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Rushton 109

Henry Rushton, of Canton, New York, was a preeminent boatbuilder in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Living and working between the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondack wilderness, and his skill in designing, building, and marketing small boats allowed him a long career. Rushton may be best remembered today for his lightweight cedar canoes. His Wee Lassie is still a popular hull design built in all manner of methods. Maybe less well known these days are his pulling boats. According to Atwood Manley in Rushton and His Times in American Canoeing, rowing craft accounted for the bulk of his trade.

Photographs by the author

In the original boat, the planks were clench-nailed to the frames through the laps. Here they are riveted. A single copper clench nail secures the laps between frames. These planks have glued scarfs; the drawings show plank sections joined by scarf joints set in varnish and held with clenched 1/2″ copper tacks.

The Ruston 109 is an old-fashioned guideboat type combining lightness, good looks, and easy rowing. It’s a double-ender with nearly plumb stems, a lapstrake hull, and sweeping sheer. The boat is 14′3″ long with a beam of 39-1/4″. Many of Rushton’s pulling boats were offered as rowing/sailing combinations with a compact folding centerboard and a rudder with a yoke and steering lines. The plans for the 109 show no accommodation for sailing but do offer a rudder design. No doubt the fashion of the late 1800s allowed a fellow to pull hard on the oars, not seeing where he was going, while his amiable companion pulled the ropes.

My wife, Tina, and I have long enjoyed fishing the lakes, bays, and rivers of the mid-Atlantic states and northeastern U.S together. We’ve spent many fine days afloat in an aged, lumpy, chopped-off canoe that’s as slow as a slug. Last winter, with my shop idle, I decided to upgrade our fleet by building a spry fishing boat for two that we could also enjoy rowing solo. Anything much longer than 14′ would not fit in my work space. I’d never built anything with a transom, and I like the looks of double-ended craft. Happily, I came across Ben Fuller’s 87 Boat Designs: A Catalog of Small Boat Plans from Mystic Seaport’s Collection and found, on pages 56 and 57, a Rangeley Lakes Boat and the A.L. ROTCH, Rushton’s 109. I had an affinity for the Rushton; as a boy, I spent summer vacations with my family at a camp on a lake not far from where J. Henry plied his trade.

The plans for the Model 109 come from Mystic Seaport on three sheets: lines, offsets, and construction details. The hull is symmetrical fore and aft, so lofting half of the boat is all that’s required, though to ensure fair curves I did run my battens beyond the middle station. While lofting, I changed the vertical keel to a 4″ plank. The Rangeley Lake boat is built this way, and I had read that Rushton’s sailing canoes called for red-oak plank keels. I might one day want to add a folding centerboard and sail rig, but am now heeding the advice of Mr. Fuller that this would be “more successful in a longer and wider model.”

The plans call for all of three thwarts to be 5/8″ oak, like the center thwart here, but the cane seats, meant for a canoe, are lighter and more comfortable.

Station spacing on the plans is 14”. I set up five molds 28” apart, with two stem-end molds 68” from the center mold. I got out the 13′3-1/4″ keel from 4/4 ash and worked the rabbet. The plans indicate a steam-bent, two-piece stem, but I laminated them with ash strips and made two bending forms so I could glue them both up in one day. The stem-keel marriage was bedded with 3M 5200 and riveted. The backbone was then attached to the molds, and the stems plumbed and secured for building the hull upside down.

I began planking by spiling a pattern for the garboard, keeping an eye on the plans for plank width. Each plank has one scarf, as my northern white cedar stock ran mostly 8’ to 10’. After the garboards were bedded and screwed in, the rest of the planking continued. I fastened the 1/4″ planking with 5/8″ clench nails, being mindful of the spacing of the ribs, which would be installed later. I beveled the stems as I went, first clamping planks to the molds at their lining marks and filing for fit. Planks were bedded and screwed at the stems. There are eight strakes, and the sheer is especially shapely.

The center thwart can serve as a stretcher when the boat is rowed from the forward station.

