The Newfound Rangeley is a strip-planked interpretation of a well-known western Maine guideboat.
The Rangeley Lakes boat, adapted for modern wood-strip construction by Newfound Woodworks, is ideal for fixed-seat recreational rowing. It moves easily through the water thanks to its slender bow and tapered stern, and its generously flared hull amidships lends great stability. The historical use of this boat was for sport fishing, where standing up in the boat was a common practice. In the decades before reliable outboard-motor power, builders of these boats developed a design that performed exceptionally well under oar power and had the stability that customers demanded. Newfound Woodworks has preserved the essential performance qualities of the original Rangeleys while allowing the 21st-century builder to achieve the smoothly rounded contours characteristic of a wood-strip boat.
The classic Rangeley Lakes boat was lapstrake planked on light bent frames. John Gardner, widely regarded as the dean of American small craft, describes the Rangeley’s history and construction in detail in his book Building Classic Small Craft. His narrative is entertaining and informative, and prospective builders who want to re-create the Rangeley Lakes boat in its lapstrake form will enjoy his chapter on the type. Historically, the construction of these boats was fairly standardized and simple. For builders unfamiliar with spiling planks for lap joints, or who just prefer the look of a wood-strip hull, Newfound’s wood-strip/epoxy adaptation offers a sound and easily maintained alternative.
Michael Vermouth was helping a friend renovate his family’s camp in the Rangeley Lakes region during the winter of 1989–90 when the pair discovered an old boat that had been left outside under snow. The bottom of the boat had been hogged by then, and advanced decay was evident. The relic was soaked through and through, and weighed about 200 lbs. However, Michael, a cedar-strip canoe builder, was intrigued by the fine lines of this boat: It had clearly been a high-quality rowing boat in its day. He wondered if it could be reproduced in wood-strip form. With the permission of his friend’s family, he hauled it back to his shop for further inspection.
Upon perusing Building Classic Small Craft and other books, Michael determined that he had the remains of a Rangeley Lakes boat. The old boat was too misshapen to have its lines taken, so Michael approached boat designer Tony Dias to adapt the offsets in Gardner’s book for wood-strip construction. He then built a wood-strip prototype of the Rangeley from those plans. It proved to be a joy to row, and Michael was convinced that this wood-strip edition would be perfect for recreational use.
Today, Michael Vermouth is the proprietor of Newfound Woodworks, which supplies plans, kits, materials, tools, and instructions for the wood-strip boat builder. The company offers plans for a variety of boats, including a nice selection of rowing craft. Several years ago, when he converted his production process from hand-cutting to CNC, Michael and his staff went back to John Gardner’s original offsets and started from scratch to create a digital file of the lines. In the process Newfound developed digital plans for a several models of Rangeley boats: a 15-footer, a 16 1⁄2-footer, and a 17-footer. Most have a transom stern, but a double-ender is available. The 17′ model is 2″ wider than the 15′ and 16 1⁄2′ models—which are each 46″ in beam. Aside from being refaired (checked for accuracy and corrected as needed), Newfound’s Rangeley lines are faithful to those found in Gardner’s book.
The Newfound Woodworks
Newfound Woodworks offers its Rangeleys in three lengths: 15′, 16′ 6″, and 17′. The company also offers a 17′ double-ender.
Building a Newfound Rangeley Boat
Newfound offers a variety of options to those desiring a Rangeley Boat—or any of its fleet of small craft. You can simply purchase the plans ($110), and build from scratch; you can purchase the CNC-cut molds ($250) and mill your own strips, and buy your own fiberglass, epoxy, and hardware; or you can purchase a complete kit ($2,695) containing everything you need.
Twenty years ago, when I began working on my first boat, I was a rather tentative builder. I was quickly hooked, though, and continued building wood-strip canoes, trying a different design with each new project. Eventually, I began displaying my work at shows and woodcraft demonstrations. Back then, there were few strip-built rowboats at the events I attended. I wondered about their absence, because it was obvious to me that this method of construction would be suitable for just about any small, lightweight craft. Later on, when a couple of wood-strip rowboat plans appeared on the market, I noticed the shapely lines of the Rangeley Lakes boat. Thinking that this was an especially pretty boat, I contacted Michael at The Newfound Wood- works, and settled on the 15′ model.
I started building my Rangeley Lakes boat in October 2004, and completed it, except for the last coats of varnish, a year later. I named my boat CRYSTAL EMBER for the way she glows on the water in low-angle light. A pair of 7 1⁄2′ spruce oars from Shaw & Tenney finished her off perfectly.
Although some folks are able to build strip boats in a couple of months, mine took longer because I worked intermittently on the project. I used CNC-cut stations from Newfound Woodworks. They came with clamping grooves milled into the edges, which eliminated the need for blemish-inducing staples. For those who plan to paint their strip boat, I recommend stapling because it is a much faster way to assemble the hull over the mold.
I sawed my own strips from salvaged wood. About two-thirds of the strips were cut from cedar tongue-and-groove siding salvaged from a building in Olympia, Washington. About one-third of the strips were cut from a cedar log found drifting in the Columbia River. I made feature strips for the hull sides using cedar scraps left over from earlier boat projects. CRYSTAL EMBER’s transom is built of marine plywood sandwiched between 1⁄4″-thick pieces of cherry. The outwales are ash, which is renowned for its strength and abrasion resistance. I chose cherry for the inwales, deck, quarter knees, and oarlock blocks. The seats and seat risers are of Douglas-fir.
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The hull is sheathed in 6-oz fiberglass cloth, which is standard for a boat of this size. Two lengths of cloth were overlapped by 6″ on each side of the flat plank on the bottom of the hull, inside and out. This provides greater strength where it is most needed. The decorative feature strips on the hull of my boat have a band of 4-oz fiberglass cloth bonded to the inside surface for reinforcement.
Rangeley boats are fast, responsive, and stable; thus they are well suited to pleasure rowing. They can handle choppy water, and in fact are appreciated on their native lakes for safely negotiating storm-tossed waters when unanticipated weather rolls in. I am very impressed with my Rangeley Lakes boat, and although I originally thought I might enjoy the boat for a while and then maybe offer it for sale, I would have a very difficult time letting such a fine boat go.
Although the 15′ Rangeley is a fairly small, light boat, it is too broad-beamed for most people to load by hand onto the top of a vehicle without risking injury to the boat or themselves. I transport mine using a lightweight aluminum trailer or a boat cart. Also, despite the design’s flat transom, the fine stern that contributes so much to the excellent rowing qualities of the boat make it unsuitable for supporting a lot of weight back there. The transom can accept a lightweight motor; I would recommend a small electric one, with a long tiller that allows the operator to sit on the middle seat. If too much weight is moved into the boat’s fine bow, the Rangeley may capsize. Finally, it would be good to see foot braces added as an optional feature in the plans for the Rangeley, as braces really improve the oarsman’s ability to apply power.
The outstanding performance and beauty of Newfound’s Rangeley boat has reaffirmed the place of this design as the quintessential sportfishing and pleasure-rowing boat. With Newfound’s support in the form of detailed building instructions (including videos) for the amateur builder, as well as materials and tools, the Rangeley design should have great appeal to a strip-boat builder in search of a fine rowboat.
FOPA: A Reader Built Rangeley
Need some inspiration before building your own Newfound Rangeley boat? Read about FOPA, a Rangeley lake boat built by one of our readers.
Order plans for the Newfound Rangeley from Newfound Woodworks, Inc., 67 Danforth Brook Rd., Bristol, NH 03222; 603–744–6872.
While she was originally intended for the pursuit of striped bass and bluefish in the choppy waters of Block Island Sound and the Gulf of Mexico, Ninigret is well suited to a wide range of uses including family outings and picnics, weekend cruising, or any other activity that benefits from quiet, economical operation, lots of room, and a smooth ride.
Roeboats
While John Atkin designed Ninigret for fishing the choppy waters of Block Island Sound, the boat also makes a superb camp-cruiser. Irish boatbuilder Tiernan Roe built the fine example in the photograph above.
An easily driven hull allows Ninigret to use a relatively small outboard of around 25 hp, though she can handle as much as 60 hp. With a 30-hp four-stroke Honda outboard she has been shown to burn less than a gallon of fuel per hour at 15–20 knots depending on how she is loaded. Thus the initial expense of the motor is about as little as it could be for a boat this size, and her operating costs are likewise near the minimum. It stands to reason that a boat that is cheap to run will be run more often.
Unlike the short, heavy, high-powered boats that have been so popular in recent years, Ninigret planes easily at moderate speeds without much change in trim and without making big waves at any point in her speed range. In really rough water she can be slowed down, and she will still handle well and be safe and comfortable. This easy feel in a wide range of conditions is part of her agreeable personality.
“Designer John Atkin had a particular talent for creating “timeless” designs, and Ninigret is a prime example.”
Designer John Atkin had a particular talent for creating “timeless” designs, and Ninigret is a prime example. Introduced in 1963, she still has a fresh and contemporary look today, and we expect that decades hence, people will have the same reaction. At the same time, all who love the emotion in well-drawn traditional lines will find her easy on the eyes. Ninigret became one of John’s most popular designs, with more being built every year almost a half-century after she was drawn.
Roeboats
The motor on Tiernan Roe’s Ninigret is concealed by a hatch.
One of the weak points of many outboard-powered boats is a vulnerability to seas approaching the boat from behind, when the boat is stopped. Normally the transom of an outboard boat is plumb or nearly so, and the weight of the motor is all at the extreme aft end of the boat.
When a large sea comes from that direction, the stern of the boat has little tendency to lift to it, and commonly water pours around the motor and over the top of the transom, leaving the boat dependent on whatever defenses are inboard of the motor, if any. When outboard boats lose power they typically turn away from the wind, and many otherwise good boats are lost each year because they could not cope with seas impacting the boat from behind. In Ninigret, the motorwell arrangement allows a flaring transom, plus freeboard and buoyancy aft that are more typical of an inboard-powered boat—a major improvement in safety.
Timm Schleiff
Timm Schleiff’s motor sits handsomely in an exposed well.
While today’s outboards are not very susceptible to stalling as a result of wave impacts, there is obviously still a limit to how deeply they can be immersed in a wave without trouble. Ninigret’s outboard is almost completely protected from waves and also from collision. While we hate to think it is a problem one has to consider, we should note that its location in the well makes the motor much less likely to be stolen.
The outboard’s location also makes possible effective soundproofing of the motor. Few things improve a day on the water as much as simple peace and quiet, and a four-stroke outboard with good sound insulation is the about the quietest option available today, short of an electric motor.
Timm Schleiff
Boatbuilder Timm Schleiff (see WoodenBoat No. 215) built this glued-lapstrake plywood Ninigret in his West Virginia shop.
Compared to an inboard engine, the outboard saves considerably on installation costs, and when it is time to replace the engine, this, too, can happen quickly and at minimal cost, even if the motor is a different make. The aft engine location eliminates the usual ’midships engine box or elevated cockpit sole, leaving Ninigret’s cockpit sole low, level, and unobstructed.
Ninigret’s cockpit is large enough for many activities, and because it is well centered in the boat fore-and-aft, she is able to carry considerable weight without being thrown too far out of trim. Numerous arrangements are possible due to the lack of obstructions or level changes.
Roeboats
John Atkin recommended a 30–45-hp outboard for Ninigret; the corresponding top speed with this power reportedly ranges from 18 to 25 knots. Tiernan Roe’s Ninigret is powered by a 30-hp Honda.
The other very notable feature of this design is her small, canvas-roofed cabin forward. In most motor-boats, a small cabin like this is a seldom-used after- thought, but in Ninigret it is a real plus, adding much to a wide range of uses. For one thing it is an excellent storage area for anything you need to keep dry. Everyone enjoys a day boat more if there is a private place to use the head. Beyond this, it is plenty big enough to sleep in, and one can sit upright on the berths and see out the large windows, which make the cabin cheery and open feeling. Thus Ninigret is a perfectly feasible little cruising boat, and numerous options for cockpit tents or awnings could add much to that potential.
The cabin features a removable canvas roof. The roof will keep the rain out just fine, but when it is removed the entire cabin area becomes a comfortable place for open-air seating and lounging, considerably protected from spray and wind by the cabin sides and windows. As such it is a great place to grab a nap away from the activities in the cockpit, or to ride in comfort with good forward visibility, and it would be a particularly good spot for small children to be safe while they can still see what is going on.
If one wanted, one could make a screen that covered the entire roof area, at which point the cabin would be about the perfect place to sleep on a hot summer night, under the stars. Despite its many contributions, the cabin trunk is relatively low, and taken as a whole the boat has minimal windage that is reasonably well distributed fore and aft. She will not become unmanageable in a strong crosswind, as a result.
Roeboats
Roe’s boat includes seating for six and accommo-dations that include berths for two and a head.
Ninigret’s hull lines show a boat that is long, lean, and light—everything that an efficient powerboat should be. There will be no big “hump” to climb over to get onto a plane, and indeed the hull will essentially be planing at all speeds because the underwater lines are so shallow and straight. The efficiency of the hull is partly proven by the very small size of the waves it will generate, in motion. The hull is what is called a “warped V” shape, flat under the transom for easy planing and good stability, moderately V’d amidships for minimal pounding, and with a sharp V shape forward, for a soft ride.
Flaring topsides all around make for a dry boat, with lots of reserve buoyancy and stability. The design is well known for a smooth ride at speed, and makes relatively flat, comfortable turns. While she has ample stability, she has a bit slower motion in a beam sea than most boats, which will be much appreciated especially when she is stopped.
Building Atkin’s Ninigret
Ninigret’s sharp forefoot transitions to flat after sections, amounting to quick planing and a dry ride.
Plywood construction is ideal for this type of boat, combining light weight, rigidity, and somewhat reduced maintenance. It will go well with epoxy glue and light fiberglass-and-epoxy sheathing, which will form a good foundation for long-lived two-part paint, if desired. If the amount of varnish is held down to a minimum and two-part paints are used where they are practical, maintenance requirements will be close to the minimum possible.
Builders should not think they are doing the boat any favor by increasing any of the scantlings— relatively light weight is one of the reasons Ninigret is so good at what she does, and the Atkins had vast experience in the priorities of construction. The hull is 3⁄8″ plywood over 5⁄8″ × 2 1⁄2″ white-oak frames. Some examples have been finished plainly while others have been done up yacht fashion. The boat will look great with an all-paint finish or with lots of varnish. Modify this boat with great caution. Seemingly minor changes could throw the whole look and function off, and we highly recommend trusting the famously competent and artistically gifted designer to have gotten it right the first time.
Atkin & Company designed over 800 boats, many of them motorboats, and many design themes similar to Ninigret were returned to and refined again and again over the course of many years. Perhaps there can be no greater recommendation for this design than to point out that she is the boat John Atkin chose for his own use in his retirement. He and his wife, Pat, enjoyed countless picnics and cruises in Ninigret, in Long Island Sound.
Numerous examples of Ninigret have been built in recent years, partly due to increasing interest in fuel economy and in wooden boats in general, but also from a simple desire for great-looking boats that do their jobs really well.
The Schooner 18 is an iconoclastic camp-cruiser from Shell Boats of St. Albans, Vermont. Her aft cabin offers several advantages over the more typical forward-placed cabin—including good forward visibility. This arrangement, however, requires remote steering in the form of a pedestal-mounted wheel.
BIG SWIFTY is an 18′ schooner from Shell Boats of St. Albans, Vermont. Her design is called the Schooner 18, and is the largest in proprietor Fred Shell’s Swifty line, whose basic hull form and techniques range from the 7′ Leif up to the boat featured here. The evolution of these boats has coursed over the past 25 or so years, and was inspired by a synthesis of Dutch and Norwegian hull forms and construction methods, as well as the Joel White-designed Nutshell pram. The Swifty moniker was given in honor of a legendary musician, whose identity we’ll return to after considering some of this boat’s attributes.
Fred Shell sails more than any builder I know. He’s the first on the lake in the spring, and the last off in the fall. He copes with the hard-water season on Lake Champlain by tinkering with iceboats. Since, like most of us, he doesn’t live on the waterfront, feeding his habit requires boats that are easily trailered, launched, and rigged. Fred fills these needs by designing and building a variety of imaginative designs, making them available as kits or finished boats. Shell boats’ hallmarks are low cost, simple construction, economical materials, light weight, and good performance.
For the moment, let’s leave aside the fact that Fred’s Schooner 18, with its aft-placed cabin, appears to be sailing backwards, and contemplate the hull and its construction. The basics are these: The boat has a flat 3⁄8″ plywood bottom and ¼″ lapstrake topsides. The chine seam is fiberglass-taped and the laps are epoxy-glued. Rather than complicate life with a centerboard and trunk, Shell has fitted the Schooner 18 with bilge keels and a skeg. These appendages provide lateral resistance, and metal shoes mounted on these “feet” allow the boat to beach and trailer with alacrity, as she perches in a solid, three-point stance. This configuration also protects the lightweight bottom of the boat and eliminates the need, weight, and cost of fiberglass sheathing.
Shell Boats
For trailering and storage, the Schooner 18’s rig stows in a crutch forward and on permanent gallows on the cabintop.
The cockpit sole is a false bottom, incorporating three flotation chambers. The splash-well structure aft for the motor and tank includes flotation as well. The stem is a stitch-and-glue technique epoxy fillet, strong and simple. The 5⁄8″ plywood decks are simply butted to the sheer, with the joint backed by an epoxy fillet after gluing and screwing it. The dramatic raked coaming stiffens the deck structure while keeping the cockpit dry. The low, short cabin is built with simple joinery, primarily of lightweight plywood, with a few stringers and beams here and there.
The deck arrangement is well worth our contemplation. The Schooner 18’s appearance strikes me as Venetian, or maybe even Venutian, but after a spirited Saturday morning sail I will heartily endorse the concepts embodied in this aft-cabin, forward-cockpit layout. It’s an iconoclastic concept to a contemporary American eye, though we’ll find it on traditional Norwegian rowing and sailboats. It works well: sailing visibility is completely unencumbered. The outboard motor and gas tank are screened from noise and view by the cabin. The bridge deck offers majestic seating for a crew of two, especially when equipped with folding cushions. The huge padded cockpit bay offers copious sprawling and lounging space, cleverly made more gracious by a footwell and the raked coaming. One can sit comfortably almost anywhere, as dictated by trim or social needs.
“BIG SWIFTY sails very well. She is quick to handle and accelerate, with a nice turn of speed for such a small boat.”
One of the idiosyncrasies necessitated by the Schooner 18’s aft cabin is remote steering. Rather than invoking Rube Goldberg, Shell has addressed this challenge with a simple, well-executed scheme. He has mounted an off-the-shelf cable helm unit in a combination mast partner–steering pedestal. This puts the 10″ wooden wheel within easy reach of the bridge deck seats, and also of a skipper sitting one notch forward and outboard as necessary.
The helm is coupled to a skeg-mounted rudder with a tiller arm sized to give one turn of the wheel, stop to stop. The resulting steering is easy, quick, and positive. There is no “feedback” as with a tiller, and that can leave experienced small-boat sailors feeling a bit empty, but I found it very manageable and felt comfortable at the helm within minutes. The overriding triumph is the space saving afforded by the helm. Tillers, of whatever configuration, restrict the use of space within their arc and thus they dominate many small boats.
The Schooner 18’s rig is just about as simple as could be hoped for. One hundred eighteen square feet of sail are almost evenly divided between sprit-boomed, leg-o’-mutton fore and main. The sails are luff-sleeved and live on their tapered spruce masts. The foresail is trimmed by a single sheet running to a swivel cam cleat mounted on the steering pedestal.
The main has a double sheet run to cam cleats on either side of the companionway, leaving the hatch free, and puts the sheet within the helmsman’s reach on either tack. The rotating masts, set in tubes with plastic bushings, allow roller furling or reefing when needed. When the sails are reefed, one simply strikes the sprit-booms as the reduced sails are small enough to set well without them. The rig stows and trailers in a crutch forward and on a gallows on the aft cabin top. This wide, arcing gallows allows the spars to be set to either side to free the companionway for traffic.
The cabin offers lounging headroom, a 6′ 6″ flat, and many convenient nooks, shelves, and cubbies. The very compact space is made habitable by large deadlights along the cabin sides, a full-width sliding hatch aft, and the very generously proportioned companionway. Any number of screen and canopy schemes could enhance the cruising comforts for one or two.
Shell Boats
The Schooner 18 carries 50 sq ft in her foresail, and 68 sq ft in her main. Sleeved luffs and sprit booms make setup and reefing as simple as can be.
The Schooner 18 is definitely not for the classicists among us. But the sailors among us must take note. The Schooner 18 sails very well. She is quick to handle and accelerate, with a nice turn of speed for such a small boat. She is stiff and dry, and reasonably rigged in terms of sail area, requiring the crew to trim the boat, but no heroic hiking is involved. The boat is light enough to be easily managed under oars, which, by the way, stow either forward under the side decks or in their sockets with blades cleated to the cabin sides in a sort of ready position.
This boat’s unusual configuration lends itself readily to the use of an outboard auxiliary. Indeed, it is a far happier auxiliary than most boats its size. Shell’s normal setup utilizes a 3.5-hp engine with an integral gas tank, a rig that provide hull speed—about 5 knots—and 12 miles of cruising on a tank of gas. A spare gas can stowed in the splash well extends the range by about 100 miles. On the day I sailed with him, Shell was experimenting with a 6-hp engine from another of his designs. He rigs the engines for semi-remote operation, extending the starter pull cord and the engine tilt cord over the cabin roof, and the shifter and twist-throttle handles forward through the cabin. Thus, once the engine is started, the helmsman steering with the wheel has engine controls within reach.
Shell Boats kits include sails, shaped spars, and all the plywood parts cut to shape and fit. The materials are basic and inexpensive, though always reasonable choices. Shell preassembles each kit, so that not only are hardware and screws included, but so are the pilot holes for the screws. He’ll include an optional epoxy kit if you so desire, and requires only that a customer pro-vide tools and consumables such as paint, sandpaper, brushes, and rags. He even builds his owns sails for the kits. His boats are not high-gloss, heavily detailed show-pieces. They are honest and useful, good performers with character. They are unmatched when judged by cost to usefulness. And, after all, any boat named for a Frank Zappa song must be way cool!
The Schooner 18’s shape suggests simple construction. Twin bilge keels will allow the boat to sit bolt upright on the beach, and provide lateral stability. The boat is available in either finished or kit form.
For more information, contact Shell Boats LLC, 561 Polly Hubbard Rd., St. Albans, VT 05478; 802–524–9645.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
When James Kealey built a boat so his sons could learn about perseverance and independence, he gave them something priceless: immersion in an activity at so young an age that they won’t remember learning what to do on a boat, they will just know how to do it. As children, we learn without questioning, and if we’re lucky enough to learn in an unthreatening environment that is patient and encouraging, we learn without inhibition or fear of getting it wrong.
By the time I was 16, I had no memory of a time when I couldn’t sail; it was just a part of life, like walking or talking. I could remember learning some of the finer details, but that was about mastering anticipation—What was the wind going to do? Where was that other boat going to go? It was never about where I should be sitting or how my sails should be set, those were things that just happened.
Then I started teaching at the local sailing school, and for the first time not only did I have to think about the process of moving a boat under sail, I had to explain it. I was at a loss…how do you explain something innate? Fortunately, my students were young, and as is the way with small children, they didn’t seek explanation. When I showed them what to do—push the tiller this way, and the boat will turn that way—they didn’t ask why, they simply followed my lead. A few years later, I graduated to adult students and was faced with a new reality. These learners wanted to understand the whys and the hows.
For me, a still-young instructor, the adults were frustrating: How could they not get this? How could they sit firmly to windward with their boat heeled toward them, even as they subconsciously leaned their bodies into the center of the boat in search of level comfort? How could they not know where the wind was coming from? Or see how the tidal current was affecting their progress? Or not be infuriated by that flapping jib?… And what was with the incessant questioning?
