Previous 2000 What's New

12/26/2000 - We've just added two pictures of a Crown Jewel being set up on an island in Sweden. The experienced voyaging couple who are building her are doing much of the work themselves with help from a local boatbuilder. It sounds like they are doing a very careful job. .... We've also added several pictures and a customer done CAD wireframe of a slightly enlarged Juliette dinghy. .... In the Loch Fyne Marine Hardware section of the three types of Women's Deck Shoes one has been dropped by the manufacturer. This isn't good but on the other hand the prices of the other women's deck shoes have gone down, which is nice. .... It's a winter wonderland in Eastport right now folks.

12/24/2000 - Dawn breaks on Christmas Eve in Eastport, Maine. Happy holidays to all our friends and clients. This is the view we see waking up in the morning. Frost patterns hint at the temperature. Vague shadowy shapes half seen behind the glass are a few limbs of a large fir tree and a hint of the houses, trees and the bay. Dimly, if you know where to look, you can see Campobello Island, Canada. Notice also the extreme frugality of the local culture as represented by the lower right window pane which when broken by a former owner was carefully pieced back together by using silicon caulk. Considering the time and the cost of a tube of caulk it is fairly amazing they didn't just buy a new pane of glass at Wadsworth's down town. We keep this to remind ourselves of the difference between saving money and obsession. We hope we've done a good job for you in the past year. We try to be good friends to all of you. May everything go well with you in the coming year. Tom, Nannette, and the crew.

12/20/2000 - We have updated the Yacht Design School Tools List and Order Form to show 25 sheets to a box of mylar. This new packaging keeps the price down at least a bit for students. .... On the order forms you will notice that the C.O.D. fee has been raised from $5 to $10. We're sorry but that represents a minimum appraisal of our actual extra expenses for C.O.D. orders. .... We have changed some version numbers on the software used with our CAD course. .... You will now see the Osprey 30 a nice solid steel liveaboard tug in with the stock plans. Earlier this year this design was finished off for a couple living in Europe for use in exploring the East Coast of the United States. .... Here in Eastport we're getting ready to celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas. We wish everybody a great holiday season. Come spend it in Eastport sometime.

11/23/2000 - There have been a few minor changes this week in the Careers page. The link to this is on the bottom of the main page. .... The Mason cutter in the brokerage section has been sold. We need to find someone to act as Brokerage Listing Secretary if we are to find enough boats to list. .... On the idea designs page I've added a very rough sketch of the Clarsach 18. She's a small canoe yawl. Those who love canoe yawls but find some of them too expensive for their weekending accommodations might like to look at her.

10/18/2000 - In the idea designs section you will notice a link to a new Silver Gull 19 Class Association Page. Here you can find out about signing up to participate in providing this design to you and the other members at a lower than custom design cost. The more members we get up to 26 the lower the cost. .... If anybody knows Ivan Skocanic or if Ivan reads this, for whatever reason I can't get an email to you to save my life. They keep coming back as undeliverable. By extension if anybody out there is not getting a prompt reply from us believe me we are sending it. We try very hard to get back to everybody within 24 hours. When we are in terribly busy times like spring and fall (in either hemisphere) it can take 48 hours but we respond to everything that even by inference asks a question. .... Our thanks to Roy Bryant for pointing out a link error in our airport page. .... Our thanks to our colleague Tony Dias for pointing out a couple of bad links also. .... We had a good time this week with Jim and Joan Vibert who came to Eastport to pick up a boat that we had brokered. We expect them to have a lot of fun with her.

08/30/2000 - Well folks we just had a wedding here this past week. Tom and Nan's daughter Heather married David Bass. We all had a great time. As many of you know Tom and Nan are very proud of their daughter and are especially proud of her choice for a husband. Dave is a great gentleman who has a boat restoration business in Anacortes, Washington. The father of the bride was under strict instructions not to say anything sentimental before walking her down the isle and thus everybody got to the alter without crying. Thanks to Brian and Alice we had wonderful music with violin, clarinette, and mandolin at the wedding. Thanks to Doug Beaver on guitar with some help from the groom on the harmonica and the best man Mark Kirkland on washtub bass we had some very engaging folk and blues music at the reception. .... You will note in the Brokerage section that we have sold the dark green amphibicon. Also Lichen the latest Amphibicon listed has been reduced in asking price from $12,500 to $10,500 due to a change in the owner's plans. There's been a lot of careful work and upgrading done to this boat. .... You will note in the Publishing section that the Encyclopedia of Yacht Designers is now scheduled to be out in early 2001. This has been a big project and Dan and Lucia are pretty exhausted by it. As Llewellyn Howland has said though it should be "the boating book of the decade" when it comes out.

