Boat Design Questions

People often ask me about Liv's design and whether I designed her myself. The answer is that she was designed by Phil Morrison, an experienced UK-based yacht designer who has designed more or less every successful ocean row boat of the last decade. In fact, I'm not aware of any designer other than Phil that has designed more than one ocean rowboat. Here's the general arrangement:

The design for Liv was the product of eight months of back and forth collaboration between Phil and I, begining in September of 2006. Going in to the project I had done months of research on existing ocean row boats and concluded that the first generation of plywood constructed (I'm not kidding) boats weren't for me. Many of these boats are more than a decade old, are incredibly heavy, prone to rot, and are designed to be rowed by two people rather than one.

My solution was to have Phil design a boat to provide minimal accomdations for a single rower, to be constructed of 100% composite materials (i.e. no wood). Though composites materials (carbon fiber, fiberglass, etc...) cost more, Liv weighs in (unladen) at only 450 pounds, just over half of the weight of the traditional 25-foot first generation plywood boats.

Here's another look at her lines: