TARI-ANN

On August 15 last year, a 48' shallow-draft motorsailer named TARI-ANN slid down a marine railway and into Nova Scotia’s Gold River. In the water, her likeness was remarkably similar to a sketch drawn by her owner and co-designer, Tom Goodwin, well before the project took shape. 

TARI-ANN looks like a vintage boat, but she is, in fact, an entirely new, original design—a modern boat that harks back to old ways. “There are a whole pile of lines going on,” said Laurie McGowan, describing the boat’s shape. McGowan worked with Goodwin on the design. “The trick is to get them to blend somehow, to make it look pleasing. I never aim for trendy. I think we aimed for a timeless look.”

But the design alone doesn’t quite explain TARI-ANN’s classic appearance. Tern Boatworks, her builder, was committed to meticulous attention to the smallest details. Indeed, it was the close collaboration of the designers and builder that made the TARI-ANN project a success.

The Co-Designers

TARI-ANN is Tom Goodwin’s third boat built in Nova Scotia. He hired Covey Island Boatworks in Lunenburg for the first two, which were a Bahamian sloop and a solar-electric ketch. For the ketch, Goodwin, an artist, musician, and seaplane pilot who lives in the Bahamas, sent the builders a watercolor of the boat he wanted—a gaff ketch based on a hard-chined schooner designed by Edward A. Stinson in 1890. Though Goodwin’s artwork is rich in detail, Covey Island needed actual lines and dimensions, as well. The yard’s then-owner, John Steele, called McGowan to ask him to be her designer.

Recalling that initial project with Steele, McGowan said,  “He said, ‘Would you be interested? I’ve got some information. See what you can do with that. I finished it the next morning and sent it out.” Steele’s call came “out of the blue,” said McGowan, who believes Steele got his name from an email he sent to fellow members of the Nova Scotia Boatbuilding Association. 

That was 2006, and McGowan, who writes this magazine’s Sketchbook department (see sidebar, page 36), had been a yacht designer for five years, working out of his home office in the Annapolis Valley. Though he had initially wanted to design sailboats, he could then only find work designing robust commercial fiberglass fishing boats. That’s because boatbuilders in Nova Scotia primarily serve a lobster fishery so successful that potential buyers currently have to wait three to four years for a new boat.