Here we have an 18′ Hampton sloop, an evolution of a coastal workboat that developed for fishing in and around Hampton, New Hampshire, and spread far afield. The boatbuilding duo O’Donovan & Dole of Searsport, Maine, built the boat in these photos, modeling it on an original one built in the early 1900s.
Early Hampton boats were double-enders, and were common in New England beginning in the early 19th century. By the end of that century, transom sterns were more popular on this type, and motors eventually came to dominate them; the iconic Maine lobsterboat is likely an evolution of the type, as its bow profile and forward sections will attest. Hampton boats were carried on schooners and sold to ports as far away as Newfoundland and Labrador, where they were further developed as local types. The boats ranged in length from 16′ to 26′, and had a distinctive profile shape: a straight stem, a deep forefoot, a long, straight keel, and a generous sheerline. The boats were shapely in plan view, too, with hollow waterlines forward and aft.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
John O’Donovan and Patrick Dole, doing business as O’Donovan & Dole in Searsport, Maine, chose this handsome Hampton sloop as their shop’s inaugural construction project. The daysailer is based on a century-old original in the collections of Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
John O’Donovan and Patrick Dole opened their business in 2008. After an earlier career as a New York City stagehand, John had attended the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building, and then moved back East to work for some of the finest shops on the coast: Ballentine’s Boat Shop in Cataumet, Massachusetts; Beetle Cat in Wareham, Massachusetts; and French & Webb in Belfast, Maine. At French & Webb, he met Patrick Dole, who had sailed tall ships as a young man, and had then attended The Landing School of Kenebunkport, Maine, studying small-craft construction and systems engineering, before moving on to jobs at Rockport Marine and French & Webb. The two builders had impressive résumés by the time they struck out on their own, and they were looking for a boat that would showcase this experience, to be built on speculation. Their requirements boiled down to these three points:
1) The construction had to be within the shop’s budget; as much wood as possible would be sourced locally, and as much hardware as possible would be shopbuilt.
2) They sought a workboat with Maine ties. “A Herreshoff design might have been a wise financial plan,” John acknowledges, but they wanted something even more traditional—more rooted in working craft.
3) Finally, the boat had to be adaptable as a recreational daysailer.
Seeking perspective, the pair sought the counsel of several designers. “One of the designers we talked to said ‘this Hampton boat [CUSPIDOR] would be your best bet,’” said John.
CUSPIDOR had been launched in 1902 on Bailey Island, Maine. Despite being named for a New Hampshire town, the Hampton boats were well rooted in that state’s neighbor to the northeast. CUSPIDOR had been designed as a pure daysailer, and as such it was finer lined than its working cousins. Forward, the boat is narrow and deep, but it swells out to firm-bilged ’midship sections, and then narrows up again in the stern. The layout and rigging were meant for recreation, rather than for fishing. O’Donovan and Dole had found their boat.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
The Hampton sloop is built traditionally, which is to say that it’s carvel planked on steam-bent frames. O’Donovan & Dole brought a diverse resume of boatbuilding experience to this project, and are quite capable in a range of boatbuilding styles.
The new Hampton boat is an “interpretation” of CUSPIDOR. The hulls are identical, but the new boat’s layout has been modified for family sailing, and the rig is a sloop, rather than the more typical ketch. “We didn’t want a mast right there,” John said, gesturing to where I was sitting as I steered the boat. “We weren’t trying to build a replica of the boat; we were trying to build a boat for young families,” he continued as we set out from the docks at Stockton Springs on a drizzly early September morning. “We pulled a lot of details from other boats.” They were particularly inspired by the sheet leads of the Herreshoff 12½, and the seating arrangement of the Matinicus Island boat. The simple bronze hook-and-eye gooseneck also came from a Matinicus Island boat at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, two hours south of the O’Donovan & Dole shop on Route One. “We went down there looking for details,” said John. “We tried to make as much of the hardware as we could.”
Some other shop-made items on this boat include the jib-sheet leads, which are fabricated from bronze bar, bent and fixed to the coaming; the bronze-rod center board pennant; a simple bronze mast gate that can be unscrewed from the partners for unstepping; black locust bow chocks; and a rack of belaying pins for the halyards. Subcontractor Tom Ward made the blocks, strops, and shroud-tensioning deadeyes.
I’d brought my 22-month-old son along for the trip, and it was immediately apparent to me that this was, indeed, a family boat. A boy that age requires constant vigil onboard. The Hampton’s cockpit is divided into forward and after sections by a thwart, and the after section has side benches for the helmsman. Forward of the thwart the space is wide open, and it’s a deep, safe place for young kids to play. They can watch for birds and buoys over the side of the boat, but it would take some effort to climb those sides and get to the water. While I wouldn’t underestimate my son’s ability to do this, there’s a security to this arrangement that’s absent from many shallower-bodied daysailers.
You’d think that so deep a cockpit would indicate a deep-draft boat, but that’s not the case here. The O’Donovan & Dole Hampton draws just 1′ 9″ with the centerboard raised. “That’s what I love about the centerboard,” said John. “We can go over to the beach on Sears Island and step ashore.”
This shoal draft, however, does not indicate easy trailerability, for there are other factors that affect this. This boat is carvel planked, which means that “she really just needs to go in and stay in,” said John. “I guess if you wanted to build a strip-planked version or a cold-molded version, she could live on a trailer.”
The skies brightened, the rain stopped, and the wind freshened during our September outing. The boat tracked well, with its long, straight keel. But it turns well, too; even in the light breeze, I felt no threat of being caught in stays. Of course, it doesn’t spin on a dime—you sail it through a tack—but this is a surpris-ingly maneuverable boat, given the depth and length of its keel.
Because we had wind, we didn’t bother with the oars. John told me, though, that he’s still working out the best, most comfortable way of rowing the boat. Initially, he’d tried sitting in the center of the thwart and rowing with a pair of oars, but that put him right on top of the centerboard trunk—an okay position for brief stints, but certainly not for a marathon. Sam Martinelli of Shaw & Tenney, during the cover shoot for this magazine (yes, that’s the Hampton boat nosed into the beach on this issue’s cover), suggested that John try sitting off to one side of the thwart, rowing with one oar, and adjusting the rudder to compensate for the single oar. That worked, and it seems the best way to propel the boat in a calm, when alone. When crew is available, one member should be assigned to the other oar.
The O’Donovan & Dole Hampton has a white oak keel and stem, white oak steam-bent frames, and Atlantic white cedar planking. The shape of the boat is such that John and Patrick could gang-cut three planks at a time, to the same pattern, and just tweak the ends a bit to get them all to fit well. The planking is fastened with bronze screws. As John suggested, the boat’s construction could be modified for wood-epoxy, though an element of her heritage would certainly be lost in doing so. The boat’s spars are Sitka spruce. While that choice might seem a violation of the economical, local-sourcing mandate, it isn’t. A local yard had some beautiful offcuts from a large project, and so the option was just too good to pass up. The boat’s materials list is adaptable to what’s available locally.
I was impressed with a detail back aft at the helm station: the cockpit sole’s carefully fitted and bent red-oak margin boards. While a more usual approach here might have been to build a wide elevated platform, the fitting of these boards to the inner hull, and the associated deep narrow sole in this area, provided a delightfully ergonomic footrest when sailing.
In fact, ergonomics are a hallmark of this boat’s layout. While it may seem a simple matter to rig such a boat, the careful location of sheet cleats, the tiller’s long length, and the mainsheet lead make the difference between an effortless outing and a frustrating one. I’ve sailed a Mackinaw boat of similar size and shape as this Hampton boat. That boat was ketch rigged, with foresail sheets out of reach of the helmsman, and tacking while alone was a project. The O’Donovan & Dole Hampton’s jibsheets are led practically to the helmsman’s hand, with cleats right there for easy belaying. John noted that he’s found these cleats to be a handy place to tie off the tiller when he needs to slide forward to tend something. One must simply lean forward from the helm to trim the mainsail. An added benefit of leading lines to a single station in a family boat is the comfort of knowing that sheet tails aren’t living with kids; I’m ever aware, when sailing with my son and his friends, of the perils of a line wrapped around an ankle—or worse.
We often hear the phrase “family boat,” but without a lot of description of what, exactly, that means. My short trip in this Hampton boat last summer really helped me to refine my understanding of the label, and this simple, beautiful, and functional boat fits the bill.
Plans for CUSPIDOR are available from Mystic Seaport. Contact Ships Plans.
Finished boats no longer available from O’Donovan & Dole.
The O’Donovan & Dole Hampton boat is built faithfully to CUSPIDOR’s lines, which are shown here. The new boat’s ergonomic layout is the product of much research and thought by O’Donovan & Dole. Particulars: LOA 17′ 4″, Beam 6′, Draft (cb up) 1′ 9″, Draft (cb down) 3′ 2″, Displacement 2550 lbs, Sail area 170 sq ft
Peter Lamoureaux, a strong oarsman, commissioned his friend John Brooks to create a pulling boat that he might race and then, after the competition, row out to an island with his wife for a picnic. The resulting Peregrine 18 has proven fast, easy to row, and handsome.
Preliminary sketches indicate that this design began, more or less, as a Whitehall boat; but the finished drawings reveal something quite different. The designer’s friend and client needed a boat that could average about 6 knots around a 3-mile racecourse, which included tight turns, in sometimes choppy water. He started by drawing a nearly semicircular mid section for low wetted surface. Highly flared sides would increase secondary stability, and they would provide a spread of nearly 4′ at the rails for the oarlocks. Brooks reckoned that a working waterline of about 18′ would offer the optimum length for an athletic one-person-power engine. A shorter waterline would waste energy through excessive wave generation. A longer boat might suffer from too much wetted surface and hull weight.
In order to reduce wetted surface yet more, and to allow for quick turns at the marks, he introduced a little rocker (convex longitudinal curvature) into the keel. For the same reasons, he drew a short skeg with an end plate running along its lower edge. This arrangement provides adequate directional stability at speed, yet it stalls readily during tight turns. In this circumstance, stalling is a good thing.
Peregrine shows a wider, flatter run than many pulling boats. Brooks wanted to provide adequate bearing to support the strength of the oarsman and the added weight of a passenger and picnic basket. That is, he ensured that this boat will not go down by the stern while being rowed at maximum speed or when loaded with wine, cheese, and cookies for an afternoon on the islands. He concluded the hull with a heart-shaped transom—no less elegant for its greater-than-usual breadth.
Robin Jettinghoff
With an installed, adjustable sliding-seat outrigger unit, Peregrine can meet the demands of an athletic oarsman seeking the sporting challenge of open-water rowing.
As for hull construction, the designer suggests that we plank the glued-lapstrake hull with 4mm-thick plywood if we intend to race, or 6mm-thick plywood if we seek more casual recreation. Perhaps contrary to our first thoughts, heavy pulling boats might hold some advantages. Any waterman will tell you that a heavier skiff provides a steadier platform for fishing and hauling traps. Inertia can prove helpful, and a good robust skiff will take little notice of small waves and can carry (glide) impressively between rowing strokes. L. Francis Herreshoff argued persuasively on the pages of The Rudder and in his books on behalf of heavily built human-powered boats. Yet, all else equal, the light boat usually will win the race.
