PDRacer.com Cheap, Creative, and Having Fun On The Water
Why We Don't Have Required Plans
The required hull shape.
With almost every other sailboat class, the way it works is you buy a set of plans that the class sells, and then build that exact boat (or buy one). Their class rules are setup so that all the boats are as identical as they can enforce, so that the only unique part of the boat ends up being the paint job.
The Puddle Duck Racer is the opposite: There are no required plans, I prohibit the sale of pdracer plans , instead we have a hull shape that we all conform to as specified by the Class Rules . We have an emphasis on sharing boat building information and plans for free, duckers are encouraged to learn how to design and configure their boat, connect with other duckers to discuss how to build them, then you build a duck the way YOU want to, and go play & race them the way YOU think is fun. Even though we have hundreds of boats on the water, no two of them are the same.
The feeling of earning the satisfaction of designing, building and sailing your own boat is incredible. You can't purchase this, nobody can do it for you, it can only be claimed through your actions. Above and beyond that, you have advanced your personal understanding of how things work and accomplished a goal which is something you keep personally with you for the rest of your life.
Don't worry about screwing up
She really is the easiest boat in the world to build, even when you design her all yourself. Since the hull has almost no resale value, you don't have to worry about cosmetic issues. The most important part is to start building and get on the water so you can gain real world experience. With that experience and meeting with other duckers to sail together and share information, you will develop new ideas of things you want to try and can start modifying your boat to test them out. The hull is very easy to modify, the internal parts are easy to change and worse case scenario, you can build another hull and move your number over to it. .
If it ain't broke, go ahead and fix it anyway
Modifying our boats is a fun part of our hobby and enjoyed just as much as the sailing and racing part. Doesn't matter if there is a common solution to a problem, often we will over think things and that process seems to reveal the truly unique & simple solutions to problems. Or maybe you want to try a complicated solution just to see if you can get it to work. Some duckers organize competitions based on utilizing limited materials which is a fun design challenge. Doesn't matter, she is your boat, you should explore ideas and try them out in the real world to see what happens. If you don't like the results, then figure something else, make the modifications and try again. Just incase, always take a set of oars so you can row back to the dock.
Innovative Duckers
Since our club pushes everyone to learn and create a configuration of their boat, and duckers join with other local duckers to create events they think are fun, we have a group of the brightest most creative innovators. And that is the reason you continually hear about puddle duckers improvising their way out of any problem, often with just the materials in the near vicinity, and helping other sailors. Ask around and you will see what I am talking about. What the average person thinks is a problem, looks like an engineering challenge to a ducker.
Popular Hull Configurations
End Airboxes
The most popular configuration of the PDRacer is the "End Airboxes", called that because the flotation airboxes are built into the ends. The nice thing about this configuration is that it has a lot of interior room for passengers, drink cooler and your dog. She is very simple and quick to build, you can build her with 2 weekends worth of work, and go sailing on the 3rd weekend.
The drawback of the design, is that if you knock her over on her side, after reboarding you have a few gallons of water to bail out. For pictures of this, see the emergency flotation page . This configuration is best for recreational use.
Full Length Side Airboxes
The second most popular configuration, she has air boxes that extend the full length of the sides. The big advantage of this configuration, if you knock her over during a race and then right her, there is almost no water left in the cockpit. See the emergency flotation page .
The side decks also provide a great seat for when you are hiking out. The disadvantage of this configuration is a reduced amount of inside cockpit space so there will be less room for people to sit inside the boat.
This configuration is better for hard core racing, and also has been proven to be a able to withstand extreme weather in excursion events such as Scott Widmier during one of the worst weather years of the Everglades Challenge .
As you can see from this photo, there isn't much to her and she is just as simple as the end airbox design except the airboxes are on the sides. Make 4 of our hull panels, attach a bottom, deck over the top and poof she is 3D. Some people cut all 4 panels at the same time.
Examples of Puddle Ducks
Free pdracer boat plans, shorty's simple 18 pdracer plans, free plans from duckers, free puddle duck plans in pdf format.
Please note: Some plans may have incorrect dimensions and other problems. Please make sure to use the rocker shape shown on the class rules page and review the other class rules so you will know what is (and is not) class legal.
Getting Help Building Your PDRacer
You should start off by studying the freely available materials from this website and others. Many duckers are able to build their boats from just those free materials. The next step should be to contact other local duckers to get advice from them, especially since after you build your boat, you can go sailing with them. Here are suggestions for Contacting Other Duckers . There are many great books about building boats.
Make sure to keep in mind how others helped you build your duck, so when the time comes you can help another new ducker build theirs. That way you pay it forward.
