The PT 11 sailing rig is one of our creations that we are quite proud of. The carbon tubes are engineered specifically for this rig and manufactured in Washington at Innovative Composites Engineering. ICElogoIt is fun for us to imagine our tubes along side Space-X & NASA tubes, and among top name windsurfer and paddle boarding tubes. Mostly we are proud that this quick-to-set-up rig, with sail and all hardware & rigging, weighs a scant 10.5 LBS.

Our boom attaches to the mast with a custom gooseneck. For years we have made these goosenecks out of vacuum bagged carbon & epoxy in a multi step process that included a lot of carbon dust, finishing, tapping, assembling, and hand stitching tubular webbing onto the forks for a soft contact point on the mast. OrigGooseneck-smallDSCN0643After hundreds of these, there just had to be a  better way.

In 2021, as we sought to offset increasing costs in general and reduce labor where we could, one of the things we did was redesign our gooseneck. After years of trying to think of a better way, Russell began sketching out a new design based on using 1/2" Delrin plate and CNC router technology.

The resulting gooseneck is clean, practical, stronger, and most importantly, much less labor to finish and install. The new goosenecks are installed by pouring epoxy around them. A tight fitting foam plug traps the epoxy. Speaking of tight fitting foam plugs; there are 7 plugs in the 3 tubes that these rigs are made from, 5 of them custom made of different sizes from dense rigid foam. Why? To keep them from filling with water and sinking of course. Why do we need 7 plugs to plug both ends of 3 tubes? The seventh plug is a secret. 😉

The new gooseneck, right to left: blank, blank with edges rounded, installed in the boom.
The new gooseneck, right to left: CNC machined blank, post-CNC blank drilled & edges rounded, gooseneck installed in the boom.

PT 11 sailing rigs are still produced by Russell and drop-shipped from Port Townsend. They can be purchased through Chesapeake Light Craft. Customers who purchased their PT 11 kits from PT Watercraft pre-2021 should contact us directly regarding PT 11 options. We have experienced periodic delays so lead times vary.

Happy Sailing! ...AEB 😉

UPDATE September 2022- This boat is SOLD!

PNW local,  is currently seeking a good home for his PT 11 nesting dinghy. Please see his description and contact information below. Note that shipping is not an option. Buyer will need to pick up in Port Townsend WA.

Nesting PT 11 for sale fob Port Townsend.  Built in 2015 by the skillful John Caples. Wooden Boat Festival regulars will recall his immaculate wood GB 42 Xanadu and her PT 11 tender.  The skiff is available, complete with PT sail kit (gorgeous foils, carbon mast and PT 11 class sail which still exudes that brand new dacron feel).  Varnished, nearly flawless wooden oars included.  This PT 11 comes complete with a low-hours EP Carry electric motor with two batteries and spare key and prop.  Yellow canvas cover.  Bags for protection of foils and mast/sail. All in fine condition.

 

B.AlexanderPT11_0294.HEICxb.alexanderPT11-2xB.Alexander_0296b.Alexander_0293

Jzerro is the last Pacific Proa that Russell Brown designed and built for himself. After owning the boat for more than 20 years, a New Orleans native and seasoned sailor, Ryan Finn took over ownership of the boat.

{{ UPDATE: JUNE 2022 Latitude 38 article/ interview with Ryan Finn. }}

On March 21st, Ryan completed his New York to San Francisco solo voyage around Cape Horn in JZERRO, a 33 year old, lightly built wood epoxy boat, in an amazing feat of seamanship, a testament to wood epoxy boat building, and a real moment for Russell.

Photo clipped from original by Merfyn Owen
Photo clipped from original by Merfyn Owen

Curious?

See Ryan's FB page 2Oceans1Rock.  Sailing Anarchy thread following Ryan. Sail-world article. Sail Magazineincludes a pre-voyage podcast. Lat 38 articles. Youtube Channel with Jzerro videos.

A movie is being put together of the voyage. We are incredibly proud of Ryan.

Photo by Guillaume Beaudoin
Photo by Guillaume Beaudoin

If you don't receive Professional BoatBuilder Magazine, we recommend that you go to their site and sign up. The magazine has always been free for industry professionals but if you can donate to keep their operations running smoothly in this digital world, that would be great too. RBTaskSheetIntro

Last year, Russell was asked to write about epoxy and the editors decided to turn it into one of their featured Task Sheet formats. Russell is not comfortable in a classroom setting but he has received praise for his technical writing that has given many seasoned boat builders clarity and refinement on the subject of working with epoxy. Proboat has generously given us permission to post the task sheet here in a downloadable PDF.

RBtasksheet-HEADERTaskSheet194-FINAL

This first quarter of 2022 has been interesting for Russell and I here at Port Townsend Watercraft.