The glued-lapstrake construction makes good use of epoxy and high-quality plywood, and it results in a light and elegant hull. Despite the thin planking and paucity of transverse framing, Peregrine feels strong. There is some flexibility, but it’s a lively elastic flexibility rather than the wet-noodle limpness of a plastic kayak. Full-sized patterns come with the plans package (no true lofting needed), but we’ll still want to take great care with lining off the strakes. The shadows cast at the laps should accentuate the sweet lines of this hull. If even one plank droops or is pinched, that flaw will catch our eye now and forever.
Robin Jettinghoff
Light glued-lap plywood construction makes Peregrine’s interior very clean, with only enough framing to support her seat risers.
Thanks to the strong gap-filling nature of epoxies, the building of glued-lapstrake hulls rests well within a neophyte’s capabilities. Yet those builders not brought up with the technique will benefit from a careful read of How to Build Glued-Lapstrake Wooden Boats (WoodenBoat Books 2004), which Brooks wrote with his wife Ruth Ann Hill. Some of us will want to build Peregrine in traditional lapstrake fashion and plank the hull with cedar. That’s fine, but we’ll need to add sufficient transverse framing to keep the pleasantly aromatic wood from splitting at the laps.
On the water, Peregrine behaves as promised. I rowed the boat along the Maine coast on a clear sunny day with just enough breeze to raise a slight chop. She pulls easily up to a comfortable cruising speed. The winged skeg keeps her rock-solid on the desired course. Yet, for an 18′ 2″ boat, she can change direction quickly at low speeds. Wheeling around racecourse marks or working into a crowded float should pose no undue problems.
Joe Thompson
Her waterline length makes Peregrine a stable rowing platform, creating little wake and avoiding any “hobbyhorse” motion as the rower’s weight moves forward and aft.
After I exceeded cruising speed, perhaps 3½ knots, the hull absorbed all the strength I could muster. The harder I pulled, the faster Peregrine went. Unlike shorter and deeper boats, she didn’t squat or dig herself a hole in the water. King Kong himself likely could not overpower this hull. The boat’s owner tells of having rowed a 3-mile triangular course in a 15-knot breeze. Although not racing, he covered the distance easily at an average speed of more than 5 knots.
Peregrine seems to meet her design criteria in crisp and handsome fashion. Lightly loaded in a reasonable breeze, she travels fast when propelled by a strong rower. After the race, she’ll idle comfortably out to the islands while carrying two people and a picnic basket.
Robin Jettinghoff
Careful attention to lining off Peregrine’s overlapping planks will enhance the hull’s lovely form. This boat was built by Joe Thompson of Brooklin, Maine, shown here at the oars.
For those of us who can’t take advantage of the 18-footer’s speed potential, or who simply prefer a smaller boat, Brooks has come up a shorter sister, the 16′ Merlin. As you read these words, he’s working on finished drawings for this design. At present he can supply a materials list, full-sized patterns for many parts, and a set of Peregrine plans (construction details for both boats are essentially identical). Although some “figuring out and reworking” are involved, several Merlins have been built using this mix of information.
John Brooks specializes in the design of glued-lapstrake boats. He does business as Brooks Boats Designs. Plans for the Peregrine 18 are available for $75.
John Brooks / Brooks Boat Designs
John Brooks, a Brooklin, Maine, boat builder and designer, drew the plans for the Peregrine 18 to emphasize solo rowing, with an option for two rowing stations. For racing, light 4mm plywood planking would be best; for cruising, 6mm will prove more durable. Particulars: LOA 18′ 2″, LWL 16′ 3″, Beam 3′ 10″, Draft not much, Racing weight 110 lbs, Cruising weight 133 lbs
This is a gentleman’s Whitehall.” That’s how Steve Holt describes the Shaw & Tenney Whitehall, a 17′ 9″ recreational rowboat based on a legendary 19th-century working type. Holt is proprietor of Shaw & Tenney, the 150-year-old, Orono, Maine–based maker of wooden oars and paddles. The company itself is something of a commercial legend for its longstanding success in its small niche, and this Whitehall, a modern wooden version, is Shaw & Tenney’s first boat offering in all of those years.
The Whitehall pulling boat is widely believed to have originated in New York and been named for Whitehall Street in that city, though the great small-craft historian John Gardner cast some doubt on that supposition in his book, Building Classic Small Craft, Volume 1. He said the boat’s origins were “vague and shadowy,” and suggested that it might even have been imported from England. Regardless of the type’s roots, it was in active service in New York by the 1820s, and it spread to Boston, where it developed distinctive regional traits.
“The Whitehall was not a ship’s boat, but a vehicle of harbor and coastwise transportation,” writes Gardner. “Not only were these boats the choice of crimps and boarding-house runners, but of nearly everyone else as well who required reliable and expeditious transportation about the waterfront or from one part of the harbor to another—ship chandlers, brokers, newspaper reporters, insurance agents, doctors, pilots, ships officers, port officials, and many others.
“Gentlemen of that day,” continues Gardner, “seeking a pleasure boat, frequently adopted modifications of the Whitehall workboat.” The impulse to adopt these boats for recreation has not diminished after nearly 200 years. With its purposeful plumb stem and seductive wineglass transom—and good rowing characteristics—the Whitehall still often makes the short list of boats for a recreational rower with a penchant for classical good looks. But refinements are, indeed, in order to bring this type into the realm of pleasure rowing, for a commercial Whitehall, while easy on the eyes and oars, could be relatively heavy and hard to turn. Which brings us back to the Shaw & Tenney Whitehall.
N. Forster-Holt / Shaw&Tenney
The new Whitehall’s construction is strong and does not require frames. Some rowers, however, will take comfort in their presence, and so Shaw & Tenney offers the option. The boat we see here is framed in sassafras.
Shaw & Tenney developed its Whitehall because “we have a market that appreciates fine rowing,” said Steve Holt. But the boat is not simply a business venture for Holt; it’s also the fulfillment of a “desire to build something that hadn’t been built before.” That “something” that hadn’t been built before is a glued-lapstrake-plywood Whitehall pulling boat, with proportions refined for recreational rowing.
“Glued lapstrake plywood” means that the boat’s planks are cut from sheet plywood, bent around a building jig as they would be in traditional construction, but glued together with epoxy rather than being fastened with rivets or nails. This popular construction technique yields a hull of traditional lapstrake appearance, but without the traditional worries of leaking and drying out. The boat can therefore live on a trailer between outings, with no need to soak up in order to be watertight. A glued-lapstrake hull should simply not leak, ever. If it does, then something is wrong.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
The Whitehall’s forward rowing station is used when two rowers are pulling, or when a passenger is seated in the stern sheets.
The Shaw & Tenney Whitehall is planked in 6mm sapele marine plywood. While a glued-lapstrake hull does not require frames, this boat has them. A frameless hull is a bonus in regard to cleanliness and refinishing, for it allows unfettered scrubbing or sanding of the inner planking, and there are no frames to trap dirt. But the absence of frames also reveals the boat’s modern glued construction; and a belly full of frames just makes a boat appear so classical, so sculptural. The Shaw & Tenney Whitehall has bright-finished sassafras frames contrasting with its painted inner planking. Although widely spaced, they certainly add some strength to the hull. They also provide some visual relief to that expanse of white inner planking. And, finally, they provide blocking for the inwales, creating an open gunwale structure that allows water to drain out entirely when the boat is inverted. Of course, this open gunwale arrangement could be accomplished with simple blocking, too. The optional vestigial frames, in short, are a personal preference—though not a necessity.
The boat’s transom and bright-finished accents are of sipo mahogany, prized for its so-called “ribbon-stripe” grain. The keel is of white oak—heavy, but heavy in the right place.
The development of this boat began as a conversation with Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. Fuller is also a former curator at Mystic Seaport Museum, where that conversation took place at the 2008 WoodenBoat Show. The mandate was for a tandem, fixed-seat classical rowboat that could also be rowed by a single person—and could be adapted for a sliding seat, if one were desired. “We looked at hundreds of different designs,” said Holt.
N. Forster-Holt / Shaw&Tenney
The Shaw & Tenney Whitehall comes equipped with outrigger oarlocks at the primary rowing station. These oarlocks flip out for use, and are folded inboard for stowage. They allow for oars 1′ longer than would standard, gunwale-mounted hardware, and are also available separately from Shaw & Tenney.
The resulting boat is an original design, but it most closely resembles a recreational model, the Bailey Whitehall, on display at Mystic Seaport—“a fancy pleasure Whitehall,” as described by John Gardner in Building Classic Small Craft. The Bailey boat measures 16′ 9″, and carries a beam of 3′ 7″. The boat’s scantlings are minimal, to save weight, and the lines are “drawn extra lean and fine,” according to Gardner.
The Shaw & Tenney boat is also extra lean and fine. It resembles the Bailey Whitehall, but the newer boat is 17′ 9″ long and 3′ 7½” on the beam—proportionally narrower than even the fine-lined Bailey boat. “Our boat,” says Holt, “is not meant to carry four men and 600 lbs of supplies out to a ship.” But at the launching festivities at Pushaw Lake near Orono, the boat did carry 600 lbs of people through a 2½’ chop. “No trouble at all,” Holt reported of that outing.
I too had no trouble at all when I tested the boat in a 1 2–15-knot northerly at Pushaw Lake on a sparkling afternoon last August. I’d had a brief spin in the boat a few weeks before, when we were shooting this magazine’s cover, so I knew that it tracked very well in a straight line, and that it turned slowly. So I was impressed in August, when leaving the dock in tight quarters and a breeze, that I could practically pivot the boat in its own length with short bursts of opposing oar strokes. Once aimed where I wanted to go, the boat tracked dead straight, despite the breeze being on the forward quarter.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
Because of its long, straight keel, the Shaw & Tenney Whitehall is not nimble in sharp turns, but it’s fast and it tracks straight for long distances.
Steve told me as I left the dock that the boat responds well to a modest pace at the oars—that a fast clip would wear me out sooner, but not necessarily make the boat go faster. This turned out to be true, and it was an especially useful observation when I was rowing the boat upwind. I’d take a firm stroke, and then wait and watch the shore. One one thousand…two one thousand…three one thousand…four one thousand…. The boat continued to carry its way forward, despite the headwind. Then I’d take another stroke.
The night before my Pushaw Lake test, I’d been rowing a popular small dinghy at the WoodenBoat waterfront, in a similar breeze. This smaller boat is famous for its good rowing qualities, but I was struck that evening by how the headwind stopped it in its tracks between strokes. A staccato rhythm was required to maintain headway. I don’t mean this observation as a criticism of that dinghy, for I certainly would not want a tender of the size and weight of the Whitehall. But the role of a little weight and waterline length in keeping a boat gently moving forward in difficult conditions was illuminating.
