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Woods Designs specialise in the design of sailing catamarans for both home and professional builders. However we also have a small range of dinghies, trimarans and power catamarans. Scroll down to see the full list, divided into lengths and boat types. Read More...

Before deciding which boat to build it's worth getting as much information as possible. So apart from this web site we have produced lots more to help you. Read More ....

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Click here for Beach Cats and Dinghies (8 designs)

This range of rowing and sailing dinghies and off the beach catamarans complement the larger catamarans designed by Woods Designs

Click here for Trimarans Under 20ft (6 designs)

Six daysailing trimarans, each with a plywood hard chine main hull.

The Tryst 10 is based on the Duo dinghy. The Zeta 14 and Strike 15 are complete designs, while the Strike 16 and 18 use a beach cat for the rig and outriggers. The Strike 20 is a racing boat based on the F18 beach cat. 

Click here for 18ft to 25ft Catamarans (10 designs)

The 25ft and under range of designs comprise a variety of trailable boats, generally either with an open deck layout or with a central cuddy. These boats are suitable for daylight or overnight coastal and "cross-channel" sailing.

Note, Saylon has a full bridgedeck and, like its smaller sister Chat, is only suitable for inshore sheltered water sailing.

Study plans are available for purchase for all designs (except for Acorn, Chat, Eagle and Saylon which are available on their own pages as pdf downloads)

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Click here for 25ft to 30ft Catamaran Designs (7 designs)

The 25ft - 30ft range of designs comprise a wide variety of open deck and bridgedeck boats. These boats have limited load carrying ability and so if sailing long distances you will have to be careful not to overload them.

Study plans are available for purchase for all designs (except for Elf, Saturn and the Salish 28 which are available for free download on the design pages)

Download study plans cost GBP15.00.  To order studyplans please select from the correct box below 

Click here for Catamaran Designs Over 30ft (8 designs)

The over 30ft range of designs comprise both open and bridge deck cabin boats.

The range of designs comprise a wide variety of open deck and bridgedeck boats. These boats have added load carrying and increased seakindliness compared to smaller designs so are more suited for offshore sailing.

We do not recommend home builders to attempt a boat over 40 ft unless experienced and want a boat for charter or long term cruising. Most families will find that boats under 40 ft will comfortably meet their needs.

Study plans are available for purchase for all designs (except for Tamar, Vardo and Transit which are available on their own pages)

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Click here for Power Catamarans (8 designs)

In September 2010 we were very pleased to announce the launch of our first powercat design, the trailable Skoota 20. It was a very successful boat which we cruised for two seasons in British Columbia. Seven more powercat designs are now available. In addition to the Skoota 20 there is a centre cockpit, trailable Skoota 24. Next, the Skoota 28 is a transportable coastal cruiser, and was the Woods Designs floating office/cruising home for 7 happy and successful years.

Also in the portfolio are the Jazz 30, designed for fishing, day charter work or coastal cruising  The Skoota 32 which is available as a production boat or for home builders in flat panel foam sandwich. The Skoota 36, a really comfortable fast cruiser (available in two options) or, slightly modified, for use as a passenger ferry. All are semi displacement designs, so not designed for high speeds but rather for good fuel economy and a comfortable ride in any seastate. Finally there are the newest designs, the Skoota 18 which is based on the Chat 18 sailing catamaran. And the Aegean 30 which is a development of the Skoota 28

See this article for the reasons why we chose a Skoota 28 as our newest cruising boat

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Richard Woods

Woods Designs specialise in the design of sailing catamarans for both home and professional builders. Founded in 1981 we now boast possibly the largest and most comprehensive range of catamaran designs in the world. Designs range in size from 14’ to 45’ and types include beach catamarans, open deck cruising catamarans, bridgedeck cabin cruisers, racing catamarans and trailable boats. Boats can be built in a range of materials of which the most popular include sheet ply, cold moulded ply, strip plank cedar and foam sandwich. Email: [email protected]

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Catamaran Daggerboards and Keels – Woods Interview # 9

• Post author By Diane Selkirk
• Post date March 27, 2021
• No Comments on Catamaran Daggerboards and Keels – Woods Interview # 9

I am with Richard Woods, and we are talking about catamarans. He’s a legendary catamaran designer and experienced catamaran sailor of many different designs. This is one of several interviews we’re having on different topics. Today, we’re talking about daggerboards versus keels. Richard will tell us a little bit about how daggerboards work, how keels work, and what some of the benefits of each are.

