Many years ago, I took an adult-education entry-to-woodworking course. The once-a-week evening classes were held at a local high school over 10 weeks. I made a mahogany hinged-lid box with dovetailed corners. It took me the whole 30 hours of the course to make. When it was finished, I was ridiculously proud of it until a friend said, “Nice! What else did you make?”
I still have and use my adult-ed box, but I’ve made nothing since. I’m handy with a paint-stripper, power sander, sanding block, paintbrush, varnish brush, even occasionally a palette knife and wood filler, but I am not a maker of wooden objects. So, when another friend recently suggested I make a wooden toolbox, I laughed. Then I found the CLC Tool Box. While Chesapeake Light Craft is well known for its kits for kayaks, canoes, and boats, the company also offers some “small projects,” among them the Tool Box.
The finished box measures approximately 25″ × 10″ and, with its gently arched carrying handle, stands about 9″ high. It’s made entirely out of 9mm marine plywood. On their website Chesapeake Light Craft says the toolbox is an “interpretation of the ‘classic tab-and-slot’ type favored by woodworkers for its ease of assembly.”
When the kit arrived, I was skeptical: I opened the box to reveal nothing more than a pile of machine-cut plywood pieces taped together. There were no fancy wrappings, not even any tools, but there was an illustrated instruction manual. I quickly scanned the 11 pages and was pleased to see large full-color photographs accompanied by one- or two-sentence directions showing the toolbox assembly, step by step. I read that I would need a file or rasp, some sandpaper, and some wood glue.
Photographs by the author
The 9mm plywood kit pieces are all accurately machine cut for snug fits. The small tabs seen at the bottom edges of many pieces are leftovers from the router-cutting process and need to be removed before assembly.
The tools are used at the beginning of assembly. Nearly all the pieces have small tabs left over from the cutting process and these must be removed prior to building the box. The manual recommends a rasp, file, or sanding block. I started with a file, but the process was frustratingly slow. I persevered with half-a-dozen of the tabs but with many still to do I decided to try a sharp-bladed knife. I carefully cut away the bulk of each tab and then sanded the edge smooth. In very short order all the tabs were gone, and I was ready to start assembling.
The parts are assembled in a particular order so that the finished tool box doesn’t need glue to hold it together.
Apart from one false turn at the very beginning when I failed to spot that the two side panels were not identical and that I had, by chance, started with the wrong one, the assembling process was quick and simple: the tenons and slots lined up perfectly and to my delight, in less than an hour, I was ready to install the carrying handle and locking keys. This was the only moment during the construction when I doubted the process. It is a tight fit to get the handle (two 9mm-plywood pieces glued together along their length) into the holes in the end panels. I had to use some gentle persuasion with a rubber mallet to get the two pieces to accept one another. Once the handle was through, the locking key slipped into place in its slot without complaint. I repeated the process at the other end and there it was: a completed plywood toolbox.
A few taps with a rubber mallet helped get the end pieces set.
During and after construction I smoothed most of the edges with 120-grit paper to remove splinters and round-off the hard cut of the plywood, but I was impressed by the ease of assembly and the look of the finished product. While the instructions indicate the marine-grade plywood doesn’t need to have a finish, I applied several coats of spray shellac, which I rubbed down between coats with a 3M scuff pad.
The handle is made of two pieces glued together to make it stronger and provide a more comfortable hand grip. The keys tapped into the ends of the handle hold it in place and lock the entire assembly together. The dividers in the center can be removed.
At the end of the construction, there were two extra pieces still on the bench, so I called Chesapeake Light Craft. They apologized that the pieces are not mentioned in the text but explained that I could glue them to either side of the top arc of the handle to increase the thickness, if desired, for carrying comfort. It might, indeed, improve the feel when the box is heavy with tools, but for my smaller hands I think I will just do a bit more smoothing of the edges and call it good.
A shellac finish brought out the color of the plywood. The middle divider has been removed to create a space for larger items.
After the shellac dried, all that was left to do was load up some tools. In each end, a shelf with holes can hold five screwdrivers and the two layers assure that the tools remain upright, handle at the ready. The wider ovals are useful for pliers, files and rasps, slender-handled paintbrushes and scrapers, and spokeshaves. In the main body of the box the partitions create spaces for palm planes, glue bottles, and tool rolls. Dividers can be removed for wider bays as needed.
Along the front, a 24-1⁄4″ full-length compartment will hold a framing square, hammer, larger brushes, and a short saw. Everything is kept in place and easily visible. Perhaps, when I go to work on one of the boats next spring, I’ll be able to spend time actually working instead of rummaging in my canvas bucket for the next elusive tool.
Jenny Bennett is the managing editor of Small Boats.
John Lloyd grew up in a canoe. His first memory, he says, is of standing on tiptoes to peer over the side of the family’s 1937 Skowhegan to watch a toy boat trailing behind on a string. Over time, John grew from passenger to paddler and the canoe became his. For the next 65 years he used it regularly on waterways around New York and the Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. But when John and his wife could no longer easily carry the Skowhegan, they passed it on to a couple with young children. John began the search for a boat he and his wife could “pick up and portage and afford.”
John built his first boat, Percy Blandford’s PBK 26, a skin-on-frame kayak, when he was 16. He built two more for friends. Much later, in 1999, on leaving a career in construction, he retrained as a teacher and began working in an alternative high school for students with severe learning disabilities. He brought his love of canoes and boatbuilding into the classroom where, along with an English teacher, John taught a year-long course in which students alternated between maritime literature and project-based learning—and two more PBK 26s were built.
Photographs by John Lloyd
Built to his own design, but reminiscent of a wide-bottomed Adirondack Guideboat, John did not regard BELUGA as a total success. Nevertheless she continues to be used by friends in upstate New York.
In more recent years, John built a Platt Monfort Snowshoe 16 canoe called FLIPPER—“due to its habit of dumping the unwary”—and BELUGA, “an original but totally impractical skin-on-frame design resembling a wide-bodied guideboat.” Both FLIPPER and BELUGA were given to friends on the upper Saranac in the Adirondacks.
John gives away completed boats, he says, “in part, because I love to share the sense of freedom that I experience paddling. And, in part, because giving a boat away leaves room for the next one…and there’s always a next one.”
The Wee Lassie was assembled upright. John gave the laminated frames temporary crossbraces to ensure their shape was maintained during construction.
When it came time to replace the Skowhegan, John first decided to try some new techniques on a smaller boat. After some research, he settled on Dave Gentry’s skin-on-frame adaptation of the 10′6″ Wee Lassie, originally designed and built by J. Henry Rushton in the late 1800s.
Gentry describes a setup of polyester skin on a skeleton of solid-wood stringers on four plywood frames. John opted to laminate his frames out of 1⁄8″ red oak to create a lighter, stronger framework. Each of the four frames was laminated over a mold. For the tight bends in the first and last frames he soaked the oak strips, bent them into place on their molds, allowed them to dry, and then glued them up. The cured laminates were trued on a jointer and cut to width on a tablesaw. Each frame was fitted with a temporary crossbrace and set up on its station. The first and last frames were beveled to create a fair hull shape.
The stringers and frames were joined with glue, pin nails, and synthetic lashings. In past projects John has found that epoxy alone can shear under stress—by using the three different fastening media he hopes he’s achieved longevity and strength in the joints.
For the stringers, John used larch. He volunteers as a ship’s carpenter at the Buffalo (New York) Maritime Center and was able to use scrap from material milled for larger projects. He cut out the “brashy grain and knots,” and scarfed pieces together to achieve the required lengths. He attached the stringers to the frames using yellow glue, pin nails, and nylon artificial-sinew lashings “sort of belt, suspenders, belt,” reflects John. “But my experience has been that epoxy alone will shear when the joints are stressed.” He notched the outside face of the stringers so that the lashings would not create bulges beneath the fabric skin.
The assembled framework awaiting its skin. Internally, the central plank is still to be fitted.
With the frames and stringers complete, John fit a single cedar plank on which to stand while boarding and sit while paddling. He laminated breasthooks that provide both structural strength and carrying handholds. The backrest was laminated as an integral part of the third frame.
With the light shining through the Dacron skin, the simple symmetry of the Wee Lassie’s framework is revealed. For additional strength John fitted laminated breasthooks, which also serve as carrying holds, as does the laminated backrest at the third frame.
Once the woodwork was finished and varnished, John turned his attention to the skin. He applied heat-and-bond tape to the gunwales and keel. “Platt Monfort used the technique and honors to him for thinking it up, it works really well. I ironed the tape to the skeleton and then sealed the Dacron skin fabric to the tape using a household iron. I also used the iron to shrink the fabric.” At the bow and stern, he slit the fabric, attached and trimmed one side, and then repeated the process for the second side. Finally, he applied laminated-oak trim pieces at the stem and stern, and fitted rubrails and a keel made of larch.
Cynthia McCloskey
Despite its diminutive size the Wee Lassie performed well with John, and maintained good stability even after he brought a 30-lb bag of gear on board.
The finished canoe weighed 24 lbs—perfect for cartopping and singlehanded paddling. “It’s stable and responsive with an old man on board,” says John, “and was unaffected when I loaded an additional 30-lb backpack.” The Wee Lassie was passed on to his daughter and, with experience gained, John looked for a larger design.
Karen Keenan
Like so many of John’s building projects, the Wee Lassie was passed along, this time to his daughter.
In a corner of the maritime center, he noticed a set of molds that had been used to build a strip-planked Swift Prospector 16, and realized they could be adapted to form the molds for a skin-on-frame version that would be an ideal replacement for the old Skowhegan. He laminated red oak over the existing molds to create the frames and for the stringers used some cypress salvaged from another large project underway at the center.
The Prospector was built upside down, its frames laminated on molds originally used in the construction of a strip-plank version.
“The construction of the Prospector was the same as the Wee Lassie other than in the interior details. The Wee Lassie got a backrest, the Prospector has a carry yoke. The Wee Lassie has the single center plank, the Prospector got a cypress planked floor and traditional fitted seats. It was my first time caning seats. Fortunately, there are experts at the maritime center to provide guidance, and it was fun.”
The bottom of the Prospector was strengthened and protected by full-length cypress planking glued and lashed to the frames beneath.
Within three months the Prospector was ready for launching. It was just the right size to carry John, his wife, and their camping gear and Labrador retriever. “It was initially too ‘lively,’ even though I paddle kneeling on the floor. So, I lowered the front seat an inch and that helped the stability a lot. And for regular use, when we have all the gear and the dog, it will calm down even more.”
Traditional cane seats were fitted in the stern and towards the bow. Seated well aft, the paddler’s weight keeps the bow from digging in, and the narrow beam in the stern results in an easy reach for paddling.
This summer John plans to introduce the Prospector to the streams around Buffalo, New York, and then visit the Adirondacks for some extended trips. This fall, he says, he’s hoping to take it up to the Algonquin Park. “Maybe I’ll visit the Swift Canoe & Kayak shop in Ontario and let them take a look at it.”
While disappointed by the Prospector’s finished weight of 60 lbs, John nevertheless was impressed by its volume and carrying capacity—ample for himself and his wife even when joined by their Labrador retriever and all their camping gear.
John is happy with the techniques he picked up through building the Wee Lassie and the Prospector but acknowledges that the overall weight of the Prospector was disappointing. “At 60 lbs it came in heavier than I wanted,” he says, “but that’s life.” It’s also a challenge he can’t resist: “I’m going to build a pack boat that I’ll bring in under 15 lbs.”
Jenny Bennett is the managing editor of Small Boats.
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ZIP is the prototype model of the DragonFlyer 3.2, a design intended as a versatile and dynamic sail trainer. She can be sailed with main alone, main and jib, or main and asymmetrical spinnaker.
Here we have the DragonFlyer 3.2, a brand-new 10′ 8″ sloop meant to offer training for beginners and spirited performance for experienced sailors.
Bystanders have described this particularly striking little boat as nifty, swell, cool, or awesome. The choice of adjective appears to depend upon the observer’s age. DragonFlyer comes from Brooks Boats Designs in Brooklin, Maine. John Brooks and Ruth Hill (husband and wife) run this outfit, which specializes in designing glued plywood-lapstrake boats ranging from dinghies to small cruising sailboats.
Brooks has given DragonFlyer a gunter sloop rig with a fully battened mainsail. At first glance, that main looks as if it might be a “batwing” sail pulled from a late-1800s sailing canoe. However, close inspection reveals the battens to be nearly parallel to the boom rather than splaying out in the old batwing pattern. This configuration will permit slightly better airflow across the sail and allow for simpler furling (after we release the sail from the yard).
Ruth Hill
DragonFlyer is easily transported from car to water with a simple two-wheeled cart.
Full-length battens offer several advantages. They support considerable roach (convex curvature to the leech). This allows more sail area to be carried by a relatively short mast, yard, and boom. The mainsail is compact, but of powerful shape.
If we wish to fuss with the full-length battens, they will give us precise control of the draft or “fullness” in the sail. We can vary the thickness of the battens along their lengths or force them farther into their pockets (to produce more draft), or let them project farther out beyond the leech. In any case, we might make the battens somewhat more flexible (thinner) in their forward portions, where we want maximum draft to the sail, and stiffer as they approach the sail’s leech.
Ruth Hill
The DragonFlyer’s light construction and flat bottom make her easy to launch from a beach. Rigging her sails and getting her into the water take only a few minutes.
Full-length battens can almost eliminate violent slatting as the mainsail luffs. Whether this proves to be an advantage or a potential problem seems to depend upon the situation and the skipper’s level of experience. When a fully battened sail is full and driving, it wants to keep going. As we approach the float, simply letting go the sheet might not slow our boat as quickly as we fervently hope. We should keep this in mind, lest we wind up in the parking lot next to a Buick.
The sail plan shows that we can step Dragon Flyer’s mast farther forward and sail her as a catboat. Brooks believes this will prove popular with novice skippers and smaller children. A noble idea, but as a long-ago little kid myself, I’m inclined to think that many youngsters will want to fly all sail possible all the time. They might well leave the conservative cat rig to their parents.
That cat rig, although simple to sail with “only one string to pull,” might prove more difficult to sail really well. Fully battened sails tend not to telegraph notice of improper trim so quickly as unsupported (slatting) Dacron. With no headsail to direct airflow, we’ll need to pay close attention to the single sail’s sheet. In the beginning at least, let’s tape a forest of telltales to the sail.
At the other end of the scale, we can move the bow-sprit to its full-forward position and fly an asymmetrical (single-luff) spinnaker. For the truly adventurous, Brooks has drawn an enlarged sloop-rig option. He describes the overall rig as “simple, affordable, and fast.” Well, it’s certainly versatile as we can set several different combinations of sail.
DragonFlyer’s glued-lap hull shows a fine and shapely forefoot. For about the forward one-third of the boat, the lower “lap-edge” of the second plank widens to nearly 1″. This plywood-epoxy edge forms a lifting strake. Brooks reports that the device deflects spray as well as providing hydrodynamic lift. The hull flows gracefully aft through an easy midsection to culminate in a long straight run. Given any reasonable breeze, this shape allows the little sloop to jump up and plane away. The wide “flat” to its bottom and relatively firm bilges, result in good initial stability. Despite its small size, this is not a particularly tender boat.
Designed from the beginning as a kit, DragonFlyer goes together quickly and efficiently with little waste of materials. We’ll build the hull over a framework of interlocking plywood bulkheads and stringers, accurately secured by a series of slots and tabs. This structure gives us a sturdy well-aligned form on which to hang the planks, and all of it stays in the boat. No separate building jig remains to be stowed, tossed, or burned in the shop stove.
Ruth Hill
Sealed tanks built under the sole and on either side of the cockpit during construction provide ample positive flotation for this sail trainer.
John and Ruth tell us that we’ll build this hull in standard glued-lapstrake fashion, “with an innovative twist: no laps to bevel.” The kit will arrive at our shop with a constant bevel worked into one edge of each strake. They suggest that we might assemble the frame-work “dry”—that is, without epoxy. This procedure will give us a good practice session free from the deadline pressure of rapidly setting up epoxy.
Then we’ll disassemble the framework. The designers recommend that we proceed slowly and keep careful track of the various pieces: “This is easy to do, so long as you don’t get too far ahead of yourself…especially if several selves are working together.”
When the time arrives for final and permanent assembly, we’ll glue together the frame and apply thickened epoxy to the plank laps. Battens sprung temporarily along the outside of the laps will ease the job and help to ensure that each strake takes a truly fair curve. Those who have built lapstrake hulls in the traditional fashion (cedar planks, bent frames, and no goop) might ask: “How can these strakes mate in a leak-proof manner without nice rolling bevels at the laps?” The answer lies in the strong gap-filling properties of epoxy.
As it turns out, the easy lines of this hull allow the straight-beveled strakes to mate more closely than we might think. John and Ruth originally had planned to plank the prototype’s hull dry and then to inject epoxy into the laps. The surprisingly close fit prevented this. In the end, they proceeded in usual glued-lapstrake fashion: coating the lap joint of each strake before hanging it. This boat’s glued-lap construction consumes relatively little epoxy and requires much less sanding and fairing than the popular stitch-and-glue technique.
Glued-lap hulls have been with us for decades. They are light and strong, and last well. When nicely lined-off, as this hull is, the shadow lines along the laps help define the boat’s sweet shape. But these hulls absolutely demand the use of high-quality plywood and thickened epoxy. If we attempt to build them in this manner with traditional materials, they will split along the laps…perhaps not today, but soon and catastrophically. If we wish to play with solid cedar strakes, we’ll need to re-engineer the structure.
At least for now, DragonFlyer can be had only as a kit or completed boat from Brooks Boats Designs. Building plans might be available in the future. Some of us like to start with a pile of raw lumber, or a stack of virgin plywood, so that we can say, “I built this!” But, if we can get past our builder’s ego, the kit offers advantages. It certainly reduces assembly time, and we know all the pieces will fit properly first time around. Novice builders will find that the kit makes for simpler work and requires fewer tools. Given the kit supplier’s access to materials at lower cost, and the efficiencies of series production for the kit’s components, the monetary savings for building from scratch could prove slight.
There might be yet another advantage to kits. Brooks tells us he has no intention of setting up an organized racing class for DragonFlyer, but he expects that some owners will. If that should happen, having all the boats come from the same source could preclude unpleasantness at hull-measurement time.
John and Ruth and their four children built the first DragonFlyer as a family project. The boat’s distinctive appearance, even from a distance, makes for easy identification. When Ruth sees that bright-red fully battened mainsail far across the busy cove, she knows “those are my kids.” And her kids seem to recognize the bugle call that tells them it’s time to come home.
The DragonFlyer 3.2 has proven fast and exciting under sail. It tacks with certainty and planes readily in any real breeze. The little boat teaches lessons gently yet firmly. Novice sailors soon learn to correct their mistakes, but Brooks and Hill tell us that their children haven’t found this boat to be at all “touchy or scary.” Indeed, kids and agile adults consider the 3.2 to be good fun. Larger skippers might hope that Brooks Boats will offer a DragonFlyer 4.7 (15′ 5″ LOD) somewhere down the road.
Kits for the DragonFlyer, as well as finished boats, are available from Brooks Boats Designs; http://brooksboatsdesigns.com
Brooks Boats
Particulars: LOD 10’8″ LWL 10’7″ Beam 4’6″ Draft, board up 5″ board down 2’9″ Hull weight 100 lbs Sail area: Cat 44 sq ft Sloop 59 sq ft Large sloop 68 sq ft Spinnaker 35 sq ft
Brooks Boats
DragonFlyer was designed from the start as a glued-plywood kit boat. The kit arrives with pre-beveled strakes, so the hull sections can be assembled dry, before applying any epoxy, ensuring a good fit and no misplaced pieces.
Low-powered, double-ended launches called snekker are ubiquitous along the coast of Norway, but rather exotic in New Hampshire, where Andrew Wallace’s Traditional Boatworks builds these boats.
The soul of the Viking ship lives on, and on, and on, proof that it’s worth sticking with a winning formula. The graceful indigenous lapstrake craft of Scandinavia have metamorphosed into a variety of shapes and types, but the strong sheer, pointed bow and stern, and lapped planks of the boats that raided and traded throughout Europe persist, a thousand years on.
Boatbuilder Andrew Wallace can claim real Norse genes. His mother was born in Oslo and he spent childhood summers at the family’s place in Grimstad, on Norway’s southeastern Baltic coast. Unsure how to contain the boy’s energy, his mother placed him in the care of an elderly local fisherman. Man and boy headed out into the island-dotted strait called the Skagerrak every morning, no matter what the weather. There’d be a breakfast of sardines and jam on bread, then a day of longline fishing for mackerel or cod. They would land cod as large as the eight-year-old Andrew. As the years passed he was trusted with more and more of the fishing and boat handling.
The boat whose Nordic DNA soaked into the impressionable young Andrew Wallace was called a snekke (SNEK-uh). The word translates more or less as “skiff,” but in Norway it means a boat that looks exactly like the replicas Wallace is now turning out under his shingle, Traditional Boatworks, in Canaan, New Hampshire. These sturdy, burdensome descendants of Viking ships are ubiquitous in Norway. On one Norwegian brokerage site I found 934 snekkes for sale. Harbors there are crammed with them.
Snekker (to use the Norwegian plural) come in a fairly narrow range of shapes and sizes. Most hover around 24′ long and are either completely open like a motor launch, or have decking forward with artfully proportioned windshields, or an enclosed cuddy cabin. Wallace designed his snekke based on photos and his youthful recollections, synthesizing the best features of the type. Tim Estabrook of Yarmouth, Maine, did the naval architecture chores, including hydrostatics and Mylar patterns for the frames. The boats are built at Wallace’s shop. He’s built three so far, including one on spec, whose moorings we slipped for a test drive one unseasonably cool Chesapeake afternoon in August.
Jay Fleming
The Snekke’s outboard rudder is a trait inherited from its sailing forebaers.
This is a very unusual powerboat. It’s not just the elegant lines and all-bright finish, though to be sure we looked like a swan amongst pigeons as we threaded out of a marina thick with fashionable plastic motor cruisers. That was my first impression of the snekke: To contemporary tastes it is an unfashionable boat. It is unabashedly wooden, heavy, and slow.
Whereas an all-varnished finish can be flashy and showy, it just looks right on this Nordic workboat. Planking is 7⁄8″ European larch fastened to fence-post-like double-sawn white oak frames, 3″ square and spaced just 21″ apart. The keel is a massive 5″×9″ balk of oak. This is not a boatbuilding project for the amateur crowd—Wallace is classically trained in the art. With a hull that combines hollow garboards, tumblehome amidships, full ends above the waterline, and fine lines below, every single one of the nine planks per side requires steam- bending. The laps are fastened with wood screws and bedded in a modern polyurethane adhesive. (Wallace is ambivalent about the latter, seeing little real improvement over older nostrums like Dolphinite.)
Jay Fleming
Some snekker are dayboats with open-air layouts, while others have modest sleeping accommodations. The wind-shield is a distinctive feature of the type.
This noble heap of timber contributes substantially to the all-up displacement of 5,000 lbs, and this weight is essential to the Snekke’s charm. When you step aboard, the sensation of real substance is immediate. A crowd of people on the rail would heel the boat only a little. The Snekke dispatches a light chop and passing powerboat swill with a quiet “crunch.” This is no half-tide rock, however. The large outboard rudder offers precise control, and I had little trouble imagining myself running an inlet in a gale. As we motored into 15 knots of wind and short chop on the South River, exactly zero spray came over the bow. Experiments in punching the bow into the ugly wake of a big stinkpot were anticlimactic; the boat takes it like a duck.
The literal throbbing heart of the Snekke is a likewise noble lump of a Sabb diesel. Our test article is equipped with a two-cylinder, 22-hp mill built in 1968. Wallace had it restored and sent over from Norway to replace a more conventional 20-hp Westerbeke. The 450-lb Westerbeke, while ample to push the boat, was simply too light and required internal lead ballast to settle the boat on its lines. “Motor weight is essential to the character of the boat,” Wallace says. The old Sabb weighs 800 lbs.
Mounted inside a locust and cambrera box amidships, the engine gives the Snekke its special sauce. It has a lovely musical throb, not at all noisy, even with the box cracked a bit to help the external keel-cooler. “It puts my toddler daughter right to sleep,” says Wallace, who uses the boat for day trips off the coast of New Hampshire with family and friends.
As someone who is mostly allergic to engines on boats, I was enchanted with the Sabb. There is no reduction gear, and indeed no transmission. While there’s an electric start, you can spin the huge flywheel with a Victorian-looking hand crank, ease in the compression, and fire up the beast with maybe a half-dozen turns. Another crank adjusts the pitch of the 18″, two-bladed prop, giving you forward, neutral, and reverse at any engine speed without crunching the transmission. While we were at full throttle, Wallace reversed the pitch on the prop. There was a furious boiling under the stern and the boat came to a stop in a boat length or two, smoothly enough not to spill your coffee.
The gently rumbling Sabb pushes the Snekke to all of 61⁄2 knots. This is a stately and completely unfashionable pace. It is also the Snekke’s best feature. Our progress down the South River that August day felt luxuriously out of step with the big machines that were passing us. They were all hustle and mountains of bustle, acutely unrestful. Enjoying the pace of things aboard the wooden Snekke made me think of the Slow Food movement. The nautical analog—boats like the Snekke that are built by hand and get 25 miles per gallon—has yet to achieve the goateed hipness of Slow Food. Wallace admits that it’s been a challenge to sell the concept of Slow Boating, and that many correspondents have asked about a planing version.
