"Another one?!!!" my parents asked in horror, hopefully rhetorically, when they heard about my plans to launch a fourth boat. Fortunately, the neighbors living right across from my workshop didn't hear that. Later, when it was too late to stop it, all they could do was put on a fake smile as they walked by and occasionally ask through gritted teeth, "Is it going to be finished soon..?" If only there were more polite people like that in this world...
But really, why? When one boat would already be too much for a normal person, why am I building my fourth? Almost every representative of a any complex hobby often proudly declares, "If you can do without it, don't do it." Mountaineers say, "If do without climbing mountains, don't climb them." Sailors say, "If you can do without the sea, don't sail." And so on, each with the proud implication that we can't help ourselves. Apparently, my diagnosis is somewhat similar.
In fact, it all comes from knowing that you can do better. My first creation, Melatelia, was a cute little sailboat that is still sailing today, but she wasn't particularly fast, and after a strong gust of wind I often had to take a deep breath and grab a bucket for the next 20 minutes. The second, named Palm, designed to be particularly stable and safe, built to order for a friend of our family, was capsized by this friend on the very first day of sailing and then locked away in a garage for several years as punishment (no one knows where she ended up after that). The third one, Jumpyra, although loved by almost everyone I let sail with her, was much heavier than I had anticipated in the design, required a trailer to transport, took a long time to set up on the shore, the rig was complicated, and in regattas – sailing races held every summer in various corners of Lithuania – even with her I couldn't overtake my long-time rivals, the Liutkevičiai family and their cheerful boat Kūlverstukas (Olympic 470 class). But the most important thing, perhaps, is the feeling that something else remains unsaid. Not everything can be expressed in words. Sometimes you have to write a piece of music, sometimes make a painting... And sometimes build a boat.
In my imagination, Feather was an exceptionally light, dead simple sailboat, with hull narrow as a kayak, widening above the waterline into a spacious deck with protruding "wings" on which the sailor can sit and balance the boat with their weight even in very strong winds. I took this idea from the sports sailboats like International Canoe, National 12, Moth, and several others. Despite the choice to sacrifice comfort for speed, Feather would carry a traditional lug sail, just like Melatelia. Although it may seem absurd to combine an "old-fashioned" sail with a racing hull, its practicality won me over long ago, and I have almost never felt the few theoretical percent of missing power compared to modern sails. Here are a few screenshots from the early stages of the design.
After spending long evenings sitting in front of the computer screen and counting every gram of weight, a radical idea suddenly came to mind – instead of traditional materials such as wood or plywood, perhaps it would be worth trying to print the hull of this boat in pieces with a 3D printer, glue them together, and cover them with glass or carbon fabric, which would provide almost all the strength? Admittedly, I didn't come up with this idea myself, but quietly stole it from American engineer Jan Herich, who had built several kayaks using this method. The idea seemed great in theory, and after a few experiments at the KTU materials laboratory, I had already printed more than half of the boat... Unfortunately, reality quickly brought me back down to earth when I realized that a hull made using this method, although seemingly very strong against bending and twisting, is terribly vulnerable to local compression — or, in non-engineering terms, knees, elbows, and other sharp parts of the human body, which, traditionally accompanied by a string of expletives, would quickly crush the fragile printed plastic inside the boat. Fortunately, I managed to find someone who could recycle this plastic, so I got a second chance at this project without committing an ecological atrocity.
Realizing that I won't get away with it so easily, I had to go back to the wooden design and try not to exceed the weight limit through a smarter construction.
But why is weight so important? Every kilogram onboard is a kilogram of water that the sailing boat has to push aside. Besides, after all my adventures with Jumpyra, I realized that I definitely didn't want to go back to a trailer and, like Melatelia, carry Feather on the roof of my car. Since I lost my gym membership card somewhere, I decided that it would be too difficult to lift more than 40 kilograms onto the roof of the car by myself. In comparison, Melatelia weighed 35 kilograms, which I could still lift, maybe a little more. However, Melatelė was 3.2 m long, while Feather was 4.5 m long and almost twice as wide, so doubling the size of the boat with only a 5-kilogram difference was an extremely difficult task.
With spring around the corner and the sailing season fast approaching, I quickly redesigned Feather to a 4 mm plywood, epoxy resin, and fiberglass stitch&glue construction with a double bottom and internal bulkheads (the “ribs” of the boat), maintaining a shape similar to the original and trying to keep as much roundness and smoothness as possible—as much as this manufacturing method allows.
