Michael Porter, Marine Design -Live & Work Anywhere


Michael Porter MARINE DESIGN SYSTEMS ENGINEERING CONSULTING 27 Soule Road Chebeague Island, Maine, U.S.A. 04017 Fax: +1 (207)846-1083 Email: mporter@mp-marine.com
This boat is intended to allow two middle-aged people to live and work almost anywhere one can go by water, getting there with reasonable dispatch and with a reasonable degree of comfort and safety, and living there in a relatively uncompromised lifestyle. This is explicitly different from more conventional 'cruising,' which I (at least) define as time out of one's ordinary life, a time free from outside constraints except the pleasant ones imposed by the medium. (My first attempt to become a turtle, carrying my house around with me, was in Switzerland, where I lived for a time in a Citroen 2CV panel truck, where there was just room to stretch out if one folded the passenger seat, traveling around and pounding out a dissertation on a tiny portable typewriter.)

		A key element of the dream is that the boat, the clients' home, should carry them wherever they want to go, from the coast of Maine to the Caribbean to the canals and rivers of Europe, and allow them to work there without major readjustments. Her accommodations are relatively simple compared with those of most sixty-foot power boats and, except for the large engineroom, are more like those of a sailboat of her size. There is no hot tub or wet bar (although of course there could be). For ease of maintenance, she will be finished like a high-end commercial vessel, with all steel-work painted with modern coating systems. Mechanical equipment on this boat will be apparently complex but actually quite simple, complex in the functions performed, but simple in the way these functions are carried out. With everything out in the open in a spacious engineroom, maintenance is a simple chore.

The canals complicate the design problem; the great rivers, the Rhine, the Elbe, the Seine, can handle almost any size craft, but most of the French canals were built to conform to the Freycinet Act of 1879 (a great improvement at the time) and allow a draft of five feet, a beam of sixteen feet, and a height above water of just over eleven feet. The price of her all-around ability is that she can't fit in the very smallest canals, but she can certainly travel though 95% of European waterways. The picture to the right shows her in canal trim with her foremast lowered.
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In these photos she is shown on her home mooring, still light and riding high, with her interior yet to be completed by her owner.



For some renderings of the interior arrangements, click here		The Working Waterfront carried an article about this boat in December, 2004.
The builder:
Construction Comments and Photos (Part 1: Up to Rollover): Construction Weblog Part 1
Construction Comments and Photos (Part 2) Construction Weblog_Part 2
Construction Comments and Photos (Part 3: Moving from the Fabrication Shop to the Boat Yard, and then Launching!) Construction Weblog_Part 3
Construction Comments and Photos (Part 4: Work on the Interior) Construction Weblog_Part 4