Jay Fleming
The snekke, with its displacement hull, is not a fast boat. It moves easily through the water at a consistent 6 knots, sipping fuel.
As he talked about how speed modifications would spoil the boat’s charms, my mind was wandering to thoughts of long coastal passages in the Snekke. It wasn’t just the seakeeping qualities or the long range under power. It was the layout of the interior, peculiar to the snekke type and mostly unseen in these waters. An automobile collector would call it a “cabrio coach.” There’s a decked area at the front of the cockpit, with two big settees port and starboard that extend up under the foredeck to double as very comfortable berths. Passengers sitting here would be dry in any weather. A quick-folding dodger extends the hard top to increase the covered area of the cockpit. Another bit of canvas closes in the stern to create a fully enclosed cabin, sleeping three adults or more. (See page 20 for more about the Snekke’s canvas treatment.)
The helmsman stands at the tiller on a platform aft of the engine box. The geometry is perfect, allowing a 360-degree view from the helm but genial proximity to the passengers under the hard top. There is no inside helm station. Wallace objects to the complexity this would add to his Thoreauvian powerboat. A hydraulic linkage with its oily fittings would not only literally disconnect the skipper from the feel of the boat; Wallace feels that being out of the weather disconnects the Snekke from its undecked Viking ancestors. “If I’m at the tiller, out in the wind and rain,” he says, “I’m going to be in the very best position to assess the weather and sea conditions and make the best decisions for the boat and the passengers.”
Even as the boat is admired wherever it ties up, Wallace wonders openly about the market for charmingly slow powerboats. I don’t think he should worry. There’s one constituency who will “get it”: all of the sailors who’ve thought about crossing over to internal combustion. A speed of 6 1⁄2 knots, all the time, no matter what the conditions, in fine style and perfect comfort, sounds like a great deal. Sailors understand the appeal of Slow Boating.
As we took up our mooring lines that evening, three small boys, damp and sunburned from a day of tubing behind an anonymous plastic sliver of a powerboat, swarmed the dockside. “Awesome!” “Cool!” was the chorus. “Does it have a propeller?” “Is it all wood?” Wallace invited the groms aboard.
“Would you rather go slow in a beautiful wooden boat, or fast in a plastic boat?” I asked the boys, still in reporter mode. After a pause, the answer came back: “Slow, in a beautiful wooden boat!”
There’s hope yet.
For more information, contact Andrew Wallace, Traditional Boatworks, www.traditionalboatworks.com.
Andrew Wallace/Tim Estabrook
Particulars: LOA 24′ Beam 8’6″ Power 22-27 hp diesel
Andrew Wallace/Tim Estabrook
The sailing forebears of the snekke are apparent in the lines of Andrew Wallace’s interpretation of the type. Snekker typically measure under 25’ overall, and are relatively firm-bilged and double-ended.
The classic transom-sterned skiff that became known as the Sid Skiff, here with cobuilder Zach Simonson-Bond at the oars, first came to Ray Speck’s attention while he was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California. The boat is as much as joy to look at as it is to row.
So what modifications do you think might make it point a little higher?” I ask, following an embarrassing moment where I boggle an attempted tack. “Drop the rig and row,” answers Ray Speck, who’s built about 20 of these boats.
A perfectly practical solution, for sure, and one that resonates nicely with the Sid Skiff, a boat that’s as practical and adaptable as it is pretty. Okay, it’s not about to claw upwind like a sloop. But it also doesn’t suffer from a sloop’s rigging complications. As it is, it’ll reach off the wind in a wisp of a breeze, and it glides so deftly and easily under oar power that on any given day’s outing, it would be a crime not to include an exercise leg.
“I built one with a 19′ mast,” Speck recalls, riffing on the Sid Skiff’s versatility. “It had maybe 150 sq ft of sail. The guy who bought it was sailing in Raccoon Strait off Sausalito, and he swore it broke away on a plane. And he weighed 195 lbs. His wife, who weighed about 110, capsized in it.”
Speck, who retired in 2012 from teaching at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock, Washington, has a long and intimate history with this boat—though the crucial first chapter is missing. He first encountered the design in 1969 when he was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, and frequently noticed the harbormaster, Sid Foster, rowing around Richardson Bay in a lovely little lapstrake skiff. “We all lusted after that boat,” Speck says. “When Sid died, one of my friends got the boat, and another friend thought he was supposed to have gotten it. A battle ensued. I said, ‘Wait a minute, guys—why don’t I just build you another one?’” Speck took the lines off the disputed bequest and built a slightly larger version, giving new life to a classic design. Speck named it the Sid Skiff in Sid Foster’s honor.
Only trouble is—whose design was it? Speck doesn’t know. He asked around the Bay Area and heard a vague rumor that it had emanated from the Puget Sound area. Much later, after he’d moved to Port Townsend to teach, he happened to peer closely at a 1950s photo of a Prothero Brothers schooner on the wall. Tied up at a Seattle dock next to the schooner was a Sid Skiff —he says it was unmistakable.
Speck thinks the design was originally a production boat; the clues were certain signs of construction expedience. “It was down to the fewest possible number of parts,” he says. “Six planks to a side, with sawn frames. It looked like they were able to crank ’em out pretty fast.”
Lawrence W. Cheek
A boomless sprit rig, which is simple to set, strike, and stow, moves the Sid Skiff well in favorable winds. She won’t point as high on the wind as a marconi racing sloop, but asking her to do so is a pointless exercise when it is so easy to strike the rig and row.
Speck has slightly fancified the construction. There are now eight or nine planks per side, and the detailing is careful and elegant. Still, it isn’t a complicated boat. Speck, now 69, says he used to be able to complete one in about 250 hours. He figures an amateur could build a Sid from his five pages of plans in 500 to 600 hours. And for any builder, the design welcomes variation and adaptation. Speck doesn’t mind a bit. He has built iterations from 12′ to 18′ with one, two, and three rowing stations. The builder simply spaces out the molds to vary the length. The plans specify 3⁄8″ fastened lap planks, preferably cedar or mahogany, but Speck says there’s no reason why glued-lap plywood wouldn’t work. For upwind fanciers like me, sailmaker Sean Rankins, who occupies the sail loft in the school’s main building, has developed a jibheaded sprit rig for a 16′ version.
The 13′ 6″ Sid Skiff I sailed and rowed bears an unusual history. Chris Payton, a 1999 graduate of the Northwest School, began building it after his graduation but completed only the backbone, centerboard trunk, and transom before he died. The pieces made their way to the school, where they resided in the boatshop’s rafters for nearly a decade. At some point in the 2011–12 term, the Traditional Small Craft class was running low on project boats, so they decided to begin the planking. The 2012–13 class then finished out the interior and rigging.
As usual with the school’s project boats, the joinery is solid and tight and the details all look professionally executed. The faculty keeps a close watch on students’ work to ensure quality control. Wait: starboard bow, fifth plank down from the sheer clamp—what’s that? A conspicuously mismatched finger-width patch strip of not-exactly-red western red cedar. Speck thinks the students cracked the plank as they were bending it to the stem, then grabbed a random scrap of cedar to make a graving piece. One class was expecting the boat to be painted, but the succeeding class couldn’t bear to cover up the honeyed glow of red (and yellowish) cedar. So the discordant patch now affirms that the boat was crafted by fallible human hands, like the 18th-century harpsichord builders who always took care to incorporate an intentional mortal mistake so as not to irritate God.
Zach Simonson-Bond, a 26-year-old boatbuilding student from nearby Whidbey Island, worked on the skiff during the school year and now is exuberantly, uncontrollably in love with it. On the day I visited, the school drafted him to accompany me on a foggy morning outing on Port Townsend Bay, and he waited for me to finish interviewing Speck with barely suppressed impatience. Once underway, he explained that he used to crew on the historic Puget Sound schooner ADVENTURESS (see WB No. 232), which deployed another Sid Skiff as a tender.
Lawrence W. Cheek
The boat built at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding is all about the beauty of wood, with western red cedar planking over oak frames, although glued-lap plywood planking would also work.
“People on ADVENTURESS regarded the skiff with so much affection,” he said. “Kids would have their first rowing experience on her. I honed my own rowing skills on her. She’s really easy to row, pretty maneuverable, really sweet lines. No, she doesn’t point too well.”
I don’t have much rowing skill myself, but after ten minutes with the skiff’s oars I sensed that the boat and I were finding an eerily magical groove, we were making good speed, and it felt wonderful. When we began to get a usable breeze and shifted to sailing mode, I was a little less enchanted. Although Sid made good progress in our stingy breeze, it wasn’t necessarily progress in my preferred directions, and the bay was crowded with moored boats that had to be dodged. It seemed to be making a lot of leeway, and it stubbornly refused to point high. I managed one slow tack, blew another, then figured out that Sid is happier obeying suggestions to jibe. After this the morning’s sail went better.
Lawrence W. Cheek
The Sid Skiff is light enough to nose in to a beach for a shore outing.
The next day, I talked with sailmaker Sean Rankins, who built the sails for several of Speck’s and the school’s Sid Skiffs, and whom I’ve found to be an excellent authority on rigs of all kinds. What, I wondered, would improve the boat’s pointing ability?
“First of all, I might have trimmed the sail a little differently than you did,” Rankins said, with exquisite diplomacy. “It’s also very responsive to crew weight and position, and that could make a difference.”
Lawrence W. Cheek
The mahogany transom, along with the backbone and centerboard trunk, waited a decade before helping a new generation of students appreciate the timeless design.
But more fundamentally, Rankins explained that if a Sid Skiff were to be tuned more toward sailing than rowing, several modifications would in fact be useful. “If I were having one built for my use,” he said, “it would have a higher-peaked main and definitely a boom. That would give better sheeting to weather and would better control the twist in the sail.” When I mentioned that the centerboard in this particular boat was limited to a 45-degree deployment, he added that a deeper-setting centerboard, or a daggerboard with larger area, would also improve the boat’s weatherly behavior and decrease its tendency to carve a lot of leeway.
My takeaway from our talk was not that he was critical of this particular boat, or Speck’s interpretation of the design, but that small boats are wonderfully responsive to personalization. It’s a sparkling argument for building one yourself or commissioning one from a professional shop—or a school. (The Northwest School builds boats on commission and speculation that range from the 7′ 7″ Nutshell Pram to a 62′ Bob Perry racer. This Sid Skiff was priced at $8,750.) Adding a jib or boom to the Sid Skiff’s sprit rig or trying out a balance lug might cost a few hundred bucks as opposed to the fluttering away of thousands involved in rig modifications to a big boat. And the physical forces acting on a small boat are small themselves, so mistakes and miscalculations tend not to escalate into disasters. Unlike most other aspects of our modern lives, errors and trials with a small wooden boat are fun.
Plans and finished boats no onger available from Ray Speck, or through the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding.
Ray Speck
Captivated by the shapely hull he first saw in Sausalito, California, boatbuilder Ray Speck got to know the boat very well, having taken the lines off the original in the late 1960s. He has built many of them since. The hull’s shape promises a comparatively easy planking job, with plenty of opportunity to mind the details of fitting out. Everything about the boat seems well proportioned, the very essence of the word “classic.”
Particulars: LOA 13’6″ Beam 4’9″ Draft, board up 10″ Weight 175 lbs
Canvas sheathing over a wooden framework makes Ned McIntosh’s 9’ dinghy extraordinarily light, at only 35 lbs, yet it remains a versatile tender that is easy and quick to build.
These 9′ ×3′ 3″ symmetrical double-enders have been around for many years. Oddly, they were born in Panama while Ned McIntosh and his wife, Alice, were there in 1942 in their cutter STAR CREST and Ned was working in a local boatshop. Although he first built himself a sharpie, Ned needed a lighter boat to get back and forth from STAR CREST’s mooring. First he tried a folding canvas dinghy, but it didn’t work out. Then came this fixed-frame, canvas-sheathed dinghy, which did work.
After Ned devised a sailing rig with leeboards and a small single sail, the boat became so popular that he and friends built about 20 of them. The group—which eventually formed the Panama Yacht Club—had a great time, racing them backwards as well as forwards. (To sail in reverse, Ned tells me, you have to hold out the boom to catch the wind, then steer backwards.) After returning home to his native New Hampshire, Ned continued to turn out many more of these useful little craft. And after he ceased building them, one or two other local builders began turning them out.
My first exposure to the boats came after sighting STAR CREST steaming into York Harbor early one evening about 50 years ago while Anne, our daughter Kathy, and I were there, living aboard our R-boat PENOBSCOT. We met Ned and Alice after they docked, and among all the neat features they showed us was their little canvas tender nestled nice as you please on this 35′ Atkin cutter’s deck. The dinghy could carry two people, yet one person could lift it out of the water and load it onboard. I never forgot our first viewing and, later on, noticed that other sailing yachts, most of them somehow connected to the McIntoshes, were also using Ned’s canvas boats as tenders. Conversations with their owners brought forth nothing but compliments.
After seeing so many of these cute little boats here and there and hearing only good reports about them—including a story Waldo Howland once told me of Ned building some of them right in the living room for the Howland children—I longed to build one for us. As I understood it, there were no plans for the boat itself, although Ned sent me a drawing for the sailing rig. So it came down to finding a boat that I could measure, and Karl Webster offered his. I jumped at the chance and created a drawing that included a building jig I thought would work.
Matthew P. Murphy
A single centerline seat permits shifts in crew weight. When a passenger is aboard, the oarsman turns around to get his weight toward the end, rowing the double-ender in the opposite direction.
Except for the three frames, the pieces of which can be sawn out from common white pine boards, a set of stringers form the skeleton around which the canvas is draped, glued, and stapled. There are five of these stringers. The one for the keel bends at its ends to form the two stems. In addition, there are two chine stringers and a pair of sheer stringers. All of these longitudinal members have to be stiff enough to remain fair between the supporting framework. Pine is too springy; I used Douglas-fir because I had some on hand. But I think spruce, mahogany, oak, or ash would also work well. There’s considerable curve in these stringers as they spring around the hull, so they need softening by hot water or steam. The stems, which have a sharper curve, are easier to bend if kerfed and glued back together—or they, too, could be steamed.
Over this skeleton of inner stringers goes the canvas. Heavy 10-oz stuff (No. 2 is what Ned calls it) is what you need, and if it comes in the usual 60″ width then a single piece just makes it across the boat at the maximum beam—just as Ned advised me it would. Another of his suggestions was to staple the canvas first along the sheer, only just pulling out the wrinkles. (Don’t pull too tight, or when the canvas shrinks it will distort the stringers.) Then mark along the chine with a pencil and make a cut toward the middle from each end. Then, he says, staple the sides to the chine stringers, trim them, and spread a bead of 3M 5200 and staple on the bottom panels. Trim off the excess. Staples should be an inch or so apart along chine and sheer stringers.
Although perhaps it was a mistake, I felt more comfortable covering the bottom first, then completely cutting away the port and starboard overhangs and using them separately afterwards for the sides. This called for a continuous overlap along the chines, and amidships I found that my overlap was a little scant.
Maynard Bray
A simple building jig accepts the keel, chine, and sheer battens, ready here to be covered with canvas.
In any event, my bottom piece draped nicely over the keel for most of its length but had to be cut along the centerline and overlapped at the stems, over a bead of 3M 5200. Closely spaced Monel staples hold the canvas to the skeleton and the adhesive makes the joints watertight.
After the bottom pieces were fitted, stapled, and glued where necessary, I stapled on the sides, doing the sheer first and then pulling out the wrinkles as I worked along the chines, over a bead of 3M 5200. I drove plenty of staples close together and hammered them flush afterward. You want these areas smooth for later installation of the outer keel, outer chines, and guardrails. A putty knife, pressed down hard and run along the overlap, helps squeeze out excess sealant.
Natural canvas was a pleasure to work with and goes on, if you’re careful, without much wrinkling. Ned tells me that his later boats were covered with a heavy synthetic material called Herculite, which makes for a more rugged hull that better resists puncturing. But it doesn’t have the “give” of canvas, so it doesn’t go on as smoothly.
At this point, after the adhesive has cured, it’s probably a good idea to spread on a coat of paint in order to seal the canvas against moisture. Either oil-based paint or latex will work, and you’ll find that both do a good job of shrinking any errant wrinkles out of the canvas.
Now come the outer stringers, which in order to bend around the hull need to be softened with steam or hot water, or else slit, or kerfed, lengthwise and glued into place in two layers. I chose the latter to prove the method, since I’d already used hot water for the inner stringers.
Also, this method kept the surfaces dry for gluing. To attach these outer stringers, I used thickened epoxy instead of 3M 5200 because it is easier to clean up and cures faster. Drywall screws with fender washers held things together until the epoxy kicked off.
For good looks, it pays to plane some taper near the ends of the chines and guardrails and nose them off a little. I also hollowed out their contact surfaces a little for a tight fit. Sinking screws permanently into their very ends always makes sense—just in case the epoxy lets go someday.
For finish, I ended up using a couple of coats of latex paint inside and out. The cedar plank used as a floor-board and seat (there’s no standing up in this boat) was to be left bare, so it went in after painting, held with oval-head screws so it could be removed for access to the bilge.
Oarlocks and breasthooks finished the boat. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a log of the hours spent in construction, but I can tell you that the work goes fast. Using this design, not much time passes before you have a usable boat.
Because of its relatively high freeboard and double-ended symmetry, it’s surprisingly seaworthy for its size. Being so very light and with a single person aboard, it rises quickly to the oncoming waves. But, as with almost any 9-footer, a maximum of two people s about the limit for capacity, and you always have to be careful where you place your feet so as not to push against the canvas.
There’s only a single set of oarlocks, and you sit right down on the floorboard to row. To keep the boat trimmed right, you row in one direction if you’re alone, and get on the other side of the oars to row the opposite way if you have a passenger. Without a backrest, rowing is a little uncomfortable, but I suppose this could be and probably has been improved upon in other boats. Improvement, however, comes with more clutter and weight. It’s not an ideal “all-day” boat anyhow, so for short distances I think it’s fine as it is.
I can’t recall ever having rowed one of these boats previously, and I was amazed at how easily she picks up speed from a standstill, how quickly you can turn her, and how effortlessly she moves along. Six-foot oars are about the right length. We towed her behind either a powerboat or a sailboat most of last summer, and she bounced along happily at a variety of speeds. I got overzealous in pulling her alongside once while we still had headway and were leaving a wake, and she flipped upside down. That was quite a surprise, and I should have known better, but recovery was almost as rapid as the capsize. At only 35 lbs, she was easy to raise up by grabbing the rail, and once she shed the water it was easy to set her right-side up again.
New boats take getting used to, and all boats—including those you think you know—are able to teach you a lesson. This little double-ender, I’m sure, has more in store for me.
By measuring an existing boat, Maynard Bray developed construction plans so he could build one for himself. Because he intended the boat as a tender, he didn’t draw the sailing rig devised by designer–builder Ned McIntosh. Particulars: LOA 9′ Beam 3’3″ Draft not much
Harry Bryan’s 12’ Thistle is powered by a large rudder shaped like a fish’s tail and driven by foot pedals. With steady pedaling you can keep pace with about any rowboat of the same length.
At the beginning of a family cruise to Tasmania some 25 years ago, our friend and frequent Wooden Boat contributor Harry Bryan became intrigued with pedaling a small boat with one’s feet as an alternative to rowing or paddling, leg strength being greater than that of the arms and hands. While at sea, and after having earlier tried out a little foot-powered paddle-wheel craft and finding it enjoyable but inefficient, he began studying how fish moved through the water with such speed and with seemingly so little effort. He caught and examined a number of fish, bending their tails back and forth so he could better understand how they worked. And, as is often his custom, Harry soon started planning how to build a practical version. Long periods of time while standing watch in the Pacific, it seems, got those creative juices really flowing.
Back home again in his New Brunswick shop after the voyage, the ideas for a fish-tail drive generated during those watches began to come to fruition. After building some full-sized prototypes and trying them out, Harry perfected his so-called fin drive.
In its first iteration, Harry tells me, it worked like a rudder in that its big blade, operated by foot pedals, simply swung back and forth. But as the concept evolved (and became more like a fish’s tail), a second pivot came into being partway back on the “rudder” that provided more articulation and increased the forward drive. This worked much better—well enough, in fact, for Harry to draw up detailed plans for sale. He also designed a boat specifically for the fin drive, the 12′ Thistle.
As you can see from the photos, the blade itself is made of thin Lexan sandwiched between a leading edge of the same (but thicker) material, both chosen for their ability to flex. In use, the fin hangs down about a foot below the surface to get a good bite on the water. But it can swing up if it needs to when striking bottom or to make the unit easier to deal with when removed from the boat. The fin assembly is demountable (a threaded hinge pin hangs it onto the transom bracket, and a couple of snaphooks connect the foot pedal ropes), but in use it extends well beyond the boat’s stern; it has to in order to perform so well. After all, it’s supposed to simulate a fish. It’s this streamlined piece of Lexan, bending as it swings back and forth, that pushes the boat ahead.
Matthew P. Murphy
A spring and pin allow the fin to pivot forcefully through the water.
The mechanism between the fin and the boat that does the articulation rides clear of the water. This apparatus is very critical in that, besides supporting the forward tip of the Lexan fin, it has the pedal-driven yoke mounted at the front, along with the gudgeons and pin that make the connection to the boat’s transom. In between, there’s a second set of rudder-like hangers and a tiller (called a top piece on the drawing) that uses a tensioned coil spring instead of a human hand for its operation. By means of this device, the fin bends back and forth somewhat in concert with the forearm unit. In operation, the fin can really push on the water without stalling out, and shoots the boat ahead with remarkable speed.
It really works well, we’ve found, and leaves your hands free for holding a fishing pole, a camera or binoculars, or simply for waving as in, “Look, Ma, no hands.” You can alter course by pushing harder on one of the pedals than the other. Or you can simply stop pedaling and coast with the fin drive in the hard-over position, wherein the fin acts like a simple rudder. Either way works okay for a gradual turn, but for the tightest possible turning circle (and it’s still a pretty big one compared to most oar or paddle-driven boats), you keep the boat’s waggling “tail” toward one side and use rapid short strokes to kind of push the stern around.
Sculling by moving a boat’s rudder from side to side has always worked, but not efficiently. In a Beetle Cat, for example, this technique will get you home when the wind dies, provided home is not too far away. But with Harry’s fin drive, you can pedal for miles and go much, much faster without wearing yourself out. With steady and energetic pedaling, you can keep pace with about any rowboat of the same length.
The propulsion efficiency comes from the fin’s flexibility; it bends naturally as it swishes back and forth and pushes a lot of water aft, just the way a fish swims. With a combination of pivots, a yoke, and a centering spring, Harry has come as close to simulating a fish’s tail as you’re likely to see. While this device has a number of moving parts and may seem fragile, rest assured that Harry, his family, and others as well have proven it through many hours of use. I remember Harry’s daughter Sadie scooting around Mystic Seaport’s waterfront almost continuously during one of the three-day Wooden Boat Shows there.
The materials are commonplace, although there’s some machining and welding to contend with. There’s the Lexan fin itself (three layers, riveted together), some small pieces of plywood to contain it and make up the fin’s “tiller,” a bit of oak or locust for the yoke and forearm, and a few pieces of stainless steel to make the connections, pivots, and reinforcements. But all this is well detailed on the fin drive drawings.
Maynard Bray
Three sheets of Lexan riveted together give the fin both strength and flexibility. The articulated plywood bracket pivots at the boat’s transom, while the fin pivots independently.
Now for the 12′ × 31″ boat that Harry designed especially for the fin drive and which he calls Thistle. The hull is built dory style with sawn frames, a flat bottom, and lapstrake sides. Like most of his boats, it’s designed for cedar planking, but one could adapt the design to lapstrake plywood construction. It weighs 65 lbs and carries only a single person within the cockpit. The bulkheaded stowage compartments in each end are accessed through deck hatches.
You sit facing forward in a comfortable canvas seat that is reminiscent of an early wood-framed lawn chair. The seatback can be adjusted fore-and-aft to fit various leg lengths and make the pedaling comfortable and effective. The pedals swing on a common rod held by three wooden cleats close to the boat’s bottom, and interact with each other by means of the 5⁄16″ braided ropes that run aft and connect each foot pedal through the yoke and finally to the oak forearm of the fin-drive unit.
To dampen the boat’s sideways wiggle as the fin swishes from side to side, Harry added a couple of permanent external keels to the boat’s bottom, one near the bow and the other aft. While these 6″-deep keels keep the boat from wiggling so that most of the energy you put into pedaling drives the boat forward, they are a bit of an impediment ashore. They’re thin and appear a little fragile, so you have to be careful to not damage them when launching off the shore or beaching.
As mentioned earlier, because of these two keels, maneuvering is trickier than in boats using oars or paddles. The turning circle is rather generous, and backing down isn’t an option. There’s no reverse. Either you coast to a stop, or you grab the single paddle that you hope is at hand, and bring the boat to a halt with it.
That said, the fin drive is a blast to use. The boat really moves fast; aiming it is intuitive; you’re comfortably seated in a canvas chair with your arms resting on the side deck; and you’re set for an all-day experience, if you choose. As Harry says on his website, “Although capable of keeping up with any oar or paddle propelled boat of her length, she is at her best silently swimming close to wildlife or just enjoying the waterborne equivalent of an afternoon walk.”
