How to make a boat – Part I

The editor makes no apologies for changing the title of Dave Hollom’s article on designing a yacht by hand, shamelessly plagiarising the title of Adrian Newey’s seminal work on car design prompted by his legendary ability to visualise airflow and create grand prix-winning design concepts with just a pencil and drawing board

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things, of lift and drag and ratios, of whirling vortex rings…
I understand that nowadays many, if not all, courses in yacht design allow the student to go directly to drawing hulls using computer aided design programs. This, to me, seems unfortunate, for not only will the art of drawing a boat by hand sooner or later be lost, but there is much to be learnt about shape and about which features make for speed during the hand drawing process. After all, human intuition about flow, whether water or air or both, needs a foundation from which to develop.