is set up you may expect to see us expand our product and service offerings a great deal, which we hope will help fill some of the needs that you have expressed.

03/07/2003 - On the school page our design students will find another firm which asked us to help them find design personnel. Our students should remember that we tend to be looking for people as well fairly frequently. .... Also on the school page we have added some more lesson summaries up to Lesson 7. These are the lessons that we seem to be doing less revision on now. The later lessons are still being revised very frequently, so the contents keep changing. .... On the YDS enrollment form we have made it easier to order lessons and have added the ability to order the Rhino/Flamingo educational license bundle which gives you not only the CAD capabilities of Rhino but photorealistic rendering as well .... We've added several potential designs to the idea designs page. Hopefully at some point we'll start to add some color renderings of what these designs would look like. .... On the Brokerage page you will note that we have added a direct email link to Ed's office. It will speed brokerage queries up slightly if you go directly to that email address. Otherwise we lose a little time relaying to him. .... On the Publishing order form we finally just had to make one change. We were charging postage only on foreign orders and books and trying to build some compensation for postage into the cost of the articles. Unfortunately we find that, when we analyze this, people ordering one article are at present paying less than the cost of mailing them and those ordering many are paying too much. With that and other complications we have decided that it just makes more sense to charge whatever the actual shipping costs are. This is especially true since we calculate that we should be charging nearly twice as much for these articles as we actually are. We are losing money as compared to just concentrating on other things in order to provide these reprints. However we are not raising the prices of the reprints themselves.  Perhaps we might produce a book of these reprints later this year for a low enough price that it will be a good option for people to just buy all of them. Then we can charge what we really should to the occasional person who really only wants one reprint. We might also try to make these available as files that can be just sent to you by email or downloaded at a lower price.  This will all be the province and decision of our Publisher who will be joining us mid-year .... The drafting tools order form was originally intended to simply provide the drafting tools needed by our students. However we have found that naval architectural firms, colleges which teach design, naval departments, aircraft design firms, and government agencies involved in such things as road design all seem to be increasingly relying upon us. Many long time naval architects have occasionally broken a ship's curve or two and need replacements so we have added the ability to order all the curves individually so that people don't have to order complete sets just to get a few curves. To accommodate boat builders, aircraft designers, and others for whom a 36" spline may not be ideal we now show a large selection of splines from 24" to 96". We have also added a much wider range of triangles. In addition we should mention that we have managed to reduce the prices on a few items and are pleased to say that only one item has risen in price recently.

02/26/2003 - Tom won't be available for a couple of days this week to answer email and talk with people on the phone. Though we seem to be caught up from the huge influx in January and early February we still don't have most of our major design projects going as fast as we should. Any good yacht draftsmen looking for work should look into the Careers section of the web site. .... We've made a couple of minor corrections to the publishing order form. .... We've updated the Silver Gull 19 page a bit. .... We have updated various pages of the Yacht Design School material, including the Tools order form.

02/03/2003 - We've made some minor updates in the publishing section. About half way through this year you may expect to see this section expanded considerably.  In the meantime do not hesitate to ask us for help with your book needs. .... We have added another drawing to the Passage Maker 28 set and slightly increased the price. .... You will find some updates to the listing for Lichen in the brokerage section of the site.  .... We also again ask your patience in the matter of email response.  We do answer everyone but press of work and increased email volume is making it very difficult to do this in a truly timely fashion.  We will do everything we can to correct this.   The goal is a response within 24 hours.  At the moment this can slip to several days.

01/16/2003 - We have added a drawing for a small pilot house to the Shilling set. You will see a slight change in the plans pricing to reflect this. This was done for a couple in Slovenia who plan to sail around the world. .... Take a look at our brief biography of our Intern Sven Oftedal. Sven is one of our students who got the first of our newly instituted room and board scholarships that will be awarded to occasional very advanced students. The key to this Intern program is that it allows the Intern to work full time on the course right in our office with special tests designed so that the Intern can work on real world design work to satisfy the requirements of the tests. .... Since the beginning of January email has been increasing at a very rapid  rate.  We find we are not able to respond as promptly as we would wish.  I promise we are trying to catch up as best we can and apologize for not replying within 24 hours which has always been our goal.

01/08/2003 -  On the Careers page you will note that we have filled the position of Publisher.    Sometime in mid-2003 a very fine gentleman will be moving to Eastport to take over and expand the entire publishing end of the business.   He will also do the promotion work for the design end of the business and Yacht Design School.  We are also fortunate in that his wife also has a great deal of really extraordinary experience in publishing.  She will advise, and hopefully at some point join us as well, as the work load increases.  Look for a big announcement mid-year with biographies of these extraordinary individuals. One of the best testimonies that we can give about these folks is that their quite young children are tremendously intelligent and charming.  Who knows maybe someday we can get them to work here as well! .... We've made a few minor changes to the web site. Just cleaning things up a bit. .... We are still waiting for our new Intern, who is here on scholarship, to give us a biography.  When he does we will put it on the web site with a picture of him and some of his design work that he is doing for the course. .... In the brokerage section we have added Ed's phone number at his request. As most of our regulars know we encourage email. With the volume of people contacting us if everybody called we'd never get any work done so we have never made the office phone number too obvious on the web site. Hence this separate number just for brokerage. We can handle several email messages in the time a phone call takes. The criteria here is maximizing customer service any way we can.

2002 What's New entries
2001 What's New entries
2000 What's New entries
1999 What's New entries
1998 What's New entries
1997 What's New entries

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