BUILDING NEMO — I
n January, the Latitude 38 editorial dungeon received an enthusiastic call from Ron Moore, who was eager to show us the latest boat he was building. "I am completely consumed by the project," he said. You may recognize the name — Ron Moore is the builder of the George Olsondesigned Moore 24, one of the most successful keelboats to ever grace West Coast waters.
A modern computer rendering rests on the drafting table next to old-fashioned pencil drawings and wafers of bulkhead material.
Moore's customer in the new project is Terry Alsberg, another icon of Santa Cruz boat building; Alsberg Brothers Boatworks built the Carl Schumacherdesigned Express 27s, 37s, and 34s in the 1980s. The new boat will be called Nemo, after an Express 27 Alsberg used to own. Nemo came out of the Express 27 mold in '86 or '87; it was never intended to be a stock boat, but rather a 'funny car'. 'Nemo's stainless steel keel is a work of art. "Ron filled it with epoxy foam so it's devoid of any air inside that can distort it," said Alsberg.
"It's a wider layup than a stock 27," said Terry Alsberg. "It's got more glass in it. And we thought we would slice down the shear about 6 inches to reduce windage and weight aloft, and make a flush-deck boat that's just a pure race boat. So we built a custom deck for it. And we put in some stringers that went fore and aft to support the cockpit. "In 1988, after we got the project to a certain stage, the Boatworks went bellyup, and this sat on Moore's Reef, where I had learned how to build boats working for Ron. He had a storage yard there with various ferrocement monstrosities and orphan trimarans that were hard on the hard. I was bankrupt and eventually couldn't pay the rent, so Ron repo'd it and sold it. It ended up in Stockton. And then Rob Grant got hold of it." Grant was the racing editor at Latitude 38 at the time. "Rob calls me up and says, 'I hear you had something to do with this boat I bought; I just wanted to know how I should finish it off.' I said, 'You don't want to build it. You want me to build it.' So I sweet-talked him into selling it to me for what he paid for it: $2,500 including a rusty old trailer. "I picked it up and was trying to figure out where I could get it built. Bill Riedel runs Stretch Surfboards in Santa Cruz. He used to work for me, and he was back over on Tower Place where my company used to be. They took the deck off and tore out a bunch of the interior." But Riedel didn't have time to work on it because the surfboard shop is so busy. "I ran into Ron and Martha one afternoon and I said, 'Hey, you still building boats?' and Ron said yeah, and I said, 'You want to build one?' He said, 'Yeah, I'd love to do that.' So I rolled it on over here." Work on Nemo began in earnest last April. Ron finished removing the rest of the bad interior. Some water had gotten into the hull so he drilled some holes in it and got the water out. "The hull is tip-top now," he said. "We're pretty confident that the hull is uber sound," agreed Terry. The deck had a few flaws in it too, which Ron repaired. "We changed our concept about how
the interior was to be done," said Terry. "I started thinking that this thing's basically a big girder — my background is architecture and structural engineering. You have two skins you hold apart with some verticals, so I thought how about if we just break the hull up lengthwise." The carbon bulkheads are about four feet apart. They must weigh something, but when you pick up a slice of the material, it feels weightless. "This is going to make the whole thing into one big box girder that's very stiff on the ends. Boats get a torsion load because you've got a rig pulling one direction, a keel pulling the other direction, and the rudder pulling in another direction. By locking bulkheads athwartships all up and down, we take out those torsional forces. It should be hella stiff." "It's like the Moore 24. It's overbuilt," said Ron. "The way Terry has the keel connect to the hull is very different. Projecting out of the top of the foil are four tapered tabs that fit in matching slots that are also tapered. You wouldn't even need nuts and bolts to hold it in." "In Santa Cruz we always attached our keels on a stubby," said Terry. "We like stubbies as a way to ease the forces into the hull, rather than just have a hard force on a right angle to the hull surface. In the past when we used to at-
