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Sailboat rigging costs scale disproportionately with size

Size can be deceptive, particularly where a boat's purchase and operating costs are concerned.

Let's consider the cost of a sailboat's rig. We'll assume that the annual cost of maintaining and repairing the rig is a fixed fraction of the cost of building the rig in the first place, and this fraction does not change with size- an assumption, yes, but likely a reasonable one for yachts of typical design and modest size.

TL;DR: The rate at which you spend money on a sailboat's rig increases faster than the increase in boat size. This expenditure can be minimized by designing long, slender, efficient hulls that can be driven to good average speeds with relatively small rigs compared to shorter, fatter boats of the same size.

Splitting up the website

If you're a regular reader of our blogs, you'll discover this week that things aren't where they used to be.

The site was simply getting too diverse to run as a single entity. The photography side was getting mixed up with the marine side, and our crusing logs (which we like to keep strictly non-commercial) needed some distance from our marine business.

So we've split it up. Photo.marsh-design.com will host our professional photography business, while the boat design side moves to Marine.marsh-design.com. The "ramblings of a techie" and sustainable development sections are now at Tech.marsh-design.com and, for the on-the-water crowd, our cruising logs are at Boating.marsh-design.com.

Proper Dimensions for a Boat Launch Ramp

I am tired of lousy launch ramps.

Bad launch ramps aren't usually that way on purpose. They're usually lousy because, when they were built, nobody involved knew any better. In the interests of making life better for all trailer boaters, then, here are some pointers on how to build one correctly- and a free plan you can give to your contractor as a starting point for your own ramp design.

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