Reader Built Boats Articles - Page 3 of 5

September 2019

The Kingfisher Elective

A class in boatbuilding

Glenn Joyner was ready to retire after a 43-year-long career as an educator, but the school was reluctant to let him go. Glenn floated an idea: “Build me a boatshop on campus and let me teach boatbuilding instead of English.” The school agreed to his terms and now students have an elective in boatbuilding. Glen-L’s Kingfisher 18 is the latest boat to emerge from the shop.

August 2019

WEE BONNIE

Variations on a classic

Phil Boyer has built four modified Wee Lassie canoes: one in cedar strips, one with a foam hull, and two skin-on-frame, and all named WEE BONNIE after his late sister.

July 2019

DREAM WEAVER

College credit

Two industrial design students at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, furthered their education by designing and building a kayak. Their strip-built kayak is as much an artistic expression as a seaworthy vessel.

June 2019

WEE LASSIE SURVIVOR

A memory to hang on to

As a teenager, James Shamis worked for a boatwright who happened to have an old Wee Lassie canoe, and the joy of paddling that diminutive vessel stuck with him for decades. The memories even helped him pull through a bout with cancer. Two days after his last treatment, he started building Gentry’s skin-on-frame version of that classic.

Young Henry saw his grand plan through to a successful completion.

May 2019

BLUE PEARL

Time and money well spent

Mark Bonnette’s grandson, Henry, asked if they could go fishing. When “Grampy” replied, “We don’t have a boat,” Henry said, “Well, let’s build one.” With the design criteria established—two seats, an anchor, oars, and a motor—the pair went to work.

April 2019

CHIPS

Carl Kaufmann’s Block Island 19

Carl Kaufmann’s CHIPS is a Block Island 19, a handsome daysailer that he designed and built on Rhode Island’s Block Island. Carl makes guitars and other stringed instruments and brings that level of craftsmanship to his boatbuilding.

With JIM crewed by his friends, Peter takes JIM's helm for her first sail.

March 2019

Craftsmanship and Courage

Peter Sibley

Peter Sibley is an Australian boatbuilder who revels in all of the tasks and tools that go into a boatbuilding project. His Jim, a canoe yawl design from Selway-Fisher, give us a look at the work Peter does, with a little help from his friends.

HERON kept busy with family and friends on a vacation stay on the shores of an Arkansas lake.

February 2019

Flat-Bottomed Skiff HERON

A new Blake-built boat

Nick Blake, a popular SBM contributor, designed and built an outboard skiff with the help of his father, Daniel. As they have done with the other boats they’ve built, they started with logs from trees grown on the family woodlands and slabbed with a mill only yards from their shop.

Jon followed the advice of Spring River Boatworks and installed folding outrigger rowlocks. They each add 4" to the span, allowing the use of longer oars for a more comfortable stroke.

January 2019

A Boat of His Own

A square-stern wood-and-canvas canoe

Jon Wiegand built canoes for his kids and a kayak for his wife before he gave much thought to a boat for himself. With the three strip-building projects to his credit, he decided to raise the stakes and build a wood-and-canvas canoe and the form the traditional construction requires.

Middle schoolers have the privilege of taking MSS BROOKWOOD out rowing on Cutler Pond on the edge of the school grounds.

December 2018

A MacIntosh Canvas Boat

Built by 4th and 5th graders

Brookwood School, serving kids from Pre-K to the 8th grade, decided that building a boat would be a good fit for their “project-based learning” approach to education, so they put fourth- and fifth-grade students to work on a wood-and-canvas tender designed by Ned MacIntosh.

November 2018

ODYSSEY

A Marblehead gunning dory

When Harvey Hamel of Kingston, Washington, decided to build a Marblehead gunning dory, he searched for months for good boatbuilding lumber at a good price. A Craigslist ad led him to white oak and clear, old-growth vertical-grain Douglas-fir that had been sitting in a warehouse for 15 years.

October 2018

BUTTERFLY

A makeover for a metal boat

Beneath her warm, bright-finished cedar decks, BUTTERFLY is, at her core, an old boat with a heart of…aluminum. If Patrick MacQueen hadn’t saved her, she might have been recycled into cans, pots, and pans.

With open sections for the cockpit and stern, the nesting configuration allowed an overall assembled length of 12'.

September 2018

Nesting Boats

Tom Hepp's take-aparts for travel

Tom Hepp had had boats growing up, served in the Navy, and chose a career as a merchant mariner, so it’s not surprising that he wanted to take a boat with him when he drove across the country on his vacations. He didn’t want to haul a boat on a trailer or a roof rack, so he decided to make a sectional boat he could pack inside his van.

