Trick 1The four shadows
One boat, four views: the plan (from above — that’s the big oval), the profile (from the side), and the bow and stern faces. Four flat shadows are all it takes to describe a whole hull on a single sheet of paper.
The naval architecture corner
The Drafting Table — where the CANDU E-Z was born
In 1986, Berkeley Eastman folded an entire harbor tug into fourteen trailerable feet, and in 1997 David Cronk drew Sheet 1. Pull up a stool: this page teaches you to read that sheet, explains why the little tug is shaped the way she is — and then hands you the pencil so you can redesign her yourself.
1986 design conceived
10-28-97 sheet drawn
65 pages of plans
14 stations one per foot
1 boat that got a foghorn
Sheet 1 of 1
How to read a boat blueprint
A blueprint looks like secret code until someone shows you the four tricks. Here’s the actual CANDU E-Z sheet — the very design AWOOGA was built from — and everything you need to read it like a shipwright.
Trick 2Stations 0–14
The dashed vertical lines numbered 0 to 14 are stations — slices through the hull, one per foot, like a CT scan of a boat. Every frame, bulkhead and curve in the plans is located by its station number.
Trick 3W.L. — the waterline
The long horizontal line marked W.L. is where the sea agrees to hold her. Everything below it is displacement doing quiet, honest work; everything above it is freeboard, cabin and charisma.
Trick 4The title block
The boxed corner is the sheet’s pedigree: Berkeley Engineering Co., Fallbrook, CA — designed by Berkeley A. Eastman, drawn by David Cronk, dated 10-28-97. When a drawing signs its work, you can trust its lines.
Top-left corner of the sheet
The spec box, translated into human
Eight little lines of type, one entire philosophy of boatbuilding. Here’s what each line of the official specification actually means.
- Length over all
- 14′3″Two parking spaces long. The whole ship fits in a garage — which is the entire point, and where AWOOGA spent her first three years.
- Beam
- 7′4″More than half as wide as she is long. Tugboats are round for a living — the width buys stability, a real cabin, and the correct silhouette.
- Head room
- 6 ftA cabin a grown adult can stand up in, on a boat you can tow home. This is the design’s party trick, and nobody believes it until they step inside.
- Draft
- 20″She only asks the sea for twenty inches. Creeks, gunkholes and the shallow end of the harbor are all fair territory.
- Weight
- ≈ 1,150 lbsAbout half a small car — before the builder starts “improving” things with foghorns, brass and opinions.
- Power options
- Electric, 10 HP – 36 VDC · gasoline or dieselRead that again: the original 1986 spec is an electric boat. Berkeley Eastman was a few decades early to the party everyone’s now arriving at.
- Construction
- Plywood, nail & tapeFlat plywood panels, epoxy fillets, fiberglass tape on the seams. No steam box, no lofting floor, no shipyard — just a garage and stubbornness.
- Trailerable
- Towable by compact truckThe boat lives at your house, not at a marina. The sea gets visits; the mooring fees get skipped.
Design decisions, decoded
Why she’s shaped like that
Nothing on the sheet is an accident. Four quiet decisions make the CANDU E-Z buildable in a garage, stable in a chop, and unmistakably a tug.
Flat bottom, hard chine
Her bottom is flat and her sides meet it at a crisp angle — a hard chine. Round bilges need lofting and torture-bent planks; flat panels come straight off a sheet of plywood. It also means shallow draft and a boat that sits upright on a trailer like it was born there.
Tubby on purpose
A length-to-beam ratio near two makes naval architects raise an eyebrow and tugboats feel at home. The width is what buys standing headroom, a stable platform, and that unmistakable pushed-together working-boat profile — scaled down without being watered down.
A displacement hull
She rides in the water, not on top of it. That caps her speed at “hull speed” — a number set by waterline length and pure physics, roughly five knots for a boat this size. No engine changes it. Tugs accepted this bargain centuries ago: all pull, no hurry.
Nail & tape construction
The build method in the spec box is the whole reason ordinary people finish these boats: cut plywood panels, nail them over a handful of frames, seal every seam with epoxy and fiberglass tape. It’s the exact recipe AWOOGA was built with — do-overs, learning curve and all.
Now you hold the pencil
Redesign her yourself
Three sliders, live physics. Stretch her, squeeze her, over-power her — the drawing redraws itself and the numbers tell you what kind of boat you just invented. Berkeley Eastman’s answer is one of the presets; see if you land anywhere near it.
Builders famously stretch the E-Z a foot. Famously.
Width is stability, headroom and attitude.
The sheet says 10. AWOOGA said 20. Physics says “cute.”
Load a design
Profile
Bow view
Berkeley-ish Engineering Co. · your garage · sheet 1 of hopefully 1
DESIGN: CANDU E-Z (factory spec)
- Hull speed
- 4.8 kn≈ 5.5 mph — set by the waterline, not the engine
- Displacement
- ~1,150 lbswhat the sea has agreed to carry
- Power needed
- ≈ 8 HPto reach hull speed; you spec’d 10
- Bollard pull
- ~220 lbsnapkin rate: one tonne per 100 HP
- Plywood
- ~24 sheetsat AWOOGA’s real-world consumption rate
- Garage time
- ~3.0 yrsevenings, weekends and do-overs included
The committee’s verdict: this is the boat exactly as Berkeley Eastman drew her — properly tubby, honestly powered, and towable home behind a compact truck. Hard to improve. People keep trying anyway.
All figures are proud napkin math — hull speed as 1.34 × √LWL, weight and plywood scaled from the sheet and from AWOOGA’s real build. Wonderful for arguing at the dock; do not cite this page in your naval architecture thesis.
Designed vs. built
The sheet vs. the boat
No CANDU E-Z has ever been built exactly to the sheet — deviating from the plans is a proud builder tradition, and AWOOGA upheld it enthusiastically. Here’s her official scorecard.
| Line item | The 1997 sheet says | AWOOGA, as built |
|---|---|---|
| Length over all | 14′3″ | 14′3″The one number that survived contact with the builder. |
| Beam | 7′4″ | 7′0″Four inches shy of the sheet — close enough that the drawing never noticed. |
| Draft | 20″ | ≈17″Even less to ask of the sea. |
| Power | Electric 10 HP – 36 VDC, gas or diesel | 20 HP Tohatsu outboardDouble the spec. The surplus is stored as attitude. |
| Construction | Plywood, nail & tape | Meranti marine ply, fiberglass cloth & epoxySame recipe, fancier flour. |
| Foghorn | — (not specified) | Wildly out of scaleSome deviations are the whole point. |
Sheet values as printed on the original drawing; as-built values per AWOOGA’s press kit. Discrepancies between paper and boat are settled, as always, in the builder’s favor.
Leaving the drafting table?
Take the design somewhere
Now that you can read the sheet, the rest of the harbor makes more sense.