For those who enjoy technicalities more than literary litanies, here is a little refreshment – the final technical data for the Feather:
Length: 4.5 m.
Width: 1.57 m.
Draft with and without daggerboard 0.94 m. / 0.12 m.
Sail area: 10 m.^2
Mast/total height: 4.5 m. / 6.4 m.
Waterline length: 4.43 m.
Waterline width: 0.76 m.
Prismatic coefficient: 0.52
Wetted surface area: 2.42 m^2
And so, the hastily reworked project moved from the computer screen to the garage workshop. As with Jumpyra, to save time, I asked the sellers to cut the marine plywood I had purchased with a CNC machine, so I brought home something that resembled a jigsaw puzzle or a LEGO set, which I assembled into a neat, albeit extremely fragile structure in just a few days.
The assembly process was very simple – first, the long parts were glued together with jigsaw joints, then holes were drilled in the edges of the paired parts, short wires were inserted through them, and by tightening them, the parts were pulled together, bending each other into the correct shape. It's like sewing – but results in more scratches on the skin.
Next comes the slow, careful, and meticulous process of straightening, during which I tried to bend the hull into the correct shape with the help of rulers, lasers, strings, sticks, clamps, and loads of profanity. You straighten one spot, another one warps, you straighten that one, and three others are now off... However, it is healthy to devote some time to profanity at this stage, because later, when the seams are glued together and it becomes clear that something is still crooked, you will have to swear a lot more – and it will be of little help.
At the same time, a centerboard well was installed on the boat – that mysterious hole in the middle, which later proved very useful in regattas as a hook for making new acquaintances, because no passerby could resist asking “How does water not leak through this hole..?!”
Finally, after measuring 10 times and not letting anyone do the cutting, I impregnated every piece of wood and plywood inside the boat with two layers of epoxy resin, and joined the seams with the same resin and strips of fiberglass.
When my father visited my workshop, he would always ask me, “Why do you need so many clamps...?” No, no, no. Any serious shipbuilder who saw my tools would just laugh – pfff, this is not "many" clamps, not at all. Amateur...
As in Jumpyra, here too I built the mast well from a 90 mm PVC pipe inserted through the partner to the step, where it was sealed with epoxy resin.
Although I am not a fan of selfies, sometimes they happen unintentionally...
Finally, once everything was ready inside, the deck was bent and glued to the internal structures. The bending is spherical – it's like wrapping a sheet of paper around a basketball: it wants to tear and crumple, but if you manage to bend it into such shape, it becomes extremely stiff and strong, so even 4mm plywood, which you can usually break with your fingers, can easily support a person's weight after being bent in this way.
Since I am terribly lazy and knew how much work it would take to reinforce the bottom and floor with wooden strips, this time I decided to fill the gaps between the bulhkeads with XPS foam panels, which, although not very strong, in this case they can perfectly support fairly large areas of deck panels and reduce the likelihood of a horrific “crack” while underway.
And finally, after taking one last look inside the boat, I closed it forever with deck/cockpit panels, which I also temporarily fastened together with wire, and then reinforced all the seams in the traditional way with epoxy resin and fiberglass strips.
Looking at the stern of the boat – known among sailors as the transom – one might wonder why there are so many holes, isn't one large hole in the middle of the boat enough already..? And the answer, unfortunately, is not “so that it sinks faster” – this time I decided to install not only rudder hinges at the stern, but also transporting wheel axles, which would turn Feather into a cart on the shore, and instead of asking others to “can you help me carry the boat to the water,” I could turn raise my chin, and as I once did in my childhood, proudly declare, “I CAN DO IT MYSELF!”
Neighbors passing by would tease me, asking if the bow of the ship (stem, in sailor language) would remain so blunt. Indeed, leaving it that way would have been a blunt choice, so I glued together several oven-dried aspen boards into a seemingly strange shape, which, in all its ugliness, was glued to the bow and later nicely blended in with the bottom and sides of the boat.
Although I would very much like to take credit for such a sculpturally flawless work, I have to give them to my good friend Milda, who visited this workshop many times and lent a hand in shaping the Feather, and another friend Leonora, who both spent half a day scratching her hands while cutting wires from the sides of Feather. When organizing the work, I always saved the most "enjoyable" tasks for those who carelessly offered to help. Big thanks to the girls and their (once) beautiful hands!