Harry takes his canoe to many riverside gatherings and lets people give it a try.

August 2018

A Sturgeon-Nose Canoe

Tradition brought forward

The Sinixt, a First-Nations people of southwest British Columbia and northern Washington, developed sturgeon-nosed canoes with reversed prows for traveling and fishing the rivers lakes of their homeland. When Paul Montgomery was asked by a member of the Sinixt tribe to build a reproduction of the canoe, he set his other projects aside and went right to work.

James' daughter Kyrie was three when construction began. By the time she had turned four, she had taken an interest in helping build the boat.

July 2018

ARGUS

A family-built Chester Yawl

Born to a family of Alabama river folk, James Fullton grew up around boats. His interest in them waned when his parents moved him and his sisters inland, but when he started a family of his own in New Haven, Connecticut, he felt the impulse to build a boat of his own.

The dinghy sits lightly on the water and has enough volume to carry a complement of three.

June 2018

Auklet

A tender built by father and son

Ernst Glas and his family sail the Baltic Sea aboard a 43’ sloop his father built in the early ‘90s. He had sold its tender, but his young son missed the boat. Ernst struck a deal with him: they would get a new dinghy, but they would do as Grandfather did and build it themselves out of wood.

May 2018

Catherine

Whitehalls in the Netherlands

A Dutch boatbuilding school that has taken an interest in American sailing and rowing craft launched its seventh Catherine. It’s a lapstrake boat in the Whitehall style that fits well in the canals, inland seas, and coastal waters of the Netherlands.

South of Dubuque, Iowa, a couple new friends accepted an invitation to paddle along for a day, and provided rare photos of both Barb and Gene in the kayak together.

April 2018

KUPENDANA

A kayak with a purpose

Barb Geiger’s father had dreamed of building a stitch-and-glue kayak but when a stroke restricted him to a wheelchair, he thought his dream was out of reach. Barb didn’t agree. They ordered a kit and got started on the project. Sadly, he didn’t live long enough to see the boat finished and launched. He would have had good reason to be proud of the kayak—it carried Barb and her husband safely on a 2,000-mile journey across America.

March 2018

BEULAH

An Escargot with a difference

Curt White made a number of modifications to his Escargot to turn it into a roomy, well-furnished, and warm living room afloat. BEULAH takes Curt and his wife in style and comfort to the lakes near their home in the hills of western North Carolina.

On it's inaugural outing LIBBY B lived up to her builder's expectations.

February 2018

Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff LIZZY B

A Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff

Bob Burns was finishing the final year of a career in data management and his forward-thinking wife bought Jericho skiff plans for him for Christmas, expecting the project would keep Bob from growing idle in retirement. When he retired, the boatbuilding project did keep him busy, but not for long. In six months the skiff was ready to launch.

January 2018

ATNA

An Adirondack Guideboat

Gary Strombo of Everett, Washington, told his friend John Leyde that he wanted to build a boat. As often happens, the moment you speak of your wishes to someone else, the momentum to carry them out begins to build.

December 2017

KRAKEN and THE G.O.A.T.

Harbor Master Skiffs

The Independence Seaport Museum is not only preserving artifacts of the past, but is also keeping traditional skills alive by passing them along to the youth of Philadelphia. This year the Workshop on the Water, the museum’s working boatshop, brought groups of high-school students together to build a pair of flat-bottomed skiffs.

November 2017

HARMONY

A peapod tender

HARMONY, based on a sailing peapod built in the 1880s for the northern Maine coast and adapted for strip-built construction, is the tender and a fitting accompaniment to INTEGRITY, a 32’ double-ended Eastport Pinky.

October 2017

SYNCHRONY

A customized Tread Lightly

John Welsford’s Scamp has created quite a following and his Tread Lightly is often overlooked. It’s 13” longer and has a mizzen and a cabin with enough room to sit and sleep comfortably. Reader Steve Judson made a few modifications to his homebuilt Tread Lightly to best suit the sailing he had in mind.

September 2017

GYPSY SOUL

A Tennessee cruiser

Scotty Pugh of Sardis, Tennessee, grew up riding dirt bikes and later indulged his passion for motorcycles as he collected vintage Harley-Davidsons. But a ride gone wrong landed him a hospital trauma ward for a week and he was forced to consider something else to focus his interest upon. “Wooden boats,” he thought, “will keep me entertained.”