Then, one winter when I was in my mid-20s, I was invited to take downhill skiing lessons, and I became an adult beginner, riddled with insecurity and doubt. Eight-year-olds flashed past me, whooping and hollering with delight as I snow-plowed across the piste like an oversized Bambi on ice; my teacher made effortless, graceful turns as I, unable to get my skis to change direction, again and again came to an abrupt halt in the ungroomed snow at the side of the slope. I didn’t get it, any of it. And the more I struggled, the more I questioned and internally screamed for the hows and the whys. In one of my catching-my-breath moments lying crumpled in a snowbank staring up at the bright alpine sky, I had a sudden flash of admiration for all those mature sailing students I’d known. They had been dropped into an alien environment where their only tool was a ridiculous adult brain that kept getting in the way. And yet, despite that, many of them had actually gotten it and become excellent sailors.
Learning a new skill as an adult is not the easy, unconscious journey that learning to sail will likely be for James Kealey’s sons. Some of us shy away from the challenge, annoyed by the well-meaning but mildly condescending acquaintance who tells us “You’re never too old to learn”; succumbing instead to the inner voice that cautions “You’re too old, you’ll look a fool.” Yet, there are those who prove that it really is never too late. Gary Carbocci graduated from high school in 1969 and launched his first boat in 2024. He’d been thinking about building it for 50 years before he finally decided, seven years ago, that the time had come. He’d never before built a boat, any boat. But he didn’t start with an easy project; instead, he stepped right into the deep end and built a traditionally planked, 16′ Adirondack guideboat with intricate curves and delicate joints. He worked alone, without a mentor or instructor, just a couple of well-written books. But Gary had a desire and a self-confidence that told him “You’re never too old.”
This compact and easy-to-build canoe from designer Warren Jordan is a fine choice for a first-time builder who wants a lightweight craft for exploring shallow inlets, streams, and other calm waters.
Inexpensive, fun, and easy to build, this single-occupancy explorer canoe combines the sleek lines of a conventional canoe with the efficient paddling propulsion and minor draft constraints of a center-cockpit kayak. At 11′ 3″ LOA and 30″ beam and just under 40 lbs, NEWT is one of the handiest new canoes on the water.
Warren Jordan of South Beach, Oregon, designed NEWT with the desire to create a small craft that would not intimidate an inexperienced woodworker. He wanted her to be a size and weight that is easy to carry, able to accommodate a normal-sized adult, and still provide room for enough gear for a day trip. She loads and launches with ease: one can load NEWT on cartop roof racks or simply slide her into the back of a pickup, with the option of stacking two boats.
In addition to serving the individual builder, NEWT is a perfect fit for community boatbuilding workshops, where groups are usually looking to create a simple yet beautiful and useful craft in a short amount of time.
Warren Jordan is a man who refuses to let the sawdust settle. Most recognized for his cradle boat, Baby Tender, which he first designed and built in the late 1980s—a design that is still in demand—Jordan has since designed 25 other boats and has built over 50, all to a high professional standard.
Warren Jordan
“Marine plywood panels (1⁄4″ or 6mm thick) make up the sides, and then chine logs (long strips along the boat’s bottom) are attached to the outside of the hull. A plywood bottom will cap the assembly.”
I arranged to meet Jordan at his home. It was a moody spring Saturday, typical for the Oregon coast. In learning about him, I was immediately attracted to his ideal of no-waste wooden boat building. After deciding on a style of boat to design and build, he spends hours calculating how best to achieve the desired result with the hopes of leaving only sawdust on his shop floor as excess waste. With the growing awareness of the Earth’s limited natural resources, his minimalist approach to boatbuilding is gaining more widespread acceptance. Jordan said of NEWT, “If I have a sheet and a half of plywood, I try and get every piece of the boat out of that, including the paddles, with nothing left over, utilizing everything.” With a hull of plywood, paddle blades of plywood attached to an 8′ piece of closet rod, and remaining pieces that can be found at any local hardware store, NEWT runs about $200 in cost of materials.
After touring Warren’s modest and well-organized garage shop, snacking on treats prepared by his wife, Rita, and meeting their friends, Ashley and Yasmina, we set out for Ona Beach State Park for our trials. Ashley launched the boat; the rest of us walked along the shore, watching her as she glided effortlessly downstream. NEWT turned on a dime and seemed to react with ease. The water depth was no more than a few inches deep, yet Ashley kept her momentum. “You can paddle it in a puddle,” she said. That about sums it up.
James Holzgraf
Weighing less than 40 lbs, she is a cinch to carry in the back of a pickup truck or on top of almost any car.
Next, Yasmina had a turn. I decided to challenge her by putting her 50-lb chocolate Lab, Mojave, in the back to see if they could hold their balance. Mojave looked a little nervous, but nobody got wet and NEWT performed well under the added weight and altered load. But the real test of breaking strength came when I took my turn; I stand 6′ 8″ and weigh 230 lbs. I climbed in and shoved off, and NEWT took me gracefully along the bank. I was amazed at the boat’s stability as I paddled along. Even paddlers with significantly different body weights and proportions can enjoy a comfortable ride, mostly due to Jordan’s careful placement of the folding chair that is fixed amidships. This is an ordinary camp chair with adjustable reclining straps. The placement of the chair on the boat’s sole positions the paddler so that he or she can maneuver the double feathering paddle with ease. The chair doesn’t slide forward or aft because it is screwed to the ’midship frame and a shim that is mounted to the floor. A slight adjustment of the straps can give added com- fort and help to trim the boat. Until I felt NEWT in action I couldn’t fully appreciate the comfort that the seating arrangement offered. Even my legs—and I’m all legs—could rest fully extended rather than being bent. This allows for many more hours of comfortable cruising. For those who prefer a foot brace, the forward frame might suffice—or could be used to prop up a customized one.
James Holzgraf
Warren Jordan secured a camp seat just aft of center to place the paddler’s weight right where it will do the most good to keep the boat stable underway.
As mentioned earlier, NEWT’s flat-bottomed hull enables the user to maneuver her in a mere 8″–9″ of water. This makes her an optimum craft for paddling shallow estuaries and creeks. An ability to hold trim is essential for maintaining directional stability (the boat’s ability to track on course or to easily correct to get back on course). With every paddle stroke some sideways momentum accompanies forward movement. Without the correct amount of rocker (the longitudinal sweep of the boat’s bottom) and an accurate estimate of the location of the boat’s center of gravity, its efficiency would have been compromised. NEWT has no skeg, and her center of gravity is just aft of center; this adds just enough drag in the stern to preserve the desired directional stability.
The paddle blades are oriented on the loom at 90 degrees to one another. This keeps the non-working blade from facing the wind and slowing the boat while the stroke blade is underwater. To help prevent water from reaching the paddler as it drips inboard from the blades, Jordan has tied Turk’s Head knots a few inches inboard from each blade; this seems to do a good job of keeping both boat and paddler dry.
James Holzgraf
NEWT can carry a surprising variety of weights and loads without incident—even though Mojave the Lab seems a bit concerned.
Another advantage to the floor-seating arrangement is the increased level of intimacy with the waterway that it provides. For me, it conjures childhood memories of floating the rivers by raft and leaning over the edge—my nose just barely out of the water—wondering at the plants and rocks below as I make my way downstream. In a typical canoe, leaning over to touch the water or to grab something puts you at risk of capsizing. With NEWT, you feel less of that separation from the water. While a kayak brings you close to the water, NEWT makes you feel even closer because there is no deck fencing you in. This gives a whole new perspective and adds an important dimension to the experience, I think.
NEWT offers even the novice builder an empty canvas for experimentation and exploration. Once the basic boat is constructed, there is ample opportunity to outfit the boat to suit individual needs. With plenty of room for tie-down hooks, straps, or framing mounts for a cooler or gear bin, NEWT is spacious—and poised for fun.
Plans for Newt are available from Jordan Wood Boats, P.O. Box 194, South Beach, Oregon 97366, 541-867-3141.
Warren Jordan
NEWT’s frames are set up on its modest strongback and are used to shape the hull. Every piece of the NEWT canoe is dimensioned, and many details—from breasthooks to paddle blades—are provided at full scale on the plans. Additionally, there are well-organized and thorough instructions on the plans to take you through every step of construction.
Paul Gartside, designer of the 10′ sailing pram Spitfire, says that he drew it with “youngsters in mind.” He describes it as a “neat little boat to learn to sail in and hopefully one that might instill the magic of a real wooden boat at an impressionable age. From the builder’s perspective [it’s] a great place to hone traditional skills.” A small transom-bowed lapstrake dinghy, Spitfire is a fun sail-and-oar boat for two people—adults as well as “youngsters.”
Before building the Spitfire, we had tackled a few other builds and were glad to have the experience—construction of this small boat is sufficiently complex that it would tax a beginner. Indeed, Gartside says of the design, “this [is] real boatbuilding. It doesn’t get much more challenging, regardless of size.”
Fani Skoulikidi
Thanks to the warm dry weather on Syros, we were able to build the boat outside beneath a simple shade awning. We built the Spitfire upside down on a strongback, planking it in spruce because cedar is hard to come by in Greece. Once the hull was fully planked, we turned it upright for fitting out and decking, first painting the interior—the ends would never again be so easily accessed.
The hull, which requires lofting, is of traditional lapstrake construction with 10 planks per side on steam-bent frames. The four sheets of plans are detailed and provide the necessary information for an experienced builder, but there are no step-by-step instructions. The first sheet includes the lines and a table of offsets from which to loft the boat full size. The second provides details of the construction including the recommended types of wood, the thicknesses, the number and type of fastenings, the 10 lbs of lead to weight the centerboard, and other small details. The third sheet describes the setup of the strongback, and the fourth is the sail plan.
The Spitfire is built upside down on a strongback. We used pine for the centerboard, centerboard trunk, gunwales, carlin, floor timbers, deckbeams, deck, and rudder (which we built with a fixed blade, as we typically sail in deeper waters; Gartside’s plans detail a rudder with a kick-up blade). We used spruce for the planking and floorboards and also for the spars and oars. Gartside suggests Atlantic white cedar, 5⁄16″ for the planking and 3⁄8″ floorboards, but in Greece, where we live and built the boat, cedar is hard to come by. We used oak, as specified, for the keel plank, frames, transoms, rubbing strakes, coaming, tiller, and cleats. The plans note the hanging knees as being laminated, but do not specify the wood type; we made ours of solid oak. We also made our own blocks out of elm. For fastenings, we used copper nails and roves, and used silicon-bronze screws and bolts where needed. The deck is two layers of 5⁄16″ pine covered with 4-oz fiberglass cloth and epoxy.
To achieve the necessary curves, we steamed all the frames and the coaming. In the bow we wrapped some of the plank ends and applied boiling water to help bend them into the transom. As they cooled, we clamped them between curved blocks to help maintain their shape. We planed the ends of the planks to a feathered edge to bring them flush to the transoms.
Fani Skoulikidi
The ends of the planks are planed to a feather edge to bring them flush into the transoms. From this angle, the Spitfire’s jaunty sheer is apparent; in a chop that high bow helps keep the boat and crew dry.
The designer estimates the build time of the Spitfire to be about 300 hours. For us, the project was slowed because we were not working on it full-time, and we were often forced to wait for weeks for materials to arrive from abroad. From beginning to end it took us roughly four months.
For its size, the dinghy is remarkably spacious. There is room for two adults and their gear. The plans indicate the placement for oarlocks but do not include seats, so a rower must sit on the centerboard trunk, which is a good position for the oarlocks but not the most comfortable; or, if the mast is not stepped, on the foredeck, which is more comfortable but something of a stretch. In either position there is still room for a second person to sit in the stern and steer.
Working from the plans we built 7′ 9″ straight-bladed oars with sewn leathers, and while these can be stowed in the boat mostly under the deck, occupying very little cockpit space, we find that when sailing with two people on board it’s better to leave them in the oarlocks lying on the sidedeck, where they are in easy reach should we need them.
Fani Skoulikidi
Paul Gartside’s plans call for a kick-up rudder but as we typically don’t sail in shoal waters and rarely require the rudder to lift, we went with a fixed blade. Both transoms rise above deck level. In the stern it allows for a sculling notch (partially hidden here by the rudder). The oars can be stowed in the boat, but we like to keep them in the oarlocks so they are out of the way but readily to hand when needed.
The finished boat weighs around 200 lbs, so a small trailer is best for easy transportation, and while it can be dragged down a sand beach—the keelband and half-rounds fitted along the first four plank lands protect the wood from damage—to carry it does require two or three people. It is far easier to find a launching ramp and launch straight from the trailer; the boat slides off and on the trailer with ease.
We live on Syros, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. There are many deepwater gulfs and bays within easy access, and we have been happy with the boat’s performance. It is stable and feels safe when climbing aboard and moving around, even with two of us on board. When we are together, one of us sits forward and manages the sail (or rows) while the other sits aft, leaning forward to avoid the arc of the tiller when tacking or jibing.
Under oars, the boat tracks well, even when rowing into a choppy sea and light to moderate headwind. We have even rowed in a wind gusting 20 knots and the boat performed well, unhampered by weathercocking. In all conditions it is responsive to the helm or to a change in pressure to an oar, and rowing is a pleasure—although if you wanted to row for any distance, you would want to build a wider seat.
Clement Kalliambetsos
On launching day, we rigged the boat on the beach and blessed it with a splash of local wine. The sailplan shows the sail loose-footed, but we added lacing. The single deep reef means this small boat can be sailed in stronger winds, although we would recommend a top wind strength of around 16 knots.
The boat’s rig is an unstayed mast with a 45-sq-ft spritsail. We have the sail permanently laced to the mast and boom, and we can be off the trailer and sailing in about 10 minutes. When sailing singlehanded, the helmsperson can sit on the floorboards or, if preferred, the aft deck (although here your body does impede the swing of the tiller, and you must duck down into the cockpit to avoid the boom when tacking or jibing). Sitting on the floorboards, it is comfortable to lean against the cockpit coaming, and there is plenty of room to get forward of the tiller and to change sides with ease. Thus seated, there is good visibility in all directions, and the mainsheet, run through a double block secured to a simple pad-eye mounted on the after end of the centerboard trunk, is within easy reach.
Sailing with two people is a little more cramped, and with the forward crewmember seated alongside the centerboard trunk, it is often easiest not to change sides when tacking or jibing.
The Spitfire is responsive to the helm, and we have found that trimming the pivoting centerboard helps to improve performance on all points of sail except closehauled when we keep it all the way down. The boat does well through jibes and tacks, finding its new course and picking up speed quickly, but on the rare occasion when we have been caught in irons, we’ve been able to quickly restore control with a couple of strokes of an oar. We haven’t measured our speed under sail, but being close to the water it feels fast.
Clement Kalliambetsos
For a 10′ dinghy the Spitfire is surprisingly roomy. When the rig is up, the rower can sit atop the centerboard trunk but if the rig is down, they can sit on the foredeck, which is more of a stretch to the oars, but also more comfortable as a seat. In either circumstance there is plenty of room for two adults.
Like any small boat, the Spitfire has its limitations. We would recommend sailing it in protected waters and winds up to about 16 knots. Our local sailmaker followed the designer’s recommendation of a single line of reefpoints in the sail, and it is certainly comforting to have that one reef if the wind picks up suddenly. Fully rigged and with two people on board, seated low on the floorboards, the stability is good. The marked rise in the sheer forward, coupled with the raked transom bow, helps to keep the boat dry even in a stiff breeze and steep waves.
From building to sailing to rowing, we have been very happy with the boat, which we have named Φαφαφηνα (FAFAFINA). Not only does the design live up to Paul Gartside’s promise of being suitable for younger sailors, but also it has proved enjoyable for all ages whether sailing alone or with company.
Ioanna Moutousidi and Giannis Bormpantonakis are boatbuilders from Greece. They studied traditional wooden boat building at Aprendiztegi (the Lance Lee International Boatbuilding School) in Basque Country. After completing their three-year apprenticeship, they returned to Greece where they run a workshop for building small boats and work in shipyards around the Greek islands.
Plans for the Spitfire, Design #177, are available from Paul Gartside Boatbuilder and Designer. Digital study plans are $20; printed study plans are $40 including shipping. A full set of digital plans is $150. The Spitfire is described by the designer in his book Plans & Dreams, Volume 1.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
Newfound Woodworks of Bristol, New Hampshire, specializes in strip-built canoes and kayaks. Their Sea Wolf kayak, designed by Hans Friedel of Sweden, has stability that would put novice paddlers at ease and provide a reassuring platform for fishing or photography. For more ambitious endeavors, it is the company’s “best expedition-style kayak.”
The Sea Wolf can be built from plans or a kit.
For scratch builders, the plans set consists of eight sheets. Six are printed with full-sized patterns for the 16 station molds, bow and stern end-forms, hatch spacers and lips, and the two bulkheads. The remaining two pages are overall views, one indicating the placement of the molds on the strongback, the other showing the placement of all the fittings on the finished kayak. Included with the plans is a 30-page manual of detailed step-by-step instructions illustrated with color photographs.
Christopher Cunningham
The Sea Wolf has a generous volume both for larger paddlers and cruising cargo. The low profile of the recessed coaming keeps it from interfering with paddling and rescue techniques.
The kit includes all the materials for building and outfitting the Sea Wolf kayak, from the molds and a precut sectional strongback, to cedar strips and epoxy, to deck hardware and cockpit accommodations: seat, backband, and foot braces. The printed plans for the kit are a five-page set that includes assembly instructions for the interlocking pieces of the strongback. For those new to such a project, an optional Pre-Kit package has a booklet describing the building process, and DVDs on strip-building and fiberglassing.
The Sea Wolf I paddled was built by Newfound Woodworks as a demo kayak, and the workmanship is first rate. While the bead-and-cove strips fit neatly together (as I expected, without gaps), there are many joints between the deck strips that surely required careful work to make them tight. Throughout the kayak, each strip showed tiny dark marks where staples had secured them to the molds while the glue in the seams cured. Using staples speeds the building process as there is no limit to the number of strips that can be applied in one session. The resulting staple marks can be avoided by using the grooves milled in the kit’s molds. These make it possible to use spring clamps and tape to hold the strips, but fewer strips can be applied during each gluing session.
Christopher Cunningham
The forward end of the cockpit has plenty of room for size 13 (even size 14) booties. SEA-LECT Designs foot braces provide a solid connection with the kayak.
The bulkheads at each end of the cockpit are plywood and are fixed into the hull with thickened epoxy fillets and to the deck with an adhesive caulking. The hatches are cut from the deck, a task that must be done accurately the first time: there is no straightening the sides or smoothing the corner curves later. The hatch openings are large enough for loading good-sized dry bags without having to squeeze them through. Even an uncompressed sleeping bag would be easy to stow. A soft neoprene gasket seals each hatch, and its cover is held down by a pair of straps with buckles and blocks attached on the underside to apply direct pressure to the cover’s sides. The resulting seal is nearly watertight. The rear compartment took on only about half a cup of water during my several capsizes, rolls, and self-rescues. The forward compartment took on more as a block was missing from beneath one of the straps.
There are rectangles of bungees laced through low-profile fittings through-bolted on deck. These provide places to stow gear needed while underway and also serve as a means of anchoring a paddle blade during a paddle-float-outrigger self-rescue. I would also add non-stretch deck lines on the ends of the kayak to serve as handholds for self- and assisted rescues.
The ends do have grab loops made in the manner of square-knot paracord bracelets. They offer a comfortable grip and don’t make the annoying noise that hard plastic toggles do.
Weighing just 44 lbs, the Sea Wolf is light enough for a solo carry and for lifting to roof racks. The coaming, without protruding thigh-brace flanges, has nothing to make a shoulder-carry uncomfortable.
Alan Mann
The Sea Wolf is light enough that the bow can be easily lifted to drain the cockpit after a capsize and a wet exit.
Getting aboard the Sea Wolf seat-first is easy. I am 6′ tall and the cockpit opening has plenty of room—both in its length and in the broad curve at its forward end—to bring my legs in after I am planted on the seat. The foot braces, made of fiberglass-reinforced nylon by SEA-LECT designs, are adjustable over a range of 10″ and are hand-locked in place with a twist of a rod that extends aft from each brace fixture. The pedals are non-slip, have a large surface area for comfort, and provide a solid connection with the kayak. At the forward end of the cockpit there is enough space between the foot braces and the deck for my size-13 feet in neoprene booties.
The molded plastic seat has deep, comfortable contours and its integral hip braces kept me centered in the cockpit while edging for turns or rolling. The fabric-faced compressed-foam backband spans the distance between the seat and the back of the coaming. It provides excellent lower-back support and didn’t hamper my torso rotation while paddling or rolling.
The cockpit coaming is recessed to lower its profile and keep it at deck level. Its aft end doesn’t impede re-entry maneuvers, and its forward end is well below my knuckles when I’m paddling.
Alan Mann
While the plans and the kit for the Sea Wolf include thigh-brace flanges at the forward end of the cockpit coaming, their absence in the test kayak didn’t compromise edging or rolling.
The Sea Wolf’s initial stability put me at ease while I had my hands off the paddle to take notes or check my GPS-measured speed. The kayak could easily lend itself to fishing and photography. The secondary stability was excellent. I could edge the kayak to get the coaming to the water’s edge before the stability dropped off. This was without cargo aboard; the weight of any gear in the cargo compartments would make the stability even better.
The speed was also very good. At a relaxed paddling pace, I averaged 4.5 knots while at an aerobic-exercise pace I could hold 5.8 knots. In a short sprint I made 6.7 knots, an excellent top end for a cruising kayak.
Tracking was outstanding at any speed. The Sea Wolf went where I aimed it, and the bow yawed very little between strokes. Turning at speed was made easier by edging, although the bow would swing around during the stroke and not continue to carve through a turn between strokes made on the outside of the turn. Achieving a 360° spin took 25 strokes, pulling on one side and backing on the other. That is on the high side for a kayak of this size and type and confirms that the Sea Wolf was designed to hold a course while making long passages.
Alan Mann
Stability, both initial and secondary, are strong points for the Sea Wolf, and bring confidence to aggressive maneuvers.
In self-rescue techniques, the Sea Wolf performed well. To do a wet exit after a capsize, I could easily drop out of the cockpit. I didn’t have to grip the coaming with my hands to push myself aft in order to free my legs. After the capsize I swam to the bow and lifted it to drain the cockpit. The aft bulkhead is close to the aft end of the cockpit so most of the water drained before the kayak turned upright. The cowboy self-rescue—climbing over the stern of the kayak, crawling forward, and dropping seat-first into the cockpit—went well with only a little bracing with the paddle to steady myself as I brought my legs aboard. The Sea Wolf’s stability kept me upright throughout the process.
There was no spray skirt available for my sea trials, but I can roll a sea kayak easily without one and had no trouble rolling the Sea Wolf. The seat and hip braces kept me centered and the backband didn’t restrict my layback. While the plans indicate knee braces as part of the coaming structure, this Sea Wolf was built without them, but the recess for the coaming creates a contour that allowed me to keep my legs well braced. Even for a re-entry and roll—where I capsize, exit the kayak, duck underwater, and slip back aboard upside down—I was able to get locked in quickly and roll up without difficulty.
Alan Mann
The Sea Wolf’s strong tracking and easily driven hull would be well suited for quick passagemaking on coastal cruises.
When I paddled the Sea Wolf, the conditions were calm, so I couldn’t assess its performance in wind and waves. However, judging by the photos taken of the kayak with me aboard, there is plenty of volume and freeboard forward to take on waves without having them wash over the deck. In a crosswind, the shape and depth of the stern below the waterline would have the effect of a skeg and minimize weathercocking.
Newfound Woodworks notes that “the extra capacity that this design has can also facilitate gear storage for extended trips,” and a photo of Alan Mann, one of the co-owners of Newfound Woodworks, shows the Sea Wolf supporting his 6′ 5″, 300-lb frame with plenty of freeboard to spare. The kayak could easily manage my weight with upwards of 100 lbs of cruising gear and supplies aboard.
I was impressed with the performance of the Sea Wolf. For a kayak with generous carrying capacity and first-rate stability, it has surprisingly good speed. I think the pleasure I took in paddling it in mild conditions would extend into multi-day, even weeklong, cruising.
