Introducing Alki Watercraft
WELCOME to the inaugural Alki Watercraft newsletter! We are very grateful to all of you for showing your interest and enthusiasm in what we are doing. We are excited for you to come on this journey with us!
Gabe driving Little Tahoma in the Puget Sound
Our Mission
Our goal is to create a new brand of affordable, capable, and safe watercraft to enable more people to get outdoors and experience the world by water.
Who We Are
The founders of Alki Watercraft are two couples, Gabe and Ann Mountjoy, and Michael Gonzalez and Bianca Barr. We are all degreed engineers - mechanical, materials science, and aerospace. Gabe and Ann own Common Fibers, a composites manufacturing company located right here in Seattle. They have over a decade of success designing and building composite parts for supercars, aircraft, and now watercraft. Michael and Bianca are aerospace engineers with over a decade of professional experience. Michael also has lifelong experience boating in the Salish Sea and Bianca has experience building networks and doing sales as a professional realtor. Fate would have it that we became neighbors, and discovered a shared vision for a new product designed and built in house to fill a void in the existing boat market.
Michael, Gabe, and Ann with Little Tahoma on Vashon Island
Little Tahoma
Between day jobs and a pair of young kids each, we have spent nights and weekends building a prototype boat called "Little Tahoma". The key methods and concepts we wanted to demonstrate with this prototype (which are cornerstones of our brand and will be incorporated in all production models) are as follows:
A 2-piece hull designed for expedient manufacturing from advanced composite materials and a Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfusion Molding (VARTM) technique
Expanding foam fill to create an extremely strong, watertight, and buoyant hull
Net positive reserve buoyancy when fully swamped, i.e. you can fill the boat with water until it's spilling out over the transom and it maintains positive, level flotation
Self-bailing decks, i.e. the deck you sit and walk on is above the static waterline and has a drain overboard, so any water that comes into the boat is passively drained out by gravity, no bilge pumps needed
Smooth ride and predictable handling, giving comfort in the choppy conditions we get in the Salish Sea while maintaining stability and surefootedness
Gunnel mounted accessory system to host a wide variety of accessories and allow the operator to quickly adapt the boat to different uses such as cruising, entertaining, fishing, camping, utility, or anything else they can imagine
We are pleased to report that we have successfully demonstrated ALL of these objectives with the Little Tahoma prototype! It is made from 2 infused pieces of fiberglass, filled with expanding foam, floats full of water, self-bails, handles great on and off plane, and hosts gunnel mounted accessories. This success was not without some iteration and tweaking, which we'll share more on in future newsletters, but the tweaks were relatively minor, and all the lessons learned have been integrated into the full size design.
Ann driving Little Tahoma right off of Alki Beach
What Comes Next?
We are hard at work designing the first full size production model, a brand new 15' boat with all design features listed above, complete with motor and trailer for $20,000! We are also establishing our company and brand, so expect lots of updates to our website and various social media platforms in the coming months. We will share news and updates as often as we can, and are so excited to bring you along with us as we build something innovative and new.