Saturday Night Special
Description
The Saturday Night Special (often abbreviated SNS) is a small, fast, lightweight sailboat designed by New Zealand naval architect John Welsford (JW Boat Designs). It's a modern plywood stitch-and-glue (or glued-lapstrake option) daysailer/beach cruiser/raid boat, created around 2011 as a quick-build, affordable "throwaway" solution specifically for events like the Texas 200—a challenging 200-mile coastal small-boat adventure along the Texas Gulf Coast. The name playfully references cheap, disposable "Saturday night special" handguns, implying a no-frills boat you could build fast, use hard, and even discard if needed (though most builders keep them as fun performers). The design proved so capable that it evolved beyond its original intent: excellent planing performance, good stability, shallow draft for beaching, and suitability for singlehanded or two-up sailing, including camping aboard with minimal gear. It's popular in the wooden boat community for home builders, small-boat rallies, raids, and casual fast daysailing.
Construction Details
| Designer | John Welsford |
|---|---|
| Builder | Home Built |
| Length | 14.670 ft |
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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| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
Documents
Sails
Saturday Night Special - STANDING LUGSAIL
| Luff | 11.319 ft - (3450 mm) |
|---|---|
| Foot | 10.006 ft - (3050 mm) |
| Leech | 16.043 ft - (4890 mm) |
| Tack Angle | * 84.01 ° |
| Diag (clew/throat) | 14.304 ft - (4360 mm) |
| Head | 6.693 ft - (2040 mm) |
| Area | * 104.15 ft² |
| Edit in Calculator |
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.
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