Site Map Articles Members Free PDRacer Plans Contact Shorty Books Search Advertise At PDRacer.com Support the club: Get a HIN Plate or Donate Subscribe To The PDRacer Newsletter
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[ >> NEXT, I start Building ]
I decided to make a new Boat, a Puddle Duck Racer
- Part One, What's a Puddle Duck?
- Starting to Build
- My Puddle Duck Racer goes 3D It's official, I get my hull number.
- Next, I add flotation compartment.
- Bottom gets fiberglassed and Gunnels are added.
- Daggerboard case and seat get made.
- Making the daggerboard.
- Adding weight to the daggerboard
- Making the kick up rudder along with a tiller.
- I made a wooden sprit
- Finishing the carbon fibre mast I made a few years ago.
- Replaced the Broken Carbon Fibre mast with a wooden one.
- My PDR gets a mast step, plus side and front decks and more glass
- Finally Finishing the hull
- The Duck gets some hardware
- I make a Sail for the Puddle Duck
- My Puddle Duck Gets Launched!!
Being perfectly satisfied with my little Skerry, I decided to make a new boat.
What is a puddle duck racer.
Quoting the Puddle racer website:
"The PDRacer is a one design racing sailboat that is basically a plywood box with a curved bottom, and is the easiest boat in the world to build. Free plans, ... all boats must have have the lower 10" of their hulls be alike, but the rest is up to the builder. You can put any type of sail rig or underwater fins that you wish. Also the interior and deck above 10" is completely up to you. A simple hull can be made from 2 sheets of plywood, titebond II glue, and latex house paint. It only took me 10 hours to make the basic hull on my boat. The sail can be made from polytarp, or borrowed from another sailboat. You could literally make a complete boat for $100 or less using materials that came from your local Home Depot. Or, there are many different ways and configurations you could use to build your hull."
So far there are well over 1000 hulls registered as of 2017. (You can get a hull number once you have gone 3-D). My Boat Hull Number is: #457. Here is a link to the registry page for international Puddle Ducks
"Brick started as an exercise in how much boat could be built out of three 4x8 foot sheets of plywood. ... It's disconcerting that these box boats do everything better than elaborately modeled boats of the same overall dimensions, if they both have to carry the same load."
Many were build and well loved. Here is a page talking about the differences between the Brick and the Puddle Duck Racer.
WHY build a Puddle Duck Racer?
Where will i build.
The nice thing about building a 8 feet x 4 feet boat is that it will fit just about anywhere. So far I've been working in the basement and then in the back yard. It's moved to the garage now. My long suffering Nick is eying his shrinking garage with alarm.
Can it actually sail?
This is the surprising part. YES. It has even been made to plane. Because of it's footprint it is extremely stable. Various people have developed sailing rigs and lee-boards or daggerboards that have performed extremely well for an 8 foot box. Crazy groups have taken Ducks to Gulf of Mexico races. Texas 200, Everglades challenge
There is an active building community hell-bent in experimenting and just plain playing.
To be class legal the lower 10 inches have to conform to the official shape. Everything else is pretty much open for experimentation and sometimes just plain silliness.
- Official Website Designer of the boat Shorty Routh website. Free plans and lots of info and links to Duck related pages. There is tons of interesting material, and photos (Most of the finished boats on this website come from the official PDF website, with thanks!) If you plan to make a boat this is your first stop. You can get plans and lots of suggestions for rigging your boat, playing games, and you can register your hull and get an official hull number at no cost!
- Michael Storer's Oz Racer It's often referred to with the OZ prefix. He has produced plan which includes his rigs, improved foil sections and spars. In particular he has refined the shape of the profile for the daggerboard / rudders. Slight variation (no flat spot) in the hull profile differentiates it from the official PDR. He has also perfected the oversize version the OZ Goose.
- There is an active yahoo group on the PDRacer.
Lots of video are available on youtube about PDR's here is one example among many.
Sails for the Puddle Duck Racer
The triangular sprit also known as leg of mutton sprit and a few other names is often seen on Puddle Duck racers. It's easy to make out of polytarp and allows for a clear deck free from low head banging spars. Many "serious Puddle Duckers" have experimented with Balanced Lug Sails.
There is no regulation class sail for Puddle Duck Racers and just about every rig has been tried.
Some puddle ducks sport ridiculously large sail rigs. Because the boat is so stable it allows for lots of experimentation.
There have been many terrific paint jobs as well.
[ >> I START BUILDING ]
emails: Christine
This web site reflects my personal ideas and doesn't represent anyone else's point of view.
Puddle Duck Racer
From Issue Small Boats Annual 2015
A sandbox with a sail? The Puddle Duck racer may be humble in appearance, but it gets people on the water quickly for satisfying sailing.
