Talk about different flavors. About 25 years ago the door to my small office flew open and in burst George Buehler looking wild and woolly smoking a pipe with a broken stem repaired with a wad of black electrical tape. Under his arm was a large can of Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco. After brief introductions George launched into a tirade based upon the premise that "your boats are silly. My boats are sensible." I was new in business, not tremendously secure and genetically a little on the combative side, but we managed to end our meeting before coming to blows. George harangued and puffed on his crippled pipe while I puffed on one of my cherished, immaculate Dunhills probably packed with imported Escudo cut navy plug. Yep, we certainly were two different flavors.

A year later settling down on Ricky Nelson for a quiet night on the hook in Eagle Harbor, I noticed a perky double-ender drop anchor across the bay. It was George. I finished dinner, grabbed a fresh bottle of single malt and rowed my dinghy toward the dim yellow kerosene light in George's cabin. I don't think we finished that bottle of scotch that night, but I remember making a good dent in it. George and I were now friends.

George reminds me of Van Morrison, the Irish singer. You may not like everything he does, but you have to admire a man who for many years is faithful to his own unique vision of his craft. I like just about all of George's boats. They are rough and ready, and they border on workboat aesthetics. This one, called ALCA i, was designed for a couple who will build the boat themselves and have the fortune of owning an oak farm for materials. They wanted a boat they could use for marine biological research. This is a true motorsailer with a true pilothouse. This is a manly boat.

The hull style harkens back to the North Sea lifeboat types with its strongly curved ends and its boldly sprung sheer. This boat is heavy at 94,443 pounds. But with a waterline length of 59 feet, 6 inches the D/L is only 212. George favors an almost symmetrically balanced hull form fore and aft. Deadrise is almost constant throughout, and both ends are on the full side. Not surprisingly, this full-ended shape gives an exceptionally high prismatic coefficient of .622. This would indicate less than great performance in light air and good speed when the big, six-cylinder auxiliary kicks in. In fact, with 1,066 gallons of fuel, this boat will go 4,000 miles at 9 knots without the aid of sails. There is essentially no salient keel to this design. The high-deadrise-angle canoe body is well over 4 feet deep amidships. Draft is only 6 feet and that precludes even reasonable upwind performance. This boat is designed to motor to weather.

George calls this rig a "three-masted schooner." I think not. If it were a schooner the last mast should be no less in height than the mast forward of it. Hell, I don't know. It's 2002! I'm going to call it a "gooner."

Given the size of this boat and the fact that it will have a crew of two you have to break the rig down into small-sized sails. Of course, you could use all the modern gizmos like Leisure Furl and hydraulic roller-furling headsails, but Van Morrison wouldn't use a drum machine, would he? I'll bet this rig has galvanized wire standing rigging. The low center of pressure afforded by this handsome rig will couple well with the boat's 11 percent ballast-to-displacement ratio.

There's a lot of cabin sole in this boat. It is refreshing to look at an interior that is not the five pounds of marbles in the two-pound-bag type.

Solidly built, the hull is all white oak with a laminated keel, double sawn frames and 23/8-inch-by-21/2-inch strip planking. This will be a stout and stalwart passagemaker.

You are what you sail. I'd feel really good sliding into a remote harbor in this rugged beauty. But I still wouldn't wrap electrical tape around one of my Dunhills.