I had a call last night from my blog boss at Sailfeed asking me why I had been quiet on my blog. Truth is I just have not been feeling like I had anything very worthwhile to say on the blog for a couple of weeks. I've been designing and taking care of a few personal things but I have not been waking up busting with profound or important thoughts I felt I needed to share. I'm reminded of a line in Bob Dylan's tune BROWNSVILLE GIRL: "Oh if there's an original thought out there I could use it right now." Years ago, when I was traveling on business a lot I began writing to a couple of friends. It soon occurred to me that I was really writing to myself, trying to sort out the sensations of being in foreign countries and dealing with cultural adjustments. 
So I stopped writing letters and began a diary. I would write in the diary, a yellow paged notebook, each morning while I slowly ate my breakfast getting up the courage to go and face what ever weirdness-es I would have to deal with that day.
I wrote pages and pages of observations and feelings that were quite personal. It was my way, I guess, of processing the flood of experiences each day held. I really thought I was writing profoundly important things. But years later, after having stopped the diary, from time to time I'd go back and read my entries. They were for the most part self indulgent and shallow, jejune. I marveled at the things that at the time seemed so important but in reality they just sounded silly. They were not thoughts that stood the test of time. I was not Jack London. I never felt comfortable with the idea of letting anyone else read my diary. So to make sure that didn't happen I would hide my diary. I'd move it from time to time to a new hiding place. I got so good at hiding it that today I have no idea where it is. But it will turn up someday in an obscure file for some esoteric piece of marine hardware that hasn't been produced for years. Maybe the trick is not to try to be profound. I once had a debate with a good friend. He preferred the MOODY BLUES to PROCOL HARUM. I preferred PROCOL HARUM. My preference for PROCOL HARUM was based on the idea the PH didn't try to be profound while the MOODY BLUES worked too hard at being profound. I'm still right. I went to bed last night feeling a bit defeated by the whole blogging process.
But I walked the dogs this morning and that usually clears my head and I actually had a thought.
I frequent the Sailing Anarchy website where I hang out at Cruising Anarchy. We were a loose bunch of know it alls who began pissing and moaning about the things lacking in modern production boats. This went on for numerous pages and then I had the idea that perhaps we should try and formalize our thoughts and produce some drawings that would represent our idea of the "perfect boat". A dumb thought but a thought and one that my fellow CA'ers seemed to think would be fun. 
I would produce the drawings. 
Soon it was apparent that we had a pretty talented group of people all willing to pitch in with design ideas and solutions. This was the beginnings of what we call now the World's Largest Yacht Design Office (see my blog entry on WLYDO). For me personally this became important. From a group of people who really did not know each other at all a circle of friendship evolved. I have had several of the members stay in my home and in my darkest hours the WLYDO was there to bolster me. And we had a hell of a good time arguing and exploring design features to what would become the CA 36.
It didn't take long for us to figure out that we were not in total agreement on exactly what the "perfect boat" was. So I drew some hull lines. We agreed that we wanted a pretty boat with some overhangs, not much though, and a nice spring to the sheer. The draft would be modest but not shallow and the boat would have a spade rudder. We did not want a slow boat. We did not want a fat transom. We wanted a pretty transom. I gave the boat a spoon bow but I added that slight knuckle just above the DWL to help stretch out the sailing length without going to a near plumb stem. OK,
it's a compromise to aesthetics. You can see in the pilot house sail plan drawing that the stem was later modified and we gained DWL and got rid of the spoon shape. It's not a light boat at a D/L of 242 but we k new we wanted volume for tankage and stowage. The displacement would also come in handy when we started laying out the interior. We also realized that some in the group wanted a raised house type design and some wanted a low cabin trunk so we did both.
I thought my layout drawings were pretty good but soon someone was posting revisions of my layout drawings. This kind of pissed me off at first. Then I studied the new drawings and realized they showed good ideas and a good understanding of design. On top of that they were very nicely presented. These were done by my now pal Tim O'Connell aka Wun Hung Lo, I just call him the Hungster. Our final layout reflects Tim's revisions. It's not a fancy or novel layout. It's very normal and orthogonal. But it works and nothing is really crammed in. 
So enjoy these drawings. They were fun to produce and they resulted in some good friendships and a lot of ideas tossed around. But no, unfortunately you can't run out and buy a CA 36. The object was just an exercise in exploring design ideas and looking for the elusive perfect boat.
These beautiful renderings are by my pal Rick Beddoe who cut his yacht rendering teeth on the CA 36 project.