For more from Richard Woods, please go to his website .

Richard, can you start off with what dagger boards and keels do for a boat?

There’s the three basic ways of preventing leeway, which is what you’re going to be doing with a multihull. On a monohull you’ve got the keel. Essentially, it’s for stability to balance the heeling, to stop the boat heeling too much. You don’t have that as a problem on a multihull. You are just trying to stop leeway.

You can do it either with using the hull shape, which would be like a Catalac or Wharram catamaran. Then the next would be to have keels. The third would be to have daggerboards.

You could essentially say that a catamaran with keels is a bit like a long-keel monohull, and the daggerboard catamaran is a fin keel monohull in more terms. I think we all know and all agree that the best sailing boats are going to be the one with fin keels. Then progressively a long-keel boat or keel or one with low aspect-ratio keels on the catamaran, that would be the next best. Then the one relying just on hull shape, whether it’s a test barge or a Catalac is going to be the the least good.

There’s two things on that. One is that the daggerboard prevents leeway better, but also prevention of or reduction of pitching, increasing potential top speed. You want to have buoyancy at the ends of the boat and not in the middle. You imagine a diamond shape sailing to windward, and it pitches up and down, up and down, and you end up hobby-horsing. Whereas a boat with fuller ends isn’t going to do that. Unfortunately, the thing with their keels, is that the buoyancy is more in the middle of the boat.

So there’s the two factors: one is the the sea kindliness of having daggerboards, and the other is the better performance.

A daggerboarded boat is always better, but it does have some disadvantages. The main one is that if you want to beach your boat or dry it out. To me, that’s always a major advantage of a multihull. You got to be able to have lifting rudders, and essentially, you don’t want your propeller to be the deepest part of the boat, or if you’ve got an inboard engine.

The daggerboarded boats work really well when you’ve got outboard engines and when you’ve got tiller steering, because it makes it easier to get the rudders. It is still possible on bigger boats and you can also have a bit of a compromise of having a small keel, and then the daggerboard. Or you can have like your boat was, which had daggerboards in the lead hull, so you didn’t need to lift the rudders. The rudders are still higher than the bottom of the keel.

Although there’s a lot of places in the world where you don’t have to beach the boat, the most obvious to say: the Great Lakes in North America, Florida, the Bahamas, most of the Caribbean in fact, you don’t have to. The Mediterranean. They don’t have tides and so you’re not in the beach.

I’ll just show you this. I’m just going to turn the camera around a bit now. As you can see, this is our house now. In fact, it’s low water and we have about an 18-foot tidal rise, so that’s more than you. It actually is neat, so it goes up quite a bit further. But we are used to drying out for six hours a day, every day when we moor our boats. So for us, it’s much more important to have good protection for the bottom of the boat.

If you’re sailing in Florida and then you sail up to say, Cape Maine, you suddenly get to the box and you get this 10, 12-foot tide, and you do want to go around, either deliberately or what not. With daggerboarded boats, you’ve got to think about a lot more when you’re beaching a boat.

The interior room, you might think that was a problem. But usually you can make the daggerboard, say, fit around the side of a heads compartment, or the galley worktop, or something like that, so it’s never really a problem. You can have the dagger board on the inside or the outside of the hull, it doesn’t seem to make much of a problem either.

But the other thing is that the daggerboards are more expensive to make because you’ve got to make the daggerboard case, which is in effect, same as making a keel. Then the daggerboard and then the controls for the daggerboard, so that all adds to cost and complication.

And there’s definitely a learning curve to knowing how to use the daggerboard effectively, and have that experience. So are they less of a beginner kind of attribute on a catamaran and more of a somebody who’s been sailing for a while?

Yes. There’s no point really, in having daggerboards if you’re not going to use them. Essentially, that means having them in simplest, both down sailing to windward, and then lift the leeboard when you’re reaching, and lift both when you’re sailing downwind. That’s the normal.

But you can have the position of, if you’re sailing in big seas, especially big quartering sea downwind, the tail wags the dog. In other words, the rudder steers, and it’s not actually doing anything, because there’s no hull in the water. Then, it makes it a lot easier having the daggerboards both half down.

So yes, you learn quite quickly how your boat behaves according to whether the daggerboards are up or down.

The other thing that I found, is that a lot of people, when they break a daggerboard, it tends to be the lead daggerboard that breaks. When you’re sailing, that’s the side that gets powered up when you’re pushing down on being hit by a wave, and pushing sideways tends to break the daggerboard.

Of course the other thing is, it’s quite a good ultimate echo sounder. We have never actually broken a daggerboard, on any boat, I don’t think. When we were, this is a good excuse because it was an unmarked reef, but we were sailing off Nicaragua, and we were sailing at eight knots. We hit a reef with the daggerboard and the boat stopped dead. In fact, my wife fell over. It was driving a car at 10 miles an hour into a wall, sort of effect, and once we sorted ourselves out, and we lifted the daggerboard, we lost about the trailing edge, about a foot by four inches being totally destroyed. We had a mill u-volt, a 5/16th u-volt, as an up haul, and that was bent completely flat by the force of the boat stopping.

I guess it was a sacrificial item!

We still sailed.

Right. That’s what I’m thinking. Rather than hitting the reef with your boat, you hit it with something sacrificial. They can be expensive to replace, but…

Yes. We didn’t hit it with the boat, no. We hit it with something that we could carry on for another three months before we actually had it taken out of the boat and repaired.

Of course, that’s always something. If you can take the broken bit to the mechanic, or to the boat yard, that’s always better than doing it the other way around. Usually, you can carry on sailing with one daggerboard or two half-daggerboards, whatever, but it is quite a common problem.

As I say, if you’ve got a conventional inboard engine with fixed rudders, there are quite a lot of multihulls around, even here, but they’re treated like monohulls. You can’t, for example, go to the Scilly Isles and go to Hawaii, and Green Bay, which is a wonderful place to spend a lifetime, really. It’s the nearest the equivalent of going into the Bahamas. But you can’t do that if you’ve got a boat you can’t dry out.

I guess that’s why multihulls became so much more popular in the UK before other places.

Everything in design, it’s always interconnected. Going back to the comfort, and the rolling. If you look at the Scilly Isles, which are 30 miles off the Southwest corner of England, sort of like saying you’re going out of Miami, and there’s the Bahamas. It’s not quite that far, but it’s pretty near the same as going to Bimini.

There’s a whole stack of islands, but the pilot guide says there is no safe anchorage, because it was written by a monohull sailor. We’ve been and they say, “You know, if you go into this anchorage, then you’re going to be as protected as you can be.” We’ve been into those anchorages, and they’ve been horrible, because you’re open to when the tide’s in. You’re open to the ocean because when they’re out, it’s out in the Atlantic. When you can dry out, you go onto these lovely sandy beaches, and you can dry out and you’re safe then.

Well that’s cool. So thank you Richard, that was fascinating on daggerboards and keels.

• Tags Buying Advice , Richard Woods

By Diane Selkirk

I love to travel and have spent the past seven years sailing with my family aboard our 40 Woods Meander catamaran - traveling from B.C.'s north coast, to the west coast of the US, Mexico, the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia, across the Indian Ocean to South Africa and on to St Helena, South America, the Caribbean and Central America.

