Two Zippy Little Schooners

Who doesn’t love a schooner? I sometimes ask myself why schooners pull so strongly on the heartstrings of so many sailors. Is it simply the name, or is it a deeper, less-tangible quality? Whatever the reason, I, for one, would like to own just one more schooner before weighing anchor for that final voyage. A couple of good friends feel the same. But schooners tend to be big and therefore costly and time-consuming to build and maintain. My friends and I no longer possess the stamina that in our youth allowed us to lavish energy on big boats.

For us, the obvious answer is, “Let’s build small, easy-to-manage schooners!” This idea has been tried before, but schooners under 30′ LOA rarely perform well, especially to windward. Squeezing comfortable accommodations into a small hull requires volume, which means heavy displacement. It takes a tall, powerful rig to drive such a short, chunky hull to windward in a choppy sea, which is why most successful small cruisers are rigged as sloops, cutters, or yawls.

The balance of accommodation and performance is an age-old design challenge. Favoring one comes at the expense of the other. We can have our little schooner, but she can’t be both roomy and fast. If we want a small schooner that sails well, we’ll have to do without the headroom and elbow room of the roomier hull. That choice, however, opens the possibility of a narrow, easily driven hull with shallow draft, and this is where the schooner rig can really excel in a small boat. We shall be content with sitting headroom in a very cozy cabin and foam mattresses on the sole for overnight camping. My friends and I have had lots of fun going back and forth with ideas and design details.

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