oldsalt_1942

Howard: From my experience (18 years as a professional captain and another 15 years doing repair and restoration work on boats) and from a lot of thought recently on boats I might either buy or build since I'm now retired and looking to do some extensive cruising myself, I think that "standing headroom" is way over rated except in one place...the galley. I don't want to do my cooking sitting down. With that one exception everywhere else in the boat you're either going to be sitting or laying down and standing headroom is wasted space. I owned a small sailboat, a Kaiser 26, that I lived on for nearly six years and it had 6' headroom in the "main cabin" such as it was. Actually that was an area only about 9 feet long and standing on the tiny cabin sole I could touch the cabin sides without stretching my arms full length. If you place the galley at the aft end of the cabin you might be able to build some kind of hard dodger or dog house that would allow you to stand up there. For the rest of the boat I wouldn't worry about it. Trying to get standing headroom throughout will destroy the esthetics of the design. I think it was Hershoff who said "If you want to stand up in a boat go out into the cockpit."

I think you'd be better off with a balanced lug rig, especially if you're going to be single-handing. They look the same but you don't have to go through the whole bit of lowering the sail, moving the lug to the other side of the mast and raising the sail again. I, too, am very interested in the lug rig concept and have been reading a LOT about lug rigs online. From what I've been able to gather, any loss of performance when the sail is on the weather side of the mast is so negligible that it is not noticable.