Product Description

Cruising Designs is a catalog of plans for great cruising boats, sail and power, for living aboard. First published in 1975 and since become a classic of its kind, Cruising Designs is a collection of basic boat plans of a variety of Benford designs, ranging in size from 7 to 131 feet in length, selected from the custom designs created over the past three decades. It is designed as the spark to fire one's ideas about the sort of boat one really wants or to suggest an idea for a new boat. The fourth edition includes a number of designs new since the third edition. Heavily illustrated with photographs and plan drawings, Cruising Designs is a classic wish book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #335399 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 97 pages

Review
...a widely known yacht designer with a far-ranging imagination and great versatility, unbound by prejudices on materials or...construction." -- WoodenBoat Magazine

We could not believe it, a firm devoted almost exclusively to boats so salty that they made our eyes rust. -- Volume 6, The Mariner's Catalog

traditional...with contemporary elements, imaginative... unfettered by allegiance to rating rules or fashion, anachronistic, eclectic, eccentric...always effective... user-friendly." -- Pacific Yachting

About the Author
Jay Benford was taken sailing before he could walk, by parents unconcerned about the impressions being made on the youth. He was several years old before he determined that this might not have been perfectly normal procedure on the part of his parents. By then, of course, it was too late for he had become hooked on cruising. His school teachers' pointed remarks about the lack of variety on his book reports (always nautical books) seem to have been of no concern to him. His two years at the University of Michigan led to a much better knowledge of the location of the nautical sections of the libraries than the locations of his classrooms....

He says the best parts of his education were his apprenticeship with John Atkin and the subsequent jobs with a number of boatbuilding firms. After seven years of working for others, he opened his own yacht design office full time in the spring of 1969. Shortly thereafter he got a series of instructive lessons from his accountant in the use of red ink....

He has lived aboard for over a decade and a half, living on both sail and power boats, and brings this experience to all his design work. His recent design work varies from small craft to freighter yachts to a 40 meter (131') ketch. When not off cruising, he can be found in his St. Michaels, Maryland, office working on one of his dozen or so current design projects.