Danube 6.4
The Danube 6.4 is a testament to the power of the internet! The client lives in Romania and fishes the Danube River Delta region. He contacted me after seeing my designs for Yar-Craft and wanted to know if I could design a similar boat for one-off construction. Evidently the fishing boat choices in Romania are not of very good quality and he feels he can build a better boat himself. I named the design in honor of the region where she was to be built.
The Danube Delta is a rather large area and is very remote in spots, so the boat had to be capable of fairly high speeds and have decent range. With fishing trips lasting a couple days at a time, the boat was to be equipped with a small refrigerator. I imagine it would be a first for a bay boat! She also had to be efficient as fuel in Romania is very expensive. To that end, I designed her to be light and to have an easy planing hull.
Her construction is Corecell™ foam cored fiberglass as good boat building wood is difficult to find. As you can see in the images, there will be one stringer per side supported by five frames and bulkheads. The casting platforms fore and aft, as well as the cockpit sole, are balsa cored composites glassed to the hull sides to create a stiffer structure. The stringers aft form two large knees to help support the transom and also form the sides of the motor well.
You will also notice that this boat was designed in 3D using Ashlar-Vellum Argon™. As I was going to create plywood mold frames to aid in the construction of the hull, I thought it better to model this hull from the very start. It worked out well and most of my new designs are now done this way. It also allows me to create images that show the boat a little more clearly than a standard 2D drawing. Just ignore the wild colors, they make it easier for me to see what I am doing!
This was never meant to be a complete design as the client wanted to create the deck himself. Since he failed to pay all of the design fees, I doubt this design will ever be built. I have considered finishing it off as a bay boat for home builders though. Most home builders are not interested in building a cored fiberglass boat, so I would have to change the construction to either cold-molding or strip planked composite. This would be a shame as foam cored composite really is a pretty straightforward method of building a boat and the finished boat is probably more valuable than a wooden boat in most peoples eyes. I still have this one on my list of things to do!