After rowing a suitable distance upwind, I rested for a moment to recover and make a few notes. Driven by the wind, the boat headed for the barn. It was a great ride back, with my strokes as much for steering as for drive. I tried the boat on different points of “sail.” Dead downwind, broad reach, beam reach…she tracked straight no matter what the relative wind. I rested one oar and pulled with the other, watching the shore astern as I did. The boat’s stern would steer slowly across the backdrop of trees. As the breeze came on to the stern quarter, I’d need to drag the lazy oar briefly to get through the broad reach—a particularly stable wind angle, it seems.
As noted above, I had a brief outing in the boat in calm conditions, and she’s a joy to row in a flat sea and no wind. While not a nimble boat, it’s fast. And it’s beautiful. I can imagine having one for morning rows on the Penobscot River, and I’d feel confident making the two-mile crossing of that river’s lower portions—even in its frequent short, steep chop.
Steve’s 11-year-old son Sam asked me what I thought of the boat when I returned from my breezy trip on Pushaw Lake. I told him some of the things that I’ve just told you—that the boat carries beautifully between strokes, but that it didn’t take excessive power to get it going in the first place, and that it tracked so well. Sam thought for a moment, and then replied with what I think is a more succinct description of the boat’s handling qualities than I’ve been able to muster: “It doesn’t smash up and down because it’s too light, but it isn’t too heavy, either.”
Modeled on a recreational Whitehall conserved at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, the Shaw & Tenney model is narrower than its working forebears. Particulars: LOA 17′ 9″, Beam 3′ 8″, Weight 145 lbs
When I realized the car that had turned right at me was not slowing down, I tried to speed up, but the camping gear I carried on my 10-speed weighed it down and I was unable to get out of the way. The car hit me broadside and the impact launched me over the handlebars: I did a somersault in mid-flight, the top of my head just glanced the pavement, and I landed on both feet in a deep crouch. I stood up, stunned that I wasn’t injured aside from a road rash on my left elbow. My bicycle didn’t fare as well. The rear wheel was badly bent, and the left crank arm was pushed to the opposite side of the frame so that both pedals were on its right side. Somehow my left foot had come free of the toe clip and strap and my leg wasn’t broken. I ran after the car, which had stopped a few dozen yards away.
Photographs by the author
On the approach to Salt Lake City, Jim (seen here) and I had to endure a hot, 40-mile stretch of road across the Great Salt Lake Desert.
On August 1, 1977, my best friend Jim and I started riding from our hometown, Edmonds, Washington, headed for the Grand Canyon. We rode 800 miles to Salt Lake City and Jim was missing his new girlfriend, Jane. He decided to take a bus home, and I couldn’t blame him. On August 10, I continued south on my own. I’d gone just a few miles and was still within the city limits when the elderly driver with impaired vision ran into me. After my brief suborbital flight over Utah asphalt, I had no idea that the collision would (eventually) lead to my dream job—which I couldn’t even have imagined at that point: working as an editor for WoodenBoat. At the time, I was just happy to be uninjured. The driver paid for a replacement bicycle and, two days later, I was back on the road and pedaled another 1,400 miles before arriving back home. That was my last bicycle tour.
At the same time that I was finishing the dory skiff, I sewed its sails from cotton boat drill, as recommended by Pete Culler in Skiffs and Schooners. The structure behind the boat is the shop in which I built the skiff. My father had the garage occupied with his racing-shell repair work, so he let me build an extension on the back of the house over the concrete pad I’d used for basketball.
Before that ride in the summer of 1977, I had done a lot of backpacking, but I had hit the limit of what I could carry and how long I could stay out. Eventually, the pressure of a 70-lb load on my pack’s hip belt had caused nerve damage that left my right thigh numb for decades. I shifted to bicycle touring, but after getting hit I was no longer at ease sharing the road with cars and gave that up, too. I still wanted to pursue traveling under my own steam, and small-boat cruising seemed the best way forward. A boat could carry more gear than I could haul on my back, and waterways had room for me to stay well clear of motor-driven traffic.
After I finished the skiff, I dismantled my boatshop and left one corner of it around the garage door at the back of the house for Dad to use as an extension when he was working on 40′-long four-oared racing shells. The workbench beyond the bow of the skiff, with the red chair on it, was roughly built and meant to be temporary, but I’m still using it 45 years later.
I studied maps of Puget Sound and British Columbia and was taken by Knight Inlet, which follows a crooked 78 miles from the B.C. coast to some of the 7,000′ summits of the Coast Range. I needed a boat but I couldn’t afford to buy one, so I decided to build one. After reading a handful of boatbuilding books, I settled on the 14′ Marblehead dory skiff. I started building it in the fall of 1978 and launched it on a rainy spring day in 1979.
Our neighbor across the street gave Dad an old trailer for a V-bottom boat and the rollers weren’t at all suited to the skiff. I set a piece of 1/4″ plywood over the rollers to protect the hull. Dad’s 1965 Chevy Sportvan was the tow vehicle.
While my plan had been to row and sail to Knight Inlet that summer, I had grown uneasy about my lack of experience. I had also discovered that building the skiff was a challenging endeavor, and far more satisfying than the means to an end that I’d thought it would be. I put aside my vision of cruising and talked my father into letting me build a boat for him. I spent the next year building a Chamberlain gunning dory.
There was a boat ramp on the Edmonds waterfront, but I wanted to launch the boat at Skinny Beach where I had spent my summer vacation days all through secondary school. I also preferred having the dory carried bow-first to the water by my family and friends rather than backing it in on a trailer.
After launching Dad’s boat in the summer of 1980, I felt obligated to finish what I’d started with the dory skiff before I let another year slip by. I launched from Mukilteo, Washington, and headed north. After a week of rowing, Knight Inlet was coming up just as I’d settled into the rhythm of rowing day after day and enjoying the wilderness as it unfolded around me. The rowing was tiring but didn’t leave me aching at the end of the day as backpacking had, and not a single boat had run over me. I wanted to keep going and opted to follow the Inside Passage northward. I managed to row and sail 700 miles to Prince Rupert, just shy of the Alaskan border, and stopped the day after the mild summer weather had given way to dangerously strong winds.
Inspired by the orphan girl played by Paulette Goddard in Charlie Chaplin’s movie, Modern Times, I christened the dory GAMINE. It was a rainy windless day, so I left the sails at home, but brought the mast for the Cunningham house flag I’d made as a copy of the flags flown by five generations of my family before me.
When I got back home, my parents showed me a copy of Nor’westing, a local boating magazine, which had been published while I was away. In it, presented as the first article of a series, was a letter that I’d written to friends of my parents who had been eager to hear about my trip. They were also the owners of the magazine. I was shocked that my casually written letter had made its way into print and, worse yet, that a few thousand readers were expecting the rest of the story from me. To spare myself further embarrassment, I had to become a writer.
After my first row aboard GAMINE, I took my parents out. The sou’wester Mom is wearing is one I made of canvas coated with GacoFlex, a rubbery paint Dad had used when he reskinned a wood-and-canvas canoe.
I didn’t do any more writing for publication until 1987 when I sent Sea Kayaker magazine an article about building a paper canoe and paddling it 2,500 miles from Québec to Florida. Still wary after my first experience with publication, I fussed over the writing endlessly until I was sure it was squeaky clean. It was squeaky clean, apparently, and was published verbatim. Two years later, I got a phone call from the founding editor, who was planning to retire. He had remembered my clean copy and invited me to succeed him. I knew nothing about magazine production, but I took the chance. It turned out well and I held that job for 25 years.
Two years after launching GAMINE, I set out from this stretch of Puget Sound on a course that took me 700 miles north along the Inside Passage and beyond that to a career devoted to boats and their stories.
In the last few of those years, sea kayaking had passed the peak of its popularity and in 2014 the magazine had to close. Shortly after the last issue went out, I got an email from Matt Murphy, the editor of WoodenBoat, with the offer to edit Small Boats, a new online magazine that WoodenBoat Publications had in the works. The path that began with getting hit by a car in Salt Lake City had finally delivered me to my dream job.
Many of my classmates in high school and college seemed to know from an early age where their life trajectories would take them, but I didn’t have that gift of foresight. Perhaps being raised as a rower by a father who was himself a rower got me used to not seeing where I was headed, and the notion that the path would only make itself clear while I was looking back. As it turned out, I didn’t need to know where I was going to arrive where I wanted to be. Sometimes we have the good fortune to be guided by happy accidents.
As the wakes of passing powerboats slapped SOUL CAT’s port side, she rocked gently. I was in a secluded part of Georgian Bay; the nearby island’s black and red granite outcrops had been smoothed and rounded by ice-age polishing. White pines and brush partially concealed a pair of plain, two-story cottages. These were new to me, but otherwise the low 1⁄5-mile-long island, unnamed on the charts, was much as I remembered from a 1960 camping trip with my dad, brother, and cousin. On this day, August 13, 2022, I had reached the turnaround point in a voyage from my home in Napanee, Ontario, up the Trent-Severn Waterway—a 240-mile chain of rivers, lakes, locks, and canals from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron— and back again. I was 290 miles and 11-1⁄2 days from home.
Photographs by the author
This island at the entrance to the Main Channel from Georgian Bay marked the beginning of SOUL CAT’s homeward-bound journey.
Four solely solar-powered electric boats had previously made the east-to-west journey along the Trent-Severn: in 2017 the American boat, RA, was the first, coming this way during its Great Loop adventure; in 2018 I followed in SOL CANADA; in 2021 a catamaran yacht named THE HARVEST followed the waterway from Trenton, Ontario, to Georgian Bay but then looped back to Lake Ontario via Lake Huron and Lake Erie. Now, in SOUL CAT, I had become the fourth to make the trip and I hoped to become the first to make the 580-mile round trip on the Trent-Severn under solar power.
Inspired by a Small Boatsreview of Bernd Kohler’s gas-outboard-powered Eco Cat, I built SOUL CAT, a modified version of Kohler’s 18′ x 8′ plywood-on-frame catamaran. I had been using her for a year and thus far she had met my expectations. I had a Torqeedo electric motor, the equivalent of a 5-hp gas-fueled outboard, that pushed the boat up to a top speed of 6 knots.
SOUL CAT is propelled by a Torqeedo Cruise 2.0 electric outboard set in a well and powered by a bank of batteries housed beneath the forward bench. The sixteen 3.5-volt lithium-ion phosphate batteries are configured to provide 24 volts with a capacity of 10kW. The boat is capable of a top speed of 11 mph but cruises at an average speed of 5.3 mph. The batteries are charged by eight flexible solar panels in two arrays on the canopy. They have a rated output of 660 watts for the first string of three and 900 watts for the second string of five, giving a total theoretical capacity of 1,560 watts, which is rarely, if ever, achieved because of adverse conditions: the angle of the sun, the hour of the day, cloud cover, etc. The canopy is supported by four motorized struts that can lower the canopy 30″ to rest on the bulwarks for trailering and control the port-to-starboard tilt of the canopy to maximize solar performance.