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• Payware Airports and Scenery Reviews

Scenery Review : Moscow City XP by Drzewiecki Design

• drzewiecki design

By Stephen September 24, 2016 in Payware Airports and Scenery Reviews

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You fly for hours, anticipating your arrival, wanting to take in the area and the views of another country far away from your departure airport. The airport and the area you leave from is detailed and visually full, and you know you have a great airport scenery waiting for you at the other end of the flight, then when you arrive...

...  Nothing, but flat plain emptiness and the same boring standard X-Plane basic scenery, worse there is no OSM (Open Street Map) data in the tile either, so there is no road or autogen detailing in there as well, just well nothing.

When Drzewiecki Design released their UUEE Sheremetyevo Airport XP , I loved it because it was like a visitor from the Cold War past, the Soviet era, and it was also great scenery and great choice of a destination to fly to from any of the capitals of Europe...  but that was it, just this great airport in the middle of nothingness, bland....   zero ville.

Now Drzewiecki Design has released "Moscow City"  a scenery package to compliment their UUEE Sheremetyevo, and boy how much a difference this release has done to this totally boring area.

To get the full first impression effect I flew JARDesign's A320neo from EFHK Vatnaa, Helsinki to UUEE Sheremetyevo which is flight Finnair AY153 which is a daily 9.25am service.

First Impressions

I was surprised to start picking up scenery still quite away out from central Moscow, as I approached my 6000ft transition altitude. Here there was buildings and houses and the physical visual notes you were arriving somewhere.

Looking hard at the horizon through the A320's windows and you could see the iconic silhouette of Moscow city.

The scenery provides lite versions of all Moscow's Airports, this is UUWW Vnukovo, which was easily recognisable as you flew over. As you fly closer to the centre of the city the density of the objects below becomes quite heavy as the landscape fills in. You have all kinds of infrastructure including, blocks of flats, tower blocks, factories, housing, skyscrapers and almost everything that makes up an urban landscape, in all there is 2000 custom-made buildings that makes up this impressive scenery.

A note here in that you don't get that rolling as you move feeling effect where as it just suddenly appears in front of you and then quickly disappears behind as soon as you have flown out over the area. There is a slight effect of that as there has to be, but only in the far distance and as you can see from the images the views in every direction are widespread and visually it is very good to excellent.

The "Seven Sisters" or "Stalinist skyscrapers" built from 1947 to 1953 are all in the scenery with their "Wedding Cake" architecture or officially  Russian Baroque               - Gothic style. Most famous is the Moscow State University, front and centre of the image below.

Central Moscow is excellent and extremely realistic, and you really need a travel guide to pick out the landmarks and detail, but it is hard to miss the Red Kremlin complex  and St Peter's square from the air.  Both sides of the aircraft is visually full until you have crossed right over the city.

I am not a fan of the generated 3d OSM scenery, but this is very good in blending in perfectly with the X-Plane default scenery and giving you a smooth transition from country to urban and back again with great realism.

Over the city and turning north towards Sheremetyevo, another Moscow airport UUMU Chkalovsky is represented on the turn.

The city skyline is now easily visible on landing at Sheremetyevo, and that really helps in the arrival factor, more so in that the cities building infrastructure spread now comes up and around the airport to fill the gaps to the city itself, and making the original  Sheremetyevo scenery that was so open and lonely in the old X-Plane view is now a big part of the whole in this combination. No doubt it really brings this always good scenery now alive and very usable.

Sheremetyevo Airport

Before we move on to the city itself. It is important to note the area around UUEE Sheremetyevo itself.

Compare the large image above to the earlier image at the start of this review to see the amount of change there is around UUEE Sheremetyevo with the addition of this Moscow City package. The two sceneries are of course meant to be used together, and in reality it would look odd if you had Moscow City scenery installed without the Sheremetyevo scenery included to fill out the northern areas. A highlight is that both sceneries together form a single whole, as the areas between the airport and the central city area are well filled in and that gives you a huge area of coverage and the full visual aspect.

To get a closer lower look at the Moscow Center I commandeered Dreamfoil's lovely Bell 407.

