The Alberg 30 is a famous sailboat for being extremely easy to sail and extremely capable at sailing. These little 30 foot sailboats can be seen all over the world, with their stout full keel and simple rig. They have few amenities which means they have less to break and as a result are able to keep sailing when other, more sophisticated sailboats, breakdown.
Alberg 30
These boats have a simple and stout rig which is very versatile and easy to use. There is a mainsail and a headsail, normally set on a roller furler. Depending on the winds you will normally be seeing, you can carry your favorite headsail on the furler and deploy it as needed. This is great for short handed sailing in protected areas where you can simply furl the sail away when you get to your destination and focus on relaxing with a sundowner instead of bagging sails.
The shallow draft is also really useful as this lets you get into excellent anchorages where you can duck out of the weather as needed. If you bump the bottom, the full keel will hold you up until the tide rises or you jump in the water and push the boat off the shoal with your shoulder, as a 4.5 foot draft makes this boat very manageable in sticky situation.
Docking is also easy to carry out as the boat is rather light, normally around 9,000 pounds when sitting on her designed waterline. This means that pushing off the pier or pulling in on the dock lines is doable with simple arm or leg strength. This boat is an awesome little cruiser which is why they have an intense following.
Alberg 30’s have a rather high concentration in the Chesapeake Bay, where more than half of the known Alberg’s are moored. Such a concentration of this good little boat means that if you really want one, you only need to search in one area to find one that is for sale and in an agreeable condition for your plans.
My plans for my next project are to build something which I consider the ultimate ocean cruising boat for short handed sailing. The Alberg 30 is the ultimate platform to build on as it starts off as such a good little boat.
The end result will be a 40 foot sailboat which is notably bigger than the original 30 foot design, but most of the extension will simply be the bowsprit jutting forward. To reduce marina fees, this bow sprit will be retractable!
On the stern, a robust stern anchor roller will be mounted in a fiberglass extension on the stern which will also wrap around the Monitor Windvane and provide more space for solar panels. The stern extension will only be 4 feet long to keep the forces low on it. As I am not a naval architect, neither do I imagine myself to be one, I am building this structure to be as minimal as possible. The pontoons of the extension are small so that their volume doesn’t affect the boats center of buoyancy much when they are immersed. For the most part, this extension will be above the waterline so that it has no effect on the boats sailing characteristics at all.
The rig will be changed from a simple sloop to a more complicated cutter rig with three headsails. Instead of roller furling, each dedicated sail will be hank on and have reef points in them to provide more versatility to the sailplan without the added storage space requirements for additional sails. The plan is to have a Staysail, Genoa, and Yankee, and if the winds are light, fly a Drifter on the furthest forward headstay.
The plans are constantly in flux as we go working on one aspect which then narrows down exactly how we will do the next aspect of the build. Having a general guideline but not strict figures makes the project more fluid in the execution. We know what we want to have and figure out the details along the way.
To make this project possible, we have partnered with TotalBoat who is our sole supplier for all our fiberglass needs. We are getting all of our CSM, 1708, Gelcoat, and Polyester resin from them.
We are using Polyester instead of Epoxy purely for cost reasons. This project does not need to be done in Epoxy, and the price difference adds up. Epoxy costs roughly $100 per gallon, while Polyester costs $67 per gallon.
The goal is to build a very capable sailboat where everything is robust and easy to control for a small crew or single hander and make this classic sailboat look timeless.
