[Leica] SAILING: Stone Horse and its older brother

[lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin at aol.com)]

On Aug 29, 2009, at 11:16 PM, Sonny Carter wrote:?
?
> Love the Stone Horse shots. I usta have a little Bayfield sloop,?
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?
Dick, Sonny, and other sailors on the LUG.?
?
Indeed, the Stone Horse is a lovely little boat. The Stone Horse was 
designed by Sam Crocker, a well known boat 
designer, in 1931. His sailboat designs were considered very seaworthy and 
featured a flush deck with relatively high hull sides. This type of 
construction 
put all the accommodations inside the hull and eliminated the deck house, a 
source of weakness in small boats. The Stone Horse has been made for the 
last 
few decades by Eady and Duff and is still as popular as it was 50 years ago.?
?
How do I know this? I owned and rebuilt and sailed a prototype of the Stone 
Horse in the early 60s. Back in the days before computers and tank testing, 
boat 
designers built smaller versions of their boats to test them out before 
releasing the final plans. As our engagement gift to each other, my wife and 
I 
bought a early, smaller version of the Stone Horse that had been blocked up 
in a 
Staten Island boatyard for the previous 20 years. The papers showed that it 
was designed 

in 1921 by Sam Crocker and built by Sid Davis, a Long Island, NY boat 
builder.?

The boat had been owned 
and sailed by a young man before WW2 and was stored in the yard when he was 
drafted. Unfortunately he never made it back. The yard owner couldn't bear 
to 
scrap it so it sat in a back corner until we found it. By the time we got 
it, 
the planks had opened up so far that you could sick a finger between them. 
We 
stripped the boat, repaired the woodwork, fiberglassed the exterior, and in 
general put it in good conditions. It sailed wonderfully.

Right now I own more boats than I own Leicas but that Stone Horse prototype 
was 
my favorite. I'll post some pictures of the boat and rebuilding process if I 
can 
find them. 

Larry Z



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A follow on. I managed to locate a few pictures of my old boat "Cognac," the 
prototype of the Stone Horse, and posted them in the LUG gallery. Please be 
kind when you look at the pictures. They were taken almost 50 years ago with 
my wife's 1/2 frame Olympus EE camera and little attention was paid to 
photographic quality (of which there is precious little). I was a bit rushed 
so the pictures are arranged in an almost random order but they convey the 
tasks in restoring an old boat.




http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/




Sailors will enjoy the snaps. The rest of you can ignore them.




Larry Z