This same fin drive unit, I suppose, could work on other narrow lightweights as well, provided they have a strong flat vertical transom on which to mount it, and are fitted with keels or have some other means of dampening the side-to-side wiggle. My advice is to stick with the Thistle. It’s easy to build, looks good, and has proven to work. Granted, the fin drive is a bit of a gimmick, but a very enjoyable one that you can build yourself of readily available materials using Harry’s very detailed drawings.
Plans consisting of seven sheets and a 36-page instruction book can be purchased directly from Harry at Bryan Boatbuilding, 329 Mascarene Rd., Letete, NB, E5C 2P6, Canada; www.harrybryan.com.
Harry Bryan
The seven sheets of plans for the Thistle include extensive details on how to construct the fin assembly. Bryan also offers a sail plan—a nice feature for long distance runs.
Harry Bryan
Particulars: LOA 12′ Beam 2’7″ Weight 65 lbs Propulsion: pedal-powered fin or sail Sail area: 22.5 sq ft
The Spindrift series of dinghies from B&B Yacht Designs promises a range of capable yacht tenders that offer plenty of sailing excitement. Here we see a 12’ model built by Meredithe Stuart-Smith of Castine, Maine.
Here we have one member of a family of boats—four in all—doing business under the name of Spindrift and designed by Graham Byrnes of Vandemere, North Carolina. The very first Spindrift was a 10-footer, and was meant purely as a tender to a larger yacht. As Byrnes tells the story on his website, “Not long after the first few were built, we were invited to take part in a race for yacht tenders with a maximum length of 10′. There were dinghies of every description: Trinkas, Connies, Dyers all were represented, as well as some less-well-known brands—and a few custom boats.”
Spindrift trounced the fleet—so much so that there was a mass exodus of dinghies from the local yacht club, and a flurry of Spindrift construction. The word spread to other parts of the country, and more models followed. Today, the lengths are 9′, 10′, 11′, and 12′, and you can choose nesting versions for all but the 12-footer. “Nesting” refers to the boat’s ability to be separated into two pieces—a bow and stern section—with the bow portion turned around and nestled into the stern sections. The result is a tidy package that can be carried on the deck of a small yacht. The rig options include a cat for the 9′, 10′, and 11′ models, and sloop or cat for the 11′ and 12′ ones. To date, Byrnes has sold 1,025 sets of plans.
“A Spindrift,” writes Byrnes, “is a very good investment if you have a junior sailor in your family. Unlike many dinghies used as trainers (such as the Optimist), you do not ‘outgrow’ a Spindrift. While the boat is very suitable for children and inexperienced adults, in the hands of a good competitive sailor it offers the challenge of top-end racing.” Byrnes also intended for the boat to carry a small outboard, which he says it does very well.
The forgiving nature of the boat and its top-end potential are what drew Meredithe Stuart-Smith to Spindrift. A resident of Castine, Maine, Stuart-Smith had taken a sailing course at WoodenBoat School several years ago, and now she wanted a boat in which to hone her new sailing skills. What boat, she wondered, would be adequate for the local conditions, and under 12′ so she could store it on land at the local yacht club? She called Graham Byrnes’s shop and spoke with his wife, Carla, who mentioned the Spindrift—which, as it happened, was to be the subject of an upcoming class at WoodenBoat School.
Stuart-Smith was intrigued, but a little concerned about her limited capacity with woodworking tools, and she shared this concern with Carla.
“Honey,” Stuart-Smith recalls Carla responding, “there are women who could not get out of their Maiden form bras who could build one of these.”
“So,” says Stuart-Smith. “I came, I built, and I sailed.”
Matthew P. Murphy
The 12′ Spindrift’s spars and blades all stow tidily in the boat for easy trailering.
The construction is stitch-and-glue—a process that has as much in common with sewing as it does with traditional boatbuilding. In sewing, the curved edges of flat sheets of fabric are stitched together to yield a sometimes-complex three-dimensional shape. In stitch-and-glue boatbuilding, flat sheets of plywood are cut to precisely curving shapes, and the edges of them “sewn” together to yield a hull. The sewing is commonly done with copper wire or cable ties, and the seams are then “taped” together with fiberglass set in epoxy. There are nuances in this gluing-together job, such as the filleting of seams to eliminate hard inside corners and allow the ’glass to properly bridge the joint, but the process is rather simple and the rewards quick. Hulls are often stitched together in a day—though require much more work to make them solid and strong.
Stuart-Smith finished her hull in the WoodenBoat School class. After that, the demands of business and family life took over, and she sent the boat to Salt Pond Rowing, a shop operated by WoodenBoat School shop assistant Joe Thompson, who finished it—complete with a distinctive and flawless gunsmoke-blue paint scheme. “I’m sad I didn’t finish the boat,” says Stuart-Smith. “But I knew I couldn’t get it done.”
Matthew P. Murphy
The 12′ Spindrift’s two-piece, unstayed aluminum mast is quick and easy to step, and the wooden boom attaches at the gooseneck with a simple slip-on fitting. Rigging takes a matter of minutes.
Stuart-Smith named the boat ANGEL, and four years after its launching, I joined her for a couple of sails from the backshore beach in Castine. This gravelly strand faces west into upper Penobscot Bay, and we arrived at high tide one August evening in a fresh westerly.
Setup was easy. The aluminum mast separates into two sections, which stow neatly and entirely in the boat. The top mast section has a wooden plug inserted in its top. These two sections are easily joined together, and the lightweight spar dropped through the partners and into the step. There is no standing rigging.
The rig is a Bermudan cat, and the sail’s luff is sleeved, like a Laser’s. But unlike that ubiquitous Bruce Kirby–designed board boat—at least the ones I knew growing up—this luff sleeve has a zipper running its length, allowing the sail to be hoisted up the stepped mast, rather than threaded onto the mast on the ground, and the whole thing raised together. That made a big difference in ease of rigging in the breeze that was blowing that evening, for raising that sail Iwo Jima style would have required some manhandling. The zippered luff also allows for quick reefing and shaking-out from the helm position—which is not possible with a standard sleeve luff.
The clew is left to fly while the boat is launched and the boom attached to the gooseneck. Then the rudder is secured, the boat is pointed into the wind, and the outhaul made off. The engine, so to speak, is now idling.
I thought that getting off the beach in the onshore breeze would be a bit awkward—a reflection on me, and not the boat. In the past, I have found daggerboards can be ungainly in this situation. When beam-reaching into a beach, it’s good to have a little bit of blade exposed underwater for as long as possible. And I like to have the board propped in the trunk, ready to press into deep water, when departing in an offshore breeze. But in some of the boats of my youth, the height of that loaded board could impede the progress of the boom across the boat’s centerline, creating an interesting situation—one not unlike the time my ’75 Ford Grenada’s accelerator pedal got stuck under the floor mat as I was cruising down the Nahant causeway in Massachusetts in my high-school years…but I digress. My point is that Byrnes’s careful fitting of the board to clear the boom gave me confidence in the setup. This is a carefully engineered rig— mindful of both the beginner and advanced sailor.
Meredithe Stuart-Smith
Spindrift has a rare combination of traits: Exciting sailing, good rowing, and ample volume to serve as a yacht tender. The designer claims that she handles an outboard motor well, too, though this wasn’t tested for this review.
I got away from the beach, deployed the centerboard, sheeted in, and whoosh: Stuart-Smith had told me that the local kids likened the feeling of her boat to a Laser’s—which I hadn’t sailed for decades. This brought it all back. The boat accelerated quickly, and I settled into the tack and tidied up the mainsheet. Then I tried a few turns. The boat was quick to tack, and sure-footed in jibes.
Stuart-Smith had told me earlier that every one of her sailing outings is like Groundhog Day, referring to the Bill Murray movie in which the protagonist awakes every day to the same circumstances, his life never advancing. She typically sails the boat with a more experienced hand along, and on one solo outing did have the distinct and enlightening pleasure of capsizing. She reports that it was easy to right, and came up only partially filled with water. Much of the interior volume is taken up by the flotation tank seats, so there was minimal bailing. Stuart-Smith has pushed through insecurities about a solo outing, saying that she’s “always doing things that terrify me.” She was bound and determined to take a few passes along the beach that night. And she did. As is often the case in learning, she’d internalized more of the previous year’s lessons than she’d thought. She’d developed instinct. This was proven out in one particular incident when, after the boat was caught in the wind while departing the beach, the sails filled as ANGEL sat still. That’s often the sitting-duck position for a capsize, as all of the sudden wind energy is pressing the boat over, and little or none of it is bleeding off in forward motion. Stuart-Smith leapt to the high side, settled the boat down, and darted off. The rest of the evening was textbook sailing, and putting the boat up took only ten minutes. We lowered the sail, hauled the boat up the beach on its aluminum trailer, popped out the mast, and secured the blades and spars in the bilge. With the hull strapped down, Stuart-Smith and ANGEL headed for the barn.
She told me later that building her own boat was a bit like having a baby. “Afterward, I thought, ‘I’m never doing that again.’” But the confidence she gained from the project soon eclipsed those feelings. “Six months later,” she says, “I was looking at design catalogs. I will definitely build another boat.”
B&B Yacht Designs, 196 Elm St., Vandemere NC; www.bandbyachtdesigns.com.
GRAHAM BYRNES, B&B YACHT DESIGNS
The Spindrift dinghy from B&B Yacht Designs is available in four lengths: 9’, 10’, 11’, and 12’. Here we see the 12-footer, the boat tested for this article, with the optional sloop rig.
GRAHAM BYRNES, B&B YACHT DESIGNS
Particulars: LOA 12’0″ Beam 4’6″ Sail area (sloop rig) 85 sq ft (cat rig) 70 sq ft Weight 95-120 lbs
In 1831, one of Charles Darwin’s Cambridge University professors, John Henslow, had been invited to sail as a naturalist aboard the HMS BEAGLE for what was to be a two-year voyage to survey the coasts of South America. He declined the offer and recommended that Captain Robert Fitzroy take Darwin, his 22-year-old protégé, instead.
Darwin set sail aboard BEAGLE from Plymouth, England, in December 1831 and arrived in the waters of the Galápagos archipelago, after a three-year, eight-and-a-half-month voyage. On September 17, 1835, the ship’s crew went ashore on Chatham Island, the easternmost of the islands, now known as Isla San Cristobal. The young Darwin was not favorably impressed. In his book, The Voyage of the Beagle, he writes:
A broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly. Although I diligently tried to collect as many plants as possible, I succeeded in getting very few; and such wretched-looking little weeds would have better become an arctic than an equatorial Flora.
I wasn’t feeling quite so peevish when I arrived at San Cristobal, by air, on May 16, 2005. The air was thick with heat, but the stands of Galápagos prickly pear, an endemic species first recorded by Darwin, graced the airport grounds and sleek sea lions dozed on the town-front beach. I had been invited by my friend Olaf Malver, founder of the guide service, Explorer’s Corner, to join a group of kayakers and journalists for a six-day tour of seven islands: San Cristóbal, Española, Floreana, Santa Fé, Santa Cruz, Santiago, and Bartolomé.
GALÁPAGOS VISION
Our 50′ catamaran mothership, GALÁPAGOS VISION, carried seven inflatable sit-on-top kayaks: three doubles and four singles. We would paddle a new island from her every day and every night the Ecuadorian crew would make the passage between islands while we slept.
Darwin had come to catalog the species of the islands’ flora and fauna and for that work he will be forever remembered. It’s baffling that as a naturalist he didn’t enjoy the experience more; the Galápagos archipelago is one of the more beautiful places on Earth. Below are some of the animals and plants that I saw along with my impressions and, for some of them, in italics, what Darwin wrote about them.
Galápagos marine iguana
Amblyrhynchus cristatus (Galapagos marine iguana)
Darwin wrote of the Galápagos marine iguana:
It is extremely common on all the islands throughout the group, and lives exclusively on the rocky sea-beaches, being never found, at least I never saw one, even ten yards in-shore. It is a hideous-looking creature, of a dirty black color, stupid, and sluggish in its movements. A seaman on board sank one, with a heavy weight attached to it, thinking thus to kill it directly; but when, an hour afterwards, he drew up the line, it was quite active. Their limbs and strong claws are admirably adapted for crawling over the rugged and fissured masses of lava, which everywhere form the coast. In such situations, a group of six or seven of these hideous reptiles may oftentimes be seen on the black rocks, a few feet above the surf, basking in the sun with outstretched legs.
I threw one several times as far as I could, into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood. I several times caught this same lizard and as often as I threw it in, it returned in the manner above described.
Darwin chalked up this repeated return of the iguana to a “singular piece of apparent stupidity,” missing the fact that the iguana always knew exactly how to find its way back to where it belonged. I found the rocky shores were teeming with marine iguanas. The tops of their heads looked as if they had been crowned with barnacles, and their skin of scales hung in loose folds like chain mail. Despite their formidable appearance, the one above, with its enigmatic Mona Lisa smile and drowsy half-closed eyes, conveyed how gentle they are.
Galápagos land iguana
Conolophus subcristatus (Galápagos land iguana)
Like their brothers the sea-kind, they are ugly animals, of a yellowish orange beneath, and of a brownish red colour above: from their low facial angle they have a singularly stupid appearance. They are, perhaps, of a rather less size than the marine species; but several of them weighed between ten and fifteen pounds. In their movements they are lazy and half torpid.
I watched one for a long time, then walked up and pulled it by the tail, at this it was greatly astonished, and soon shuffled up to see what was the matter; and then stared me in the face, as much as to say, “What made you pull my tail?”
At the west end of Isla Española, we went ashore and followed a rough boulder-paved trail. I walked with my head down, picking my steps as much to find sure footing as to keep from inadvertently stepping on the iguanas that were draped over the rocks and nestled in the crevices between them.
Galápagos giant tortoise
Chelonoidis niger (Galápagos giant tortoise)
I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.
The only tortoises we saw were in the The Charles Darwin Research Station in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island. This subspecies, above, has a saddleback shell, an evolutionary adaptation that provided the ability to reach higher edible vegetation.
Blue-footed booby
Sula nebouxii (Blue-footed booby)
Darwin wrote of the booby and the noddy:
The former is a species of gannet, and the latter a tern. Both are of a tame and stupid disposition, and are so unaccustomed to visitors, that I could have killed any number of them with my geological hammer. The booby lays her eggs on the bare rock.
On Isla Española, I walked within arm’s reach of the blue-footed booby above straddling a chick whose pink skin was only lightly covered with linty down. The booby was so unmoved by my presence that I felt invisible. Staring into the bullet-hole pupil of a booby’s pale-jade eye, I found myself moving my head to see if it would track me. It didn’t.
Sula nebouxii (Blue-footed booby)
While a male blue-footed booby will use its brightly colored feet to attract a mate, I saw many of them alone, slowly raising one foot at a time and tilting its head to admire his own feet. When sunlight hit their feet, the reflection gave the white feathers of their underbellies a pale, mint-toothpaste glow.
Darwin: The gannets, sitting on their rude nests, gaze at one with a stupid yet angry air.
Galápagos hawk
Buteo galapagoensis (Galápagos hawk)
Writing of the “extreme tameness of the birds,” Darwin notes:
…all of them are often approached sufficiently near to be killed with a switch, and sometimes, as I myself tried, with a cap or hat. A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree.
Galápagos sea lion
Zalophus wollebaeki (Galápagos sea lion)
Although Darwin made no mention of the fur seals or sea lions of the Galápagos, he voiced his disdain for them eight months earlier on the Chilean island of Chiloe:
On the way the number of seals which we saw was quite astonishing: every bit of flat rock, and parts of the beach, were covered with them. They appeared to be of a loving disposition, and lay huddled together, fast asleep, like so many pigs; but even pigs would have been ashamed of their dirt, and of the foul smell which came from them.
At San Cristobol, I spent hours snorkeling. When I dove and swam along the bottom, a couple of sea lion pups would pass by, disappearing as quickly as they had appeared. But if I swam in loops and spins, two or three pups would join in swimming loops and spins around me.
On one occasion, as I was swimming just below the surface, a lone juvenile sea lion came slowly straight toward me staring steadily at me with eyes as dark as old motor oil. When it was about an arm’s length away, it bared its teeth, snapped its jaws, and turned suddenly away. For a moment, all I could see in the frame of my mask was its dark flank, and then there was only limpid turquoise water. I spun around, but in that instant the sea lion had disappeared.
Zalophus wollebaeki (Galápagos sea lion)
There was a single tree in the center of Isla Lobos. Sea lions huddled in the shade of its canopy. The dappled light fell across a mother nursing her pup. Still wet after climbing out of the water, her fur was as smooth and as bright as polished bronze.
Waved albatross
Phoebastria irrorate (Waved albatross)
On Isla Española, a pair of albatrosses faced each other in a mirrored dance, beaks swaying to the side then pointing upward while making raspy whistling sounds like poorly played flutes. The well-synchronized moves ended with a clattering swordplay of their beaks.
Three feet from the path we walked, an albatross was sitting on her nest. Her eyes, wide set and under the deep brow of alabaster white feathers, had a doleful, world-weary look. She lifted herself and turned her head to the side to look at the marbled egg that lay between her pale blue legs. On the other side of the path was a clearing a few dozen yards long leading to a cliff at the water’s edge. An albatross at the downwind end of the runway unfolded his wings and ran into the wind. By the time it reached the cliff, it had enough speed to get airborne and rose quickly in the updraft coming up from the water.
Galápagos brown pelican
Pelecanus occidentalis urinator (Galápagos brown pelican)
We paddled from Gardner Bay west along Española’s northern shore, a ragged tear of black bluffs, splattered white where birds had found places to perch. A pelican with pale blue eyes rimmed in red preened its feathers while I drifted by a paddle-length away.
Magnificent frigatebird
Fregata magnificens (Magnificent frigatebird)
Dagger-pointed wings of frigate birds carved circles in the sun-blanched arch of sky above the cove where VISION was anchored. Dozens of them had settled in the tangled branches of low trees along the shore, their ebon feathers glowing with green and purple iridescence as they puffed up their strawberry-red gular pouches to attract mates.
Galápagos greater flamingo
Phoenicopterus ruber (Pink flamingo)
On Isla Floreana there was a lagoon occupied by a dozen flamingos. There are only a few hundred of them in the archipelago and we were lucky to see them. The chicks are born with gray feathers; the pink develops over time from the carotenoids in the brine shrimp and algae they eat.
Galápagos heron
Butorides sundevalli (Lava or Galápagos heron)
I slowly and quietly walked toward a Galápagos lava heron that seemed to be asleep while standing next to a ledge of lava. I was 5′ away when it opened its eyes, at least the one facing me. I stopped, and a few seconds later the lower eyelid slowly rose up and closed.
Sally Lightfoot crab
Grapsus grapsus (Sally Lightfoot crab)
Sally Lightfoot crabs seemed to have extraordinary vision and when I approached them they quickly skipped over the rocks, even leaping the gaps between them, a shyness that was unusual on the islands. They got along well with the marine iguanas, which were content to let the crabs crawl over them. I saw one crab plant an icepick-sharp leg on an iguana’s eyelid without it flinching. The crabs feed on the iguana’s parasites and dead skin.
Galápagos prickly pear
Opuntia galapageia (Galápagos prickly pear)
This opuntia is one of six subspecies endemic to the Galápagos Islands. It is a tree-like prickly-pear cactus with the rust-red scaly trunk of a madrone. Land iguanas, like the one on the rocks, can’t reach these cactus pads, but there are five other endemic opuntias that they can feed on.
Palo Santo tree
Bursera graveolens (Palo Santo tree)
On Isla Floreana, the soft-shouldered hills are veiled with a tattered lace of palo santo trees, which leaf out only during the rainy season, January to April.
Gray matplant
Tiquilia nesiotica (Gray matplant)
The highest point on Isla Bartolomé is a volcanic cone flecked with gray matplant, hoarfrost-white and just as fragile. The matplant, a Galápagos endemic, is a pioneer plant—life taking hold on ruptured earth. A boardwalk leading to the summit left the surrounding ground unmarred by footprints.
Bartolomé and San Salvador
Darwin wrote that the islands of the Galápagos archipelago “rise with a tame and rounded outline, broken here and there by scattered hillocks, the remains of former craters. Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance.”
With the sun rising behind me, I stood on the summit of Bartolomé looking northwest to San Salvador and watched the morning light bathe an unspoiled primordial landscape. It was like looking out over Eden.
My son-in-law, Jess, is a professional river guide in Jackson, Wyoming. At the start of the 2019 season, one of his colleagues arrived in town with a handcrafted, double-ended, fully decked river dory he had built in the off season. It’s a beautiful boat based on plans in Roger Fletcher’s book: Drift Boats & River Dories. Jess was smitten and asked me, an avid woodworker, if I’d like to make a boat for him. Without a thought, I said I’d build it with him, not for him, and thus began our two-plus-year journey building Fletcher’s 17′6″ wooden Colorado River Dory.
Neither Jess nor I was familiar with Fletcher’s book, so we each obtained a copy. It’s a bit of a history book that also includes a variety of dory and drift-boat lines drawings and tables of offsets. In addition to the backstories of the 10 boats he describes, Fletcher provides detailed plans for each and general assembly methods for all. The Colorado River Dory is presented in nine pages in Chapter 21, and the construction method occupies the 73 pages of Chapter 11. For those who’d like to take a trial run at the construction, the book also includes a chapter on building a 1″ scale model of any of the 10 boats.
Jeff Battin
The Colorado River Dory is designed with six watertight hatches and offers plenty of storage space and flotation. The second hatch from the bow is offset to starboard to ease loading larger items like coolers. The aft seat, as designed, would have had passengers facing the stern. Here, that seat has been moved toward the back so passengers can look forward. The cleats aft of the center footwell keep the rower and a seat pad centered while navigating rough water.
Jess and I built the boat in Castle Rock, Colorado. The structure for the hull is composed of 10 frames that are each beveled on their floor timbers and side frames to fit the plywood bottom and side panels. We made ours of straight, vertical-grain Douglas-fir to optimize the strength-to-weight ratio. Notches cut in the floors will accommodate a hard chine made of white oak. The hull sides are specified to be made of 1⁄4″ plywood—we used 6mm Hydrotek. The panels are 19′ long and required two 1:12 scarf joints, which we cut with a shop-built router sled. The plans call for the bottom of the boat to be made of 1⁄2″ or 5⁄8″ plywood, with the option of a sacrificial layer of 1⁄4″ plywood. We used 18mm Hydrotek plywood, two sheets scarfed together to length.
River boats can be built on a strongback, but it seems most are built free-form and bottom up. We began by fastening the two side panels to a beefy white-oak inner stem using Sikaflex and silicon-bronze screws. Next, we fastened the frames to the hull from amidships working our way fore and aft. The transom is a glued-up piece of 1 1⁄4″-thick white oak and was installed last.
When we had all the frames in place between the side panels, we noticed that the sides were pinched, rather than straight, between stations 4 and 7, and that the bottom was hogged, not flat as it is designed to be. We rechecked our work, but we had built to plan. It became clear that the plan’s baseline offsets for the frame pattern at stations 5 and 6 were off by roughly 1⁄2″. We solved the problem by pushing the two frames deeper into the hull so that the chines ran, as intended, straight between 4 and 7. While full lofting could reveal the error in the offsets, particleboard molds cut to the given offsets for stations 5 and 6 could be put in place and adjusted to fair the hull and then be used to create patterns for the frames. Fortunately, both stations have no bevels.
The installation of the chine log was a challenge. Fletcher’s book suggests that it can be made from one piece of oak, steamed, and slipped into the frame notches. The chine log needs to be angled fore and aft to accommodate the angles of the stem and stern. This makes the top side of the chine log longer than the opening set by the stem, transom, and the bottom edge of the sides. The instructions call for inserting the ends of the chine before sliding the rest of it in; short blocks of wood clamped to the side frames serve as guides to hold the curve of the chine and guide it into the notches. Jess and I found steam-bending and edge-setting the white-oak chines stressful and ended up installing them in two pieces with scarfs that would be joined amidships after the pieces had been installed. In a recent conversation, Fletcher mentioned: “That chine log is a spooky placement. Before steaming was commonplace, the Rogue River boys cut two 1⁄2″ chines and installed each separately to give them a 1″ chine. Kind of crude, but it worked for them.”
Jeff Battin
In this side view, the straight and flat section of the side and bottom are made evident by the straight run of the outside chine. Jess is experimenting here with spare oar placement. Here on the Snake River boaters are required to carry one spare oar, but two spare oars will be required in the Grand Canyon.
Fairing the chine and the frame floor timbers was done with hand planes and an ingenious sanding board described in Fletcher’s book. We installed the bottom with Sikaflex and silicon-bronze screws and then planed its beveled edge fair with the hull sides. We had to steam-bend and affix white-oak outside chines. The outside chines have the same bends and edge-sets as the chine logs, but with the bottom in place there was no way to use clamps to hold them to the boat. We resorted to fender washers, construction screws, and polysulfide to set them in place. Installing the false stem was much easier.
The last step, before we could flip the boat over, was to fiberglass the bottom. While we are wooden-boat purists, the bottom of a river boat gets hard use. The old-timers would have installed sacrificial sheets of plywood to protect it, but we opted for the contemporary method noted in the book: 20-oz triaxial fiberglass cloth and multiple coats of epoxy, with graphite added to the last two coats to reduce friction when dragging the boat across sandy beaches. We laid the ’glass and applied all seven coats of epoxy in one go. It made for a long day but eliminated the need to sand between coats.
The boat had been upside down in my garage for nine months, and we were dying to see it right-side up. We had to build a wheeled cradle and needed an extra pair of hands to turn it safely, but it was a joy to see it looking like a boat.