After cutting all the wires, filling in the cracks and holes, and countless other chores, Feather was covered with fiberglass cloth and coated with resin. She looked as if she had been varnished – it seemed almost criminal to paint over these natural colours... But it would have been a greater crime to leave the evidence of my poor fairing job for all to see.
Finally, after repeating the same procedure on the inside of the boat, came the stage when you're wishfully thinking, “well, it's practically done now” – but in fact, it's only halfway done... It was time for the laborious and time consuming fairing, using up sandpaper by the ton. Prime – plaster – sand – prime – plaster – sand... Again and again, trying to smooth out every bump, every pinhole, which kept popping up like mushrooms after rain. But I kept going on, convincing me that each eliminated bump is an extra knot to the speed of the boat.
When it seemed that there would be no end, it finally came, and after the last coat of primer, Feather was rolled out into the open for the first time, where her dust was quickly washed away by the warm summer rain.
Alongside the hull, I also prepared other parts of the boat – the rudder and the tiller, for which I traditionally gave a NACA profile with a router and sliding templates...
...the tiller that wraps around the feather with a Y-shaped fork...
...and three spars – the mast, the boom, and the yard. To save time and weight, I used 3D printing for these parts – after printing a lightweight mold, I placed it on a (kinda) straight workbench with adjustable supports...
Then, like a sock, I pulled on a carbon fiber sleeve, soaked in epoxy resin. Then another one, and another one—four layers in total—and finally vacuumed it for a few days until the resin hardened.
Of course, every boat build must have its “oops,” “oh no...” or “oh my God” moment (there are also some uncensored versions). But by now, I was thinking, maybe I got lucky..? I lived with that naive illusion until one day, after rolling the boat out into the yard, I decided to put the mast into the hole in the hull.
IT WON'T FIT!!!!!!!!
It was a moment after which there was nothing left to do but look around, desperately searching for the so-called “moaning chair” so that I could hopelessly collapse into it and spend the next hour crying bitterly. How, after so many months of complex design, calculations, revisions, checks, approvals, drawing preparation, and other engineering intricacies, did I manage to overlook what was perhaps the most important dimension in the entire project?!
The answer came quickly, and it saved my crumbling self-esteem, even if not the project itself — it turned out that the PVC pipe I had glued into the hull of the boat had a much smaller inner diameter than listed in its specifications... I trusted it, and didn't measure it. It was only a difference of a few millimeters, but it was enough to prevent the mast from fitting. No chance. And you can't grind down a carbon mast, its walls are already extremely thin... All the options I tried to widen the hole also failed. As painful as it was, I had to remake the mast, a few millimeters narrower. Oh, if only that had been the only problem with this mast... But more on that soon.
There were a few more parts that benefited greatly from 3D printing – the rudder pintles and gudgeons, for which I printed wax-coated pressure molds, poured resin mixed with carbon fiber inside, and compressed them with clamps. After removing them from the mold, all I had to do was sand them down a little, drill holes in the right places, and they was done. After the mast misadventure, this success seemed so suspicious that I kept watching those parts for quite a while, almost expecting they would catch fire or explode.
Well, now for the fun part – painting! For the Feather, as I did for Melatelia, I chose a combination of a blue bottom, yellow stripes, and a white deck - an aesthetic rather than political choice (although my political views are also in line with these colors). An alternative theory is that, as a color-blind person, these are some of the few colors I can clearly distinguish. At least, that's what I think. Blue, yellow, white... I hope that's what they really gave me in the paint store.
The finish line is in sight! Hardware installation. Bolts, eyebolts, nuts, ropes, hooks, stickers – these are also an extremely enjoyable part of the build, signaling that the end is near. As usual, the eyebolts were the wrong size, the ropes weren't long enough, I was two and a half screws short, and I lost the only screwdriver bit that fit them. As I said, a very enjoyable stage of the build.
I decided to glue on a non-slip covering in the cockpit of the boat – a mat that I had once bought from a swimming pool equipment store. As it turned out later, this was a lie – you won't find a more slippery surface anywhere in the world. A cow on ice would much rather stay on the ice than climb onto this mat. I can't count how many times I slipped and capsized with the Feather thanks to this wonderful human invention... Once, in Murphy's Law book, I read the following law: “It is impossible to fall off the floor.” Not true. When you are in a boat covered with this mat, it is very much possible.
I glued or sewed artificial leather onto all parts of the boat that would be subject to friction. As I later realized, it is perfect for gluing, but natural leather would have been much better for sewing. And yet, as it turned out, sewing leather was so much fun! When the seam was finally finished, I even felt kind of sad... Like... That's all?
