Boat Profile
A lapstrake pulling boat
...a deep and dramatic curve. The bronze oarlock sockets are patterned on Rushton’s original design and made by Bob Lavertue, proprietor of the Springfield Fan Centerboard Company. He does fine reproductions of many Rushton accessories and owns a Rushton-built Iowa. I enjoyed making the brass mooring-ring assembly shown on the plans and also cold-hammered and bent some 3/8″ bronze rod...
Boat Profile
An Oughtred canoe
...seven strakes for plank-on-frame construction, but don’t provide scantlings for frames and planks. The Stickleback shown here was built in the traditional manner by Tom Regan of Grapeview Point Boat Works in Allyn, Washington. He took the 3″ frame spacing from Rushton’s description of the 10’6″ Nessmuk canoe in his 1903 catalog: “Ribs, very light and spaced 3″.” Rushton’s legendary...
Reader Built Boats
Variations on a classic
...man at 5′3″ and 103 lbs, also asked Rushton to build an even smaller canoe, SAIRY GAMP, most of us would need something larger. Mac MacCarthy, a century after Rushton, stretched the Wee Lassie to 13′ 6″ by 29″ and called the new design Wee Lassie II. Photographs by Phil Boyer Phil completed this skin-on-frame WEE BONNIE, the first of...
Boat Profile
Strip-built in cedar, spruce, and pine
...in the floorboards anchor adjustable foot braces. Plans were not available then as they are now. Atwood Manley’s Rushton and His Times in American Canoeing included the lines and offsets for Rushton’s Saranac Lake guideboat. Steve built a nicely crafted wood-strip version, and it was closely followed by a second. While generally pleased, he found the Saranac Laker had two...
Boat Profile
A classic in skin-on-frame
I already had a sailing dinghy and a sail-and-oar skiff in our two-car garage, but I thought there was room for one more boat, a small one, alongside my wife’s car. I decided to build Dave Gentry’s Wee Lassie. In the 1880s, Henry Rushton designed the original Wee Lassie as a beautiful lapstrake canoe and since then, his iconic design...
Reader Built Boats
A memory to hang on to
...summers working for Milo Williams restoring antique Adirondack guideboats. While working in Milo’s shop on the north shore of Little Moose Lake, he grew to appreciate the beauty of the guideboats and the pleasure of working with wood. Among all of the boats Milo had under his care was a Wee Lassie, an undecked canoe designed by Henry Rushton. “I...
Small Boats Annual 2007
A solo canoe for double paddle
Harry Bryan, a boatbuilder and designer from New Brunswick, Canada, designed the Fiddlehead, a 10 1⁄2′ double-paddle canoe, in 1992 after his sister-in-law introduced him to her Wee Lassie. The Wee Lassie is a small double-paddle canoe designed by J. Henry Rushton around 1893. Bryan had always rowed small boats, rather than paddled them. He had “never faced forward in...
Reader Built Boats
From corrugated roofing and rusty nails to cypress strips and epoxy
...37 years went by before Ernest seriously considered building another boat. An article by Mac McCarthy in the May/June 1991 issue of WoodenBoat was an illustrated guide to the construction of a strip-built version of Henry Rushton’s Wee Lassie double-paddle canoe. The article included Rushton’s lines for a 10′ 5-3/4″ by 27″ canoe. The drawings on the magazine page were...
News and Curiosities
...4’6″. Based on John Gardner’s plans and documented as-built by the Apprenticeshop in Rockland, Maine. Lapstrake with centerboard. Creole Skiff Gibben Dupre, 17′9″ x 4′9″. Built by Alexander Giroir at Pierre Part, Louisiana, in 1934. Canoe by J.R. Robertson, 15′ x 30″. Built at Auburndale, Mass. in the early 1900s. Lapstrake construction. Rushton canoe Ugo, 16′ x 30″. Smooth-skin lapstrake....
Adventures
Cruising Canoes in Algonquin Provincial Park
...author Derek would use the 32-lb strip-planked canoe I built using blue insulating sheet foam for strips rather than cedar. The canoe in front of me is one of three skin-on-frame versions I built of my Wee Bonnie series. The design has its roots in the Wee Lassie canoes built in 1880 for George Washington Sears—aka Nessmuk—by the Rushton Boat...
Reader Built Boats
...out for a first sail. “She stood up to the wind, rain, and chop. She stayed dry for the most part and was a pleasure to sail—a dream come true.” The boat still awaits a christening, a name, and an owner. Joe is now working on a Rushton wooden canoe, a project that is much more manageable and less expensive....
Boat Profile
A decked canoe with a Roaring Twenties flair
The microBootlegger is an elegant, cedar-strip boat that is a joy to paddle and draws compliments every time I take it out. Designed by Nick Schade of Guillemot Kayaks for use on small lakes or sheltered bays, it was inspired by a 1924 mahogany speedboat named BABY BOOTLEGGER as well as by Henry Rushton’s double-paddle canoes. Nick calls it a...
Reader Built Boats
Building canoes to give away
...try some new techniques on a smaller boat. After some research, he settled on Dave Gentry’s skin-on-frame adaptation of the 10′6″ Wee Lassie, originally designed and built by J. Henry Rushton in the late 1800s. Gentry describes a setup of polyester skin on a skeleton of solid-wood stringers on four plywood frames. John opted to laminate his frames out of...
Adventures
A traditional canoe with a contemporary twist
...he brought into his own shop a late-1800s Rushton wood-and-canvas canoe for restoration. During the weekdays he was tearing the sailboat back to rough, splintered fiberglass, and in the evenings and weekends he was falling in love with the canoe. “Something about the mass and complexity of the sailboat left me craving boats I could actually pick up and carry....