There is a 4.000km² total area covered with this scenery here, and you have expect some sort of building replication to cover all that ground. There is of course but as well in the fact there is also enough variations as to not keep it all interesting and not obviously visually obvious.

The closer you go to the central area, the variations in the buildings change there in style and density as well. And then more of the iconic buildings start to appear as you get closer in again to the middle. The business district is excellent, with a lot of business towers and the more modern futuristic skyscraper architecture that stands out in every view point in eye scans across the city.

The more recent is in tune with the more older Stalinist era that makes up the Moscow skyline.

The Kremlin Complex and the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed (St Basil's) is excellently represented and so is "Red Square"

There are Orthodox churches everywhere and all the big icons in the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Grand Arena of the Central Lenin Stadium, Otkrytive Arena and department stores, museums and power stations and more....

I did have issues with many buildings floating, including the Kremlin. I tried both "Runways follow terrain contours" on and off with no flattening of the objects and there is no information in the manual either on how to fix the problem.

Night lighting is very good, yes there is again a repeatable pattern to the majority of the hundreds of the apartment blocks that does stand out, but the more individual buildings do all have that personal touch and some buildings look really very good.

The highlight here is the business district which looks magnificent and is very realistic from any direction at night as is the lit Stadium.

Although away from the central area the Ostankino Tower that stands 540.1 metres (1,772 ft) tall, and is the tallest freestanding structure in Europe and it looks great at night and is a very good position indicator from the air from any direction.

Included Moscow Airports

As noted also included in the scenery are seven airports and several helipads.

UUWW Vnukovo

The futuristic Vnukovo International is very good for a lite version, with great terminals and lots of small detailing. Only thing missing is the static aircraft and a bit more ramp equipment, but otherwise it is highly usable.

UUDD Domodedovo

The oldest of Moscow's International airports is Domodedovo. Again it is quite devoid of static aircraft and I am not crazy about the blue terminal glass work, but it is still a very workable scenery to use and has a lot of well made objects.

UUBW Zhukovsky

Zhukovsky was a major aircraft testing facility since the  cold war years, with most of the major Russian Experimental Design Bureau's having facilities here. It is also now used by the Ministry of Emergency Situations! and cargo carriers. It was also used as a test site for the Soviet Buran  reusable Spacecraft because it has the world's second longest pubic runway at at 5,402 m (17,723 ft). Mostly it is a collection of very large hangars but has a lot of static aircraft in storage.

UUMO Ostafyevo International Business Airport

A former military airbase. Ostafyevo features a new modern glass terminal, and caters primarily to business aviation.

UUMU Chkalovsky

Chkalovsky is a military logistics airport that is famous for it's support for the Russian Space program and transport to Star City and the Yuri A. Gagarin State Scientific Research-and-Testing Cosmonaut Training Center. Yuri Gagarin left here on his final flight before crashing by the town of Kirzhach.

UUBM Myachkovo Airport

Myachkovo is a small General Aviation Airport that is owned by the Finpromko company. Cargo aircraft up to the size of the Ilyushin ll-76 freighter can also use the airport.

UUMB Kubinka

Kubinka has been a significant Russian military airbase and large airshows are held here to show off the Russian military might.

There is also provided UUU1 Kremlin Airport, within the Kremlin walls, but I couldn't get it to work? There are two pads in H1 and H2.

Your first thoughts after reviewing this excellent Moscow scenery is not with this actual package. You then wish that you could have this extensive scenery at London, Rome, Madrid, Berlin and the list could go on with any of your favorite European Cities, and don't count a load in the Middle East and Asia. But a London scenery like this would certainly be a godsend in our X-Plane world. Drzewiecki Design has already done Warsaw and Manhattan, so there is always hope.

It is not cheap either and you need to add in their UUEE Sheremetyevo scenery package on top of that as well. But you get an awful lot of ground covered here for your money, with the area covered here that is extensive...  huge and flying into Moscow will never be the same again.

