: thanks everyone;
: i've got it now. i'll probably be spending that million hours to figure it
: out . i'm going to try to design a boat for a friend that weighs over
: three hundred pounds. thanks again for your help!
: regards;
: daren...
: p.s. first launch of my wee lassie yesterday, in the pouring rain. it was
: great . just another couple of weeks till my s&g guillemot hits the
: waves. can't wait!!

Is it the friend that weighs over three hundred pounds, or do you just want a heavy boat?

Since you have just built a wee lassie, and I assume you still have the forms, you can stretch the length of that wee lassie another foot or two to get the displacement needed for carrying a 300 pound paddler (solo) just by spacing the forms an inch or two further apart.

Or, consider the idea of a boat that was longer and wider, but had similar lines to the wee lassie. You could do this by taking the front forms ( at the conventional spacing, and moving them two or three feet forward -- leaving a gap between them and the back forms. You would then just need to make a two or three forms to fill in that gap. As a start, stretch some strips over the forms that you have and use them to determine the size and shape needed for the "missing" middle forms. Cut a mockup of a "form" from cardboard and put it in the gap, adjusting it to the right size. then you can trace this onto plywood for a more substantial form to use for the construction.

Have you tried letting the 300 pound friend paddle the wee lassie? How far down does it sink? I believe it should sink about 4 inches with a 150 to 175 pound paddler, so with a 300 pound paddler it will probably sink another 2 1/2 to 4 inches. To put that in more nautical terms, with a 150 pound paddler it should have 4 inches of draft, and with with a 300 pound paddler it should have about 6 1/2 to 8 inches of draft. Freeboard, or the amount of the side of the boat that is above the water, will decrease as the draft increases (as the boat goes lower into the water with a heavier paddler the amount of the side above the water goes down). You usually want at least 6 inches of freeboard if you are paddling on calm lakes, and more freeboard as the likelyhood of waves or rough water increases. If your larger paddler is comfortable with the wee lassie, you can build one with a higher gunwale by adding more strips to the sides. This would involve adding 1x2 or 1x3 strips to each form to extend them so you could strip lower (with the hull being built upside down, of course)

PGJ