Bolger Advanced Sharpie (As29)
Description
The Advanced Sharpie (AS) series represents a revolutionary family of plywood sailboats designed by the innovative American naval architect Phil Bolger (1927–2009), emphasizing simplicity, affordability, and seaworthiness for amateur builders. Introduced in the 1980s and refined through the 2000s, these flat-bottomed, hard-chined sharpies evolved from traditional East Coast fishing boats, incorporating Bolger's "advanced" refinements: rectangular sections, raised ends for reduced pounding, matched side/bottom curves, and efficient bilgeboard or leeboard systems. Unlike conventional keels, they use inside ballast and vertical boards for lift, enabling shallow-draft exploration while providing surprising stability and interior volume. The series spans daysailers to liveaboard cruisers (AS19 to AS39, with posthumous AS34), ideal for coastal cruising, gunkholing, or extended voyages. Over 100 examples have been built worldwide, often as DIY projects, and they're praised for low cost (~$10,000–$30,000 to build) and ease of maintenance.
The standard boat dimensions
| i | - |
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| j | - |
| p | - |
| e | - |
| p2 | - |
| e2 | - |
| i2 | - |
| j2 | - |
| I | J | P | E | P2 | E2 | I2 | J2 |
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| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
Blueprints
Sails
| Sail Type | DRIFTER |
|---|---|
| Luff | 22 ft - (6706 mm) |
| Foot | 12 ft - (3658 mm) |
| Leech | 20 ft - (6096 mm) |
| Area | * 119.06 ft² |
| Sail Type | ASYMMETRICAL |
|---|---|
| Luff | 22 ft - (6706 mm) |
| Foot | 12 ft - (3658 mm) |
| Leech | 20 ft - (6096 mm) |
| Area | * 198 ft² |
| Sail Type | GAFF MAIN |
|---|---|
| Luff | 13 ft - (3962 mm) |
| Foot | 19.83 ft - (6044 mm) |
| Leech | 28 ft - (8534 mm) |
| Tack Angle | * 86.3 ° |
| Diag (clew/throat) | 23 ft - (7010 mm) |
| Head | 16 ft - (4877 mm) |
| Area | * 312.63 ft² |
| Sail Type | LEG-O-MUTTON |
|---|---|
| Luff | 15 ft - (4572 mm) |
| Foot | 7 ft - (2134 mm) |
| Leech | 15.88 ft - (4840 mm) |
| Tack Angle | * 84.56 ° |
| Diag (clew/head) | 15.94 ft - (4859 mm) |
| Head (Inches) | 2 |
| Area | * 53.5 ft² |
Disclaimer. Boats are not all the same -- even when produced in the same factory of the same model. Sailrite does its best to publish accurate dimensions, but we often find it worthwhile to have our customers measure their boats carefully before we produce kits for them. You should take the same precautions, especially when the data is not from Sailrite. The information on this site is not guaranteed to be accurate. Sailrite offers this content as a service to our community, but takes no responsibility for the reliability of the data provided.