Gregs review of Deux Chevaux
Greg Chapman is a Broads sailor in his Seahawk yacht and also runs the Seahawk web site, you can find out more about Greg at http://www.gregafloat.plus.com/index.html I asked Greg to put together a few words about his impressions of sailing Deux Chevaux. when it arrived it was more like an article that he used to write in Anglia Afloat! So instead of a a few lines added to the page on sailing DC here is a whole new page as written by Greg.
It was a warm sunny day, though there was a reasonable breeze, as I turned into the grounds of Barton Turf Adventure Centre. The grounds are large. There’s 17 acres of reed beds alone and several more acres of meadows in which stand the main buildings and round which is space for car parking, boat storage and camping, plus of course, the moorings that fringe the dykes to the north of Barton Broad.
I hadn’t made any specific arrangements with Ian about where to find him, but I knew where his mooring was and that was where I planned to head as soon as I had parked the car. However, I as emerged from the short narrow entrance way that takes you beyond the rear gardens of the neighbouring houses, there was Ian walking up the field perfectly timed to greet me.
I grabbed my jacket and other gear from my car while Ian unpacked the gear needed for the boat from the boot of his. This included a converted golfer’s caddie, on which he mounted an outboard motor. Although of relatively small diameter, the wide wheels of a caddie proved a good compromise for wheeling the engine on the 100 yard long deep shingle track that leads down to the waterside. Unfortunately, its wheels which were set well apart were just a little too wide when we encountered the fairly narrow board walk around the quay heading of the moorings themselves. However, overall, I wouldn’t have wanted to be without it. It’s a fair way to lug an engine.
I had seen Deux Cheveaux once before, out on the water, but now I looked at her anew from the shore. She isn’t painted in colours I would have chosen. She has a certain “Honey, I shrunk the battleship!” look about her. Mind you, I understand the reason behind the colour scheme. She gets her name from a Citroen 2CV that Ian once owned. This happened to come in a two tone grey that in England gives the model a certain old-school bowler-hatted civil service look of respectability that is somehow at odds with the car’s reputation for French farmers willingness to drive them directly across a ploughed field while carrying the wife, five children and three large churns of milk.
Deux Chevaux is based on a Selway Fisher design, a Lynx 14. Ian has modified his. He decided to provide more headroom in the cabin, so raised the roof line by four inches. From the front his gives the boat the look that one might expect in a scene in a Tom and Jerry carton. In my mind I conjure an image of the boat having been connected to an air line and inflated to the point just before it explodes. To further increase cabin space Ian made another change. The aft bulkhead has been set vertically rather than sloping forward as the plans suggest.
Clearly, there is more room in the cabin and when I got round to trying out the cabin, at around six foot three inches, I had more than enough room to sit upright, leaning against the aft bulkhead. Had the aft bulkhead leaned inwards I wouldn’t have been able to do that and I doubt that I’d have had sufficient headroom without those extra inches. Ian told me that he planned the boat for mainly for day sailing and the cabin was there as a refuge from showers. With that in mind I would rate the changes as a success. However, Ian will also point out that he hadn’t realised how much the extra height would block the view forward from the cockpit.
With first impressions out of the way, we begin to prepare for our voyage. Before stowing things on board we have to remove the canopy over the cockpit. This Ian had made by a local firm. It’s a true senior service strength piece of work, in heavy matching battleship-grey plastic coated canvass. Unlike the design I was expecting, with access through flaps at the stern, the side can be unzipped. This makes boarding much easier. Also, although it extends well forward over the cabin, it is not closed around the mast. Instead it is left open. Ian explains that this was deliberate. Rain doesn’t penetrate. It would have to be near horizontal and be able climb the slope of the cabin roof to reach the cockpit. It was made this way to allow plenty of ventilation so condensation and general mustiness is prevented, and it seems a great success.
One thing I realise, as I look at the boat, is that there is no fore hatch. I use the hatch a lot on my boat. It’s a secure place from which to fling a mud weight overboard and to rig the head sail before hoisting it from the cockpit. While considering the lack of fore hatch I wonder about another feature of the bulbous look to the cabin roof. On my SeaHawk, to lower the mast, so I can pass under bridges, I will step up from the cockpit seat, grab hold of the mast to steady myself, and walk over the cabin to reach the fore stay and release it. Then paying out the line attached to the fore stay, I return to the cockpit over the roof. Then I continue to pay out the line and so lower the mast. On Deux Chevaux both the height of the cabin and the rounded nature of the cabin roof suggest that this would not be the approach to use. Of course, this operation may be less of a concern for Ian as the first bridge that he will encounter is beyond his normal day cruising range. Ian explains one further issue with his mooring before we cast off. It is heavily lined with over hanging vegetation. This was another reason for the cockpit tent being a high priority when equipping Deux Cheveaux. Apart from the problems falling leaves will give him come autumn, it also means he can only moor one way round as he has to avoid the mast fouling the trees. However, that’s not really a problem, since, in the tightly confined space of the dyke he’ll never be sailing directly onto a lee shore to moor and need that kind of room to manoeuvre.
With the motor running, we cast off and make our way out of the BTAC moorings. We turn left, keeping Cox’s yard to our right, and take the dyke towards Barton Broad. Before we reach the Broad the engine is cut and we are under sail. We are using Ian’s specially commissioned Enterprise rig. Selway Fisher recommend this for the boat. It means that you can avoid having to learn the new set of skills needed for constructing the mast and boom, while also saving the cost of the many minor components by buying a job lot from a wrecked Enterprise dinghy.