Jeff Battin
Here, the rower is sitting facing the stern, normal for rowing saltwater dories but not for river dories. The Colorado River Dory can be rowed from either position; rapids are run facing the bow with the oarsman doing the steering and maneuvering and the current covering the distance. The rocky shore here at Deadman’s Bar is typical and demonstrates the need for a dory bottom armored with epoxy and fiberglass.
Jerry Briggs, whose 1971 Grand Canyon dory inspired the Colorado River Dory, said, “building the hull is the easy part; it’s all the carpentry work that takes the time.” I would certainly agree that crafting the bulkheads, seats, decks, and hatches took a lot of time. Fletcher’s book gives general details and measurements for how Briggs “tricked out” his boat but makes it clear that it can be configured however you like. We generally followed Briggs’s design, although we did eliminate the drain tube that is set in the elevated sole in the rower’s footwell and opted to have a continuous deck surrounding the footwell so Jess could sleep comfortably onboard. In the book, the four adjoining decks in the center of the boat were staggered and sloped to shed water into the footwell. We also reoriented the stern seat to face forward.
We used Douglas-fir for the carlins and beams. The fussy part of the build was fitting the 9mm-Hydrotek plywood decks around the frames and accommodating the rolling bevel of the hull. We used joggle sticks and templates and it came together nicely. We added epoxy fillets to all the seams but didn’t reinforce them with fiberglass. We may regret this decision, but fiberglass can always be added later.
The last step before painting was to cut and fit the six deck hatches and the inwales. We used stainless-steel circular hinges, circular compression latches, and spring hatch holders to make the lids watertight. The inwales are made from steam-bent white oak and are fastened to the frame heads with stainless-steel carriage bolts.
We used bilge paint below decks and topside paint on the hull and decks. The brightwork has multiple coats of spar varnish. We added rubber grit to the deck paint to improve traction. Jess bought a drift-boat trailer that fit our dory perfectly, and we towed it to Jackson in April 2022. Jess and his friends welded custom oarlocks, which we installed in July.
There seem to be countless equations for calculating oar length that all yield different results. Jess was convinced he needed 11′ oars, but Levi Jamison of Songbird Oars said that the dory would do best with 10-footers. He was right, and Jess couldn’t be happier with his handmade ash-and-walnut sticks.
Taylor Lambert
Jess (right) and the author ran the Snake River at the foot of the Grand Tetons. The full bow can support the weight of a passenger sitting well forward and maintain trim without needing another passenger aft to balance the load.
For our Colorado River Dory’s maiden voyage, Jess and I ran the Snake River in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park in mid-July 2022. During the 10-mile trip Jess noted that the dory rows like a dream. Its long, flat bottom allows it to track well through the water and glide over shallow, rocky sections without fear of damage. The boat rows great whether bow or stern first, which is helpful when a downstream ferry is best.
Typical of all river dories, balance is important whether carrying people, cargo, or both. If the load is the least bit off-center, it becomes difficult to maintain a straight course; the boat tends to spin to the weighted side.
Jess and I built our dory in about 75 days, working on and off over two years. It was a wonderfully rewarding experience. A decked river dory like the Colorado River Dory is a complicated thing to construct and best suited to someone with considerable woodworking experience. For the neophyte, the open river dories described in Fletcher’s book would be the better place to start.
Jess has a permit to run the dory, christened CUTWATER, down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon this October. He’ll be accompanied by two friends, each in a wooden dory inspired by Fletcher’s book. We’re confident CUTWATER is ready to provide Jess a safe passage.
Jeff Battin is a retired finance and consulting executive who spent most of his career in telecommunications and healthcare. He lives with his wife, Linda, and two Labrador retrievers, Koda and Nellie, in Castle Rock, Colorado. He is an avid woodworker and skier and enjoys building furniture (and boats) for his two children, grandson, and friends. Jess Hahn is a professional raft guide in Jackson Wyoming where he lives year round with his wife, Kelly, and 19-month-old son, Wyatt.
François Vivier originally designed the Seil 18 in 1988 for a group of sailors from Nantes, a region of France through which the Loire, the country’s longest river, flows on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. They wanted a boat suitable for rowing and sailing on rivers. The design was intended for glued-plywood construction, but about 150 were produced in fiberglass by Canotage de France before the company went out of business in 2007.
When Tasmanian Adrian Levings bought the Seil plans some years ago, they came with a full set of Mylar templates for “pretty much everything,” including the box-girder building frame, the molds and bulkheads, the planks, rudder, and centerboard. Vivier’s study plan for the boat included drawings with all the component parts laid out on sheets of plywood to allow the most economical cutting. Today, there are many companies around the world (including in the USA, UK, and Australia) that produce CNC plywood kits, and Vivier can provide electronic CNC cutting files.
Photographs by the author
While cutting gains on the plank-end laps is called for by the plans, this Sei has the laps left proud at the transoms.
The hull is built upside down, on a 12″ × 16″ box-girder strongback made from 3⁄4″ chipboard. It is the length of the boat and is angled at the ends for the transoms. Two supports installed under the strongback hold it at a comfortable working height and have angled outer edges so that the whole structure may be tilted 45 degrees to either side to allow for easier planking. On top of the strongback, amidships, there are four bulkhead supports, and near each end is a mold. The building frame is completed with the addition of two longitudinal pieces on the centerline, which establish the curve of the middle plank (referred to in the plans as the sole). A gap between these pieces accommodates the centerboard trunk.
The bulkheads are 3⁄8″ plywood, and where they extend above the thwarts as frames they are reinforced with 3⁄4″ upper frame doublers. Adrian beveled the bulkhead edges according to the information on the Mylar templates, and then temporarily bolted them to their chipboard supports, which were already installed on the strongback. Both transoms were made up of two layers of 3⁄8″ plywood, and Adrian temporarily fastened each of them to the angled ends of the building frame and the centerline longitudinal chipboard pieces. The centerboard trunk—3⁄8″ plywood, sheathed in epoxy and ’glass on the inside faces with spacers and reinforcement in celery-top pine—is glued and screwed in place between the middle two bulkheads.
The Seil 18’s 108-sq-ft boomed balance lug has an advantage downwind over the optional loose-footed lugsail.
Each of the hull planks is made up of three scarfed pieces (the study plans also offer finger joints as an alternative in the case of CNC-cut kits). There is no conventional centerline component—keel or keelson—but the middle plank, which gives the boat its narrow flat bottom, is of 1⁄2″ plywood, the extra thickness being used for additional strength. After Adrian had cut the centerboard slot into the bottom plank, he glued it to the transom, frames, bow transom, and centerboard case (he applied plastic tape to the edges of the molds to prevent adherence there). He then installed the remaining 3⁄8″ plywood planks (four each side). Throughout the planking process, Adrian planed the plank edges to the correct bevel to accept the adjacent planks in situ. He temporarily fastened the planks with screws and large flat washers—none of the planks needed twisting or edge setting.
Once all the planks were fitted, Adrian applied epoxy fillets on the outside of the hull between the edge of each plank and the face of its neighbor; and then sheathed the hull in 10-oz ’glass and epoxy up to the lower edge of the sheerstrakes. He finished the exterior with two-part polyurethane paint. Finally, Adrian freed the bulkheads from their strongback supports to release the hull so that he could turn it over.
Adrian stripped the box girder and then built supports to cradle the upright hull at a comfortable working height. He began fitting-out the interior by installing the gunwales. The plans call for oak, sapele, mahogany, or Douglas-fir; Adrian used celery-top pine. Each gunwale is laminated in four 3⁄4″ × 1″ pieces. The first piece had a 3⁄8″ rabbet machined into it so that it could be fitted on the inside of the planking and cap the end-grain of the plywood sheerstrake; the second piece went on the outside of the planking, and the last two to the inside face of the first. He then fitted the celery-top pine transom knees, fore and aft (the plans specify oak, acacia, or iroko).
Both rowing stations have stretchers to aid more powerful rowing, but they are removable so they can be stowed, out of the way, when sailing. Raising the pivoting rudder blade reduces drag when rowing.
The plans call for foam buoyancy in various parts of the boat, but Adrian decided to fit the sealed compartments with round plastic access hatches. There are seven such compartments in total: a central one at the bow and three on each side; one between the mast gate and the forward rowing thwart; one under the side benches between the two rowing thwarts; and one each side of the sternsheets. The compartments are constructed with 3⁄8″ plywood with the listed support framing members. Supports made of 4″ strips of 3⁄4″ plywood, set on edge just outside of the perimeter of the floorboards, have angled notches to accept 1 1⁄2″ dowels that serve as the rowing stretchers for the two rowing stations. The forward station straddles the centerboard trunk, and the stretcher is made in two separate pieces. The notches offer each rower two stretcher positions.
For the thwarts, seats, and floorboards, the plans recommend red pine, spruce, Douglas-fir, and larch (hackmatack). Adrian used 3⁄4″-thick cypress (macrocarpa) for the center section of the sternsheets and forward sole, while for the aft parts of the side seats he used gray ironbark, and for the 1″-thick thwarts and mast gate he used celery-top pine. To fasten these components, he epoxied stainless-steel threaded inserts into their bearers to allow for easy and frequent removal without deteriorating the wood. He coated these and the gunwale and knees with Deks Olje D1.
The designer shows the centerboard and rudder blade made from two layers of 1⁄2″ ply, but Adrian chose to make them from strips of 1″ celery-top pine glued together. Discussions on the WoodenBoat Forum revealed a consensus that “solid wood was more robust as long as it was laminated with opposing grain pieces and sheathed appropriately.” He filled a 6 1⁄4″-diameter hole cut into the end of the centerboard with lead shotgun pellets bedded in epoxy and sheathed the outsides of both the rudder and the centerboard in 10-oz ’glass and epoxy.
The plans for the Seil 18’s transom include a notch to port for a small outboard and a smaller circular notch to starboard for sculling.
Vivier offers two alternative sail plans: a 118-sq-ft loose-footed standing lug or a 108-sq-ft balanced lug with boom. Adrian opted for the latter, again guided by the WoodenBoat Forum “about sail twist and control,” and because he had used such a rig on a smaller pram dinghy he had previously owned. The plans call for spars made of northern pine, spruce, Douglas-fir, or larch, with the mast stock glued up in three layers. Adrian made the spars from salvaged Douglas-fir—the mast is hollow; the boom and yard are solid. He thinks he didn’t hollow out the middle of the mast’s three laminates as much as the design stipulated, and so it is a little heavier than intended, but nonetheless it is easy for one person to step and unstep, ashore or afloat.
The Seil is a fun boat to sail. It has the momentum of a bigger boat, and tacks easily and with no threat of getting caught in irons, an important quality for a boat without a jib that could be backed to help the bow around. It is very stable, which is particularly important to Adrian: he has a 12-year-old son and is “navigating between keeping him interested and not giving him a fright.” It is also remarkably directionally stable: a couple of times I secured the tiller amidships and didn’t touch it for a while: she held her course nicely, despite variations in the wind strength. In Vivier’s study plans there is an option to create a large flat sleeping platform (using the thwarts and floorboards) so that one or two people can spend nights on board under a tent (although Adrian has no plans to do this).
The Seil 18’s sternsheets extend to the forward rowing thwart. There is plenty of room aboard for six, the design’s maximum capacity.
Adrian bought used 14′ oars from a local rowing club and shortened them to 10′, the length specified by Vivier. The Seil weighs almost 600 lbs, so it was no surprise that, when rowing, it takes a bit of effort to get it moving, but before long it starts to carry its way in a most satisfactory manner. Adrian has rowed the boat extensively—including one 2.7-nautical mile trip from the Tasmanian town of Snug to Bruny Island and back—and reports that it is better to leave the rudder in place with the tiller tied on the centerline for directional stability. To reduce windage and clutter when rowing, the mast can be stowed on top of the side benches—one end on top of the aft buoyancy tanks, the other beneath the mast thwart, while the other spars can be stowed in the bottom of the boat beneath the thwarts. Similarly, although Adrian does sometimes sail his boat with the oars stowed along the gunwales, in windier conditions he likes to get them out of the way in the bottom of the boat. With a second set of oars, two rowers will get a great deal of pleasure from this boat, and there is plenty of room for a crew of up to six when sailing or rowing. Although Adrian has no plans to get an outboard motor, the Seil was designed with room under the sternsheets’ removable ’midship sections in which one could easily be stowed.
The Seil 18 is a thoroughly enjoyable boat to row and sail and, I would imagine, would also behave well under power. It is excellently suited for singlehanded use, but there is plenty of room for a helpful crew member and several passengers.
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boatbuilding and repair industry, and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
There is only land here in South Louisiana if the Mississippi River, which drains some four-tenths of the United States, brings it to spread out over the edge of the continent at the Gulf of Mexico. Its alluvium is an offering to cypress, cattails, and spartina to build the land higher—if the next flood, storm surge, or rising sea level does not reclaim it first.
Over millennia, the river has formed a 10,000 square-mile expanse of mud—the Mississippi Delta. This mud is both the product of the river and its primary impediment. The river always seeks a faster route to the sea, and so its course across the massive mudbank of its own making wavers over time. Some 5,000 years ago, as the last ice age receded, torrents of glacial meltwater flowed into the river. It sought open territory, and the delta shifted to the east.
Roger Siebert
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Prior to that period, what we know now as Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas would have been open coast. But, over the course of 2,000 years, the new delta hemmed in these waters until their connection to the Gulf narrowed to deep passes through the mud. The waters seemed more akin to lakes than bays.
Because the river builds the land here millimeter by millimeter, the horizon is everywhere a thin green band, like a patinaed copper weld between the expanse of the water and the dome of the sky, limiting what was once limitless. There is no vertical relief, apart from the occasional upward lilt of a road bridge lifting drivers above the water. To fully appreciate the beauty and power of the forces at work here, one must invert the landscape to see not just the thin contour of the earth above the water, but also the topography carved into the delta by ever-changing river and tidal currents.
A cool late-March breeze blew the scent of jasmine among the homes of uptown New Orleans, which lies between the manmade levee along the Mississippi River and the subtle natural levee farther inland, just a handful of feet above sea level. The river flows around Carrollton Bend, a quarter-mile from my apartment, along a riverbed that cuts 90′ deep into the muddy delta. A few miles down the river, as it rounds Algiers Point in front of the French Quarter, it deepens to 200′.
Photographs by the author
While Emma, Cassius, and Sophia (from left to right) apparently enjoyed the sail across Lake Pontchartrain, Sophia would later confess that she was seasick for much of the crossing.
It was early afternoon, and I had just gotten home from work at the hospital. Next up for the day was a 22-nautical-mile sail aboard my 23′ Norwalk Islands Sharpie (NIS 23), MYRNA C, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans to Madisonville with three friends—Emma, Sophia, and Cassius—for the first, staging leg of a weekend afloat exploring Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas.
We met at Bucktown, just across the Orleans Parish line. No clouds marred the sky. The breeze blew from the southeast at 15 to 18 knots. With a single-reefed main and a full mizzen, we sailed out of the harbor on a close reach, and then fell off to head north. A couple miles to our west, the Pontchartrain Causeway shot straight across the brackish lake until it dipped below the horizon. The lake here is 24 miles across but only 10′ to 15′ deep, a trapped shallow sea.
Our course was an easy broad reach, and we made 6 knots sliding down the fronts of the following sea. We sipped beer and chatted. Eight miles from the south shore, the causeway lifts for one of two High Rise Bridges over the channel, the only vertical relief on the horizon except the skyline of New Orleans, which was receding behind us. We plowed under the bridge on a deep broad reach as cars and trucks hammered the bridge deck above us. We were beyond sight of land in every direction, yet adjacent to a pulsing artery of civilization. It was an odd discord, and I was eager to get farther west, beyond the bridge’s intrusion.
The sun settled down among hazy low clouds. The color of water shifted from light brown to a glinting blue. The sky glimmered gold. Our bow wave rode just short of the stern, sometimes slipping farther aft as we lifted on plane, surfing the 3′ to 5′ chop.
As our spot-on Earth wheeled out of reach of the sun, we picked up the marks at the head of the channel into the Tchefuncte River on the horizon. Cassius offered me another beer, but I declined, not having made the passage into Madisonville from the lake before. I needed to focus on our course.
The black stripe painted on the Tchefuncte River Lighthouse provides a more precise back range mark for vessels navigating the narrow channel leading to the mouth of the river. The water surrounding the channel is only 3′ to 6′ deep.
Soon, the stars emerged. In the dark, the wind seemed stronger, the waves bigger, and the heel of the boat more threatening. The comfort of the previous four hours sublimated into anxiety. We sailed on a beam reach toward the Tchefuncte Light, and then had to turn due east to enter the last leg of the channel before the river. I considered using the engine to ease our way upwind, but with the chop, the prop would intermittently roar out the water and the hull would pound. The crew would not be happy. So, we stuck with the sails.
Cassius and Sophia used the spotlight to identify the channel’s day markers. Emma looked out for the lonely pilings and ruins from Hurricane Ida that lurked just above the surface on the west side of the river entrance. A grounded tug listed on a bar. The low land was barely land at all, just a slender finger visible between troughs of the waves. The sails crackled, and the centerboard shifted as we traded four tacks upwind in the dark.
MYRNA C, here at rest on Friday morning, had spent the night at the seawall in Madisonville without me. After we had docked on the Thursday night, it took us 30 minutes to find an Uber driver willing, at 10 p.m., to drive us back to New Orleans across the 24-mile-long Pontchartrain Causeway.
We rounded the last mark and turned north to slink into the calm of the river. The boat’s heel mellowed into a gentle repose, and the mood on board transformed. We shook out the reef in the main to glide north upriver. The wind ambled through Spanish-moss-draped cypress, silhouetted against the glow of Madisonville. Cassius said he understood now why I had wanted to hold off on a beer. I finally took him up on his offer.
Two miles upriver, we made Madisonville, and sidled up to the town’s seawall for the night. I had to return to New Orleans to check on a few of my hospitalized patients in the morning. Emma, Sophia, and Cassius had to return, too. We called an Uber to bring us back across the long causeway to the city, but this time in total darkness and in just 35 minutes.
I made my hospital rounds the next morning and drove back to Bucktown to drop my car before catching another Uber back to Madisonville. As my ride crossed the low steel-plate girder swing bridge over the Tchefuncte River, I saw MYRNA C sitting prim on the town seawall against a line of grand live-oak trees, their gnarled branches reaching just shy of water. I brought my bags on board. The solar panel controller was not working, and it was not salvageable. I relied on the solar panel to recharge the battery that powers the navigation and cabin lights and radio. I debated calling off the rest of the trip, but then remembered I had backup battery-powered lights in the cabin, a backup anchor light, and colored glow sticks for navigation lights. There was enough power left in the battery to recharge my cellphone at least a couple times. The handheld VHF had a full charge. I decided to proceed.
I requested an opening of the Madisonville bridge on channel 13. I would have to wait until 3 p.m., about 15 minutes, for the next scheduled opening. When its low horn blew, drivers slowed to a stop. The steel bridge girder creaked into motion. I passed between the bridge piers into the lower Tchefuncte.
The approach to Pass Manchac during the golden hour of dusk was my favorite moment of the trip. The tower off the starboard bow is one of around 150 that carry power lines across the west side of Lake Maurepas.
A stiff south breeze pushed up the river. At its mouth, I raise a reefed main only and set off closehauled toward the Tchefuncte River lighthouse, situated on a peninsula of spartina-topped land. Clouds obscured the sun, and only an oily yellow light filtered through. The water was dirty brown and, to the west, a high-voltage powerline draped just off the coast before disappearing into the sodden air in the distance.
The whitecapped chop shoved the bow again and again, like an annoying little brother, as we made way upwind. The NIS 23 does not love a close haul and after an hour of ambivalent progress, I flopped to a starboard tack to dip the port-mounted outboard deep in the lake. I started it up and motorsailed for about 30 minutes to get well to windward in order to make the entrance of Pass Manchac, which leads to Lake Maurepas, on one tack.
The powerline running just off the swampy coast shadowing my course lifted high into the sky to cross Pass Manchac, like a woman lifting her skirt to step across a puddle. As I approached, the sun settled lower to the west. The overcast sky coalesced into islands of tall and narrow clouds, like hanging planters on the horizon. The yellow, oily light changed to a warm glow. The chop faded to gentle wavelets.
I felt the outgoing current of the pass catch the centerboard and rudder, jostling our course as the depth plunged from 5′ at the mouth to 56′ where the pass runs by the eastern head of Jones Island, a 6-mile-long low-lying island between the two meandering passages connecting Pontchartrain and Maurepas. Pass Manchac, the larger of the two, cuts deep into the mud left by the Mississippi River over thousands of years, reminding me of the accretive forces that shaped the land here. I imagined the topography of the unrelentingly flat landscape turned upside down, making the pass a sharp ridge rising 56′ above the surrounding marsh.
I motored up the Amite River as far as Carthage Bluff. I thought about stopping here, but the one person I saw on the bank seemed none too pleased to see me, so I continued on my way. I wondered how the buildings had made it through Hurricane Ida intact while camps just 1-1/2 miles away, at the mouth of the river, had been flattened.
As I sailed on a beam reach up the pass at 4 knots, I approached a collection of camps. Camps are what would be called a beach house in most parts of the country, though with an interesting twist: many are located deep in the marsh or bayou and are accessible only by boat. Powerlines cross miles of marsh to reach them, or they are powered by generators. They are elevated on pilings and fronted by a small dock. Sometimes they are perched entirely over the water, but usually are surrounded on three sides by marsh grass or swamp. There are some five dozen around Pass Manchac. Some seem like the full-time homes of commercial fishermen and a few are practically mansions. Nearly all of them show unrepaired wind and storm surge damage from Hurricane Ida, the Category 4 storm that passed through here in August 2021.
A man fishing from the dock fronting his modest camp gave a slow wave, seemingly in appreciation of the sight of a sailboat actually sailing in these waters. Wind rustled through the cordgrass and cattails on the banks. Purple martins looped overhead in gangs. Cormorants cruised the surface. Gulls screeched. The day seemed to be telling me to call it quits.
My goal was to reach the mouth of the Amite River that night, but it lies about 12 nautical miles farther west, on the other side of Lake Maurepas, and only 45 minutes of sunlight remained. After sailing a few hundred yards past the east end of Jones Island, I doubled back and turned into North Pass, moving silently past the camps lining the bank until marsh again fully took charge of the landscape.
I nosed the bow of the sharpie into the cattails lining the 280′-wide channel. As the wind began to push us away from the bank to the north, I dropped the anchor into the marsh’s thick mud. As we eased back, the current caught the hull, too, and angled us to the east.
I tied the mizzen off to the starboard ’midships stanchion to clear the cockpit to prepare dinner. I pulled out the Coleman stove, setting it on the port cockpit bench, and prepared a simple meal of canned chickpeas, tinned sardines, cheddar and diced onions, and bell peppers. I ate in the cockpit, surrounded in all directions by marsh. Cattails, spartina, a few palmettos, and the even rarer stunted cypress lined the bank, which made a rim of slightly higher ground around the low interior of the marsh that I could peer into only by standing on my toes on top of the cabin. Green-gold spartina standing just a couple of feet tall dominated these endlessly flat estuarine plains, amplifying the flaring spectrum of the setting sun.
Soon bullfrogs and crickets filled the enveloping darkness like radio static. Mosquitoes and no-see-ums followed, peppering the deck and cockpit. I hustled the screens into place on the hatches, retreated to my berth, and fell asleep.
Early the next morning, distant outboards whirred like giant mosquitoes, their pitch rising and falling with the Doppler effect as they raced back and forth through Pass Manchac less than 1⁄2 mile away across the narrow neck of land at Jones Island’s east end. I put on some coffee and munched an almond-butter sandwich as I looked absent-mindedly at the hundreds of flies that had drowned on deck in the night’s dew.
The third day of the trip began with a warm sunrise, but the rain soon moved in, so I decided to stay at anchor in North Pass and spend the morning reading.
The day was overcast and dreary, and I was in no rush to get going. I spent much of the morning reading journal articles on living-donor liver transplant, on which I had to give a short ethics lecture in the coming week. As I lay in my berth, light rain intermittently pattered on the cabintop overhead.
By 10 a.m., I was ready to get moving. The breeze pulsed from the southwest, meaning that the rest of Manchac would have to be covered with the motor. Tacking upwind and upstream in the serpentine 80-yard pass would be a Sisyphean endeavor, but I could still sail the mile back down North Pass.
I raised the sails at anchor and fell off to a beam reach, then wing-on-wing, then back to a beam reach as I wound through the last two bends of North Pass. Near the bank, the tail of a redfish danced just above the surface of the water as it nuzzled the bottom rooting for a meal. I came around the nose of Jones Island, and headed up to a close haul to see what kind of progress I could make upwind in Pass Manchac. The east-bound current was too much; the marsh upstream moved away from me even as I sailed toward it. I turned on my own mosquito and hummed west for Lake Maurepas.
After motoring about 4 nautical miles, I passed under a bascule railroad bridge and then a road bridge and eased into Maurepas. There was a steady SSW breeze at 8 to 10 knots. I put up the full main and mizzen. It was only midday, and the Amite River, my destination, lay just 8 nautical miles due west, just beyond the horizon. The sky was a dull blue. Lazy and amorphous rain cells sauntered across the lake from the west, occasionally milling around when the wind rested.
