The genesis of this story was an incident that occurred back in July of this year in which Polina Star III, an Oyster 825, which reportedly had been extended to 90 feet and was just over a year old, was lost off the coast of Spain. The very first report came from Oyster, but contained...

This is an event I've had an eye on for a little while, but had mentally stashed it in my IBIWISI (I'll Believe It When I See It) file. Well, I think I may be starting to believe it. Since the beginning of the year, organizers of the Sailing the Arctic Race (STAR), to be...

HUMANS HAVE BEEN building boats out of wood for many thousands of years. Many assume therefore it must now be obsolete. Wood certainly does not lend itself to mass production the way fiberglass does, though there were a few builders who manufactured wood boats on something like a production basis not long before the advent...

My last missive in this continuing series on plastic boat construction dealt with internal structures within a hull and how they help support and stiffen a boat. This time we'll look at how the two biggest pieces of a plastic boat, the hull and deck, are married to each other. Almost all builders these days...

So far in our exploration of fiberglass boatbuilding, we’ve only discussed how to create a solid glass laminate. Very few boats, however, are made entirely of solid glass. Most also contain some cored laminate, as this is the most effective way to decrease weight in a fiberglass boat while also increasing its strength. Cored decks...

Blisters have been the bane of many a boatowner. There are literally hundreds of causes, many of which have to do with the quality of a fiberglass boat’s construction. The primary cause is the presence of water-soluble molecules in a laminate. These impurities come from innumerable sources, including glycols in improperly cured resin, any dust,...

Over the millenia people have built boats out of all kinds of stuff. Bamboo, leather, paper, concrete. You name it, someone somehwere has tried it. But by far the most popular contemporary boatbuilding material is a strange substance known as fiberglass. Once derided by traditionalists as being nothing more than “frozen snot,” it now absolutely...