Motor Sharpie  Kingfisher

 Lou Brocetti 19  Power Sharpie

While were on the subject of sharpies, I should mention - my good friend, the superlative boat builder/designer Lou Brochetti wants to sell his practically brand new motor sharpie. Sorry, I dont understand why. He gets a hankerin to build a new boat from time to time, is all I can figure.

Two summers ago, Lou took this boat to the San Juan Islands, in Washington State. It was a brand new boat then and performed beautifully, just as planned. Well, Lou was tickled because, of course, it was his plan.

You may wonder why this is considered a sharpie. Well, I had that question too. Why not a semi-dory?

So, Ive come to these conclusions. First, Lou knows what hes talking about. Second, a semi-dory (which is most often a motor dory) has a flat aft profile allowing it to plane. I owned a semi-dory once, with an old Evinrude 35 hp that would push its heavy-built plywood hull up to a wide-open 25 mph! We called it the Bay Bomber. I swear it used a gallon per mile.

Lous sharpie is slower and infinitely more efficient. It has quite a bit of rocker in the bottom, a narrow transom with very little interest in planing. With a 9.9 hp outboard, it burns a gallon of gas every four hours or so, at cruising speed, which is around six knots.

Lous second trip in this boat was last summer on Franklin D Roosevelt Lake, which is behind Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. According to him, it just might be one of the best cruising grounds in the world.

If you want an efficient motor driven gunkholer, you should call Lou. He has just the boat for you.
(Shown here tucked comfortably up on a remote sandy beach.)

A pretty salty, hardworking boat, built just for fun.
Lou Brochetti, Redmond, Oregon:  541-504-0135

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Motor Well A Mini Project Unto Itself

Oh, the motor well.  Seems simple enough.  Build a box that bolts to the back of the boat, upon which the motor clamps.

Ive been working on the motor well since the days of the Troublesome Skegs and before the Boat Flip.

Turns out that though this earns only a brief paragraph in the Glen-L Waterlodge instructions, it is really quite time consuming.

And though the motor well shows up on various views in the plans three times, it still leaves a lot of unspecified dimensions. Despite a lot of fancy maths including tangents and the Pythagorean theorem my first effort to suss out the missing dimensions and angles was a loose collection of mismatched angles and incorrectly cut two-by stock.

The challenge of the motor well is that there are few right angles, several that are very close, but not quite 90 degrees, several similar obtuse angles and some crazy acute angles. The difficulty lies in translating perfectly good angles and lengths to actual measurements and cuts.

My second attempt -- salvaging as much of the previously cut wood as I could -- discarded the mathematical approach and did it the way a carpenter would. Rather than cutting the two-by stock first, I marked out the known angles and measurements on plywood, solving the unknowns as I went along.  I cut out the 5/8" plywood giving me a useful template that would be used for the sides of the motor well.  Finally, I measured and marked the two-by members to match the template. Magic!

After fitting everything best I could, I epoxied everything together to give me two assembled sides to the motor well.

This was a logistical challenge similar to assembling the side stringers -- you want to align the two-by members facing up, but the screws need to go in from the other side.  In this case, the motor well sides were small enough I could assemble the two-by members facing up on saw horses, then put a few screws in from the bottom to hold them together.

After that, I flipped them over and screwed the shit out of them.  All done while everything -- drill, screws, wood, hands -- are covered in sticky goo. Fun!

I completely encapsulated the wood inside the motor well with epoxy to protect it from decay.

I know from experience assembling boxes, it is easy to discover in the end that youve created a parallelogram that doesnt fit your last side.  How to prevent this?

I temporarily screwed the bottom on the motor well to square up the sides before assembling the rest of the box.  Im using wax paper to prevent the epoxy from accidentally adhering the bottom.  In fact, the bottom wont go on until after the motor well is already bolted on to the hull to allow me access to the bolts.

Now, I can go ahead and epoxy and screw on the back and the framing members.

We have to bolt this thing in with 5/8 carriage bolts no greater than six inches apart.  Turns out thats a lot, really.

I marked the bolt holes and drilled from the outside of the motor well using a carpenters square to get holes perpendicular to the rake of the hull.

Sixteen bolts for this 2 foot square box hanging off the back of the boat.

The heads of some of the carriage bolts would fall on angled members, and so needed to be countersunk.

I needed to temporarily hang this thing so I can mark the bolt holes on the hull.  I built a little support jig that took into account the missing bottom piece.

Here is the motor well on the boat.  Fancy.

Using a wax china pencil, I marked the bolt holes for mounting the motor well.

It seemed like madness to drill 16 holes in my previously watertight boat hull.  Soon, well finish the outside of the motor well and bolt it on.

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Todays motor home on the water

I like to sail on boats that I can see and feel the wind. By seeing the wind I can see the ripples on the water, by feeling the winds I can tell when running down wind at night how far the wind has veered by the feel of it against my ears and neck. I also sail to see and enjoy the pure energy of how a vessel moves along by the force of the wind. When entering a Harbour under sail all my senses are on alert to avoid shoals ,other boats and to see a possible wind shift.

So my sailboats are very clean of gear on deck and around the cockpit. At sea I can rig in a second a nice sun awning from the boom gallows to the aft railing supports that were made for this. When its blowing hard I take this awning down and now have a clear view. When going to weather in rough going the wind vane steers the boat and I can just sit in the doghouse and watch the world go by. 

Coming into port in nasty weather I done foul weather gear and just deal with it. At anchor we have a very nice awning setup.

Todays group of sailors think in a different way. These people were raised on tv , computers , video games and commuting by car long distances while talking on the phone and listening to talk show hosts that are bitching about something. These people are used to being in enclosed areas on the way to work, at work and when they get back home. One day they decide to become a sailor - cruiser and start on the computer looking up what they need to live on a boat that will make them feel at home.

This trend has brought us the Island Packet crowd, the huge Room-Ma-Ran catamaran crowd and all the other group of sailors that want to stay under cover till the last instant when one of them has to go forward and lower the anchor. Otherwise they want to stay in what is the equivalent of a sailing motor home. In the typical cockpit of one of these vessels you will have a steering wheel that is over shadowed by a huge GPS system flanked by the VHF and loud hailer . To see around this getup one must stand up on tip toes to see over. Now the compass is in there somewhere but this crowd has the GPS full map system so who needs to look at that , all i need is my waypoint book .

Sailing under a fully enclosed Florida Room like you see on the intra costal where they enclose half the property and pool area under a huge screen cage . Side flaps down , the little window to maybe look up at the set of the mainsail but who does that and the sun might find me so its closed.

What the whole sailing experience comes down to is seeing the goose neck of the main boon and maybe the genoa tack at the bow.

Sensory deprivation at its best. But hey the sun cant find you under  all this crap.

At night with the GPS TV show going on all night vision is gone . But the good this is theyre in the safety compound of the FLORIDA ROOM.

Id rather experience the sea that I sail on. 

Todays floating CARAVAN-MOTORHOME at rest . They have missed the channel completely . The wind is in the east coming from their stern . They have set the anchor to leeward in the channel they should have been in. Three more of their tribe are consoling and trying to figure out what to do. 

In passing by in our dinghy going home I suggested to put a kedge out to windward and put a strain on it so when the tide floats them they will be heading into the wind and not drifting into the channel and onto the leeward rocks. They got off fine.

But iam sure they missed the channel because they were not looking at it but at their GPS TV show

Enclosed in the saftey of the FLORIDA  ROOM.

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