The lake was dotted every couple hundred feet with low-profile, circular green buoys about the size of a Frisbee with a small solar panel and light in the middle. “Geophysical Technology” was stamped in black ink on the tops. I would later learn that the buoys were part of seismic testing to assess the environmental impact of a planned carbon sequestration project under the lake that would serve a hydrogen manufacturing plant 37 miles away in Ascension Parish. It is ironic that we are trying to put carbon back into the mud of the Mississippi River Delta after spending the last 100 years pumping it out through oil wells.
I thought this quintessential-Louisiana, hand-stenciled marker reading “STUMPS” was hilarious until my centerboard hit a stump about 100′ beyond it. I was then grateful that the person who made it had taken the time to warn me to slow down.
By late afternoon, I arrived at the mouth of the Amite River. A widely spaced line of cypress stood as sentries guarding its mouth, and I was tempted to motor through them to reach the main flow of the river. Instead, I followed the channel indicated on the chart as well as the corresponding pole-mounted channel markers. Both guided me into an oxbow that seemed like the original mouth of the river before the shoreline receded. Despite being in the middle of the channel, I saw the centerboard line go slack, and my speed slowed as I motored into a very soft mudbank. I backed off and then headed back toward the scattered and isolated cypress.
About 1,000′ from the “STUMPS” sign, there was a narrow line of cypress along the old bank of the Amite River. I thought this would be the location of the stumps, but they were much farther out, revealing just how much the mouth of the river has shifted in recent times. Beyond this line of trees and stumps, I reached the deeper waters of the river.
A couple hundred yards from the sparse line of cypress along what was once the riverbank, a group of four pilings held up a galvanized ladder to the light marking entrance to the river and a sign that read simply, “STUMPS.” I turned the throttle down to idle and crept toward the river. Clunk! My heart skipped. I yanked up the board before it could hit any more stumps and pressed on. There were no visible stumps, no irregularity in the water suggesting anything just below the surface, and the boat drew only a few inches with the board up. I decided to drift extremely slowly over the old riverbank and drop into the main river. I made it and continued to motor upriver.
The west wind let me sail down the Amite River in silence with only the occasional creak from the rigging interrupting the quiet.
I hadn’t gone far when a 6′ alligator swam toward the boat, its tail swinging in a long S. When just 2′ from the hull, it must have realized that I was not its kind, and dashed away toward the riverbed. Broad, flared, cypress trunks rose from the shallows on the bank, then narrowed as their branches angled off, full of early spring’s bright-green leaves. I motored about 2-1⁄2 miles upriver to Carthage Bluff, a collection of ramshackle camps and mobile homes. The breeze was blowing from the west now, and so I raised sail and headed back downriver. The booms were sheeted way out and almost touched the branches shading the bank. A small fish jumped out of the water, landed on a lily pad, and lay there flopping on its side. Two blue herons chased one another in soaring arcs over the cypress crowns. An owl hooted. Purple iris blooms gleamed from deep in the swamp, their seclusion given up in brief glimpses between the trees and brush.
Back at the river mouth, I furled the sails, pulled up the centerboard and rudder, and played stump roulette again as the west wind pushed MYRNA C over the old bank back into Lake Maurepas. I then motored near the NOAA-marked channel for protection from the northeast breeze that was expected to roll in that night.
I anchored about 100′ offshore, and had plenty of time before sunset. I read some more before pulling together a meal and settling in for the night. Soon after dark, I heard a motorboat approach. To make sure I’d be seen, I turned on my navigation lights, in addition to the anchor light that was already on. A 26′ Sea Ray passed me by, headed up the channel, and I returned to my reading. I heard the boat throttle up once they were clear of me, and then I remembered the NOAA channel led nowhere. Sure enough, seconds later, I heard their outboards strain against the mudbank.
I had seen pictures of lonely cypress trees, like this one, in art galleries in New Orleans, but never a living example. Beyond it, is the “STUMPS” marker off the entrance to the Amite River.
Bugs were whining just beyond my screens, and I had very little enthusiasm for getting involved in their grounding. My plywood boat with a 6-hp would not be able to pull a boat like theirs off the bottom. I heard the engines revving and the rush of water against the hull, and figured they were making progress. Yet, the sounds seemed to be getting farther away rather than closer. I got concerned—were they trying to drive through the oxbow? I was new to these waters, and perhaps they were more familiar. Maybe there was a channel to get into. I hailed them several times on the radio to ask. No response. I went back to my reading. Twenty minutes later, I heard them getting closer again, now with the high-pitched scream of their engine alarm blaring between full-throttle blasts of water. They had made it all the way around the oxbow. Convinced now of their incompetence, I braved the bugs to come on deck. Just as I did, I watched their bow light go skyward, the engine roared, and a woman’s voice exclaimed, “There is water in the boat!” Stumps.
They were about 1,000′ from me. The night was still, and I called out to them, my voice echoing through the cypress swamp. A man yelled back that they had no radio on board and their phones were dead. There were no injuries and despite the damage to their hull, they were not sinking, perched as they were atop a cypress stump. I called the marine patrol for them and went to bed. I was not going to put my boat on a stump, too.
The next morning, I woke an hour and a half before dawn. The wind whispered over the black, glassy surface of the lake. I looked west. Every 15 seconds the lake lit up with thousands of white lights on the seismic buoys, covering the lake like an airport tarmac and signaling that it had been yoked to human enterprise. To my south, I could still see the glowing port navigation light of the marooned Sea Ray. With each flash of the seismic buoys, a faint outline of the hull appeared, angled upwards atop the cypress stump, a warning against the presumption of dominance over nature.
Before dawn, Lake Maurepas was lit up every 15 seconds by thousands of flashing white seismic-survey lights. The light show abruptly ended when the sun rose above the Pass Manchac bridges on the east side of the lake.
I raised anchor and motored through the lights toward where I expected the sun to rise, reaching the east end of the lake just as it cleared the elevated interstate bridge. I carried on back through the deep Pass Manchac to Lake Pontchartrain.
By mid-morning I had reached Pontchartrain. The gray-blue cloud cover burned off making way for clear skies and a building 12-knot breeze from the northeast. I began making my way southeast toward New Orleans. A few hours later, the wind had built to 20 to 25 knots, forcing me to double reef the main and douse the mizzen. MYRNA C powered through the 5′ chop.
On my homeward leg across Lake Pontchartrain, the flat Louisiana terrain left little to see but water. Only the Causeway (at left) and the tallest buildings of the New Orleans skyline (right of center) rose above the horizon.
I was 10 miles and more from land in all directions and felt far offshore, but just 10′ below the tip of the centerboard was the Mississippi’s muddy runoff from the eastern United States. Even as I worked my way upwind, Lake Pontchartrain’s waves were eroding the cypress trees’ grip on the muddy shores of this endlessly flat land. The Causeway capped the eastern horizon and, to the southeast, the towers of New Orleans were back in view, rising above the thin green line of the levee protecting a city that rests largely below sea level. I passed under the hammering bridge deck of the busy Causeway, eased the sheets, and headed for home.
Peter Sawyer is a general surgery resident in New Orleans, Louisiana. He learned to sail when he was 11 years old at Camp Sea Gull, a seafaring summer camp on the North Carolina coast. He has been at it ever since.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Wooden boats come with their fair share of hand-sanding, whether it’s smoothing wood surfaces or between coats of varnish or paint, so it pays to extend the useful life of sandpaper. In my experience, it’s not the abrasive particles that wear out. I’ve looked at the grit of new and well-used sandpaper through a strong magnifying lens, and there’s not much difference: the grit outlasts the paper. Some of the newer, more expensive sandpapers have thicker backing materials, but they still can be torn. Once a small tear starts on the edge, it’s likely to continue across the sheet.
Photographs by the author
The paper backing of a piece of 150-grit doesn’t hold folds well and can roll, damaging the abrasive coating. The same 150-grit sandpaper with duct-tape backing doesn’t roll and keeps its shape. The sharp, undamaged folds can more effectively work into corners.
Unlike sandpaper, duct tape is not easily torn, and when applied to the back of a sheet of sandpaper it adds its resistance to tearing. Sandpaper is wider than duct tape, so it takes several lengths of tape to cover an entire sheet. Overlapping the tape by 1⁄4″ or so will avoid creating weak spots at seams that are just butted together. A taped full sheet can be cut with a utility knife to whatever sizes are needed.
Duct tape can be applied in multiple strips to cover wide areas of the back side of sandpaper, and strips of sandpaper can be butted together on a single width of tape.
One of my favorite sizes for hand-sanding is a one-third sheet folded in thirds. With the duct-tape backing, the creases stay put; without the tape, the creases roll as the three layers of unreinforced paper slide over each other, leading to less effective sanding and delamination of the paper and the abrasive coating.
Although I retired my quarter-sheet Makita orbital sander years ago when I switched to random-orbit disc sanders, I remember well how it regularly tore the sandpaper loaded in it long before the grit gave out. Duct-tape reinforcement would prevent the untimely failures of sandpaper in fractional-sheet orbital sanders.
While two 11″ strips of sandpaper can be butted together on a length of duct tape (top) to make a long sanding strip, a single 11″ length can be backed with an extra-long piece of tape (middle) to create handholds and still have enough sandpaper to do the work.
Duct tape even makes sheet sandpaper work very well for a job that it couldn’t do without the reinforcement: sanding cylinders in shoeshine fashion. With a strip wrapped over the top of anything round from a bronze pintle to a spruce spar, the draped ends, pulled tight and alternating up and down, sand round and smooth; only cloth-backed sanding belts were strong enough to do that work. I had been using old 3″ x 21″ belts from my Makita and 6″ x 48″ belts from my stationary Grizzly. While the cloth backing was much stronger than the paper of sheet sandpaper, the grit was usually worn from long use and not as effective as it once was. New belts would have sharper grit, but I was reluctant to buy belts just to tear them up into strips for hand use. The fresh fabric-and-resin backing would be stiff, making the edges prone to dig in, and not as easy to handle as belts softened by use on the machines for which they were intended.
A tape-backed sandpaper strip can stand up to aggressive sanding that would quickly tear unreinforced sandpaper.
Sheets of sandpaper are 11″ long—not long enough to use with the shoeshine method on a mast 3″ in diameter. Two 11″ strips, butted end-to-end and backed with a 22″ length of tape, are more than long enough, but the sandpaper on the ends never gets used. A single 11″ strip of sandpaper provides enough abrasive to do the sanding, and a length of tape extending 1′ beyond each end of the sandpaper and folded back on itself will make 6″ handholds. The taped sandpaper strips work great for rounding and smoothing spars; I can pull as hard as I like to move wood quickly and still not tear the sandpaper.
I’ve had duct tape and sandpaper in my shop ever since I built my first boat in 1987. They may be an unlikely combination, but after you put them together, they seem made for each other.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
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Since changing homeports from Florida to Virginia in 2021, Skipper and I are once again trailering boats to local creeks, rivers, and bays. Our small-craft collection includes a punt, two kayaks, seven sailboats, and a canoe; they range in length from 8′ to 17′ and in weight from 40 lbs to 150 lbs. Rather than buying multiple trailers or committing to the cartop challenge, we found a small, multipurpose trailer with an extensive selection of racks that supports a variety of boats in our fleet: the Malone MicroSport Trailer. We bought it used this year. It had been assembled the year it was built, 2012, by a Malone dealer and was rigged to carry a fishing kayak and sailing kayak.
Our 2012 MicroSport Base trailer is built from 11-gauge galvanized steel and has a load capacity of 500 lbs. The overall length, from hitch coupler to aft frame, is 13′6″, allowing for the transport of boats up to 20′ in length. It is equipped with Malone’s retractable tongue kit, and with the tongue retracted the overall trailer length shrinks to 7′4″. Thanks to the rubber bumpers included with the kit and added to the aft frame, the trailer can be stored vertically. The coupler has a convenient handle for lifting to and from the towing vehicle’s trailer ball.
Kent and Audrey Lewis
The mounting racks are easily attached and can be located in a variety of different positions to offer great versatility. Secured by universal plates and bolts, the racks can also be used on other trailers or roof racks.
The 2012 system includes two 66″ load bars that sit 30″ above the ground and provide the mounting point for a wide selection of Malone racks. The racks attach to the load bars with Malone’s Jawz universal-fit mounting system, which consists of mounting plates for a variety of trailer and automobile crossbars, secured and tightened with steel mounting bolts and T-knob nuts.
Our trailer is set up to carry a 10′ sit-on-top kayak and a 14′ Sunfish sailboat, using two J-Style DownLoader racks and two heavy-duty MegaWings. For our kayak, we are using the side-loading J-shaped carriers, which are of corrosion-resistant aluminum, well-padded for hull protection, and rated for 75 lbs each. The J-Style DownLoader carrier also has slots for tie-down straps and is part of Malone’s roof-top DownLoader system. Loading our 40-lb kayak from the side of the trailer can be accomplished easily by two people, or one person can load the bow first, then move around to load the stern. The cradles steadily support a kayak while straps are tightened or loosened, and there are plenty of locations to attach the straps.
To carry our Sunfish, we are using the V-style carrier called the MegaWing, which also attaches to the load bars with the Jawz system. The load bars are spaced far enough apart for us to spread the MegaWings and secure the boat in a balanced position—the load-bar spread is adjustable from 44″ to 63″. Each V-shaped MegaWing is 27-1⁄2″ wide, 6″ deep, and can carry up to 150 lbs. The MegaWing is made from non-marring nylon and has integral cutouts to accommodate 1″-wide straps. The MegaWing nylon material is slightly flexible and conforms to the Sunfish hull shape without placing excessive pressure in any one area. All the attachments can be swapped out in minutes without the use of hand tools.
Malone’s Jawz mounting system gives versatility and stability not typical in other trailers of this size. Seen here the trailer has been set up to carry a 14′ Sunfish with a 10′ sit-on kayak on edge beside it. Both boats can be loaded on and off the trailer by one person. Because of the raised position of the racks the spare wheel is still easily accessible when the trailer is fully loaded.
The 2023 MicroSport Base Trailer is still made of marine-grade galvanized steel, but it has an extra leaf in each spring and will carry 800 lbs. It is 13′ 3″ long and has an overall width 55″; the frame width between fenders is 40″. It weighs 197 lbs, has galvanized wheels with marine-grade sealed bearings, and comes with submersible LED lighting. The crossbars are now 78″ wide.
Malone, based in Westbrook, Maine, a suburb of Portland, began as Malone of Maine making fine-quality laminated wooden paddles and later made roof-rack fixtures for paddle craft; in 2001 the company established itself as Malone Auto Racks, a roof-rack manufacturer. Trailers were introduced into its line in 2008. The new MicroSport trailer ships in four boxes, unassembled, to the consumer’s door. Malone says that the new model requires approximately three to four hours to assemble using standard tools; based on our experience of assembling other sports trailers, that estimate seems reasonable. There is nothing complicated about the design, the hardware is of good quality, and the assembled trailer is light on its feet.
Malone also offers several more styles of racks to fit a variety of watercraft and bicycles, plus T-racks to stack watercraft. It is unusual to find a company that builds trailers with the small boater in mind and with so many options for different types of boats. The Malone system offers outstanding versatility, convenience, and quality, and we are very happy with the new addition to our fleet.
Audrey (Skipper) and KentLewis have a passion for trailers, which they disguise with 16 small boats. They are currently exploring the Tidewater area of Virginia and North Carolina.
The MicroSport Base Trailer is made in the USA and comes with pre-tested electrical system, pre-fitted chassis components, instruction manual, and registration documentation. Available direct from Malone, the base trailer is priced at $1,999. The MicroSport Retractable Tongue Kit is $199. Malone products are also available through a network of dealers and online retailers. See comments below for further information on locating a dealer.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
I like to eat especially well when I’m cruising, and I enjoy the juxtaposition of roughing it in a small boat with fine dining while at anchor. I’ve done well with frying and sautéing on camp stoves, but I’ve missed baked goods. I have a camper’s Dutch oven that you cover with coals, but was never brave enough to cook with it when I had campfires. I’ve known about Coleman’s Portable Camping Oven for decades but had never seen one in use. It was time to give it a try; I bought one.
Photographs by the author
The three stoves used for testing the oven are, from left to right: a single-burner stove with a 1-lb propane tank; a portable butane gas range; and the Gas One Mini with the propane adapter.
For my first tests with the oven, rather than go the time and effort of finding a recipe, buying ingredients, and mixing up something, I bought a few tubes of prepared dough for cinnamon rolls and biscuits.
For baking trials, I used premade dough and followed the instructions as well as I could. After relying on the oven’s built-in thermometer for the first trial, I used an oven thermometer to get accurate readings. The disposable aluminum pie pan worked well and didn’t leave the rolls scorched on the bottom.
The cinnamon rolls require baking at 350°F for 20 minutes or until golden brown. For heat, I used a Coleman single-burner camp stove, the kind that screws onto the top of a 1-lb propane cylinder. The base for the cylinder kept the oven perched on top steadily enough. I lit the burner and opened the valve to its maximum setting. After 16 minutes, the oven’s temperature dial was at 340°F and there was no sign of it progressing to 350°F, so I put two cinnamon rolls on a foil pie pan and slid them in. The temperature gauge fell about 10 degrees while the rolls were baking.
I took a peek at about 10 minutes and the rolls had risen well and hadn’t been scorched by the high heat. At 12 minutes they were golden brown and ready to eat.
In spite of the quick bake, the rolls were fluffy, and the bottoms were as golden brown as the tops. I weighed the propane cylinder before and after baking and the combined 28 minutes of warming the oven and baking the rolls had consumed just 2.75 oz of fuel. At that rate the 1-lb canister of propane would, in theory, fuel 163 minutes of baking. (Nearly empty canisters don’t put out as vigorous a flame.)
Next, I tried my butane-fueled stove. I didn’t expect it to do as well—it has a smaller burner head and is quieter than the one-burner propane—but it brought the stove all the way up to 350°F in 16 minutes and continued raising the temperature. I put a new batch of cinnamon rolls in, dialed the flame down—a bit too far at first—then up again to hold at 350°F. Within 13 minutes, the rolls were turning golden brown. Cooking with butane consumed 2.3 oz over the 29 minutes. A full canister contains 7.8 oz of butane, enough for 98 minutes of baking.
I used doubled aluminum foil for baking the biscuits and, while it worked well in the oven, its flexibility proved challenging while removing the hot food.
The propane had delivered 10.2 minutes of baking heat per ounce, the butane 12.6 minutes per ounce. In the standard 7.8- to 8-oz canisters, butane costs 33¢ per ounce at current U.S. prices; propane in 16-oz canisters costs 58¢ per ounce. I was pleased that butane had the edge for both performance and economy as my butane stoves are the ones I use most often, and they provide a more stable base for the oven. Coleman made the oven for use on its classic two-burner stove, but it works fine with a single-burner stove that has supports long enough to span the 7″-diameter opening in the bottom of the oven.
The chocolate-chip cookies spread as they baked, limiting how many I could put in the oven at one time. The parchment paper worked well and didn’t scorch while baking, but it was slippery and should have been supported by a cooking pan with a lip. This batch got away from me and smeared hot chocolate down my shirt front on its way to the ground.
Finally, I tested the oven using my GasOne Mini as the heat source. The Mini is a dual-fuel stove and I used the adapter hose to hook it up to a propane canister. This time, I decided to bake some biscuits and to place an oven thermometer in with them to get a better sense of the internal temperature. In 12 minutes, with the burner going full blast, the oven’s gauge was showing a temperature of 300°F, but the oven thermometer was reading 350°F, just right for the biscuits. The instructions called for baking at 350°F, for 16 to 19 minutes or until golden brown. The biscuits were golden brown in 14 minutes and, like the cinnamon rolls, flaky right through and browned but not scorched on the bottoms.
While the biscuits were baking, I used my laser thermometer to check the temperature of the door around the oven’s gauge. The readings averaged around 155°F—evidently the gauge isn’t calibrated to take into account the cooling effect of the door. Also, it seems likely that the gauge’s readings will vary with the temperature of the ambient air—I did all my baking tests on warm summer days. An inexpensive oven thermometer set inside the oven would be the best indicator.
Folded, the oven measures 12-1/4″ top to bottom, 12″ side to side, and 2-1/4″ thick (not including the knob or rack). It weighs 7 lbs 3.3 oz.
I’ve been impressed by how well the Portable Camping Oven performs. When folded up it is smaller than a butane stove, it is easy to set up, and supplies even heat without consuming a lot of fuel. Now I just need to go roughing it with recipes and ingredients for baked goods.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats.
The Portable Camping Oven is made by Coleman and is listed at $37.99. It is available from many retail outlets and online sources for around $50.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
James Danner designed and built his own tent so he could more effectively use his Iain Oughtred– designed Caledonia Yawl for adventures in Alaska.
In Southeast Alaska, rocky beaches, insects, and a large resident bear population often make tent-camping on the beach an unappealing option,” James Danner writes from Juneau. “Having a boat tent has really opened up the family’s beach-cruising options. It can be set or struck easily while at anchor and has seen regular summertime use since it was created. My wife, Leni, appreciates the privacy the tent affords while camping on the water, and the kids just think it’s fun, bundled up in a sleeping bag rocking gently at anchor in their collapsible home away from home.”
James Danner
Clever uses of space give Danner’s boat enough room to cruise with his wife and two children.
Danner designed and built the tent for his Iain Oughtred–designed Caledonia Yawl, SPARROW, as a winter project. He based its structure on dome tents he had observed. “Then, the details were worked out over a full-sized mock-up in our basement, using plastic sheeting as pattern material for the various panels. Several Internet searches turned up all of the materials needed to complete the project.”
Danner’s tent is made from heavy-duty coated rip-stop nylon. Five segmented aluminum tent poles fit into pockets sewn into the tent, two of them forming an X across the cockpit from corner to corner. Three shorter poles form hoops to keep the ends open and support the center. The tent attaches to the boat at the gunwales with sewn-in web straps, and its ends are made off to the main and mizzen masts.
“The tent itself is made up of six individual panels that were stitched together with a UV-resistant thread with reinforcing patches added where the tent pole pockets are located,” Danner writes. “The ends of the tent are finished off with zippers to accept solid panels to enclose the cockpit area completely. The plan was to make screened panels that would keep the mosquitoes out while letting a breeze through, but in practice this has been unnecessary, since most summer evening temperatures here range from the mid-40s to low-50s.”
A Different Kind of Alaska
Rod Mort
In fair weather and for maximum ventilation, the tent that Rod Mort developed for his Don Kurylko–designed 18’ Alaska can spring outboard, away from the hull.
For his Don Kurylko–designed Alaska, an 18′ Whitehall type, Rod Mort of British Columbia had a specific idea in mind for a tent. “Don’s Alaska design came about partly as a result of a long cruise he did some years ago in his own Whitehall,” Mort writes. Kurylko lives in Nelson, B.C., which is far inland but within trailering range to gorgeous lakes and also to various sections of the Inside Passage. Beaches in the rocky, narrow passage are relatively scarce, however.
Rod Mort
In cold weather or when it’s time to ward off mosquitoes, the tent can be drawn in for a tight fi t to the gunwales and closed off forward, making a palatial space for the best kind of boat relaxation.
“The tent design is a prototype, but it has worked so well I haven’t had to change anything yet,” Mort writes. “My initial thoughts were to make something without adding any hardware to the boat. I wanted to avoid snaps on the rubrail or some such if I could. To facilitate setting up the boom tent, Don designed an extra maststep through the after deck. One thumb cleat on each mast holds up a ridge-line. The tent is secured to each mast first, then draped over the ridgeline and secured to the sides forward, amidships, and aft. Then the tent poles are added. Three short lengths of line on each side are attached to a loop on a pocket that receives the poles. The pockets and loops are made simply of webbing material. The tent poles needed to be quite thin to take the bend. In practice, I set up the diagonals first, going over the ridgeline and into the pockets on the other side. Two other poles are inserted into the middle pockets and over the ridgeline as well, one forward, one aft.
“Once the poles are in, the sides can be snugged down or left up for increased ventilation. The front and rear sections of the tent can be untied from the masts to open up cockpit space aft or forward. When the tent is secured all around, there is almost complete privacy.
“The fabric itself is coated rip-stop nylon, a very ‘quiet’ material sold here as a guide tarp. We added a couple of panels up front to cover the forward section completely, but we generally leave it open unless it’s quite cold out and the mosquitoes are bad. I have mosquito netting, which I have yet to try. It is suspended from the ridgeline and tucked in around the edges and poles. I’ve discovered that to get any sleep you have to keep mosquitoes as far away as possible.”
Windage is always a consideration in tent design and construction for small craft. “I have a 17-lb fisherman anchor with two fathoms of chain up front and an 11-lb Danforth off the stern,” Mort wrote. “The boat and tent act like a kite with this arrangement. I think about 15 knots of wind would be worrisome. I have an awning for those situations.”
The Randonneur
François Vivier
A veteran of many raids and a prolific small-craft designer from Brittany, François Vivier developed a large-volume tent for his Stir Ven design.
Not every boat design will come with a naval architect–designed tent as part of the specifications, noting panel dimensions and the exact types and locations of tie-downs. François Vivier, however, speaks from experience in the subject, having developed such a tent for his own boat. Because he designed his Stir Ven for competing in “raids”—weeklong sailing and racing events for open sail-and-oars boats—he worked out the details for himself. The result is detailed in drawings included in the plan sheets for the design. Stir Ven, a 22′ sloop (see Small Boats 2007), is one of Vivier’s most successful small boats, several of which would adapt well to raid-sailing or camp-cruising (see www.vivierboats.com). The French call these “randonneurs,” a term adapted for small boats from another kind of adventure, long-distance bicycling.
