3 Tonner 

 

 

 

Building a new Eventide.  A 25Ft version.


 

 
 

Building an Eventide 25

Nigel Vaughan

 

Introduction

 

In 2013 I commissioned a boatyard in Bristol, Star Yachts Ltd., to build for me a new Eventide 25.  On these pages I am going to write about why I decided on this, describe the design decisions made, provide a lot of pictures of the building process through to eventual commissioning of the new yacht, and finish with some lessons learnt and musings on the practicability of building wooden boats at affordable prices in this day and age.

 

PART A – WHY BUILD A NEW EVENTIDE?

 

My Experience of Sailing an Eventide

 

Why on earth would anyone spend a lot of money building a very old fashioned design of yacht when there is so much choice of modern production boats or, if one really must build in wood, of attractive modern designs?

 

In the 1990s I was looking for a small cruising yacht to replace my open boat sailing and an article in Practical Boat Owner about an Eventide 24 called Pegasus caught my eye.  The Eventide 24 was designed for amateur building in 1957 by well known and prolific East Coast designer, Maurice Griffiths.  Many were built, mostly of plywood but some using double diagonal planking (one or two in teak) and some in steel. 

 

In 1996, having looked at a number of Eventides, I bought one called Odden, named after a Danish Baltic port, which her owner was so pleased to make in a full gale that he instantly renamed his boat after it!  She was build of pitch pine strip plank on oak frames, the planks glued and edge-nailed.  I re-named her Niarbyl (Manx for “the tail”), after a beautiful rocky cove in the Isle of Man near where we used to live.  I did her up, replaced soft wood, installed a modern diesel engine and bought a fabulous set of sails from Jeckyls.  I then sailed her for many years, during an era in which my boys grew from toddlers to students, all over the Bristol Channel from Gloucester at one end to Milford Haven at the other. 

 

Niarbyl ticked all the boxes in terms of what I wanted from a boat – safe and seaworthy, shoal draft, spacious and cosy accommodation, and traditional and pleasing to the eye.  She drew compliments from owners of plastic boats wherever I went, and I was proud of her and loved her.  But having turned 50 years old, she developed never-ending deck leaks and was pretty maintenance-intensive.  At every refit soft wood would be found – never in the hull planking, but in places like the plywood sheer strake and cabin sides and ends of deck beams.  I patched her up with epoxy filler and scarfed in new wood and I could have kept her going like that for ever.  However, I owned a company and was extremely fortunate to sell it.  With money to burn and little interest in posh cars, I decided to look around for a new boat - something more modern, yet still “traditional” in appearance.

 

Requirements for the New Boat

My basic boat requirements and rationale for them were as follows.

1.       Requirement: A sailing boat of between 24 and 26 feet length on deck.

Rationale: Big enough to provide a feeling of security in a seaway.  Sufficient accommodation for three or, at a squeeze, four (I generally sail alone, sometimes with a friend and very occasionally with two others).  Small enough that harbourmasters of small drying harbours are content for her to be left inconspicuously in a corner, perhaps for a couple of weeks – I love small harbours as opposed to sticking with marinas.  And small enough to take up little creeks and rivers.

2.       Requirement: A strong, seaworthy boat with robust rig and reliable, modern diesel engine of adequate power.

Rationale: Ability to sail offshore and safely deal with rough weather, to Force 6, but always bearing in mind the possibility of being caught out in worse weather still.  Reasonable ability to punch against tide and waves by engine.

3.       Requirement: Shoal draft – less than around 3 feet (0.9 metres).

Rationale: I enjoy exploring small creeks, rivers and harbours and sailing in interesting, shallow areas.

4.       Requirement: Able to take the ground and remain level.  This implies bilge keels as I don’t consider bolt-on beaching legs to be sufficiently robust to be left in a “bouncy harbour” and they are a hassle to mount, dismount and stow.

Rationale: Provide ability to dry out comfortably in small drying harbours.

5.       Requirement: A traditional and pretty appearance.

Rationale: Part of the joy of boat ownership for me is the aesthetics and having people coming up to you and saying “what a pretty little boat, what is she?”

6.       Requirement: Traditional and cosy accommodation.

Rationale: There is nothing as satisfying as eating a meal washed down by red wine and retiring to bed in a traditional cabin.

7.       Requirement:  Easy to manage single-handedly.

Rationale: I mostly sail alone!  This requirement breaks down into two important sub-requirements, as follows:

a.       It shall be easy for one person to safely set, reduce (reef) and remove sail, including when bouncing around in a lumpy sea.

b.      The boat shall manoeuvre well under power – shall be able to turn virtually in her own length even with the wind tending to blow her head off, and shall be easy to steer when coming astern.