Christopher Cunningham is Small Boat’s editor-at-large.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
When my wife and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I felt I had arrived in paradise: mild weather, great food, plenty to do in the glorious outdoors. But when I became a father in the Bay Area, I began to wonder if paradise might be a challenging place to raise well-rounded adults. For one thing: how would our children learn patience, perseverance, independence, and resilience without challenges like the truly awful summers of my youth in California’s Central Valley? I remembered a fellow teenage camper on a hike in the Marble Mountains who collapsed mid-hike under a not-that-heavy backpack, wailing that the 80° heat was too much for him as he was “from Marin County.” I didn’t want to intentionally subject my kids to suffering, but I didn’t want them to have it too easy, either.
What was needed was a mildly demanding system of real rewards and consequences, accessible to very young participants; a way to introduce incidental hardship in the guise of pure fun. What was needed was a boat.
Thomas Schwei
“Fair winds, following seas, and safe returns!” It had been a few years since we last sprayed champagne, and our skills had suffered from disuse. But TOTORO was launched, most of the bubbly got on the boat, and the supervisor was none the worse for the sprinkling.
We chose François Vivier’s Seil, an 18′ sail-and-oar cruiser. As best I could tell, it would be the right compromise: large enough for the four of us, small enough to be rowed by one person; stable and forgiving, but capable of thrilling sail performance; and plenty of storage room for gear, without sacrificing carefully designed and tested built-in flotation along with the ability to self-rescue after a capsize. I anticipated that the build would take at least three years so, wanting to occupy the smallest possible footprint for as long as possible, I began not with the hull but with all the rest: the sails, spars, oars, and foils.
I started when our younger boy was seven months old, young enough to watch me shape oars with chisels and hand planes for an hour without demanding much beyond the occasional ash shaving to chew. His way of thoughtfully overseeing fit so nicely into the home workshop that we took to calling him the “supervisor.”
His older brother was then three, old enough to come to the project with ideas of his own and a passionate commitment to directing his father’s efforts. He quickly earned the title “manager,” and when, after a few weeks of intermittent work sewing the sail, he stopped calling it “Dada’s sailboat” and started calling it “our sailboat,” I felt we already had our money’s worth.
Forty friends and family came to the naming party, and the boys showed every one of them the many parts they had built. Their descriptions of smoothing the hull led their grandfather to declare them “boat sanders, first class.” He still occasionally calls them this, even in unrelated landlocked gatherings, where the title confuses everyone else but pinks his grandsons’ cheeks with pride.
Photographs by the author
In our first summer we quickly came to appreciate TOTORO’s size—large enough for each boy to have a space of his own, even when we were loaded for camping. A small deeply curved section in the bow cradled the manager at all angles of heel until he lost his fear of the leaning boat. Airtight buoyancy compartments under the side benches held up to five sleeping bags, most of our sleeping mats, and warm dry clothing for us all.
We named the boat TOTORO after the eponymous forest spirit of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film, My Neighbor Totoro. We can’t agree on how we came to it—everyone is pretty sure someone else said it first—but we all agree it fits. The cinematic Totoro is a powerful, gentle, protective creature, visible only to the very young, useful in a crisis if you can rouse him, but preferring to spend his day napping in the dappled sunshine nestled in a bed of wildflowers. What more could we want?
In that first summer, TOTORO proved more able and better suited to our needs than we had dared hope. We camped for weeks in lovely, quiet spots accessible only from the water. The boys, by then three and six years old, loved riding in the boat and were loosely interested in its workings, but didn’t seek further responsibility. I’d suggest that the manager might like to helm, and he’d agreeably hold the tiller, but I couldn’t convince him to keep his eyes out of the boat and off his book. They were delighted to be out there, but a bit surprised when any action, like crossing the boat in a tack, was required. We figured they’d come to it when they were ready.
By the next summer, the manager was ready.
Roger Siebert
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"Wow Dad. Even you got enough boating today.”
The manager and I were finally settled in for the evening. Vegan sausages sizzled over a beach fire as wind blew through the cottonwood trees above our tent. The Sacramento River loped by, strong and loud, the exact color of school-lunch chocolate milk. Bats pirouetted in the remains of a sherbet sunset; herons winged overhead, every bit as sharply shaped as their pterodactyl ancestors; everything was going somewhere and doing something fast except, finally, us. The growing dark and glowing embers and promise of many roasted marshmallows to come lit the manager’s face, not too badly burned by our long day under the sun. With 20 miles of river covered through a wicked headwind, there hadn’t been much time to unwind.
That morning, the manager and I had launched TOTORO on the river in Butte City, where dusty façades hinted at a past that must have seemed destined for a more expansive future. A store grandly called the Butte City Emporium stood vacated, red-tagged, and barred. The only saloon in town had burned to its foundation years ago, and now there wasn’t even a place for a seven-year-old and his dad to pick up a cold soda and some local conversation. I guessed that, like a lot of valley towns, Butte City’s heyday coincided with the peak of commercial transport on the Sacramento River, when there were livings to be made in the places where farm goods met barges. Now, about all that remained was a good county boat ramp and a not-too-dangerously-rotten dock.
We encountered our first hazard almost as soon as we left Butte City. I looked downstream with mild trepidation; the manager was unmoved.
Our plan was to ride the river south from Butte City to Colusa, where we would meet my wife and the supervisor the next morning. We knew next to nothing about the river. I hoped it would give us a view into the backyards and remaining wild spaces of a landscape that showed none of its secrets to the straight-line highways we usually traveled. We took advantage of a large family vacation and arranged a car shuttle to allow a one-way float downstream—freeing us, I hoped, of any real need for the motor we didn’t have. Our local extended family said that while they’d never heard of anyone sailing this stretch of the Sacramento, we couldn’t go too far wrong. It was mid-May; snow melting in the mountains would make for high river flow. Anything floating in the stream would move along at 2 or 3 knots. The estimate was reinforced by an excellent, though perhaps dated, float-time map published by the California State Parks service, which suggested, by dint of its existence, that a non-motorized boat might not be a bad way to see the Sacramento River.
The momentum provided by the current was important. This would be the longest boat journey the manager had ever taken. We had carefully eased the boys into onboard life via short, sweet jaunts, with plenty of distractions in the boat, plenty of food, and plenty of stops ashore. Now the manager and I were launching into a current too strong to row against and aiming for a destination far downstream; it was a commitment to a considerably greater journey. The manager’s frequent natural wish for variety would have to be weighed against a real need to cover river miles. He’d be asked to practice patience all day long.
We set off with the rig down and, minutes later, came to three tightly spaced bridges, really three iterations of the same bridge: one antiquated, one currently in use, and one under construction. If there had been time or space I would have mused aloud on the role of the bridges, roads, and rails in changing the local economy and demographics of the valley towns, their past, present, and future. We were spared the lecture by the need to find and transit a tight gap in the bridge construction. We looked up at cranes laying steel, and workers grinding and welding, then ahead at the current swirling up around closely spaced pilings, and I wondered, briefly, what I had signed us up for. Then we were through, clearing the clamor with room to spare, my doubts left behind.
The family tent is so large and heavy that its storage bag has built-in backpack straps. Lashed against the side of the boat, it provided a good backrest for a devoted reader. The manager required a quantity of books roughly equal to his own weight, but the payoff (a happily occupied crew) was entirely worth it.
Beyond the bridges, I shipped the oars. The Sacramento River lay broad and silty under the spring sun, braiding through a shallow, wide, gravelly cut in the vast working plain. Row crops and orchards abutted the banks. It was only May, and we’d had a rare wet winter, yet already everything once green had turned to tan, another shade on the continuum of browns that encompassed our surroundings: dirty clay banks, dried dead grasses, dust clouds raised by tractors and the gusty wind, the river itself, and with time under this sun, our own tanned arms and faces. Already visible downstream were the rising riparian jungles we had come to explore—ahead lay green.
With no independent movement over the water, TOTORO spun slowly in the current, nosing at times into swift sinews of brown water on the outside of the river bends, drifting at others with the wind into slower eddies. We needed some kind of speed to maintain steerage, but I was the boat’s primary engine and was feeling lazy, under-caffeinated, and disinclined to row.
“If only we could have launched yesterday,” I said. “We would have had a tailwind that just wouldn’t quit.”
“You could have taken me out of school yesterday!” came the swift reply. “That would have been fine.”
“Well, we could sail now. We’d just need to tack often.”
“That sounds OK.”
“The wind is strong. I’ll tuck in two reefs, but the boat will still heel. Is that OK?”
“Um… OK? I don’t know.”
“Well let’s try it. You can always tell me if you don’t like it.”
With two reefs, a 3-knot current behind, and a headwind gusting in the low 20s, TOTORO picked up her skirts and ran for the riverbank. If we were to sail in these conditions I was going to have to learn a lot of river piloting very quickly.
Hot, Hot, HOT! We tucked into a back eddy around the downriver tip of an island to sample life ashore, but the sunbaked sand was too hot to stand on barefoot. We didn’t linger, but soon pushed off in search of new landings.
Jerry MacMullen, historian of Sacramento River paddle-wheel steamers, wrote “River seamanship is an art in itself, and any of the salt-water brethren who are inclined to look down their noses at river pilots are invited to try it themselves sometime, preferably with a vessel of no great value. The river pilot must know all the answers, and know them right now.”
That afternoon I had none of the answers, but I slowly gained confidence in my guesses. Rarely more than 600′ wide and seemingly never configured the same way twice, the river required constant tacking and provided endless variation. Some courses were threatened by shallows and visible riffles; some by downed trees straining in the fast-moving water; some by long branches dangling overhead, sticky traps ready to grab our mast. Deciding where to point the boat, guessing where the sum of the variable current and TOTORO’s own movement would take us, hedging against the unpredictable blows that came tearing through the trees at the worst times, and recognizing the last moment in which to tack safely: this was to be my all-consuming work for the afternoon. The alternative was to take ignominiously to the oars.
The manager was an excellent crew. He kept himself shaded from the hot sun, properly fed, and well watered. He exercised TOTORO’s library, working through most of the collected comic strips of Calvin and Hobbes and a good deal of the Dog Man oeuvre. His initial hesitance about the heeling boat was relieved when I showed him how quickly we popped upright with an eased mainsheet, and how the sheet was always in my hand. He asked for—and mostly got—many stops to explore the sandbanks and islands that dotted the banks every mile or so, and was perfectly understanding when we had to press on.
From time to time the wind would ease off and the reef seemed excessive, but then we would round a bend and be hit by another gust, and I was glad I’d not been tempted to shake it out.
My pre-trip investigation of the route had shown me that there really were no opportunities for getting lost: so long as the water beneath us was moving, we were in the right place. So, we hardly looked at the few charts we had brought. At any given moment we were somewhere between Butte City and Colusa, just as we had been all day, and just as we would be until tomorrow morning’s rendezvous. I wondered if not knowing our precise location made it easier for us to enjoy being there and not fuss about what came next. Lying on hot sand for a brief bit of relaxation in the mid-afternoon, we traced verdant wild grape vines far up into the tops of tall overhanging cottonwoods and oaks. Dense willow, poison oak, and thorny blackberries formed a foreboding understory. We agreed we had lucked into the right way to see and transit the river jungle.
Late afternoon found us still sailing, tired but proud, a hundred successful tacks behind us and not a scratch on the boat. We approached an aluminum outboard fishing boat, anchored midstream with a crew of two retirement-aged men. We saw our own novelty—and perhaps the beauty of our boat—reflected in the slow back-and-forth motion of their white beards, white hair, and dark visors as they followed our tacks down the river toward them. We must have been quite a sight racing back and forth, our pale green hull contrasting with the muddy stream, the cream-colored sail above stark against a cloudless valley sky.
As I put in a final insouciant tack to pass upstream of the fishermen, their countenances changed from passive admiration to active concern. I registered their feeling but did not share it. Could they really think we would hit them? I enjoyed a moment of bemused condescension—motorboaters, no possible sense of the glory of sailing—before my error became clear even to me. We were about to collide. I threw us into a tack and shouted at the manager far forward in the bow.
Large cottonwoods, like these, have a reputation for losing limbs in high winds. The tent site, to windward of the trees, seemed safe enough when we wanted shade, but not quite so risk-free when I was lying awake in the night listening to the wind.
“Get down and stay low!”
“Got it! Down and low!”
The tack was too late: the current, relentless as ever, brought us down on their sharp metal bow. I sprang forward just in time to fend off, narrowly dodging hull-to-hull contact.
“I am so sorry! This is my fault,” I cried out, as though our victims had not personally witnessed my very recent and very obvious stupidity, and as though we were not near enough to shake hands. They responded with remarkable kindness.
“Well! That big sail must really catch the wind. It pushes you around.”
“No!” I hollered, adding absurd denial to my sins. “We were doing great before. I am so sorry. My fault.”
We drifted apart, undamaged, to the sound of four relieved sighs. Better, perhaps, to be lucky than good. The manager picked himself up from the floorboards, dusted himself off, and reached for a book.
I was about to offer the fishermen a compensatory beer at some downstream bar when, hearing a new zinging sound, we all turned to see several of their fishing lines dragging loudly across TOTORO’s mast. Thick fishing lines, ending no doubt in large, sharp hooks. We were gathering them up rapidly as the boats diverged in the current.
Even in my fear I felt glowing pride at the speed with which the manager again dropped to the bottom of the boat, repeating “Down and low!” as he went. When the hooks, sharp and finger-sized, finally came aboard and snagged the mast at the thwart he was safely away aft. The lines stretched and snapped, and we were free. The poor fishermen’s hooks, now firmly embedded in the leather of the mastgate, came downriver with us.
I grabbed the tiller and the sheet and got us pointed back downstream. Without comment, the manager returned to his book, as though there was nothing unusual about ramming boats that were in our way. The fishermen receded upriver and into the past, their white beards and dark visors again gently swaying side-to-side, perhaps no longer tracking our course but simply shaking their heads at the follies of youth.
François Vivier’s description of the Seil notes that the “fore rocking facilitates embarking on the strand.” I read that comment at least five times and thought I understood, but I only fully appreciated it the first time I sent a child forward alone to step over the transom bow and onto dry land. TOTORO’s weighted centerboard, kick-up rudder, and shallow draft make beaching effortless—a good feature for a restless crew.
The approaching riverbank demanded a tack. I went for it, and botched it, audibly skidding the centerboard over gravel. Self-doubt set in, and for the rest of the afternoon I could do nothing right.
Later that evening, camped under the cottonwoods next to the river, our appetites whetted by the smell of a fire-roasting dinner, our heads filled with memories of a long day afloat, the manager kindly said that he thought we had picked a great campsite and built a great fire. I told him how impressed I was by his quick reflexes during the crash: no questions, no backtalk, just great reactions. All-day patience practice had become all-day sailing practice had become a lesson in paternal humility, or perhaps paternal hypocrisy. I gazed into the embers and told my son of a long-ago family road trip across the desert when my father and cousin, two self-reported terrific drivers, pulled into a turnout to confer, and slowly crashed their cars into each other. I can still remember the sound of squealing metal. Our car wore the dents for the rest of my youth. If I had done it, I told the manager, “there would have been hell to pay, but fathers are good at forgiving themselves for sins they’d crucify their sons for.”
The best s’mores, we decided, require strategy, preparation, and intense focus.
“Like getting sand in food?” the manager asked.
“I suppose so. Why?”
“You just dropped a sausage on the beach. It looks gross now.”
“Oh, indeed. I have already forgiven myself. Ready for dinner?”
“Yes. I’ll take the other sausage, please.”
We made one final landfall before our arrival in Colusa. One of my favorite features of the unstayed lug is how easily it can be dropped—a great safety feature and one that eases the fears of a hesitant crew. On the second morning I dropped and packed up the rig before setting out both to reduce windage and make rowing easier, and in preparation for the end of our trip.
The morning smelled of damp reeds and river mud. We had packed minimally, eschewing a stove in favor of last night’s fire, meaning there could be no cooking our usual breakfasts. Instead, we ate oats and raisins soaked overnight in milk we had kept chilled in a thermos. The taste was far superior, we agreed, to gluey cooked oatmeal, and surely a recipe to repeat all summer. When we broke camp, I noticed that for the first time the manager did not need to be asked to haul gear toward the boat.
We shoved off into less wind, easy rowing, and steeper, riprap-lined channels along much of the bank. A short distance downstream on the right bank was a wide nature reserve. Much of it had recently burned, and fire scars ran sometimes close to the low bank, leaving gaunt standing snags. It was dark and eerie under an unseasonably overcast sky.
TOTORO lay alongside at Colusa landing for a few days before we returned with the trailer to retrieve her.
On a bend, as we approached the outskirts of Colusa, we pulled in for one last beach stop and then set off to find the marina by 11 a.m., the appointed hour. We rowed a very slow 100′ upstream along a finger dock to tie up in our reserved space, paid for the few days of dock fees we’d accumulate before we could return to pick up TOTORO, and hauled our gear to the parking lot, just in time for the arrival of my wife and the supervisor, and a joyful reunion. The manager was proud to tell his mother of our feats on the water. I smiled; he had come away from the river a little taller and a little surer than he had come to it.
Weeks later, the manager, the supervisor, and I found ourselves afloat on Spicer Meadows Reservoir, a big blue drop among bone-white granite at 6,600′ in the Sierra Nevada mountains. A brisk upwind sail had occasioned discussion of the term “rail meat,” initially received as an affront but eventually understood as praise of the nimble and accurate movement executed by both boys in every tack. As we arrived at the limit of their patience with the role of movable ballast, I rounded up, dropped the yard, and tentatively suggested that the manager might enjoy sailing us under bare poles back to our friends at the campsite.
The manager—a steady and reliable hand.
He sat up and looked downwind. “You mean that big cliff way down there with the tallest trees on top? I’ll take us right to it!” Sure enough: eyes out of the boat, head on a swivel, arm comfortably over the tiller, no distracting book at hand, he held his course to the right true line. Last summer’s awkward crew had become this year’s reliable hand.
James Kealey is a teacher and avid outdoorsman living in Richmond, California. TOTORO is the second boat he has built; he profiled his first build, a Gentry Shenandoah Whitehall, for this magazine.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Twenty-five years ago, my method of applying paint resulted in a finish that looked like I’d used a mop and bucket. Then I was introduced to the roll-and-tip method, and I have been using it ever since.
To roll and tip is to apply a thin coating with a roller and then go over it lightly with a brush, using just the bristle tips to smooth the coating and remove the bubbles. The coating can be paint, epoxy, or varnish, but for the purpose of this article we’ll focus on paint.
As with any paint job, the key to getting the results you want is good preparation of the surface, good tools, and good materials. And the key to selecting the right tools and materials comes down to the project in hand—we find a low-nap roller cover works well when applying paint, and a foam cover works best with epoxy resin.
Make sure the surface to be coated is smooth, clean, dry, and dust free, and that any fairing compounds and primer used are compatible with the paint system. We brush off excess dust and then vacuum; some folks next run a lint-free tack cloth over the surface to remove the last of the dust. To ensure system compatibility, we stick to one brand of fairing compound, thinner, primer, and paint and follow the manufacturer’s recommendations on its website. If using multiple brands, check the small print on all products (or consult the relevant web pages) to ensure compatibility.
Photographs by the authors
With a smooth-sided hull the paint can be applied either vertically or horizontally. Remember to work only a small area and to apply only light pressure to the roller. Too much pressure will result in bubbles in the paint and ridges forming off the end of the roller.
When applying paint, you want neither too much nor too little. How much is enough? Do you need to thin the paint? Will the paints need to be thinned with brand thinners or mineral spirits, or conditioned with brushing liquid such as Interlux 333 or Penetrol, and what will be the effect of atmospheric conditions? Air temperatures, in particular, can have a marked impact on paint performance: hot temperatures, for example, may cause solvents to evaporate—or flash—before the paint can self-level or be tipped flat. Humidity, too, can make or break a project: high humidity will slow the drying process, which can lead to an uneven finish or, in extreme cases, to the paint never completely curing.
Take time to become familiar with one system of thinner and paint; apply the first few rolls of paint to a test surface. We like to start with a half-quart of strained and possibly thinned paint. While working we leave the can covered so the remaining paint doesn’t lose solvent. We test to see how large an area we can cover before the solvents flash and the leading edge becomes dry. We apply several coats, preferring multiple thinner layers to one overly thick “mop coat.” Our marine carpenter friend Keith likes to apply three coats: a flood coat to get full coverage of a surface, a show coat that “shows” irregularities not visible on the first translucent coat, and then the finish coat.
We use a 4″ roller with a very low nap. There are many options on the market. Our most recent favorite is the Whizz 25003 4″ Velour, which has a lint-free cover with 3⁄16″ nap, and was recommended to us by George Kirby IV at George Kirby Jr. Paint Co. It carries just the right amount of one-part marine-grade paint with minimal thinning, and its covered end works well over seams and in corners and reduces paint ridges on flat surfaces. When choosing a roller cover, it is important to follow the coating manufacturer’s recommendations to be sure it is resistant to whatever solvent is in the paint or resin system (if not, the roller cover can dissolve, which will result in a big mess).
Lightness of touch is everything when it comes to tipping. The goal is not to spread the paint but to smooth out any imperfections such as ridges or bubbles. Remember, even if the paint has been rolled on vertically, when tipping the brush should always follow the line of the planks.
For tipping brushes, we like the Corona Europa 16038 Badger Style Brush, Corona Deck and Trim 3358 Angular, and have also had good success with Purdy’s XL Cub short-handled sash brushes, which come in handy when painting in tight spaces or at awkward angles. As with the roller cover, make sure the brush is compatible with the formula of paint to be used, and be sure to find one with bristles that are soft, not stiff. We prefer the results we get with a bristle brush, but disposable foam brushes can also be used (be aware, however, that some lose their stiffness with solvents).
Be sure not to work on too large an area when rolling the paint. If the leading edge of the freshly painted surface becomes dry, you will not be able to tip out the paint. The size of area to be worked is dependent on the environment in which you are working: for example, when we worked in the humidity and heat of a Florida summer, we would be lucky to roll and tip a 2- to 3-sq-ft area at one time, but in a cool, dry Virginia fall we can cover as much as 6 sq ft before the solvent flashes off and the surface tacks.
When rolling, the goal is to get a smooth coat with as few passes as possible. A light touch is essential—excessive pressure will cause ridges to form off the end of the roller and create bubbles in the paint. How much paint to apply is, again, a matter of testing: too much will require an excess of tipping, and you will have to deal with sags and runs; too little and the paint will dry faster than it can be rolled and tipped.
If a boat is smooth-sided, the paint can be rolled vertically or horizontally. If the hull is lapstrake, we tend to brush-paint the laps before rolling, and then roll horizontally. In all cases, the tipping should be horizontal to follow the line of a plank.
For tipping, use a light touch, passing over just the top layer of paint to smooth any bumps or peaks in the still-wet paint and to take care of any bubbles and ridges. While tipping can be done from either ahead of or behind the leading edge, we prefer to lightly tip from the dry unpainted surface back into the most recently rolled section, across the leading wet edge.
As with all techniques, the more you roll and tip, the better you’ll be at it. Practice and testing are key, as is patience—don’t overwork the paint: roll it, tip it, and then leave it alone to self-level. If you have a choice, work on the side of the boat that’s in the shade rather than full sun—it’s better for the paint and for the painter. If you have a willing friend, ask them to work with you—it’s helpful to have one person roll while the other tips. Don’t worry about whether to paint bow to stern or stern to bow, instead figure out whether you like to work left to right or right to left—you will find one direction gives you better brush control and is less tiring. And finally…don’t be overly self-critical, nobody achieves a perfect paint finish first time out.
Audrey (Skipper) and Kent have been rolling and tipping for 25 years, when not restoring boats or messing about in their menagerie of kayaks, canoe, runabout, and sailboats. Their adventures are logged at smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats readers by sending us an email.
It’s been a long time since I bought new binoculars. For many years I’ve used a pair I inherited that are decades old, but last summer, when I finally tired of the stiffness that had worked into all the moving pieces and the lack of a rubber cup on the left eyepiece, I decided the time had come.
