The Selected Design

After weeks of thinking, I chose to build a Hartley Trailer Sailer (TS) 14. It's a 14 feet long wooden sailboat with a cuddy (or small cabin). (Supposedly two adults can sleep in the cuddy ... we'll see). It has a main sail and a jib sail (the small sail in the front). It can also be rigged with a spinnaker, which I understand to be a parachute-like sail only for sailing with the wind.

This design was selected because the finished boat and trailer should fit in my small garage and be under 1000 lbs, so I can haul it with my compact car. And it should be an ideal micro-cruiser for two for trips along the Columbia river and the occasional trips to Puget Sound or the Oregon coast.

There are many different sizes of the Hartley TS. The most popular is the Hartley TS 16, but there are also the 12, 18 ... and larger. The boat was designed in New Zealand and is a very popular boat in Australia. The design dates back to the 1950's, claiming to be the first "trailer sailer" and starting the movement toward trailerable small boats.

I ordered the plans on the internet and they took over a month to arrive from New Zealand. The plans simply show different views of the boat, but don't have any step-by-step instructions. They do have full size patterns for the frames, so that's nice. The plans are fairly detailed, but still seemingly lacking for the first-time boat builder like myself. Umm ... where do I start? I decided to just stare at the plans for a few days and maybe figure it out.