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Email if you can! But if you need a friendly voice call:207-249-5313
What's New
01/01/2026 – It’s is hard to believe it has been so long since I updated this page. We have been so busy that it is hard to find time. Hopefully this year we will be able to put in some revision time on the site as a whole every week.
We also have set up one wall of our library to provide a “set” for doing videos for a YouTube channel. These will cover what we teach in Yacht Design School, our MacNaughton Yacht Designs business, and answering questions about learning design, design options, living aboard, and voyaging. Hopefully at some point we will be able to include interviews with other designers, boat builders, and living aboard and voyaging people. Suggestions are welcome.
We also have set up one wall of our library to provide a “set” for doing videos for a YouTube channel. These will cover what we teach in Yacht Design School, our MacNaughton Yacht Designs business, and answering questions about learning design, design options, living aboard, and voyaging. Hopefully at some point we will be able to include interviews with other designers, boat builders, and living aboard and voyaging people. Suggestions are welcome.
07/23/2024 – I’m pleased to let all our friends know that, with the help of our student Nicholas Leo, an accomplished web site developer whose contact information you will find below, we now have a new Custom Design Quote Form. This allows potential clients to outline the custom design they would like us to develop for them. We respond with a Concept outline, and a Contract Price to do the design.
Just go to any of the drop down menus at the upper left corner of the newer pages, or to the MacNaughton Yacht Designs page and click on the link “Custom Design Quote Form”.
Our earlier form ceased to work some months ago. Pre-occupied as I was, with my wife’s final months, I didn’t notice when it stopped reporting results. I hate to think how many of you submited a request and never got a response. We look forward to seeing the requests you come up with. Doing design quotes and concepts specially for you is one of the most fun aspects of our work. Unlike many designers, we feel that our ultimate product is happiness for our clients. We don’t design for our own egos. We try to design purely the happiest vessel for you. Among the designs on our web site, and the concepts on our “idea designs” page, you may see something that inspires you. On the other hand, you may find you want a completely different style or type than previous clients have asked for. Don’t hesitate to ask for a style and type which you feel will make you the happiest. The form is carefully designed to lead us to a proposal which you will fall in love with.
For those wanting a web site developer contact: Leo Technical Services LLC, https://leotechnicalservices.com/
I have also updated the Yacht Design School Main Curriculum Lesson Pricing, which hadn’t gone up since 2015. This rise doesn’t keep up with inflation, but we had to increase pricing at least some. Some people have questioned how we can charge so little for an in depth professional degree. The answers are simple. We don’t have fancy offices with hot and cold running secretaries. Everybody who works with us either as a draftsman, or helping out with Yacht Design School, either works entirely out of their own home office or can use a workstation here in my home office, plus our library, and our new test lab/shop. Overhead expenses of the school are covered by the fact that we all have our own design work, or do drafting for MacNaughton Yacht Designs. Lesson pricing need only cover the time it takes to work with the students. Another important factor is that we have students all over the world. Some of them are in countries where they may only make in a month the price of one of our Main Curriculum lessons. This means it is a real struggle to afford to attend YDS. We hate the thought that there are people out there who should be yacht designers but can’t afford to attend our school. We hope at some point to have an endowment which will allow us to grant scholarships. For now, we just keep the costs for students as low as we can.
Just go to any of the drop down menus at the upper left corner of the newer pages, or to the MacNaughton Yacht Designs page and click on the link “Custom Design Quote Form”.
Our earlier form ceased to work some months ago. Pre-occupied as I was, with my wife’s final months, I didn’t notice when it stopped reporting results. I hate to think how many of you submited a request and never got a response. We look forward to seeing the requests you come up with. Doing design quotes and concepts specially for you is one of the most fun aspects of our work. Unlike many designers, we feel that our ultimate product is happiness for our clients. We don’t design for our own egos. We try to design purely the happiest vessel for you. Among the designs on our web site, and the concepts on our “idea designs” page, you may see something that inspires you. On the other hand, you may find you want a completely different style or type than previous clients have asked for. Don’t hesitate to ask for a style and type which you feel will make you the happiest. The form is carefully designed to lead us to a proposal which you will fall in love with.
