The first New Zealand Goat Island Skiff has been launched by Ian Howeth.

He has taken a year to build it as spare time became available.

It was launched during the Xmas break

John Goodman and I sailed the immaculate Goat Island Skiff he built from my plan in the Texas 200.

The boat showed itself to be one of the faster in the fleet despite loading up such a short boat with food, water and camping gear for six days with little outside support.

We played with sailing the boat by the lee – a method used by racing boats to gain both speed and control.

I document the method here including a video showing how the angle of heel can be controlled using the mainsheet.

AlexN, who is building an Oz Racer and I drove up to Toronto at Lake Macquarie for the Classic Boatfest 2011. I think I will go again in 2012 and try to have a boat to sail around.

Shows on the water are the nicest type and this one has good access for small sailing boats and canoes.

We met up with Bruce (Woodeneye on the storerboats forum) who had is “for sale” Goat Island Skiff.

Csaba is my agent in Hungary.

He has translated several of my plans to Hungarian.

This is some of his promotional material in Hungarian.

More videos of John Goodman’s Yawl Rigged Goat Island Skiff.

He is trying out some rigging variations to see if we can simplify the building of the yawl rig version.

At the moment this is inconclusive, but wow, he got some good videos

Dete Hasse and his family built a Goat Island Skiff in Geelong, Victoria a while ago. He has just written to me about his experiences trying to sail on Port Phillip Bay and more happily on the recently refilled (the drought is over!) Lake Eppalock.

Also he makes some good comments about reefing and how it changes an overpowered boat into a much more rriendly beast in stronger winds.

You can pay money for dry bags to store gear in when canoeing, kayaking or sailing. Or pay even more for buoyancy bags that keep you boat afloat after capsize.

Here Ian tells us how we can make our own cheaply.

A few more pictures from the duckflat spring school.

Boats from Oughtred, Storer, CLC, White and Wooden Boat Magazine

I am currently helping at the twice yearly duck flat boatbuilding school in Adelaide.

There are boats designed by me, Oughtred, CLC Kayaks, Joel White and Woodenboat.

People are from Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Perth.

There are a number of different suppliers in different areas. You can of course build direct from the plan and mark out the shapes. We have a system that minimises the chance of errors. However these suppliers all produce very good kits for Storerboats.

The conservative viewpoint is that traditional rigs are not very efficient. However allied to efficient hulls and set up correctly, lug and sprit rigs can be very efficient indeed – not too much slower than “modern” rigs, particularly when the same lessons are applied to trad sails and way cheaper.

This is a WIKI drawn from the group on the Storerboats forum discussions on setting up lug and sprit rigs for best performance building on the information in my webpage.

John Goodman who recently spent 5 days semi racing a Goat Island Skiff in the Texas200 event got back to me with some observations and even some pictures of aspects of the boat and the sailing.

I have responded with suggestions to make some further improvements. Between John and me there are some useful tips about setting up a boat for more speed.

However the standard setup of the Goat is fine for most – it is still pretty quick in standard form.

There is advice for both lug and sprit traditional rigs here.

Plan info – yawl rig info, please contact me. John and Mark are pretty happy with the Goat Island Skiff Yawl. You can see some of the story here Goat Island Skiff Plywood Boat sails 200 miles up the Texas Coast. There are some more pics Nice woodworking detail in that one above! For much [...]

Exciting News, John and David Goodman finished the Texas200 event in their lime green Goat Island skiff.

Five days and 200 miles up the Texas coast dodging huge barges and commercial traffic.

They had a great time and are very happy with the performance of the Goat

John in Texas built his Goat Island Skiff from a kit made by Clinton Chase. They are experimenting with a yawl version of the Goat.

They had a launch and a capsize by the dock.

The boat is a great lime green. I used to have a lime green NS14 dinghy that I enjoyed so much some of the design input went into the goat.

Bruce in New South Wales, Australia has launched his Goat Island Skiff plywood sailing dinghy at Port Stephens.

They had a nice day sailing around but capsized the boat by accident when someone tripped up. Ooops.

I am still not sure who is to blame!

We are still waiting for launch day pics to be retrieved from the waterlogged camera.

Bobwes has been using his Goat Island Skiff over the last weeks.

It is brightly coloured and looks pretty great.

Christophe has launched his Goat Island Skiff in New Hampshire. A very nice looking boat.