Saltaspiaggia

www.modernwoodenboat.com

“Saltaspiaggia”, can be translated as “Beach-hopper”; this sailboat is a minimal coastal cruiser, a sailboat to hop from one beach to another with a small group of friends, and to be garage-built by a homebuilder with plywood and epoxy.

This was my goal when I decide to develop this plan, which had to be: easy to build and rig , quite cheap, and produce a small sturdy trailerable sailboat enough roomy to allow a small family of four to travel for a week holiday.

I decided to stretch the “stitch & glue ” plywood and epoxy system somehow to its limit; a 6,20 m multichined hull was the result, to be built by an homebuilder as a dinghy “on steroids”, keeping things easy, in plywood sheets and epoxy resins starting from a very detailed set of drawings.

Hull is quite simple, with a good balance between interiors and cockpit volume, a shallow draft lifting keel, with a decent amount of lead ballast poured in the lifting keel; sail area is the low range, since I was more interested in a small light manageable sailboat than in absolute performances; I choose a somehow peculiar cutter configurations, with a mainsail, a small olympic jib and a bigger genoa/MPS to be used in light conditions or downwind/reaching; bow sails are quite small so they can be furled with a cheap dinghy furler , avoiding expensive cruising boat furler; a second option in the plans is the classical gaff rig mainsail, which keeps the centre of effort of sailplan even lower, increasing stability in windy conditions.

Plans are, as always, richly detailed; this time I decided to add a drawing about mast building, to allow an even cheaper realizations (alloy masts are quite expensive, in this case you can built your own wooden mast by plans).

Engine is a 5-8 HP long shaft outboard fitted on transom, aside from a transom hung rudder, simple and effective.