Metal boats have always fascinated me; something about the blend of strength, appearance, and versatility.

Here are some amateur reflections on fiberglass, steel, and aluminum sailboats.

Fiberglass

Glass Reinforced Plastic (GRP)—aka fiberglass—is ubiquitous in the sailboat industry. GRP can be handled with relative ease, is widely available, and with the right mold can be shaped into just about anything. Legend has it that old GRP sailboats were especially solid because early adopters were unsure how much plastic to use, so they used a lot. True or not, we were suitably impressed with the heft of our 1984 Cal 35. Our retired marina neighbor once told of early GRP boats being marketed with a bullet to the hull.

Despite unfortunate balsa missteps—whereby efforts to lighten the build led to delamination—it is hard to argue with the persistence of GRP boats. Indeed, they may have been too well made. Unlike the built-in redundancy we’ve grown to accept in modern consumer goods, some boat builders have needed to compete against the success and longevity of their own designs.

Why Metal?

Despite the allure of “better living through chemistry” in a fiberglass boat, we are northerners who pine for the fjords.

Metal boats seem to fare well, up yonder. Sure, wooden boats have transited the NW passage and even the occasional jetski has a go (spoiler alert - it didn’t go well). I’m not a betting man, but faced with an errant iceberg or unsurveyed shoal, I’d wager on metal.

Which metal?

Steel

Steel can be readily welded in your backyard, in a pinch you could probably weld a scrapped car door to your hull. Steel can be worked with a range of welding rigs and hand held tools. Heck, there are heaps of DIY boats for sale on Yachtworld and some are already setup for the our research activities of interest.

Yet, steel is not for us. In part, we were impressed—not in a good way—while repowering last summer in Maine, by a couple in year five of a steel boat refit. Five years, seriously! They’d pretty much sliced the boat in half. Plasma cut and welded the entire transom due to corrosion. That’s actually kind of cool, but way too intense for us. There is no way I could relax knowing that little red monsters in hidden nooks could be redoxing our hull away. Good maintenance and diligent grinding and painting help keep up with a steel boat, but we don’t want to be on the hook for that level of care.

Among other reasons, you can’t spray insulation on the steel since you need to access those nooks to inspect for rust. We’re looking for a bigger boat and the decision point for steel gets better with yugeness. But, in the 35’-45’ range the weight to length ratio of steels gets kattywompus—or antigoglin for the New Englanders.

Aluminum

There is no perfect material for boats. Limitations upfront:

• Yes, aluminum galvanizes and we may well become the anode for the whole marina’s stray current
• Ok, it can harder to weld and find expertise and material on distant shores … got it
• More expensive, roger that.

However, it’s wicked strong for it’s weight. You can use more, more thicker, at the sweet spot we seek for length (~40’). For sound and seasonality, you usually get spray insulation from the waterline on up. It can be performant. Plus, it looks good and I like the taste. Well the latter is more a function of aluminum water tanks. Note, a guy should definitely use a carbon filter when pumping chlorinated city water into their aluminum tanks. Those little flakes in your water pump screen are likely aluminum oxide. You want that to stay put on the tank surface, it’s gives an otherwise reactive metal it’s stability. Aluminum is somewhat self-healing. It oxides, but that white sheen then protects it from further corrosion. You don’t want to remove it by brushing, sanding, chipping or chlorinating the aluminum.

There’s also the environmental aspect. Plastics are a mess. We all know “that guy” who’s spent too much time doing boat yoga and huffing fiberglass fumes. Oh, and a mounting body of evidence that the indestructibility is leaving a scourge of trash of epic proportions: microplastics in the oceans (see campaign by Matt Rutherford) and remotest bodies of water (see plastics in Mongolia by olaf). These inputs were an element of my graduate work, and left their mark. As a child, my first 15 science fair projects were on sharks, but then I became a jaded concerned citizen scientist and did the next lot (including post-secondary work) on plastics. Not good.

Steel you can repurpose in creative ways. But it can be dirty, and well there’s that mining thing. Aluminum is no saint. It takes lots of energy to work with, there still the mining thing, and it persists. But, it has value (think cans) and can be almost infinitely recycled, with attention to purity, with relatively high conversion. This aspect makes living in a floating aluminum can seem even more agreeable to us.

The north is calling

I frequently daydream over Jimmy Cornell’s atlas, yearning for passage making to Svalbard. I’m continually astonished by how many others also pine for the fjords. This was echoed earlier today when I spoke with the previous owner of our Cal 35 who confessed he shared our desire to cruise north.

We met whilst collaborating at a research station in the north. We’re both of northern descent. We adore winter, snowflakes, saunas, frosty fringes, and the cold. When we’re not sailing, we’re skiing the backcountry.

There have a been an epic number of passages through the NW and NE passages of late. That’s a distant goal, requiring many more nautical miles of experience north of 60. However, a metal hull may tolerate being frozen in, all things being equal. It’d also suffer the indignities of ice and snow. For a full aluminum boat, I love the idea of being surrounded by a continuous cocoon of metal without pesky deck joins to drip icy water on your duvet.

Our next boat will be metal …

Tales of science, sails, and trails
     by Seafaring scientists in the new world