No sailor wants a boat that is a sailing slouch, but sailing performance was not high on my priorities list – I have never been fond of racing and the ability to get from A to B in a safe and seamanlike fashion in adverse conditions as well as fine ones is what I look for in a sailing boat.

 

 

My old Eventide in Porlock Weir

 

 

Production Boats that Come Close

 

I looked at lots of boats but two excellent designs which caught my attention were the Yarmouth 23 and the Cornish Crabber 26.

 

 

The Yarmouth 23

 

The Yarmouth 23, pictured above, is small, pretty, shoal draft and so seaworthy that she has crossed oceans with single-handed crews (read about David Matelicani's transatlantic solo voyage in Eileen of Avoca).  She was designed by legendary designer David Freemen, renowned as a yacht designer who started as a ship designer and co-designed the famous Fisher range of strong, seaworthy motorsailors.  The boats are built to a high standard by Neil Marine in Sri Lanka. 

 

In terms of meeting my requirements, the Yarmouth 23 is demonstrably strong and seaworthy (RCD Category B), has a modern, well powered diesel, is shoal draft (0.89 metres), there is a bilge keel version which takes the ground level, she is pretty and traditional and she has cosy accommodation.  That she is easily handled under sail by a lone skipper is apparent from her single-handed open sea voyages.  How well she manoeuvres under power in very confined spaces, I do not know – she has a long keel, which generally means restricted ability to turn tightly when going ahead and difficulties in steering when going astern, but also has a large, transom-hung rudder which will mitigate against these factors.

 

But the Yarmouth 23 is a bit smaller than the Eventide 24, and you really feel that the accommodation is a lot more confined, not only because she is a foot shorter but because she has a heads compartment, which the Eventide did not have.  You cannot have it all in a small boat, and if you want a separate heads compartment, you will sacrifice spaciousness of the general accommodation.  I asked myself, do I want to spend some £69,000 (including VAT) to get a boat which is smaller inside than the one I owned that had originally cost me 1/23rd of the price! 

 

 

Cornish Crabber 26

 

The Cornish Crabber 26, on the other hand, has plenty of accommodation.  She has a separate fore-cabin with small access opening, creating a nice two-space accommodation plan.  Because the coachroof continues forwards, the forecabin does not feel confined.  The main cabin is ample in size despite there being a separate heads compartment.  Cornish Crabbers are well built and everything is good quality – the deck and spar fittings, for example, are substantial and well made. 

 

The Crabber 26 meets almost all my requirements.  She is strong and seaworthy – RCD Category B with a modern, high power diesel, and she is shoal draft (0.91m).  The design cleverly manages to deliver substantial, well thought-out accommodation whilst retaining traditional, pretty looks.  

 

My first reservation was that she is not designed to take the ground on hard shore on the level, although it should be possible to add a modification by bolting galvanised bilge plates on to the GRP stub bilge keels.  Whilst she looked easy to sail and handle for a couple, I felt that she would be more difficult for the single-handed sailor.  As with the Yarmouth 23, her long keel hints at inability to execute very tight turns going ahead and possibly difficult steering astern, although, again like the Yarmouth 23, she has a large transom-hung rudder to help with these aspects.  Finally, she looks like a much larger boat than the Eventide 24 (which she is), and would be less acceptable to leaving tucked away in the corners of small drying harbours.

 

The Crabber 26 costs about £90,000 including VAT.

 

So, there we have two lovely production boats that came close to meeting my requirements, but they still gave me some reservations.

 

My Interim Plastic Yacht

 

After much deliberation I decided not to take the plunge by spending some £70k to £90k on a new boat, but to find out a bit more about what I really wanted by buying a second-hand boat built of modern materials.  I won’t name the boat type, because I don’t want to enter into argument with owners, but I will outline the boat I bought and her strengths and the frustrations I had with her. 

 

She is a 25 foot, traditional GRP boat built around 1990.  She looks lovely, especially under sail, and members of my sailing club express envy.  She sails well and she is strong and seaworthy.  She is shoal draft and takes the ground on the level by virtue of her bilge keels.

 

And yet ….. like a man who has left his wife to take up with a new girlfriend (not that I ever have), I kept making disgruntled comparisons with the good attributes of my old Eventide.

 

The biggest issue was manoeuvrability under power.  The boat had a small diesel engine and could not be steered astern until she had proper way on, and even then with some difficulty.  Her long keel gave her great directional stability under sail but a large turning circle under power – I was unable to spin her round in my narrow creek to approach my mooring.  One day I was in a marina.  It was a lovely sunny sailing day with a fair breeze blowing on the starboard beam.  On backing out of the pontoon, there would be a very large, expensive, shiny yacht to port.  I realised that, single-handedly, with a boat that would only steer to port as she went astern, there was no way I could extricate myself from my berth.  With two people on board one can do these things by warping and fendering, but not on your own.  I would have had no problems with the old Eventide, but with this new boat of mine ….. I didn’t go sailing that day.   And I thought that this was ridiculous.

 

Her gaff rig was heavy to set sail and reef on your own – possible but difficult compared to the sloop-rigged Eventide, though I could see that there were potential modifications that I might do to make it easier.  Running backstays didn’t help single-handed sailing either.  Her accommodation, whilst well thought out, was “open plan” and “plasticky”.  Some people thought it really good and “modern” but after the cosiness and woodiness of the Eventide, I found it hard to love. 

 

To my surprise, there were some really poor ergonomics issues as well.  Engine access was very difficult and you had to have the body of a small boy combined with the arms of a tall man to access the rear of the gearbox, prop coupling and stern gland through a tiny round hatch in the cockpit sole.  Switches were mounted in glassed-in mouldings, accessible for replacement or re-wiring only by taking a jig saw to sections of the moulding.  The run of the berthing lines from Sampson post to fairleads was such that you could not open the after lockers (one being the gas locker) without slackening off the berthing lines and then re-making them afterwards.  I was really surprised to find such basic maintainability and ergonomic difficulties on a modern production boat.

 

Many of these issues could have been partially mitigated with modifications.  I could put a modern, powerful diesel in which would have assisted with manoeuvring under power.  I could see various possible rig modifications to make her easier for the single hander.  And I could solve many of the ergonomic difficulties with modifications to access, etc.  In time I might even, by use of curtains and wooden trim, convert the open plan, white plastic accommodation into something more cosy.

 

But I was cheesed off, really, and kept coming back to the point that the Eventide had been the perfect boat for me.

 

Why not just build a new version of your old boat, then?

 

My wife was also cheesed off - with all my moaning.  “If you liked the old Eventide so much, then why don’t you just build a new one”, she said.  So I did, aiming to replicate all the good attributes of my old boat, but using modern methods of timber construction, thus producing a boat that was lower maintenance. 

 

Of course there are lots of lovely, traditional-looking modern timber boat designs available.  To name but a few:

Roxanne (30 foot) and Romilly (22 foot) designed by Nigel Irens

The North Quay 22 and North Quay 24 designed by Ted Spiers

The Golant Gaffer (19 foot) and Golant Yawl (25 foot) designed by Roger Dongray

Méaban (22 foot) designed by François Vivier

Kite (21 foot) designed by Andrew Wolstenholme

 

Beautiful though all these boats are, none of them ticked all of my requirements boxes and, after my experience with my GRP boat, I was in a mood of “why take the risk”.  I knew that the Eventide suited me down to the ground, so I began talking to a local boatbuilder, Dutchman Winn Cnoops of Star Yachts in Bristol, about building a new one.

 

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PART B – DESIGN AND BUILD DECISION

There were a number of key design and build decisions which had to be made at the outset, not least the length of the boat and the method of construction of the hull. Also, over the years the original drawings by Maurice Griffiths had undergone official modifications by the Eventide Owners  in order to deliver “improvements”. To my eye some of these improvements were excellent whilst others I was not so keen on, so I decided to build to a hybrid of the original drawings and the updated drawings.

Length of Boat


There are two “official” lengths of Eventide, these being 24 and 26 feet on deck, although people have produced versions stretched to 27 ft 6 inches. My old Eventide, whose virtues I was aiming to reproduce, was a 24. However, I wanted to add a heads compartment/hanging locker and I figured that I could do that by a combination of increasing the length on deck by 1 foot and stealing a foot off the main saloon on one side, thus creating 2 feet for this addition, without impacting too much on the accommodation and whilst retaining four berths.

The Eventide 26 looks like, and is, a much bigger boat and I didn’t feel I wanted to go up to that size, given the small creeks and drying harbours that I like to frequent. Also, I was keen to use the rig/sails from my old Eventide 24 and I believed that they would be fine on a 1 foot stretch but that they would under-canvas an Eventide 26.

So the first decision was to stretch the Eventide 24 by 1 foot. A 2 foot heads compartment would be inserted on the port side, between forecabin and main saloon, and opposite that I would install a solid fuel cabin heater. We will increase the spacing between stations by a factor of 25/24, whilst maintaining the beam and all other dimensions as in the Eventide 24.

Hull Construction Method

The next major decision was construction method. Being a single-chine hull, most Eventides were built of marine ply, though a few were built in steel, some in double skin planking with a membrane between the skins, and my old boat and one other Eventide that I knew of were built in glued and edge-nailed strip-planked pitch pine.

I decided to build using modern epoxy-strip-plank construction over a conventional backbone. Star Yachts in Bristol have good experience of building using this method and it seemed to me to be a good compromise between traditional timber build and use of modern materials, to produce a very strong and stable hull. I was later to find out that, contrary to popular belief, it is a very time-consuming process and the arguments for building by other means, especially in glassed plywood, are pretty compelling – but more of that in Part D.


