After a 40+ year career, entirely based on innovation,
where there can be no-one whose ideas, concepts and arrangements have been more
copied, an accusation of stealing ideas and others warned that I will steal from
them, on a public forum, rather takes one by surprise. It calls for an
answer.
The attack continues with an attempt to undermine what
we do regarding improving efficiency of boat building, when I am the only person
to put in long term effort and to succeed in providing clients with a truly
efficient build technique.
There is something strange here and even more strange
now we know the subject of the accusation. The idea of a Wharram
with space. Some may consider this a brilliant
idea.
Jerry Dycus tells me of a call in 1976. He
remembers the call. I do not. I do recall the details of the design
and the background very clearly. I will recount exactly how the
Kelsall design in question came into being. We were designing both open
and bridge deck cats, and building both. This made us very aware of
how easy the hulls were and how much time went into the bridge deck projects,
after the hulls were complete. We were always discussing how to save
time and how we could get cats, with reasonable space, built at less
cost. A young designer working for me, wanted to build himself a cat
to live on, but could not afford the time to do a full bridge-deck cat. It
should be a simple hull shape wide enough for a double berth within the
hull. It was as simple as that. He did the
drawings. He had use of my table and he built the first Lima
31, with rather wider hulls than our previous open bridge-deck cats.
The design was unusual; for it’s single rudder and single board, which we had
just been testing on an open bridge-deck, Leocat. We talked to lots of clients
on same lines and built others to the same format.
An “invention” cannot be “obvious”. An idea
this obvious cannot belong to anyone and hence cannot be stolen.
Regarding the attempt to undermine our way of resin
infusion, we have another self appointed expert prepared to condemn and to
contradict, without understanding the topic. For information, if
needed we could work with a 5 minute gel time.
We can thank Jerry Dycus for adding one more endorsement
of the KSS basic principle.
Derek Kelsall.