As I understood the OP, it's not a matter of incredulity or ignorance. It's a matter of having a number of firmly established observations about large ships with wooden hulls. Wood is not rigid enough, and the available means of binding together beams of that size are not strong enough, to eliminate severe flexing of the beams and failures in the bindings. The joints leak, and this would happen regardless of whether there are masts or not.
BTW, if you think masts would have been unnecessary, you would have to make up some story about how the ark could be steered into the wind to avoid being capsized by waves. Or else you would have to make up some story about how the waves wouldn't have been so very big, but then you'd have to reconcile that scenario with how the flood could have caused all the geological mayhem that creationists attribute to it, without making waves.
Of course, all that mayhem consists of made up stories as well, having absolutely no plausibility in relation to actual physical processes of fluid dynamics, erosion, sedimentation, volcanism, and so on. So it's really just a matter of trying to reconcile some incompatible flights of pure imagination, each of which is equally at odds with reality.
OBVIOUSLY, GOD COULD HAVE MADE ANYTHING POSSIBLE, given any typical definition of "GOD". But then, why not have Noah just build a big box that God could then cause to float in the air or be teleported to a safe place -- Mars, maybe -- while He destroyed the rest of land life on earth?
Simple answer: the Hebrew culture in the millennia Before Christ had no concept of science fiction comparable to what we have today, so they could not make up such a story. And there's also the fact that some slightly earlier culture already had this nifty ark idea going around in the popular mythology.
If you want to tell your kids "amazing stories", there's no problem with that -- whether they believe the stories or not is their own business. Whether you believe the stories or not is your own business. Trying to assert the stories as fact (even asserting the possibility that such stories could be factual despite plenty of clear evidence to the contrary) is another matter. It doesn't work.
I could just as well say "We have very little information about the turtle who carries the world on its back, so it is difficult to judge the turtle's color. Much has been written about the turtle..." Same thing.
{Added by edit:} Having "little information" about the ark, and having "much written about it", strikes me as a very enlightening statement about the subject: so much writing, and so little information...
Edited by Otto Tellick, : (added last paragraph)
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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