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Yacht Designer Tad Roberts' Web Log
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Wooden seine boat Chelsea Lake. Sank 1987Documenting Historic BC Boats

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ODAMIT (oh-dam-it)

By admin | Published: August 4, 2025
Odamit (Later Chack-Chack), my Grandfather Harry Roberts boat, at Malaspina Galleries, Gabriola Island, 1924. The boat was about 35′ x 12′, built on the beach at Roberts Creek and launched 1923. Harry sold Chack-Chack in the ’30’s and replaced her with the slightly smaller schooner Leyo, also built on the beach at Roberts Creek and[.....]

Island Tender by Phil Bolger

By admin | Published: August 3, 2025
Island Tender Drawn by Phil Bolger in 1958 and built by the Essex Shipyard in Essex, Massachusetts, this boat was intended to be used as an Island Tender carrying passengers and light cargo around St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Lightly built with a vee-bottom using sawn frames the hull is moderately deep and high-sided[.....]

ALEUTIAN TERN

By admin | Published: August 3, 2025
Aleutian Tern Aleutian Tern, William Garden design #478 done in 1963 when his office was in Seattle. She was built of mostly yellow cedar in Seattle by Warren Teller for his own use. 38′ x 13′ with 4’8″ draft, her engine was to be a BMW diesel fitted backwards over the shaft log, driving the[.....]

Spirit

By admin | Published: July 31, 2025
Yesterday I posted about the big Spencer/Kiskaddon schooner New World, here’s her forerunner, the Sparkman & Stephens sloop Spirit. Intended as the first of a new San Francisco Bay racing class, S&S design #1557 was drawn mainly by Robert Harris in the summer of 1960. The boat was to be very much a day racer,[.....]

NEW WORLD

By admin | Published: July 30, 2025
New World New 8 JuneShow less The ocean racing schooner New World was launched in New Zealand about 1971. 69′ x 13′, of light plywood construction, with a displacement of 30,000 lbs, 11,600 lbs of ballast, flush decks and no engine, she was pretty different. Her design was a collaboration between designer/builder John Spencer, and[.....]

LITTLE GOOSE

By admin | Published: July 29, 2025
There were actually four boats built to this mid-1950’s William Garden design. Garden has written that the first one, Little Goose for John Case, was one of his favorite boats. That might partially stem from her being built at Maritime Shipyards where Garden’s office was at the time, so he saw her every day. The[.....]

The Perfect Coastal Motorboat

By admin | Published: July 28, 2025
In 2010 I was involved with a group that wanted to design and build “The Perfect Coastal Motorboat”. A nice idea, group design, but in my experience it doesn’t work. The pushy-argumentative people always get their way and the others follow along. But any product “designed” by a group of non-designers will end generic in[.....]

DORISTON BC

By admin | Published: March 16, 2024
Echo and Orivo, trollers built on the beach at Doriston, a tiny village on the Sunshine Coast, by my grandmother’s fourth husband, Gunnar Gjerdin, and his brother Martin. It’s a poor picture but the only one I have. Echo is the tiny white boat, about 25′ long, and I would guess built sometime around the[.....]

What is a “Bristol Channel Cutter”?

By admin | Published: April 26, 2021
Marketing doublespeak…….We’ll build a fat little boat and call it a “Bristol Channel Cutter”, that’ll bring in the rubes……And it did and still does. The Hess designs are in reality pretty much the exact opposite of the original Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter’s, in that they are wide with lot’s of form stability and minimal outside[.....]

A DECEMBER TOW

By admin | Published: December 28, 2020
December Tow. I think of it as a tow, but it wasn’t all towing, we got the old MD2B to run for a few hours and even sailed a bit. It’s not far, Cadboro Bay to Silva Bay, about 45 miles as the crow flies. But it was December in BC, the tow was a[.....]

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