Ian, though, had gone one step further and got Jeckells to make up a set of Enterprise sails in grey, to tone with the rest of the boat. He then added his very own 2CV logo. Looking at it made me realise that working out how to make an effective silhouette is quite an art in itself. My only complaint was that it really needed to be three times bigger, to have the impact it deserved.
Now out on the Broad the full strength of the wind is felt and we begin to pick up speed. The cockpit is a comfortable size and has adequate room for the two of us. Ian explained that it had felt cramped with more than two and one of his modifications over the previous winter had been to hinge the tiller so it now lifts. It can clear a great collection of knees with ease as you go about and helm and crew shift their position. It also means that it becomes far more comfortable to steer standing up. Something you often want to do when under power, and sometimes under sail, especially given the height of the cabin.
One of the things that Ian said he had been looking for a boat that you could sit in rather than on. He wanted the feeling of security that this would give. The Lynx 14 seems to achieve that – most of the time. When I think about my own SeaHawk I realise it achieves its sensation of security in a different way. The cockpit combing on a SeaHawk rises less than two inches above the seating, so you might expect to feel that you are sitting “on” the boat. However, guard rails mounted on the combing provide that feeling of being “in” and the real difference comes in the confidence you feel about whether water will over-top the the combing, as I’ll explain in a moment. As we continued with our conversation about aspects of our two boats, the gusts were becoming livelier. Ian began to talk of the whether we should have fitted his smaller Hobie sails. Some of the dinghies around us were capsizing. I was on the helm and luffing up into the gusts. Then it happened. A gust that I didn’t anticipate well enough. We heeled violently as I turned into the wind, but I was not quick in spilling the wind from the sail and we shipped a good deal of water over the gunwale. We were safe enough. It was less than a gallon that came in as we snapped upright, but even an inch or two slopping about in the bottom of the cockpit was not welcome.
“Well, I’m glad my wife wasn’t on board for that”, said Ian, as he dived into a locker to retrieve a bailer, while telling me where to look for something to mop down and dry off the seats. It was then that another significant difference with my SeaHawk impacted. My cockpit floor is above the water line and self draining. There are two holes in the transom. Any serious volume of water in the cockpit will drain out. Well, it will if you don’t stuff the holes with sherry corks as I normally do. I do it so that water cannot enter the cockpit when heeled. I know that some sea going SeaHawk owners take a different approach and leave the holes open and put slatted boards down on the cockpit sole instead to keep you feet dry should water get in the cockpit. Maybe it’s because I’ve not been coastal cruising in a SeaHawk, but I’ve never been close to being swamped like that. So this was the significant difference in the cockpits. On a SeaHawk there is a pronounced fall down and out from the combing to the gunwales, effectively a side deck. The result is that as you heel, the combing doesn’t appear to dip towards the water. Should you heel that far you would see the water rising over the gunwales well before the point where the cockpit might become swamped. On the Lynx, the cockpit reaches to the very edge of the boat, the combing is gunwale, and once there, in the water comes. There’s a further aspect of the SeaHawk hull. Its buoyant bilge fins help prevent heeling beyond a certain point. This means you never seem to reach that point where the water comes over the gunwale anyway.
It wasn’t long before we had the water cleared from the cockpit and surfaces dry again so we could sit in comfort. No harm was done and the few moments of excitement were over, but it did raise questions. Obviously, a primary cause of the swamping was me not being alert enough on the helm, but what could be done to the design of the boat to reduce the risk of it happening again.
I thought of side decks. I realised that the dinghies I was used to all had them. But then I remember the one time I capsized an Enterprise. The water came over the side decks as well and then couldn’t get out again. We had to spend hours baling it out. I loved the 420 in which I learned to sail. That had very comfortable sealed side deck to sit on. If you capsized any water just rolled out of the boat as you righted her. But Deux Chevaux was quite narrow and you would need to sit on any side decks, and that would destroy the whole point of the boat for Ian. So side decks weren’t the answer.
Perhaps it was raising the cabin roof that did it. This meant the whole rig was taller, offering more leverage in gusts. However, I couldn’t believe that four inches would make that significant a difference. The other way to stop the boat tipping would be more ballast. However, in my untutored experience, the boat seemed well ballasted as it was. I would be confident that with the pressure off the main sail it would have come upright long before excessive water had entered the cockpit. We carried on talking over the incident but I think that in the end we reached the conclusion that all in all, it’s just the nature of a small boat and you have no choice but to bail when the cockpit sole is beneath the waterline. On balance, you have to accept that the Lynx 14 will ship water in extreme conditions.
Overall, I really enjoyed our little cruise. It’s inevitable that I would be constantly comparing Deux Chevaux with my own boat and that’s unfair. The extra three feet that a SeaHawk has over a Lynx 14 makes all the difference. For its size Deux Chevaux has a huge amount to offer and the pride in the accomplishment of having built her from scratch must outweigh any of its shortcomings. I begin to understand why so many home boat builders seem to be serial builders, rather than boaters. Once you have have enough builds under your belt to feel you have perfected your skills, then you decide you haven’t quite got the right boat for your current circumstances.
Has it changed my mind about building a boat for myself. Well, I have learned that it is neither cheap, nor quick, nor easy. However, I do still hanker after a really small boat that could be sailed and paddled on the narrowest and shallowest of waters. You never know, it might happen one day.