Weather Helm and Manoeuvrability Under Power

The original Eventide 24 had a number of rig options, the most prolific being Bermudan sloop. The original design suffered from excessive weather helm. Two design modifications were later made to address this. One was to add a bowsprit and the other was to infill between the centre keel and the skeg. My original Eventide 24 had a bowsprit but did not have the infill. Her weather helm was far from excessive, even in strong winds, and she could be turned on a sixpence under power. Having experienced a long keel boat with a poor ability to manoeuvre under power, I was reluctant to take the risk of infilling between keel and skeg, although many who did do this compensated by moving from an inboard rudder to a transom-hung rudder.

In the cause of minimising risks of changing from what I knew worked very well for me, I decided that the new Eventide 25 would have a separate skeg with inboard rudder, as per the original design, but with a bowsprit as per my old Eventide.

Keels

The original 24 foot Eventide had a 750 lb (341 kg) cast iron centre keel and two bilge plates weighing 25 lb (11.4 kg) each, giving a total ballast of 800 lb (364 kg). This total ballast was increased to 1020 lb (464 kg) on later plans because the original boat was too tender.

My old Eventide 24 had a cast iron keel weighing 850 lb (386 kg), two bilge plates of ¼ inch (6 mm) mild steel with concrete-filled tubes bolted to the bottoms weighing 71 lb (32 kg) each, and 590 lb (268 kg) of internal lead pigs, giving a total ballast of 1582 lb (719 kg). This made her stiff enough.

For the Eventide 25, I proposed to increase the length of the centre keel from 7 ft 5 inches (2.4m) to 8 ft 5 inches (2.6m). I also decided to have it cast from lead and estimated that this would weigh 1463 lb (665 kg). With bilge plates made from ½ inch (12 mm) mild steel plate then they will weigh 92 lb (42 kg) each. This will give a total ballast of 1647 lb (749 kg).

Compared with my old boat, the Eventide 25 will have a 5% increase in ballast on a boat which is 4% longer and has the same sail area. Without the need for any internal ballast, the centre of gravity of this ballast is lower down, so the Eventide 25 should be stiff enough with this ballast.

Sheerline, Cabin Length and Deck-stepped versus Coachroof-top-stepped Mast

The original Eventide 24 plans were modified to provide increased accommodation and head room. The coachroof was raised and extended forwards and the mast, which was originally deck-stepped just forward of the coachroof was re-positioned on top of the coachroof. The distinctive Maurice Griffiths sheerline step was moved aft and in order to make the lines flow with this change, the sheer was reshaped.

The photographs below show the effect of these changes. Aesthetically I prefer the older design and so decided to go with that. Because my boat would be 1 foot longer, and the cabin 1 foot longer, mounting the mast forward of the cabin would mean that proportionally it would be a few percent further forward. Advice was sought from a well known yacht designer on this and he was certain that it would not be an issue to the balance of the boat.



   
Old-style design Newer design – longer cabin & different sheer



Cockpit Size

I decided to make the cockpit larger than in the original Eventide by extending it aft at the expense of a shorter after deck; the length of the cockpit thus increases from 4 ft 1 inch to 5 ft 6 inches, providing more sitting-out room.

Bilge Water Handling

On my original Eventide, all rainwater drained down into the main bilge under the cabin sole, from where it was pumped with an automatic electric pump supplemented by a manual pump for use in emergency. The bilge inevitably almost always had a small residue of water in it. Most modern boats have self-draining cockpits so that the main accommodation bilges stay dry. We looked, with our professional yacht designer consultant, at doing this in the new Eventide but it would have meant raising the cockpit sole a few inches, which we did not want to do.

Our solution was to segregate the cockpit and accommodation bilges with a low watertight bulkhead and fit an automatic electric bilge pump and emergency manual pump in the cockpit bilge. Ordinarily the main accommodation bilge should thus stay dry, although the manual pump inlet will be able to be switched to empty the main bilge in an emergency. In the incredibly unlikely event of an enormous following wave breaking and pouring a very large amount of water into the cockpit – which never remotely happened in my last Eventide – its watertight bulkhead is low enough that the water would flow over it into the main bilge rather than making the boat’s trim dangerously stern-heavy.

Type of Mast

The last major build decision was to have a wooden mast, minimising its weight, rather than having an aluminium alloy mast as most Eventides had. This is purely in aid of aesthetics and the mast will be built by Noble Masts in Bristol.

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Above is a link to star Yachts where Nigel's boat is being built.

 

they are almost there, she is afloat.  Have a look at the pics of her build by clicking on the logo.

   
 

   
   
   
   
   

 

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