François Vivier
A zippered panel forward allows access to mooring or anchor lines.
“It takes about 10 minutes to mount the tent,” he writes. “The fi rst step is to put the ensemble boom, sail, and gaff on one side deck. For that purpose, the goose-neck has to be easy to disconnect. This gives much more free space under the tent.” The mainsail’s peak halyard is clipped to the transom and hauled taut, allowing the aft end of the tent to be made off to the halyard at the right height. The other end of the tent is made off to the mast. Vivier specifies five athwartships tent hoops, giving the tent a Conestoga-wagon look and ample interior space, including standing headroom. The hoops consist of sail battens of a type common on catamarans. “The ends are simply inserted into gussets closed by Velcro on one side,” he says. “At the centerline, there is a small rope, sewn to the tent, to attach the batten and keep it in position. For the end battens, there are some additional attachments.”
An unusual aspect of the tent is that those battens are long—about 11′ 6″, or 3.5m—but they stow alongside the cockpit under the side decks, where Vivier’s design already allocated space for stowing the boat’s long oars.
François Vivier
Velcro pockets receive long battens used for the hoops, which stow alongside the cockpit in space originally intended for stowing the boat’s long oars.
“The tent is lashed to the toerail, which is drilled about every foot,” Vivier wrote. “Eyelets on the tent are located in front of these holes. On each side, we use a single line to lash the tent to the toerail. A small cleat, also used for fishing lines, is used to belay the line end.” Because the boat has wide side decks, the cockpit stays dry. His cruising grounds in Brittany are mercifully free of insects, so no netting is needed, though it could easily be added to the tent doors. Vivier used a canvas-style cloth, but figures a lightweight waterproof cloth could be more satisfactory.
François Vivier
Food preparation and moving around are greatly enhanced by the full standing headroom, which any small cruising yacht owner would envy.
A door at the aft end of the tent provides access to the short afterdeck. Forward, a door to one side of the mast permits access to the foredeck for managing the anchor rode or mooring lines. With both doors open, ventilation is assured.
Stir Ven actually has a small cuddy cabin, but the tent extends and enlarges the living area, which can be a positive benefit when socked in by weather, or when four people are aboard. “Two people may sleep in the small cabin and two on the cockpit floorboards,” Vivier writes. “It is possible to stow bags and sails on the side decks, so four people may spend a weeklong raid. Of course, during the day, the cabin is almost full with all the boat and crew equipment.”
A Powerboat Cockpit
Jay Fleming
For hunkering down during inclement weather, a cockpit tent greatly expands the living area of a Snekke from boatbuilder Andrew Wallace of Traditional Boat-works in Canaan, New Hampshire.
by John Harris
In the year 2013, boatmen acquainted with the idea of a camp-cruising powerboat are one in a thousand. Don’t powerboat accommodations comprise decks stacked upon decks, surmounted by a flying bridge? But shipshape camping in open powerboats can be done, and it can be done very well.
Jay Fleming
While the boat is under way, a retractable dodger gives guests shelter from the rain.
Thinking about canvaswork at the design stage helps with clean integration. Start, first, with a boat like Andrew Wallace’s Snekke, a deep, comfortable, 24′ inboard launch of traditional Norwegian origin (see page 44). Then add a handsomely proportioned cuddy, also idiomatic to the type. The neat windshield and high coamings around the cockpit create a solid foundation to which artful canvas-work can be anchored.
A single bent stainless-steel hoop is mounted at the rear of the cuddy opening. Folded away, it’s completely unobtrusive, even with the canvas attached. Flip the hoop back 90 degrees, and you have a dodger that roughly doubles the covered area of the cockpit. This dodger works beautifully under way to protect the helm without obstructing forward vision, and four adults may lounge in the cuddy out of the rain and wind.
Jay Fleming
The cockpit tent itself at-taches to the aft edge of the dodger and fi ts to the coam-ing for a quick setup.
The Snekke has sleeping accommodations for three or more adults on settees or the floorboards. To enclose the cockpit completely, another hoop folds up from its near-invisible housing against the aft bulkhead, supporting a swath of canvas over the helm station. Now you have a completely enclosed cabin with standing headroom aft. Elapsed time: just minutes.
Jay Fleming
The tent provides ample sitting headroom in the cockpit, and its zippers and snaps allow easy access. When the weather clears, the tent removes and stows easily.
Ventilation is essential for crew comfort. If the skies open up, there are small integral vents that will provide at least some cross-flow. (If the tent is being used as a cover for storage, this ventilation can also help guard against mildew.) A crew camping in a temperate climate would open a flap right aft and a forward window in the cuddy for a brisk flow of air at anchor. Screens zip into the openings to keep out stinging and buzzing things.
If it’s colder, Wallace points to a peculiar virtue of the inboard-powered Snekke: the 800-lb iron Sabb diesel, mounted right in the middle of the cockpit, radiates heat long after it’s been shut down. Free heat for winter camping!
The Snekke is a proper little yacht, and canvaswork in this class is not cheap if hired, or easy if you do it yourself. The bending of the hoops is best left to a professional shop accustomed to that sort of work. The intricate fabric shapes require careful patterning and siting of zippers and snaps. The result, rendered in the best UV-resistant yacht canvas, is as elegant as it is functional.
In the summer of 2017, the Maine Maritime Museum (MMM) in Bath, Maine, began a year-long restoration of the recently acquired MARY E, a 70′ two-masted schooner built in Bath in 1906 and the last surviving example of her type. As the museum began the renovation, Kurt Spiridakis, MMM’s director of boatbuilding, put a proposal to the board of trustees: the MARY E would need a tender. He suggested they build a replica of a peapod built around 1886 in Maine’s Washington County. Although the MARY E would more likely have had a dory as a tender, the Washington County peapod was representative of the era in which the schooner had been built. Furthermore, it had good load-carrying volume, could accommodate multiple passengers, and, with three rowing stations and two possible rigs, could be configured in several ways. Kurt was given the green light to build the boat in the museum’s Boatshop.
The Boatshop was initially established to restore private boats and reproduce originals in the museum’s boat collection, but over time it has expanded its mission to offer courses in boatbuilding—most particularly to middle-school students—and a range of associated traditional crafts. On occasion, the staff build or restore boats on commission.
The plans for the peapod had been redrawn for the museum in 1979 by David W. Dillion from the lines and offsets taken off an existing boat in 1937 by Howard I. Chapelle and presented in his classic book, American Small Sailing Craft. Toward the end of the summer in 2017, Kurt lofted the boat and then shifted his focus from hands-on to logistics.
Photographs courtesy of Maine Maritime Museum
The peapod has 10 strakes. The learning curve was steep but, says Kurt, by the time the fourth plank was laid, the crew was well-practiced in the process and the build established a rhythm.
“The boat,” he explains, “was built mainly by volunteers. The museum has a team of about 35 volunteers who come and go in the Boatshop. Some of them are here only for the summer. Some are never here in the summer. Some will work on one aspect of boatbuilding once a year, like spiling. A normal boatbuilding project develops a flow, a rhythm. But when your workforce is intermittent, that doesn’t happen so much. It’s definitely not the most efficient way to build a boat.” But, where the project lacked efficiency, it had dedication and heart. “They are all really devoted, interested people,” says Kurt. “So, it’s just a matter of communicating; communication is everything.”
With the hull planked up and ready to be turned upright, fitting out and finishing would follow.
Working in a teaching environment is not new for Kurt. After training at the Carpenter’s Boatshop in Pemaquid, Maine, in the early 2000s, he went to the Alexandria Seaport Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia, to be a boatbuilding instructor, and from there traveled on to Greece to spend a year apprenticing for a traditional boatbuilder. He has been at MMM since 2008 when he returned from Europe to take up the position of the museum’s director of boatbuilding. He is familiar with making relatively complicated projects practical for teams with varied skill levels. Now, he set about breaking down the project into manageable tasks. “I instructed people on taking patterns,” Kurt says. “Then it was building molds and making the backbone. We always had a work plan, but volunteers typically came in only on specific days, so it was hard to get everyone together. I did find myself repeating things a lot.”
Most peapods are very nearly symmetrical end for end both in plan and in profile. The Washington County peapod is asymmetric—fuller in the bow than in the stern—and has a straight sternpost to better accommodate a rudder.
From start to finish, the project would take almost five years, but despite that, there was a core group of four or five volunteers who were involved throughout. One was Ken Moller, who serves on the museum’s board of trustees. He has fixed boats, built a couple of skiffs, taken some classes at WoodenBoat School, and has been volunteering in the Boatshop for the past 10 years. He comes in regularly because, he says, “I enjoy the socializing, and the coffee hours, but above all, learning from Kurt.”
The peapod was built of locally sourced Maine wood. The museum has its own sawmill, a 1994 Wood-Mizer LT-40 bandsaw. “It’s not huge,” says Kurt, “but it’s big enough to do pretty much everything we need. We generally get donated logs from within 30 miles of Bath, which we bring back to the mill, saw into lumber, and leave to dry. We use a lot of northern white cedar, white oak, and black locust. The local arborists let us know if they have something suitable for us. We’ll drive a couple of hours to pick up the right log. If we didn’t do it, the wood would be turned into firewood.”
After the hull was returned to upside down, it was prepped for painting the exterior. Like other early peapods, the Washington County type has no centerboard. The pronounced keel provides some lateral resistance for sailing, but peapods were sailed on reaches and runs and rowed to windward.
Not only does the practice of harvesting and sawing on site keep things local and allow the museum to make the most of local resources, but also it gives those who volunteer at the Boatshop the chance to follow a “pretty complete path from tree to boat,” says Kurt. “It’s definitely a little more work but it gets people invested in the whole process.”
The peapod’s framing is white oak and black locust, the knees and breasthooks are white oak, the planking and floorboards cedar, and the thwarts pine. The keel is white oak. “We cut it out of a log and the next day we started shaping it; it was really green” says Kurt. “That’s not unheard of, but usually a build of this size doesn’t take five years. As the wood slowly dried in place, the keel changed shape, so we were repeatedly having to reshape it. We had oversized it, to allow for the changes.”
Sitting on her trailer outside the museum’s Boatshop, the BILL D is ready to row. Although one of the two maststeps has been set in place just aft of the stem, the mast holes in the two forward thwarts have not yet been cut. The rudder will be hung from the sternpost with the bottom of its blade flush with the bottom of the keel.
Built upside down, the hull was to be planked lapstrake with 10 planks to each side. The earliest peapods, built in the late 19th century, were planked either carvel or lapstrake, and after the turn of the century lapstrake was less common. But the original peapod had been built lapstrake, and, says Kurt, that suited his crew: “It’s a forgiving type of construction and it looks really pretty.”
As the BILL D goes down the ramp for the first time, Luke Small, boatwright at Maine Maritime Museum, rides with the boat to check on any leaking as she enters the water. At the stern, Kurt Spiridakis guides the boat, while Ken Moller follows at the bow.
The molds and backbone were set up toward the end of 2017 and construction progressed slowly through the following 12 months. “It was an interesting project,” says Kurt, “but it wasn’t a Boatshop priority. It wasn’t a commissioned build and, unlike the middle-school boats, there was no deadline for its completion. We worked on it when we could, but there was no concerted effort.”
At rest alongside the museum dock, the BILL D has her rudder left in place with the tiller lashed amidships to prevent it from swinging. In the distance, the building with the red walls is the museum’s Blacksmith Shop, the white building behind it is the Paint & Treenail Shop, and to the right is the Mill & Joinery Shop.
When COVID-19 hit, the project all but ground to a halt. Most of the volunteers chose not to come into the museum at the height of the pandemic and some stayed away for two years. For a while, Kurt worked alone again, but the core group was eventually back on site and the project moved slowly on.
With planking completed, the boat was turned over and fitting out began. A fundraising campaign was initiated by the museum and, as the peapod neared completion, more and more helpers came in to lend a hand. “In the spring and early summer of 2022, all kinds of things happened,” says Kurt. “We made the spars for the sprit rig, we fashioned oars, the rudder and tiller,” and the boat was painted and varnished.
When the museum held another fundraiser, among the items up for sale to raise funds was the right to name the peapod. Ken’s wife made the winning bid. “We thought it appropriate to honor William Donnell”—the man who had rescued MARY E from certain demise in the 1960s. “After all, without him we wouldn’t have the MARY E, and with no MARY E there’d be no peapod. So, we decided on BILL D.”
The BILL D has three rowing stations and will have two maststeps, offering many configurations for rowing and sailing.
The BILL D was launched into the Kennebec River on August 2, 2022. She is docked at the Maine Maritime Museum alongside the MARY E, two working boats built a century apart, both honoring a bygone era, and both crafted by locals using local materials.
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A well-thought-out tent can create a capacious living space, transforming any small boat into an expedition cruising craft.
Boatbuilding never ends with launching day. Refinements and alterations are a constant source of clever ideas well suited to individual needs, never more so than when a small boat is intended for big voyages. In inclement weather, those with open boats may yearn for the enclosed cabins of sailing yachts or small power cruisers—but on the other hand, the accommodations on most small cruising boats can be confining, even claustrophobic since they are often not much larger than the average backyard doghouse. With an increasing interest in using small boats for adventure voyaging and multi-day sails in company, individual innovators have been discovering the practical uses of custom-built tents, which can provide roomy quarters of a size most small cruising boats would envy. The air is fresh, the view is unparalleled, and with advances in tent poles and supplies, the results can be a joy to a cruising sailor.
In small-boat cruising—particularly under sail—having an absolute destination and schedule can be hazardous. At times, getting into a sheltered cove can be a necessity, but you can’t always count on finding a legal or comfortable place to camp ashore. Being able to stay aboard the boat gives the small-craft sailor the same kind of cruising freedom a yachtsman has. Anchor in the cove, cook your meal, enjoy the twilight, stay dry, settle in with a good book, and be ready for wherever the next day’s adventure might bring.
The elements of what makes a good tent may be as individual as the person setting out and the craft in question. Finland (like Sweden) has the cultural ethic of “every man’s right,” meaning you can camp ashore anywhere so long as you respect the owner’s privacy. But one Finnish camper found that level ground was tough to find. His solution, recounted on page 10, was an adventure setup in which he wheels the boat ashore and uses it as its own tent platform for comfortable nights. In Alaska, as another tent-boater explains on page 15, tenting on board away from shore may be a safety advantage—and that may seem counterintuitive until you are informed that an anchored boat is safely out of range of bears. In Maine, enjoying that last bit of twilight from the cockpit may mean having very effective bug screening.
What do small-boat tents have in common? Good design, practical setup, protection from rain, comfortable sleeping, room enough to avoid claustrophobia, and the freedom of a self-contained lifestyle. One of the best ways in the world to develop a good tent is to look around at what other people have been doing, borrowing ideas that work. For some boats, it might even be possible to simply cut the floor out of an existing land tent and adapt it to the boat—however, sources for tent poles and cloth abound, so the do-it-yourself route can assure a custom fit.
The Finnish Touch
Anthony Shaw
Instead of seeking level ground, adventuring oarsman Jouko Koskinen worked with designer Ruud Van Veelen to devise a way to level his boat, using side braces and blocking.
by Anthony Shaw
Anthony Shaw
Bicycle wheels fit to the boat hull make the light boat easy to haul out or portage.
Jouko Koskinen is a Finnish architect who had a dream of building a boat that suited both his camping and his boating interests, easy to land from the water and capable of carrying a two- to three-person tent. The design did take nearly 50 years to come to fruition, but it has all the benefits of a well-chewed briar pipestem.
Anthony Shaw
With the boat leveled, the off-the-shelf tent sets up quickly.
It was Koskinen’s encounter with Dutch boatbuilder Ruud Van Veelen that crystallized the dream. A scale model was already built and Koskinen had bought a suitable tent when the two met. Van Veelen, the designer and builder of a number of single and double, three- and four-chined rowing skiffs, had little challenge in adapting these to accommodate a two-person tent. The principal difference is the provision of a decked area 2.5m × 1.5m [8′ 3″ ×5′] amidships for the tent.
Anthony Shaw
For this boat, the tent is meant to be set up while the boat is out of the water, with straps running around the girth of the hull.
The chosen tent, the Halti XPD2, is a three-hoop, two-person, 4 kg [9 lb] expedition tent made of rip-stop polyester, supplied with a cotton inner tent and a waterproof floor. It is well ventilated and has also proved its durability in all-season expeditions. Attachment to the boat is secured with three straps that pass under the boat, locking the tent in place just under the three structural poles. The aluminum poles themselves clip into the eyes of the former internal cross-straps supplied with the tent, which now hang over the sides of the boat, ensuring drainage overboard. The guys attach as usual from the tops of the hoops, but only those stretching to the bow. At the stern, longitudinal stability depends exclusively on Koskinen’s own modification to the rain fly, and in particular on his sewing skill.
Anthony Shaw
The boat’s interior fitout was arranged so that the tent’s large sleeping area would be supported by the central platform, which has storage underneath. The tent door opens to the sitting area.
To provide coverage for the whole boat, the rain fly had to be extended at both ends in order reach the boat’s ends. The material was taken from the rain fly of another Halti tent and was sewn with cotton thread. These extensions are secured outside the gunwale by a shock cord passing through gussets sewn along their edges. In addition to the end fittings, the rain fly is secured by small clips amidships, which also prevent the hoops from slipping too low outside the gunwale.
Anthony Shaw
With a table mounted in oarlock sockets, the Sinne has a comfortable cockpit from which her crew can enjoy nature and a taste of the good life while protected from the elements.
After beaching the boat via the detachable 36″ wheels, pitching the tent is straightforward. Stabilized at bow, stern, and sides, the boat provides a thoroughly flat and level sleeping area. It would be tricky to set up the tent while the boat is on the water, but Koskinen argues that doing so would defeat the purpose of the boat’s design. The supreme advantage of the Halti XPD2 is access from both sides to the food preparation and storage area, which on the Sinne covers just the area of the rear cockpit. The boat has four open storage lockers at the side, the main watertight compartment under the deck, and a smaller one under the stern. Six small hatches allow access through the central deck. With one’s partner on the facing cockpit seat, some cushioning on the plywood seats, and the meal spread on the table, which fits into oarlock pins, dining is comfortable and compact, and for any backwoods traveler it is as cozy as it ever gets.
A Dory Tent
Paul McKinney
A fitted tent of Sunbrella fabric, with zippered access panels forward and aft and clear windows at each side, gives a Lowell’s Surf Dory a vast interior volume and good ventilation.
Paul McKinney of Montville, Maine, used a blend of do-it-yourself and professional help to design a tent for his dory. “I often row and cruise an 18′ Surf Dory built by Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, Massachusetts,” he writes. “Though the dory has no sailing rig or centerboard, she does have a very spacious interior with removable thwarts and a flat bottom, which are ideal features for an effective rowing and cruising boat.
Paul McKinney
With thwarts removed, the interior is large and remarkably clear of obstruction.
“I worked collaboratively with Art’s Canvas of Belfast, Maine, to design a tent structure that would be sturdy in high winds, dry, well ventilated, bug-proof, quickly set, and with a well-lighted interior. The tent, which is fabricated of Sunbrella fabric, is supported by five sprung arches cut from 3⁄4″ CPVC plastic pipe. Before erecting the tent, each arch is slid through a 24″ sleeve stitched to the top interior of the tent.
Paul McKinney
With the sides rolled up, the view is unobstructed, and by removing one hoop the boat can even be rowed with the tent blocking the hot sun.
“The method of attaching the bases of the arches to the gunwales is simple and uses readily available parts. There are three rowing stations on this dory, with each oarlock socket being the standard 1⁄2″. Into each socket, I place a 1⁄2″ hitch pin of the type used to secure a trailer hitch in its receiver. The protruding portion of the hitch pin angles at about 45 degrees, turning toward the center of the boat. A short section of plastic hose is pressed over each hitch pin, increasing the diameter to about 5⁄8″. The inside diameter of the arches closely matches the modified hitch pins, resulting in a secure and sturdy attachment when sprung into place.
Paul McKinney
The dory tent’s hoop structure uses CPVC pipe supported by fittings set in the oarlocks at the three rowing stations.
“The fore and aft ends of the tent are designed to cover the stem head and transom, respectively, causing the support poles to stand erect with no movement fore and aft. A bungee cord sewn into the lower edges of the tent clips to a series of hooks discreetly fastened just below the sheerstrake lap.
Paul McKinney
For the two intermediate hoops, support fittings slip into the open gunwale.
“Both ends of the tent are designed with semi-circular zippered openings for ventilation, access to the anchor gear, and the creation of a spacious cockpit area in the sternsheets. Additionally, each end has fully zippered insect netting. On each side, amidships, is a generous window with a zippered privacy curtain on the interior.
“If desired, the tent sides can be folded up over each other, creating a very effective sun canopy for rowing on hot, windless days. The arch at the desired rowing station is simply removed from its pin and the hitch pin replaced with oarlocks.
“I have trailered this dory with the tent erected for many hours at speeds in excess of 50 mph without incident. When anchored on a rainy night and a sudden squall blows through, it’s comforting to know that my dory and its contents will remain snug and dry.”
Designer Chuck Paine enjoys a sail in his newly launched Paine 14. The boat is based on the venerable Herreshoff 12½, but is 45 percent smaller. The unstayed carbon-fiber rig weighs but 20 lbs, and the boat is easily trailered behind a mid-sized car.
The venerable Herreshoff 12½, which will turn 100 years old in 2014, is widely regarded as one of the—no, the—finest daysailer ever designed. Such a statement seems hyperbolic until one considers that the 12½’-waterline sloop has been in continuous production since the first one rolled out of the Herreshoff factory in 1914, and over those 100 years an average of 30 boats per year have been built. Herreshoff built 364 of them before the business closed and production moved to the Quincy Adams yard. Quincy Adams built 51 of the boats before Cape Cod Shipbuilding picked up the mantle, building 35 wooden hulls before switching to a long run of fiberglass ones. Doughdish, Inc. also builds a fiberglass 12½—an exact copy of the Herreshoff original—and Artisan Boatworks has built a few new wooden ones, and is willing and able to do more.
From the success of this legendary design came derivatives. In the early 1980s, Joel White conceived a shallower-draft centerboard version. He widened the hull slightly to offset the loss of stability caused by the shallower draft, but his Haven 12½ in the water is nearly identical to the original Herreshoff model. Designer-builder John Brooks has recently launched a glued-lapstrake plywood interpretation of the design, and Phil Bolger, at the time of his death in 2009, had just sailed and praised highly a sheet-plywood interpretation that he’d devised. And now Chuck Paine, who retired from active designing a few years ago, has just unveiled a scaled-down version of the boat—a beautiful 60-percent miniature of the classic Herreshoff 12½ with some decidedly contemporary updates, including an unstayed carbon-fiber rig and foil-shaped fin keel and rudder.
With all of the other H12½ derivatives on the market—and the new originals—I couldn’t help but wonder why the world needed another one. And so I asked Paine that question the day I met him for a sail aboard the new boat.
“I don’t know if it does,” he politely demurred. “I was retired and wanted a project.”
Paine and I had met near his home in Tenants Harbor, Maine, on a blustery August afternoon. Over the course of our outing in AMELIA, as the new boat is called, the answer to my question—the rationale for the new boat—unfurled slowly but decidedly.
“I didn’t want a boat the size of a 12½,” said Paine. He has ambitions to take the boat to Florida in the winter one of these years, and realizes that the original 12½ is just too much boat to tow those 1,500 miles behind his Subaru Outback. “This boat,” he said of the prototype Paine 14, “is so easy to put in the water.” How easy? Paine walked me through the launch procedure, which involved backing his custom Triad trailer down the ramp until the tailpipe of his Outback is just touching the water. Float the boat off, pop in the unstayed rig, strap the mainsail to the mast (more on that verb in a moment), raise it and the jib, and sail away. It takes two minutes, literally, as compared with the two hours Paine reckons it takes to launch and rig a Herreshoff 12½. And he should know, because he’s owned and loved an original 12½ for the past 40 years, and keeps it in pristine condition on a mooring adjacent to AMELIA’s.
Paine also did not want to tread on the business niche developed by Doughdish, Cape Cod Shipbuilding, and other H12½ shops over the past several decades. “They are making the world a much better place,” he said. “Plus, I didn’t want to mess with the world’s most perfect design.”
Art Paine
AMELIA, the prototype Paine 14, sails in company with Paine’s Herreshoff 12½. In light air, AMELIA has a decisive speed advantage over her big sister.
Nautical linguists will note that, two paragraphs above, I wrote the rather lubberly phrase “strap the mainsail to the mast.” But I meant it, for Paine has come up with an elegantly simple method of affixing the luff of this sail to its carbon-fiber spar. It involves a series of five 2″-wide Velcro straps sewn onto the sail; they wrap around the mast, functioning as a sort of soft mast hoop. They don’t look traditional, but who cares? They’re almost invisible to the eye, and create a very secure attachment—with one slight drawback: There can be no strap above the jib halyard block on this fractional rig, as a strap so-placed would hinder the sail’s passage aloft. And so this portion of the sail is unattached, requiring considerable halyard tension in the 20-mph gusts we experienced that day. But, the halyard should be tight in these conditions anyhow, and so this loose portion of the luff offers a sort of halyard-tension gauge.