With planking complete, I cut the plank ends flush with the inner stems and then bedded and attached the outer stems. After plugging the countersunk screws, I turned the hull upright for planking. The plans call for clench-nailed 1/2″ x 1/4″ half-round elm ribs spaced 2-1/4″ on center. In Appendix B of Atwood Manley’s book there is a detailed description of the method Rushton’s crew used in framing. One held a specially grooved backing iron while another quickly hammered home the clench nails in the short time the rib remained pliable from steaming. Because I generally work alone, I’m more comfortable riveting frames. I can bend, clamp, and screw steamed ribs to the keel while they remain supple and return after they’ve hardened for riveting through the planks. I spaced 9/16″ x 1/4″ rectangular white oak ribs 3-1/2″ apart and fastened with 14-gauge rivets. The flat face of the frame gives a solid landing for the burr, and the heavier scantling allows a wider spacing while retaining strength and minimizing weight.

The breasthook (“deck” in canoe nomenclature) and rails are of white oak. The rails I attached as a set, fastening one end of the outer rail with screws through the planking and into the breasthook, and then setting the inwale in place and clamping all together following the sheer sweep. I placed 10-gauge rivets through every other frame. The remaining frames were fastened through the inner rail with ring nails. The thwarts were placed according to plan: white oak for the center and cane seats for the bow and stern. As work progressed, I sealed and primed where appropriate.

The depth amidships is 11″ and the stems rising 13″ above that, giving the sheer a deep and dramatic curve.

The bronze oarlock sockets are patterned on Rushton’s original design and made by Bob Lavertue, proprietor of the Springfield Fan Centerboard Company. He does fine reproductions of many Rushton accessories and owns a Rushton-built Iowa. I enjoyed making the brass mooring-ring assembly shown on the plans and also cold-hammered and bent some 3/8″ bronze rod for center thwart stiffeners. After finishing the removable floorboards, I fashioned an adjustable foot brace as depicted in Rushton’s Rowboats and Canoes: The 1903 Catalog In Perspective, by William Crowley, and made 6’6″ spruce oars.

To get our boat to the water, I made some trailer modifications to cushion the lightweight hull. Tina and I can easily place the Rushton on and off the trailer and carry it where we want. Trailering the boat also makes it easy when I launch solo at a boat ramp. It’s a bit overweight to manhandle alone but can certainly be cartopped. For long road trips I would prefer the boat riding on top to having it on a trailer getting peppered with gravel kicked up by the truck.

Getting aboard the Rushton is a lot like getting into our old canoe, though with its flat bottom, the 109 is steadier. Still, we generally board while holding the gunwales and make sure to plant our feet on the narrow floorboards, keeping our weight centered. Pushing offshore, the wide keel takes the grind instead of the planks. There are two sets of oarlocks. The center station is for rowing solo. Rowing from the bow balances the boat nicely with a passenger in the stern.

With these two adults aboard, the Rushton 109 sits in perfect trim.

You sit low in this boat. There hull amidships is only 11-½” deep between the floorboards and top of the gunwales, and the center thwart sits just 5-3/4″ above the floorboards. With the dramatically curved sheer, the oarlocks are far enough aft from the middle to have some extra elevation to give plenty of room for the rowing stroke with your legs straight out. I am 6’ tall and comfortably row solo at a steady pace with my heels planted on the foot brace. Tracking is superb in this light, fine-entry double-ender. A few short strokes get you going, and then it’s easy to maintain a rate that’s faster than walking speed.

With two aboard, rowing from the bow, I’ve found that the center thwart is ideally placed for bracing my feet. The 109 responds to the added weight favorably, carrying beyond a boat length with each stroke. And it’s a nimble craft. I can turn the boat 360 degrees from a standstill with nine pulling and backing strokes. The aft seat is 7-½” above the floorboards, and Tina reports that it is quite comfortable for an afternoon cruise, though the tight quarters in the stern make an all-day fishing trip feel a little bit cramped.

One day, I took two young neighbors out for a row in the Rushton. There was plenty of room for the three of us on board while we poked about looking at lily pads and little fish. I imagined myself at a camp in the North Woods, sitting in the stern seat, with my dad rowing and brother in the bow with a coffee can of worms between us and our fishing poles restlessly waiting for a strike. The Rushton 109 is that kind of a boat.

Tom Devries and his wife Tina live in New Braintree, Massachusetts. Now that both of their kids are off to college, Tom DeVries spends more time in Beyond Yukon Boat and Oar, his woodworking shop, and imagines that away he and Tina will be spending more time together fishing, paddling, and sailing in little boats. In years gone by, Tom has pirogued on the Congo, canoed on the Yukon, fished commercially in Alaska, and sailed his skipjack on the Chesapeake.