I turned SOUL CAT from the unnamed island and retraced my route along the crooked 4 miles of the Main Channel toward my overnight destination, Port Severn, 15 miles to the southeast and the site of Lock 45, the most north-westerly lock of the Trent-Severn Waterway’s 45 locks. I cruised in the shadow of high pine-topped granite cliffs along a channel well-marked with buoys as well as day markers on posts and low rock prominences. This midsummer Saturday, boats were flying back and forth, heedless of the speed limit and oblivious to the cresting wakes they dragged behind them. As slow and as light as SOUL CAT was, I felt like I was riding a scooter on the freeway and motored cautiously through the the chaotic intersecting wakes. After a few hours I reached Port Severn and settled in for the evening at the public dock just around the corner of the upstream end of the lock.
SOUL CAT settled in for the night with the side tarps rolled down for shelter and privacy. The cockpit has an aft bench seat and two forward bench seats that fold down for sleeping. A small sink, countertop with hinged table leaf, and a double-burner propane stove serve as the galley. There are two coolers, one for refrigerated food and one for fresh produce. Up forward beneath the ’midship benches, there is plenty of storage space for clothes and tools. The canopy is canvas over an aluminum frame, while the roll-down sides are made from an inexpensive tarp attached, fore and aft, to large bug screens.
The next day dawned shrouded in cool mist so thick that I could not see across the harbor. I took my time over a cup of coffee and tidied the boat while the sun slowly burned off the mist until there were only smoke-like wisps above the barely rippled water. I cast off and ventured into Little Lake with its dark clear water and banks of granite, peppered with maple, birch, and pine that veiled the dozens of cottages crowded along its shore.
Most of the lakes along the waterway are natural, although a few were created as the canal was built and surrounding land was flooded. Construction of the Trent-Severn began in 1833. Linking natural lakes, rivers, and streams across 240 miles, it was hoped that the waterway would open Ontario’s interior and promote agriculture, the lumber industry, and general commerce. It was almost 100 years in the making, and by the time the waterway was completed it was no longer viable—cargo ships on the Great Lakes had grown too large for the canal, and the railways had expanded and were now taking freight overland. From the day the waterway was opened it became a route for pleasure craft, now operated by Parks Canada and open to navigation from May to October.
At the far end of Little Lake, the channel wove through a maze of tree-crowned islands. The channel markers guided me around a northward bend to Gloucester Pool, a 3-1⁄2-mile-long lake where cottages perched on the steep sides of the lakeshore and on the offshore islands were often obscured from view by the trees; long docks extended from the wooded slopes out into the lake.
At the eastern end of the lake is Gloucester Passage, a zigzagging channel that narrows to 25 yards where the swirling Severn River current flowed so fast that I worried my motor, capable of only 6 mph on still water, wouldn’t have enough power to maintain steerage. I made it through, slowly, and without having to contend with any fast-moving boats squeezing through the narrows. Less than a mile farther upstream I reached the Big Chute Marine Railway.
Roger Siebert
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As early as 1914 there were plans to build a lock to bypass the Big Chute rapids, but construction was interrupted by the World War. The first railway, intended as temporary, was built in 1917 and has been replaced twice. Today, there is a flat-bed carriage 100′ long and 24′ wide. It is the only railway of its type still in regular use in North America. The carriage descends into the water so that a boat can be driven on over its submerged platform. Once the boats are secured, cables pull the carriage up the 60′-high granite slope and down the other side back into the water. The front and rear wheels of the car ride on separate tracks set at different levels so the carriage stays level as it traverses the hill.
As I approached the railway, a single boat was departing, and I motored straight on and had the carriage to myself. In barely 10 minutes SOUL CAT was floating off and I head for Swift Rapids, Lock 43, just 8 miles upstream.
There was a light headwind and the sun shone down from a clear sky, ideal for solar-powered travel the panels generated almost as much energy as the motor was drawing. I arrived at the Swift Rapids Lock along with about a dozen boats ranging from cutters to personal watercraft and we all crowded into the 120′-long lock. There once was a marine railway like the one at Big Chute, but it was replaced in 1964 by what became known as the Giant Lock, the deepest single-chamber lock on the Trent-Severn, which carries boats through an average lift of 47′. When the lock gates opened at the top of the ascent, the other boats all took off and I was soon left behind, once more in peace and quiet.
On SOUL CAT’s port side, is the pop-up cabinet that encloses the head. When the head is in use the upper section of the cabinet is raised; at all other times it is lowered to this height and provides a useful work surface.
The landscape was now flatter, and the channel wound maze-like through inlets and outcroppings. For the first 1-1⁄2 miles there was only a single cottage, snug on an island scarcely larger than it was. Traveling upstream into a headwind and plowing through mats of weeds made for slow going. After a 2-mile crossing of Sparrow Lake, I entered a narrow stretch of river where the flat banks on either side were again crowded with cottages. The powerboats here traveled slowly, providing welcome relief from their wakes. At points along this 4-mile run, the river was so narrow, and the buildings so tightly spaced that neighbors on either side of the waterway could converse with one another while standing on their docks.
I arrived at Couchiching, Lock 42, made the 20′ lift, and moored for the night on the upstream side at the last vacant spot on the low wooden dock. The tall pines on the high banks blocked any wind there might have been. Next to the ash-gray cement wall, a faded-green picket fence lined the gravel trail that led into the woods.
I was awake and up by 6:15 the next morning and rolled up the side tarps. The morning mist was thick and hung over mirror-still water that reflected the surrounding pine, balsam, blue-beech, and maple trees. There was not a whisper of sound.
An hour later, I headed upstream on what seemed to be the river’s natural course with both sides thick in forest right to the edge of the low-lying shore but was a 1.6-mile-long canal that had been cut by hand a century ago to bypass the last stretch of the Severn River en route to Lake Couchiching. The lake is 10 miles long and up to 3 miles wide with a well-marked channel to keep clear of its shoals. I was pleased with the gentle following breeze and the bright sunlight shining on the solar panels. When I first attempted this round trip four years ago, the end of sunny weather had forced me to stop at Lake Couchiching after 377 miles in 16 days. Now, four years later, I was breaking my distance record and was two days ahead of the 2018 schedule.
There is typically little solar benefit to be gained when cruising in the early morning and at 8:15 a.m. the panel was producing only 250 watts while the motor was drawing 800 watts to maintain 5 mph. My battery budget was to draw no more than 600 watt hours from the 10-kilowatt battery bank so I could travel all day and finish the day on a full charge. As the day lengthened, the solar energy increased and the panels produced more and more so that, at times, I could be traveling at 5 mph and yet have a trickle charge into the battery. The power management game was to balance speed and draw—on an overcast day, I would drop the speed and exponentially drop the draw.
At its southern end, Lake Couchiching leads to the city of Orillia and Atherley Narrows, a 50-yard-wide marina-flanked passage that flows beneath a busy highway bridge and on to Lake Simcoe. At 15 miles wide and about 22 miles long, it’s largest lake on the Trent-Severn Waterway. Like Lake Couchiching, its waters are shallow, and a strong wind can swiftly build rollers into large breakingwaves . During the crossing from the east side of the lake in 2018, I had had to slow to 3-3⁄4 mph to keep whitecaps from washing over the bow of SOL CANADA. This time I was in luck, the day was calm and sunny and as I crossed the northeast section of the lake from Orillia to the canal, I was struck by the vast expanse of the blue-green water. I could see no land on the horizon, and seagulls and cormorants flying over were the only signs of life. The marked channel never more than 3 miles from shore, the wind remained light and at my back, and I made good progress.
At the top of Couchiching, Lock 42, SOUL CAT is nestled between two yachts. In the center of the cabin space, the portable toilet enclosure is in its raised position, which provides plenty of seated headroom.
Exactly 5-1⁄4 hours after leaving the dock at Lock 42, I rounded Mara Point, a blunt headland on the eastern shore, and approached the two limestone-rock breakwaters that jutted 250 yards into the lake to protect the canal’s 45′-wide entrance. I looped SOUL CAT around to steer north into the entrance then northeast along the still waters flanked by 6′-high concrete walls that were equipped with mooring bits and iron ladders. On the landward end of the breakwaters, I passed through a blue-painted steel swing bridge and waved at the lone Parks Canada operator. Steering clear of the weeds in the shallows close to the banks, I headed northeast along a narrow 1-1/8-mile straight stretch of canal up to Gamebridge, Lock 41. Instead of the granite rock formations and tall pines of the Severn River and its lakes, layers of limestone, overgrown with scrub brush, cedar, and small white pines, lined the banks, making it impossible to pull into shore. The weeds were thick, and the propeller snagged some that grew from the canal bottom as well as those ripped up by passing boats that gathered into floating islands.
When storms kick up swells on Lake Simcoe, the breakwaters at the narrow dogleg entrance to the Trent Canal give shelter to boats waiting to head out.
On both sides of Gamebridge Lock the walls were painted with a blue stripe, which is standard for all manned locks on the waterway: a boat moored in the blue area waits to pass through. A boat in an area not painted blue is there for a short stop or overnight. The walls leading to and from the lock were again 6′ high— a protective measure in case of a storm surge from Lake Simcoe—so I had to climb a ladder to reach the bollard at the top. I was alone passing through the lock and glad I chose to travel in late August when there is a lot less boat traffic than in July.
Beyond Gamebridge, a series of four locks is separated by as little as 1⁄2- to 1-1⁄2 miles. The shortest stretch, 2⁄3 mile, from Gamebridge to Thorah, Lock 40, was little more than a straight ditch, bordered by flat fields and banks devoid of vegetation, shored up by large limestone rocks. The canal was almost choked by weeds in some sections, and I was forced to stop and clear them from the motor’s shaft. As I got underway again, I saw two cabin cruisers waiting to enter Lock 39 and hurried to catch up to them. The lock tenders contact one another about how many boats are coming their way so that they can lock a group of boats through together. I didn’t want to be the slow poke holding all the others up, so I throttled SOUL CAT up to a blazing 6 mph. SOUL CAT and the other two boats passed together through Locks 39, 38, and 37—Portage, Talbot, and Bolsover.
Leaving Bolsover, I let the cabin cruisers pull ahead of SOUL CAT—Lock 36 was 7-1/2 miles away and she wouldn’t be able to keep up. The canal widened, and the shoreline became a series of small irregular inlets and bends crowded with cottages. I had to wait only a minute for a swing bridge to open before entering the 5-mile-long Canal Lake. I was pleased to have come this far, but the weather was no longer in my favor: a 4-mph headwind was slowing me down and the sky had become overcast, making it difficult to get a good charge.
Canal Lake was manmade after the canal was built and the area flooded. A wide, grassy body of water, the lake is at the western end of the Kawartha Lakes, chain that forms the upper watershed of the Trent River. The channel was well-marked but narrow between shoals and areas of dense weed. I worked my way along the well-marked channel between shoals and areas of dense weed, into the building headwind. The lake was divided by three islands connected to one another and to the lake shores by highway bridges. The channel took me to the concrete arch bridge on the south side of the lake: its 60′-wide semicircular arch, mirrored in the breeze-rippled water, looked like a hole in the wall leading to the second half of the lake. I passed through with fanciful expectations, but it was more of the same: a 3⁄4-mile-wide, grassy lake with weeds that stopped me several times to clear the motor.
