I'm curious if you have designed freeboard and beam with rowing in mind? If so, I'm curious what limitations you put on each?
I had been aware that if I wanted to row Gizmo, I needed to keep the wetted surface down to make the boat easier to row. With that in mind, I had kept her as light as possible. At the time I had done quite a few lines drawings exploring the relationship of waterline beam to wetted surface and had picked a ratio that worked for that while still maintaining enough form stability to allow her to carry adequate sail area. If I remember right Gizmo had a beam just below 8'-0" but had more flare than most sharpies so that she would have a narrow enough bottom to push her a little deeper in the water to reduce wetted surface.
I also had a number of other ways to reduce wetted surface for rowing. Like the historic sharpies, Gizmo's centerboard pivot was mounted on a movable vertical slide that allowed the centerboard to be completely lifted clear of the bottom, and the pindles were designed to allow the entire rudder to be pulled clear of the water as well.
I'm also curious about design weight. I'm guessing this is a towable boat, my recent research has taught me 26' is about the maximum reasonable towable size. I have also observed that tow vehicles aren't what they used to be. 1/2 tons are towing more all the time, but most SUVs and cars can hardly tow anything.
I really don't recall where I ended up with the dry weight. My recollection is that I was trying hard to hit a dry weight below 2,000 lbs. I am not sure that I actually hit that.
The scantlings were 1/2"(5 ply) plywood for the bottom, cabin sides, and deck, 3/8" (5 ply) for the topsides. There were four 1/4" plywood bulkheads but the bulkheads in the cabin had large openings in them to accommodate movement and keep weight down. The main bulkhead was 1/2" ply. All of the plywood was supposed to be a western red cedar faced marine plywood which was pretty light in weight and which was readily available at the time but which I have not seen for sale in years.
There were 1 x4 spruce chines, and deck carlins and closely spaced 1x2 longitudinals. The centerboard trunk was made from glassed over cedar planks. To the best of my recollection the hull and deck weighed around 1,000 lbs-1,100. The centerboard was a steel weldment with a 450 lb lead tip, and wood fairings which was all intended to be glassed over and which weighed somewhere around 600 lbs.
I planned to seal the plywood inside and out using West System epoxy. The plan was to tape the hull to deck joint, bottom to the CB Trunk, and the length of the chines with epoxy/FG tape. and then apply a layer of epoxy/glass cloth over the bottom to the waterline, and over the cabin top, sides and the decks.
There were almost no interior furnishings. Storage was in mesh hammocks. The head was bucket and chuck it. The water system was a 'water cube' that hung from the boom and had a hose that came down into the cabin. There was a small portable aluminum sink that drained into the bucket. One of the 'gizmo' things was a series of plywood shelves that slid into place on cleats on one side of the cabin and also on similar cleats out in the cockpit. (The ones in the cockpit were meant to be used when the boom tent was rigged, or it was too hot in the cabin) Each shelf either had its own unique hole or no hole. The hole in one shelf held the sink above the bucket, another had a hole that served as a toilet seat, and held the bucket in place when being so used, one served as a galley shelf for the one burner alcohol stove.
There were a couple of seats that were made of canvas slings that were stitched around a piece of closet pole at each end of the fabric. When used these dropped into curved wooden sockets that supported the top and bottom and when so placed became sling back chairs that could be used when cooking or reading. There were similar sockets in the cockpit and cabin. The sockets were arrayed so you could sit up straight at the galley or recline either fore and aft or athwartships. There was an ice chest that stowed under the cockpit and served as a cooking surface when making dinner. There were milk bins also stored under the cockpit or the 'vee berth' area that held the ground tackle, plates, pots and pans and spare gear. The long sweeps (oars) were made from glued up spruce with curved plywood blades and they stowed along the length of the cabin, passing through holes in the bulkheads to keep them out of the way.
The rig was very simple. The mast was intended to be a simple sitka spruce box spar and the boom a sitka spruce glued up tee section. The fractional rig was similar to a Folkboat except with slightly raked aft spreaders and no genoa. The intention was that both the jib and mainsail had reef points (1 in the jib and two in the mainsail) Instead of a furling jib, the intent was that the hank on slightly overlapping jib would have a downhaul that pulled it to the deck. The jibsheets were 2:1 with the hope that I would not need to use winch handles. The halyards were wire with nicropress and thimble end fittings that could be tensioned by small tackles that would hook into the thimbles to avoid needing winches. (That was how I had rigged my folkboat.)
If I remember right, back when really expensive clear western red cedar marine ply was something like $25-$30.00 per sheet I expected to be able to build the boat for something like $2,000 (without sails) or roughly what a trailerable boat of that day cost. I think the sails were expected to cost around $400. Of course, in reality if I had actually built Gizmo, the boat could easily have cost twice that, and I have no idea what she would cost to build today. But at the time this was all about building something that I had designed, that was cheap to build, pretty to look at, shallow enough to get back into the marshes and which could sail out in the Atlantic, be pretty fast and which was easy to handle single-hand.
I left Savannah around the time that I was contemplating this so Gizmo 1 remains a 'gunna'.
Jeff