The club-footed jib is set flying, which means that it’s not attached to a forestay, because there is no forestay. It’s self-tending, making tacking extremely easy, as we’ll see shortly. The rig, with halyards, weighs about 20 lbs, and it fits into a socket made from fiberglass exhaust tubing that runs from the deck to the keel.
Paine handed me the helm as he dropped the mooring, and as we bore away and sheeted in, the boat accelerated noticeably more quickly than would a Herreshoff 12½. Paine noted that AMELIA, in light air, literally sails circles around his 12½ —which one would expect given the new boat’s underbody configuration. Paine was quick to point out that Nathanael Herreshoff designed the H12½ for the blustery and choppy conditions of Buzzards Bay—and that the older boat, once referred to as the “Buzzards Bay Boys Boat,” was meant as a trainer, and was thus conservatively rigged. The Paine 14 is not so conservatively rigged; although its hull is 45 percent smaller than the 12½’s, the sail plan, at 95 sq ft, is only 35 percent smaller. The racier, lighter, more trailerable Paine 14, says the designer, is meant for a different niche than the 12½. “I could sail this boat in the morning at Brooklin,” he said, casting his gaze downeast, “and then load it on the trailer and
sail it at Acadia National Park in the afternoon.”
Art Paine
Plywood bulkheads define the boat’s flotation chambers. The after chamber doubles as a stowage compartment, and has a watertight hatch.
After I tacked down the harbor, Paine took the helm in order to demonstrate a few of his observations about the new design. First, he called attention to the boat’s impressive short-tacking ability, the result of both the self-tending jib and, more important, the boat’s ability to accelerate out of a tack. There is simply no noticeable loss of speed as the boat comes through the eye of the wind and fills away on the other tack. AMELIA could, I believe, tack her way up a 20′-wide channel.
She also carries significant way. In the breeze we were sailing in that day, I would have expected AMELIA to stop pretty quickly when punched directly into the wind. But she does not—especially with 400 lbs of yacht designer and magazine editor as payload. Paine demonstrated this as we approached a moored boat that we could not quite point above. About 15′ away from it, he gently luffed AMELIA—more than a pinch but less than directly into the wind—and she continued, with virtually no pressure on the sails, to clear the mooring ball. Paine then bore away and continued on.
After this, we doused the jib to get a look at how she performs under mainsail alone. As expected, AMELIA did not point as high, but she still made clear and deliberate progress to windward. Under a reefed main and jib in 18–20 knots, she seemed to lose no speed but there was no need to dump the main in gusts, as there had been under full sail, when we kept a nearly constant bubble in the main’s luff—a so-called fisherman’s reef, Paine told me. With the mainsail reefed, gusts of breeze had no apparent effect on the helm, while with a full main it clearly loaded up, and required constant tending of the sheet. In fact, Paine rightfully chided me at one point for taking advantage of the handy mainsheet cam cleat on the deck of the after flotation tank.
As we made our way back to the mooring, we saw a fleet of 420s zipping around the buoys, with young athletic crews hanging from trapeze. “No hiking on this boat,” said Paine, whose sailing résumé includes an Olympic tilt in the Finn dinghy. “It’s an old man’s boat,” he said of the “14.” “But I’m an old man.”
Art Paine
Paine calls the Paine 14’s wood construction a “hybrid” method, because there are sawn plywood frames in the ends of the boat, while the mid-body is molded around a temporary jig. A production fiberglass version is under discussion.
The wooden Paine 14 is built of three layers of 1⁄8″ Spanish cedar or western red cedar. The planking is applied to forms spaced 7½” on center in the boat’s cockpit area, while permanent frames define the shapes of the bow and stern. “The frames don’t need to be there,” said Paine. “The boat complies with ABS standards without them.” He calls his approach to this boat’s molding “hybrid construction,” and he did it simply to ease the building process. The frames, which are about 2″ deep and made from a stack of marine plywood, are hidden in the flotation chambers—the after one of which has a watertight hatch, allowing it to double as a stowage compartment.
Paine built this prototype himself, out of wood, after an earlier version was built in New Zealand. He reckons, however, that the real market will be in fiberglass, as he estimates that a professionally built wooden one will cost about $70,000, while a fiberglass version will come in around $38,500. Plans are available to home builders.
Paine planked the prototype the old-fashioned way, which is to say that it was temporarily stapled, rather than vacuum-bagged. He then faired and fiberglassed the hull. The exterior received one layer of 10-oz boat cloth, while the visible cockpit area received a 6-oz layer, “for longevity,” said Paine. “I want this thing to be around 100 years from now.” If the Paine 14’s predecessor is any indication, that’s not too tall a wish.
For more information, contact Chuck Paine Yacht Design, www.chuckpaine.com.
The Paine 14’s sail plan is proportionally larger than the Herreshoff 12½’s, and the underbody is decidedly up-to-date with its foil-shaped keel and rudder.
Paine 14 Particulars: LOA 14’0″ LWL 11’2″ Beam 5’3″ Draft 2’3″ Displacement 850 lbs Ballast (lead) 385 lbs Sail area 95 sq ft D/L ratio 271 SA/disp ratio 18.79
John C. Harris of Chesapeake Light Craft designed the Faering Cruiser for a client who had three firm requirements for his coastal voyager: The boat had to sail, its auxiliary power had to be provided by sliding-seat rowing, and it had to have sleeping accommodations beneath the deck.
This unusual 22′ pocket cruiser from Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) is based on traditional inshore boats of the west coast of Norway, but the initial inspiration for it came from someplace far different from that. “The boat’s owner,” says CLC proprietor and chief designer John C. Harris, “was obsessed with Sven Lundin.” Lundin is the Swede who, in 1980, sailed his 20′-long BRIS II around Cape Horn, after attempting the voyage and pitchpoling in BRIS I (it means “breeze” in Swedish) on his first attempt in 1972. Lundin made other improbable voyages in improbable boats, espousing a philosophy of low cost, easy handling, shallow draft, and beachability. His boats also had no engines, and had to row reasonably well.
Harris’s customer did not intend to cross oceans, but rather wanted to make alongshore expeditions under sail and oar, and this posed a problem for the designer. He saw Lundin’s “pod”-style boats as well adapted for long offshore passages, but not so great for inshore work. His customer also wanted a sliding seat, which dictated a cockpit layout centered in the middle of the boat, which bumped the cabin from its traditional place. These constraints are what led Harris to the traditional boats of Norway’s Nordland county.
Nordlandsbåts, as these craft are called, are characterized by high, plumb ends, and sheerlines that sweep dramatically low amidships. The subtypes are named for the number of oars they carry: The small ones, faerings, have four single oars, while the larger fembørings have five pairs of oars. Harris had already designed a faering for stitch-and-glue construction, and saw an opportunity to stretch that hull to accommodate his customer’s wish for a sliding seat and cabin. The Norwegian vernacular boats held more precedent, for fembørings often have raised-deck cabins in their after ends, out of the way of the open middle working portion of the boat. And so the general form of the cabin fembøring guided Harris in the design of his new boat, which he poetically calls the Faering Cruiser. In the Norwegian tradition he might more accurately call it a toaering, for it has but one pair of 9′ sculling oars, which live permanently at the ready, resting in their oarlocks with blades strapped to the gunwales.
The oars posed a design problem, for the boom and mainsheet occupy the space through which the rower sweeps with each stroke. Harris solved this dilemma with lazyjacks, which lift the boom clear of the rower’s head. For rowing, the mainsheet must be unshackled from its deadeye and moved to a forward location, out of the way of the sliding seat.
The seat is a shop-made, drop-in unit that lives in the cabin when not in use. With the seat removed from the cabin, there’s room for a tired body to rest and read—but not much else. While the boat has room for a passenger on day trips, this is a solo sailor’s expedition boat. In fact, I’ve come to think of it as a great option for a frustrated kayaker who does not relish the idea of having legs immobilized for hours on end, or paddling hard into a breeze that could be providing motive force. In fact, it would be most helpful to view the performance of the Faering Cruiser against other expedition-style boats—particularly kayaks—than against performance daysailers. Because if you want a boat that’s dry and nimble and tacks on a dime, there are better options than this one. But if you want to go where kayaks go, but faster, with more gear, less exertion, and more excitement, then stay with me for a description of the new boat’s performance.
John C. Harris
The Faering Cruiser’s oars live in their oarlocks when the boat is underway, and the looms are strapped to the boat. The sliding seat assembly lives in the aft sleeping compartment, and is easily dropped into place.
When we stepped aboard the boat, the boom was cocked up high in the lazyjacks. Harris gave me a quick tour of the control lines, and then raised the sail with the lazyjacks still engaged. “Like all of these boats, you want lots of downhaul,” he said tightening the sail’s luff. He then lowered the centerboard, which has two control lines—one to hold it up, and one to hold it down—obviating the need for ballast to sink it, but obstructing its ability to kick up in the case of an accidental grounding.
Harris then departed in the dinghy, leaving me alone to test out the boat. He offered to cast me off from the dinghy, saving me from crawling forward on the narrow foredeck, but I declined, wanting to experience the boat fully. The narrow deck and the forward extension of the lug made for an awkward operation, but after lowering the lazyjacks I slithered out to the bow cleat and dropped the mooring pennant with my reputation intact, and it occurred to me that a mooring point closer to the cockpit would be a welcome addition for the soloist. I did not relish the thought of returning to the mooring under sail and, as we shall see, I furtively chickened out from doing so.
The Faering Cruiser’s long keel and relatively large lug sail make it go like a freight train while tracking dead straight, and it’s easy to see the joys of long inshore passages in this boat, the cabin packed with books and food. One must be mindful of the limitations imposed by that dead-straight tracking, however, when it comes time to change tacks. This boat is slow in stays, and really must be sailed deliberately through the wind, rather than slammed over. In fact, you can’t slam it over, because the rudder, way back there on the stern stem, is connected to the cockpit-mounted tiller via cables and quadrant. Detents in the system limit the swing of the rudder to about 45 degrees—an ample amount, but a limit one should be aware of, which I was on my second tack.
John C. Harris
The Faering Cruiser’s owner chose a lug rig for its ease of handling and low center of effort. Harris has drawn an alluring sloop rig, too.
I made my first tack to avoid a transient yacht sitting on a WoodenBoat guest mooring. The boat was slower in stays than I expected it to be, and not wanting to be the guy who T-boned a parked boat while shaking down a new design, I abandoned my experiment, grabbed an oar from its holster, and took a few strokes to get her through. On later tacks with more searoom, I learned that the boat always had enough way to carry through stays, and that a touch of backwind in the big lug sail will speed things along. I also learned that, in this breeze, I much prefer to jibe this boat. The maneuver is faster than tacking, and is easily controlled in the usual way by letting the mainsheet run after the jibe, and holding the helm hard over as the boat comes around, so by the time the boom crosses, the boat is on the new reach and there’s a bit of a luff in the sail. That’s called a Hudson River jibe, I’m told. Running dead-downwind, the boom of this unstayed balance-lug rig can be let to run forward like a weathervane—a depowering maneuver.
The mainsheet has a handy cam cleat where it exits the block. It was gusting 18–20 on the day of my outing, and the sheet kept cleating itself when I trimmed, because of the angle. I’d be inclined to do away with that cleat, and instead have a post or horn cleat that the sheet could be turned around, but not belayed. I almost dumped the boat in one puff, and I do believe it would have been fun if I had, but I just wasn’t in the mood for such shenanigans that night. I did fill the cockpit with water, and was delighted and relieved to see the angled-aft drain tubes work as intended.
I took a reef to see how that system works. Quite simply, it did so quickly and flawlessly. The tack line and halyard were handy to the helm, and the clew line was led far enough forward on the boom to be taken in comfortably. There were nettles, too—those small lines tied into the sail that allow the excess to be rolled and secured into a nice neat bunt. Wanting to keep my center of gravity low in this breeze, I deemed them unnecessary and skipped them without penalty. On a long voyage I might have tidied them up for the sake of satisfaction.
When it came time to put the boat up, I told Harris I was dropping the sail to test out the rowing rig. But the truth is that I didn’t want to crawl out onto the foredeck to pick up the mooring under sail. It was a nice row back once Harris reminded me to raise the centerboard, which was very effectively keeping me from heading into the wind. My performance in the sliding seat was awkward, but that was me and not the boat, as it’s been years since I rowed like this and it was choppy that night. I do believe I could establish a proper rhythm in a flat calm—the most likely scenario in which one would row this boat—and could pace myself for miles. Harris reports having made a couple of knots into a 12-knot headwind, which bodes well for the boat’s ability to exit a crowded harbor under oars.
John C. Harris
While slower in stays than an average sailing dinghy, the Faering Cruiser tracks beautifully. One can imagine long days island-hopping on Maine’s Island Trail.
A solo builder spent about a day assembling the computer-cut hull of the prototype Faering Cruiser. The hull was planked in 9mm okoume bent around bulkheads and frames and stitched together along the laps—the same system CLC uses for its kayak designs. It’s an approachable method that has made boatbuilders of many first-timers working in unlikely places, such a studio apartments, dormitories, and small living rooms.
That day of assembly is a rewarding first step, but its time poses a deceiving number: The boat’s entire construction took 700 hours, and that included the strengthening, or “filleting,” of joints with thickened epoxy, the construction of the cabin, fiberglassing, the finishwork and fitout, and the rigging.
On his blog (at www.clcboats.com), Harris initially expressed an unwillingness to offer a kit for this boat, but the response to it has been positive and he’s recognized the interest of “a few rugged latter-day Vikings.” The price starts at about $4,500, and Harris recommends a skill level of intermediate and up. If you’ve built a few kayaks and would like to expand your cruising range and adrenaline output, this boat deserves a close look.
For more information, contact Chesapeake Light Craft, www.clcboats.com.
The Faering Cruiser’s long, straight keel and ample skeg make for good tracking, while near-circular sections offer minimal wetted surface for fast sailing and rowing. The accommodations (bottom profile) are small but surprisingly comfortable—even for the mildly claustrophobic.
CLC Faering Particulars: LOA 22’6″ LWL 21’1″ Beam 4’10” Draft (board up) 8″ (board down) 36″ Trailer weight 530 lbs Max displacement 1262 lbs Sail area (lug) 125 sq ft Sail area (sloop) 143 sq ft
Andrew Kitchen of Irondequoit, New York, had always wanted to build a sharpie, and he settled on Reuel Parker’s adaption of a historic boat recorded by Howard I. Chapelle, originating from Cape Cod. The sail reefs by being drawn to the mast.
When people rhapsodize about shapely curves in boats, they usually are taking inspiration from round-bottomed hulls, often with wineglass transoms. Doing so, however, leaves off entire sets of criteria—ease of construction, cost, practicality in use, suitability for local waters, and form stability among them—that will ultimately be in the mix, like it or not, when a boat is judged to be a success or a failure. When a full set of criteria is brought into play, it is apparent why flat-bottomed and hard-chined boats have survived the ages as well as their round-bottomed cousins. The surprise is that they can be every bit as eye-catching.
Andrew Kitchen, an upstate New York resident who has an eye for quite a variety of boats, had his head turned last year by a sharpie, a historic American workboat type used far and wide. The particular model he admired was adapted by Reuel Parker as a 14-footer intended for pleasure use and published in his The Sharpie Book. Parker’s version was based on an 18′ workboat used on Cape Cod for oystering and documented by Howard I. Chapelle in his classic American Small Sailing Craft. Kitchen was casting about for what would be the fifth boat in his fleet, which now ranges from a MacGregor canoe to an Iain Oughtred–designed Ness yawl. He even dreams of building a heavy Yorkshire coble of the type he grew up among in his native England. For the winter of 2012–13, he settled on the sharpie, which he could build mostly using materials he had on hand, even sewing the sails himself from a Sailrite kit. His goal was to have the boat ready to sail solo in the 2013 Small Reach Regatta (SRR) in Maine, in which he has participated regularly for many years.
Rosemary Wyman
The sharpie’s flat bottom has ample rocker aft, bringing the nicely shaped transom above the waterline.
“It was a nice little project,” he said. “It was something I could have in a short period of time, and I decided in the fall that I had to build it by the summer—I couldn’t spend my usual one or two years on the boat.” He usually sails on Irondequoit Bay off Lake Ontario, and originally he had in mind bringing his MacGregor to Maine for the annual rendezvous. To prepare, he tried a new rigging setup meant to improve versatility, with the varied conditions of solo sailing on the coast in mind. It didn’t go well. “I thought, I’ll do this, and I’ll see if I like sailing it this way. So I took it out on the bay, and proceeded to have a great time until I got hit by a gust of wind and capsized. There I am in a tangle of masts and rigging, because there’s so much rigging on a boat like that. So the MacGregor, I decided, is not the boat for me,” at least not for the SRR. “You can’t hike out, and you’re a sitting duck if the wind hits you.”
Given that experience, the simplicity of the sharpie’s rig, not to mention its hull form, kept Kitchen coming back to Parker’s book. The boat would be easy to handle while sailing alone, even in comparison to his Ness yawl, which he ordinarily sails with crew. Ideas started to percolate.
Rosemary Wyman
Turning blocks on the mast partner lead the snotter line (at right in the photo) and the reefing line (at left in the photo) aft to be in easy reach.
Rosemary Wyman
The plywood centerboard, shown here fully retracted and pinned, lowers by means of a hinged handle visible along the top edge of the board.
Kitchen is an inveterate tinkerer. His boats show personalized solutions to problems, and a distinctive and personal style of woodworking. “I was trying to use as many scraps of lumber as I had to keep the price down,” he says, including some sheets of okoume plywood, 1⁄4″, which he used for the sides and 3⁄8″ for the bottom, sheathed on the exterior only in 6-oz fiberglass cloth set in epoxy. The interior is coated first with Deks Olje No. 1 and then painted, a method Kitchen favors for all his painted or varnished surfaces. For some assemblies, he joked, “the inside is kind of the way they used to build cathedrals in Britain—the outside looks beautiful, but the inside is just rubble!”
His tinkering with this boat started with the shape itself. “I wanted a sharpie,” he said, so he stretched the length from 14′ to 15′ overall, adding about 1″ of freeboard one-third of the way forward from the transom and 11⁄2″ at both at the transom and the stem for a bit more spring in the sheer. He did this by simply expanding the spacing of the station molds, which meant there was no corresponding increase in beam. “I may be damned for it, but as I wasn’t increasing the sail area,” which is 75 sq ft in a single triangular sail, “I felt all I was adding was stability and, for an old person, it’s good to have a boat that you can handle.”
For the SRR, he wanted a boat to fit the rules and the spirit of the event, which calls for seaworthy sailing boats that have oars as their auxiliary propulsion. The boat’s beam of 4′ 3″, however, posed a rowing puzzle: the gunwales were rather close together for effective rowing, and low enough to put the oar handles in conflict with knees. Kitchen’s solution was to create wooden outriggers, simple wooden constructions in a loose L shape that slip alongside the side panels, to be trapped by both the inwales and seat risers. The result is that the oarlocks are higher than the gunwales by a couple of inches and outboard by about 10″ per side—without the need for complicated and permanent hardware that would be in the way while sailing or trailering. He uses 9′ oars, the same oars he uses for his Ness yawl. Fitting the outriggers is simple and handy, and in my time at the oars, overcoming a strong current in light air, I found the rowing enjoyable and the boat easy to move.
Rosemary Wyman
The boat’s shop-made wooden outriggers are L-shaped. One leg slips down along the inside face of the hull planking, to be snugly held by the gunwale and the seat riser, permitting the use of 9’-long oars and greatly improving rowing efficiency for a hull that is only 4’3” wide.
Kitchen also took a hard look at the rigging. The triangular sail is low-profile and uses a sprit-boom, a marvelously effective device for making the sail flatter or fuller to adjust to any wind condition. The line that captures the heel of the sprit—called the “snotter” line—is hauled to increase sail tension or eased to reduce it. The plans leave a lot of room for interpretation on how the rig actually works, so knowing that he was planning to sail solo, Kitchen wanted the snotter line led aft, where he could reach it from the cockpit without having to leave the tiller. The line belays to a cleat to port, making the reach a simple one.
He also wanted to be able to reef the sail from the cockpit, which presented a more complicated problem. To reduce the area of this kind of triangular sail, traditionally, reef nettles were built into the sail in a vertical line, parallel to the mast, to which they would be made off. It was always a clever and simple way to reduce sail area, but in practical terms it meant getting the mast down to reef. Andrew had the idea of linking the reefing lines through brass loops, leading them in a series to be spliced into a single reefing line that could be led aft to a cleat to starboard. The system works well in reefing—the sail can be shortened quickly this way. In casting off the reef, however, he found that the lines tended to bind, preventing the reef from shaking out fully. “I wish I could say that it’s entirely successful,” Kitchen said. “I look at a problem and basically try to solve it myself. This is basically a bunch of brail lines, and I wanted them all going to one line that I could lead back to the cockpit.” Kitchen’s “full disclosure” admission during our sail was that he launched the boat only a week before the SRR, so he had little time to work out any bugs. Clearly, however, his mind was already turning over modifications and improvements, starting with how the reefing lines can be made to run freely and how to keep halyard tension on the reefed sail.
Designer Reuel Parker has long been an admirer of sharpies, and for The Sharpie Book (International Marine, 1994), he took a fresh look at numerous designs, one of which was an oyster skiff used for the shoal waters around Cape Cod. He adapted the boat for plywood construction—a simple task for a flat-bottomed boat—and reduced its length to 14’. Andrew Kitchen, who built the boat shown in this article, adapted the design by adding a foot of length and raising the sheer a bit.
Kitchen took admonishments from both Chapelle and Parker seriously for this boat. Both warned about the danger of capsize and the need for careful work at the tiller. Kitchen never cleats his sheet, instead taking it directly from a turning block to his hand. He also fitted four sizable flotation bags, especially since the top of the centerboard trunk is open, making bailing much harder if the boat is awash.
In sailing, the boat can tend to pound, especially in motorboat wakes. It can also be difficult to tack in a chop. “She handles well in smooth water,” he says. The boat also goes to weather well, often pointing higher on the wind than other types. So far, he has concluded that the boat doesn’t sail terribly well in light air—in fact, “I find her a little bit of a dog in light air. Most of the other little boats were overtaking me. The only advantage I had was I found that I kept up with them because when tacking I could get closer to the wind than they did. She likes a fresh breeze, but not overpowering—then she takes off.”
We had weather like that often at the 2013 SRR in Muscongus Bay, and I observed Kitchen’s boat moving well, with her transom tucked up prettily and the heel of the stem riding just above the surface, which Chapelle noted was the trim favored by working sharpie sailors. And there was Kitchen, in a big floppy hat, the tiller in one hand, the sheet in the other, and the biggest grin imaginable.
Plans available from Parker Marine Enterprises, Inc., www.parker-marine.com.
Cape Cod Oyster Skiff Particulars: LOA designed 14′ LOA as build 15′ Beam 4’3″ Draft board up 9″ board down 2′ Sail area 75 sq ft Weight 150 lbs
Beach Pea is based on the well-known peapod type that evolved on Maine’s Penobscot Bay in the 1870s, but built of lightweight plywood. It retains the earlier type’s oar steering and simple sprit rig.
In the course of a decade, my appreciation for the Doug Hylan–designed Beach Pea has grown from a casual admiration to an abiding need. I first encountered the boat in 1997, when Hylan published in WoodenBoat a series of articles on how to build this glued-lapstrake plywood interpretation of the classic Maine peapod. In crisply drawn plans and clear words and photographs, he walked the reader through the steps of building the boat, and in the final installment included details on rigging and sailing.
Howard Chapelle, the great American boat historian, recorded the details of the peapod’s origins and use in his book American Small Sailing Craft. They were double-ended inshore lobstering boats that first appeared on the Maine island of North Haven around 1870 and quickly spread to other parts of the coast. The boats were symmetrical fore and aft, and sometimes carried small spritsails; they were typically steered with an oar when under sail. Original peapods were planked both both carvel (smooth-skinned) and lapstrake, and averaged about 15′ in length—though some were bigger and some smaller.
Hylan’s, at 13′, would look right at home among the ledges of Penobscot Bay—at least from a distance. (Hylan offers a 15′ version of this boat, too.) A knowledge able observer from 1870 making a close inspection of Beach Pea, however, would immediately notice that the boat has no frames. Their absence is a hallmark feature of the glued-lapstrake plywood method, which allows for the construction of relatively low-maintenance and neglect-resistant wooden boats. Which is not to say that neglect is desirable or something to be guarded against, but let’s face it: On modest maintenance budgets and limited time schedules, tenders often suffer for the bigger boat. I know many glued-lap dinghies in our area that are managed rather like rechargeable batteries, their finishes serving for several years until the boat looks unbearably bedraggled, and then the whole thing painted to like-new condition. It was, in fact, a benign amount of neglect in a used Beach Pea that allowed me to acquire one of these durable boats quickly and within budget a few years ago.
My wife, Holly, and I bought a 34′ cruising sailboat in 2008. Before the birth of our first son, we built a tender for it—a nice, small dinghy that would carry us all that first summer. With a wheel tucked into its bottom in the bow, this little boat was easily hauled up on the shore, and it remains a fine boat for its niche: We use it to this day for beach-launched ventures from a rocky shore in our neighborhood. But it’s too small for two growing boys and their parents to pile into for a trip from the mooring to the lobster pound. With the birth of our second son, it became abundantly clear that if we were to cruise in a safe and sane fashion, then a larger dinghy was needed.
