Good Books and Resources on Proa & Sailboat Design?
I’m reading Dave Gerr’s “The Nature of Boats: Insights and Esoterica for the Nautically Obsessed” and Frank Bethwaite’s “High Performance Sailing: Faster Racing Techniques” at the moment and I really like both books thus far.
While I was initially very skeptical of Gerr’s ‘The Nature of Boats’ on account of it’s vague title and seemingly esoteric nature, I have to say I’m really loving the book! It’s entertaining to read, and goes through the hull-shape / overall configuration of the boat aspect which is discussed on the forums so endlessly, with a lot of real world examples together with their pros and cons. Sadly multihulls don’t feature in the lineup, but if you’re interested in different boat types, and learning about (or more about) why they behave the way they do, then it’s definitely worth reading! Even though I’m not far in yet, I’ve already picked up some real nuggets of information from the book (particularly the section on ergonomics / space near the back of the book is proving really useful with the extreme space constraints in my design), so by the time I’m through with it, I’ll probably concur with Rob’s high praise of the work as well! 😉
Cheers,
Marco
P.S. - And thanks for sharing all the really cool resources guys, we’ve gotten some really neat stuff together here! 😊
I read Chris White’s The cruising multihull cover to cover a few weeks back - a good book I thought. And I’ve just read Devlin’s Boat Building - a very good guide to stitch and glue.
I just ordered “The Nature of Boats: Insights and Esoterica for the Nautically Obsessed” from Amazon secondhand. Always good deals there!
Not on design, but I just found that system 3 have a nice epoxy handbook online, geared mostly to boatbuilding.
http://www.systemthree.com/reslibrary/literature/The_Epoxy_Book.pdf
FYI- system 3 have a nifty self mixing epoxy cartridge system. I haven’t used it but it looks like it would make a lot of boat building epoxy tasks a lot less messy 😊
An absolutely wonderful book about pacific island migration, voyaging, culture and the modern effort to revive it is here:
http://www.amazon.com/Vaka-Moana-Voyages-Ancestors-Settlement/dp/0824832132
Its an amazing book that is full of stuff I did not know about after decades of dabbling around in the subject.
chris
I was lucky enough to see they exhibition - in Canberra I think - very good. I should get the book