Nemo is my personal runabout / camp cruiser. She is the result of blind chance, opportunism and intuition rather than engineering and design. Nemo started life as the Hexcel Ultimate 30 professional racing skiff designed by Ian Murray of Australian 18 fame and built in carbon/nomex by McConaghy in Sydney Australia. After the boat sat…
The Red Boat is the first boat that I designed and built (circa 1992). I built it during evenings and weekends while holding down my Naval Architecture day job. It was built from thin okoume plywood and is still being sailed. This is the first boat in which I applied the computer aided patterning techniques…
The Riptide 35 was my first design for Jonathan and Libby McKee of Seattle. The concept for the 35 was conceived by Jonathan during a long and uncomfortable distance race on an ultralight 50 footer. He realized that a high percentage of the sailors on board were there purely as human ballast. His design brief…
The Bieker 765 was designed for Phil Jameson, a professional foredeck hand whom I met through my America’s Cup work. Phil wanted to build the boat himself and sail it under the NZ Sportboat rule. I designed the boat with plenty of ballast to avoid turtling in the capsizes that are inevitable with these sorts…
The B1 Cherub (Bieker’s first Cherub) was designed for David Chisholm of Integra Composites in the UK. The company name for the skiff is the GT60. The goal was to a produce a design which would fit within the UK Cherub class rule but have the potential to have appeal outside that class. I used…
The Trinado was a design collaboration between Russell Brown and myself. It was designed for Donald Young and built by Russell in Port Townsend, Washington. The original concept was for a small trimaran which would use Tornado hulls as its floats. The Tornado floats ended up being a little shorter on righting moment than ideal,…
For me proas represent an alternate reality to mainstream sailing. They trade transverse symmetry for fore & aft symmetry and in doing so enter a different world of possibilities and constraints. Russell’s boats are Pacific proas which means that the single float is to weather and can be water ballasted. Structurally, this kind of proa…
The PT Dinghy was designed as a performance double-handed hiking boat to be built at the Wooden Boat School in Port Townsend, WA (a center for traditional wooden boat building in the Western United States). The intention was to use the project to introduce students to lightweight wood/epoxy construction, carbon/epoxy detailing and metric units (I…
Strum was built as an evolution of the concept behind the Riptide 35 and 44. She is a high performance long course racing boat with comfortable cruising accommodations. Her light displacement and water ballast make her capable of 24 hour runs in excess of 350 NM and cruising speeds under power of 10+ kts. Water…
