built my first kayak in 1978. It was my own design, a mongrel of elements I’d seen in the classic documentary book, Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard Chapelle. It had a stern profile from Alaska’s King Island, a midsection from Canada’s Southampton Island, and a bow . . .
In 2005, when I built a Caledonia yawl for camp-cruising with my two kids, I kept the hull and sailing rig as designed but started from scratch for the interior arrangements. Applying the sneakbox’s lessons of asymmetry and adaptability, I moved the centerboard trunk 14″ to starboard. (Keeping its top at seat level and raising it bottom up the slope of the garboard diminished the depth of the trunk, so I made it longer to give the board the same area.) The trunk led to wide side benches with parallel inboard edges, and those invited a modular system where slip thwarts and floorboards could rest anywhere on ledges to fill the gap between the benches.
When winter comes, is it time to haul out or head out? When cold weather doesn’t entirely freeze the water, boating offers daunting challenges and memorable rewards.
I have a fair number of boats in my fleet and some are getting on in years. The oldest of the ones I’ve built is a Chamberlain gunning dory I built for my father in 1980. The oldest of all of them is an English river wherry bearing an oval brass plate that reads: T. Cooper & Sons of Shrewsbury, Boatbuilders, Shrewsbury. Dad acquired it perhaps 40 years ago and believed it was built around 1890. Dad may have told me where he found the wherry, but at the time it was just another boat in a garage crowded with racing shells and I didn’t pay much attention to any of them.
An easier way to see underwater is through a different kind of plywood box with a window, used at the surface. When I was kayaking the south coast of Menorca in the Mediterranean, there were some fishermen wading in the shallows, bent over with their faces up things that looked like oversized megaphones, with an opening at the top to fit around their eyes and a window on the bottom. I never found out what they were looking for, but I was intrigued by the method. The devices they used are called bathyscopes or aquascopes, and they’ve been around for quite a while, perhaps almost as long as window glass has been.
Over the following decades, I continued to build reproductions of Arctic kayaks. I was drawn to the sleeker and faster Greenland types, learned how to roll them a dozen different ways, and enjoyed paddling them in storms with water washing thick across the decks the deafening roar of the wind in my ears. The Hooper Bay sat under the eaves of my parents’ house for year, dusted green with the pollen of the cedar trees. When I had a house of my own, I kept the Hooper Bay alongside the garage. The canvas covering grew speckled with mildew, and the paint cracked. Eventually I removed the skin, leaving the lashed latticework frame bare.
I’ve had only four anchorages go wrong (so far). In the middle of a night aboard my dory skiff, I had to sit up in my sleeping bag and row across a cove to get into the lee of a shifted wind; that morning I woke up stranded by a low tide. During an overnight outing in our Escargot canal boat, anchored in the upper reaches of a tidal river, the four of us aboard spent a noisy sleepless night when the river current accelerated with the falling tide. On my solo in that same boat on the Everett sloughs, I slept well enough but lost my best anchor to a submerged snag. Those anchorages were merely inconvenient and uncomfortable. My worst anchorage could have been deadly.
here’s an interesting exhibition of art at the Georgetown Historical Society in Georgetown, Maine. Some of the pieces on display are an unusual pairing of abstract painting and wooden boat models. The disciplines of art and boatbuilding have very different goals, one purely aesthetic and the other quite practical, but both require thoughtful attention to . . .
athaniel Holmes Bishop III was born in Medford, Massachusetts, on March 23 1827, and died in Glens Falls New York, July 2, 1902. In his time, he was quite well known for books he had written about his travels in small boats. I first heard about him, quite by accident, in the spring of 1982. . . .
I made my first crossing in 1965, when I was 12 years old, and while it didn’t shape history, it shaped me. I had bought a flat-bottomed skiff from a kid who lived a block away from the home in Edmonds, Washington, where I grew up. I paid $15 for it, a few weeks’ worth of my allowance. I don’t know who built the boat, probably some a penny-pinching amateur, because the plywood that made up the hull was textured and meant for house siding. The boat was too heavy for me to cart the half mile from home to the shore of Puget Sound, let alone drag over busy railroad tracks to get to the beach. Dad let me keep the boat at the Edmonds marina alongside his 27’ Tumlaren sloop. He also let me use his 5-½ hp Johnson SeaHorse outboard on one condition: I had to stay close to shore.
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