The happy owner de-rigging his boat for the drive back to Germany from the Beale Park show.

The SeaRaider project started in 2005, after another project with a fairly standard GRP boat of similar size had unexpectedly gone wrong.

After many years of experience sailing off-the-shelf open boats, which always meant having to make a good few compromises, I then finally decided I now wanted one boat that would really get it ALL right for me. I could define the requirements very clearly after having competed a few times in ‘Sail Caledonia’ which in my eyes is the most versatile and demanding of Raids because it offers such a huge variety and intensity of tough conditions along its way. If one can make it there, one can make it anywhere.

I approached Matt Newland of Swallowboats whom I had first met at the Beale Park Show in 2004, and found his ear open. Matt and his father Nick at Swallowboats specialise in modern classics, which is my taste exactly. Their strength is that they both design and build the boats themselves, using modern CAD machinery for design and production, and have a well proven building process from epoxy-reinforced plywood material.

Foremostly, I wanted to give up none of the many advantages of my previous boat, i.e. trailerability, seakindlyness, motoring well, suitable both for high seas and shallow waters, capable of being sailed single handed and in heavy weather, having a safe ketch rig, and pretty ‘classic’ looks.

 But then, in addition I also wanted:

• Much better sailing performance, especially when tacking up.
• Better rowing capability (my wife and I have taken to sail&oar rallies and raids lately).
• A self-draining cockpit, and one wide enough that one can overnight in it comfortably.
• A self-tacking jib.
• A mizzen mast and sail that would be more efficient and easier to manage from inside the cockpit, with no mizzen bumkin.
• A rudder with a strong grip in the water and which must not be removed before beaching the boat to avoid damage.
• Especially, the boat should have great uprighting force after a possible knock-down so it should be easy to right and easy to bail out when swamped.
• Loads of storage capacity, with both open and closed watertight compartments, and some of them lockable.

Quite a long list, really.

Matt did take on the task, and has now really delivered me what I had wanted, and even some more. SeaRaider ‘Craic’  has retained all that I had loved about my old boat, some of it even further improved, but they also added loads of new features I had not even hoped for, like her capability to be self righting after a 90 degree knock-down.

All through the design process we had stayed in close contact, and together developed very innovative ideas and solutions of which I am sure several will make their way into many future boats.

One is the ingenious waterballast system in a cavity at the lowest level of the hull, Matt’s and Nick’s original idea right from the start. Through it, the SeaRaider has really several different personalities if and when you need them. With the tank empty she is a light rower and a swiftly planing dinghy. With the tank full, she moves through the water, even in high winds, like she has a ballast keel.

Another idea was to put –as an option- two inflatable buoyancy bags (Crewsavers) into the tank which can be partly inflated to be able to finer control the amount of ballast water taken in and to prevent the water from sloshing around when the tank is not full with its full capacity of water, which is a huge 300 kgs in total. When I now go out all by myself for some offshore fishing, I often do that on the West coast of Ireland, where the sea can be really rough, I can now play it safe and use the ballast tank to steady the boat and reduce her drift, but when I am with able crew or maybe in a race, and want some excitement and fun, I can empty the tank and have all of that too.

We actually also found an ingenious solution how to fill and empty the big waterballast tank: With self-bailers. The tank can be filled up ‘on the fly’ through a reverse positioned self-bailer which is within reach of the helmsman, and be sucked dry by three others, while the boat is moving with as little as 3-4 knots, the faster, the quicker. Without forward speed, the water can also be pumped out by a conventional bailing pump, or be drained off automatically while the boat is retrieved onto its trailer.

But these selfbailers also serve another purpose: While the tank is empty and the boat moves through the water, also all water gathering in the cockpit can be sucked out automatically. In addition, the boat has all the other usual added advantages of a self-draining cockpit, like self-draining itself after being swamped after a possible knock-down. With her ballast tank full, she is even self righting after a 90 degree knockdown.

 Then the outboarder issue: I had insisted I wanted an engine in the boat, for safety and convenience, and for the family. And it had to sit protected inside the boat and the propellor should be in the centreline, not offset to one of the sides. But how to prevent an outboarder well from shortening the precious long 20 ft. waterline length or from creating much drag? We found another novel solution for this by having just a narrow slit in the bottom of the outboarder well for just the propellor to fit through, but which slit in addition can be closed with a flush fitting flap when the engine is tilted up and the propellor is completely  inside the hull.

To make the sails more efficient, we decided on using extremely thin but incredibly strong carbon fibre (Windsurfer) spars, and put them into luff-pockets of the sails, like they can be found in Windsurfer rigs. The effect is astonishing, this boat can point so high like no other boat I had before, and with great velocity. What totally smashed me is how effortlessly she tacks up with her self-tacking jib. It is as simple as putting the helm over, no sheet needs to be touched, not even must a close hauled mizzen be loosened to get through the wind.

She also tacks up perfectly well balanced under jib and Mizzen alone in Force 5-6 conditions, with a VMG of 2.9 knots directly up to windward. I never had anything like it or had thought it ever possible in a perfectly classic looking boat.      

(Last year we participated with our old boat in a raid in Holland, where in one race we had to tack up a fairly narrow canal, and where we simply couldn’t and had to give up. That’ll be a very different story with ‘Craic’ next time around).

The mizzen mast is really a windsurfer mast just put to better use. The weight is low, the stiffness is great, but there is yet another advantage: It is round, and sits in a round holding bracket. Therefore, the mizzen sail can be furled neatly around the mast through just turning the mast in its holder. In my previous boat I had to stand up on the open deck and lift the mizzen mast and sail as a whole from its bracket to do the same.

For a similar reason we put the main mast in a tabernacle, which can thus be stepped and lowered in seconds rather than minutes from inside the cockpit, no work on the foredeck is necessary.

Maybe one other thing, the weight. Through the modern building as epoxy/plywood compound she weighs –dry- about 200 kgs less than her GRP predecessor which had had quite the same overall length as ‘Craic’. Yet, without compromising on robustness and durability, as Swallowboats give the same hull warranty period as the manufacturers of the previous GRP boat.

A boat that much lighter is also that much easier to handle on dry land, i.e. to move around the garden and driveway, to tow behind the car, to launch and to retrieve, that’s really a crucial advantage for anyone who is often short-handed at such tasks, like me.

Pricewise, ‘Craic’ was not built on a tight budget, but on a generous note, because I wanted her to be complete and ready right from the start. There are built in as standard really a lot of expensive goodies, like the four self bailers, the bailing pump, the over a dozen big and small sealed hatches, the stainless steel rudder wire mechanism, the custom heavy S/S tabernacle and rudderhead, the specially cast bronze fairleads and hand finished mahogany cleats, a great lot of swivelled snap-shackles in the right places, the carbon spars and the hardwood trim everywhere, both on deck and underneath, and on the hull.

But then, considering the many extra advantages I get from her that I couldn’t get from the other boat at all, and comparing the very different performances of the two, I feel I am actually now putting my money to better use and much more fun, and that is what matters to us a lot and that is –finally- why our new boat is named ‘Craic’. : Firstly of course because she is from Wales, so a celtic name it had to be. But secondly because she really serves a ‘craic’ purpose - to have a splendidly good time on the water. And this she does indeed.

 
C.-W. Riepe,
May 24, 2006

P.S. – June 4, 2006