Ruston 109 Particulars

[table]

Length/14′3″

Beam/3′3″

Weight as built by author/95 lbs

[/table]

Plans for the Ruston’s Pulling Boat Model 109 come as a set of three pages and include lines, offsets, sail plan, and construction details. They are available from Mystic Seaport for $75.

Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!

Ebb

The best-known boats of the Adirondack region of northern New York are, of course, the Adirondack guideboats—sleek, lightly built double-enders with tumblehome stems. Designed to reach some of the smaller, less accessible lakes, they were developed to be carried as much as they were to be rowed.

Not everyone drawn to the Adirondacks needed a boat that was easily portaged. Lake George, second only in size to Lake Champlain, is 32 miles long and up to 3 miles wide. Set apart from the network of lakes that gave rise to the guideboat, it produced another type of boat, called, naturally, a Lake George boat. This is a lapstrake pulling boat, very much like a Whitehall, but lacks the wineglass transom. Light construction and a trace of tumblehome in the stem hint at the influence of the Adirondack guideboat. WINONA, a Lake George boat built around 1911 by Jared Bartlett of Sabbath Bay Point on the western shore of the lake, is now in the Mystic Seaport collection. Her lines were taken off in 1983.

Tom Regan of Grapeview Point Boat Works wanted to build a fast rowing boat and took an interest in WINONA; he decided to make a version of the boat for his home waters on the tidal fringes of Washington’s Puget Sound. He began the process by making a 1:8-scale half model to get the shape of the boat he wanted. He would narrow the beam from 50″ to 45″, diminish the width of the transom, and forgo the tumblehome stem for one with a bit of rake to keep the boat a bit drier in a chop.

Photographs by the author

The Ebb first took shape as a half model. Wires were bent around it to transfer the sections to drawings for further development.

In 2015, Tom built the first, and as yet only, Ebb for his own use. Like WINONA, it is lightly built and weighed just 85 lbs before the paint went on. The paints and hardware contribute about 15 lbs to the finished boat. WINONA was planked with 1/4″ white cedar and framed with 3/8″ x 5/8″ oak on 5″ centers. The Ebb’s planks are 4mm okoume marine plywood from Joubert, and the steam-bent frames are 5/16″ x 5/8″ Alaska yellow cedar on 6″ centers.

No hardwoods were used in the Ebb: Alaska yellow cedar served for everything but the thwarts and floorboards, which are of Western red cedar. The departures from WINONA’s composition helped Tom meet his target for the Ebb’s weight—light enough to load singlehanded on his truck’s rack. A replica of WINONA built under Regan’s guidance at the Gig Harbor BoatShop, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving working-waterfront traditions, incorporated hardwoods that WINONA had, and finished up at 165 lbs.

The steam-bent knees are light in weight and adequate for a boat that is meant for rowing and not subject to the racking forces of sailing.

I’m used to seeing a lot of fastenings punctuating the frames and laps—which tears up both sandpaper and knuckles during finishing and refinishing—but there are just a few rows of roves visible on the frames at the sheerstrake and just above the floorboards. Ebb’s construction is glued-lap plywood with steam-bent frames, and rivets were used only where required to hold the hull’s shape. The smooth surfaces will make refinishing a much more pleasant task.

The tall back rest slips in place and has a cleat that bears on the inner face of the transom.

I rowed the Ebb on two separate occasions. The first was at Port Townsend and required carrying the boat across a rough shore with large rocks to avoid and orange-sized rocks that made for unsteady footing. Tom and I were able to carry the Ebb to the water to launch it but we had a third person help carry the boat back ashore when I returned and it was much easier. The second outing was on the little inlet by Tom’s boatshop. The two of us could easily lift the boat onto a dolly; it’s wheelable solo, so one could do a dolly launch singlehanded.

While WINONA had a touch of tumblehome in its stem, a common feature of Adirondack guideboats, Ebb’s stem is angled forward.

The soft bilges made the Ebb feel just a little bit wobbly when I stepped aboard, but the boat steadied itself when I got myself seated. I could lean over the gunwale and look straight down past it to the water without any fretting that the boat was going to roll out from under me. With a passenger in the stern setting the hull deeper in the water, the Ebb was quite steady.

The Ebb has three rowing stations. The placement of the forward and aft stations favors generous spacing between rowers rather than keeping the ends light.