08/08/2000 - We are still having intermittent troubles with the Internet that may occasionally prevent us from receiving an order from you. If you don't get a confirmation of your order, normally a shipping confirmation, within two days of ordering let us know immediately. .... Well dear readers believe it or not we have just been informed that we are in the top 10% of most linked to domains in the world. This is according to WebsMostLinked.com If you know a marine related site that invites link suggestions and doesn't list us we are happy to have people suggest a link to our site. If your favorite search engine doesn't list us let us know and we will submit our site very carefully to them. .... Today looks to be a hot one here in Eastport. This little city is on Moose Island between Cobscook and Passamaquoddy Bays and therefore is cooler than areas inland in the summer. Heaven knows what it's going to be like inland today. It would be a great day to be out on the water.

07/24/2000 - In the brokerage section we have slightly revised the material on the Amphibicon Lichen. Several items that the owner forgot to mention have been added to the equipment list. These are great little coastal cruising boats. .... Some of our customers may have noted that we piggy backed a web site for Raye's Mustard Mill here in Eastport onto our site for the last three years. Raye's now has their own domain name and you can order all their stone ground mustards direct from their web site. This Eastport business has been around for a century and is one of two stone ground mustard mills left in the world. There is a difference. I would never use anything else. This is an unsolicited endorsement and I have no involvement with Raye's other than eating their mustard and admiring the owner, Nancy Raye, for her determination in strengthening her old family business. .... We've recently had a nice visit from one of our design students. He is moving to Eastport in mid-August to pursue his education with us at a faster pace.

06/27/2000 - We've added particulars to the pages of information on the Amphibicon. You can get to these from the Amphibicon listings on the brokerage page. .... The Controversy 36 Pleiades has been sold. .... We have another Amphibicon listed in the brokerage pages. This one we believe to have had a good deal of upgrading done quite recently. .... It seems like there are an especially large number of our designs starting construction this sping and summer. We are doing a lot of helping out with advice and explanatory sketches. .... We still seem to be very busy and short of draftsmen.

06/19/2000 - In the Idea Designs section I've added a 20' version of our Coin Collection Chinese rigged voyaging yachts. She'd be big enough for two people to have a lot of fun in reasonable comfort as long as they weren't gadget and gear minded. .... You may be interested to know that our ISP has started to provide us with some statistics on "hits". We were interested to see that in May nearly 37,000 people visited our site. Of course I suppose a lot of these were duplicates. They were apparently from 28 countries. .... It's a beautiful morning in Eastport as I write this. Eastport is a fairly high island and the low lying fog around it glows in the morning light so that Eastport itself could be a city in the clouds or on the top of a mountain. .... We are working on some updates of the mechanisms by which the search engines call us up. For some reason even though these engines are calling up relatively few entries in our categories we are not coming up the way we should. This probably means that our recent transfer to another internet service provider produced errors in addressing long enough to get us deleted from most systems. It will take a few weeks before we are in the top rankings again. .... The Careers section has been updated a bit to show our current needs. .... Nannette is adding to the gallery section a good deal now.

05/17/2000 - If you have ordered anything from our site in the last week to week and a half up to noon today and have not received an email confirmation please contact us. A peculiarity in the set up of our order forms at our new ISP had the potential to not properly record some orders. We apologize. Please let us know immediately. .... In the Harbor Gallery section a major revision of the whole section is underway. .... We have finished the Construction Drawing for the Aruna 134 and sent that off. The next drawing on that project is the Accommodations drawing. It won't be quite as elegant as we had originally hoped but still everything but the crew's quarters should be completely wheelchair accessible. We are trying to get at least the Captain's and Cook's cabins wheelchair accessible as well. .... We are closing in fast on the first two drawings of our 33 foot schooner project. We are still doing some calculations on the rig and typing up the offset tables to go with the hull lines. .... We also just got a commission for our smallest design ever. This is for a sailing life dinghy. That is a lifeboat for a small yacht arranged so you can sail it home. This will be designed to go on the foredeck of a Laurent Giles Vertue class sloop.