At the northeast end of the lake, I entered a narrow channel that led to Kirkfield, Lock 36, one of two hydraulic-ram lift locks on the Trent-Severn Waterway. It raises eastbound boats 49’ to the highest point on the waterway—840′ above sea level. I motored into what looked like a big bathtub, the sides and overhead a web of white-painted steel. The gate closed behind me, and up SOUL CAT and I went. The counter-balancing tub to my right was descending without carrying any boats, but the weight of the water in it was creating the hydraulic pressure that was raising me. Since there was no water flowing in or out of either tub as in a lock chamber, there was no turbulence. It was just a quick elevator ride up. At the top, I left the lift and decided to call it a day. It was 5:30, the lock was closed for the day, I had traveled more than 40 miles in just under 10 hours since leaving Couchiching, and I had the entire upstream half of the lock site to myself. The mooring wall extended along the channel for 1,200 feet on both sides and I stopped about a third of the way along—if anyone else showed up they would have plenty of room to tie up in seclusion. The only downside to my chosen spot was the long walk back to the lift lock, down the multiple flights of stairs and across the road to get to the washroom. Even so, I was content and after some supper and a quick swim in the cool water, I rolled the tarps down for the night.
Kirkfield, Lock 36, is the larger of the two counterbalanced hydraulic lift locks on the Trent-Severn Waterway. Its caissons are each 140′ long and 33′ wide. The rising caisson stops when its water level is about 1’ below that of the canal on the upstream side of the lock. When the lock gate opens, water flows into the caisson, increasing its weight by many tons. Simultaneously, the lower caisson stops when its water level is about 1′ above that of the canal on the downstream side. When its gate is opened, water flows out of the caisson, reducing its weight by several tons. Finally, when the valve between the cylinders of the pistons that support the locks is opened, the heavier upper caisson descends, forcing the lighter one to rise. Just 18 days after SOUL CAT passed through the lock on the homeward-bound leg, one of the gates at the top of the lock failed and the lock was closed. Kirkfield is expected to reopen in time for the 2023 boating season.
It was 7:20 a.m. when I left Kirkfield and puttered up the straight canal between the cement walls and walkway. About 1⁄4 mile from the lock I entered an equally narrow canal that took a sharp curve to the southeast for an arrow-straight 2 miles. Walls of intertwined cedars leaned out from both banks, their lowest boughs just inches above the water. In places, loose layers of limestone rose 10′ to 15′ above me and shrubs had grown in the fissured banks. Glass-smooth water reflected the trees and limestone making the canal appear even narrower and SOUL CAT seemed to be floating on a pathway of sky and clouds. It was a stark contrast to the granite landscape from just the day before.
I motored the canal slowly. The battery bank was still low and overcast skies and thunderstorms were forecast for the afternoon. The only sound was the gentle turbulence trailing each hull. The canal led into manmade Mitchell Lake. On one shore I could see wetlands with green weed beds and cattails. It was still early morning and there was not a soul to be seen except a leggy great blue heron perched motionless on a “No Wake” sign. Another straight and narrow 2-1/4-mile-long canal led to the 19 square miles of Balsam Lake, the top of the watershed. From here on I would be traveling downstream, the channel buoys switched from reds to my left to reds to my right, and all the locks—draining instead of filling—would be less turbulent.
The northeast breeze in the late morning was still light as I headed due east and then dipped south to round Grand Island’s rocky shores and sand beaches surrounded by yet more weed beds. It was a 5-mile crossing to the inlet at Rosedale that would lead to Lock 35. From the lock I continued through a marshy channel into and across Cameron Lake, and within less than 3 miles reached the village of Fenelon Falls at the mouth of the Fenelon River. There is wall space for mooring above Lock 34 and when I arrived, the upper mooring area was taken up by motoryachts, so I locked through and tied up at the concrete downstream wharf.
It was only 11:30 in the morning but since sun was scarce and storms were forecast, I decided to stop here for a rest day to allow the batteries to charge. From my tie-up I could see the long spillway where the river tumbled in an endless rumble of falling water which I hoped would lull me to sleep when I turned in. Downstream, the low concrete canal sides gave way to higher rocky banks of sediment limestone topped by pine, fir, cherry, and maple trees obscuring the view of simple cottages and two-story condos.
I wandered past the yachts, stopped to chat with one or two boaters, and strolled into town where the streets of Fenelon were bustling with traffic and shoppers. The sky soon turned dark, so I circled back to the boat and as I rolled down SOUL CAT’s nighttime tarps the skies opened and a torrent of rain came pouring down. I had made the right decision to stay in Fenelon. Within an hour, the rain stopped and my boat, once all alone in a quiet spot on the pier, had been joined by several other craft; the noise of the rain was replaced by the sounds of chattering neighbors.
Evening came and I went ashore for dinner at an eatery just a block away. Returning to the boat, the roar of the falls was drowned out by the sound of portable gas-powered generators as the yachts charged up their battery banks. The light breeze blew the exhaust fumes from one generator about 10′ away, straight at me and, rather than sit and choke on the fumes, I left to spend the evening at a pub. When I returned, as I had hoped, all was quiet.
I was up and gone before 7:30. The sky was overcast but there was no wind as I journeyed down the Fenelon River, which ranged in width but was generally about 150′ wide with high banks of many-layered limestone. After just 1 mile, the river opened into Sturgeon Lake and I headed south down the western arm of the Y-shaped lake with a light breeze behind me. It was a quiet morning, and I had the lake to myself. After 4 gentle miles, I took a sharp turn around the bottom of Sturgeon Point and headed northeast into the light wind that had previously been in my favor. Ten miles later I was at Lock 32 and the small town of Bobcaygeon that nestles between the north ends of Sturgeon and Pigeon lakes. Even this late in the season, the lock walls were lined with boats.
My route took me south through Pigeon Lake before winding east along Gannon Narrows into Buckhorn Lake. SOUL CAT had covered 30 miles upon arrival at Lock 31 at the lake’s north end. Boats staying the night filled the walls on both sides of the lock, but I managed to squeeze in before walking to the nearby grocery store to restock. I settled in early and after a peaceful night got off to a lazy start as I had to wait until 9 a.m. for the first lock-through of the day. By 9:15 SOUL CAT and I were through and cruising east under a hazy sky with a light following breeze. I had gone through the lock in a swarm of boats, but they were now spread out along Lower Buckhorn Lake well out in front heading to Lock 30, a 3⁄4-mile passage. I followed them through from Lower Buckhorn into Lovesick Lake. My route passed between rocky granite islands with jagged inlets and mature-growth trees hiding concealing small cottages and the mainland shore, where large summer homes stood before a backdrop of high rocky hills covered in maples, oaks, and balsam firs.
I left Lovesick Lake at Burleigh Falls, Lock 28. The channel downstream from the lock opened to an arm of Stoney Lake and 1⁄3 mile to the southeast along the shore the rushing water and spray of Burleigh Falls divided around a small island topped with a thicket of pines.
Beyond the falls was a cluster of islands that required close attention to avoid boulders, shallows, and other hazards. Stoney Lake has its name for good reason. I arrived in Clear Lake, a 4-mile-long body of water that stretches from northeast to southwest uninterrupted by a single island. Clear Lake also appears to have earned its name. Now I could head south in a straight shot to Youngs Point, Lock 27, at the head of the Otonabee River, which meanders southwest to Rice Lake some 33 miles away.
Otonabee, Lock 23, is one of 11 locks closely grouped together over a distance of 26 miles. The long cement walls are typical of all the lock stations on the waterway.
I still had many miles and several days ahead of me, but it was beginning to feel like the homestretch, and I was determined to push on as far as I could. My goal for the day, if all went well, was to make it through another eight locks to end just below Ashburnham, Lock 20, in the heart of Peterborough, 15 miles away. On the downstream side of Youngs Point the Otonabee began as the 5-mile long, 1⁄2-mile wide Katchewanooka Lake and its waters reflected the overcast sky and surrounding evergreens. The rocky shores were giving way to flatter, lower-lying land with the occasional wetland. At the south end of the lake, in the town of Lakefield, I passed through the first of five locks, 26 through 22—Lakefield, Sawer Creek, Douro, Otanabee, and Nassau Mills—all with little to distinguish them, and all within about a mile of one another. A drizzle of rain started and stopped and started again. Moments after I left Nassau Mills, a peal of thunder rattled overhead. If it continued or lightning appeared, the locks would close. It was getting late in the day and I had 4 miles to go to reach the next lock so I poured on the power—1,400 watts—and sped along at 6.4 mph. At 5:15, just 15 minutes before closing, I arrived at Peterborough Lift, Lock 21. The second of the waterway’s two lift locks, Peterborough differs from the Kirkfield Lock only in its greater drop—66′ instead of 49′. SOUL CAT was gently lowered in a matter of minutes. I had planned to spend the night upstream of Ashburnham, Lock 20, but boats aren’t allowed to spend the night between Locks 21 and 20, so I made the ¼-mile sprint to Ashburnham, locked through and was done for the day. I was pleased with the day—eight locks and 31 miles despite the clouds and rain.
While SOUL CAT waited for Lock 19 to open at Scotts Mills on a sunny Saturday, her canopy is tilted 5 degrees, which doubles the solar performance in the early-morning light.
Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny, not a cloud in sight and not a whisper of wind. I was up early and had to time to bide until the 9 a.m. opening of Scotts Mills, Lock 19, just 3⁄4 mile down the Otonabee. In the Ojibwe language, the river is called Odoonabii-ziibi, while the word Otonabee comes from the Ojibwe ode, meaning “heart” and odemgat, meaning “boiling water.” In essence the name translates to “the river that beats like a heart and passes through the boiling water of the rapids.”
At 12 percent, my batteries were dangerously low, but I could get a trickle charge going by motoring slowly and taking advantage of the almost-2 mph downstream current. I arrived with an hour to spare. Scotts Mills was bathed in sunlight but there was a constant clatter echoing in the still morning air from the construction work on the dam. I tied up and tilted the canopy to a 5-degree angle to make the most of the sunlight. I was surprised to see the power production surge from 200 watts to 435 watts even at 8 a.m. and decided to lock the canopy in this position for the upcoming run south. When the lock crew came on duty and opened the gates I silently slipped into the lock as the sole occupant and within a few minutes SOUL CAT was heading downstream at 4 mph drawing 480 watts but generating 550 watts—very good for 9:20 in the morning with the sun low in the sky—leaving 70 watts to trickle charge the battery bank. Later in the morning that rose to 150 watts.
