by John C. Harris on Wed Jun 08, 2011 10:13 am
It's no secret that Bolger is my biggest hero, so no brickbats from me. I built and for years owned an "Oldshoe," a slightly smaller version of Micro, and have sailed on Micros.
The Micro and Oldshoe designs aren't quite like anything else on the water, so the comparison isn't necessarily fair without throwing in some additional filters. The Micro exhibits lovely handling under sail, and yes, you can dial in self-steering with such ease that you find yourself steering with the mizzen sheet instead of the tiller. The hull is easily driven and capacious. The commodious, safe, and dry cockpit, with high seat backs, was consciously copied in PocketShip. Micro is faster to build than PocketShip, though not necessarily easier.
While PocketShip #1 was being built, I showed Bolger the drawings at his home in Gloucester. He approved of the design, and endorsed my reasoning for the hull shape, which is where we get into the essential differences. On my home waters, standard-issue conditions are light to moderate air with powerboat wakes. The wrong height and frequency powerboat wake would often bring the scow-hulled Oldshoe and Micro to a dead stop, and in light air it was hard to keep water flowing over the shallow keel fast enough to generate lift. When it came on to blow, the scow hull----really a sharpie hull with the namesake sharp bow cut off---made it difficult to get to windward in waves. The absence of a jib also limits the pointing. The upshot was that I often was late getting home because I couldn't weather a certain breakwater on the Chester River, and once very nearly lost my boat when the mainsheet went into the prop off a rocky lee shore in 25 knots of wind. I couldn't have sailed her off; only freeing the prop saved me.
PocketShip got a comparatively fine bow, for moving through choppy waves, and a jib to turbocharge upwind performance. PocketShip can be sailed off a lee shore into a hairy amount of wind, and it isn't easily stopped by powerboat wakes in light air. (This isn't to compare PocketShip to a racing dinghy, now. It's still emphatically a heavy cruising boat.)
PocketShip's rudder is 100% Bolger, and when he saw the boat on the water at Mystic the summer before he died, he perked right up and said some very flattering things.