Chesapeake Light Craft continues successful production of the PT 11 Nesting Dinghy Kit. You can see the details on their page here.

What has changed?

PT 11 Nesting Dinghy kit packed for shipping from Chesapeake Light Craft 2022
PT 11 Nesting Dinghy kit packed for shipping from Chesapeake Light Craft 2022

There is a price difference from our previous rates. This was to be expected. For one thing, CLC includes the WEST SYSTEM Epoxy Kit that had been an option on our package. We are happy about this because we have always recommended WEST SYSTEM for this project. Anther big one is that our cost of the connective hardware doubled. They are, however, exquisite thanks to a local machine shop here in PT. The total kit price hike reflects both the inclusion of the epoxy kit and material price increases across the board from plywood to stainless steel. That considered, customer investment has not increased by much because we made efforts to streamline production of certain parts to offset those inevitable material price increases. Russell and I would have been hard pressed to continue production on our own with all this factored in..

CLC also has a well established packing system for their kits. This makes the kit package more manageable than our long and heavy plywood crate.

In our shop in Port Townsend we have finally been touched by the "supply chain delays" talked about in the daily news streams. A lack of sail cloth, delayed our sail production. We finally learned this after several ETA predictions that came and went without sails. We are assured this time that sails are on their way so we can ship out the rigs on order. (Talk about stress!)ptwatercraft.comRussell has been doing a deep dive into the boat building technique referred to as 'Tortured plywood'. One of the 3 foot models (of which there are at least 8 versions), have been translated into 27ft long hulls. This project has been both exciting and frustrating beyond expectation. More to come on that later.

Early stages of tortured plywood hulls.
Early and very deceptive stage of tortured plywood hulls. This technique is somewhat miraculous.
Jzerro 'flying' in Puget Sound
Jzerro 'flying' in Puget Sound

Those who know about Russell's earlier boats, including his windward proas, may have seen our videos of "Jzerro". We sold Jzerro a few years ago and of late, have anxiously followed the new owner Ryan Finn, on his massive journey from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn. This last week, Ryan rounded Cape Horn successfully and has been flying northward at speeds from 9 to 19MPH on the edges of and through gales and rough seas. You can follow his tracker progress here.

Also see 2 Oceans 1 Rock on FB for descriptions of his journey.

 

More updates to come soon, including the 2022 Shipwright's Regatta this Saturday (Postponed a month due to a gale in the bay in FEB 26th. (there may be more than one PT 11 this year!) and an update on our new goose-neck design. AEB 😉

There is hardly a better way to start the sailing year that the Shipwright's Regatta every February. The regatta was originally started decades ago at a time when most of the shipwrights in Port Townsend owned a boat. But owning a boat was not the only criteria for being a shipwright. You had to get out on the water in it! The work ethics of our Marine Trades keeps most of them totally focused on their work, often year round, so the Shipwrights' Regatta was created to get everyone out on the water to PLAY at least one day a year.

Besides the 505 racing dinghies, most of the entrants are either cruising boats or schooners. Some daysailors often show up and, for me, if we failed to go dinghy sailing on January first, the Shipwrights' Regatta is often our new year sail. P2270034

This year at least one other PT 11 is planning to join the day. The apples to apples competition will be extra fun. May the weather gods be kind.

See you out there!

Christmas Eve is upon us and the end of 2021will follow swiftly. We are so very thankful to all of our customers and friends, many of the former becoming the latter and some of the latter becoming the former too! Thank you all. holidayPT11-21

Chesapeake Light Craft has been shipping PT 11 kits this Fall and more are being prepared for January. Some are asking about the PT Spear and when it will be in production. Please stay tuned and we will post updates on that when we know for certain.

Thank You Chesapeake Light Craft!

Russell and I wish everyone good health, joy, and happy boating in 2022.

Russell's latest adventure on Jiminy, the new Pod-Cat.
Russell's first adventure on the new Pod-Cat.

It has begun, Friends! Chesapeake Light Craft has their first orders for the PT Eleven Nesting Dinghy and we look forward to this relationship being successful. image of the clcboats.com PT 11 page

The CLC team has been working diligently through the many details related to our collaboration. We thank them for including the PT 11 in their catalog.

Ordering info Link

Port Townsend Watercraft will be updating our website to function better on multiple devices and to reflect the changes in our business. We will maintain information about our designs as supplemental to the CLC website, and we will be creating new content related to our designs and our books.

We remain open to feedback, photos, and those particular questions that only we might be able to answer for now. Please send your favorite PT 11 photos to Ashlyn's GMAIL : PTWATERCRAFT@

THANK YOU to everyone who asked us to keep production of the PT 11 active and to all who have built our boats.

We are particularly fond of PT 11-in-action pictures and beautifully scenic pictures where even a small portion of the PT 11 is visible. Did you personalize your boat with some special detail? What color did you paint it? Of course, we love animals and pets-in-the-PT 11 pictures are welcome too.