For those wanting a web site developer contact: Leo Technical Services LLC, https://leotechnicalservices.com/
I have also updated the Yacht Design School Main Curriculum Lesson Pricing, which hadn’t gone up since 2015. This rise doesn’t keep up with inflation, but we had to increase pricing at least some. Some people have questioned how we can charge so little for an in depth professional degree. The answers are simple. We don’t have fancy offices with hot and cold running secretaries. Everybody who works with us either as a draftsman, or helping out with Yacht Design School, either works entirely out of their own home office or can use a workstation here in my home office, plus our library, and our new test lab/shop. Overhead expenses of the school are covered by the fact that we all have our own design work, or do drafting for MacNaughton Yacht Designs. Lesson pricing need only cover the time it takes to work with the students. Another important factor is that we have students all over the world. Some of them are in countries where they may only make in a month the price of one of our Main Curriculum lessons. This means it is a real struggle to afford to attend YDS. We hate the thought that there are people out there who should be yacht designers but can’t afford to attend our school. We hope at some point to have an endowment which will allow us to grant scholarships. For now, we just keep the costs for students as low as we can.
05/05/2024 – On the third of March we lost my dear wife Nannette after a long battle with dementia. She died without pain, and with me by her side. Her warmth, compassion, generosity and intelligence, were a major contributor to the trust and loyalty our clients showed toward us. Quiet and calm as she was, any group of people she was in were happier and had a better time when she was there. She handled all our routine business functions, and a lot of our communications. There were people all over the world who considered her a close friend just from her handling of their correspondence. We were married for nearly 54 years. We lived and worked together pretty much 24 hours a day for all that time. There cannot be many who’ve had as happy and close a marriage as we had. She was devoted wife and mother, a gourmet chef of incredible talent, a fine musician, sang beautifully, and was an artist whose painting were bought even by people who were famous painters themselves. It was nearly two months after her death before I realized that subconsciously I had never expected, despite her dementia, to out live her. I made no plans for life without her. I am grateful to the outpouring of support from friends, clients, and students, who have made it easier for me to continue to live, and the work my clients and students need from me gives me a sense of purpose, which is very necessary right now. Where Nannette was, there was my Eden.
I should have updated this before now, but I have been moving my personal office back to our main office/house. Our telephone number is still 207-249-5313. This is a smart phone which I keep with me all the time, and you should always be able to contact me. If you are visiting or sending us something, our office is at 35 Clark Street, Eastport, Maine 04631.
I must mention the support and companionship which I have received from my son-in-law Roberto Campos who is doing much to restore this 1780s Cape Cod house.
I have some major updates nearly ready for the web site. I will be trying to make them active at the same time this is uploaded. I hope they will work well. Even if they do, there will be a great deal more to update. Please bear with me as I continue to learn to work with the openElement web site development package.
As Nannette gradually required more and more care, I barely noticed that we were getting less custom work. I was almost grateful for a lesser workload which I assumed was due to economic uncertainty. However, after Nannette’s passing, I have discovered that our Custom Design Quote Request Form was not working. So presumably, a number of people submitted quote requests and were disappointed to not receive replies. I’ve created a new form, but I have no idea whether it will work or not. I will put it up on the site and test it. If anyone uses it and doesn’t receive a reply within a couple of days, for heaven’s sake email me.
I won’t be updating Yacht Design School lesson pricing with this web site upload. However, we definitely have to raise prices soon. We haven’t increased lesson pricing since 2015, and even when we do increase prices they won’t really have kept up with inflation. Now is a good time to acquire more lessons and save a bit.
In addition to the “CAD Course Certificate” and the professional degree in “Naval Architecture with a Specialty in Yacht and Small Craft Design” we will be adding a “Yacht Draftsman Associate Degree” for those who want a qualification oriented around getting them an entry level job with a design firm rather than a position as a fully trained yacht and small craft Naval Architect.