There’s a wide variety of binoculars on the market ranging from very small to very complex, and from not-especially powerful to extraordinary levels of magnification. The price tags also range widely from well under $100 to well over $1,000. For a while I was confused by all the offerings, so I made a shortlist of needs: They must be waterproof, reasonably rugged, have a magnification of no less than 7 and objective lenses no smaller than 40mm; they should be fog-proof, comfortable to hold, no heavier than 2.5 lbs (which is what the old pair weighed), and cost less than $300. It would be nice if they also floated and had a compass.
Photographs by the author
The Hooway 7×50 Marine Binoculars are fully sealed and waterproof. The rubber eyecups can be folded back so that they can be used efficiently if wearing glasses.
The Hooway 7×50 Marine Binoculars ticked all the boxes.
The binoculars come with everything you need: a stiff nylon carrying case with a 1 1⁄2″-wide web shoulder strap and a belt loop on the back; a narrow nylon strap with a 1 3⁄4″ bright-yellow nylon pad to go behind the neck; an eyepiece cap; objective lens caps; a lens cleaning cloth; two replacement batteries (needed for the compass and rangefinder lighting system); and a nine-page instruction manual.
As soon as I lifted the binoculars out of the box, I liked their rugged but comfortable feel. They weigh just under 2 lbs—heavy enough to help with stability in a moving boat, but not so heavy that they are an effort to hold up. From lens cap to lens cap, they are just under 6″ long, and the maximum width ranges from 7 3⁄8″ when closed to 8 1⁄8″ when opened wide. The coating is a smooth black rubber except in the hand grips, which are textured and ridged to reduce slipping when wet and have thumb hollows right where you need them. The grips’ contrasting bright yellow means that the binoculars are easier to locate when they’ve settled in the bottom of a dark locker. The movement when reducing and expanding the body width to adjust for your eye position is satisfyingly stiff but smooth. The eyepieces have rubber eyecups that can be folded down if you are wearing glasses, but when fully extended they fit comfortably around the eyes.
The binoculars have a built-in rangefinder reticle. The calculator dial, seen here above the objective lens to the right, allows you to establish the distance or size of an object without having to do the math. The carrying strap includes a stretch of wider, padded nylon that rests comfortably on your neck.
Each eye lens has its own diopter adjustment ring so that it can be focused independently; there is no center focus. Once in focus the image is remarkably sharp and bright, 3D shapes and shadows appearing more defined than to the naked eye. Within the field of vision is a rangefinder reticle, with a horizontal scale and a vertical scale. The instruction manual devotes two pages to this tool and how to use it, written in clear English. The second of the two pages dives into the math needed to use the scales to estimate size of an object or distance to a known object, but for those with less mathematical inclination, the opening line advises the reader to skip to the next page where there is a description of the binoculars’ calculator dial and how to use it. The calculator has one moving dial with measurements for both view angle and object size, and one static dial for distance. It should be noted that the readings are in meters and kilometers.
The neck strap floats, but even without it the binoculars have sufficient buoyancy to hold them up on the water’s surface. If they’re dropped overboard while you’re underway, the bright yellow of the carrying strap and handgrips makes it easier to spot them.
Below the rangefinder reticle is a compass that reads to magnetic north—a range of 20° is displayed in the view. At times of low light both the compass and the rangefinder reticle can be illuminated red, so that while the binoculars do not offer night vision, they are useful for confirming position at night.
Of all the claims made by Hooway, the one of which I was most skeptical was “floating.” I tested this as soon as I unpacked the binoculars, but not wishing to commit my new purchase to the depths of the harbor, I filled the kitchen sink and lowered them in. They floated horizontally on the surface. I took them down to the town landing to carefully drop them into deeper water, and this time they floated with barely half of the body beneath the water. I was impressed. I recovered them and looked for signs of ingress of water in the lenses, but there was none, and that remains true several weeks later.
Last July, I was in the process of commissioning RAMONA, my Nigel Irens–designed Romilly, which had not been in the water since 2019. At the end of that season, I had rolled the 206-sq-ft fully battened mainsail around its battens to store it in its bag in the covered boat. A couple of years later I hauled the sail out for inspection before sliding it back into the bag, tying it up, and storing it on sawhorses in the boatshed.
Photographs by the author
When I pulled the sail out of the bag, I could hardly believe my eyes. I had put it away clean, but mice had made themselves at home and, as I thought on first inspection, had destroyed an old but perfectly serviceable sail.
This summer, I took the sail up to my deck and unbagged it. I knew I was in trouble the moment I opened the bag and saw some acorn shells. I unzipped and unrolled. Disaster. I’d never seen a sail so discolored with mouse urine. I found a mouse nest, some minor holes, and the luff and leech lines had been chewed. It was a mess. I took some photos and sent them to our local sailmakers. No one wanted to touch it—neither the cleaning, nor the repairing. None of them would be set up for laundering until the fall, and the sail was really nasty. I started to think I would have to buy a new mainsail. This one was two decades old but, like most fully battened sails, it still had its shape. Nevertheless, it was no good; I was done. It was time to add a new sail to the boat budget and put off sailing for another season.
I reported the situation to my partner Marti, who has vast cleaning experience. She recommended trying Nature’s Miracle Urine Destroyer Plus, which she’d initially used to clean up puppy messes, and then found it to be an effective rodent-mess treatment when she rehabbed and repainted her house during the Covid-19 pandemic. The product, she said, would lift the stains, and Folex would be suitable for a follow-up clean. She gave me some of each to try.
I started with the Urine Destroyer and followed up with the Carpet Spot Remover. The results were remarkable.
As advertised on the bottle, Nature’s Miracle enzymatic formula claims to work on all manner of nasty organic problems created by pets: “Guaranteed to work or your money back.” In turn, Folex, an Instant Carpet Spot Remover, claims to remove almost anything from any kind of fabric—no rinsing needed. Neither product cites any green credentials, but online searches have attested to both being nontoxic, not harmful to humans or animals. Safety data listed on the Folex website describes its product as not toxic to plants and animals. Similarly, the Nature’s Miracle product contains no ingredients listed with the EPA, and the Environmental Working Group marks its hazard score as “mid-range.”
As for the wondrous cleaning claims, I was skeptical but had nothing to lose. I spread the sail on the deck and read the instructions on the bottles. For both products the directions were similar: test, spray on, wait, blot. The stains on my sail were too large for blotting; I would have to rinse. I tested the Nature’s Miracle on a corner of the sail. After a very few minutes, the black urine stains began to float off. I rinsed the sail with the hose. It was looking better. Next, I attacked the same spot with the Folex, and more of the stain came off.
Two days of work and the sail was saved! There are still some holes, and the leech and luff lines will have to be replaced, but at least now I can take it to the sailmaker.
Satisfied with my limited test I decided to tackle the whole sail. I worked section by section: apply, wait, rinse, move on. Using a scrub brush, I spread the mix of cleaner and water and was able to work it into the fabric. I scrubbed and rinsed for the best part of a day to complete one side. I hung the sail so that the rinsing water would run down, and the following day I repeated the exercise on the other side of the sail. The result was outstanding.
As the sail dried, I inspected the rest of the damage: there were a few holes; a few inches of light luff line and leech had been chewed; the leech telltales were gone, but it was all fixable. I considered doing a short-term fix with some light line and sail-repair tape, but didn’t have time for the project. Instead, now that the sail is clean, I can send it in for repair and will be out on the water next season.
Ben Fuller, curator emeritus of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats: kayaks, canoes, a skiff, a ducker, and a sail-and-oar boat.
Nature’s Miracle can be found at most pet stores and online retailers, priced between $13 and $17 for a 32-oz spray bottle. Folex can be found at hardware stores and online retailers, priced between $6 and $10 for a 32-oz spray bottle.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
On Church Pond in New York State’s Adirondacks, the day after their high-school graduation in early June 1969, Gary Carbocci and friend Rich Horehlad were fishing from an old wooden canoe borrowed from Paul Smith College on Lake St. Regis. The day had been a little chilly, but relaxed and uneventful. Then Rich hooked a 30-lb (or so) northern pike. As he strained to land the fish, Gary leapt to assist. “No!” cried Rich, “Don’t touch the line, Gary!” Too late; Gary pulled on the line, Rich lost his rhythm, and the fish swam away with a flick of its tail. Words were spoken, the boys resumed their positions, but there were no more fish that day.
Gary Carbocci has carried the memory of the “one that got away” for “55 years, 3 months, 11 days, and counting.” He felt bad as soon as it happened, and through the months and years that followed, he made and kept a vow: he would build an Adirondack guideboat (“the boat we’d wanted to borrow from the college”) and take Rich out on Church Pond to “claim his prize.”
Gary Carbocci
Each of the frame blanks was laminated in seven layers of spruce. Ultimately the frames would be 3⁄4″ × 5⁄16″. The frames in the ends of the boat (seen here at top) do not overlap and thus required no feet.
Gary had no boatbuilding experience. A professional arborist, he has decades of experience with wood, and for much of his life he’s used small rowing and paddling boats, but he’d never built one. His father, he says, has built museum-quality boat models, but Gary didn’t learn the skill from him. But still he dreamed of building that guideboat, and when a friend gave him Building an Adirondack Guideboat by Michael J. Olivette and John D. Michne, he was hooked. He decided he’d waited long enough. “I’d been thinking about it for almost half a century,” he says. “It was time.”
The book came with offsets but no plans (a second edition does offer downloadable CAD drawings), and Gary spent “countless hours on the drafting table lofting.” He describes the process taking hold of him, “I slipped into a gentle dream [that would ultimately last seven years], and then fell headlong in love with what I was creating.”
Gary Carbocci
The boat was framed, in the traditional manner, while on its side, so Gary had easy access for fastening the overlapping frame feet to the bottom board. Once all the frames were in place, he turned the hull upside down for planking. The notched stock plank—seen here above and behind the frames—was lowered, and the bottom board was centered over it, the frames fitting into the notches.
Olivette and Michne’s book (Gary’s constant companion throughout the build) describes two building methods: traditional planking and strip-planking. Gary decided on the traditional approach. “I wanted it to be historically accurate as far as possible.” His frames would be spruce—laminated in seven layers to 3⁄4″ × 5⁄16″—and the planks 3⁄16″ white pine. He bought 2 1⁄2″-thick pine boards and milled them in his driveway, first to rough-cut planks about 1⁄2″ thick, and then to planed plank stock of 3⁄16″.
Along the way, Gary made many of his own tools, again following recommendations and direction in the book. He made a Grant-lap cutter to fashion the shiplap-style edges of his planks; a scarf-cutting ramp that utilized a router to accurately cut the plank scarfs (with at least one, sometimes two, scarfs per plank), and he made some of Michne’s deep-throat planking clamps, as well as many fast-action clamps based on a design featured in Gordon L. Fisher’s book, Tale of an Historic Adirondack Guideboat and How to Build One.
Gary Carbocci
Spiling the planks was a slow process until Gary found the plastic strips marketed for creating kitchen-countertop templates. He cut the strips into short lengths, which he could glue together along the length of the plank and create a template in half an hour.
Everything was a new experience. He’d made small stuff before, fixed things around the house and yard, but, Gary says, “had never built anything so complicated; it’s all curves, there’s not a straight line on the boat. And every step took a long, long time.” After building the strongback, he moved on to creating the frames. There were a lot of steps—all of which he had to learn—and the 16′ boat has 33 frames, each built in two halves; “that’s a total of 66 pieces to be constructed. And they have to be right…it’s the frames that define the boat’s shape and give it its strength.” Each frame had to be lofted; spruce billets that would make up the laminations had to be ripped, and the billets bent around the forms and then glued up into frame blanks, seven laminates per blank. The blanks then had to be cleaned and shaped, and finally, each blank was sliced into four parts: two pairs of half-frames, one frame for each side of amidships. “At least with the two ends of the boat being mirror images of each other, I only had to build half the number of blanks.”
As with so many at-home boatbuilding projects, space was tight. Gary built the strongback on a wheeled platform so he could move the boat in and out of the garage, to work in the driveway in fine weather. “Assembling the frames was OK,” he says, “because I built it guideboat-style, on its side, but once that was complete, I had to flip it upside down to assemble the stems and the planking, and it was almost impossible to get around it in the garage.”
Gary Carbocci
On fair-weather days, Gary was able to wheel the building jig out into the driveway where there was natural light and more space.
Like the frames, the stems were laminated in spruce. They are also the same in both the bow and the stern so Gary could laminate up a single stem blank and cut it in half, down from a 2″ thickness to 1″. The outer laminate of each stem was a 1⁄4″-thick strip of mahogany. he would fit and hand-shape the outer stems in place after the hull was planked.
From the outset the planking went slowly. The planks, Gary explains, are roughly 6″ wide and over their 16′ length they curve in “every direction imaginable.” Working on his own, constantly second-guessing what he was doing and seeing, it took him three weeks to make the first plank and three more weeks to install it. Nevertheless, he persevered. He moved on to the second plank, another three weeks to make and three weeks to fit. At that rate, he says, “I was looking at a total of 96 weeks, just to complete the planking; and that assumed everything went according to plan.” And things didn’t always go according to plan; in the early stages, Gary “ruined a huge number of hard-earned planks, and wasted hours of time.”
Gary Carbocci
Planking complete, the end was in sight, but there was still a lot to do. Next, Gary would turn his attention to fitting the cherry decks, then the finishing, fashioning the brass stem caps and runners, and installing all the fittings.
Then he found a product that changed everything. “Plastic template strips…they’re long rolls of stiff PVC plastic, made for creating templates for kitchen countertops. I cut them into short lengths, butted and clamped a piece to the Grant lap of the plank above, then grabbed a second piece, laid it down so that it overlapped the first one, butted and clamped it to the plank lap, glued the two template strips together, and moved on, repeating all the way along the plank. It worked like a charm. Suddenly I was able to get a plank shape in half an hour. All I had to do then was take the long plastic template to the board, cut the plank, and mount it.” Theoretically, Gary says, he could have used each template for both sides of the boat, but he played it safe and made one template for each plank on each side.
Four years into the project, Gary had a fully planked boat. He turned it upright and took a moment. “That shape,” he says, “when it was all ribs it looked like some prehistoric skeleton, but planked up, it was so beautiful.”
Philip Simone
On launching day, PRINCESS BRYNN remained bone dry. There was, says Gary, not a single leak.
But he was still a long way from the end: There were the spruce carlins and cherry decks to fashion, the mahogany gunwale made from a single 22′-long piece of mahogany, the cedar floor grate that he made “one year to get me through the winter doldrums, but then was forever underfoot.” And there was the brass: three brass strips on the bottom of the boat to protect it when sliding across the ground or on the trailer, and two brass stem caps. Shaping the caps, Gary says, had seemed daunting, but once more the book helped him. “The authors did such a great job describing the process, it ended up being child’s play. I’d seriously thought about having the bands and caps made, but I’m glad I didn’t.” His only regret, he says, is that he went with 1⁄8″-thick brass, which he believes to be historically correct. “The book recommended 1⁄16″, and I wish I’d done that because I added too much weight. All told, the brass added close to 40 lbs and now the boat’s too heavy for me to pull up onto my shoulders by myself. Once it’s there I can carry it…I just can’t get it there!”
When he had embarked on his build in 2018, Gary had set a launch-date goal for the spring of 2024. As he neared the self-imposed deadline, however, he realized he wasn’t going to make it. “I wanted to make everything, but there was no way I’d be able to do that and get it in the water for 2024.” He decided that, for expedience, he would buy some of the parts from Newfound Woodworks. “I bought the bronze oarlocks, the oars and the paddle, and the three seats. They’re beautiful quality, but I’m still going to make my own at some point.” It bought him time and allowed him to focus on the finish: two coats of epoxy, eight coats of varnish.
Philip Simone
The rower sits on a cherry-framed caned seat suspended on seat cleats fitted on either side. The seat is not fixed and can be moved fore and aft to suit the size and preference of the rower. The carrying yoke, seen here in its cleats forward of the rower, will typically be removed for rowing.
By spring 2024, PRINCESS BRYNN (named for the most recent of Gary’s grandchildren) was ready. But then the plans went awry. “Rich’s daughter in Australia had a baby, so he had to go visit. Then his other daughter had a baby, so he had to go visit her. Then, just as it looked like we might be able to plan an excursion in the summer, Rich had to go in for heart surgery. Turns out, when you get older, it’s not the boat you have to worry about working, it’s yourself!”
Despite Rich being unable to join him, Gary did get PRINCESS BRYNN into the water this year. “She moves like a dream—the 2″ rocker built into the bottom board makes her so maneuverable, she glides over the water like you’re flying. And she’s so stiff, nothing flexes, so all the energy you put into the oars goes into moving the boat forward. The original builders knew what they were doing.”
Philip Simone
Gary Carbocci—proud builder and, for once, happy passenger.
Next summer, Gary says, he and Rich will make it back to Church Pond and they’ll land that fish. “It’ll happen,” he says, “I promised.”
Read More About the Adirondack Guideboat
Did you know this classic rowboat traces its lineage all the way back to the 1840s? Learn about how this design came to be, and how boatbuilders adapted it to the building methods of today.
The Bay Pilot 18, designed by Arch Davis, is a swift cruiser that accommodates up to four adults during day outings, or two for overnight excursions.
NATARA, a Bay Pilot 18 designed by Arch Davis (see WoodenBoat No. 190), is reminiscent of a cabin cruiser from an earlier era as she skims across the sparkling waters of Roberts Bay at Venice, Florida, powered by a quiet, 60-hp four-stroke outboard motor. At 18′ LOA, with a 7′ 3″ beam and 8″ draft, this pocket yacht belies her dimensions, having the look and feel of a larger boat.
Owner and builder Bob Bridges, a retired sales and marketing executive, weighed various designs and was ultimately drawn to the Bay Pilot 18’s traditional look and accommodations. A bottle green hull and brilliant white deck, separated by a Douglas-fir rubrail, add to the boat’s classic appearance.
The modest V-bottomed hull is seakindly in a light chop and leaves a clean wake, though in heavier seas caution should be the watchword, with speed reduced according to conditions. Fishermen will appreciate the boat’s stability. The Bay Pilot 18 is ideal for cruising along saltwater coasts or in the sweet waters of the Great Lakes, rivers, and inland lakes. Davis recommends outboard power ranging between 30 and 60 hp, with either single or twin configurations.
NATARA, named for Bridges’s daughters, Natalie and Tamara, has a sizable open cockpit, with the helm located amidships on a console attached to the forward bulkhead. The console also accommodates electronic instrumentation. A swivel chair secured to the deck next to the throttle offers a comfortable seat for the helmsman. The surprisingly roomy cabin, entered through a step-down companionway, features a V-berth and space for a portable head. The berth is ideal for an afternoon snooze and otherwise is a good place for dry storage.
Bridges eliminated the built-in fore-and-aft seats specified in the drawings, using the space instead for fishing gear—bait boxes, tackle boxes, and poles. Collapsible canvas chairs provide comfortable seating for Bridges’s wife, Laine, and a couple of additional adult passengers.
George D. Jepson
NATARA’s open cockpit features a starboard steering console, which flanks a step-down companionway leading to V-berths below, with space for a portable head.
Although NATARA is trailerable, Bridges prefers the convenience of keeping the boat overboard in a slip. “Just unsnap the cockpit cover, turn the key, throw off the docklines, and you’re ready to go,” he said. Within minutes, he and his wife can be drifting along in the Gulf of Mexico or cruising the Intracoastal Waterway.
At age 75, Bridges launched this 18-month building project in his 21′ × 21′ two-stall attached garage. Family vehicles were banished to the driveway for the duration. By the time NATARA was launched, he had expended over 1,500 hours.
“Positioning the boat catty-corner [diagonally] across the floor gave me plenty of room to work,” Bridges said. “Building in the garage has a lot of advantages. It’s right there if you have a couple of extra hours—and weather is never a factor.”
Fabricating the stem presented a challenge. “It was my first time working directly from plans, and it took some study and interpretation,” he said. “After that it became easier.” Other than the change in seating, Bridges followed Arch Davis’s original plans almost to the letter. He chose to exclude the hard top but retained Davis’s windshield scheme, while modifying the side windows “to look more like a picnic boat.” He added an external mahogany keel 1 3⁄4″ wide by 2″ deep, beginning about 3′ back from the forefoot and ending 3′ from the transom, which improved NATARA’s maneuverability at low speeds.
The boat’s pieces were primarily fabricated from two woods: 3⁄8″ or 3⁄4″ meranti marine plywood (bottom, decks, sides, bulkheads, cockpit, and the cabin sole) and Douglas-fir (stem, keel, frames, stringers, windshield frame, and deckbeams). The bottom was constructed of two layers (3⁄8″ and 1⁄4″) of meranti, and the transom was built of two layers of 3⁄4″ meranti glued together with epoxy.
George D. Jepson
Able to carry single or twin outboards, she has proven herself seaworthy in the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Bridges worked with a variety of tools: a set of chisels, a small hand plane, two cordless electric drills (one for drilling pilot holes and countersinking and one for driving the screws), an 8″ circular saw, a 10″ tablesaw, a 3″ handheld power plane, and a router.
The lapstrake hull was built upside down on a jig. The two full-length stringers held the bulkheads, frames, and temporary molds. Planks were glued and screwed to these longitudinals and frames, which provided additional stiffness to the structure.
A significant challenge was bending plywood to fit the bottom. Bridges treated exterior surfaces of the panels with hot, moist towels to make them bendable, and then clamped them to the chines; this was the only stage of the project that required two sets of hands. Bending Douglas-fir was a simpler matter. An overnight soak in the family swimming pool left the wood pliable for clamping into place.
When the basic hull was completed, the builder faced another knotty problem—turning it over to work on the interior. After much contemplation he arrived at a simple solution: He invited the Venice High School coach and 10 linemen over for pizza and soda. Within 20 minutes, they were able to carry the hull outside, turn it over, bring it back into the garage, and set it on a Styrofoam block cradle.
Arch Davis
The Bay Pilot 18’s midsection shows a boat that is surprisingly roomy, belying her diminutive dimensions. Deadrise angle and flare in the forward sections promise a dry ride, while the wide-bodied aft sections mean that the ride will be comfortable, too.
Every surface on NATARA was sealed in epoxy. The bottom was sheathed with a layer of fiberglass cloth, two coats of epoxy, a coat of primer, and one coat of bottom paint. Topsides were primed and then received three coats of paint. A layer of fiberglass was laid down on the deck, which was primed and finished with topside paint mixed with nonskid compound. Frames in the cockpit, stringers, the cabin bulkhead, and beams were finished with varnish.
On a crisp and sunny Florida morning in February, we stepped aboard NATARA at her dock. The outboard turned over and purred softly. Lines were cast off, and the cruiser slid smoothly down the channel toward Roberts Bay. A slight breeze caressed the open water as the throttle was pressed forward. A trim wake stretched out behind us, as NATARA settled into a steady, comfortable ride at 20 mph, or about 17 1⁄2 knots.
George D. Jepson
NATARA was completed with an open cockpit, providing room for fishing gear, and allowing space for collapsible canvas chairs while cruising. Davis’s design offers permanent seating for four as an alternative.
Steering with the large stainless-steel wheel, I was whisked back to the 1950s and stints at the helm of my grandfather’s 24′ garage-built plywood cruiser on Lake Superior off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. NATARA responded well and cornered nicely. Her compact size made maneuvering alongside docks effortless.
The Bay Pilot 18—a throwback to the years of Ike, Howdy Doody, Elvis Presley, Ed Sullivan, and the Cold War—is an affordable way to get on the water in a charming wooden boat with a modicum of luxury, whether picnicking, fishing, or overnighting in a secluded cove.
Nathanael Greene Herreshoff designed the original Coquina for his own use. Excellent balance and sailing characteristics—and above all, simplicity—made the 16’8” LOA boat one of his favorites.
It can be a bit difficult sometimes to get beyond the mystique of a great yacht designer’s hallowed reputation, never more so than with Nathanael Greene Herreshoff (1848–1938). “Genius” is appended to his name as routinely as it is to Mozart’s. It’s best, if you can, to try to forget the history surrounding such a designer’s boat—like trying to listen to a famous string quartet as if you were hearing it for the first time. Instead, get inside his mind by using the boat plainly and simply for what it was meant to do. And when it comes to N.G. Herreshoff, no design makes that easier than a Coquina.