My good friend and sailmaker Ignas kindly “lent” me his sewing workshop, where I was able to sew a sail for the Feather in record time – a total of 16 hours – a sail which was probably a little too large.
The last few weeks before the boat was finished were a rush. Every free evening, weekend, almost every free minute was planned and organized according to a relentless schedule, with work sometimes lasting until 3 or 4 in the morning... Why was I in such a hurry? I had promised my friends we'd go to a camp where we were going to christen this boat and sail together for a week. If I didn't make it, if I made a mistake, or if even one more thing (apart from the mast that didn't fit) went wrong, how could I look my friends in the eye? I had to make it. No matter what.
And even on the last day, when the paint wasn't completely dry yet and the mast hadn't even been painted at all, I was still sanding a few leftover parts, desperately trying to get everything ready. And even when the last item on the TO-DO list was finally checked, the thought lingered in my mind for a long time — no, there was something else... Something else that needed to be done... I had definitely forgotten something... But no matter how hard I thought, I couldn't remember anything else.
The Feather was ready.
Although I didn't have time to weigh her before leaving, I think she definitely didn't exceed 40 kilograms, because, as it quickly became apparent, it was very easy to lift her onto and off the roof of the car, even single-handed.
Feather successfully reached the camp, where we celebrated her launch with a group of wonderful friends with champagne, good wishes, and a song. Finally, after four months of hard work, she finally landed in the water.
On the second day, after letting a friend try out the Feather, I got her back with a broken tiller. But that didn't spoil my mood for too long, because everything can be fixed, and most importantly, the new boat exceeded all expectations. Just as I thought, the Feather has practically no stability, but she is fast as a rocket, maneuverable, quick to respond to every input, gliding across the water's surface almost silently, and the feeling is unreal. This perfectly fits a comment made by a friend of mine about his ex-girlfriend, taken out of context: “unstable, but fun"... You couldn't put it more accurately.
Of course, it's one thing to play around on a lake, but it's quite another to test a boat in a race... And just a week later, it was time for the most amazing regatta of the year in Lithuania – in the town of Palūšė, which I have been visiting faithfully for many years.
Although you can only sail in the “open” class with a homemade boat, fortunately, everyone starts at the same time, and this is a great opportunity to measure up with sports boats such as Laser, Laser 2000, Finn, and so on... I have long had the modest ambition to prove that a homemade boat, built for less than a tenth of the price of a similar factory-made boat, can be just as fast on the water. The only thing that seriously worried me was the carbon mast: as it turned out after a week of sailing, it was a complete fiasco – flexible like a swimming pool noodle, and worst of all, once bent, it remained bent, which contradicted everything I knew about the properties of this material.
As I later found out, the mistake was using those carbon “sleeves” – experts told me that carbon fibers woven in this way, have fibers going in a terrible angle, and it is hopeless to expect any stiffness... That's what I get for rushing! I should have done more research. With such a mast, it was impossible to put the sail into the correct shape, and while sailing, the mast bent more and more until I inevitably had to return to shore and try to straighten it out. This horror was later caught on camera...
Well, what can you do, the mast got limp. It happens to everyone, sooner or later. There are solutions for that too – I'll think of something before the next race.
Even with such a horrible mast, the first race of the regatta was such a triumph that I didn't dare to hope for. Starting in 8th position out of 25 boats, I began to overtake one after another, and by the time I rounded the last buoy, I was already in first place... I finished with such a lead that by the time the second boat crossed the finish line, I was already on shore eating sandwiches. The other races were not as successful (I got stuck at the start line "demolishion derby"), and the organizers ended regatta earlier than planned. However, it was clear right away: Feather lived up to her name.
Although there are many things I can and want to improve, Feather has already revealed its potential and delivered much more than I expected. Perhaps this will be my last racing sailboat—I can't really think of anything else that could have been done better. After all, the joy of sailing is not just about excitement and adrenaline. But there's certainly a lot of that. Why are we splashing around in the water, circling buoys? Why are we rushing to be the first to finish? What's the point? Money, fame, women... No, that's not it. Something more. Or at least it seems that way.
I suppose I could try and add some infinitely profound and noble thoughts about the wind and freedom, man's harmony with nature, and so on, but... I think I'll rather go sailing some more.
Thank you to everyone who helped with the Feather design, the build, and the launch!
