Carmel-by-the-Sea is the official name of the village of Carmel, CA, a beautiful community nestled in the Carmel Valley, with towering Monterey pines and cypress trees piercing the top of the low-lying coastal fog. If you head west, just a step, you are in the Pacific ocean. To the east, the coastal mountains block you. Access to Carmel is via the Pacific Coast Highway, snaking south along the coast towards San Simeon and Hearst Castle, or north past Laguna Seca raceway and Monterey. There’s a European feel to the architecture among the numerous art galleries that draw the tourists, and somewhere is a business belonging to their most famous former mayor, Clint Eastwood. But this is a place rich in tradition and history too: Father Junipero Serra, the founder of the California mission system, is buried at the mission he founded there in 1770, Mission San Carlos Borromeo. More importantly, it is the home of Stevenson Projects.

    For the premier issue of The Gaff Rig, there can be no finer interview subjects than the creators of the Weekender, Pocket Cruiser and Vacationer.

     Peter Stevenson, 58, responds with characteristically self-effacing humor when asked to list the things he considers his greatest accomplishments, "An otherwise sane and level-headed family still puts up with me," he responds, but when pressed the list is impressive indeed. Nine published books on projects and car racing history. And the projects themselves: a bodywork design for an electric racecar that "trounced the big Indy shops at Phoenix raceway," land sailers that embarrassed the competition in short-track racing and "some machines that will never hit the market, but still explore some brand new areas of performance."


     Mike Stevenson, 34, is familiar to most BYYB members because of his presence on the BBS. He does most of the web work and helps with order fulfillment. He describes his role at Stevenson Projects: "When we build a new project, we bounce design ideas around and I tend to act as a second opinion/design critic. We trade off depending on whomever’s project we’re working on."

     GAFF RIG: Now that we know Mike’s role, how would you describe yours?

     PETER STEVENSON: "Chief Fabricator." Since our design process has a lot to do with not locking in the ideas you cling to until you know they work, we ‘design in the medium,’ sculpting the shape in the wood as we go and running performance tests before we start putting in a lot of time varnishing things. The more time you invest in a certain design, the less you’ll want to make those changes that could make it a great performer.

     MIKE STEVENSON: The first boat I remember working on was the Amphora, an eight-foot precursor to the Triad. We just received an email a week ago from a high school student who’s building one. The Amphora was the second of a series of three projects designed to be built by kids with minimal adult assistance. These were presented in book form. Perhaps one of these days we’ll transfer the Amphora information to plans form.
     PETER: When I was fourteen a bunch of us all decided we’d each build ourselves a sailboat. Most of us designed our own, but one guy bought plans. Now this guy wasn’t a quitter, -- football captain, student body president, and all. But he couldn’t build it from the plans he got. I never forgot that. With all the jigs and blueprints, it was still un-buildable to a beginner.

     GAFF RIG: How did yours turn out?

     PETER: Mine was a Polynesian style multi-hull I optimistically dubbed the "Hello Honolulu." I learned about building light from that boat. Its components were heavy, which made it weak in turn. We’d worked it out into the surf when a couple of big surfers pirated the boat. Just when we’d made it back to shore we saw a huge wave coming that tumbled the whole display landward like a bunch of dice. Next time I would pay more attention to structural integrity (and test when there weren’t big bruisers around.)

     GAFF RIG: Most of us can’t imagine ‘starting from scratch’ rather than building to an established plan. Can you describe the boat design process?

     PETER: That’s a role attitude you get when following other’s plans. I do the same thing when I use somebody else’s directions. Some designers will take advantage of this role attitude to seem like magic gurus of the dark arts of boat design. But being able to make a new boat is just like any other body of knowledge. It takes a lot of experience to stop making mistakes. Around here, we get our boat designs from on the water experience.

     GAFF RIG: Do you draw up detailed plans and then head to the shop, or do you start in the shop with mock ups?

     PETER: We don’t trust formulae. This doesn’t mean that you can’t measure a boat that works and work out numbers that describe it. It means that when you start extrapolating these numbers in new situations, the whole thing falls apart. We proved that to ourselves in our late teens when my brother and I built a 24’ catamaran following every formula we could put our hands on. "Rudder immersed area shall be 1/12 the profile wetted surface", "Sail center-of-effort is located at the junction of the bisected corner angles" – all that malarkey. Nothing worked and everything had to be changed before the boat would sail. We took a second look at how these "professional methods" were arriving at concepts like center-of-lateral-resistance and sail-rig-center-of-effort, and saw that they were making up methods that had nothing to do with sailing realities. But they sounded good to rich clients. How can you figure the center of effort of a sail when its constantly changing in actual practice? When we realized that professional designers were placing sloop, ketch and schooner rigs on the same hull, we knew they were just handing people a lot of bull. And the way the boats handled proved it.

     GAFF RIG: Is that a ‘trial and error’ method, then?

     PETER: We began to worship in-use trials and constant changes until the boats really performed sweetly. Many times we wouldn’t even paint the boats for their first trials. The real reason we started making boats that could really sail was that we built a bunch of them in close succession and could make changes to improve the next one. If you look at [famous sail boat designer] Herreschoff, I can’t help thinking that in the quick succession of boats he created, it was just possibly the constant flow of new boats being built by him that led to the nice handling characteristics as much as any vaunted magic genius.

     GAFF RIG: Who were your ‘design mentors’ in the early days?