Like all of Herreshoff’s designs, formal lines drawings never existed for this 16’8″ LOA hull because he measured his own half models to develop tables of offsets that he handed directly to his yard’s boatbuilders for lofting the hull full-sized. The Herreshoff Mfg. Co. built the first boat of this design in 1889 for Herreshoff’s own use, and only one other was built in the designer’s time.
The absence of lines drawings has complicated replica construction in the modern era for any but the most experienced builders, who have had to analyze papers and photographs in the Hart Nautical Collections at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum—MIT being Herreshoff’s engineering school alma mater and its museum the custodian of the Herreshoff company’s drawings and offset tables. However, several years ago boatbuilder and designer Doug Hylan teamed up with this magazine’s technical editor, Maynard Bray, both of Brooklin, Maine, to develop a detailed building plans package for the boat (see also WoodenBoat magazine No. 187).
“Regardless of whether the boat is built in plywood or the traditional cedar, sailing a Coquina is an undoubted pleasure.”
Working under license from the MIT Museum, they based Doug’s drawings on Maynard’s research. But they also added extensive detail and instructions to bring the boat within grasp of talented amateur builders. The resulting plans are uncommonly well detailed, running to 11 sheets, specifying either traditional planking or glued-lapstrake plywood construction, all supplemented by an instructional CD with 550 photos documenting the construction.
I had seen Coquinas under sail and at rest many times but never sailed one myself before scheduling an outing aboard WIZARD with Vagn Worm. Vagn has a summer place on the Benjamin River neighboring the D.N. Hylan & Associates yard, where the pieces for WIZARD were assembled. Doug not only sells plans but also builds completed boats, bare hulls, and kits like the one Vagn purchased. Vagn was looking for a daysailer to take advantage of the afternoon breezes he could see from his porch, and he quickly settled on a Coquina, having seen the first two boats of this design come out of Hylan’s yard.
Building this boat, no matter what method, would be a real joy. The planking lines are a pleasure to look at, and instead of the careful lining-off that would be required in building from original plans or tables of offsets, Hylan’s plans specify plank locations at each mold. He also provides specific layouts for each individual plank. With the boat’s fine, easy lines and its thin planking stock, the work should go very easily and pleasantly. The masts and spars would present some opportunities for working with fine stock—the boat is crying out for varnished clear spruce spars—but the quantities involved would not be so large as to be completely ruinous to the bank account. Careful attention to detail and to finishes would yield a stunning result, whether in traditional planking or plywood, bright-finished or painted.
I’m aware that most people would likely choose plywood planking these days, for easy availability if nothing else. For my money, though, I would go with traditional cedar planking. It would be a great pleasure to run those gently curving plank edges with a hand plane and work in the “gains” at the plank ends with truly sharp edge tools to fit perfectly in the stem rabbet. Such work on a lapstrake boat is one of the great joys of life. The result would probably be heavier than a glued-plywood construction, but in my view ever-lighter weight as a holy grail of boatbuilding is highly overrated.
Thinking of building a Coquina of your own? Check out this Reader Built Coquina for some inspiration.
Regardless of whether the boat is built in plywood or the traditional cedar, sailing a Coquina is an undoubted pleasure. In our first outing, Vagn and I were slammed by a dark-souled squall line carrying something more than 25 knots of wind with it. We got the rig down in a hurry and I took to the oars, barely able to make headway against the wind and waves of some 3′. Though the boat never felt in peril, with a lee shore looming we ultimately took a tow from a neighborly lobsterman.
Tom Jackson
Vagn Worm keeps his kit-built WIZARD on a mooring, so all he needs to do after an afternoon sail is tend the sails and raise the centerboard. To furl the mizzen, he rotates the boom all the way forward for easy access.
A break in the weather for our second attempt a week or so later gave us a pleasant late-August breeze of about 12 knots and mostly sunny skies—a picture-postcard day tailor-made for this boat, it seemed. For the new guy—me—it would have been nice to have had this weather in reverse, with the pleas- ant day as a warm-up for the screaming banshees later.
Making sail is uncommonly easy in a Coquina. Both main and mizzen are gaff-rigged. Hauling the throat and peak halyards together (mizzen first, then main) takes the gaff aloft level to the waterline until the luff is taut. After making off the throat halyard, you peak up the gaff until a crease shows in the sail from tack to peak, then make that halyard off, too. Vagn brings his mainsheet aboard through a swiveling cam cleat mounted on the centerline of the after thwart.
The mizzen sheet reeves through a cam cleat mounted on the forward edge of the afterdeck, a little to port to clear the mast. Granted, the masts were already up and the boat was already at the mooring when we embarked, but the setup was as easy as taking off the sail stops, lowering the centerboard, raising sail, and casting off. This boat’s hull form, however, clearly would make the alternative of launching from a trailer very simple. Without stays or shrouds, the mast and rig setup wouldn’t take much longer when trailer-launching than it does at the mooring. The rudder is not so deep that it would have to be removed—depending on the trailer setup and the con- figuration of the launching ramp, of course.
Without doubt, the steering system is the most unusual aspect of the boat. In the design specifications, one line per side is made off to the rudder and reeves through a fairlead “beehole” in the transom. This line then operates through a three-part mechanical advantage under the afterdeck and then passes through a fairlead beehole in the after bulkhead. Then it runs through fairleads under the narrow side decks. The ends of these two lines are spliced together to make a continuous loop running around the interior of the boat. Some prefer to have the line cross the hull at the forward thwart, but others take the line all the way to the stem, as Vagn chose to do.
However the steering line is led, this system isn’t uncommon (see our Beachcomber-Alpha dory profile for a variation on the concept). This one, however, does present some differences. For one thing, you can’t see the rudderhead, so checking whether the rudder is amidships has to be done by feel. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this—I’m a great advocate (to my wife, crew, and anyone else who might be listening) of sailing and steering by feel more than by indicators of one type or another. I believe this is the best and most thorough way to learn a boat’s characteristics, and this boat would teach you well and quickly. But this steering system does take some getting used to, and I would probably always miss a tiller, with its continual feedback about exact rudder angle.
Tom Jackson
Coquina steers by a continuous line attached to the rudder, and in this case the line passes through fairleads under the side decks all the way forward to the stem. Blocks giving three-part mechanical advantage are hidden under the afterdeck. Molded sheerstrakes are one design detail the daysailer has in common with larger Herreshoff yachts.
During our first outing, while Vagn and I had to get the rig down in the blow, the boat slipped backward, pushing the rudder to one side and hard against the transom. In this state, the steering lines don’t have sufficient leverage to bring the rudder back amidships— you’ve got to either reach over the transom to give the rudder a push by hand or start rowing to gain enough steerageway for the rudder to start its swing. In 3′ seas, it took considerable effort at the oars to get up the necessary speed.
I would think that stopper knots in the steering line set to ride against the bulkhead fairleads might prevent this from happening, with the benefit of also preventing oversteering during tacks. Some sort of an indicator in the line—one whipping per side referenced to a known location, such as a knee, for example— might give a quick visual check to see when the rudder is amidships. For someone new to this system, turning the wrong way is a problem relatively quickly overcome, but getting a feel for how much to steer takes longer. Eventually you settle on the right amount of tension to keep on the line to counteract the boat’s slight weather helm, neither pulling the line nor easing it too much as the boat reacts to the seas. It’s a little bit like playing a fish with a rod and reel.
In 12 knots of breeze, the boat was perfectly at home, with an easy and highly responsive motion. Vagn compares the boat’s handling to a racing dinghy, often needing crew weight on the weather rail to keep her on her feet, despite the fact that he keeps 50 lbs of inside ballast under the floorboards. (For the record, Herreshoff himself recommended 140 lbs of inside ballast.)
The very low coaming capping the side decks makes it easy and comfortable to hike out when necessary. One benefit of the loop steering system is that a solo sailor can be well out on the weather rail and still reach the steering line. Also, he can adjust weight forward or aft, or he can move around the boat as needed to adjust a downhaul or halyard, prepare an anchor, reef, or grab his lunch, and all while still being able to steer. Those are excellent advantages.
I found it very easy to “read” Coquina’s sails. If you are pointing a hair too close to the wind, the balance response is immediate, so it’s easy to find the sweet spot. When you do, her speed picks up noticeably. If you go too far off the wind without easing the sheets, her stall is also readily perceptible. This makes it very simple to feel when the boat is on the knife-edge of efficiency and when it is being headed or lifted by variable breezes.
Coquina is well-suited for solo cruises as well. Read of one Adventure from The Isles of Finland.
She seems to point very well to windward. Tacking is effortless. Really, nothing needs to be done—just put her over and find the new tack based on sail trim. When jibing, all you need to do is haul the mainsheet and then let it run out gently to the new trim. The mizzen takes care of itself. The boat seems to settle very nicely into wing-on-wing sailing, making that often-troublesome point of sail easy to hold—which can’t be said of all boats. When jibing the mizzen, I found it simple enough to just reach aft, grab the boom, and push it to the other side, restraining it a bit to prevent shock loading. Her split rig gives her excellent balance downwind.
The boat is set up with one rowing station, but in my view this boat is all about sailing—rowing isn’t particularly easy or enjoyable and merely gets you home if the wind utterly fails. With her 130 sq ft of sail, lean shape, and great all-around handling, she promises to move well in light air. The oars would be the last resort on a day of the faintest breeze or a bothersome current.
Doug Hylan
Doug Hylan’s re-created lines for Coquina are lovely to look at. Lofting isn’t required, since the 11 sheets of details include full-sized mold patterns, which exactly specify plank edge locations.
When he was up in years, Herreshoff recalled that this diminutive daysailer was the boat he liked to use more often than any other during his lifetime in spectacular boats. In a way, this is not surprising, since it seems to be a universal law that the amount of use a boat gets is inversely proportional to its length. But Herreshoff had boats galore and access without end, so his fondness for this particular daysailer had to have been heartfelt.
The original boat was delicately built—with only 5⁄16″ cedar planking—by one of the best craftsmen at Herreshoff Mfg. Co. For decades, it was kept in davits in a boathouse adjacent to Herreshoff’s Love Rocks home in Bristol, Rhode Island. He used it often, in every season, even on fine winter days. His equally famous son L. Francis wrote that COQUINA was the first boat he could remember sailing in. The boat, sadly, was destroyed when the boathouse was carried away by the famous 1938 Hurricane that devastated New England coastlines.
Boats that designers create for themselves, free from influence of racing rules, client demands, or market expectations, offer unique insight into the designer’s thinking. Sailing a boat that N.G. Herreshoff liked so much and suited his needs so well inspires respect that can take you directly to the root of why he attained his resilient and enduring fame. It really is like hearing a Mozart concerto for the first time.
Over the years, one constant amongst our readers and contributors that has always impressed me is the shared spirit of “get up and do.” It permeates our community and is reflected in countless stories of adventures big and small, in articles that share ingenious solutions to problems, in reviews of boats used, admired, and often built by the authors, and in the personal, sometimes deeply affecting glimpses of life stories revealed in articles across each issue and perhaps most especially in the Reader Built Boat stories.
There is, indeed, an indomitable spirit of can-do, of rising to a challenge, that enriches Small Boats, as well as an openness and welcoming attitude within the community that time and again inspires newcomers to give it a go. In this issue, we meet young Liam McEvoy, a 16-year-old from Long Island, New York, who went from daydreaming to searching for free boat plans online, to building his own boat in the family driveway. He was helped along the way by Bob Hillman, a boatbuilding mentor 70 years his senior and for whom he named his boat, HILLMAN. Today, Liam is the proud owner of an 18′ skiff in which he fishes for crabs in Great South Bay, or simply goes out on the water to test himself and his boat in the wind and the waves.
Like Liam, Al Watts, who writes about the Wittholz 15, had never built a boat. He had years of sailing experience behind him but wanted to downsize from his much-loved 30-footer. After an extensive search for the right boat, he was inspired (perhaps persuaded) by an experienced friend to build his own. It wasn’t always an easy project, but with the help, guidance, and encouragement of the friend, Al worked through the challenges and today is happily sailing and trailering his very own catboat.
And it’s not only the newcomers who find themselves facing new challenges. Mats Vuorenjuuri is no stranger to small-boat building and cruising, and he’s no stranger to the pages of Small Boats, having shared his Nordic adventures with us in the past. In late July this year, Mats and his daughter embarked on a four-day cruise above the Arctic Circle on Finland’s third-largest lake, Lake Inari. They knew their boat and its capabilities, knew each other and their strengths with sailing and navigating, and Mats had sailed the waters before. What neither of them probably expected was a voyage of almost constant strong winds that forced them to improvise a reduced rig, modify plans, and accept that even the most experienced of us needs to be prepared for the unforeseen.
But perhaps the final article in this issue is the one that, for me, speaks loudest and most clearly of the enriched relationships and the dreams fulfilled that come out of small-boat adventuring and building. Pam Ayres was 92, had owned and messed around in small boats for much of her life, but had never had her own rowboat. Her daughter, Rebecca, and son-in-law Eric, resolved to change that. When they couldn’t find a boat to buy, they decided that, with Pam’s help, they would build one. None of them had built a boat before, but Pam was an amazing woman with a spirit of adventure, an independent personality, and a love of learning that she carried into her 90s. She had no doubts that together, she, Rebecca, and Eric could pull it off. And so they did. Working weekends, learning as they went, and seeking outside advice when they weren’t sure, the three of them built THE PUNGOTEAUGE PAM.
Across these stories is a thread of uninhibited learning, of cooperation, of collaboration. And more than that, there is a thread of adventure. No one would doubt that embarking on a small-boat voyage on an Arctic lake would lead to adventure. But you will just as surely find it from the moment you first loft a frame or dip your oar in a creek.
The Catspaw dinghy, Joel White’s adaptation of an 1899 Nathanael Greene Herreshoff design, is an excellent all-around daysailer that is stable, sails well, rows well, and tows well.
Good boats almost never fail to beget more good boats. Here’s a pairing of ancestor and offspring that proves the point as well as any could: the Columbia tender developed by Nathanael Greene Herreshoff in the last year of the 19th century and the Catspaw dinghy drawn by Joel White in the 1970s. The similarities are striking, but the differences are clear—nevertheless, either boat would be a fine choice for construction and use.
The tale must begin at the beginning. N.G. Herreshoff worked up a fine yacht tender—with lifeboat-style watertight chambers forward and aft—for COLUMBIA, which won the America’s Cup in 1899 and 1901. Amid the hoopla, somehow the lifeboat was so universally admired that it became a staple offering of the Herreshoff Mfg. Co. in Bristol, Rhode Island, for decades. A dizzying array of variations were built. Mystic Seaport in Connecticut has two of them in its watercraft collection, one a 1929 boat 12′ 6″ LOA with a 4′ 10″ beam with lifeboat-style chambers and the other an 11′ 6″ open boat from 1905. The latter was documented and replicated by Barry Thomas, then of the museum’s staff, in a noteworthy 1977 pamphlet, Building the Herreshoff Dinghy: The Manufacturers Method. For a grateful audience of small-boat craftsmen and for posterity, the book also recorded a surviving Herreshoff boatwright’s memories of the building technique and some specialized tools he used.
“This is the best model for a tender I have ever seen,” the designer’s equally famous son, L. Francis, wrote in 1948 in The Common Sense of Yacht Design. “They row well, sail well, and are good dry sea boats, and will tow through anything.” This was high praise, so it is small wonder that more than a century later the type still attracts considerable interest.
Thank goodness that not all yacht owners these days insist on dragging an embarrassing battleship-gray inflatable astern in order, it seems, to avoid rowing at all costs or under any circumstances. In 2008, a group of like-minded yachtsmen gave us an extraordinary example of excellent taste in tenders. For simultaneous restorations of four Herreshoff Buzzards Bay 30s—three of them side-by-side at the French & Webb shop in Belfast, Maine, and one in Darling’s Boatworks in Vermont (see WoodenBoat No. 203)—three of the owners carried their vision through to a fine conclusion by ordering Columbia dinghies as tenders. Named for their waterline lengths, the Buzzards Bay 30s are magnificent yachts, magnificently restored, and their tenders superbly complement the yachts themselves.
Tom Jackson
Built by Taylor & Snediker Woodworking of Pawcatuck, Connecticut, the bright-finished Columbia tender for the Buzzards Bay 30 YOUNG MISS is a lovely construction, light yet strong.
Two of these tenders were for oars only and were fitted with lifeboat chambers fore and aft. The other was an open boat, set up for sailing. At 11′ 6″ LOA and 3′ 11″ beam, they are slightly smaller than the 14′ original lifeboat. All three were built the Herreshoff way by Taylor & Snediker Woodworking in Pawcatuck, Connecticut. (David Taylor, who worked with Ed McClave of MP&G in Connecticut on the research for the three dinghies, presented a paper on the boats to the 2009 Classic Yacht Symposium at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island. More Columbia dinghies came later: a full-sized version was constructed to exacting standards at Stonington Boat Works in 2009 for the restored Herreshoff New York 50 sloop SPARTAN, restored by MP&G in Mystic, Connecticut, and Taylor & Snediker built a 15′ 6″ version for a 163′ ketch built in New Zealand.)
When I took YOUNG MISS’s tender for a row around Belfast Harbor, the first thing that struck me was the boat’s delicate construction. Her steam-bent white oak frames are only 1⁄2″ × 1⁄2″, and her Atlantic white cedar planking a mere 1⁄4″ thick. With her mahogany sheerstrakes molded in the Herreshoff manner (see WoodenBoat No. 208) and mahogany trim, she is fine-looking under any circumstance, but never more so than when alongside the mother yacht herself. True to Herreshoff’s original, this one has watertight chambers fore and aft. The after bulkhead doubles as a seat back for the passenger’s thwart and in time-honored fashion carries the name of the yacht in gold-leaf lettering. Bronze lifting rings are fitted on the centerline near the stem and the transom. With these fine details and her all-varnished interior and topsides, the tender is a very handsome boat in her own right, regardless of what yacht she may be nestled against.
Beyond her appearance, however, is her performance. She is a delight to row. The boat has quite high freeboard, but with oars of the proper length—these were 7 1⁄2-footers—she moves very comfortably. She is also incredibly stable. I walked around in the boat with no worries about balance. Soon I noticed that the boat doesn’t seem to appreciate aggressive rowing, but you can readily settle in to an all-day pace. She will move so steadily at this rate that you begin to feel that you’re merely along for the ride, accompanied by the cheerful chortling of water against her plank laps. I can’t recall a more comfortable rowing setup than this one in a boat of this type, nor a greater feeling of security. I’ve no doubt the boat would sail in comfort as well.
A boatbuilder with experience could readily build such a boat. Rather than plowing through the historical records to try to reconstruct original lines—a daunting task even for professionals—the builder would be well-advised to work from existing plans. R.A. Pettaway’s detailed lines, table of offsets, Bermudan-rig sail plan, and construction plan for Mystic Seaport’s 11′ 6″ boat were included in Barry Thomas’s pamphlet, which is still readily available. This boat, I should note, did not have the lifeboatstyle chambers, so building-in such flotation would require additional planning and judgment on the part of the builder desiring them.
A serious builder could replicate Herreshoff’s methods if so inclined—which for this boat most notably called for a building mold at every second frame position, or 10 molds altogether. Frames were steam-bent directly to these molds, the rest installed after planking. An experienced builder could also devise a typical building jig—with ribbands sprung over fewer molds. There’s also no reason why the hull couldn’t be planked in glued-lapstrake plywood.
The story of the Columbia lifeboat would have been a fine one—a classic—even if it ended there. But it didn’t. The story took a new turn with Joel White.
White, often inspired by Herreshoff boats, worked here in Brooklin, on the granite-bound coast of Maine. Among his successes was the famous Haven 12 1⁄2, a centerboard version of the Herreshoff 12 1⁄2. When a client came to White looking for something like a Columbia dinghy, White thought to preserve the design’s essence while applying the logic imposed by this environment. Here, the boat would not spend a good deal of its life hoisted aboard a yacht or at a yacht club dinghy dock. Instead, it would ground out routinely on stony beaches and might often be dragged up above the tide line. Varnished topsides would be a mistake. Thin planking could easily be damaged. The original boat’s great all-around performance could be retained, but the hull would need to be more resilient.
White named his resulting design the Catspaw dinghy, completing the work in 1977. The boat, which was the subject of the first thoroughgoing, multi-part “how to build” series in WoodenBoat magazine (WoodenBoat Nos. 26, 27, and 28), became widely popular. For years, the design has been, and continues to be, one of the staple boats of WoodenBoat School’s Fundamentals of Boatbuilding course. Hundreds of plans have been sold, and who knows how many have been built.
What’s different? For starters, the Catspaw is a carvel, or smooth-skin, construction. Instead of riveted, overlapping planks, these are riveted to the frames only, and where the plank edges butt against one another, the seams are caulked in the traditional way with cotton. The planking has to be 1⁄2″, instead of 1⁄4″, for this type of construction, so the boat is heavier. White also made it 10 percent longer—12′ 9″ instead of 11′ 6″—to better accommodate family daysailing. Reasoning that the original’s daggerboard could damage the hull if it smacked hard into a submerged rock, White used a centerboard instead, which would pivot upward and spare the hull itself any harm. He drew a simple sprit rig, which has no boom and poses no risk of knocking heads when tacking. Like Mystic Seaport’s original 1905 version, White’s boat omitted the lifeboat-style chambers but retained the simple interior arrangement.
Tom Jackson
Being able to run up on a beach in Maine—definitely a desirable trait—calls for the stouter 1⁄2″ planking used on the Catspaw dinghy. For hoisting Columbia dinghies aboard a yacht, the light weight of the original light lapstrake construction was preferred.
These days, some people may be tempted to look at something other than carvel construction for the Catspaw. It could be built handsomely in lapstrake construction. Strip-building would work. But I suspect that many intending to launch from a trailer for each outing will look to cold-molding, using glued-up overlapping layers of wood veneer. Carvel-built boats have to be given some days to “take up” after launching, and until they do, they will leak, sometimes considerably. For those without access to a mooring, marina, or dinghy dock, cold-molding would be a reasonable choice. Builders choosing this method will have to make adjustments to the mold patterns for their setup, and those unfamiliar with the technique would need to do considerable study, or perhaps take a course. Builders I respect also caution assertively against making such a hull too light.
For all of the 12 years that I’ve worked at WoodenBoat, the Catspaw dinghy JESSE—carvel-built at The WoodenBoat School in the mid-1980s—has been quietly riding to her mooring off our waterfront. To renew our acquaintance, I took her out in a pleasant 10 to 12 knots of breeze. The rigging is as simple as it gets. With no stay or shrouds, the mast stepped quickly while the boat was alongside the float. The sprit slips into a loop at the peak of the sail and its heel fits into a kind of sling called a snotter, which hauls taut and is made off to a cleat on the mast. The only other line is the single sheet, which takes a turn around a thumb cleat well aft on the rail. To tack or jibe, you just free the sheet from this cleat and take a turn on the corresponding cleat on the opposite side. The plans call for two such cleats per side for more control over the sheeting angle depending on the point of sail—a good idea.
I rowed JESSE a few days later, choosing a breezy day with gusts to perhaps 16 knots. The characteristic I noted on YOUNG MISS’s Columbia dinghy I saw again—she doesn’t like to be pushed too hard. The all-day pace works best. I easily made steady headway into wind and tide, and seas of a couple of feet posed no problem at all. The boat felt a little heavier than YOUNG MISS’s tender, but not enough to be a bother. One quibble I had with both boats is that they really should have foot braces for rowing; neither had them, and both would benefit.
Joel White and R.A. Pettaway/Mystic Seaport
Though their construction methods are completely different, the larger Catspaw dinghy, left, and its predecessor, the Columbia dinghy, right, have very similar hull shapes.
