M.B. Marsh Design offers a steadily growing range of plans for small watercraft. Our services include custom design, refit planning, condition surveys, failure analysis, systems integration and more.

Our designs hit what we think is an ideal balance between performance, capabilities, cost and ease of construction. Most of them are suitable for amateur or advanced amateur construction. These are boats that you can build in your garage, needing only patience, common tools, basic carpentry and fibreglass skills, and a willingness to learn. The resulting vessels are stylish, capable boats that will serve you well for many years.

From The Drawing Board

New designs from our drawing board, and assorted thoughts on boat design in general.

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In The Shop

Dispatches from the shop: Progress reports on our boat building projects, plus some useful information for those of you who are building, restoring or repairing your own boats.

New plans: Almaguin 400 & 500 utility runabouts

Submitted by Matthew on

The plans are ready! The four- and five-metre Almaguin runabouts, designed with first-time builders in mind, will be excellent fishing, utility or sport boats for inland lakes, rivers or calm coastal areas. They're built in taped-seam plywood and don't require elaborate jigs or fine carpentry skills. Have a look here, and please feel free to contact me if either of these boats interests you.

Breached hulls, swamped hulls, and bilge pumps

Submitted by Matthew on

You see them at just about every boat show. Sometimes it's a six-metre fishing boat, sometimes it's a luxury cruiser with a six-figure price tag. But there are always a few boats with something terrifying lurking under a hidden access hatch in the stern: a "bilge pump" that would barely suffice for aquarium duty in my wife's Red Oscar tank. Sure, it'll get rid of rain water and the occasional bit of spray that seeps down there, but that's not what a bilge pump is for. Its main function is to keep you afloat if everything goes to pot, and frankly, most pumps just aren't up to the job.

What's it really made of?

Submitted by Matthew on

It's not always easy to figure out what a boat is made of. Aluminum is usually pretty obvious, as is traditional wood construction. But fibreglass is a different story- without cutting the hull open, there's no easy way to tell what's below that innermost layer of roving. Anyone who has read David Pascoe's article "Are they fiberglass boats anymore" is at least a little scared of the mysterious substances that take the place of proper hull structure in many production boats.

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