Inspired by several cruising friends who have owned and loved classic plank-on-frame peapods as their primary tenders, and knowing that I wouldn’t be building a new dinghy in time for the next season, I scoured Maine Craigslist for candidates, and found several. As I was narrowing the field, an unexpected prospect appeared: A man in Massachusetts was selling a Hylan-designed Beach Pea, built from the pages of WoodenBoat all those years ago.
This was the perfect dinghy for my family of four. It rows easily with four grown people aboard, it tows well, and it’s much lighter than a traditional pod; we can carry it a short distance on the beach, and roll it longer distances on a beater fender. With no frames, it is very easily cleaned of the inevitable sand that accumulates in it. It has two rowing thwarts, plus seats in either end.
I called the seller, who had purchased it from the builder, and who was honest regarding its condition: He hadn’t used it for a while, and hadn’t had the space to store it indoors. Its finish was tired, but overall it was structurally sound. The Beach Pea, in fact, had sat upside-down in a garden for a few years, and ground contact had rotted the gunwale guard. It sounded as if there was a lot of fine boat lurking under a veil of old paint. Since the planks of a glued-plywood boat don’t dry up and split when the boat spends a few summers baking in the backyard, it all seemed like a good bet. The owner and I were 200 miles apart, but we were close on price, so we arranged to meet halfway. I bought the boat, and a winter’s worth of part-time sanding, filling, and painting—and a new canvas rubrail—yielded a tender that has become an integral part of our cruising kit.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
With its ease of beaching and good rowing and sailing, the boat makes a fine tender to a larger yacht—and a good daysailer in its own right.
Now, I realize that a run-down peapod will not be available to all of those who suddenly find themselves needing a good, capacious tender. Here’s what to expect if you want to build one of your own:
First, the plans are on six sheets, and include full-sized patterns, which means that the boat does not have to be drawn full-sized, or lofted. The boat is built upside-down on a series of molds erected on a ladder-back building jig. The Beach Pea has five ¼” planks per side and a 3⁄8″ bottom board. These are cut to their precise shapes, and their edges beveled to receive their glued-on neighbors. The job includes good, old-fashioned gains—the rolling bevels at the ends of the planks that make the skin transition from lapped to smooth as the planks approach the stems.
The stems are laminated from thin wood, and their sides beveled to receive the planking. A cap, or false stem, covers the ends of the plywood planks, the whole assembly mimicking the rabbeted stem of an original peapod. The short floor frames and thwart knees are steam-bent. A set of floorboards allows sure footing and dry feet, and a turned post under the center thwart offers a classic touch. For the beginner, none of this is terribly difficult work if it’s taken slowly and carefully, and all of it will aid in developing the skill and confidence needed to take on an even larger project.
The optional sailing rig includes a centerboard trunk, maststep, and partners (a hole in the forward seat). Hylan has specified a rudder for the boat, though in the interest of simplicity, he prefers to sail his own boat with an oar over the stern, the old-fashioned way.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
The boomless sprit rig makes life easy for passengers. The mainsheet, let slack here as the boat drifts to the beach, is turned through a block under the sternsheets.
The boat rows beautifully, either loaded or light. It has only one set of oarlocks, which might seem unusual to those used to moving to a forward thwart when there’s one passenger aboard. In the Beach Pea, you do move to the forward thwart with a passenger along, but you then spin around and face in the other direction, using the same oarlock sockets as before, so the stern becomes the bow. That’s the simple genius of making the forward and after ends identical, as described by Chapelle.
My boat was not built to sail, but I took Hylan’s rigged Beach Pea for a spin last summer. Based on that experience, I expect there’ll be a sailing rig for mine in a few years. Before I set out in Hylan’s boat, he gave me some quick instructions (switch the oar to leeward with each tack was the main directive), and I then drifted off the beach and lowered the centerboard, my three-year-old son Linus aboard.
The centerboard arrangement deserves applause here. It’s controlled by a handle fabricated from bent bronze rod, which means you can push it down and into position positively, without having to rely on the weight of the board to sink it. And it raises up and locks into place just as easily, without having to rely on awkward purchase or a daggerboard. If you raise the board quickly enough, a squirt of water will shoot from the relief hole in the trunk’s cap, a phenomenon that elicited peals of laughter from Linus. I’m grateful that Hylan did not specify a daggerboard for this boat. Aside from the obvious and oft-cited dangers of hitting a rock with one deployed, I’ve always found them awkward to lower when sailing away from or in to a beach. The rod-pennant required just a flick of the hand. Plus, the board was always where I could find it, and not adrift, just out of arm’s reach, in the bilge. Daggerboards are simple to build and, in theory, simple to use. But I prefer a centerboard.
The steering itself is easy. This is not a pivot-on-a-dime hull, nor is this steering oar a pivot-on-a-dime rudder arrangement. But with a bit of forethought, you can be confident in the boat’s behavior, and thus thread through a crowded anchorage with ease. If you’re slow in stays, you can row the stern around.
In the early years of this design, Hylan envisioned it as sailable with no oar or rudder, thinking that shifting crew weight, sail trim, and centerboard position would steer it. And it might, but he admits to not having mastered this process yet—though he had some fun excitement trying.
Some tenders are pure utility boats, meant only to keep you dry as you suffer the trip from dock to boat. Beach Pea is more than that. It’s a great dinghy, for sure, but it’s a fine boat in itself, too. When ours isn’t swinging from the stern of our sailboat, it lives on a trailer in the driveway, and we often haul it to nearby ponds and rivers for family outings.
Plans for Beach Pea are available from The WoodenBoat Store. To correspond with the designer or to learn more about the larger version of Beach Pea, contact Hylan & Brown Boatbuilders https://www.dhylanboats.com/design/plans/beachpea_plans/
Beach Pea’s lines show a symmetrical hull fore and aft, just like an original peapod. The bottom three drawings show the details of the bronze centerboard “pennant,” which is held in both the up (top left) and down (bottom left) positions by bronze retaining clips.
Beach Pea Particulars: LOA 13′ LWL 10’8″ Beam 4’4″ Draft (board up) 3′ (board down) 1’6″ Sail area (sprit rig) 55 sq ft Sail area (lug rig) 54 sq ft
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve rowed, paddled, or motored the Sammamish Slough. It’s not my closest launching ramp—it’s a half-hour drive from my Seattle home—but the slough is well protected from wind and never stirred up by powerboat wakes. I can always get a good workout by kayaking 5 miles upstream to a gravel bar where I have to turn around and paddle back. Last summer, I did that out-and-back two or three times a week.
A few days ago, I needed to take a long-overdue break from all the things I had yet to do, not only for work, but also around the house. I was tempted to take a nap, as I had been doing with increasing frequency, but that never seemed to put me back to rights. Exercise is usually a good remedy, but I was finding it difficult to muster any enthusiasm even for my favorite workout, paddling the slough. I’d seen it all so many times that I could visualize what lies on the banks of every bend. I balked at going to all the trouble of gathering my gear, changing my clothes, loading the kayak, and making the drive to the launching site. I didn’t have it in me to paddle my usual 10 miles, but I knew I’d be worse off if I gave up entirely and stayed home.
I loaded my lapstrake canoe and, along with the usual boating gear, brought a sleeping pad, two pillows, and my cagoule, thinking I’d take a nap on board.
The entrance to the inlet is just off the bow but almost invisible. Under the gear in the bow is a dry bag filled with about 50 lbs of water to keep the bow of the tandem canoe down.
From the ramp I paddled just 3⁄4 mile upstream to a small inlet I’ve passed many times, but never entered. The entrance was only about 15′ wide, and the bight ended just 50 yards in, where it was just wide enough for the canoe. I stepped out onto the bank of spongy marsh grass that compressed almost 1′ as I put my weight on it. If there was solid ground beneath the mat of last year’s now tawny stalks and leaves, I couldn’t feel it. I dragged the canoe out of the water and settled it in the marsh.
When I arrived, I disturbed a turtle sunning itself on the log behind the canoe. The near bank of the inlet was quite soft and almost sank when I put my weight on it as I stepped ashore.
I cleared the gear from the forward end of the cockpit and rolled my sleeping pad out on the floorboards. I stepped aboard and lay down on my back. The paddling had already lifted me out of the morning’s lethargy, and I was content to look up at a patch of empty sky, only vaguely catching sight of the lacy, leafless treetops at its perimeter. The floaters in my eyes made the vault of blue look like pond water under a microscope that’s not yet in focus. Translucent specks and chains, like jellyfish and algae, drifted back and forth as if washed by waves. After several minutes, I noticed two pepper-black specks among the other varied shapes that weren’t drifting with the same rhythm, but instead were slowly orbiting on opposite sides of a common center between them. As I watched, the specks grew larger, and each became oblong until I realized they were the wings of two eagles. Even before I could make out their heads, their tails flashed white as each curved northward and the sunlight glinted through their tailfeathers. The pair drifted by, some 200′ above the marsh, without a single flap of their wings, crossing the sky from west to east. They passed by the half-moon, chalk white dappled with the ash gray of its dark plains.
With the forward seat left out of the cockpit, there was plenty of room to stretch out on a sleeping pad. When the sun neared the treetops and the light breeze got cooler, I pulled my green cagoule over me.
A fly raced past directly above me and in my darting glance, all the floaters chased after it. Muscae volitantes is the Latin name for floaters—flying flies.
It was warm in the cockpit where the sunlight slanted into the hull and the breeze crossing the coaming cooled only my forearms as they rested on my chest. Beyond the bow, a stand of birch trees was newly in leaf and the clustered trunks and angled branches were not yet masked. The leaves at the crown, fluttering in the wind, sparkled like lime-green sequins.
I stayed until the sun settled to port into the spindly tops of as-yet-leafless trees a few dozen yards down the slough from the inlet. I stowed my gear, dragged the canoe around to launch bow-first, and stepped aboard to paddle back to the ramp.
In all my outings on the slough, I have been there for some purpose: exploration at first, then regular exercise and occasional blackberry picking, and this time to take a nap. Paddling had awakened me so I could rest without sleeping; I was content just to be present. I had arrived exhausted, opened myself up to experience the slough without purpose, and returned home restored.
I wanted to build an outboard boat that would be fun to use in Florida, something eye-catching and different. I had always been drawn to classic runabouts, particularly the Chris-Crafts I see in more northern waters. While they are mostly inboard-powered, outboard motors are easier to maintain in Florida’s exceptionally saline waters. The Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) Rhode Runner was just what I was hoping to find. It’s a kit-built outboard runabout in the classic Chris-Craft style of the 1950s. With bright-finished mahogany and faux planked foredeck, it exudes elegance and prestige and would stand out among the fiberglass boats on my Sarasota waterways.
Rob Wucki
With its bright-finished mahogany and faux-planked foredeck, the Rhode Runner is a modern take on a vintage Chris-Craft runabout. There is plenty of storage space under the recessed deck between the transom and the rear seat, which is hinged to provide access.
As one of CLC’s ProKits, the Rhode Runner requires prior experience with stitch-and-glue construction. While I had previously built three stitch-and-glue plywood kayaks and one hybrid using cedar strips, as well as CLC’s Jimmy Skiff, I was unsure that I could take on this challenge; but after I spoke with John Harris, the company’s president, his confidence in my abilities inspired me to purchase the ProKit, which I completed six months later.
The builder’s guide for the Rhode Runner consists of 35 pages of computer-rendered drawings, and the construction steps are noted in a bullet list of two to six instructions, presuming the builder understands the standard boatbuilding processes. By comparison, the manual for the Jimmy Skiff II, one of CLC’s standard kits, has 160 pages, with each operation explained by one or more sentences and illustrated with a photo or drawing.
Even though the Rhode Runner guide was greatly abbreviated, it was well suited to my previous experience, and the boatbuilding I’d done previously made it easy to follow the instructions.
Bob Silverman
The Rhode Runner, one of CLC’s ProKits for stitch-and-glue construction, is assembled with neither temporary molds nor strongback. Here the starboard planking panels are being wired to the frames. Note that the frames are notched to ensure the planks’ proper alignment.
The quality of the okoume plywood in the kit was exceptional, and the milling of the CNC-cut pieces very precise. Each of the two interior stringers, two deck panels, two bottom panels, and four strakes is supplied in two pieces with interlocking puzzle joints. The mating pairs are self-aligning when epoxied together. The 3⁄8″ frames are strengthened with plywood doublers, and the aft ends of the bottom panels are sheathed with fiberglass and epoxy.
The Rhode Runner does not require temporary molds or a strongback. Assembly of the hull begins with stitching the 1⁄4″ bottom panels together along the centerline. The installation of the seven 3⁄8″ frames follows, aided by tabs that fit into slots milled in the bottom panels. Copper-wire stitches temporarily hold the pieces together. The 1⁄4″ planks in the four strakes have pre-milled rabbets that align the planks at the laps in CLC’s LapStitch method. The hull bottom gets ’glassed inside and out before the interior and the decks are installed.
The two 1⁄4″ deck pieces are tacked together along the centerline with cyanoacrylate glue, avoiding the holes required for copper-wire stitches. The top surfaces have been milled with grooves to accept contrasting strips of wood to create the appearance of a planked-and-caulked foredeck typical of vintage Chris-Craft runabouts.
Rob Wucki
Stylish and fast when carrying one, two, or three passengers, with just the skipper aboard, the runabout can achieve a top speed of 27 mph with the 25-hp outboard.
The cockpit is all plywood sealed with epoxy. There are two storage compartments along the sides in the stern. They have access openings on their forward ends and are sealed by adhesive rubber-foam gaskets on the underside of a hinged stern bench. Between the compartments, in the center of the stern, there is room for a fuel tank. A seat backrest slides into slots provided by a pair of brackets. At the forward end of the cockpit there are seats for the helmsperson and a passenger, made of 18mm plywood. I bought the kit that included the two forward seats. They add flair to the look of the boat, and have narrow fiddled shelves on the aft side of the backrests that can hold beverages and other small gear.
I installed several optional features, including a period-looking windshield, running lights, stainless-steel rubrails, upgraded seats, and a complete electric package. Hardware for a windshield and for the motor’s throttle and gear shift is available from CLC. I added switches for the navigation lights and bilge pump and installed a Garmin navigation screen with depthfinder.
Rob Wucki
With a 25-hp four-stroke outboard the Rhode Runner gets on plane easily. When at speed, the boat carves around turns rather than skidding through them.
To achieve the appearance of an original Chris-Craft, I went the extra mile and customized the upholstery with a local shop and located period-accurate flags, pennants, deck pads, and an original gas tank.
I purchased a single-axle, aluminum-frame trailer with a 1,600-lb load capacity, which supports the runabout’s weight—including motor and fuel tank—with ease. The boat behaves well on the road. It isn’t a heavy boat, so a pair of ratchet straps can keep it secure and centered on the trailer bunks. At the ramp, the Rhode Runner glides off and back onto the trailer very well.
I equipped the Rhode Runner with a 25-hp Yamaha four-stroke outboard. Its 126 lbs is ideal for fore-and-aft trim, and it is smooth and quiet from idle to top speed. The boat went on plane with ease and remained perfectly trimmed with uninterrupted visibility over the bow. When underway, the Rhode Runner is incredibly stable, and you can feel the smoothness when accelerating. The boat rides exceptionally dry thanks to the slight flare of the foredeck that deflects the spray. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it cut through the waves when crossing the Intracoastal Waterway, even in choppy conditions. When cornering, the boat dug in and stayed the course, rather than swerving out of its direction. I was able to reach speeds of up to 27 mph motoring solo, and the boat slowed down comfortably without having the stern wave pile up against the transom. The ride is incredibly smooth and stable, making it a joy to operate. I’ve only run my Rhode Runner with two people aboard, and it balances very well. I don’t doubt that having two more passengers would be just fine and it would still get on plane.
Rob Wucki
The Rhode Runner provides a smooth, stable, swift ride, and has ample space for four.
I’ve owned many boats, including Boston Whalers, flats boats, fishing cruisers, and pontoons, but if you’re after a fast, fun, and stable runabout, this is it. My Rhode Runner is an undeniable head-turner wherever I take it—both on land and in the water—with people constantly asking me how they can get one. With the quality of the kit and the easy-to-follow plans, I felt confident, after I got started, that I’d be able to complete a very solid, well-thought-out boat. Building this boat was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. If you’d like a runabout with the look of a classic and you’ve already built a kit and are ready to take the next step as a boatbuilder, the Rhode Runner provides good value and will reward your efforts.
Bob Silverman is a business-administration graduate from the University of South Florida and now a licensed real estate-broker specializing in developing mobile-home parks in Florida. Married with two grown children, he has lived in Sarasota for over 66 years. He has lived by the water most of his life and enjoys building wooden boats, kayaks, canoes, and even teardrop campers. He’s also a vintage Ford Mustang enthusiast, with ten restorations and showings under his belt. He’s currently building a hybrid stand-up paddle board with a trolling motor.
Rhode Runner Particulars
[table]
Length/14′9″
Beam/5′5″
Dry Weight (hull only)/350 lbs
Max Power/25 hp (200 lbs max outboard weight)
Min Power/15 hp
Motor Shaft Length/20″
Fuel Capacity/6 gallons (tank not included)
Passenger Capacity/4 adults
Max Payload without motor/1,000 lbs
[/table]
The Rhode Runner is available from Chesapeake Light Craft as a complete kit, with optional seats, for $4,998. Wooden parts only ($3,639), PDF plans with guide ($199), and many other options are available.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Magazine readers would enjoy? Please email us!
For many years I had searched for a boat that could sleep four, had decent headroom, a separate head compartment, great sailing performance, and a drop keel so that I could use a normal trailer. Most importantly, it had to fit in my 25′-long workshop. When I came across the Didi 26 by Dudley Dix, it seemed to have everything I was looking for, but it was just 1′ too long for my workshop. Then, I found his Didi 23, which had the same interior height and beam as the Didi 26 but was just 3′ shorter.
The plans had all the information needed to build the boat in any of several configurations. Dudley’s Guide to Radius-Chine Plywood Construction provides 21 pages of text detailing the method used for 16 of his plywood sailboats from 15′ to 40′, with 23 pages of drawings. The plans set provided enough instructions to get me started on the project, and the additional reference books cited by the designer were a big help.
I opted for the full-sized Mylar patterns for the bulkheads, keelson, and foils. There is also an option to buy digital files for having plywood parts cut by CNC machine. While the radius-chine boatbuilding technique would be faster than either strip-planked or cold-molded construction, I would suggest that an amateur builder gain some experience with the technique by building one or two smaller boats before tackling this one. Dudley provides his phone number and email address on his website, and he was very helpful in answering questions that came up. There are also several websites that show detailed photos of the build process of both Didi 26s and 23s.
Photographs by the author
The long-cockpit version of the Didi 23, seen here, provides space for a four-person crew to be comfortably seated, either side of the mainsheet traveler.
The boat is built upside down on a ladder frame. The nine bulkheads plus transom are attached to the frame and slotted into the keelson. No temporary forms are needed. I fiberglassed the 9mm-plywood bulkheads and 12mm keelson before starting the assembly. The flat sections of the hull (the side panels and the two bottom panels) are 9mm plywood, which is epoxied and screwed directly to stringers and the bulkheads. The curved chines are laminated from two layers of 4.5mm plywood cut into strips about 10″ to 20″ wide. The strips are laid diagonally to the centerline to make them easier to bend across the four stringers that establish the curve. The plywood pieces are temporarily screwed in place while the epoxy cures. The decks are also of 9mm plywood laid over the stringers and bulkheads; the cabintop is stitch-and-glued 9mm plywood.
The Didi 23’s plans include options for a short cockpit with two double berths, and a long cockpit with one double and two quarter berths. I decided on the long cockpit. The two quarter berths are tucked in the stern beneath the cockpit side benches, and there is a roomy double V-berth up in the bow. I also made a few of my own modifications; most notable is the addition of a sugar-scoop extension to the transom, which allows for easier entry from the water and docks, and when the boat is on the trailer. This increased my boat’s overall length by 20″. I also added four windows in the hull to bring more light into the interior, and changed the shape of the companionway opening from parallel sides to angled sides, making it easier to get the washboards in and out. Finally, I created a double sliding hatch for the companionway, which has given us better access into and out of the cabin. It took me just under seven months to build and paint the outside of the hull, and then another 18 months for the deck, interior, and outfitting.
The fully battened mainsail, furling jib, fully adjustable running backstay, and tracked sheet leads allow for fine-tuning that enhances the Didi 23’s performance under sail.
For auxiliary power, Dudley lists options for hanging an outboard off the transom, or mounting a small saildrive diesel under the companionway. I installed the electric Spirit 1.0 Pod Drive by ePropulsion in a motorwell beneath the cockpit floor, where it can be retracted for sailing, trailering, or while at the dock. The 1kW motor is equivalent to a 3-hp gas engine, and at full throttle will push the 2,250-lb Didi 23 along at just under 5 knots. I typically motor at about half throttle to get the most out of the small battery that came with the motor. A small gas generator installed in a lazarette compartment gives me extra battery range and allows me to charge the house battery while cruising. At some point I will upgrade to solar panels and a larger battery for the motor.
There were two fractional rigs shown in the plans, one with a 33′ mast with three spreaders and one with a 29′ mast with two spreaders. I went with the shorter option since I didn’t want the expense and complexity of the three spreaders. With a roller-furled 100 percent jib and fully battened main, the Didi 23 has a sail area of about 240 sq ft. The plans show a retractable bowsprit for a spinnaker, but I decided to wait to install this at a later date.
The faux planking of the cabin and cockpit soles lends a touch of classic style. The companionway ladder lands aft of the enclosed head and wet locker. To starboard of the ladder are the instrument panels. To port is the galley with a single-burner stove and sink. Out of the shot, aft of the ladder, two single quarter-berths extend back beneath the cockpit benches.
With the retracting keel, the boat can be easily trailered. A custom tackle system mounted on the deck and operated by one of the self-tailing winches lowers and raises the keel and its 850-lb cast-lead bulb. However, even with the 6:1 purchase that the tackle provides, 850 lbs is a lot of weight, so I recommend going with larger winches than those shown on the deck plans. The overall weight of trailer and boat is about 4,000 lbs, so it can easily be towed by a small SUV or truck.
Thanks to its shallow draft of just 20″ with the keel raised, the Didi 23 can be launched at most ramps. Setup takes me 1 hour and 45 minutes by myself, and with a helper it takes about an hour. I use a gin pole attached to the base of the mast and the mainsheet blocks with the line led to a winch to raise and lower the mast. Using the main and spinnaker halyards as temporary stays, the mast can be raised easily by one person. The plans include a choice of fixed rudder or a rudder box with a daggerboard blade. I created a kick-up-style rudder that can be mounted like a normal balanced spade rudder. With the blade positioned below the sugar scoop, there is no need for a V cutout in the extension.
Beneath the fo’c’s’le berths there is substantial stowage space. The triangular plywood insert between them provides a platform for a generous double berth, and when raised up the mast support becomes a table with cozy seating for four. On an overnight it was comfortable for the three of us to sleep on the boat. It was a little tight when we were all trying to change clothes, but still bigger than a tent. The only change I plan to make is to add curtains for privacy.
The cockpit is roomy with plenty of space for four adults to spread out—six will fit but with four the cockpit feels spacious. Down below, the double V-berth is a good size and comfortable for two. The V cushion can be removed so that a table can be raised up the mast support. This provides a dining space for four, although it is cozy and most dining and socializing will take place in the cockpit in good weather—I have a portable butane burner for use outside. There is plenty of sitting headroom throughout the main cabin. The galley holds a sink and a one-burner stove, at which one can cook if seated on a stool or kneeling on the cabin sole, and there is additional space for a cooler and a chart table.
In the long-cockpit version, there are two large single quarter berths, and in the short-cockpit version there is a transverse double. Sleeping aboard is very comfortable with ample space in which to stretch out in any of the berths.
There is generous built-in storage under all the berths, and a little beneath the cabin sole. Between the first bulkhead and the bow there is a storage compartment that I converted to an anchor well that can be accessed from the deck. Finally, the partitioned head is just big enough for someone to squeeze into and close the door for privacy. There is a small wet locker area in the head as well, which I have been using as extra storage.
The fractional rig on a 29′ deck-stepped mast supports a working sail area of 240 sq ft. There is an option for a retractable bowsprit for a spinnaker.
On the water, the Didi 23 feels like a thoroughbred. The fastest I have sailed is about 8 knots in 10 to 15 knots of wind. But another Didi 23 owner tells me that he regularly beats 40′ boats in races in the Columbia River Gorge. The balanced rudder steers with an effortless ease. The boat tracks like it’s on rails, and with more than a third of the total boat weight in the keel bulb 6′ down, it is exceptionally stable.
My family and I have very much enjoyed the boat so far, and I highly recommend the Didi 23 to anyone looking for a high-performance trailer-sailer that is as well-suited to cruising as it is to racing around the cans.
Casey Wilkinson owns Kea Custom Boats and lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with his wife and daughter. Casey started Kea Custom Boats in 2006 and has built more than 50 wooden boats ranging in size from kayaks, dinghies, and rowboats to speedboats and sailboats. Casey spent much of his career as a marine biologist and enjoys sharing his love of the marine environment with his family and clients. Casey has photos of the Didi 23 construction on his website.
Didi 23 Particulars
[table]
LOA/23′0″
LWL/21′8″
Beam/8′1″
Draft (min)/ 1′8″
Draft (max)/ 5′7″
Displacement to DWL/ 2,865 lbs
Sail area/263 sq ft
Headroom/4′3″
[/table]
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Magazine readers would enjoy? Please email us!
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Photographs by the author