Both in sailing and in rowing, JESSE seemed extremely secure, with ample freeboard and loads of stability. When I was putting the rig away, I did something I like to do with sprit-rigged sails. I freed the sprit heel from the snotter, swayed it aft, folded the leech of the sail around it, rolled the sail up tight in the sprit until it was up against the mast, then tied it all off with the sheet to hold it there, making a self-contained bundle. From YOUNG MISS’s tender I knew something about this hull’s stability, but I was a bit astonished at how steady the Catspaw remained even while I was way up forward in the “eyes” of the boat, manhandling the bundle out of the mast step and partner for stowage. That sense of security is a high recommendation for a boat and inspires confidence in her ability to handle just about anything that comes her way.
She does everything well, but nothing to a fare-theewell. She rows steadily, but she is not a racing shell. She sails efficiently, but she is no close-winded sloop. She’s no cartopper, but she’s not unduly heavy, either, and would trailer handily. Her freeboard is ample but not so much as to make her look clumsy, which she distinctly does not. She could carry a load of people or gear or both. She is, in short, a worthy successor to the Columbia’s character as an “all-around” good boat.
All in all, it’s a story with a happy ending—but for the builder of either of these fine dinghies, the story would be just beginning.
Plans for the 11′ 6″ Columbia dinghy have been published in Barry Thomas’s book, Building the Herreshoff Dinghy: The Manufacturers Method (Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut, 1977). That book and two others mentioned in this article—How to Build the Catspaw Dinghy: A Boat for Oar and Sail, WoodenBoat Editors (WoodenBoat Publications, Brooklin, Maine, 1980); and Mystic Seaport Museum Watercraft, Maynard Bray, Ben Fuller, and Peter Vermilya (Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut, 2008)—are all available from The WoodenBoat Store.
Contact Taylor & Snediker Woodworking at 22 Mechanic St., Pawcatuck, CT
The 5.40m Flat Bottom Boat was designed in 1971 by Oyvind Gulbrandsen of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for use on Lake Malawi in southern Africa. The plans are posted as a free design in their Fishing Vessel Design Database. I built the United Nations Flat-Bottomed Skiff last year, when I was 16, and it has performed well, no matter the conditions on my home body of water, the Great South Bay, Long Island, New York.
The seven pages of metric-measured plans for this 17′ 9″ flat-bottomed outboard skiff include drawings for the transom, the two molds, and the stem, all of which are straight-sided. The plans mention only some of the materials used in the construction—screws and galvanized nails for fastenings, and cotton caulking and bitumastic compound for sealing seams; the wood is given in dimensions only, not by species. That was only a minor inconvenience, as it didn’t take me long to find the wood I needed from local sources. For every structural member—transom, stem, frames, keel, and keelson—I used oak; for the side and bottom planking I used pine. Wherever the plans lacked detail, I turned to Pete Culler on Wooden Boats and Howard Chapelle’s Boatbuilding.
Liam McEvoy
For a first-time builder the 5.40m is a straightforward project using easily sourced materials. I built mine in the driveway using pine for the planking and oak for the structural members.
Construction of the skiff is straightforward; no lofting is required and the 20mm (3⁄4″) planks need no spiling. The boat is built upside down. The 150mm x 20mm (6″ × 3⁄4″) sheer planks, installed first, and the two strakes that follow, are all straight, parallel-sided, and butted edge-to-edge. The 200mm-wide (approximately 8″) garboards are installed last and are butted against the preceding planks—straight edge to straight edge. On their other side they are trimmed down to the chine curve, established by the transom, molds, and stem.
The side planking went quickly, but when I had built to the last plank, I was presented with a serious problem. Where I should have been able to fit an 8″ garboard—as suggested by the design—I found that I would need a plank that was 12″ wide at the bow and 3″ in the stern. That, unfortunately, was far wider than any board I had to hand. I had unwittingly used nominal 1×6s where the metric plans called for 20mm × 150mm, or actual 1×6s. As a result, the three planks I’d used on each side ended up spanning a total of 3 3⁄4″ less space than they should have. Of course, I only discovered this after I had installed the sheer and topside strakes. I scrapped the initial plan and, instead, used a 1×6 for the garboard and filled the voids at the bow with wedge-shaped planks, known as stealers. I would recommend this method for builders who only have access to narrower planking stock. The stealers worked beautifully; their sharp and vulnerable aft ends are protected by the oak chines, which were installed after the planking was complete, and were beveled flush with the garboards prior to planking the bottom.
Margaret McEvoy
Thanks to her generous freeboard and frames that don’t span the bottom, the 5.40m is deep and roomy. The only leaking on launch day was through a poor fit between the transom and its adjoining bottom plank. I left the chines long at the stern so I could use them as a step when getting back into the boat from the water.
For the bottom, I used conventionally dimensioned 1x4s in lieu of the wider 20mm x 150mm (3⁄4″ × 6″) boards noted in the plans. At the suggestion of a shipwright mentor, I used pine, which has worked well. The plans call for caulking all of the seams—topsides and bottom—and filling them with bitumastic compound. I used butyl rubber and light-cotton wicking, although if I were to build the skiff again I would go without the bottom caulking—to simplify and speed the installation of the cross planks—and instead rely on tight edge-to-edge joints. The cross planking has not leaked; the only leaks have been from a poor fit between the transom and its adjoining bottom plank.
For a quicker build, the bottom could be of plywood, either canvased or fiberglassed. This would have the added advantage of being immediately watertight without needing to swell.
The plans call for a dozen frames that span the side planks from the chine to the sheer on each side; they do not span the bottom, which is left unobstructed. For fastenings, I used 2″ marine-grade stainless-steel screws instead of the galvanized nails suggested in the plans. They were more expensive but well worth it for the improved strength and corrosion resistance.
Margaret McEvoy
The 5.40m is designed with thole pins for both rowing and sculling. The high freeboard does mean that the boat is not easy to row in any wind above about 10 knots, but it’s good to have the option of the back-up propulsion.
The plans show only two thwarts and a small foredeck, but the simplicity of the 5.4 lends it to custom outfitting. I intend to switch from a tiller-operated outboard to a center console, which should be easily built and installed. The plans specify a maximum of 6-hp for any engine, but with a few simple structural changes the skiff can handle more. For example, to accommodate my 10-hp two-stroke engine I added knees, brackets, and braces to the transom and made the chines from 1 1⁄4″ stock instead of the 20mm (roughly 3⁄4″) stock called for.
I built the boat as a two-month after-school project that took around 140 hours of work. The materials cost $800, and the outboard cost another $800—not a lot of work or money for an 18′ powerboat.
I haven’t yet had to trailer the skiff, but a trailer with adjustable bunks for the bottom or a flat-bed with some dunnage (to account for the boat’s rocker) would fit the bill and take advantage of its flat bottom.
Margaret McEvoy
Like the molds and transom, the stem is straight-sided. As per the plans I caulked all the seams with cotton and butyl rubber. The skiff could also be built of fiberglassed plywood, which would likely result in a quicker but more expensive build.
The 5.4 can be rowed, and tholepins indicated on the drawings are handy, even though the high freeboard, which makes the skiff a great motorboat, can make it hard to row in a stronger head- or crosswind. In calm conditions, it can move along at around 4 knots under a single pair of 9′ oars, but even as little as a 10-knot breeze can make for some hard rowing. The real value of the oars is as backup to an older, unreliable outboard; indeed, they have gotten me out of a fix or two when the engine has sputtered and died.
In the short, choppy swells of shallow waters, such as those in Great South Bay, the 5.4 is an able boat. It can handle up to 3′ whitecapped swells—if I’m smart about it—but a protracted battle with 3′ breakers is not fun, and I have learned that it’s best to stay ashore on such days. The boat is a match for 2′ waves and in 1′ waves can provide a comfortable ride.
Margaret McEvoy
Even in a strong wind and choppy seas, the 5.40m has proven very stable and it tracks well. It can handle up to 3’ waves and in 2’ or lower waves provides a comfortable ride.
In suitable conditions the 5.4 is very stable and tracks remarkably well. With my long-shaft outboard it draws 8″ with the engine down and 4” with the engine up. Because of the shoal draft, I have rarely operated in the channels with the rest of the boat traffic, but instead race over the shallowest of sandbars. Since launching the boat, I have been more than happy with its performance. It handles my local waters well and provides a safe and steady ride even at its modest top speed of 10 knots. The 5.4 is a handsome, seaworthy vessel and a simple project for a beginning boatbuilder.
Liam McEvoy lives on the south shore of Long Island, New York. He is grateful to his artist father and mother for teaching him about the beauty found in the old arts, such as sailing, classical music, and boatbuilding (as well as their tolerating the wooden boat in the driveway). He thanks Bob Hillman, an 86-year-old woodworker and owner of several wooden boats, who guided him through building the 5.4 and after whom he named it, HILLMAN. Liam is hoping to build more boats and has recently set up his own website for Clam Island Shipwrights.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
After years of sailing Lake Superior and the Apostle Islands in my 30-footer, I was looking for a trailerable boat that I could sail summers in Minnesota and winters in Florida. My boatbuilding friend Jim Wagner suggested building one—an undertaking I would not have tackled on my own—and so I settled on Charles Wittholz’s “15 Foot Plywood Catboat.”
Its gaff rig allows for plenty of sail area (170 sq ft) on a mast only 20′ long. The shallow draft of 18″ (with the centerboard up) is a good match for both Florida’s shallow Gulf waters—where my wife and I sail in the winter—and the city lakes around our summer home in Minneapolis. The mast is stepped far forward, allowing for a generous cockpit that can accommodate six, and a small cuddy cabin with room for a portable head, a large cooler, and storage. A catboat’s beam is traditionally half its length, and our boat follows this rule: 7′ 4″ on her almost 15′ length. A hard chine contributes to the cockpit’s roominess and the boat’s overall stability.
The plans, purchased from The WoodenBoat Store, include a page of notes from the designer and seven sheets of drawings with instructions, two sail plans, offsets for lofting, and options for inboard-engine and fixed-keel versions.
Al Watts
The hull was built upside down of 3⁄8″ okoume plywood on ash. The plans show the stem built in three pieces—stem, knee, and gripe—but we assembled it in one piece and shaped it with chisels and power planes.
Building the Wittholz 15
After Jim and I had built the strongback, we lofted the frames onto a 4′ × 8′ plywood sheet from the provided offsets. We used a different-colored marker for each frame and drew out the patterns from which to fashion and assemble the nine frames.
Once the frames were assembled, we temporarily fastened them to the strongback, then fitted the chines, sheer stringers, and keelson, for which we used ash in lieu of the Douglas fir or Philippine mahogany specified in the plans. The catboat’s stem is drawn with three pieces—stem, knee, and gripe—but we made it in one piece by stacking five layers of ash with staggered butt joints. Lots of chiseling and power planing were required to rough out the bevels for the plank ends.
While the detail of the plans and instructional notes were sufficient, some things are left to the builder’s choice. This was no problem for my boatbuilding partner, Jim, but it would have left an amateur like me scratching my head. However, under Jim’s guidance I was able to fill in the gaps in the information and even to make some of my own modifications.
Asli Iskeceli
The plans offer lug or gaff sail plans. We chose the latter and have found the boat to be responsive, stable, and remarkably close winded.
The plans called for a 100-lb retractable 3⁄8″ galvanized steel-plate centerboard; we replaced it with one made of epoxied ash sections. We routed out a hole at the bottom of the board into which we poured 20 lbs of melted lead. I’ve found that this weight is sufficient to lower the board, and light enough that we don’t need a winch to lift it back up.
Wittholz specified traditional Sitka-spruce mast and spars, but instead, I custom-ordered a carbon-fiber mast and spars from Forte, a carbon-fiber tubing manufacturer in Ledyard, Connecticut. This reduced the mast’s weight from more than 50 lbs to around 20 lbs, which allows me to raise and lower it on my own.
The catboat’s transom is 1⁄2″ plywood framed with 7⁄8″ ash. The sides and bottom of the hull are planked with six sheer-to-chine and chine-to-keelson sheets of 3⁄8″ okoume plywood—two sheets for each side and two for the bottom. To build the hull, we first bent inexpensive thin plywood sheets onto the strongback and frame and cut them to create templates. Then, using the templates, we cut the hull bottom and side panels out of the 3⁄8″ okoume plywood. We then temporarily fastened the okoume panels into place, traced the fastening surfaces along the longitudinals, and then removed the panels.
Al Watts
The cuddy cabin provides shelter from inclement weather, some stowage space, and privacy when using the head.
Wittholz designed the boat in the 1960s, before the popular use of epoxy, and his plans called for bedding compound on all faying surfaces. We applied thickened epoxy to those surfaces before reinstalling the panels, again temporarily fastening them to the longitudinals with construction screws. Once the epoxy had hardened, we removed the screws. Construction of the keel followed, again using laminated ash with staggered butt joints.
About 400 hours into our build, we freed the hull from the strongback and flipped it right-side up onto the trailer for completion. This included construction of the centerboard trunk and barn-door rudder. For the rudder, the plans indicate three vertical pieces of 2″ mahogany or white oak, edge-bolted together and then tapered to a 1⁄2″ trailing edge. We edge-glued seven shaped horizontal pieces of 2″ ash, finishing the blade with a power planer and lots of sanding.
Al Watts
Six people can sit in the cockpit in comfort and even the centerboard trunk doesn’t get in the way. Yet, when sailing singlehanded everything is within easy reach. The boom crutch has been a useful addition when raising and lowering the sail, and we fitted lazyjacks to catch the sail and keep it out of the cockpit as it comes down.
Any permanent screws used in the construction were stainless-steel, or bronze if they were visible. J.M. Reineck and Son fashioned the catboat’s gooseneck, and the rudder’s pintles and gudgeons. The Wittholz 15 plan calls for 300 lbs of ballast in small lead pigs placed between frames 5 and 6. Lead is expensive, but I was fortunate that a friend of Jim’s had just retired his larger boat and offered us whatever lead bricks we needed. We positioned ten 30-lb bricks in the bilge with ash supports to prevent ballast movement; straps secured each brick in place and allowed for easy removal for maintenance. Durable Tufnol blocks from R&W Rope were a fraction of the cost of wooden blocks and require little maintenance. The rest of the hardware and fittings were readily available from West Marine and local hardware stores.
Launching the Wittholz 15, GAVIIDAE
The catboat first touched water in a Wisconsin lake before completion and without its rig; it was watertight and glided along nicely, powered by its auxiliary Torqeedo 1103, a 3-hp electric long-shaft outboard. While trailering it to Florida for completion, hardly a stop for gas went by without drawing admiration, curiosity, and questions.
By the time we returned to Florida for our second winter there, we had completed the rig and were finally able to raise the catboat’s tanbark sails from Performance Sailing. All that remained was to paint the interior of the cabin, varnish the mahogany seats, flooring and trim, make some rigging adjustments, attach the catboat’s decorative nameboard, paint the spars, and install the homemade mahogany cleats.
Asli Iskeceli
We christened the boat GAVIIDAE (from the Latin genus, Gavia, and family, Gaviidae, for members of the loon species) and sail her on both lake and Gulf Coast waters. Her large sail moves her in all but the slightest of breezes, and the 3-hp Torqueedo 1103 gives us good auxiliary power when the wind fails completely or we’re maneuvering alongside a dock or into a ramp.
Our Wittholz catboat took her first sail in Charlotte Harbor, Punta Gorda, Florida. In an 8- to 10-mph wind, she performed beautifully, achieving about 5 knots with a moderate heel, she was very stable and tacked surprisingly close (we estimated about 30°) to the wind. When we dropped the sail, it bunched over the boom and fell into the cockpit, limiting our visibility, so we later added lazyjacks.
On our return to the Midwest, we installed electrics including bronze navigation lights from J.M. Reineck, and a tricolor masthead light, all powered by a 12V battery. Back on Lake Superior, two other couples joined us for a sail, and we found the cockpit plenty spacious and comfortable for six people.
Building the catboat was an investment of money and time, but the experience was priceless. As a beginner boatbuilder I definitely needed the experience and assistance of my friend, as well as access to his well-appointed shop. The boat’s performance has lived up to all my hopes. If you are looking for a generous cockpit, a small cabin for storage, privacy, and shelter from bad weather, a boat that you can singlehand, that has classic lines, and is well suited to trailer-sailing, then Charles Wittholz’s “15 Foot Plywood Catboat” is the ideal boat.
Al Watts tapped a lifelong interest in sailing later in life, first learning on small lake scows, then getting certified for bareboat chartering, then sailing his own sloop, LOON, on Lake Superior. He, his wife, and friends sail GAVIIDAE on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis and Florida’s Gulf Coast bays. Members of his Twin Cities Sailing Club enjoy the experience of a Cape Cod catboat, highly unusual in Minnesota waters.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
After more than 12 hours’ driving, plus an overnight camping stop on route, my daughter and I finally arrived at the small remote harbor of Veskoniemi on the southern shore of Lake Inari—our cruising ground for the next four days. Lake Inari is the third largest lake in Finland and lies above the Arctic Circle in Northern Lapland. Its 420 square miles stretch from the village of Inari in the west to the Russian border in the east, and to the Vätskär wilderness reserve 43 miles northeast of Veskoniemi. The lake is dotted with more than 3,000 islands and has several wide-open stretches of water that can be hazardous for small vessels in strong winds.
I had visited the lake by myself once before, when my daughter and namesake of the lake, Inari, was three years old. I had vowed to return with a suitable sailboat and to bring Inari with me so she could experience for herself the beauty, size, and untamed wilderness of the lake. The water is clear and drinkable with a healthy fish stock; the islands and shores are austere and unspoiled.
Photographs by the author
We set sail from Veskoniemi in the late afternoon after a 12-hour drive. It was the perfect weather for our departure, and even though it was already after 5 p.m. there would be about six more hours of sunlight.
We loaded our Ness Yawl NESSIE with camping gear, water, and food and readied her for sailing. We were 140 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but it was the end of July, so we had missed the midnight sun. Nevertheless, the days were still long, the sun setting at about 11:30 p.m. and rising again at 3 a.m. By the time we were ready to embark, it was late afternoon, and we were excited to swap the car for the boat.
The forecast was not ideal—we were headed north into an expected northerly wind—but that first evening there was still a gentle southerly breeze, perfect for our first forays into Lapland’s great wilderness sea. The harbor of Veskoniemi was quiet with only a few people around as we hoisted the balance-lug mainsail and small leg-of-mutton mizzen.
NESSIE quickly picked up speed to sail downwind through the narrow channel between the Nanguniemi peninsula and the offshore pine-forested islands. The warm rays of the evening sun danced on the water, and on the horizon the distant hills stood dark against a light-blue sky dotted with chalk-white clouds.
Roger Siebert
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A couple of miles from the harbor we passed an island no bigger than perhaps two acres. It was covered with pine trees and low wild bilberry, crowberry, and rosemary bushes. The forests on the lake’s small islands are not dense, and the lower limbs of the trees have typically fallen, so walking through them is easy.
Because of the openness of the vegetation, the woods offer little barrier to the wind and, with a fairly constant breeze, at this time of year there is little trouble from mosquitoes. By contrast, the middle of summer brings swarms of mosquitoes and gnats. On the western side of the island, we spotted a cove no more than 40’ wide and decided to call it a day. There were hidden rocks in the shallow water, so we lowered the sails, raised the rudder and centerboard, and poled with an oar into shore.
We tucked NESSIE tightly into a small bed of reeds at the deepest end of the cove, happy that there was no need for the anchor. We were not the first to have made use of this natural harbor—someone before us had left an old pallet to serve as a pier, and a log stuck into the rocky bottom near the shoreline to be used as a mooring bollard. It was 6 p.m. and, with the sun still high in the sky, we had plenty of light and time to set up our camp.
We hadn’t sailed far since launching, but when we spotted a sheltered little cove with a flat area for our campsite, we called it a day. The evening was calm, the air still warm, and we were surrounded by the gentle sounds of island life—the lapping water, the gentle breeze in the trees. We tucked NESSIE’s bow into a soft bed of reeds and set up our camp.
We tossed our camping gear ashore and prepared for dinner. Sitting on the dense cushion of bushes and moss I lit the alcohol stove, and we cooked up pasta with fresh avocado sauce, spiced with chili, garlic, and lime. Inari gathered some cloudberries for dessert. We were still only a couple of miles from Veskoniemi, and as we sat and ate, we saw a few sport fishermen and even a tandem canoe pass by, returning from the lake. As the sun got lower, the wind fell, the cool air enveloped us, and we fell asleep in the stillness of the northern night.
When I woke around 8 a.m. I could hear small waves slapping against NESSIE’s lapstrake hull. The wind had turned north and was building. Inari returned from a morning stroll and told me that at 5 a.m. it had been dead calm. Together we walked across the island through the sparse forest, stumbling over the low-growing bushes. As we reached the east side of the island the dense scent of wild rosemary gave way to the freshness of water over loose shingle, and we emerged from the trees to discover a secluded beach with silken sand. We both took a dip in the arctic water, which was slightly warmed by the recent heatwave but still chilly.
The wind built steadily through our first morning. The forecast predicted a 17- to 20-knot breeze, so we set sail with a single reef and no mizzen. We were headed north, away from Veskoniemi, and the lake seemed devoid of human life.
Refreshed, we returned to our camp for breakfast, packed up the boat, and checked the weather forecast on the Norwegian Meteorological Institute service, Yr.no, which covers all of Scandinavia and beyond. For this trip we could select both the village of Inari and Inari lake, which gave us an accurate on-water forecast. That day, Yr.no was predicting 17- to 20-knot winds. Time to bend-in one reef and unstep the mizzenmast.
We set sail in the overcast morning and headed north to tack through a maze of low islands, some a half-mile long, others barely 200 yards end to end. Between the islands, the channels were narrow, averaging no more than 300′ across, and the wind was gusty, its direction shifting. Sometimes it blew up and over the islands, sometimes it veered around the headlands to funnel down the narrow fetches. I had only previously sailed NESSIE solo and lightly loaded. Now, with the weight of camping gear, food, water, and a second person, she had improved stability, and better tracking and tacking performance; I was pleased.
Each day we stopped for breaks and lunch. We supplemented the ingredients we had brought with foraged foods such as cloudberries and brittlegill mushrooms from the island forests.
We took turns navigating and steering. It had been a couple of years since we had cruised together, but from an early age Inari has always been a trustworthy helmswoman; now turned 19 she had also gained confidence in navigating.
After tacking our way up the narrow, but marked, channel through the Solttusalmi islands we turned southeast into the Kaikunuora fjord.
There are several fjords between the larger islands on Lake Inari, and they can often drastically affect the wind direction. Today we were lucky; the wind held from the north-northeast, and we sailed down Kaikunuora on a fast beam reach. It was a welcome break. Clouds gave way to the sun, its rays warming us as we sailed along the fjord, its shoreline strewn with large boulders beneath steeply rising slopes topped with dense pine forest. The fjord is barely a half-mile wide, and its 5-mile length seemed endless, but eventually we reached the eastern end and stopped for a break on a small headland on Täpläsaari island.
On our second night there was no soft reed bed to pull into, so instead, we tied NESSIE’s painter to a tree and put out a stern anchor to keep her from swinging around onto the rocks.
Sailing through the morning we had amused each other by reading aloud the names of islands, fjords, and peninsulas marked on the chart in both Finnish and Sámi, the language of the indigenous people of the Scandinavian north and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Some of the place names were unlike anything we had heard before. Some creatively described the appearance of an island, others clearly referenced a meaningful event in someone’s life such as Lost Pulley Island, and Oar Bending Island.
Leaving the fjord and heading northeast across the stretch of open water known as Satapetäjäselkä (in Finnish selkä means open water), our progress to windward was slow. We were sailing directly into a short, sharp chop that was building against us. We began looking for a suitable campsite. Here the waters around the islands are shallow, but with our centerboard and rudder raised, we could coast into just about anything.
We landed on a low and narrow island little more than 100 yards long or wide. It was covered with low-growth berry bushes, and we pulled in beside a living but crooked old pine tree that stretched out horizontally over the water. The island’s vegetation was sparse—widely spaced crooked pines over the low-growing berry bushes—and there was no natural windbreak. But, along the shoreline a soft, low-rolling bush-and-moss bed gave just enough shelter for our tents and to light a fire near the water.
