[Leica] Stone Horse sailboat

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Dick,

You may be referring to this post about the Stone Horse I submitted a couple
of years back.

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Indeed, the Stone Horse is a lovely little boat. It is almost as old as the
Leica. The Stone Horse was designed by Sam Crocker, a well known boat
designer in 1931. His sailboat designs were considered very seaworthy and
featured a flush deck with relatively high hull sides. This type of
construction put all the accommodations inside the hull and eliminated the
deck house, a source of weakness in small boats. The Stone Horse has been
made for the last few decades by Eady and Duff and is still as popular as it
was 50 years ago.?


I owned and rebuilt and sailed a prototype of the Stone Horse in the early
60s. Back in the days before computers and tank testing, boat designers
built smaller versions of their boats to test them out before releasing the
final plans. As our engagement gift to each other, my wife and I bought a
early, 3/4 sized version of the Stone Horse that had been blocked up in a
Staten Island boatyard for the previous 20 years. The papers showed that it
was designed in 1921 by Sam Crocker and built by Sid Davis, a Long Island,
NY boat builder. The boat had been owned and sailed by a young man before
WW2 and was stored in the yard when he was drafted. Unfortunately he never
made it back. The yard owner couldn't bear to scrap it so it sat in a back
corner until we found it. By the time we got it, the planks had opened up so
far that you could stick a finger between them. We stripped the boat,
repaired the woodwork, fiberglassed the exterior, and in general put it in
good condition. It sailed wonderfully.


Larry Z