05/06/2000 - In response to a reader's suggestion we have added to our idea designs list a 19' version of our Silver Gull series with an enclosable steering station and foam flotation. She should make a very interesting super inexpensive little offshore capable cruising sailboat for two. You'll find a little more on the philosophy in the idea designs section. .... We continue to see a lot of interest in the brokerage section of the site in Concordia Yawls. We can usually find a few of these for you to look at. .... It's another wonderful day today here in Eastport. Nannette and I worked a bit this morning tearing off a wooden deck on the back of the house where our design customers come to visit. We're going to replace it with a patio done in used bricks. Eventually we hope to put a well with a freeze proof pump here too. This is a nice little area between two ells on the back of the house. It'll be a nice place to talk boats.

05/04/2000 - OK folks, you probably couldn't get in to this site or email us yesterday. We're very sorry. A construction crew failed to consult Bell Atlantic on where they were digging and cut a fiberoptic cable that carried almost all the traffic for the whole town in which our servers were located. This took a bunch of time to repair to say the least. Everything is back on line now. The virtual world got pretty heavily impinged on by reality there for awhile. .... It's a beautiful day here in our great little city of under 2,000 people. .... Monday I found several things to add to the latest drawing for the 134' schooner project, darn it. Just when you think a drawing's done you so often think of one more thing you really should add.

05/01/2000 - We have updated our order forms to reflect price changes and add new products. In some cases we have replaced existing products with new ones. For instance one of our staff was not happy with the .3mm drafting pencil. She found that the leads kept breaking. So we found a satisfactory replacement for it with only a slightly higher price tag on it. .... In the eastport section we have updated the telephone number of the Eastport Chamber of Commerce and added an address to their web page. .... We have also updated the brokerage page a bit. The Philip Marie has been sold. .... You will note from the tremendous gap in dates between this update and the last that we have been very very busy. This site has brought in more and more business. Ironically this makes it difficult to find time to keep you informed about what we are doing. Last year business was up 72% over the year before and this year we are running about 106% ahead of last year. This has made it difficult to keep up with the personnel needs. We are a medium sized design firm which appears to be on its way to becoming a large firm thanks to our customers world wide. .... We have just completed the large retracting keel design Bird of Passage for a Swedish couple who have put up a nice building to build her in. .... Right now the projects on the board are a 28 foot pleasure tug Osprey, a 33' schooner, and the Aruna 134 schooner. The Aruna is being specially designed to provide access to sailing vacations for those with various mobility problems up to and including wheelchair use. .... We're having some beautiful weather here. The leaves are just beginning to come out on the trees.

03/24/2000 - I've added some notes for another design on the idea designs page. Shining Moon would be a roughly 36' Chinese Junk. She'd be sort of a cross between the fictional junk Shining Moon in the children's book Missee Lee and the very real junk China Cloud built and sailed by Allen and Sharie Farrell. I'd love to get time to do this. Anybody want a custom junk designed? .... This week I've added a few modest updates here and there. .... Today one of our yacht design students and his wife showed up to chat and show us some design books they brought with them. They are in town looking at houses with the hope of moving here. The plan would be to finish up the design course in the first few months of living here. Hopefully I would then have an additional drafting job open for him. They've got some good days for looking. The little snow we had is going fast and the weather is absolutely beautiful. .... We are closing in on the completion of another design. The retracting keel on this boat has been a tough problem to get both strong enough and simple enough to be made economically as a "one off". A lot of people think of a retracting keel as just "hanging there". However in an offshore boat if the boat is rolled in a bad storm the keel had better stay extended to bring you back upright. So it's a lot more complicated than you might think. We quoted on showing the retracting keel as part of the construction drawing. This should have been a whole separate drawing. Doing it as part of the construction drawing means we are having to put in a lot more hours than we've actually charged for. That's OK though. This is a good life here in Eastport and as long as we get to live here, design boats that make people happy and eat regularly everything's fine. Besides we have plenty of work and more coming in.

