A salty collection of complete building plans for six small cruising boats, including a fantail steam launch (17' or 25'), working tugboat (14' or 20'), supply boat (20'), cruiser (14' or 20'), long-distance-sailing cruiser (14'), or fantail catboat (20'). Among the most popular designs offered by Benford, special effort has been made to reproduce the plans to scale, so that the builder will be able to work easily from the prints in the book.
Jay Benford was taken sailing before he could walk, by parents unconcerned about the impressions being made on the youth. He was several years old before he determined that this might not have been perfectly normal procedure on the part of his parents. By then, of course, it was too late for he had become hooked on cruising. His school teachers' pointed remarks about the lack of variety on his book reports (always nautical books) seem to have been of no concern to him. His two years at the University of Michigan led to a much better knowledge of the location of the nautical sections of the libraries than the locations of his classrooms....
He says the best parts of his education were his apprenticeship with John Atkin and the subsequent jobs with a number of boatbuilding firms. After seven years of working for others, he opened his own yacht design office full time in the spring of 1969. Shortly thereafter he got a series of instructive lessons from his accountant in the use of red ink....
He has lived aboard for well over a decade, living on both sail and power boats, and brings this experience to all his design work. His design work varies from small craft to freighter yachts to a 40 meter (131') ketch. When not off cruising, he can be found in his Easton, Maryland, office working on one of his current design projects.