PT 11 kits will become available this year if all goes as planned. The hiccups include supply chain issues and rising shipping and material costs. We are making forward progress.

We have been working with a well established kit company who long mentored our fledgling business and really wants to produce our kits. We will continue to manufacture and supply them with specific parts that make our kits unique.
This has been an incredibly interesting and challenging task to put our process into a transferable format. We are ‘creatives’, not ‘business managers’ persay. That we have managed, is nothing short of amazing to me as I fill in lengthy spreadsheets with suppliers, part numbers, current pricing, how many of what per kit, etc. Everything needed updated numbers. This rather daunting assignment has simply taken time to accomplish as Russell continues to make large runs of certain parts that get stocked in advance, to determine how those parts should be priced.
We have redesigned our rudder and daggerboard with help from very skilled friends. The new foils are thinner (18mm), denser, and slicker. The birch plywood is not as handsome for clear coating as the Okoume but we are pretty pleased with the overall change. Modifying the foils kits affected several other parts of the kit, so those changes are being made as well as a total rewrite of the foils manual.
We are working on a boomless rig for the PT 11. Why? Besides greater simplicity of set up and even lighter weight, a large portion of the cost and labor in our current sailing rig is in the boom. We have asked our favorite sail designers to work on this but getting a prototype is one of the supply chain hiccups. We know there will be trade-offs. It is the only way we see being able to keep producing sailing rigs that we would want to use ourselves.
With the retirement of our connective hardware machinist at the end of 2019, early inquiries at machine shops nationwide were not encouraging and we will not take this overseas. We discovered, however, that Port Townsend has a first class, family owned and operated machine shop. Truth be told, the initial quote took time to digest but we considered quantity, precision, and other local advantages. We just picked up the first run and the parts are excellent.

Kit pricing is to be determined but we expect minimal change. Our efforts to simplify parts of production are also intended to offset increased costs in other areas aiming to stabilize cost to the builder.

We expect to announce kit availability later this Summer. The details of ordering will be explained in the next update.

I continue to add names to a list of seriously interested builders. Everyone on that list will receive an email update before this blog. I do this because some of you have been waiting a year for news of kit production continuing. It is all of you on that list especially, whom I wish to thank for your patience and encouragement. It is deeply appreciated. We are excited about finding a pathway forward.
First in production will be the PT 11 Nesting Dinghy and second, the PT Spear. We are not 'there' just yet and we totally understand if you find or have found a different project to work on.

Thank you again,
Ashlyn Brown

P.S.
The PT Skiff is not in our hands at this time. There is no manual that addresses design changes. The designers may have some information for experienced builders but we will not be offering tech support for that project for the time being.

Saturday the 27th was this year's Shipwright's Regatta here in Port Townsend and as always, it was such a fun event. I find that I cannot stop smiling when we are out there in the dinghy.

Upon registration, our class choices were, Racing, Thunderbird, or Cruising. Hmmm. let me see. An 11 foot dinghy...can't compete with the 505's and the bigger racing boats, we have a bird on our sail but it is a Pacific Swift... not a T-bird..., well, I guess we are in Cruising class!

Upon checking in with the committee boat, I was asked what class I was in. My reply got a good guffaw and we were on our way along with almost 60 boats. The race committee had decided to break up the Cruising class into 2 groups due to the many participants. The forecast was for very little wind. In fact, we'd had to row from Point Hudson to the course area at the south side of the bay which I believe is close to a mile. We had left our dry suits thinking we would be lucky to make it around the course once, much less twice, and do so while remaining perfectly dry. Think again. The sailing brain can rust over a long, dark, and cold winter.

The race started with a "wind shift" a little past noon, first the Racers, then the Thunderbird fleet, then Cruising boats over 30ft, and then our lot, Cruising boats under 30ft. There was a nice range of under 30ft boats this year. It was great.

We did get around the course twice as prescribed and in fact, did so ahead of 7 boats out of 12 in our class, most of which were well over double our length! It took me a moment to realize just how well we had done. Russell's challenge was to find clean air among so many boats especially when your mast is only 15ft tall.

I put together a little video of our day. Sadly, due to Covid, the Pizza and awards party was cancelled this year but it would appear that Russell and I can lay claim to the Golden Trident for being the Saltiest Crew (literally) of 2021. It is a really fun way to kick off our local sailing season. Thank you to the PT Sailing Association and the NW Maritime Center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2afLyhv-qo

Photos:

S/V Cito
Cito owned by Sean and Inger Rankins of NW SAILS AND CANVAS

s/v CITO S/V Sir IsaacCommittee boatP2270006Skippers-meetP2270002P2270043MureletP2270042Thunderbirds at the startP2270028P2270022P2270046Noddy at the startP2270044