Duckworks - Bridget 82

Bridget 82

By Christer Byström - Umeå, Sweeden

Until 2007 I had designed and built three boats and written about all of them here in Duckworks magazine (Grace O`Malley, Stella and Shannon), and in the spring 2008 I decided to design and build a new version. My daughter Sonja (born 1996) likes to sail and in 2006 we bought her an old plywood Optimist dinghy. But it soon began to leak, because the plywood hull was rotting. So I decided to design a version that could use the rig, centreboard and rudder from the Optimist.


Grace O'Malley	Stella	Shannon

I call the concept BRIDGET and have made drawings for both clinker plywood (single chine) and strip-planking in three sizes, 8´2”, 9´4” and 10´8”. And only the smallest version can use the rig, centreboard and rudder from the Optimist dinghy. Since the centreboards are made of wood, not steel, I had to make the hulls quite wide and flat to make them stable enough.

I call the concept BRIDGET and have made drawings for both clinker plywood and strip-planking.

I decided to build the 8´2” version in strip-planking , and in the beginning of May I got a job very close to my boathouse, so I could work there between twenty and thirty minutes every lunch, and it took me two months to finish the boat. And then my daughter started to test it. At the first launching it leaked a little, but I could fix that by filling the lower part of the centreboard case with epoxy. And then it worked well, as you can see on the pictures.

So far I have made drawings of five concepts, and the concepts have between 3-5 sizes. The smallest one is STELLA (7´3”, 7´8”, 8´2”, 9´, and 10´), and then BRIDGET (8´2”, 9´4” and 10´8”), SONIA (10´6”, 12´, 13, and 14´6”), CONNIE (sailing canoe 13´, 15´, and 17´) and SHANNON (16´, 17´6” and 20´). And when all these drawings are finished I plan to design a small trimaran, the smallest version 10 feet long, and since a trimaran should have a name that begins with a T, I have decided to call the concept TARJA, and I had it approved by the woman with that name that lives quite near us.