I t’s easy to be dismissive of the Puddle Duck Racer when you first see it. I usually describe the slab-sided 8′ × 4′ boat as a sandbox with rocker, a description that’s not entirely tongue-in-cheek. And yet, among its builders, who proudly refer to themselves as Puddle Duckers, this boxiest of all box boats has achieved a degree of popularity that is difficult to understand—until you try sailing one. The truth is, despite their boxy, unsophisticated looks, Puddle Ducks are pretty darn fun.
Of course, not everyone is able to suspend judgment long enough to make this discovery, something that Puddle Duck designer David “Shorty” Routh is well aware of. “They kind of look at it and say, ‘That’s not a real boat,’” he admits. But the Puddle Duck’s ultra-simple appearance is quite purposeful. “Really, I’m trying to pull in new people to get them to go in the direction of building wooden boats,” Routh explains. “The Duck is kind of like the free candy you give out to get people addicted. It had to be very unassuming looking, so anyone would look at it and think, ‘Yeah, I could probably build something like that.’”
The Puddle Duck succeeds brilliantly on that score. It’s probably not absolutely the easiest boat in the world to build—hulls with at least some flare can actually come together in the shop a little more easily—but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that to someone who has never built a boat before, someone intimidated by curves and bevels, the Puddle Duck looks simpler than other boats. And its flat-bottomed glue-and-screw construction does make it a very simple, fast build. When I talked my brother into building hull No. 892 for his kids, he was able to finish it in just five evenings, spending well under $200 (we reused the rudder, daggerboard, mast, and standing lug rig from another boat).
With a buoyancy chamber built into each side of the boat, a Puddle Duck is easy to right after a capsize.
D avid Routh has no formal training in boat design, but he has spent a lot of time sailing and racing, and he knew what he was after when he created the Puddle Duck Racer in 2003: a way to get more people having fun sailing without needing to spend much money. But he wanted something more formal than the typical messabouts he started attending in the 1990s, which he says were “like a bunch of cats wandering around.” What he needed was a cheap, easy-to-build racing class that would provide an excuse for people to actually sail together, instead of just walking along the beach admiring each other’s boats. The Puddle Duck was his answer.
Routh describes the Puddle Duck as a developmental one-design class. The lower 10″ of each hull must be identical, with the same beam, length, rocker, and vertical sides. At official Puddle Duck events, each hull is measured to make sure it is class legal (a ¼” builder’s tolerance is allowed, and hulls that fail are allowed to compete with a penalty). Everything apart from the hull, though—rig, rudder, foils, sheer, superstructure (yes, there have been Ducks with usable cabins), and interior layout—is fair game for experimentation.
And while the Duck’s basic shape looks crude, there’s more going on with that boxy hull than might be immediately apparent. The rocker is more extreme at the ends, but flattens out in the middle—an attempt to blend the characteristics of a displacement hull and a planing hull. As a result, the boat sails better than it seems to deserve, reaching speeds up to 6 mph off the wind without too much fuss. The fastest recorded Ducker so far is Kenny Giles, who has hit 9.2 mph by GPS, using a 59-sq-ft leg-o’-mutton rig on a windy day.
“I really like the idea of having your building skills be part of the competition,” Routh says of his rules, which attempt to strike a middle ground between the arms race of open-class racing and the tight strictures of one-design classes. “It’s not about the limitations of the rules, it’s about the creativity of everything else.”
As a result of the class’s intentional openness, each Duck is laid out a bit differently within the basic shared hull shape. But it’s the rig where the developmental aspect of the class is most obvious. I’ve seen gaff-sloop Ducks, leg-o’-mutton Ducks, balance-lug Ducks, Chinese lug Ducks, lateen Ducks, standing-lug Ducks, sprit-sail Ducks, Ducks with repurposed windsurfing rigs, and one Duck rigged as a staysail cat. Routh has heard of even stranger rigs: wingsails, biplane rigs, and even a variant of the Micronesian-style proa rig described by writer and wild food forager Euell Gibbons in his book The Beachcomber Afloat.
When sailing off the wind, a Puddle Duck feels luxurious to its solo skippers.
L ike most unballasted dinghies, the Puddle Duck should generally be sailed as flat as possible, some-thing its wide flat bottom makes a little more automatic than it would be with a more sophisticated hull shape. But the Duck’s rocker makes it extremely sensitive to fore-and-aft trim, which makes it an excellent boat to learn on—Duck skippers are punished for their mistakes in very obvious, yet relatively benign ways. Keep your weight too far forward and the bow transom will dig in deeply, the Puddle Duck’s characteristic “pig rooting” behavior. With your weight too far back, you’ll bury the transom and feel the speed drop off dramatically. Someone new to sailing, or new to dinghies, will quickly learn that small boats demand constant weight shifts and awareness of trim for optimum performance, a mindset that’s not easily learned by crewing on heavily ballasted keelboats.
