November 2026  Terrapin

By Mike & Debbie Lyons

We were anchored in the beautiful bay of Playa del Coco, on the northwest shore of Costa Rica.
A warm, tropical 15 knot wind blowing the sound of the Howler monkeys in the trees ashore out to us, when a Freedom 44 sailed into the crowded anchorage. Actually sailed in. Tacking here and there amongst the many anchored boats, the man at the helm spun the wheel this way and that until he found the spot he wanted. He came into the wind, sheeted the mizzen flat, and lowered the main from the cockpit. As the boat started to drift straight back, he walked forward and lowered the anchor. No drama, no stress, no bringing headsails from one side to the other, no cranking winches. Having recently arrived on our engineless cutter, this made an immediate impression on me;
I turned to my wife and said, “That’s the rig for our next boat!”

We found ourselves in that bay in Costa Rica because in 1995 my wife, Debbie and I, with our 16-month-old daughter, left California on a 25-ft, engineless, full keel cutter that we had spent 2 ½ years building from a fiberglass hull. We spent almost three years sailing from the west coast of the United States to the east coast by way of the Panama Canal. On that trip I kept a notebook of all of the things we wanted to change and have on the next boat. After spending a year of self study of yacht design, we designed and built Terrapin from the list in that notebook.

Terrapin is a 38’ 9” cat ketch; we were now a family of four and needed more room. And she is a ketch, because the sail area is divided into smaller sails making them easier for one person to manage. The ketch rig also lowers the center of effort, which reduces heeling forces, and offers sail balance options. And a cat because I was tired of headsails, I wanted all the working sail area in just the two sails. We learned early that we liked going where the water is thin, but also we wanted decent windward ability, so she has a longish, shallow keel, with a slot down the center for a centerboard. The draft is 4’ with the board up, and 7’ down. Because I'm a better carpenter than welder, she is plywood and epoxy. The topsides are two layers of plywood down to the waterline, while the round bottom is three layers of 9” wide plywood planks in a triple diagonal pattern. To keep the boat cooler in the tropics, and warmer in the colder latitudes, the plywood deck has a 1 ½” foam core. All exterior surfaces are covered in fabric and epoxy.

We originally planned to give Terrapin the Freedom rig, basically a free standing, two masted, cat ketch with triangular sails. But half way through the build I read Annie Hill’s book, Voyaging on a Small Income. I loved the spirit of the book, but wasn't immediately sold on the junkrig. I had experience with a true, built in Hong Kong, three masted, teak built junk that my father owned for many years. As a boy, I sailed that boat with him throughout San Francisco Bay, and Puget Sound; I had not been impressed. But Annie’s book eventually led me to the JRA around 2000. After ordering a bunch of back issues of the magazine, I don’t think the JRA was on the Internet yet, we decided the junkrig, with camber in the sails, was a perfect fit for the list in our notebook; lots of easily managed sail area, low tech, low center of effort. Other advantages of the rig that we discovered included, sails that are almost infinitely reefable, no flogging, and no booms to hit you.

So, half way through the build, we switched to the junkrig. This didn't really change the build much, except for one other advantage; because the junk is a quadrilateral sail and not a pointy triangular sail, we could build much shorter masts. We originally launched the boat with flat sails we sewed up, that had double ended cones as hinges in the battens. These worked quite well. But, when it was time to replace that set, we went with rigid battens and cambered panels. We have been quite happy with these sails as well.

After 4800 hours, spread out over six years, we launched Terrapin in 2007, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We spent part of the summer sailing on Lake Michigan before going down the rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. We have since sailed multiple times, up and down the eastern seaboard of North America from the Florida Keys to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Terrapin has proven to be everything we had hoped for, a stiff, fairly fast, weatherly, manageable cruising boat that has carried us safely over 16000 miles, to many interesting places, and people over the years.

Our "Boat of the Month" Archive is here, and the forum discussion for comments and candidate suggestions is here