A few areas to note in one that in my case a few of the buildings floated, the download is huge load at 1.4gb and this Russian area is not the best for navigation aids and programming FMS units as most waypoints are not recognised. Most of the airports ILS coordinates also have to checked and recalibrated (Drzewiecki Design do provide all the correct coordinates) so there is a little work to do to set up repeat services but the work is worth the results.

Not only is the actual Moscow city and all it's buildings supported, you also get seven (if lite versions) of Moscow's other airports included as well, but the framerate processing of all this huge amount of objects and scale is pretty good to excellent. Framerate does hurt more on a lower (helicopter) level and certainly you need a computer with a little extra power is in no doubt required, but overall for the size of the area the scenery is extremely efficient.

Yes I was impressed by this Moscow City Scenery, as this once very barren area of X-Plane is now a very attractive repeat destination as nothing can give you a greater fulfilment than seeing your destination appear in the distance and then give you a huge visual experience as you fly over and approach your destination.

Moscow City certainly delivers that and more...  Just more sceneries like this please!

Moscow City XP by Drzewiecki Design is NOW available! from the X-Plane.Org Store here :

• Extremely detailed model of Moscow metropolitan area in Russia
• Almost 2000 custom-made buildings and other objects, all high quality, FPS-friendly and with night textures
• Whole Moscow center done in 3D as well as all other important landmarks - museums, palaces, skyscrapers, towers, bridges, railway stations, Zara stores...
• Trains, ships, 3D people, cars, airport vehicles, static aircraft - anything you can imagine
• About 4000 sq.km of photoreal 0,5-1m/pix terrain with autogen
• Sceneries of all surrounding airports including UUWW Vnukovo, UUDD Domodedovo, UUBW Zhukovski, UUMO Ostafyevo, UUBM Myachkovo and UUMB Kubinka, with all airport buildings, detailed layouts, people, airport vehicles and more
• Very detailed Kremlin model with newly constructed heliport

Requirements

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Installation and documents:

Download for the Moscow City XP is 1.47gb and the unzipped file is deposited in the "Custom Scenery" as four files:

DDZ Moscow City XP (3.99gb) - Yes GIGABYTES!

DDZ Moscow City XP Layer 2 (30.20mb)

DDZ Moscow City XP Documents (1.0 mb)

ZZZ_DDZ Moscow City XP Terrain (20.10mb)

Installation for Windows comes with an .exe installer that deposits the files in the correct order required (however I still moved the ZZZ- folder to the bottom via the INI text install list.

Installation Instructions are provided for Mac and Linux

You need to check all airports ILS coordinates are correct, instructions are provided.

Documents: Two documents include

Moscow City XP MacLinuxinstall

Moscow City XP Manual (seven pages)

Review System Specifications:

Computer System : Windows  - Intel Core i7 6700K CPU 4.00GHz / 64bit - 16 Gb single 1067 Mhz DDR4 2133 - GeForce GTX 980/SSE2 - Samsung Evo 512gb SSD 

Software :   - Windows 10 - X-Plane 10 Global ver 10.50

Addons : Saitek x52 Pro system Joystick and Throttle : Sound - Bose  Soundlink Mini

Plugins: JARDesign Ground Handling Deluxe US$14.95 : WorldTraffic US$29.95

Scenery or Aircraft

- Airbus A320neo by JARDesign ( X-Plane.OrgStore ) - US$59.95 : A320neo Sound Packs by Blue Sky Star Simulations ( X-Plane.OrgStore ) - US$19.95

- Bell 407 by Dreamfoil Creations ( X-Plane.OrgStore ) - US$34.95

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• 7 months later...

Thank you for this very thorough (as always) review. I just bought it (it's on sale) and have only one disappointment so far: Red Square has no ILS or any landing aids at all for that matter. And what a nightmare of an approach! Also I was hoping the package would include an add-on that gives my c172 a big cup holder for my Stoli. Otherwise the scenery is gorgeous. What a country!

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