With its flat bottom, and a length-to-beam ratio under 2, the Puddle Duck’s initial stability is quite high—another feature that beginning sailors will appreciate. And most Ducks are designed and built with two large buoyancy chambers (fore and aft, or one on each side), making the boat easy to right after capsizing. The use of a single externally mounted leeboard, probably the most common choice, allows builders to avoid the complications of daggerboard cases and pivoting centerboards if they prefer. Plenty of Ducks use daggerboards and centerboards, though, often set into a side buoyancy tank to save legroom.
The Puddle Duck’s popularity has drawn serious racers to a growing number of competitive events.
Despite its awkward appearance, the Puddle Duck is a surprisingly comfortable boat to sail when it’s not bashing its way through the waves—its lack of streamlining and short waterline can make fighting a steep chop seem like riding in an unbalanced washing machine. Off the wind, though, or in flat water, a Puddle Duck feels luxurious. After his first sail in Duck No. 892, my brother described it as “an old man’s boat”—the side buoyancy tanks offer extremely comfortable seating, and the off-center daggerboard leaves plenty of room to stretch out. With a designed displacement of 630 lbs, it could easily take two adults without dragging the bow or stern. A better option, though, would be to build a second Duck. It’s such a simple design that there’s little excuse not to.
But, simplicity aside, the real genius of the Puddle Duck is the childlike innocence it brings to sailing. Tearing along at 3 knots as if possessed by a wide-eyed eagerness to seek out the unlikeliest, most ridiculous way to do things, the Puddle Duck is a boat designed for play. I’m struck by the design’s utter lack of pretension. It’s a bit silly—and at the same time endearingly naïve—that a boat with a theoretical hull speed just over 4 mph would bother to register for a Portsmouth Yardstick rating (with a handicap of 140, it’s the slowest boat on the list), but there are serious racers among the Puddle Duck crowd. On the other hand, I was able to borrow a Puddle Duck at the 2012 World Championships (the first races of any kind that I ever competed in) and place seventh overall—far behind the leaders, but having a good time all the way.
Puddle Ducks have made some serious voyages-incompany for an 8’ boat. In 2014, 12 of them finished the grueling five-day Texas 200.
Other Puddle Ducks have been used for voyages more ambitious than simple round-the-buoys racing. Completing the five-day Texas 200 in a Puddle Duck, for example, has become something of a rite of passage—12 Duckers finished the event in 2014, a record number. Upping the ante considerably, Scott Widmier attempted the 300-mile WaterTribe Everglades Challenge in his EC DUCK in 2012, reaching as high as fifth place in his class (sailing monohulls) before high winds and bad weather forced him to abandon the race (conditions were so challenging that only two mono-hulls managed to finish). Like a Chihuahua challenging a Rottweiler, the Puddle Duck just jumps in and goes at it, without seeming to realize it might look a little silly to observers. Or maybe it just doesn’t care.
Free Puddle Duck plans are available from the website www.pdracer.com/free-plans/, or from Jim Michalak at www.duckworksbbs.com/plans/jim/catbox/index.htm. Learn more at www.pdracer.com.
The Puddle Duck is not a strict one-design; rather, it’s an open class, meaning that boats must be designed within broad measurements rather than be identical. Here we see the Catbox design, which you can download, along with others, at www.pdracer.com/free-plans.
Puddle Duck Particulars LOA 8′ Beam 4′ Sail area 69 sq ft
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COMMENTS
A Puddle Duck Racer or PD Racer is an 8 foot (2.44 m) long, 4 foot (1.22 m) wide, 16 inch (40 cm) high, spec series, racing sailboat. It is a one design hull shape with wide options in other areas. Billed as "the easiest sailboat in the world to build", the scow hull is a simple box, usually built of plywood.
Free Plans for the Puddle Duck Racer Sailboat. PDRacer.com Cheap, Creative, and Having Fun On The Water. Why We Don't Have Required Plans. The Required Hull Shape. With almost every other sailboat class, the way it works is you buy a set of plans that the class sells, and then build that exact boat (or buy one).
I've been building a Puddle Duck Racer. PDR's are simple to build out of plywood, stable and safe and can be built cheaply. What's not to love. A cheap simple plywood boat. The puddle duck even sails well!
A sandbox with a sail? The Puddle Duck racer may be humble in appearance, but it gets people on the water quickly for satisfying sailing.
The boat’s name, Elmajoja hails from this event – it’s a collection of the first two letters of the paint crews’ names. Or perhaps it’s a Mexican drug cartel? I used latex exterior house paint in a satin finish (Jones) on bare wood.