Again I would remind our readers that press of business makes it hard to update this site regularly. I will try hard to update it every month this year, but helping clients and students just has to take precedence.
I should have updated this before now, but I have been moving my personal office back to our main office/house. Our telephone number is still 207-249-5313. This is a smart phone which I keep with me all the time, and you should always be able to contact me. If you are visiting or sending us something, our office is at 35 Clark Street, Eastport, Maine 04631.
I must mention the support and companionship which I have received from my son-in-law Roberto Campos who is doing much to restore this 1780s Cape Cod house.
I have some major updates nearly ready for the web site. I will be trying to make them active at the same time this is uploaded. I hope they will work well. Even if they do, there will be a great deal more to update. Please bear with me as I continue to learn to work with the openElement web site development package.
As Nannette gradually required more and more care, I barely noticed that we were getting less custom work. I was almost grateful for a lesser workload which I assumed was due to economic uncertainty. However, after Nannette’s passing, I have discovered that our Custom Design Quote Request Form was not working. So presumably, a number of people submitted quote requests and were disappointed to not receive replies. I’ve created a new form, but I have no idea whether it will work or not. I will put it up on the site and test it. If anyone uses it and doesn’t receive a reply within a couple of days, for heaven’s sake email me.
I won’t be updating Yacht Design School lesson pricing with this web site upload. However, we definitely have to raise prices soon. We haven’t increased lesson pricing since 2015, and even when we do increase prices they won’t really have kept up with inflation. Now is a good time to acquire more lessons and save a bit.
In addition to the “CAD Course Certificate” and the professional degree in “Naval Architecture with a Specialty in Yacht and Small Craft Design” we will be adding a “Yacht Draftsman Associate Degree” for those who want a qualification oriented around getting them an entry level job with a design firm rather than a position as a fully trained yacht and small craft Naval Architect.
Again I would remind our readers that press of business makes it hard to update this site regularly. I will try hard to update it every month this year, but helping clients and students just has to take precedence.
01/06/2024 – As we update this site using a new web development software package called “openElement” we must remind our friends that our telephone number has changed to 207-249-5313 and our mailing address and office location is now at 77 Washington Street, Eastport, Maine 04631. Learning a new package, and figuring out how to use it with the existing web site, which was created with very different software, which is no longer available, is a slow process, given all our regular work.
We continue to be gratified by the number of students who get work in the field quite early in their studies. When we started the school, we assumed that students would need to go through the entire main curriculum to be confident of getting a job immediately. However, our curriculum teaches a number of things which just aren’t taught elsewhere. This tends to show up in student’s design work such that the lines, and appearance of the drawings and the yachts themselves tend to “sell” the student to employers. Of course, despite the efforts of ourselves, and our students, we must also acknowledge that there is a tremendous shortage of decently trained people in our industry, which tends to create a feeling that an employer should grab our students before somebody else does, even if they haven’t completed all that many lessons yet.
As our current students know, we constantly revise our lessons to make them as complete and straight forward to learn from as possible. The results of our on-going research are incorporated as we complete individual studies. At present we are working on making the combined Lessons 12 and 13 on materials science, structural analysis, and testing as self-contained as possible. They have always potentially been expensive for the student in that they required either access to our library by residential students, or purchase of a number of engineering text books. We are working through the massive project of creating a synthesis of the relevant knowledge in these books so that students can get a good grounding without buying all the references. As appropriate, we indicate where further study could be done by buying particular books. As I write this Jay Majors who teaches the CAD Course is painstakingly revising that curriculum to make sure student knowledge will as complete and up to date as possible.
Late in 2023 we added a 36’x 10’ (11m x 3m) workshop and test facility, which we will be equipping this year. We hope to design and build a solar panel, battery, and inverter system which will provide lighting and power for this space. Designing, assembling, and teaching about solar power systems for boats has given us a moderately good grasp of this subject. For a facility like this the expense is not all that great.
