Reader Built Boats Articles - Page 4 of 5

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.”

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While this is the scene Bruce has been hoping for, the boy is not a grandson, it's his office manager's son.

August 2017

PETIT BATEAU

A boat, boredom, a book, and a baby

With a grandchild on the way, Bruce Holaday built a Joel White-designed Shellback Dinghy. When the boat was finished and launched he was reluctant to leave the project behind so he wrote a book about a boy named Jack whose grandfather built a boat for him.

The loose-footed sprit sail makes sailing about as simple as it gets. Light summer breezes make for unhurried passages between islands.

July 2017

IRONBLOOD

Transforming the Traditional

After moving ashore from living aboard a schooner, and acquiring a wife and a small son, Michael Colfer of Bellingham, Washington, needed a smaller boat. He built a Nutshell pram and a Good Little Skiff, but then wanted a boat capable of taking on some more challenging weather in the more exposed areas around the San Juan Islands.

June 2017

A Bit of Venice on the Thames

An Englishman's S'ciopon

Richard Nissen lives in a houseboat on the Thames and has gathered a collection of small boats. After he visited Venice and learned how to row in the Venetian style, he decided he needed one more, and built a s’ciopon, a small traditional workboat that he could row standing up.

May 2017

A Tenacious Tween

Building a Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff

A girl who had her heart set on having her own outboard skiff had enough determination to see a three-year project of building a Jericho Bay skiff through to the end. In our Reader Built Boat feature you’ll meet Hannah Dumser, a remarkable youngster who was thrilled to get epoxy for her birthday.

Thatcher has a powerful stroke with good torso rotation, not to mention the game face of a kid with no shortage of determination.

April 2017

Boy Scout Boatbuilder

A CLC Night Heron

This stitch-and-glue kayak is the handiwork of a 13-year-old Boy Scout in pursuit of a Merit Badge in woodworking. He could have fulfilled the requirements for the badge by building a box with a hinged lid; the 18’ stitch-and-glue kayak he built was above and beyond.

March 2017

STILL THINKING

A Redwing 18

Barry Dusharm had built a few boats for rowing and paddling, so when he made the switch to power he built a Redwing 18 he named it STILL THINKING, the answer he’d given his wife when she asked if it would be his last boat.

The yawl rig has advantages beyond those for sailing. The two masts support a fly that can be set open for shade and a cooling breeze, or...

February 2017

FIRE-DRAKE

A sail-and-oar cruiser

When Alex Zimmerman decided to build a camp-cruising boat for himself, he applied his mechanical engineering training to use and started by crunching numbers. What he ended up with, FIRE-DRAKE, is a lapstrake boat that is as much a work of art as of science.

January 2017

EMZARA

A Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff

John Adamson visited the WoodenBoat campus in the fall of 2009 and was taken by two Jericho Bay Lobster Skiffs: the original plank-on-frame version built by Jimmy Steele in the early 1970s, sitting on a trailer parked in front of the WoodenBoat Store, and a strip-planked version built by Tom Hill, at anchor near the WoodenBoat boathouse. A few years later he built one for himself.

The post at the stern supports two mirrors; the larger one at top provides a good view forward, and the wide-angle mirror below it takes in a broader view. Mirrors are common fixtures on rowing boats used in races in Finland.

December 2016

SULKAVA

A kit-built Savo 650

Tim Murfitt of Norwich, England, has been puttering with small boats, mostly power boats, for more than 40 years and grew weary of their speed and noise. He thought taking to the water with a pair of oars would be a good change of direction for his boating, and although his only experience with rowing was on dry ground with a rowing machine, he felt confident that he’d enjoy rowing. He wasn’t so sure that his wife would.

After launching JANET MARIA it was't lnog before Haynes was back in his garage workshop. He's now building a Mertens-designed 10' pram.

November 2016

All in the Family

A grandfather's Pilot 19

Joe Haynes grew up in Detroit with three brothers and two sisters. Their father, once a tight end for the University of Michigan football team and later an Army sergeant who stormed beaches in the Pacific during World War II, was a very athletic man, but in spite of his best efforts to get his kids involved in sports, none of them showed any interest. The family moved to Algonac, a small town tucked in a bend of the St. Clair River, which flows from Lake Huron to Lake Erie and separates the state of Michigan from the province of Ontario. Surrounded by water, the kids gravitated to boats. The first boat in the family was a derelict wooden boat Joe and his twin brother fished out of the river near their home. They patched the leaks with tar and used the boat to explore the river upstream and down.

Students from the Andrea McCoy Recreation Center constructed the aptly named ANDREA McCOY. McCoy. a New Bedford resident, was among the talented young USA boxers killed in a 1980 plane crash in Poland.

October 2016

Bevin’s Skiffs

Building more than boats

Kids at the Community Boating Center of New Bedford, Massachusetts, built three Bevin's skiffs as part of a program to teach valuable skills through boatbuilding.

Nate was used to sailing a sloop and found that the trimming of the sails on the schooner had more impact on steering than speed.

September 2016

BOB

A Boat on a Budget

Nate Morrison’s Shell Schooner 18, christened BOB for Boat On a Budget, proves that limited skills, limited tools, and unlimited dreams can get you afloat even where water is scarce.

Dave made paddles for the canoe and decorated them with the same insignia he put on the canoe. He and his friend Andy Look won the wooden canoe division of the 13.5-mile Abe's RIver Race on the Sangamon River in Illinois

August 2016

Hope and Memories

A canoe to live for

An Illinois man given a second chance at life decided to recreate some of the best times of his youth by building a canoe. Working side-by-side with his 82-year-old father, he created a vessel for the future he almost lost.