Building a Goat Island Skiff

Gerald Trumpp, a retired automotive engineer from the upper Rhine valley in southern Germany, is a canoeist. For 30 years, he has owned an Old Town Scout canoe that he has paddled on local waters and across the border on French rivers. Sometimes he ventures out alone; sometimes he is joined by his wife, Petra, and their dog, Dipa. Before 2017, he had never built a boat—he’d thought about it, but never put those thoughts into actions. Then, in a boatbuilding class in Berlin, he built a stitch-and-glue canoe and was hooked.

As retirement approached, Gerald dreamed of building a bigger boat and cruising down the Danube. In 2020, still seeking boatbuilding experience, he bought a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory kit. Within a week, he recalls, he had the boat stitched together. “The kit was precise, and it was nice to build,” but it would be three more months before it was finished. “We wanted it clear-finished inside and out, and that took a lot of sanding.”

Photographs by or courtesy of Gerald Trumpp

The Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory was the first boat Gerald built at home, and was the boat in which he and Petra learned to sail.

When Covid shut everything down and Gerald himself suffered some health issues, the “big river plans” were shelved. Instead, he decided to install a sailing rig on the dory and learn to sail. “Near Baden-Baden, where we live, there’s a little lake with a sailing club,” he says. “As a canoeist, the thought of doing anything on so small a lake—just 1 sq km in size—was ridiculous, but the people were nice, and the area is beautiful. The members were all dinghy sailors with more-or-less modern boats—420s, 470s, Lasers, some German class boats. But there was one woman who had a Mirror dinghy, and she was very glad to welcome another wooden-boat guy!”

Gerald installed the CLC original sloop rig in the dory, and he and Petra launched the boat on a cold day in March, when the lake’s water temperature was 5°C (41°F) and the wind was blowing a steady Force 4. They lacked experience, and the outing, says Gerald, “nearly ended in disaster. We were driven helplessly downwind, and it was only thanks to Petra’s balancing skills that we didn’t capsize when I turned onto a beam reach.” Shocked and discouraged, they managed to get to shore and lower the mast. A “friendly observer” lent them a paddle, and they made it back to the ramp. “Suddenly,” says Gerald, “the lake was not ridiculously small…it was a beast trying to kill us!”

Gerald’s building space—between the back wall of the house and the garden shed—was extremely tight. It was not until after the hull was finished and he was able to move the project to the front of the house that Gerald discovered the hull was twisted. He was able to correct the error with tie-down straps and the installation of a second plywood bottom.

That same day, Gerald bought an old 420 from the club. “I thought it would be easier if we had the same boat and equipment that the other members had, but after just two outings in the 420, we went back to the dory…plastic boats just aren’t my cup of tea. After that, it was trial and error. Sometimes I was on my own, sometimes the ever-tolerant and trusting Petra came with me, sometimes even Dipa, our 8-kg terrier, came along. And we did it, we learned to sail.”

As their experience grew, so did the realization that the dory was not the ideal boat for their needs. “It’s a perfect rowboat,” says Gerald. “Fast, light, stable in waves, but because of its narrow waterline beam, under sail it’s tippy. And it wasn’t great for Dipa…there was no shade for her, and she’d often overheat in her life vest. Added to that, when we did some capsize drills, we found that I couldn’t get back aboard and bail because of the limited flotation. It wasn’t a big deal on a small lake, but even so, the thought of all three of us floundering in cold water wasn’t ideal.”

They discussed various ways to modify the dory, but Gerald at last decided to build a new boat; one that would have more initial stability, space for four people, some shade for Dipa, and be fast—“faster than the already-fast dory and, more importantly, faster than the Lasers!”

Knowing he would varnish the boat inside and out, Gerald spent a lot of time sanding, and paid close attention to his use of meranti and contrasting softwoods.

The search for the perfect boat was defined not only by performance but also the need to keep things light. “We looked at CLC’s Southwester Dory and Lighthouse Tender, John Welsford’s Scamp, and François Vivier’s Silmaril,” says Gerald, “but none of them was quite right. We have to launch by hand at the club, and I suffer from bronchial asthma so can’t pull a heavy boat over the grass. In the end we settled on the 15′ 6″ Goat Island Skiff. It didn’t quite fit my romantic picture of a wooden boat, and in Germany flat-bottomed skiffs aren’t common, but it was known to be fast, big enough for four people, stable, and relatively light at about 60 or 70kg. And there’s a great community of owners around the world, led by the designer, Michael Storer.”