     PETER: There was a heavy surfing influence in the early days. Creative designers like Dale Velzy would lend us boards to test and we slowly built an eye that could see performance by looking at the shape of the board. Later, in Hawai’i we were supplied with a constantly changing array of boards to ride, which honed our eye a lot.
     MIKE: It was a lucky source of boards.
     PETER: We found out later the boards were coming straight from the airport for a three-day testing session by the locals before being "found" and returned to their rightful owners.

     GAFF RIG: Besides Velzy, you were involved with Hobie Alter, weren’t you?

     PETER: We did some prototype building for Hobie, the creator of the Hobie Cat, and his design savvy made a big impression on us. We sailed in the early wood prototype of the Hobie Cat and listened closely to what Hobie had to say about creating boats that were actually almost design-organisms – each part designed not only to work, but to also affect the parts it was connected to in a way that was successful in the overall performance. Hobie broke a lot of established design rules with the Hobie Cat. It became the single most-produced sailboat in history.

     GAFF RIG: How did you get started designing boats for the home builder?

     PETER: Dave Rogoway at the American Plywood Association came to see the toys we had made, and we had a plywood land-sailer under construction in the living room. When he learned we had built a number of plywood boats, he got in touch with Art Hettich, editor of Family Circle Magazine, who wanted to run a small sailboat design as a feature.

     GAFF RIG: Family Circle Magazine?

     PETER: None of the name designers would touch the project. Run a DIY sailboat design in a woman’s magazine? But we were hungry and took a chance. The boat sold 12,000 plans in a hurry, and Hettich wanted as many more as we could produce.

     GAFF RIG: So you were "off to the races" then with your boat designs?

     PETER: Other magazine editors caught sight of the boat-project reader response figures, and we ended up building many more boat themes for Popular Science, Better Homes and Gardens, Popular Mechanics and Home Mechanix. It was hectic for almost a decade until a new generation of editors came in and wanted their own look for their magazines.

     GAFF RIG: How many plans have you sold?

     PETER: In all, over a third of a million plans have been sold by Stevenson Projects, the majority being boat plans. I’m told the "real boat designers" weren’t so happy about the number of plans we were selling in those days.

     GAFF RIG: How many of the "pocket yachts" plans have you sold? And how many are built?

     PETER: Upwards of seventeen thousand Weekenders, about eight thousand Pocket Cruisers and five thousand Vacationers. Its hard to judge how many are actually built. When we first sold 29,000 little catamaran plans we wondered how many were built, so we started calling builders to get a guess. Almost none had been built. Nothing was wrong with the plans; the potential builders would break them out and look at them every now and then. Only about two to four buyers actually built the boats. But when we got to the Weekender, that all changed.
     MIKE: In the past, a lot of plans were bought as "study plans." But our estimate for the first version of the Weekender is more like three percent, give or take a half percent. But the Weekender II, the current design, is another story.
     PETER: The Weekender II builders were a different breed, and we got more feedback and pictures from that boat than from all others combined. I’d say that ten to twenty percent of Weekender II plans sold today are built.
     MIKE: We would guess that’s 500 to 600 Weekenders built.

     GAFF RIG: Do any of those builders really stand out?

     PETER: We love getting the feedback from all the builders. But two stand out in our minds. Both are on the website. Mike Bailey, the fifteen year old who wouldn’t let an adult touch the boat until he could take them on a ride was a great experience for us. His mother tipped us off on his project. He’d scrounged much of the materials, cast his own fittings, rigged an extensive electrical system with all the luxuries you could dream of in a 19’ yacht, and went sailing with us, side by side. That was fun. Mike went on to design his own catamaran for production.
     MIKE: And the Canadian Sea Scouts who built a Weekender, took it on a cruise, and put up a web page about it.
     PETER: Those kids really are amazing, and I think they have something new planned for this summer. We’ll keep watching their website. Another boost for us was during the filming of the sailing shots in the Weekender video. It was a glorious sail day and it was hard to keep concentrating on getting the shots when the sailing was so great. Then, when we rounded a point, there was one of our Pocket Cruisers barreling along right next to us – crammed with a lot of rowdy people and extra sails. And there’s still another Pocket Cruiser story: years back we got a nice photo of a Pocket Cruiser in Australia. Decades later we hear it had been built out of Volvo packing crates in 32 days, was sold years later, and allowed to rot out. Then it was re-patched together and sailed up and down the east coast of Australia and back; -- and now proudly competes in vintage wood regattas.

     GAFF RIG: There was a dry period between all those magazine articles and the current revival in back yard boat building. A well-known boat designer is quoted in Wooden Boat magazine as saying he gets more plans sales from the Internet than all his print advertisements. Is the Internet driving the boat plans for you now?

     PETER: We had to move on to other ventures when the magazines quit publishing the articles. Full color ads didn’t pay for themselves in response rates like a full-blown article does. But we couldn’t just shut potential leftover Weekender builders down without a supply of plans, so we kept it just barely going as a service to builders who wanted to build. We got in early on the web to see if it could give us a new venue. The ad we now run brings people to the Net where they can meet other builder-skippers and get their boats underway. Now things are changing again, and we’re able to justify putting some effort back into the project. Momentum is building steadily and within a year or so I hope we’ll be able to have critical mass for some really fun events. The 20^th anniversary of the Weekender’s introduction is coming up. We think a celebration is in order.

Next time in The Gaff Rig Interview: