The Front Door
Mini tugboat plans, houseboat plans, and — in the great tradition of small family businesses — RV windows. All under one roof.
Unofficial · Unaffiliated · Unwilling to let it sink
The mothership has gone quiet.
berkeley-engineering.com — home of Berkeley Eastman’s mini tugboat plans, including the very sheets of paper that became AWOOGA — has stopped answering the radio. Nobody seems to know why. So we did what any sentimental tugboat would do: we pointed a periscope at the Wayback Machine and refused to let the little tugs be forgotten.
Read this before you steer the periscope
- This is not the AWOOGA site pretending to be Berkeley Engineering. Everything beyond the porthole below is a historical snapshot served by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — a museum exhibit, not a live website.
- We have zero affiliation and zero control. We didn’t build their site, we can’t fix their site, and we definitely can’t sell you plans, windows, or anything else you find in there. We’re just a boat with a scrapbook. (Actually hunting for plans? There’s a life raft for you at the bottom of this page.)
- Do not send money to a webpage frozen in time. Prices, addresses, and order forms in the snapshots are historical artifacts. If the real Berkeley Engineering resurfaces, we’ll happily point you at them instead.
- Why do this at all? Because AWOOGA exists because that site existed. Preserving it is the least a grateful daughter-of-the-plans can do. We’re trying to keep the mini tugs alive.
P.S. If you are Berkeley Engineering — or family — welcome aboard; see the message for you at the bottom of this page.
Powered by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine
The Time Periscope
Pick a year, pick a page, and peer at berkeley-engineering.com as it actually was. Links inside the porthole keep working — the whole old site is navigable, from right here on deck.
Destination year
REPLAYING
web.archive.org → berkeley-engineering.com
Porthole looking foggy? Some snapshots take a moment to surface — or open them directly on archive.org:
Every known page, mapped
The Chart Room
The old site, page by page — what each one held and why it mattered. Load any chart into the periscope, or jump straight to the archive.
The Mini Tug Catalog
The full lineup of Berkeley Eastman’s pocket tugboats — the page where a thousand garage builds quietly began.
Candu E-Z
14′3″ of pure charm, conceived in 1986 — 65 pages of plans, carries 3–5, sleeps 2. The exact design AWOOGA was built from. This page is why our site exists.
Candu Jr.
The 11-foot little sibling with the traditional “salty” look of a real working tug — shrunk in the wash.
Perfect 10
Ten feet of tug with a box keel that helps her plane. The judges’ scores were in the name all along.
Building an E-Z
A build diary from the source — the same journey AWOOGA took, decades earlier, one plywood panel at a time.
Building “’Lil Slugger”
One builder’s Perfect 10 taking shape — proof that these plans kept turning ordinary garages into shipyards.
Little Bitts
The Mini Tugboat Association’s corner of the site — the original fleet registry, before our Fleet picked up the watch.
Houseboat Plans
Berkeley didn’t stop at tugs: the Aqua Casa and Cape Codder let you live on the water, not just toot across it.
Cape Codder
A shingled New England cottage that happens to float. The houseboat with the best name in the catalog.
More Aqua Casas
A gallery of builder-finished Aqua Casas — the houseboat cousins of the mini tug family, out living their best lives.
Order Plans
Where the plans were ordered — were being the operative word. Please do not mail a check into a snapshot; time travel does not accept postage. Actually want plans? Hail Adam instead.
The mission
Keeping the mini tugs alive
Every AWOOGA horn blast traces back to Berkeley Eastman, who looked at a full-sized harbor tug sometime around 1986 and thought: smaller. His Candu E-Z plans — 65 pages of lines, drawings and patient instructions — turned regular people with regular garages into shipwrights for the price of a decent dinner out.
When a plans catalog goes dark, it’s not just a website that disappears. It’s the on-ramp. The next dreamer who sees a mini tug at a boat show and sprints home to search for plans hits a dead link instead — and maybe the line of little tugs ends there.
Not on our watch. The snapshots are safe with the Internet Archive, the knowledge lives on in every hull already floating, and this page exists so the trail never goes fully cold. The tugs that exist keep tooting, the Fleet keeps growing, and anyone who wants to build one can still start here.
A tugboat’s whole job is refusing to let bigger things drift away. Consider this page AWOOGA doing her job.
Came here hunting for plans?
You sailed in hoping to buy a set of Candu plans and found… a museum. Don’t weigh anchor yet! Send Adam a message. To be perfectly clear about what you’d be getting: he does not sell plans, he does not have a secret stash (probably), and he is, legally speaking, just a guy with a tugboat. But he knows the mini tug world, he cannot physically rest while a future tug goes unbuilt, and stranger things have been figured out over one friendly email. Worst case, you make a pen pal with a foghorn.
Are you Berkeley Engineering?
If you’re the folks behind berkeley-engineering.com — or family, or friends who know the story — we would genuinely love to hear from you. If the business is back, we’ll point everyone your way. If you’d like anything here changed, credited differently, or taken down, say the word and it’s done. This page exists out of gratitude, and gratitude takes requests.
Back to the living