Geezer International Canoe Design Redux - IC Fatso

If you dig far enough back in Earwigoagin, you'll suss out the blogmeister's history as an International Canoe sailor. (Though, truth be told, I had more-or-less completely stepped out of the class a long time ago, seventeen years ago, way back in 2000, long before this blog.) The International Canoe's are really great performance single-handed dinghies, and they are proving to be a good fit for top-notch (and I mean top-notch) oldster dinghy-ites who have kept up their fitness and boat building skills (ref. Chris Maas, Robin Wood, Steve Clark, Alistair Warren, Colin Brown and others (many of these skippers I competed against in the 1980's) - though you do need a bit of extra dosh to play at the top level; carbon this, carbon that, jibing daggerboard, T-foil rudder, mylar this, super control that... it all adds up).

What prompted this post was this recent comment by Steve Clark (ruminating after the recent International Canoe Worlds in Pwhelli Wales, UK) over at the Sailing Anarchy forums.:

"The elders are thinking nice thoughts about a little more stability. Remember that the old development rule allowed boats as skinny as the new rules (750mm) and the boat that emerged as "best compromise" was 1014 mm wide. So I had been meditating about what I can do in a beamier hull form. It will probably give something away upwind and in a short chop, but there isn't much slower than a capsized IC. I have an idea, based on Lou Whitman's Phoenix that was probably faster than the Nethercot in 1970, but never got much of a chance after the ICF made the Nethercot the only approved shape."

Being humble as I am (Oh, what the heck, push your brilliance out there) -- I was echoing Steve's most recent thoughts for a oldster International Canoe over ten years ago!

When Steve Clark proposed his new rule back in 2005, which favored very narrow IC's, I, being the maverick, thought - why not have an IC that was 18.5 feet long and beamy -- should end up about the same speed and easier to sail. So I drew this one up based largely on the Whitman Phoenix design. Predictably, there was not a lot of support from the class to add 1.5 feet (457 mm) in length to the IC rule and this design became an interesting but ultimately a dead-end footnote in International Canoe history. (Note this design was done in 2005 - 12 years ago.) (ed. note: The Phoenix International Canoe, drawn up in the 1960's, was a very fine-lined, shallow-V, beamy International Canoe design by American International Canoe designer wunderkind of post-WWII - Lou Whitman.)



Two years later, 2007, I pulled in my elongated, mod-Phoenix design IC into the normal International Canoe length - 17' (5.182 meters) and did a new design, the IC-Fatso.

The sections (I kept a tall bow to hopefully keep green water from sluicing over the foredeck.):



The topview of IC-Fatso:



Maybe if you wait long enough, you find yourself sitting on the right part of the circle as it comes around again ... and then maybe not. Dinghy designs are always food for thought and more often than not, there is nothing new under the sun.

The IC-Fatso remains a design exercise. I've never checked to see if the IC-Fatso would fit the current IC rule (it would be an OK design to the older one). The IC-Fatso would, under most conditions, be slower than the current narrow IC's and the IC-Fatso wouldn't qualify as a Classic (the Nethercott, Slurp are the two designs in that fleet). It would be a safe design that would get you around mid-fleet with less trauma than the current designs and possibly faster than the Classics but it seems to fit in a tweener world - which makes it a difficult proposition to build for the class.

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The blogmeister sailing his Nethercott "No Eyes" at the International Canoe Nationals at Lewes, Delaware in the early 1980's. We made it a family vacation that year and, in 2017, some 30 odd years later, returned a second time for a family beach week (no sailing).