Design To Accommodate Your Needs

Dick Newick has long told clients that they can pick two of three things: performance, accommodation, and/or low cost. In other words, you can have an affordable, fast boat with little accommodation; a roomy, fast boat that will be expensive; or a roomy, affordable boat that is slow. Of course, designers actually balance all three elements and create many nuanced solutions. I approach either creating or evaluating all boat designs by dividing each design into four conceptual elements: safety, performance, accommodation, and cost, each of which affects all others.

To help you find, improve, or create your dream boat, I and my colleagues begin by consulting with you in order to merge your desires with realistic design parameters. For new designs or design modifications, we then develop sketches, followed by detailed preliminaries. Finally, we partner with the most appropriate associates to engineer and formally design the particulars. Should you choose, we also can locate and work with the appropriate builder. If we think you'd be best served by an existing design or boat, we will tell you. Often, we can help you modify such designs or boats to most economically fulfill your needs.

Although I and many of my associates have designed fairly conventional craft, from production cruising boats to powerboats and even barges, I am particularly interested when a client wants something a little new or to suit a specific purpose. My background and tastes in designing, building, and sailing boats remain eclectic, my experiences well split between conventional and contemporary craft in both monohull and multihull configurations. I have a particularly generous amount of experience designing, building, and/or sailing quite small craft for offshore work. Overall, it's my view that building boats and using them as homes, voyaging and racing, have perfectly complemented my design work, helping me to blend the theoretical with the practical. Getting to know and interview many of the world's leading designers also has cross-fertilized these experiences, inspiring my design priorities and feeding my progressive attitude toward design evolution.

Our purpose is to bring all of our experiences to bear to give you as much as you need without overkill, to size the vessel and equip it to suit your primary goals. We prefer simplified and pragmatic systems and layouts to maximize ease of use and safety, and to minimize required maintenance. Although we love contemporary design and performance under sail, we also rely on features that have proved essential to voyagers over the millennia. After all, the need for and most effective configuration of things like a fiddle rail has never changed. Design priorities include secure and efficient arrangements for sleeping, navigating, cooking, and managing the vessel. Luxuries like entertainment centers must be secondary to essential systems. We maintain interests in all kinds of craft, from shorthanded race boats to rafts. Instead of limiting your design by some niche into which our previous boats have fallen, or beginning with our or somebody else's preconceived idea of voyaging, we begin with yours.

If you find our approach and designs appealing, whether you are an experienced voyager who now wants a big boat or somebody just starting out who would best buy a Sunfish first, we will do our utmost to be candid, honest, and lead you to the best choice.

For details on my design background and related experiences, see my biography and check out the backgrounds in brief of my primary associates on the About page. When you follow the links in the navbar to the left, you'll find selected designs that have provided my colleagues and myself with a lot of fun and learning opportunities over the years. They also help to illustrate our history, style, and thinking.

Consulting We Do

In addition to designing craft, I and/or my associates have consulted on a wide variety of projects over the years. We've helped mariners plan special voyages and put together the right teams and equipment to support these ventures. For television and feature-film projects, we've lent both technical and creative input on all types of nautical and survival issues (please see the Film-Television page). For the publications business, we've created content (writing, photography, and illustration), developed and copy edited others' work, and prepared indexes. We've also developed educational programs about seamanship and safety for mariners, and others designed for the general public. We would be pleased to discover how we might best work with you in any of these undertakings.

Brokerage

Quite simply, we can help you define and find the ideal boat for your intended use. We work primarily through David Jones Yacht Brokerage. David specializes in classic wooden boats while we concentrate more on modern craft, including multihulls. Our emphasis remains on voyaging boats, or boats that can be refit for effective voyaging. We can help you locate appropriate candidates, hone in on the best prospects, and then finally arrange the purchase. We also do not simply make a quick deal and walk away. Depending on your needs, we can follow up our brokerage service with consulting to help you with any required maintenance, refitting, and equipping of the boat to suit your needs.

The normal brokerage commission is 10 percent of the sales price. As with real estate brokerage, networked brokers share in sales commissions, so if you choose to list your boat with us, know that your boat also can be sold by a wide network of other brokers with no increase in commission. In fact, we will make our listing as detailed and attractive as possible to catch the eyes of other brokers as well as to inform potential buyers. Alternatively, should you work through us to buy a boat, even if we are not the listing broker, we can help you at no additional costs. Our advantages include being able to get candid information about prospective boats and their sellers, and helping you to then obtain the best deal possible.