100 Boat Designs Reviewed

I’m enjoying the book. But was a bit dismayed at the review of the Martha Jane. I wrote an article for the small Boat issue and know the boat well. The boat was described as being self-righting. It isn’t. I built Martha Jane to the original plans. She capsized and turned turtle. Mr Bolger revisited his design and decided it was not acceptable. He provided upgraded plans which doubled the ballast, added sponsons and a “high house.” The redesigned boat was vastly improved and self-righting. Your review of the design missed those very important details.

If you like boats, you will like this book. Many different designs reviewed.

The book gave me and my brother in law some choices to try our hands out at building. Just what I was looking, a variety of wooden boats!

I purchased the book as it was discounted 36% and it seemed like it would be interesting. I received my money's worth. I'm a naval architect who build boats as a hobby, and a wooden boat owner, so admittedly I'm biased in my views. What I liked about the book was the wide variety of boats and the personal stories related to many of the designs by the reviewers. I particularly liked when the reviewers identified if the design was actually built and what changes were made after launching. Less useful were the occasional opinions not accompanied by justification (e.g., "this is better than that", but not clarifying if it was better 100% of the time, or just in that reviewer's own experience and situation). The book's biggest weakness is the figures editing. Almost every figure should have been larger to fill the page width and height, some should have been rotated to landscape and most needed higher resolution as labels and lines were often blurred and unreadable. That was particularly frustrating when I was looking for something a reviewer commented about. Although I plan to pass it on to others, I do hope a follow-on volume covering the boats reviewed in the 25 years since it was published will become available.

It was not of the high quality of previous similar publications, " Thirty, Forty, Fifty Wooden Boats" The quality of printing the lines drawings as well as quality f paper was disappointing. That the lines drawings were not sharp and crisp distracting from enjoyment of the presentation.