The 18-mile stretch of river wove its way through lowlands with marshy pockets, and between banks crowded with overhanging trees or whose bottom branches skimmed the water’s surface. There were only three bridges, a few cottages, and clearings around beaches. As the morning advanced and the charge going into the batteries rose, I upped the speed to 4.5 mph and was still generating a charge of 200 watts.
The river at last opened into a shallow delta and flowed into Rice Lake, a 20-mile-long, 2-mile-wide, northeast-southwest, shallow lake. It can be rough on windy days, but this day it was calm and I headed northeast toward Hastings with a gentle wind pushing SOUL CAT from astern. As I neared the top end of the lake quickly moving black clouds were coming at me and there my luck ran out: the rain came in a downpour and the wind whipped the canopy so hard it snapped like a flag. I worried that the solar panels might fly off completely. The wind spun SOUL CAT around and I fought to get her back on course. Then, the squall moved on just as suddenly as it had arrived. I was soaked, the boat was soaked, but we were in one piece. I pulled into the Trent River and on to Hastings, Lock 18.
The drizzle thinned, and as I arrived at the lock’s cement wall, the sun was peeking out. Despite the quick summer storm, it had been a good day’s travel—39 miles. I moored just upstream of the lock in the very heart of Hastings, a small Ontario town with a year-round population of about 1,300, and popular with summer tourists. I was moored next to a quiet park land with picnic tables, and just a short stroll from a few restaurants, a grocery store, and an ice-cream shop—Hastings had everything I needed.
A sunny day had been forecast for the following day but at 8 a.m. there was a thick fog. My plan was to start slow, as I had done the day before, with the hope of trickle charging the battery bank and to get as far as I could while the weather held—the forecast for the next few days called for rain. At 9 a.m. the lock opened. The fog had all but burned off and I entered with one other boat to lock through.
Crowe Bay, Lock 14, seen here as water was being released from the chamber, was where Phil installed a spare propeller to replace the motor’s original prop after it struck a submerged rock shortly after leaving the lock.
The banks of the Trent River were thick with cottages and homes on one side and low, grassy wetlands on the other, while between them the river itself was translucent blue. It was 50 miles to the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario, but there were 17 locks to go through. I made my way through flat countryside as the river opened into Burnt Point Bay and the adjoining Seymour Lake before narrowing down again. There was little traffic, and I was alone in the three locks—17, 16, and 15—that parallel the last mile of the Trent River before it empties into Crowe Bay, the reservoir created by the dam at Lock 14. To the west of the lock, long gentle falls and small rapids flowed from the dam spillway over 150-yard-wide ledges before slipping back into the channel, which was rocky and, in places, shallow.
Perhaps I was tired, perhaps I didn’t see that the marker buoy had moved out of its location, but the prop hit a rock. The impact jarred the boat, and I knew that all was not well. One of the propeller’s three blades had broken off, but I had enough propulsion to hobble back to the lock entry wall at Crowe Bay. Fortunately, I had brought two older props as spares. The water was too deep to stand in to change the prop, so I tilted the motor up as high as I could, tied a rope around my waist, and, with socket wrench carefully in hand, leaned far out from the wall to get over the motor. I managed to remove the prop nut, replace the propeller, thread the nut back on and tighten it up without dropping anything. Everything worked as it should and I was once more on my way, but I hadn’t gone far when someone at the end of a dock was waving frantically at me. It was my buddy Phil from Belleville, who had been following my voyage with a tracking app. We talked briefly and agreed to meet up after the Ranney Falls locks, just beyond the town of Campbellford.
After an uneventful downriver through Lock 13 and past Campbellford, I arrived at the entrance to the flight of Ranney Falls, Locks 12 and 11, and set up for the night. Phil paid a visit for a couple of hours and after he departed, I hunkered down for the night only to be woken in the early morning by the pounding of a heavy rain. By 9:30 a.m. it had eased to a light drizzle, so I packed up, headed into the back-to-back locks, and then went on my way, once more the only boat heading downstream.
The day was warm, the rain had stopped, there were breaks of blue in the overcast sky, and no wind to speak of. The river passed through a protected wetland area, the acres stretching away through maple, oak and cedar, mixed in with areas of grass, shrubs, cattails, and weeds. The water was now a murky green, a far cry from the clear blue upstream.
By the time I had navigated 5 miles and descended Locks 10 and 9, the rain had started again. It seemed that this would be the theme of the day and I decided to make Glenn Ross, Lock 7, about 12 miles ahead, my destination for the day. The river was narrow, and the low land continued along both sides, but the water was obstructed by a weed growth that looked like floating palm trees. It was a species I had never seen before and later learned that it is an invasive called water soldier. Before it was prohibited, it was sold as an ornamental plant for water gardens. It escaped into a few areas of Southern Ontario and efforts are underway to contain it before it crowds out native species and clogs the waterways. I dodged my way through the spiky leaves, passed through Percy Reach, Lock 8, and made the final 11 miles to Glen Ross, where I pulled in at the top of the lock for the night. An isolated spot, it had just one variety store where I picked up a jar of coffee and later went back for a dish of ice cream.
In this early-evening view looking downstream from the top of the lock at Glen Ross, the section of blue-painted wall is reserved for those boats waiting to lock through. Boats tying up and not wishing to lock through must avoid this area.
The next day was again overcast but I motored the last 14 miles and through six locks to arrive, at last, downstream from Lock 1 and just a mile from the Bay of Quinte. I moored up to the lower wall of the lock, and spent a restless night disturbed by trains crossing the nearby bridge and the rain hammering on SOUL CAT’s canopy.
In the morning I tilted the canopy all the way to port to clear the pool of water that had accumulated in the canvas awning beneath the solar panels. The final stretch of canal was contained between cement walls for 1⁄4 mile. To starboard, the land rose in a 20′ barrier mound topped by a scattered border of sumac trees and separating the canal from the streets of Trenton. To port, beyond the cement, were low scrub trees and brush on a strip of land that separated the canal from the fast-flowing, unnavigable Trent River.
I motored the final 2-mile stretch of canal and beneath the last bridge before turning to look back at the “Gateway to the Trent Severn Waterway” sign that spanned the bridge. I had become the first person to have completed the Trent-Severn Waterway in both directions, solo, using only 100 percent solar electric power.
Making my way east on the Bay of Quinte, a 30-mile-long east-west inland bay that runs parallel to Lake Ontario, my destination for the day was the city of Belleville where I would meet with friends at a small restaurant tucked away near the harbor. I was not to be given an easy ride, however. A head wind and cloudy sky made for slow going and it would be a few hours before I arrived. Then, just as the downtown restaurant came into view, the sky opened and pelted me with rain. It was an unpleasant arrival, but I tied up, mopped up, and joined friends Dave and Phil for lunch. As I sat there, my granddaughter, Taylor, sneaked up behind me bearing a large sign saying, “Congratulations Papa!”
While I had done what I had set out to do, I was not home yet and still had to figure out the next 24 hours. Dave made a quick call and said I could use the mooring space of some friends at the local yacht club for the night and so off I went just as another downpour started. After I’d moored for the night, I had visits from several friends—Belleville is where I worked for 37 years before my retirement.
The morning of August 24 broke to sunshine and a light westerly breeze. I set off on the final leg of my journey to my home dock on the Napanee River about five hours away. The Bay of Quinte was quiet, and as I turned into the Napanee River it felt good to be back in my home waters. I was welcomed at the dock by my son and wife with a bottle of sparkling wine for a celebratory toast. The 23 days and 580 miles had not been without their challenges, but the experience had been unquestionably an extraordinary adventure.
Phil Boyer retired in 2017 after working 38 years in R&D in the telecommunications industry. He now keeps busy building boats and teaching karate at two local clubs. Phil has been around boats his whole life, starting with paddling as a kid. At age 11 he built a sailing pram with a bit of help from his father. In 2006 he began building solo canoes and now has four of them, featured in the August 2019 issue. Phil’s interest turned to building his first solar-electric boat, SOL CANADA, in 2015.
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.
The Fine is a cedar-strip sliding-seat pulling boat designed and built by Rick Crook of Madeira Park, British Columbia. He describes it as “a full-body workout machine. The Fine is wider than a rowing scull, thus more stable, and is suitable for ocean rowing, in reasonable conditions.”
Rick does business as Oyster Bay Boats, specializes in cedar-strip construction, and builds double-paddle canoes and rowboats. He finishes many of his boats bright and takes care to ensure the wood beneath the varnish looks good.
Photographs by the author
Both the outriggers and sliding seat unit can be easily removed to lighten the Fine for cartopping and carrying across the beach to and from the water.
During the Fine’s construction, as with all Oyster Bay boats, its red and yellow cedar strips are glued to one another and held in place with stretchy nylon monofilament rather than staples so there are no rows of dark spots that staples leave behind. The hull is sheathed inside and out with 4-oz ’glass cloth and biobased epoxy. The gunwales are big-leaf maple. The foredeck and recessed aft deck are supported by bulkheads, and access to the resulting enclosed flotation chambers is through deck plates.
A keel runs almost the full length of the hull and provides tracking as well as protection for the hull when it’s hauled on the beach. It ends in a skeg at the stern and is topped by a transom that sits well above the waterline. The weight of the hull, without the rowing rig, is around 65 lbs (not much more than a sea kayak) and is well suited to roof-rack transport.
The Fine’s outriggers and sliding seat can be moved forward from the standard rowing position to accommodate a passenger sitting in the aft end of the cockpit.
The sliding-seat arrangement is a wooden drop-in unit with weight-reducing cutouts. Aluminum tracks support a sliding seat with ball-bearing-equipped nylon wheels. Two 1⁄4″ machine screws secure the seat unit to cleats built into the hull and it can be moved forward from its normal position to accommodate the weight of a passenger carried in the stern. At the aft end of the unit, wooden clogs with heel cups and Velcro straps provide solid bracing for the feet. The outriggers are made of aluminum and held in place on the gunwale by quick-release clamps that engage aluminum plates slipped in place under the gunwale. The outriggers support gated racing-shell oarlocks.
The Fine’s stability makes it easy for the rower to launch from almost anywhere and get aboard once it’s afloat rather than having to find a floating dock low enough to clear the outriggers.
While the Fine was already at the beach when I arrived for sea trials, the bare hull, at 65 lbs, would be a heavy shoulder carry but manageable for short distances. A cart would be the most practical way to get the boat and the rowing rig in one haul from a parking lot to the water’s edge.
As I stepped aboard the Fine, afloat in the shallow water, it had more than enough stability to support me and stay upright as I brought my weight over the gunwale. Once I was seated, the initial stability was very good and didn’t require the help of the oars to put me at ease. I leaned on the gunwale and the secondary stiffened up reassuringly, even as the sheerline dipped within 1″ of the water.
With designer and builder Rick Crook at the oars, the Fine slips along at a good clip, leaving nearly smooth water in its wake.
The clogs are set at a comfortable angle, and I could keep my heels planted in them when I moved to the aft end of the slide for the catch. I’m 6′ tall, and the tracks extended 10″ farther aft than I needed; shorter rowers will have plenty of room on the slide. At the finish of the stroke, I had just enough room at the forward end of the tracks to avoid hitting the stops; taller rowers may need a longer sliding-seat frame.
