The person who was involved with the Victory Tug while Jim was doing the preliminary design and part of the final working drawings was a man named Steven Dowdney. It might have been Stephen but Jim tends to think not. He has a company called Rockland Plantation Products somewhere in the Charleston, SC area.
Requirements as defined by the The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) http://www.sname.org/Home/ drove the freeing port design.
Surviving a deadhead strike drove the design thickness of the LNVT's hull.
The hull is designed minimize snap rolling. A snap roll occurs when a heeling hull rapidly returns upright.
Lord Nelson Tugs help put Sundowner tugs out of business.
Jim credits Lindsay Lord's book for the idea of balancing the boat--i.e. keeping it traveling straight through the water--by using both underwater forces on the hull and wind forces on the pilothouse.
William Garden, Bob Perry, and Jim Backus, in that order, were approached by Loren Hart to design the 37 LNVT. After rejecting the designs of Garden and Perry, Bob Perry recommended that Loren talk with Jim Backus. The rest, as they say, is history.
Jim regrets that the board he put under the pilothouse
windows wasn't included on the finished tugs.
Jim Backus' CV
'61 - 62 gets a business degree but moonlights designing houses
'67 - '71 Marines. Works F-4 logistics—mainly fuel supply. Becomes afraid of heights after a helo wind-shear incident.
'71 - gets job as inside salesman for a lumber firm
'72? Enrolls in Westlawn
'73? Gets an engineering job with Pearson Yachts
'75 Marries Helen. Jim and Helen were introduced by Jim's father. Helen was Jim's father's nurse.
'7? Graduates from Westlawn '7 move to Seattle to work for Bob Perry.
7? Left Perry to open his own shop
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