Certification and other bureaucratic obstacles.

[jmertens]

Kiwi, I restarted that thread about regulations under a more explicit title, feel free to edit.
Yes, regulations are a major obstacle to amateur boat building in Europe. Under the pretense of offering us a protection that we never asked for, regulating authorities are destroying creativity and restricting our freedom.
I say creativity because amateur boat builders are a creative bunch not afraid to experiment. Not everybody wants a cookie cutter boat. Freedom is even more important and then there is the economic aspect of boat ownership.
An amateur not counting his labor can build a boat for much less than a yard and end up with, if not a better product at least one that fits his requirements.
As some of you may know, I left Europe for those reasons. I sailed away on a boat that I build myself and had to register her as a freighter to avoid paying the VAT on my own work!

The type of obstacle has changed and today, the biggest hurdle for amateurs is ISO conformity. I know that [b]amateurs are not required to follow those directives as long as they do not sell their boat within 5 years[/b]. However, many want to build a small boat first and resell it to finance their next project and therefore, the boat must be certified.
CEE certification will also increase the value of the boat.

After several years of hesitation, I finally decided to offer ISO conformity as an option with our plans.
Let's explain how this works: a boat plan must follow some rules to be approved and then, the builder must follow those rules plus some others to have the boat certfied. It is a two step process.
As a designer, I can satisfy the first requirement but the builder must handle the building side.
This represent a large amount of extra work at the design level.
For example, stability calculations must be shown the way CEE burokrats want it, not necessarily the way naval architects calculate it. Scantlings must follow their rules, not necessarily the ones I and many others use with success. And it goes on forever, thousands of pages and directives.
This will not produce a better plan or a better boat but it will cost more, like a hidden tax.
The plans and scantlings may show some differences and we will sell those plans (at bateau.com) as an option at an extra cost.
Again, [b]this is only necessary for those of you who want to resell their boats within five years[/b] and you must handle the building side of the certification but that should be easier with approved plans.

Commercial yards should contact us about certification. I just came back from the IBEX (Miami Florida) where I discussed all this European certifying organizations and will be at the METS in Amsterdam next month if builders want to discuss it further.

Jacques Mertens,
Yacht Designer SNAME, ABYC,
posting from a place where I can build boats without asking permission.

[kiwi]

Jacques,

I think that for the larger plans offering the certification kit will open the market to you in several countries. For the moment the directive is not law but this will not last for long. Each country still applies its own laws with the directive as a guidline. Belgium has laws which offer more freedom than France which means many French boaters fly the Belgian flag. Ridiculous but then this is bureaucracy at its best...

The country laws have not been tested by a formal complaint to the EU. This costs money and rich amateur builders just hire a certification company to do the paperwork...

On a personal note looking at the Nantucket 26 - it is a C class boat without pulpit and life lines so I think your FL26 being unsubmersible should pass C class certification with flying colors. The TW28 on the other hand would require the certification package.

The 5 year part of the law is there to "protect" the big companies from "competition". As you say the boats designed for amateur builders are better than factory built or more adapted to lots of our needs. And the ugly spectre (for them) of eco-friendly designs like the FL26 must be scary for Bénéteau and co...
Cheers

Tony

[jmertens]

Joel and I just came back from the IBEX in Miami where we participated in a good number of seminars.
The one that sticks out was about efficient moderate speed boats. Nigel Irens presented his opinion about the subject and we can't agree more.
When he described what is an efficient moderate speed boat, I thought he was describing the Fast Launch 26 (FL26).
I will try to find the time to write about it, it's an exciting subject but off topic in this thread.

[Toni_V]

As tony said there's lot's of different countries in EU and with different countries there's lot's of laws too. Maybe France is one of the most bureaucratic countries but most countries do don't have such tight laws or implementations. It's true that the laws in EU will be merged to be more uniform, but the implementation can still vary.

I think the situation is quite ok now in Finland. I haven't got first hand knowledge, but I've heard that needed certification was pretty straight forward to get. Not sure if that really is or how it will be in future.

Fuel efficient designs are nice, hopefully they'll be more and more usual and available.