The process of finding a boat that fits your needs is a combination of logic, emotion and knowledge. Until you know your feelings, have enough theoretical knowledge and have thought about it all, you can’t possibly expect to make up your mind. What follows in the next paragraphs is my explanation of how I came to make up my mind.

Well - sort of.

When I first started sailing, some time after leaving university, I really thought plastic boats were just the best. Very little maintenance, strong, light, fast, stable, last forever but I knew nothing about boats. I still don’t really. Then I began to notice a few real beauties in South African ports, mostly old wooden boats with bowsprits and gaff rigs. I also loved the look of modern traditional boats I found in the pages of Practical Boat Owner, like the designs of Lyle Hess. Aesthetically the ‘Talesin’s’ win out over more modern Tupperware designs any day. By all accounts they almost certainly sail well or better than many other modern designs, though I haven’t had the pleasure. However, the glass-fiber production Bristol Channel Cutters are way too expensive for me, as are the Crealock’s, Island Packet's or the Valiant’s that I found in Cruising World. Though I love working with wood, I didn't want to build a wooden sailboat. As I have an affinity for steel, I thought at some stage I should look for a design in steel. George Buehler’s designs appealed enormously, especially a small double-ended design featured in Steel Away. Later, when I saw Alan Payne's Skookum I felt this way too.

I thought a wood cored, West Epoxy/ glass version would be a fine compromise though. Henry Vink declined to build what amounted to a one off. He was using a female mould for his production boats, and this wood cored version required a male mould. The costs involved in building the hull myself were out of proportion to the value the finished hull, because almost every thing would have to be imported, wood, West Epoxy and some of the glass cloth. Also I was concerned about my resin allergy. Looking a little further into the future I found that in the final estimate, judging by what fellow enthusiasts were spending, not on the hull or woodwork, but on the bolt-on fitting-out. I could not afford to take this route. This choice was marginally cheaper than going out and buying a finished nearly new boat, using bank financing. The reason for this was that the pricing that big companies get on hardware, is not available to the home-builder. Also the import duties in South Africa, on every item, were, and still are, iniquitous. Steel was the logical compromise for me. Many of the fittings and stuff that everyone else was buying, I knew I could fabricate by welding up from stock. Feeling (depressed?) that this was the only real option open to me, I up and bought plans from the Dutch designers Van de Stadt, for their multi-chined steel version. I also bought a copy of Steel Away, which confirmed my reasoning at that time.

The complete and very detailed plans arrived quite quickly and I learned more about building a boat from examining these than I thought possible. The plans came with the detailing for an aluminum version too. Comparing the ballast ratio’s and finished weights of the two hull materials, I realized right off that the aluminum version was what I actually wanted. It was the same finished weight as the wood-cored version and it was metal. So much for logical reasoning! I set about finding out everything I could about aluminum and how to work with it. The best two books were Sims and Pollard’s, although I found a lot of useful stuff in Smith and Moir’s - Steel Away. Off I went, calculator in hand, to quote the aluminum from the distributor (the only local producer ALUSAF would not sell direct to me under 10 metric tons). The grades were no problem. The sheet sizes that I needed were.

"One size only, Sir".

And the price? I could have bought a finished boat for the price of the materials quoted! Depression set in when I found no other local suppliers. Yet another monopoly! Again it was, import the stuff (punitive import tariffs and shipping costs), or do something else. By this stage I had acquired scrap steel and built the boat cradle. It took a whole day to lay out and weld the frames and the following afternoon to weld the three supporting frames plumb and true, outside my workshop.

I was contemplating knocking up a quick tent to weld in (aluminum welding requires a draft free environment) but other more radical changes were afoot.

My wife got a good contracting job offer in the USA. This coupled with the worsening crime and violence situation in Johannesburg, led to us selling up, and moving. We ended up near Rochester, New York, living on Lake Ontario. Rather nice I think, though this will be my first taste of a real Northern winter.

As I wanted to sail ASAP, I looked at older and smaller sailboats I could afford, right off. However, I didn’t want to get into the kind of rebuilding that many of them required. Frankly, I worried about the integrity of many an old plastic boat hull. It sounds reassuringly solid banging a hull, which is often half an inch thick or more, on some 20 year old, 35 footers. But would they be up to voyaging across oceans? I know enough about the chemistry and the engineering of composites to consider the disastrous consequences of resin/fiber separation resulting from the osmotic ingress of water into polyester resin. Few things are able to resist osmotic forces in the living world. Plastic composites are no different. Drying out the hull doesn’t repair the resin-to-fiber integrity either. Blisters are only a symptom. How does one tell if it has gone too far? Buying someone else’s problems hasn’t appealed since I owned my first home. Smaller, newer boats seemed very lightly built - to put it nicely. I looked at possible boats that I could finance new, or almost so. No credit history in the States - no loans. Tough - didn’t feel like being in debt anyway.

So it was back to building my Van de Stadt 34. This is what I wanted to do anyway and I’m to try my damnedest to build it in 'aluminum' or is that ‘aluminium'?