There will be lesson price increases at Yacht Design School sometime this year. We haven’t raised tuition for quite a few years, and we have to do it, though this round of price rises will not completely keep up with inflation. Because we don’t spend money on fancy offices, or hot and cold running secretaries, and we all work from our home offices, our pricing is much lower than anyone who might be thought of as a competitor. Still, we do understand that folks in a few countries find the cost of our lessons tough to afford. At the same time, feedback from students indicates that some worry that we aren’t charging enough. Our pricing model focuses on whether our faculty is getting enough compensation for their efforts, so they can afford to teach. Other considerations are: How do we avoid excluding too many people from countries which don’t provide enough income to allow people to easily attend YDS? Finally, though we are confident we have superior curricula, how much less than our competitors can we charge before people actually hesitate to sign up with us because we seem too inexpensive? We are a tiny fraction of the cost of a conventional college education and you aren’t going to have to take out any loans. At the same time our certificates and professional degree are going to get you a higher income than a degree in English with a specialty in Chaucer is likely to.
Our greatest dream is that we could give scholarships to those who have a financial need. It would not take all that much invested money to make sure that we could pay our instructors for teaching and any research work and lesson revisions out of 5% of the investment’s value per year. This would allow us to grant scholarships, with those paying the full lesson costs knowing that we would add that to the endowment to allow us to expand YDS as needed.
This brings up the point that, if anyone has expertise in coaching people through building an endowment, we know how much we would need to allow us to provide scholarships to anyone who would find our education a financial hardship. A full endowment to cover all present costs and allow for the greater number of students a scholarship program would bring in would require an invested value of the endowment of $3,600,000. It isn’t all that much to permanently fund the largest school in the yacht design industry. We would love to get to that point. This would be enough so that the endowment should expand on its own in excess of the inflation rate and allow for any additional expansion over time.
It occurs to me as I re-read the above body of text that there is a distinct lack of “salesmanship” and Madison Avenue “puff”. This has been true from the school’s beginning 35 years ago. Notice we don’t call YDS an “institute” or “college”. We don’t call our instructors “professors” and I don’t call myself “president” or “chancellor”. I’m just the Director. We are here for those who want us, and do no advertising beyond this web site. Given this low key approach it is remarkable to me that we have grown to be such a successful complete program of yacht and small craft naval architecture. This year in addition to the CAD Course Certificate, there will also be Yacht Draftsman Certificate for those completing the Main Curriculum Lessons 1 through 11. This acknowledges that the furthest a student actively looking for entry level work in the field has gotten in the course before getting a good position is one gentleman who was just starting Lesson 10. He got a job with a prestigious company, and now runs his own design firm. Those completing the entire Main Curriculum will receive our professional degree in Naval Architecture with a specialty in Yacht and Small Craft design.
Our work load is heavy enough so that I should note, yet again, that updating this page tends to be infrequent. It has been suggested that the name should be changed to “What’s New This Millenium”. In any case we are always available for those with questions about the school, or yacht design in general. Email generally gets you the most complete considered reply and can be kept to refer to. However sometimes you just want to hear a human voice, and that’s what you get when you call us.
We continue to be gratified by the number of students who get work in the field quite early in their studies. When we started the school, we assumed that students would need to go through the entire main curriculum to be confident of getting a job immediately. However, our curriculum teaches a number of things which just aren’t taught elsewhere. This tends to show up in student’s design work such that the lines, and appearance of the drawings and the yachts themselves tend to “sell” the student to employers. Of course, despite the efforts of ourselves, and our students, we must also acknowledge that there is a tremendous shortage of decently trained people in our industry, which tends to create a feeling that an employer should grab our students before somebody else does, even if they haven’t completed all that many lessons yet.