WINONA had two thwarts and seating in the bow and stern. With two rowing stations, she could be rowed solo from the amidships thwart, or rowed from the forward thwart with a passenger in the stern. Tom added a third thwart; the Ebb can be rowed solo from the middle thwart and tandem from the other two thwarts. The thwarts are 32″ apart, plenty of room to allow a pair of rowers, one on the aft thwart and the other on the forward thwart, to get out of synch without clashing oar blades. Tom suggests three kids might enjoy rowing the Ebb as a triple without overburdening it. The spacing of the thwarts also provided excellent foot bracing (at least for me, at 6′ tall, with size-13 feet) at the middle and forward stations.

The Ebb’s planks are evenly and beautifully lined off. The sheer strake caries its guards and the outwales without looking pinched at the stem.

A pull or two on the oars, and the Ebb was quickly moving at a good clip. The long, ample skeg kept the boat from wandering so I didn’t have to keep watch over the stern to keep my course. There was a light breeze, about 8 knots, and it had no detectable effect on the Ebb’s ability to stay on track across the wind, even when I let the boat coast. The Ebb, consequently, isn’t a quick turner. It took 14 strokes, pulling one oar, backing the other, to do a 360, a few more than other pulling boats.

An ample skeg keeps the Ebb in line.

While the Ebb is easily moved under oars, its light weight made measuring its speed difficult. Weighing well under half my weight, the Ebb followed Newton’s Third Law of Motion with élan. It had an equal and opposite reaction to the swing of my torso back and forth, speeding up as I swung aft during the recovery and slowing down as I heaved toward the bow during the drive. You might not feel the effect while rowing unless you paid close attention to the water curdling astern, but a GPS certainly notices it. The numbers to the right of the decimal point never settled down.

It takes very little effort to get keep Ebb moving in excess of 4 knots.

Rowing solo and averaging the speeds of several runs in opposite directions in a current-free cove, I easily made 4-1/2 knots with lazy pace. I could back the Ebb at 3-1/2 knots, not bad considering I didn’t have my feet locked down. Ramping up to a sustainable aerobic effort rowing forward, I held 4-3/4 knots; in short sprints I made an average top speed of 5 knots. Tom hopped aboard and sat in the stern; I shifted to the forward rowing station. He could make a better reading of the GPS than I could rowing solo, and surprisingly he came up with an averaged top speed of 5 knots.

Susanne Regan

With two aboard, the Ebb maintains its proper trim and keeps its transom above the waterline.

To see how fast the Ebb should be by the numbers, I started by taking measurements on Tom’s drawing. The waterline length from cutwater to the trailing edge of the skeg was 15′ at a 7″ draft. The theoretical hull speed (√WL x 1.34) based on that length is just under 5.2 knots, a bit more than my sea trials demonstrated. But that waterline length includes 11″ of skeg, which is just an appendage and doesn’t contribute to the length of the hull form. Taking the measurement to the rabbet gave a waterline length of 14′1″ and a theoretical hull speed just a tick over 5 knots. That was a good match for my speed trials.

There wasn’t anything unusual about pushing the Ebb up to its top speed; what I found interesting was the 1/2-knot difference between speed at a relaxed pace and the speed at full effort. I’m used to seeing a span about three times that. In another lightweight pulling boat I rowed recently, the Drake Race Boat, the speeds I recorded were, respectively, 3-3/4, 5, and 6 knots. As the name of that boat suggests, the top speeds were the ones that mattered to the designer. The bottom number is more pertinent to a wider range of rowers. I suspect Tom minimized the surface area of the hull to give it better speed at the low end. If you’re out for a relaxing day’s row, wouldn’t it be appropriate to have a hull that is efficient at slow speeds and gives you the best return on your investment of effort?

Tom would make a few tweaks to the Ebb for any subsequent builds. A smaller skeg, for instance, would improve maneuverability without giving up much tracking ability. The only change I’d request would be to make the floorboards a bit sturdier—I weigh enough more than Tom to put him on the high side of a playground teeter-totter, so I’d hate to come down hard with a heel on a floorboard between frames and spoil a day’s outing. Everything else suited me just fine. The Ebb was a treat for the eyes and a pleasure to row, meeting Tom‘s goal to design “a fast pulling boat with a traditional appearance, but built as lightly as reasonable without sacrificing aesthetics.”

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.

Ebb Particulars

[table]

Length/15′9″

Beam/45″

Draft/7″

Weight/approx.100 lbs

Capacity/3 adults

[/table]

Update, November 2022: The Ebb is no longer available as a finished boat from Grapeview Point Boat Works. No plans are available.

Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!