03/10/2000 - We are all caught up on spline weight back orders. If anybody needs them we have plenty available now. So far as we know we are now the only supplier of these important yacht drafting tools in the world. .... This week the clients for whom we have been working on a 28 foot version of our original idea design the Osprey 26 called with comments on the first drawings we've sent him. They were kind enough to be extremely complimentary about the design. However Mrs. client had been promised by Mr. that the galley would be 8 feet wide and we've drawn it smaller. Also they thought just a bit more headroom would be nice. The end result is that we've increased the whole size of the design by 8-1/3%. So now she'll be an Osprey 30. .... We're having good weather here on Moose Island considering we're still in the first part of March. There are only a few patches of snow here and there at the moment. Looking out my windows in the office the land around is all in sepia tones like an old photograph. The islands across the bay show the deep rich greens of the firs also tinged with sepia tones in the low angle evening light. This light also picks out every line and crevice in these islands rockbound shores. .... We have a couple coming up to look at houses here in Eastport this month with the hopes of moving here. The husband is one of our design students and hopes to complete his education here and maybe get some work with us eventually. This may be a good bet. Business is continuing to increase, at the moment we are still a mid sized design firm but if this growth rate keeps up we'll be edging into the larger firm realm. This is partly long time reputation, and partly the easier access to us through the Internet.

02/27/2000 - Many of you many not have been aware that there has been a minor crisis in the yacht design tools world. Suddenly the world's last supplier stopped shipping spline weights. They did this without informing us or even stopping taking orders for them! We have finally been able to induce a small West Coast operation to produce these exclusively for us. The first samples are in and information is on the site. We have several back orders for quite some numbers of weights. All back orders should be filled by sometime in the next couple of weeks. We have put several design firms and design students off due to the back orders. I am trying to give proper word to each person but I hope this will get to anyone I've missed. .... In other news, the Aruna 134 foot schooner for those with mobility problems up to and including wheelchair use is coming along nicely. We are working on the basic construction drawings now. Your author has been very pleased to note that we have been able to keep the construction quite simple. This is going to be a very straight forward vessel to build. Throughout we have tried to design this very large vessel to be simple to build and of minimal cost to maintain. Even though she will be run by a non-profit organization it is very important to remember that the less she costs to build and operate the more good she can do. .... We are just finishing up the last drawing on a 55' yawl for a Swedish couple. This unusual vessel had to have a shoal fixed draft for canal cruising yet had to have ballast that could be lowered and fixed in place for offshore sailing. .... We are just getting well into the 28 foot tug Osprey. She is being designed for a couple residing in France. However she will be built near and used on the intracoastal waterways of the Eastern United States.

02/10/2000 - We've added some very plain unadorned perspectives of the lines for the Osprey 28 liveaboard cruising tug boat. You can get an idea of what we've been working up for our customer. This vessel is intended to be a snug, capable coastal and intracoastal cruiser for the East Coast of the United States. .... We've been working a lot on our rates lately. Even though the business is doing well overall we have been trying to find areas in which we are losing money. If we can cut costs in these areas it will not only keep us from having to raise prices but it will mean other areas of the business won't have their rates pushed up to compensate. You may be interested that we found we are losing substantial amounts on some publications. We have investigated our printing methods and have found that by acquiring a faster printer and a faster binding machine we should be able to keep the prices down and still stop losing money on them. Obviously any business would rather reduce costs rather than raise prices. This will take awhile to accomplish. We need another computer, then we'll get the printer and hopefully shortly thereafter we'll get the binding machine.

01/04/2000 - There have been some revisions to the commentary on our Bird of Passage design, which is in the design section under "a current project". We are in the midst of revising this boat to a yawl rig. This gets the rig shorter to clear some powerlines in Sweden. .... We have also revised the comments on the Aruna 134 slightly. Those of you following this project will want to visit the site set up by the non-profit organization that has commissioned the design The website for this is http://www.windjammer.org .... We answer all conventional email from individuals. If you don't receive a reply from us, check to make sure that your system sends the proper email address to us. We have had several examples of not being able to reply because the actual email address is different from that that your Internet Service Provider is attaching to your email. Why this happens I don't know. "John Johnson" and "John Harvey", we can't get through with the addresses we have.