Before eating, we explored our surroundings. The trees were all small. Among the more common, though markedly misshapen, pine trees were the more unusual dwarf birch, rarely exceeding 7′ in height. The living trees were interspersed with gray, bleached, dead ones, some still standing, some long fallen. Here, as on all the islands we visited, the only sign of human life was the firepit near the obvious landing spot. We returned to our camp and spent the evening by the fire, eating, swapping stories, and watching the brightness of the day fade as the sun sank low to the west.
Leaving the comparative shelter of Satapetäjäselkä and sailing into the open waters of Sammakkoselkä, we continued without the mizzen and took in a second reef. We stowed the mizzen, oars, and Norwegian tiller as far forward as possible, so they were not in our way in the cockpit.
We awoke the following morning to cloudy skies and a light drizzle. The wind was still blowing 15 knots, so we continued with our reefed main and no mizzen, crawling our way north against the wind and the chop. Once more crossing the open water of the Satapetäjäselkä, we had plenty of space for tacking and NESSIE obediently rose up and over the waves, occasionally tossing spray over our heads.
As we reached the northern end of the Satapetäjäselkä, we were able to head northwest on a single tack along a wide channel between a group of unidentified islands to the north and the island of Kaamassaari to the south. For a while the wind eased, and we shook out the reef—for a rare moment we sailed under full main. But within 15 minutes the wind was rising again, and we took in first one reef and then a second.
As we approached a line of islands, just yards across, I suddenly spotted a rock dead ahead, and we threw in a hurried tack. We had misread the chart and were headed to an island south of the one we had planned to reach. We adjusted our route and came around one more island. To our north several mile-wide islands provided shelter from the worst of the wind, and we decided that, before we left them behind for the open water of Sammakkoselkä, we would stop for lunch. We pulled into an island the size of a tennis court and landed straight into a bed of moss edged by tiny crooked pine trees. We were both a little chilled and wet from the drizzle and spray, so we gathered up some dry branches and lit a fire. In minutes, we were being warmed by corn soup and toasted bread, and after cups of coffee and tea were ready for another challenge of open water.
As we left the shelter of the islands and rounded into the Sammakkoselkä the chop built quickly—we eased the sheet and fell off the wind slightly to maintain our speed against the building 4′ waves. We tacked across Sammakkoselkä a couple of times but were reluctant to continue fighting our way north. Instead, we decided to follow the route of a channel that threaded through a group of islands in the middle of the lake. We headed toward a cairn, a 6′-high pile of stones painted white, but as we came close, we realized there were two cairns approximately 1 mile apart and we were mistakenly headed for the more northern of the two marked on the charts. We rounded the head-shaped 300′-wide island called Head Spinner and turned south toward the channel.
On Varttasaari Island we found a sheltered cove for our third night. At the end of a long day’s sailing crouched in the boat, it was good to stretch out on a soft mattress. NESSIE was so close we could hear the wavelets lapping her hull planking.
As we dipped between the islands, the water immediately became smooth. The first island we passed to the south of us had one of the few cabins on the lake that are free for anyone to use, but the pier and shore were exposed to the northeast wind, so we sailed on by. Not much farther on, a sheltered bay on the coast of Varttasaari island opened up.
We rounded a headland and landed under sail, tying the painter off to a convenient pine tree and throwing out a stern anchor. The clouds were making way for clear skies; we spread our gear out to dry and bailed the small amount of water that had collected in NESSIE from the spray of the bow waves. I refreshed myself with a swim in the crystal-clear and pleasantly warm water, and sipped a beer, relishing its taste as I admired the unspoiled beauty and stillness of the bay and the channel leading southwest, its wind-tossed blue water framed by the rugged rocky beaches and ancient pine trees.
Near our landing spot there was a fire pit, and level dry ground on which to cook and camp. There were few signs of human life, no trash, just a small amount of firewood waiting for fellow travelers, as is the custom here in the northern lands. We strolled inland, through the forest. The sunlight threaded through the sparse canopy of the old pine trees illuminating the bed of crowberry, blueberry, and wild rosemary, their distinctive aromas rising up as we trod the bushes beneath our feet.
In a couple of small valleys where the air and ground were damper, cloudberry bushes joined the mix. The summer had been dry, so the berries were smaller than the tips of our fingers, but Inari nevertheless managed to gather enough for a good dessert. We also found some brittlegill mushrooms—a welcome extra ingredient for our dinner.
Leaving the sheltered Varttasaari channel, we entered the unprotected waters of Kasariselkä. This would be the windiest stretch on the windiest day of the voyage. Again, we sailed with a heavily reefed mainsail and no mizzen. Inari again switched out the Norwegian tiller for the fore-and-aft tiller with extension. She became expert at controlling NESSIE down the waves.
The morning was clear when we woke and checked the weather. The forecast was for 20 to 27 knots of wind continuing from the north–northeast. We considered our route and decided to avoid crossing Kasariselkä, the largest stretch of open water on the lake, and instead to turn south after the channel, where we hoped we would be somewhat sheltered by the large group of islands in the middle of the lake to the northeast. We packed up and left our camp under two reefs in the mainsail and without the mizzen sail.
NESSIE charged southwest down the channel—the water was smooth, the feisty gusts wiping the surface but not yet stirring up a chop. As we cleared the channel and turned south, we switched into our “survival” mode for rough downwind sailing: we dropped the main and tied the foot of the yard into the foot of the mast. With the yard thus held in place, we raised the halyard to hoist the head and uppermost third of the sail, leaving the boom and the rest of the sail in the boat. The small triangle of sailcloth gave us plenty of speed but lowered the center of effort so that we now had good control of NESSIE even in the hardest of gusts.
As we paralleled the dark-green coasts of Suovasaari and Varttasaari, Inari took the helm while I carefully followed our progress on the chart. From time to time we had to jibe away to avoid the shallows and rocks. With the scandalized sail we had to follow an intricate procedure to ensure that we maintained enough speed for Inari to keep control of the boat: drop the sail; alter course; lift the yard, boom, and sail over our heads to the new leeward side; raise the sail.
The strong winds forced us to switch to our previously proven heavy-weather sail plan. We raised the lug yard but tied its foot into the foot of the mast. This gave us a decent sail shape and enough power downwind, but we had to contend with the rest of the sail and the boom lying in the cockpit.
As we cleared the islands and shallows, our route now lay in the more open waters of the lower part of Kasariselkä. The waves grew bigger, rising to almost 5′, and NESSIE surged forward as she surfed down them, the water hissing close to the gunwale each time we rose over a crest. For a moment I glanced at the GPS—we were averaging 6.9 knots over the ground. As we sailed past the cairn on Vallenkari rock—a white wooden sign marked with the letter K—we jibed once more and set a heading of 160° toward another group of islands.
The conditions demanded our full focus. We were both excited and fueled with adrenalin, but nevertheless felt in control. At the tiller, Inari maintained her steady nerves, pulling firmly on the tiller as each wave picked up the stern and threatened to push us off our course. At last, we pulled into the moss-covered ledge on the shore of Vieppisaaret and I threw out our stern anchor while Inari tied our bowline to a small birch. In the shade of the pines and dwarf birch, we sat down with some refreshments and our chart.
As we snacked on salted nuts and dried fruit, we planned our next step. A relatively sheltered route through a group of islands, each little more than an acre in size, and Iso Jääsaari (Big Ice Island) to the south would lead us first southwest and then northwest to Suovasaari, an island with an outhouse and a simple cabin that was our destination for the night. The first mile would be in open water, but after that we’d be in the lee of the islands and should be able to maintain a close or even beam reach in the relatively sheltered waters.
We set off on a broad reach with just our reduced sail, but as we sailed, I worked on a better arrangement for the sail that would give us more power and greater stability when we came back to closehauled. I pulled in the second reef clew but brought the sail’s throat cringle down to the boom as the new tack. The resulting sail had the appearance of a small lateen. The clew was low and the boom very close to the gunwale, but we could sheet it in, and the sail shape was good. I was happy with it, but as low as it was, I knew it would not be a safe arrangement if we needed to jibe.
On Suovasaari we relaxed after a hard day. The wind eased, and we were sheltered by the island. For the first time that day we shed our foulweather clothes, and Inari took time to read the chart, considering where we had been and what our plans could be for the next, and final, day.
Once we were south of Hoikka Petäjäsaari, it was lunchtime. The island is almost 4 miles long but less than 1 mile wide; it rises to about 500′ above the lake and towers over its low-lying, diminutive neighbors. We anchored NESSIE and tied her up to a rock. The shore was steep and rocky, and we had to climb to find a flat spot on which to cook. From our height on the hill, we could see for miles. Crooked pine trees—some still living and dark green, others long dead, their gray and silver limbs contrasting with their healthy neighbors—framed the lines of islands and eventually the dark mass of the mainland, and all around, the windswept waters of the lake ranged in hue from gust-darkened steely gray to blinding white.
Refreshed by pasta, coffee, and tea we headed out once more and turned northwest under our jury-rigged third reef. Progress was slow, but island by island, we crawled onward to Suovasaari. At last, sailing up a channel no more than 200 yards wide that led straight upwind, we approached the pier and cabin. The wind funneled down the channel tossing us back and forth. We decided to cut our losses and to land instead on the southwest shore of the island some few hundred yards away.
We still had to tack up to the shore, so we shook out the third reef to improve the sail’s set and our performance, and headed in. We tied the bow to a gray, semi–submerged tree stump that had been cut off below its branches but still had its roots planted firmly in the rocky bottom of the island’s shallows. Once more our landfall was sloped and forested, and it was some time before we found a flat spot where we could pitch our tents. The dull gray clouds were at last breaking up, and in our fatigue from the day we welcomed the warm rays of the evening sun. After dinner I crawled into my tent, sheltered from the elements by the pine trees growing up the steep hill behind us. Out of the noise of the wind and separated from the sounds of the waves, I relaxed, perhaps for the first time that day, and slept the sleep of the carefree.
The following morning was again overcast. The forecast was not what we had hoped for: 20 knots of wind with gusts of almost 30 knots expected through the morning. But it was still early. We decided to take things easy, slow down for a few hours, and leave later in the morning by which time the wind should have died down a bit. We were not far from Veskoniemi, where we had launched and where we would pull out. We could have gone straight there, but I suggested that when things had calmed down some, we could extend our day’s sail by going just a couple of miles farther northwest to visit Ukko (the Old Man), an island sacred to the Sámi people. Ukko is only a couple of hundred yards long but climbs steeply to a height of 98′, giving it a distinctive appearance amongst the mostly low-lying islands of the lake.
After 10 a.m. we set off to the west with two reefs in the main. On a broad reach, NESSIE charged through flat waters but strongly gusting wind. Soon we were approaching a gap through a group of islands from where we hoped to catch a glimpse of Ukko. I looked at the chart to establish our position and realized I had been in error: there was no way we would see Ukko from here; it would be totally obscured by an adjacent island, Palo-Ukko. To catch even a glimpse of the Old Man we would have to sail once more into open water, but the wind was still strong, and the gusts were severe. It would be foolish to leave the comparative shelter of our island passage. We turned back. Ukko would have to wait for another time.
Once more, we reduced sail to my improvised third reef. Now we were tacking rather than jibing, and the maneuver required careful execution and timing. Inari steered, and when I thought we had enough speed to keep our way on against the wind and vicious chop, we would tack. In the eye of the wind, I loosened the sheet, raised the boom with my hand, pushed it against the wind to backwind the sail and force NESSIE around onto a new tack. Then I would lift the boom over myself and Inari, and we’d set sail on our new heading.
It worked well, but the timing was critical. On one tack, we were approaching a rock and a shallow to our lee and agreed that it was time to turn again. I made ready, shouted to Inari to go for it, felt the bow turn toward the wind, prepared to back the sail, but… at the last minute a wave stalled us; we didn’t make it into the eye of the wind. We were in danger of getting into irons.
We needed to fall off, pick up speed, and try again. But there was no room. In a split moment I made the only choice open to us: we had to jibe. I yelled at Inari and with no hesitation she pulled the tiller hard to windward. As the bow fell off, I remembered the third reef: the boom was low; it would be as a scythe coming across the boat. As I struggled to think what to do, a gust of wind whipped the sail and boom across the boat with a speed and violence I never wish to see again. To this day I am haunted by what might have happened; to this day I cannot figure out why neither of us was hit.
We came into Veskoniemi and pulled up alongside the dock under full mainsail. It had been an exciting few days and we were tired, but Inari, NESSIE, and I had made a good team.
We came through the jibe, rounded up, and continued on a new tack. Dumbfounded by my recklessness and shaken by the near miss, I lost track of our position on the chart. About 2 miles to our east, we could see a cairn. Taking a bearing and praying that I knew what I was looking at, we reoriented ourselves on the chart and considered our route. If we sailed east toward the cairn we would pass through a maze of shallows and islands, but there was a safe channel (albeit a narrow one) and we could get to the cairn in one tack. We went for it. I breathed more easily: our tacking duel with the wind was over.
As we came to the cairn, we fell off onto a beam reach and toward the even more sheltered channel between the mainland to the southwest and the 4-mile-long hilly island of Mahlatti to the northeast. We pulled into Mahlatti for a late lunch. From here to Veskoniemi there was but one last hop of a couple of miles, along which we would be sheltered by the hills and forests of Mahlatti. For the last time, we pushed off under one reef. Before long we shook out even that one. Under full sail NESSIE carried us to the Veskoniemi dock, heeling only occasionally in a stray gust that made it through the Mahlatti forest. It was a fitting end to our time on Lake Inari. We were tired, windblown, and wet but we were happy with ourselves, with each other, and with our steadfast boat. In the last mile, NESSIE steadily gained speed, and as we pulled into Veskoniemi her bow was slicing effortlessly through the arctic water.
Mats Vuorenjuuri is the father of three and has been an entrepreneur making a living in graphic design, photography, freelance writing, and most recently as a boatbuilder, offering boatbuilding and maintenance services through Nordic Craft. After sailing various types of vessels, including sail-training schooners, he enjoys the simplicity and pleasures of small boats. He wrote about cruising the Finnish coast in his Coquina in our May 2016 issue, a Lakeland row in January 2017, and an archipelago cruise with Inari in March 2022.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
This is the best fast outboard boat of its size that I know of. Brooklin, Maine–based photographer Ben Mendlowitz, who owns one named ABACO, would agree. It features the rare and magical combination of a Mercedes-like ride with Porsche-like maneuverability. Ben’s ABACO has covered hundreds of miles in all kinds of weather since arriving in Maine 13 years ago, mostly with Ben alone searching out camera subjects, but often with me steering and Ben shooting photos.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
The Albury runabout is a sturdy, stable, yet surprisingly nimble runabout for her size (almost 20’ LOA). She can be strip-planked or cold-molded.
Together, in April and May of 1996, with a brand-new 90-hp Honda four-stroke for power, we ran ABACO 1,200 miles up the Intracoastal Waterway from West Palm Beach to Georgetown, Maryland. Even earlier, Ben had fallen for Albury outboard boats, especially this one, through chartering in the Abacos. In all her traveling, ABACO has seen her share of rough seas, both driving into them, and with the waves coming at her from abeam and astern. She feels solid, and indeed she is. For her type, she’s fairly heavy, weighing in loaded at 2,400 lbs., so pushing her fast takes power.
ABACO’s current engine is a 115-hp four-stroke Yamaha, with which she tops out at 38 mph. (Her earlier 90-hp yielded 4 or 5 mph less.) But her weight is part of what keeps her so steady and gives her that smooth ride. When other outboard boats are bouncing around so badly they have to be slowed way down, the Alburys, like the Energizer Bunny, just keep on going.
Their soft ride also comes from the rounded bilge, which for outboard boats is unusual; most are hard-chined. She rides nearly level so that her sharply V-shaped forebody stays in the water where it can split the waves and toss them aside before the flatter stern sections come into contact. The full-length, external keel keeps her steady on the helm, and those external spray rails assist with sharp turns as well as in knocking down the spray.
“I’ve heard ‘magic carpet’ describe Albury runabouts. In my mind, it fits them perfectly.”
When you push ahead on ABACO’s throttle, she seems to lift bodily to planing speed with very little change in trim—only 8 degrees before she levels out, according to one report. Trim at higher speeds can be noticeably altered by changing the motor’s tilt angle.
Willard Albury built ABACO in 1984 in his shop on Man O’ War Cay in the Bahamas as one of many near sisters and one of his last built of wood. He and his brother Ben Albury began production back in the 1950s using hand tools. When deep-V bottom configurations came into use, the Alburys recognized their non-pounding, seakeeping advantages and reshaped their boats’ underbodies to have approximately 16 degrees of deadrise.
Despite switching to fiberglass and being joined by two sons and one or two helpers, the shop’s one-boat-a-month output never satisfied the demand— even for locals. Because of that limited production and the hassle of importing to the U.S., Willard Albury licensed Jeff Lichterman to build identical boats in Florida’s Riviera Beach. That operation, now called Albury Brothers Boats, Ltd., has proven a great success, having built over 100 runabouts since beginning operation in 2003. But both the new Florida shop and the original one in Man O’ War build now only in fiberglass. For a wooden Albury, you have three alternatives: build it yourself, commission one from a professional builder, or buy it used—if you can find one.
Recognizing how nice the boats are and anticipating that a few aficionados might still want to built them in wood, Doug Hylan, with Willard’s okay, measured ABACO and prepared his usual fine and complete set of drawings (there are six sheets in all), subsequently making arrangements for WoodenBoat to sell them on a royalty basis. ABACO, built near the end of an evolutionary chain, embodies what Willard considers his boats’ best features.
Matthew P. Murphy
Here’s a behind-the-scene’s look at how many a WoodenBoat cover and calendar have come to be. Maynard Bray (left) mans the helm of ABACO while photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz does his magic behind the camera. The Albury runabout’s steadiness and agility make her Mendlowitz’s boat of choice for this work.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
To comply with present regulations, the motor should be separated from the cockpit by a watertight bulkhead as shown here. Bill Boyd and his son built this Albury runabout for summertime fun around Brooklin, Maine.
She’s straightforward all the way, yet well proportioned, as most fully evolved creations are. The platform has no steps to trip over, and its only obstruction is the split forward seat. Fuel tanks are out of the way within the seat enclosures, and there’s dry storage under the foredeck as well as inside the built-in aft seats. You could substitute a steering console amid-ships, as the newer fiberglass boats are being built, but for me, relinquishing the shelter behind the windshield doesn’t make sense. If you need to see better or want to feel the wind in your face, it’s easy enough to perch on the generously wide seatbacks with a cushion under your butt and steer from there. This is where we drive from when shooting photos. Ben fitted ABACO’s steering wheel with a spinner—a welcome improvement for low-speed maneuvering.
Because of her spartan layout, she not only cleans up and paints up easily, but she’s free of nooks and crannies where moisture collects (leading to rot). For the frames of his wooden outboards, Willard Albury used to harvest madeira crooks locally, just as Man O’ War builders always did. Doug’s drawings offer a laminated Douglas-fir or mahogany alternative, which most builders will utilize. The skin is unchanged, consisting of 3⁄4″ × 1 3⁄8″ epoxy-glued strips of cedar or Philippine mahogany. There’s also a cold-molded option for builders who have that preference. The 2 1⁄4″-thick transom is made up of layers, either all plywood or a combination of planks and plywood. In all constructions, plywood is used for deck and cockpit sole.
To date, we know that several boats have been built, one of them by Bill Boyd and his son for use in Brooklin, where there’s an occasional meeting with ABACO. I think Chris Wick made first use of Doug’s drawings, and Shearline Boatworks of Morehead City, North Carolina, built the most recent one we know of using cold-molded construction, stretching her length to 22′ and giving her 200 hp. Within the last few years, The WoodenBoat Store has sold nearly 100 sets of plans. So we know there are many more. I’ve heard “magic carpet” describe Albury runabouts. In my mind, it fits them perfectly.
Chip King (Shearline Boatworks)
Though some may prefer the looks and the utility of a simple arrangement and paint throughout, a varnished windshield, handsome and comfortable bucket seats, a rod holder, and a teak platform (walking deck) show how nice this design can look when she’s all dressed up.
Want to Build the Albury Runabout Yourself?
Get to know the Albury Runabout first by reviewing the study plan. We review the basics and the line drawings like the ones below, and give you a direct link to where you can purchase the full set of plans.
The straight and level-running buttock lines allow the Albury runabout to achieve a quick plane when the power is commensurate with her as-built weight. Her sheerline is very pleasing, both in profile and plane.
You may have heard that when it comes to building a boat, you can never have too many clamps. While that’s true, a large collection of clamps can be expensive and take up a lot of room in the shop. Fortunately, there are shop-made spring clamps that cost only pennies and are small enough for dozens to fit in a gallon bucket.
Photographs by the author
I used a chop saw to cut the 2″ PVC pipe. A scrap-wood stop clamped to the saw’s fence set the width of the pieces for the clamps at 1″. Almost any wood-cutting saw and hacksaw can be used to cut the PVC.
These spring clamps are cut from Schedule 40 PVC (polyvinyl chloride) pipe, which is made in white for plumbing and gray for electrical conduit. (The black Schedule 40 ABS pipe used for drains doesn’t have the spring-like quality of PVC and isn’t suitable for use as clamps.) I have more than 100 clamps made from 1 1⁄2″ and 2″ PVC pipe.
A bandsaw makes quick work of cutting through the PVC rings so they can open to clamp things. With the wide blade I could make the cut and pull the pipe back before it closed behind the blade, which would make it more difficult to remove the ring.
I cut the 1 1⁄2″ pipe in 5⁄8″ widths and the 2″ pipe in 1″ widths. The PVC cuts easily with power tools, but the pipe’s slick cylindrical shape requires care to keep it in place during the cut. A chop saw makes the cuts quickly, and I can hold the pipe in place against the table and fence. When using a table saw, I employ a sled. I have also used a bandsaw but a block with a groove to cradle the pipe is required to keep the saw teeth from catching the pipe at the beginning of the cut and rotating it. Whichever power tool I am using, I stop cutting while I still have enough pipe to hold it securely in place. If you don’t have access to a suitable power tool, you can use a hacksaw to cut the pipe; it just takes time. Once you have cut your rings of pipe, the last step is to cut through each one so it can open. I do that on the bandsaw. Again, you can use a hacksaw.
I used a hanging scale to measure how much force is required to open the clamps to measured increments. The force required to open the clamp is also the force the clamp exerts when in use.
PVC spring clamps can be applied by hand if they’re not too hard to open. The clamps I cut from the 1 1⁄2″ pipe take 5.5 lbs of force to open them 1⁄2″ and 16 lbs to get to 2″. The clamps cut from 2″ pipe take 7 lbs to open them 1⁄2″ and 18.75 lbs to open them 2″. These numbers are also measures of the clamping force of the pipe clamps. As a comparison, a Pony Jorgensen 2″ spring clamp applies roughly twice the amount of pressure at the ends of its jaws. Iron C-clamps can apply even more pressure, but that’s not necessary for working with epoxy when glued joints need only to be pressed just tight enough for the excess epoxy to be squeezed out, while leaving a thin film in the joint—excessive pressure starves the joint of epoxy and weakens the bond. I’ve used PVC clamps for countless epoxy glue-ups and have never had a joint clamped with them fail, so they’re evidently not squeezing too tightly.
My 1 1⁄2″-pipe clamps don’t take too much strength to open. However, to open and apply my 2”-pipe clamps easily, I made a tool.
However, applying the clamps can be a chore once my gloves become slippery with glue, and if I have a thick stack of pieces to be glued, it’s hard to open the clamps wide enough to apply them. Opening them by hand to 2″ is too much of an effort for me, especially when I need to work fast and finish before the epoxy kicks off.
I have seen some pipe clamps equipped with handles—either nails or machine screws—that open the clamp when squeezed together. They may work on wide pieces of pipe, but when I drilled holes in my spring-pipe sections, I significantly weakened the clamp. And, installing handles in every clamp adds time, expense, and bulk.
