Darned if I know, it sort of crept up on me like old age, one minute you're 26 and the next 62.

My father was in the Royal Navy in WWII and I guess that was the start of it. When we moved to Canada in 1957 we came across on the SS Scythia an experience that should have put me off boats forever, sea sick for the entire 9 days that it took to cross from Liverpool to New York.

Later I became a Boy Scout and Boy Scouts had canoes which were a lot of fun. Then I joined the Navy and boats became a big deal. Big boats, little boats, motor boats and of all things sail boats. And so I learned to sail. One of these, a Canadian Navy 27' whaler, was yawl rigged with a standing lug main, a small mizzen and jib and a large, very heavy, metal centreboard that was raised and lowered by a very under powered hand winch.

They were hoot to sail and could stand up to winds that would have modern sailors reefing like mad. They also had an fixed outboard motor in a well aft of the mizzen mast and could be rowed by a crew of 6, cox'n and 5 oarsmen. The oars went athwartship to an oarlock on the opposite side of the boat so if you got out of sync with the stroke oar then you would get a hefty belt in the middle of your back from the loom of the oar behind. They had two different tillers, one a standard tiller for when the boat was being rowed or under power and another for sailing with a yoke that pivoted around the mizzen partner, a bronze affair, and was connected to a similar yoke on the rudder head by wire strops.

You had to know the tricks to get them to sail well, one being that when tacking hold the jib aback momentarily to force the bow around.

Now that I think of it it was probably those years sailing the whalers that was the real start of my boat life.

During those years in the regular Navy, I spent an awful lot of my time doodling boats in these handy engineering note books which were meant not for doodling boats but for making drawings of systems and machinery. I still have most of them. I also built my first boat, a 15 foot sharpie, from a set of plans in Mechanics Illustrated. It was less than a success, the builder having discovered that stepping into the hull while in the process of building inevitably separates glued parts which will later leak. A mistake the builder never made again.

When I came out of the regular Navy, I joined the Reserves and spent two years working for them training new recruits and taking them sailing in whalers. Then the company I worked for transferred me to Prince Rupert on the north coast and I started helping out the Sea Cadets. They asked me to design and build a couple of dories which I did and that really got me hooked on designing. I bought a copy of Skene's and began reading everything I could find in the library on boat design.

A fellow who worked in my office had a 22' Davidson Chugger that he had bought in Vancouver and then chugged his way up the coast to Prince Rupert. He told me that the steering was awful as you could turn the wheel very easily to port but going to starboard was very difficult and required two hands and all your strength. When I had a look at it I realized why. The steering was hydraulic and one whole component, which allowed for relief of the pressure when turning to starboard, was missing from the system. He was so happy that I fixed this problem for him he allowed me the use of the boat whenever he was not using it which was a lot.

The Davidson was an excellent sea boat but with two major problems, it rolled like a pig and the fuel tank, which was fitted under the port cabin bench and hence was long and narrow, only had an outlet at the forward end so in any seas at all and anything less than a third of a tank of fuel all the fuel would go to the after end of the tank letting air into the outlet and airlocking the diesel engine. The former problem was fixed by fitting paravane anti rolling gear which I rescued from a derelict fish boat. The latter problem was beyond my capability and my bank account so remained a problem.

At about the same time I came into a 12' Davidson row boat which I managed to squeeze into my basement and over the space of three months completely remade it as a small sail boat, gaff rigged with a lee board. I made my own sails, I still have the book on how to make sails but not the boat.

After we left Prince Rupert I didn't have a boat for a very long time but my interest in designing continued and so I enrolled with Westlawn. The course was informative but since my design aesthetic ran more to Bolger than Bayliner we parted company once the course got around to designing plugs for fiberglas decks.

Then I started my own company and designing/building went on the back burner for a very long time. My interest in boats continued hence my Small Boat Journal, Woodenboat, and Boatbuilder magazine collections and now Small Craft Adviser.

Along came 2010 I was 62 and my company had slowed down and I found Duckworks. It was time to get busy again and so Kuai Le came into being.

Kuai Le

Since that project started I have built four boats, Kuai Le, a pram of my own design, a mouse like boat of my design and a PD racer, hull 763, just for the heck of it.

I don't have a real project on the go just now, my wife and I are contemplating building a boat to sail away on. I figure that puddle duck will make a great tender.

Here's the concept, Sort of a floating RV, thank you Mr. Buehler for putting that thought in my head, drinks for 6, feeds 4, sleeps 2, for bashing about the Pacific Northwest and maybe, just maybe, points further south.

We'll see how it goes.

Kevin McNeill

KMN designs

kmndesigns.weebly.com

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