Why are so many scared to draw the boat they will build? Why the wide-spread preference to buy plans or kits? Whose needs are really being served by excusing oneself from the design process instead of drawing what one builds and building what one draws?
“Modern” humans, especially in the US, are scared to make mistakes and have been trained to depend on “specialists” for all of their design needs, not just marine ones. But humans have been building 'true boats', as opposed to 'mere rafts', for at least 10,000 years, and the majority of those hulls were built by eye and from tradition, not to plans drawn by specialists.
I'll buy an occasional plan, because it's interesting to see how others solved a particular problem. But the majority of what I build is what I drew, and I have little patience or sympathy for them that won't accept responsibility for building a boat 'from lofting to launching'.
How does one learn 'boat design'? The same way one learns most other simple skills, by seeing and then doing. Decent, free, marine CAD programs are available these days that have plenty of "starter" examples that can be re-worked into something closer to one's needs/desires. Thus, if you can use a mouse to drag a line, you can draw a boat. If you give some thought and care to how where/how you drag those lines, and come to the drawing table having used a boat or two, plus general wood-working skills, it isn't hard to produce the patterns you need to start marking and cutting parts that make a decent boat.
Though a bit buggy, Carlson's
Hulls program is intuitive to use and very adequate for most non-professional needs, especially when supplemented with a decent graphing program of the sort most people encountered in first-year high school algebra. In others words, this 'boat design' stuff ain't rocket science. Any boat just a box that floats because it displaces water, and it moves easily and well if it is "shapely". For sure, there's plenty of math and physics that underlie the areo-hydrodynamics of boats, and the more burdensome the boat needs to be and/or the faster it needs to be propelled, the more engineering one needs to employ. But for most recreational hulls, one's eye and experience using boats is sufficient guide to getting it right enough.
http://carlsondesign.com/projects/hull-designer/
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