I got underway with the carbon hatchet sculls provided by Oyster Bay Boats. The height of the seat and the riggers was right on the mark for me: at the finish of the stroke, the handles were even with the bottom of my sternum. In the middle of the recovery, the handles had a 4″ overlap, which gave me the hand-over-hand position I’m used to. The Fine has excellent tracking, and I didn’t need to keep my gaze over the transom to make adjustments to keep on course. Turning is a little stiff—it took 12 1⁄2 strokes to spin through 360 degrees—but appropriate for a boat meant for aerobic exercise and passagemaking.
The Fine’s full-length keel and deep skeg give it excellent tracking.
Measuring speed with a GPS while I was rowing in water protected from wind and current, I could maintain 4 knots with ease and an exercise pace brought the Fine up to 5 1⁄2 knots. It was hard to get a good reading on the GPS in a short all-out sprint as the numbers on the display fluctuated when the boat accelerated as I moved aft at the recovery and then slowed as I moved toward the bow, pushing the boat back, at the drive. The readings averaged out at about 7 knots—the Fine is a fast boat for its size. During the sprints, when I was pulling hard, I didn’t feel any flexing of the outrigger.
Many fast sliding-seat boats with outriggers rely on their oars for stability. The Fine’s 34″-wide hull has enough inherent stability to allow the rower to take a break from holding the oars.
When I finished my rowing trials, I stopped in about 6′ of water to do a capsize drill. I pivoted the port oar parallel to the Fine and leaned over the gunwale. It took a lot of effort to get the boat up on edge, and I fell out before it turned turtle. The boat flopped back on an even keel, and I was able to crawl back on board over the side without any concern that the Fine would roll over on top of me. It stayed upright, and once I was back aboard I could move about in the swamped cockpit without feeling unstable and make my way back to the rowing station.
The seat had floated off the tracks, and it was difficult to get it back in place and then sit on it to keep it from floating off again. Sitting on the tracks was painful and put me too low to row effectively, so I had to get the seat back where it belonged, in its tracks. The tracks have flanges that are meant to engage retaining clips on the sliding seat to avoid this situation. The seat should be outfitted with those clips.
Rick Crook
Even when fully swamped after an intentional capsize, the author could still easily row the Fine, albeit slowly.
Once I got the seat on the tracks and pinned it there by sitting on it, I was able to row. The Fine floated with the gunwales just awash amidships, so bailing would have been futile, but I was mobile. After I rowed around just to see how the boat moved and maneuvered when full of water, I returned to the beach, where I had some help getting the water out. It was discovered that the stern compartment had a lot of water in it. The deck plate may have been loose. If the Fine had had the full benefit of its buoyancy compartments, there may have been a better chance of bailing it out after I’d climbed back aboard.
Rick has built Fines for several customers, and photographs of those boats show decks of different lengths to suit the needs of their owners. Opting for sealed-end compartments with more volume would be prudent for rowers intending to take on challenging conditions. A smaller stern compartment with a longer open cockpit would provide room for taking a passenger out in pleasant conditions. With large access ports on top of the compartments, gear could be safely stowed. The open gunwales provide convenient places to secure any gear stowed in the open cockpit. I didn’t row the Fine with cargo aboard, but a photo of one being rowed with a passenger seated in the stern shows that the boat can take the additional weight of a companion or cruising cargo without giving up too much freeboard or dragging its transom through the water.
Sliding seats and outriggers are often associated with slender hulls designed for speed at the expense of stability, but the Fine combines that rowing rig with a hull that can take care of itself and allow the rower to enjoy full-body exercise and still take in the scenery whether it’s drifting by at a snail’s pace or zipping past at 7 knots.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Fine Particulars
Length: 18′
Beam: 34″
Weight, without riggers and sliding seat: 65 lbs
The Fine is available from Oyster Bay Boats as a finished boat, built to order, for $6,800 CAD. Carbon-composite oars are included.
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!
Beyond Cairo Point, the eastward-turned tip at the bottom of Illinois, the Ohio River poured into the Mississippi, but the collision of the two great rivers only crumpled the surface of the water and spread ripples across the mile-wide confluence between Missouri and Kentucky. It was December 7, 1985. The cold front that had surrounded LUNA with ice that morning had cleared the sky and the sun had raised the temperature a few degrees above freezing. The Lower Mississippi, easily twice the breadth of the Ohio, pulled me toward a breach in the horizon where the umber-hued woodlands hung cantilevered over the river’s reflection of clouds.
Photographs by the author
Above the toe of my left boot is a bridge over the Upper Mississippi River; above the right boot is a bridge over the Ohio River. The low land between the bridges is Cairo, Illinois.
I rowed in midstream where the current was the swiftest and to give a wide berth to what was the first of a series of seven dikes, or wing dams, that the chart showed would be coming up on the Kentucky side, the longest reaching two-thirds of a mile from the shore. There were no wing dams on the Ohio, but the Mississippi has thousands of them. The rows of piled boulders set straight out from shore force the current into the navigable channel, speeding it up so that sediment doesn’t settle. I didn’t know what to expect, and before I saw any sign of the first wing dam, I heard a sound like wind rushing through a thicket of aspen. Carried on a breeze blowing upriver, it was clear and crisp, making the dam seem both close and dangerous, but when I passed it, the dam was covered by water so deep that there were no standing waves trailing it, just a patch of sharp-cusped ripples spilling across one another.
In the vaulted sky was a miscellany of clouds, some like rippled sand or fish scales, others billowed, flat-bottomed, or bearded with virga. As the sun angled toward the horizon, the colors illuminating the clouds changed as rapidly as their shapes and patterns did.
I’d rowed 23 miles from my last camp on the Ohio River to get to the confluence and after rowing another 10 miles it was getting late in the day, so I pulled ashore and made camp on a 3⁄4-mile-long sliver of an island near Millers Landing on the Missouri side of the river.
Roger Siebert
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In the morning I was fogged in and everything but the sand and brush within 20 yards of my campsite had disappeared. It was too risky to row—the swift current would push me too quickly toward hazards to avoid them. I’d also be invisible to vessel traffic—sitting so low in the water and having very little metal aboard, LUNA wouldn’t show up on radar.
I spent part of the morning writing letters and did some work on LUNA’s oarlocks. While they were as good as new when I left Pittsburgh, the month of rowing down the Ohio River had enlarged the holes in the oarlock sockets and made them egg-shaped while the shafts of the oarlocks were no longer straight but tapered from the middle toward both ends, the metal polished to a bright shine by the wear. I had been applying grease to the locks several times a day, but the horn and the sockets had worn through almost 1⁄8″ of bronze between the two bearing surfaces. I unbolted the sockets from the oak stanchions and rotated them, as one would the tires on a car, to have their unworn sides take the burden of rowing.
When the fog lifted, I headed downriver and made good progress—easily 6 mph with the help of the current. For 5 miles the right bank was lined with riprap, the rocky upper fringe of a revetment almost fully concealed by the high water. Most of the revetments were along the banks on the outside perimeter of the bends in the river, and the wing dams were on the opposite banks. The Army Corps of Engineers had been charged with installing and maintaining all this stonework in 1928 after a prolonged heavy rainfall in 1927 flooded much of the river plain. The Mississippi now caroms off the rockworks of this man-made corridor. The fastest water was on the revetment side of the river, so that’s where I could make the best speed. The wing dams had slow-moving water and collected sand, which made good beaches for landing and camping.
The Lower Mississippi’s many islands and sand bars provided easy places to come ashore for a midday break or to camp.
At dusk I coasted along a bend that led the river northward, and looked for a campsite. The left bank was lined with revetment. Where it ended, I pulled ashore on a gentle slope of tawny sand and made my camp at the edges of a cornstalk-littered field on Kentucky Point. The point is a lightbulb-shaped lobe of land wrapped by a great loop in the river. To the south, the Mississippi comes within 3⁄4 mile of folding back on itself. At the apex of the 19-mile loop is the city of New Madrid, Missouri, which relies on the levees to prevent the river from straightening itself, leaving the town stranded on the banks of an oxbow lake.
I often passed the time between dinner and bedtime watching the tows go by. Tow tugs operating after dark swept their spotlights along the shore to negotiate the bends in the river and sometimes illuminated my campsite.
To the north of my camp a tow’s bright spotlight glowed through a lattice of leafless trees like the rising of a full moon. Its beam slipped off the smooth surface of the river, leaving no mark other than the firefly glints of bubbles and flotsam.
In the morning the air was still as I rowed to the outside of the bend where the rush of water over the bottom made the sneakbox’s resonant hull hiss like a punctured tire. In the still air the only marks upon the water were patches of froth marbled white and tan and the dimples of tiny whirlpools that spun like ball bearings between opposing flows of water. I secured LUNA in the brush at the New Madrid riverfront and walked to the top of the levee. A man in a pickup truck driving along the crest of the levee had seen me come ashore and pulled up alongside me. “Boy, don’t I know how it is when your motor breaks down,” he said. I asked if there was a grocery store nearby, and he gave me a ride into town to the local market. Two young women working there found me interesting, probably because I was the scruffiest customer to walk through the doors. When I got to the register, one said, “Did you just get off a boat?” I answered, “Yes, I must look awful.” She replied quietly, “Yes, you do.”
When I had finished shopping, the man with the pickup truck was back in the parking lot waiting for me. He had driven to the levee to take a closer look at LUNA and then come back to take a second look at me and give me the return ride. There were some advantages to not blending in.
By the time I rowed past Kentucky Point’s slender waist, I was 2 miles along the Tennessee shore on the left bank and the warm midday air was filled with gossamer, some so fine that I saw only briefly a bright iridescent thread as it refracted the sun’s light before vanishing. The more substantial strands drifted with the wind like strings trailing errant kites.
I didn’t see as many towns as I had along the Ohio, and the land hemmed in by the levees, broad expanses of leafless trees and pale sand, gave the Lower Mississippi the appearance of a remote wilderness. I stopped at the site of the old Tiptonville ferry landing on the Tennessee side where the levee rose directly above the riverbank. From the top I could see the land on the other side. Close by it was flooded, but beyond that, stretching uninterrupted to the horizon, were fields radiant with still-green crops, laced with windbreaks of poplars and a web of roads, and dotted white and red with houses and barns, steepled churches and clustered grain silos, as different a world from the river as Oz from Kansas.
After rowing 42 miles downriver from New Madrid, I stopped for water at Caruthersville, and parked LUNA on the town’s concrete boat ramp. Two blocks into town I passed a wedding reception—the matching bridesmaids taking a stroll in the sunshine were the giveaway—in full swing at the local bank and on the sidewalk around it. I stopped at a women’s clothing boutique across the street. At the register there were three women working, and it seemed I had caught one of them off guard. She looked at my hair (which I knew had some interesting angles to it from the glimpse I had caught of my reflection in the shop’s window) and made a slow scan of the grime from there down to my boot. When I said, “Hi!” she snapped her gaze to meet mine and looked a bit embarrassed that she had forgotten her manners. “Well,” I said, “am I the best-dressed man in town?” and got a smile in reply. I asked if I might fill my water jug, and she led me to a sink in a back room. I thanked them as I left and, after I’d walked out the door, I heard them all giggling.