As our current students know, we constantly revise our lessons to make them as complete and straight forward to learn from as possible. The results of our on-going research are incorporated as we complete individual studies. At present we are working on making the combined Lessons 12 and 13 on materials science, structural analysis, and testing as self-contained as possible. They have always potentially been expensive for the student in that they required either access to our library by residential students, or purchase of a number of engineering text books. We are working through the massive project of creating a synthesis of the relevant knowledge in these books so that students can get a good grounding without buying all the references. As appropriate, we indicate where further study could be done by buying particular books. As I write this Jay Majors who teaches the CAD Course is painstakingly revising that curriculum to make sure student knowledge will as complete and up to date as possible.
Late in 2023 we added a 36’x 10’ (11m x 3m) workshop and test facility, which we will be equipping this year. We hope to design and build a solar panel, battery, and inverter system which will provide lighting and power for this space. Designing, assembling, and teaching about solar power systems for boats has given us a moderately good grasp of this subject. For a facility like this the expense is not all that great.
There will be lesson price increases at Yacht Design School sometime this year. We haven’t raised tuition for quite a few years, and we have to do it, though this round of price rises will not completely keep up with inflation. Because we don’t spend money on fancy offices, or hot and cold running secretaries, and we all work from our home offices, our pricing is much lower than anyone who might be thought of as a competitor. Still, we do understand that folks in a few countries find the cost of our lessons tough to afford. At the same time, feedback from students indicates that some worry that we aren’t charging enough. Our pricing model focuses on whether our faculty is getting enough compensation for their efforts, so they can afford to teach. Other considerations are: How do we avoid excluding too many people from countries which don’t provide enough income to allow people to easily attend YDS? Finally, though we are confident we have superior curricula, how much less than our competitors can we charge before people actually hesitate to sign up with us because we seem too inexpensive? We are a tiny fraction of the cost of a conventional college education and you aren’t going to have to take out any loans. At the same time our certificates and professional degree are going to get you a higher income than a degree in English with a specialty in Chaucer is likely to.
Our greatest dream is that we could give scholarships to those who have a financial need. It would not take all that much invested money to make sure that we could pay our instructors for teaching and any research work and lesson revisions out of 5% of the investment’s value per year. This would allow us to grant scholarships, with those paying the full lesson costs knowing that we would add that to the endowment to allow us to expand YDS as needed.
This brings up the point that, if anyone has expertise in coaching people through building an endowment, we know how much we would need to allow us to provide scholarships to anyone who would find our education a financial hardship. A full endowment to cover all present costs and allow for the greater number of students a scholarship program would bring in would require an invested value of the endowment of $3,600,000. It isn’t all that much to permanently fund the largest school in the yacht design industry. We would love to get to that point. This would be enough so that the endowment should expand on its own in excess of the inflation rate and allow for any additional expansion over time.
It occurs to me as I re-read the above body of text that there is a distinct lack of “salesmanship” and Madison Avenue “puff”. This has been true from the school’s beginning 35 years ago. Notice we don’t call YDS an “institute” or “college”. We don’t call our instructors “professors” and I don’t call myself “president” or “chancellor”. I’m just the Director. We are here for those who want us, and do no advertising beyond this web site. Given this low key approach it is remarkable to me that we have grown to be such a successful complete program of yacht and small craft naval architecture. This year in addition to the CAD Course Certificate, there will also be Yacht Draftsman Certificate for those completing the Main Curriculum Lessons 1 through 11. This acknowledges that the furthest a student actively looking for entry level work in the field has gotten in the course before getting a good position is one gentleman who was just starting Lesson 10. He got a job with a prestigious company, and now runs his own design firm. Those completing the entire Main Curriculum will receive our professional degree in Naval Architecture with a specialty in Yacht and Small Craft design.
Our work load is heavy enough so that I should note, yet again, that updating this page tends to be infrequent. It has been suggested that the name should be changed to “What’s New This Millenium”. In any case we are always available for those with questions about the school, or yacht design in general. Email generally gets you the most complete considered reply and can be kept to refer to. However sometimes you just want to hear a human voice, and that’s what you get when you call us.
