BUNDUKI is a sport boat built to Australian John Georgalas’s Deep V 16′ design. Initially, the design was to be a one-off for an American friend, but the drawings have since been made available through John’s company, Classic Wooden Boat Plans (CWBP). For this design, John was inspired by the 17′ WYNN-MILL II, designed by Jim Wynn in the early 1960s. That boat was raced with great success, including a victory in the six-hour Paris Race. Wynn subsequently collaborated with Walt Walters and Don Aronow on a production version, the Ski Sporter, which was later dubbed, and became much better known as, the Sweet 16. That was the first boat built by Aronow’s company, Donzi Marine, after it was formed in 1964.The Sweet 16 was about a foot shorter than WYNN-MILL II, and it lacked the original boat’s pronounced tumblehome aft, presumably because of the practicalities of molding it in fiberglass. At the height of production, 20 of these boats were produced each month. President Lyndon Johnson owned one, and the Israeli armed forces had a dozen of them, some of which saw action in the 1967 Six Day War.The original brochure for the Sweet 16 described it as the “softest riding, driest high-speed sports boat ever built.” The 24-degree deadrise would have contributed to those characteristics, and this has been retained in the Deep V design, as has WYNN-MILL II’s tumblehome, which John and his American friend particularly admired.
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This article is great! Keep them coming. This is the type of article that will attract more and younger people to building wooden boats. This type of wooden boat plays into a completely different market than you have been trying to attract. I am pretty sure this market is much bigger than you think.
A job very well done! Congratulations, and thanks for the article. I very much fancy a Wyn-Mill II, but without as much tumblehome. It would be great with a Volvo 4-cylinder diesel, say a D3-170, and drive leg!
There is a reference to regret about not lofting, but do the plans come with a full table of offsets? If the plans do not come with a full set of offsets, any clarification on whether the reference is to some intermediate step like using battens to make sure lines taken off the full size plans are fair as transferred to frames?
I forwarded the questions to John Georgalas at Classic Wooden Boat Plans. Here’s his reply:
“All of the frames are included in the plans as full-size patterns. They’re saved as PDF files, so all the builder needs is a Kinko’s nearby for printing. All frames have notches premarked so fairing is easy. The height above baseline is also provided. Lofting really isn’t necessary unless the builder wants to change the overall shape or size.
We’re happy to offer advice and help. Just send us an email. We provide free changes to all plans sold, mostly buyer-requested custom dash boards or engine beds. One builder, Stu Stocker, wanted a transom to suit an Alpha One leg and engine beds to fit a standard V-6 Mercruiser. We adapted the plans for him and the combination he chose to power his boat worked very well. It puts it up on a plane very quickly.”
Christopher Cunningham, Editor