The reverse-action pliers are simple to make and require common materials: two 12″ lengths of hardwood, two small pieces of aluminum, steel, or 4mm plywood, and a handful of 16D nails, here already cut to length and ready to be inserted and peened.
Instead, I came up with a pair of DIY reverse-action pliers. The business ends of the pliers spread apart when the handles are squeezed together, and not only does the geometry provide a mechanical advantage, but the tool also takes advantage of my grip strength, which is more powerful than using two hands to pull something apart. Because the handles don’t cross each other, which would require a complicated pivot point, reverse-action pliers are easy to make.
Pliers made to these dimensions work well with clamps made from 1 1⁄2″ and 2″ PVC pipe. They can open the smaller clamps to 2 1⁄2″ and the larger clamps to 2″. I used 1 3⁄4″-thick white oak for the handles. The upper, moving handle has an angle of 16° between the handle and the jaw and can be cut out of a piece of wood 12″ long and 1 5⁄8″ wide.
I used 3⁄4″-thick white oak for the plier handles, 12-gauge (0.08″) aluminum for the side plates (4mm marine plywood would work as well), five 16D sinker nails, and rubber bands to make the pliers self-closing. I used a 5⁄32″ bit to drill all the holes for the nails. Three of the nails are used as rivets to hold the aluminum plates in place. After hammering, the ends of the two nails on the straight handle are cut by either hacksaw or bolt cutter approximately 1⁄16″ proud of the plate and are then hammered to flare them until the plates are tight against the wood. Before applying the third nail, which fixes the plate to the angled handle and holds the two handles together, a thin metal shim—a piece cut from a soft-drink can works well—is inserted between the plate and the wood. The nail is then flared as before, but when the metal shim is removed there is enough open space between the plate and the handle for the handle to move freely. The finishing touch is to stretch a couple of rubber bands over the pliers’ handles in front of the plates to make the pliers self-closing.
The nails that fasten the metal plates are cut to length and peened to secure them. On the side shown here, the nail serving as the pivot for the angled handle is peened. The two nails on the straight handle are peened on the other side; their heads can be seen on this side.
The two nails at the business end of the pliers will be glued in place, so sand or file the vinyl coating off each one and roughen the underlying steel. I’m right-handed, so I inserted the nails on the left side of the pliers so I can grip the tool with my right hand and apply the clamps to it with my left hand. The nailheads should stand 1 1⁄16″ above the wood to provide enough space for PVC spring clamps cut in 1″ widths. Once the nails are in position, drops of CA glue—the thin stuff that will pull itself into the perimeter of the hole—will lock them in place. When a clamp is opened by the pliers, the nailheads prevent it from flying off. An opened clamp stores a lot of potential energy, so the shop rule—wear eye protection—applies here, too.
The pipe clamps work well when assembling the various layers for deck hatches. Here they’re holding a 1⁄2″-wide plywood coaming. When using a right-handed tool, seen here, the clamps should be applied from left to right so that they can be spaced close together but not impede the removal of the tool.
The 2″ pipe clamps didn’t have the capacity to span the gunwale of this lapstrake canoe—2 1⁄2″ from spacered inwale to outwale. I cut about 1⁄2″ from one end of each clamp, which allowed me to open the clamps to the desired width without having to modify the pliers.
In the decades since I started building boats, I’ve acquired a multitude of clamps, but there are some jobs that are best done with PVC spring clamps. They’re much quicker to apply than other clamps, they weigh next to nothing, they don’t stick to epoxy or get jammed by cured glue, and you can make as many as you like without breaking the bank or crowding the shop.
Christopher Cunningham is editor-at-large of Small Boats.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats readers by sending us an email.
When I teach boatbuilding and woodworking at WoodenBoat School and other venues, I send out a list of tools students might like to bring with them, including hand planes. I teach mostly introduction-level courses and encourage students to bring some of their own tools when they can. This past summer, a couple from California arrived with two new Jorgensen No. 60-1/2 low-angle adjustable-mouth block planes. I like 60-1/2 low-angle block planes in general but had not seen the Jorgensen before. It turned out to be a well-made and useful tool.
Photographs by the author
The interior of the Jorgensen No. 60-1/2 low-angle block plane is painted the company’s distinctive orange. The edges are smooth, and the lever cap is rounded so that it nestles comfortably against the underside of the operator’s index finger
The Jorgensen company was founded in Chicago in 1903 as the Adjustable Clamp Company. It persevered through two world wars, recessions, and depressions for 113 years, finally closing its doors in 2016. The name endures, but all the products are now made in China.
Once back in my shop I ordered one of the Jorgensen planes for myself and was pleased that the quality of the two I had seen in the summer class was not a fluke. The Jorgensen plane measures 6.3″ × 1.75″, has a 1 3⁄8″-wide blade, and weighs 1.48 lbs. The feel and function of the Jorgensen match that of any of my older No. 60-1/2s. It fits nicely in my hand and the edges are smooth. One notable improvement is that the opening throat locks down, making it less prone to slipping. The ductile iron body is finished in a bright orange. The sides are 90° to the sole, and the sole itself—while not perfectly flat—was well within acceptable tolerances. I polished the bottom and sides with 600-grit wet/dry sandpaper on a thick piece of glass, and each time I sharpen the iron I will continue to polish the bottom of the plane—soon the sole will be dead flat.
The knob for locking the adjustable throat opening doubles as a hold for the guiding hand, allowing the operator to both direct the plane and apply the necessary pressure to the blade.
The iron was also sharp enough to use right out of the box, which is not typical. The primary bevel was dead-on 25° and only required a bit of polishing on a 1,000-grit water stone to cut really well. The addition of a higher angled micro bevel applied with an 8,000-grit waterstone improved the edge even more, but this is not a necessary step for most woodworking tasks. The edge seems to hold up well while cutting both hard- and softwoods. The manufacturer says the blade is 01 tool steel hardened to Rockwell 60–64; it’s a full 3mm thick—typical of better hand planes.
The mechanism for setting the blade consists of a rectangular slot at the top end of the blade and a corresponding flange at the bottom of the knurled depth-adjuster wheel. It lacks lateral adjustment or multiple slots to attach the blade to the adjuster, but here simpler is better. The overall design has few moving parts. Once the blade has been adjusted, the cap iron’s large, easily operated spinwheel applies pressure on it to hold it in place.
The adjustable throat is a nice feature; it adjusts easily and locks firmly. When planing plank lands for lapstrake boats, and for most general boatbuilding and woodworking tasks, I keep the opening wide most of the time. When flushing up joinery or working on figured wood, I narrow the opening to prevent tearout. In both settings, the plane works well.
The Jorgensen plane has few moving parts. The blade position is set by a rectangular slot at its top end and a flange at the bottom of the depth-adjustment wheel (in the foreground of this picture). There is no lateral adjustment lever, but the slot is long enough to allow the blade to be oriented with its edge parallel to the sole. The spinwheel, beneath the lever cap, applies pressure to hold the blade in place. The throat opening is easily adjusted and held in place by the front knob.
Overall, the action of the throat, the travel and adjustment of the blade, and the wheel that locks the blade in place are just fine. Each time I sharpen the blade (which might be often as this seems to have become my new everyday plane) I’ll polish and tune-up the surfaces until the action is even better. This inexpensive little plane has impressed me and found a permanent place in my toolbox.
Bill Thomas has been a custom woodworker, designer, boatbuilder, and teacher for over 40 years. He lives and works in South Berwick, Maine.
Our small-boat fleet includes several sailing dinghies, which are sensitive to weight distribution. Depending on the number of crew and the wind conditions, we’ve found that a tiller extension is often useful for attaining good balance and trim while maintaining precise control of the rudder. The most versatile extension that we have come across is the Ronstan Battlestick with its fully articulated universal joint.
Photographs by the author
Assembly of the Ronstan Battlestick is straightforward. First the mounting plate is screwed onto the tiller. Next the rubber sleeve (seen here, flattened, at bottom left) is fed onto the extension stick. The mounting-plate cap is then slid onto the swivel joint (bottom right), which in turn is fed into the end of the extension stick and held in place with the stainless-steel pin. The sleeve is worked down and over both the pin and the end of the extension stick to lock and protect the connection. Thus assembled, the swivel joint is slotted into the mounting plate and locked in place by the cap that snaps down onto it. The Battlestick can be removed from the tiller simply by prying the cap off the mounting plate.
The Battlestick is a lightweight fluted aluminum-alloy shaft available in a range of lengths with a comfortable EVA-foam grip—a non-slip, waterproof material resistant to UV exposure and other harsh elements of the marine environment. The extension, including the soft grip, is 1″ in diameter, large enough to feel good in the hand, but small enough that you can hold it and gather line in the same hand while sheeting in. There is a knob on the grip end so you can feel the end of the extension without looking, which helps to prevent the extension from slipping out of your hand.
Fully assembled, there are no exposed moving parts, making the connections between the Battlestick, the mounting plate, and the tiller clean and stable.
The urethane universal joint allows for smooth movement in any direction. It is securely attached to the tiller with a flat mounting plate and provides excellent fine-control movements with no slop. A curved mounting adapter is also available so the extension can be mounted on a round tiller. The extension is easily removed when not needed: the quick-fitting universal joint slides in and out of the tiller-mounted plate and is held in place by a snap-on cover. If you don’t want to remove the extension completely, but don’t need to use it all of the time, it can also be folded back along the top of the tiller and held in place by either an optional Ronstan retainer clip or a simple piece of line or paracord looped around the tiller.
The Battlestick comes in lengths from 24″ to 98″, and Ronstan also offers telescoping Battlesticks, which would be useful in small sail-and-oar dinghies.
The Battlestick comes in various lengths. For the Sunfish, the 33” fixed extension is the perfect length, allowing the helmsperson to move their body weight both forward and out to balance the boat.
For our Sunfish, we chose the 33″ fixed-length extension. It allows us to use a shorter tiller when we’re sailing with two people, but to introduce extra length when sailing solo. On windy days, the extension, plus the secure fitting of the universal joint, is great for rudder control when hiking out. The Battlestick is also fun when it’s a ghosting day: I can sit in the cockpit with my feet stretched out on the deck and prop the Battlestick over my shoulder to steer—often with no more than a nod of my head. We plan to fit a telescoping Battlestick on our Penobscot 14. It will be useful for solo sails, when it’s best for me to move my body weight forward to almost amidships, but we’ll be able to retract it when Skipper and I are both on board and she takes the helm and needs to sit farther aft.
For many years the Ronstan Battlestick has been popular among dinghy-racing fleets, and while we may not be out there racing, we’re enjoying the versatility and control it brings to our boats.
Audrey “Skipper” and Kent Lewis mess about in the Tidewater Region of Virginia with their fleet of small boats. Their adventures are logged at smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com
The Ronstan Battlestick with Universal Joint is available from Ronstan and other online retailers. Prices start at $63.54 for the fixed-length 610mm (24″) extension.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
Pam Ayres was born in January 1929 and grew up in Onancock, Virginia. Her daughter, Rebecca, recalls her as a talented artist who “could build just about anything.” Pam designed the home she and her husband Charlie built on Pungoteague Creek on the Chesapeake Bay, near where she had grown up, and built most of the wooden furniture in it. She kept horses and many other animals that she rescued and nursed back to health. With the help of Rebecca’s two older brothers, Pam built the stable, sheds, and pasture fences—to say nothing of the seawall and dock they constructed with wood discarded by the local lumberyard. She loved to travel, grew vegetables and flowers, and, says Rebecca, “was always fiercely independent, maintaining her 18-acre property long after my dad died in 1989.”
When Pam was a young girl, her grandfather, who had been a member of a New York City rowing club in the early 1900s, taught her to row. Yet, in Rebecca’s childhood on the Chesapeake, she recalls family canoes, outboard boats, and kayaks, but never a rowboat. “Mom always talked about getting a rowboat one day, but for some reason, we never did,” she says.
Rebecca Ludden
While the weather was good Rebecca, Eric, and Pam were able to work outside. When winter came, they were forced inside to Pam’s basement where they had heat but much less space.
In 2021, when Pam was 92, she announced that she really wanted a rowboat. Rebecca and her husband, Eric, started a search for the perfect boat. They intended to buy one but couldn’t find the right thing. Then, in December of that year, while vacationing in Maine, they heard about Clint Chase and the kits he sold through Chase Small Craft in Saco. They called him up.
“Clint told us about the Echo Bay Dory Skiff and assured us that Eric and I, two high school teachers with no building experience, could pull it off. Mom was the one with the building skills,” Rebecca says. “It would be a project we could all do together.” They ordered a kit.
Rebecca Ludden
Throughout the build Pam was a willing participant. In fact, says Rebecca, she was the most experienced of the three builders.
In the spring of 2022, when the pallet arrived with all the materials needed to build the 11′ 7″ skiff, Rebecca admits that she and Eric were overwhelmed. But Pam was thrilled and never doubted they could build it. “We were both teaching,” says Rebecca, “and we lived four hours away, so the building process took a long time—over a year. We’d work on the boat on weekends, but often we’d only be able to make it there one weekend a month. But Mom never worked on the boat when we were away. I’m sure she could have, but this time, she said, she was our apprentice.”
They started the project in an outbuilding that Pam had set up for rescued horses. They laid out and organized the materials in the stalls and got to work. “It was fine for the first few months,” says Rebecca. “But when winter came it was too cold out there, so we had to move into Mom’s basement, which had very limited space.”
Rebecca Ludden
Pam admired the grain of the wood, so Rebecca and Eric decided to leave the inside of the skiff bright finished. They painted the exterior teal, Pam’s favorite color.
Nevertheless, the project continued apace, and Pam became more and more excited every time Rebecca and Eric came for a building weekend.
“Clint told us we could call whenever we needed help, and we did have a lot of questions. When we began,” Rebecca admitted, “we didn’t know a transom from a skeg.”
They had some mishaps along the way, Rebecca says. “One of the rubrails split in the dry-fitting process, likely because of the cold temperatures and because we hadn’t planed it thin enough. And we accidentally epoxied-in some screws that were supposed to be removed. But it didn’t matter, and Mom was just more and more pleased. After we applied the first coat of epoxy, she couldn’t believe how beautiful the wood grain looked.”
Eric Ludden
Rebecca helps Pam to install and adjust the fit of the simple foot brace on launch day.
When the construction was complete, Pam decided she would no longer be involved. She wanted the finished boat to be a surprise, and left Rebecca and Eric to choose and apply the paint and varnish by themselves. Instead, she would “work on plans for building a proper boathouse with a boatlift for her new boat.”
By late summer 2023, the boat was ready. The outside of the hull was teal—Pam’s favorite color—with white trim, and the inside was bright-finished so she could see the wood grain she had so admired during the build. Pam started talking about proper rowing techniques and how much she just wanted to get in her new boat and go.
August 20, 2023, was designated launching day. Pam came out of the house in her captain’s cap and with Rebecca and Eric christened the boat THE PUNGOTEAGUE PAM. She climbed aboard and rowed up and down the creek enthusiastically, praising how well the boat handled.
After rowing on her own for a while, Pam invited Rebecca out for a ride. Then it was Eric’s turn, and finally she rowed with both of them aboard, showing them how to hold the oars, how to pull through the strokes, and smiling all the while. “She loved everything about it and looked like a much younger woman,” Rebecca says. Pam was then 94. She had waited a long time for her own rowboat, and on that sunny day in August, on a little Chesapeake Bay creek, her daughter and son-in-law turned her dream into a reality.
Pam Ayres continued to enjoy THE PUNGOTEAGUE PAM through the summer of 2023. Rebecca and Eric joined her as often as they could. In March 2024, at the age of 95, Pam died in a kayak accident. Rebecca writes: “She was so thrilled with her rowboat and if she had taken that out instead of the kayak, I’m sure she would still be with us. She was an extremely independent woman, and she lived life to the fullest. She took out her kayak alone on a very windy day and got stranded on a bank away from her dock. We are all heartbroken, but also realize that she left us doing exactly what she wanted. She loved being on the water and just being outside.”—JB
Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats readers.
Joel White adapted the iconic Herreshoff 12 1/2—a small, full-keeled daysailer—for trailering in 1985. A centerboard pivoting in a slotted lead ballast keel replaced the original keel, and the boat grew wider to offset the loss of stability. In appearance and performance, the boats are nearly identical.
Any discussion of the Haven 12 1⁄2 must begin with the Herreshoff 12 1⁄2—considered by many to be the best all-around sailboat of her size ever designed. Measuring 12′ 6″ on the waterline, 15′ 10″ overall, with a beam of 5’10” and a draft of 2’6″, the Herreshoff boat is known for its excellent sailing characteristics, its speed, and its responsiveness.
Designed and built in 1914 by Nathanael Herreshoff, the daysailer became a rapid success. Between 1914 and 1943, Herreshoff Mfg. Co. in Bristol, Rhode Island, built around 390 Herreshoff 12 1⁄2’s. After World War II, Cape Cod Shipbuilding Company of Wareham, Massachusetts, obtained the building works and built another 30 boats in 1947–48. At the same time, an additional 20 or so were built at the Quincy Adams Yacht Yard in Quincy, Massachusetts. These were the last wooden 12 1⁄2 s built, with the exception of a few that were privately constructed.
Variations on Herreshoff’s original design evolved in years to come and led to the Cape Cod Bullseye and the Doughdish, both built in fiberglass. These two designs attracted their own audience, gained acceptance by the Herreshoff 12 1⁄2 class association, and helped keep the class alive. The Herreshoff 12 1⁄2, Bullseye, and Doughdish were all favorites for club racing, as they were easily handled under a gaff or marconi rig, very competitive, and reasonably priced. In their early years, a Herreshoff 12 1⁄2 could be purchased for a little more than $400, fully equipped; today, these boats routinely sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
The original wooden Herreshoff 12 1⁄2 fleet remains strong to this day due to the love and dedication of their owners and admirers. In fact, many of the boats still belong to their original families, sailed by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their original owners. Over 250 of the original boats are sailing or in the process of being repaired or restored, and most are found on Buzzards Bay and throughout much of New England. Each year, nearly two dozen vie for honors in the national championship regatta hosted by top yacht clubs on the East Coast.
WoodenBoat School
WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, has built several Haven 12 1/2s—in both carvel planking, as seen here, and cold-molding.
In 1985, Joel White, the late owner of Brooklin Boat Yard and a well-known yacht designer, was approached by a client who was interested in a boat similar to the classic Herreshoff 12 1⁄2 but with shoal draft and trailerability for easy transport and storage. Joel decided that the Herreshoff 12 1⁄2 was such a great design that it made sense to stick with the original concept but to reduce the draft. He retained the profile, sheer, stem, and stern profiles, along with the rig.
The draft was reduced from 2′ 6″ down to 1′ 6″ and a centerboard was added. To ensure the new design had the same stability as the original, Joel increased the beam by 3″ amidships and 1 ½” at the stern. He also kept the original longitudinal center of buoyancy so that the new boat would float and conduct itself exactly as the Herreshoff design. The Haven class, like the Herreshoff, is 12 1⁄2 ‘ on the waterline and 15’ 10″ overall. A lead ballast keel brings her total weight to approximately 1,500 lbs.
The Haven is big enough to sail comfortably with four people, but is also easily singlehanded. In terms of sailing ability and aesthetics, the design has proven to be virtually identical to her predecessor. At WoodenBoat School, we have a mixed fleet of both Havens and Herreshoffs; we constantly daysail them in company and often race them as one fleet, and we haven’t been able to decipher any real differences in their performance. If there is any variation, it can usually be traced to the quality of sails or crew.
WoodenBoat School
WoodenBoat School maintains a fleet of Haven 12 1/2s—and a few original Herreshofffs. The school’s elementary seamanship courses are taught in these boats.
Interest in building the Haven has been high ever since the design made its debut and plans became available. It is one of the more popular designs carried by WoodenBoat; well over 200 sets have been sold in just the past five years. There’s also plenty of interest in understanding the construction method, as evidenced by sales of Maynard Bray’s book How to Build the Haven 12 1⁄2-Footer, with over 12,000 copies in print. And the six-page study plans are one of the most popular items on WoodenBoat’s ever-growing Instant Digital Download site.
Hundreds of Havens have been built by both amateur and professional builders. But be forewarned: building a Haven 12 1/2 footer is not an easy project. Although the construction process is well documented in Maynard’s manual, prior boatbuilding or advanced woodworking experience is strongly recommended. The boat is designed to be built using the Herreshoff method, which calls for a timber mold for every one of the hull frames, 22 total. While this procedure involves a lot of work, the result is a very fair hull and a strong boat. Since the plans include full-sized patterns for all 22 construction molds, lofting is optional and skipping this process saves the builder a good deal of time.
Although the Haven was designed for traditional plank-on-frame construction, many builders have chosen cold-molding, for a variety of reasons: easy availability of veneers and epoxy, the peril of placing a plank-on-frame hull in warm worm-infested waters, and limited access to the water necessitating the boat being stored dry on a trailer (cycling between water and land is hard on a plank-on-frame hull, as the wood shrinks and expands).
Peter Chesworth
Can you tell them apart? Here, a Herreshoff and three Haven 12 1/2s sail in company at WoodenBoat School. (The boat to the far right is the Herreshoff 12 1/2 WE THREE; the others (from right) are the Havens ALLENE, CONNIE and IOLANTHE.)
Eric Dow has been building boats in Brooklin for over 30 years and specializes in construction of the Haven. His first, in 1987, was for a gentleman from Texas who stopped by his shop unannounced looking for a daysailer; the man decided on Joel’s design that very day after listening to Eric’s recommendations.
Eric’s first 10 or 11 Havens were built plank-on-frame, and he and his crew would turn out two or three a year. Eventually, he had a request to construct a cold-molded hull and he decided to give it a go. A mold was built, changes in construction details were made, and the boat was a success. Eric described it as “a learning experience” and admitted that it took him and his talented crew eight more cold-molded hulls before they really felt comfortable and efficient with this approach.
When asked whether he favors the traditional plank-on-frame method of construction over cold-molding, Eric is flexible. “We’re set up in our shop to build either way. Patterns exist for every piece of the boat, and we can complete one in fewer than 800 hours from setup to painting, whether it’s planked traditionally or cold-molded. For the amateur builder, however, I’d recommend the traditional method since that’s what the plans call for.” Eric also notes that “There’s a lot of sanding and prep work required on an epoxy-laminated hull. I can fair a traditionally planked hull in a half-day with my smoothing plane, but it takes lots more time fairing out a cold-molded one.”
Haven Nos. 50 and 51 left Eric’s shop this past summer. In 22 years of building this design, he sent them to ports near and far: four to Japan, five to South America, and the rest sailing in waters throughout the United States. Over a dozen of his Havens call Brooklin home. Each one of Eric’s boats is a work of art, reflecting the highest of standards, and his crew’s craftsmanship is nothing short of superlative. Joel White would be proud.
The design also plays a key role in the Small Boats Course at The Landing School in Kennebunkport, Maine. Instructor Paul Barton likes the fact that the Haven offers students “a lot of boat in a small enough package that can be built in a reasonable period of time.” Each January, teams of three to four students per boat begin the project that will encompass all aspects of construction from lofting and setup through all of the various boatbuilding and woodworking procedures to rigging, hardware installation, and sea trials in June.
From the outset, Joel White hoped the Haven would resemble the original Herreshoff boats. After sea trials, he wrote, “If you see this boat on the mooring or out sailing from a vantage point that obscures the centerboard trunk, I don’t think you can tell the new class from the old. What also pleases me is that the performance of the two classes seems to be exactly the same, both off the wind and to windward. So let the credit for the excellence of these boats go where it is due— to the Wizard of Bristol, N.G. Herreshoff.” Thanks to the genius of these two gifted designers, the Haven has gained a reputation for being a versatile beauty ideal for racing, family sailing, and coastal exploring. It is difficult to imagine a small boat design that affords more pleasure to the eye—or more pleasure to sail.
While she’s a complex boat to build, the Haven 12 1/2 has unusually detailed plans and support materials. Many first-time builders have done an admirable job of bringing this design to life.
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The Newfound Woodworks
The Newfound Woodworks