Gerald bought the plans. Finding the eight sheets of 6mm marine plywood for the hull was, he says, easy enough, but for the solid wood components, Storer recommended knot-free wood such as western red cedar, Paulownia, Douglas fir, and various hardwoods in dimensions that, Gerald discovered, are not common in Germany. Frustrated, he decided he would mill his own lumber at home and, over the next few weeks, toured home-improvement stores near and far in search of knot-free wood of between 1.5m and 2m length. No one, he says, seemed to notice “the strange guy who spent half an hour examining roofing battens only to leave with just three or four.”

Club members came out in strength to welcome the new wooden boat to their community. GAISSL stands out from the other members’ mostly fiberglass sailing dinghies, but from the day of her launching she has been adopted as the club mascot, loved and admired by all.

Then, at the club one day, Gerald was recounting his problems in finding suitable wood when one of the other members spoke up. “He had just replaced a meranti entrance door and offered to give me the old one.” For the next four weeks Gerald worked outside, milling the wood into suitable dimensions for the boat’s frames, stem, chine logs, foils, daggerboard, and rudder.

Working with Storer’s instruction manual, Gerald had no problem cutting out the plywood panels but found the framing more complicated than he’d anticipated. “Every panel is framed by battens that have to be beveled in one or even two directions,” he says, “and that was hard. Storer recommends epoxy-coating the panels before assembly, but I decided to do that at the end. When I built the dory, it seemed a great way to cover some of my mistakes. Building the Goat would have been easier if I’d had more space and if the floor of my workshop hadn’t been uneven. When the boat came out visibly twisted, I was destroyed.”

Gerald laminated the daggerboard and the rudder using a combination of softwood and meranti. The contrasting colors were aesthetically pleasing and, by using the hardwood for the edge pieces, Gerald was able to add strength to areas of vulnerability.

Not one to give up easily, Gerald sought to solve the problem. “I had already planned to install a second bottom—6mm is thin when you’re launching and recovering with a dolly all the time. So, I brought the hull into shape using tension straps, laid down the second bottom—also of 6mm marine plywood—glued it, temporarily screwed it, and kept my fingers crossed. It worked! I wasn’t worried about the slightly visible screw holes—they’d be covered by bottom paint—I was just happy to have a boat that was the right shape.”

After that, Gerald says, things progressed smoothly. He used a mix of the deep-red-brown meranti and some lighter-colored spruce to laminate the rudder and daggerboard, and to fashion the thwarts, breasthook, and gunwales. He bought a lugsail and a carbon-fiber mast both to keep the weight down and because he was mindful of the ongoing threat of wood dust to his lungs, and after six months the skiff was ready to launch.

GAISSL was launched at the sailing club of which Gerald is now vice president. He was joined for the big day by his wife, Petra, and their dog Dipa.

“We named her GAISSL (spelled Gaißl in the dialect of southern Germany, and meaning ‘Little Goat’). Our maiden voyage was in light winds—which was good as the 9.7 sq m sail is a lot bigger than the Dory’s 6.3 sq m.” But Gerald and Petra have since sailed GAISSL in a variety of conditions. “She’s fast and relatively stable—we can stand up and change places, lower the sail, reef it, and raise it again, all while we’re afloat. And the capsize drill was positive, although the freeboard is high, so to climb back aboard we use a looped rope as a stern ladder. Even Dipa enjoys the skiff—she can get under the center thwart for shade and in mid summer we rig a canopy for her under the tiller.”

GAISSL’s maiden voyage was on a day of light breezes, warmth, and calm water—a far cry from Gerald and Petra’s first sail in their Northeaster Dory, when the lake’s water temperature had been just 41°F and there had been a Force 4 wind.

The club has adopted GAISSL as a kind of mascot. “She was the club’s ‘eyecatcher’ at a local exposition in 2024, and we used her to take kids out on the water.” In the year since launching Gerald has sailed GAISSL on a mountain lake in the Black Forest, and on another lake in eastern France. “We have several plans for 2025—voyages to different lakes in France and northern Italy,” he says. “GAISSL will be perfect for those.” And as for the Lasers? The jury is still out. Gerald says that in a Force 2 or 3 he can overhaul them, but the true contest will be decided on the lake this summer.

Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.

For more on the Northeaster Dory, read Matthew P. Murphy’s review, The Northeaster Dory, and for the Goat Island Skiff, read Ben Fuller’s review, The Goat Island Skiff.

For plans and more information about the Goat Island Skiff, visit Storerboatplans.com.

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