While much of what I’d read about the Lower Mississippi described it as a dangerous river, I found it mostly tranquil and well suited to traveling in my very small boat.
I spent the night camped a few miles downriver from Caruthersville, and the following day I arrived at Chickasaw Bluff No. 1, the first of four. The tawny cliff of ancient, compacted sediment towered 300′ over the river and shunted the course of the river from southeast to southwest. Ten miles farther downriver I approached Bluff No. 2 and stopped rowing to study what lay ahead. The Mississippi takes a sharp westward bend from south-southeast, tighter than a right angle, and squeezes its width from 1 1⁄4 miles to 1⁄2 mile. It was not an easy turn for the tows—towboats pushing as many of 42 barges, each measuring 195′ by 35′, all rafted together.
The Chickasaw Bluffs on the Tennessee side were imposing features and Chickasaw Bluff #2 required downriver tows to make a surprising maneuver to negotiate the river’s sharp turn at its base.
A tow coming downriver passed me, veered perpendicular to the current to drift toward the bluff. When the tow was just shy of impact, the towboat accelerated straight into the westward leg. I followed well behind the tow, taking roughly the same line. The river bunched up and flipped wave crests into the air, but at the base of the bluff was a smooth upwelling. Water from the bottom of the river apparently curled up at the submerged base of the cliff and created a countercurrent cushion that pushed LUNA safely away. The high banks streaked by too fast to focus upon them as I bounced through standing waves and dipped into the edges of the whirlpools that trailed from the downriver edge of the bluff. On the downstream side of the bottleneck, I darted over a mound of water between two whirlpools and pulled into the back eddy. In its quiet eye I waited for the tow that had been gaining ground on me in the previous reach of the river. The rusty bow of its lead barge clipped by the edge of the bluff and squeezed through the narrows. After the throbbing tow tug had passed, I drove the bow of the sneakbox back through the eddy and into the turbulence and raced downstream with the full force of the current behind me.
The couple who took this photo of me arriving in Memphis introduced themselves at the marina and took good care of me during my stay in town.
Chickasaw Bluffs Nos. 3 and 4 were not nearly as dramatic: No. 3 was an unremarkable hill hidden by a forest, and downtown Memphis concealed No. 4. At Memphis, I rounded Mud Island and rowed into Wolf River Harbor. A local couple, Lauren and Gayle, had seen me coming in and met me after I landed. They saw to it that the harbormaster provided me with a slip where LUNA would be safe and took me (by way of Elvis’s Graceland estate) to their home where I ate well, did my laundry, and slept in a comfortable bed.
I usually passed the big cities by, making only brief stops for supplies. In Memphis, two strangers welcomed me into their home. Here LUNA is at rest in the middle of the far pier at the bottom of the launch ramp.
Before I left Memphis, I’d met a man who had taken an interest in the sneakbox and what I was doing and offered to put me up for the night. We’d rendezvous 28 miles downriver from Memphis at Star Landing, just the other side of the Tennessee-Mississippi border.
As I rowed downriver, I passed a beach on the left bank that would have made a good campsite but I gambled on the promise of a hot shower, a home-cooked meal, and a warm bed. I was still 2 miles from Star Landing when the sun set, and it was nearly dark when I reached the location marked on the chart. It was a landing in name only; the bank was covered with a revetment of broken boulders. I kept moving with the river; the sharp-edged revetment continued for as long as there was light to see it by.
With the dark came cold: 15 degrees below freezing. Spray blown by an upriver breeze came over the bow and gelled in a lumpy sheet of ice on the foredeck and glazed the canvas dodger. Beads of ice stuck to the back and arms of my jacket and blunt icicles sprouted from the oar looms. A waning moon rose over the bank as I searched for a landing of sand, but in the shadow of its glow, the shore and river merged in black. Tugs working their way upriver swept mile-long blue-white searchlight beams along the shore. I hoped that they would not see me; if they focused their lights upon me, I would be blinded by the glare. As the current carried me over submerged islands of brush, leafless stalks came out of the dark and whipped against the hull and oars. My face was raw with the ice-edged wind and my feet had been numb since sunset.
Nearly three hours into the night, the silhouette of trees along the bank thinned and lowered. I crept in close where the beam of my flashlight could distinguish between the river’s rim of ice and any patches of sand. Behind an inundated row of grass tufts, I spotted a 6′-wide pocket of sand. The grass, frozen solid, did not give way when I plowed the bow into it. I backed and rammed it a second and third time before I scraped through and beached. I tied the painter to a branch and immediately gathered wood for a fire. I needed warmth and couldn’t waste time setting up the tent. My teeth were chattering so violently that I kept my mouth open to keep from chipping them. After the cold moved in from my arms and legs and reached my core, spasms gripped my midsection, making me grunt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I got the fire going, fed it with twigs and driftwood until the heat seeped through my jacket and into my chest and arms.
In the middle of the night, long after my stomach had lost the warmth of dinner and the bottle of hot water in the foot of my sleeping bag had chilled, I lay awake and waited for morning.
In the morning, the ice that had coated the boat had not yet melted. Note the pool of solid ice at the base of the oarlock stanchion.
I didn’t get up at first light but waited for the sun to rise above the levee to the east and illuminate the tent. I stepped outside and got my first good look at the frost-dappled shore where I had landed. The patch of sand that I’d camped on was backed by a field of cobblestones, dark and wet with melted frost. In the middle of it, a dozen yards from the tent, stood a single leafless tree less than twice my height. Its shadow had kept the frost from melting, and the silhouette cast over the stones was a filigree of glistening white frost.
At Helena, Arkansas, I stopped to pick up mail. As with most stops in towns, I ran to minimize the time the boat was untended. The sidewalks of Helena were cracked and uneven; a protruding lip of concrete caught the toe of my rubber boot, and I was suddenly horizontal and airborne a good 3′ above the sidewalk with time enough to think about my landing. Pancaking on the concrete would spread the skin of my palms across the sidewalk like cold butter on lukewarm toast. That would put an end to rowing for a while. The previous summer I had learned how to fall and roll in an Aikido class and decided to use that approach for my landing. I curled one arm down from my Superman stretch and hooked it under my chest. When the outside edge of my hand made contact with the pavement, the rest of my body curled downward onto the concrete and rolled without skidding. (That evening I wrote a letter to my Aikido instructor thanking him for a self-defense technique that defended me from myself.)
At the post office I picked up two packages and several letters. My mother had sent a wool shirt long enough to tuck into my pants. My sister had sent a red polypropylene balaclava that made me look like a cloth doll with a ceramic face, but it was warm. I now had protection in the two spots that had always been vulnerable to the cold.
I camped at the Sunflower Cutoff, one of many places where the Mississippi had once served as an established border between states before its course was altered by flooding or by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The border didn’t move and often left bits of one state on the “wrong” side of the river. At mile 625 (measured from the Head of Passes on the Mississippi River Delta) there used to be two great loops, the upriver one curving out and back 11 miles to the west and the downriver one 13 miles to the east. The Jackson Cutoff and the Sunflower Cutoff were dug by the Corps across the loops in 1942. The river began to flow through the new channels, but vessels still had to navigate the old route around Jackson Point (which became Island 65) and Island 66 until the cutoff was deep enough. In the years that followed, the old channel accumulated sediment and both of the islands joined the land that surrounded them, and neither is an island now. They are still marked on the charts as islands, 65 as Mississippi land in Arkansas and 66 as Arkansas land in Mississippi. All of the cutoffs combined have shortened the Lower Mississippi considerably since Bishop rowed it in the winter of 1874: it was 1,150 miles then; 953 miles now.
On December 17 I rowed 50 miles. The Mississippi River runs faster than the Ohio, but it’s more difficult to take advantage of the current. Sometimes the fastest flow wasn’t where I thought it would be, and I often wound up in slack water or back eddies. The wind had also been contrary most of the time, and I expended a lot of extra effort dodging tows.
The confluence with the diminutive Arkansas River was much choppier than the merging of the Ohio River at Cairo.
I made a short stop at Terrene Landing, an unpaved boat ramp in the middle of the woods on the Mississippi side, then on the right bank rowed by the mouth of the Arkansas River where its current crumpled the Mississippi up against the left bank. Chaotic waves popped up so steep that froth slipped hissing down the upriver faces. LUNA surged through the buckskin-brown chop, dropping off the crests and hammering her bow in the troughs but carrying me through dry.
At the end of the day, I pulled LUNA out at the Caulk Neck Cutoff. A truck driving on a road at the crest of the bank stopped. I walked up and met a man named Fred, who explained that the land here was the property of a private hunting club. I could see that it was a fancy one with an airfield across the road, two private planes, and a large lodge, which Fred said was “four or five hundred thousand dollars’ worth.” I told him I was hoping to get off the water for the day. “We’ve got some cabins a ways up the road you could use.” I didn’t want to get far from the sneakbox, and thanked him for the offer.
I shoved off and passed beneath the lodge on its perch at the edge of the bluff. A woman on the porch waved at me and went inside; a crowd of people at the window turned to watch me. I crossed to the river’s opposite shore and landed on one of the sandy beaches on an island called The Bar. As I gathered driftwood for a fire, I could see the lodge all lit up and filled with people who I imagined were sitting down to an elegant dinner of venison, duck à l’orange, and focaccia. I was content to heat a can of beef stew, spread peanut butter on a squished slice of bread, and dine next to a warming fire under a half moon and a star-strewn sky.
Most of the Lower Mississippi was far from any towns that would keep the sky lit all night long. The half moon and campfire kept the darkness at bay.
While I was setting the tent, still icy from last night’s frost, I listened to the weather radio. Another “mass of Arctic air” had crept across Canada and was headed my way. For the moment, the air was only cool, and I was warm; my shirt and jacket smelled like they had just come hot out of a dryer. I had burned most of a whole driftwood tree during the evening, and I let the flames retreat into the circle of embers before turning in.
There had been no frost in the morning and the tent fly wasn’t even damp so my hands wouldn’t get so cold breaking camp. I made good speed toward Greenville, Mississippi. In the last bend before reaching the town’s waterfront, I was taking advantage of the swift midriver current, making good progress, though it was always hard to know how much of that speed the river was adding. I looked over my left shoulder to check my course, and in the moment that I had my head turned, a red nun buoy, which had been pulled under by the current, erupted from the water just two boats’ lengths away. Its top rose 6′ above the water and the buoy came to rest, angled sharply upriver, and passed by me as if under power, with froth wrapping around it.
It was a red nun buoy like this one that shot up out of the river close to LUNA on the run into Greenville.
Greenville was once on the left bank of the Mississippi River on the downstream end of Bachelor Bend, but in 1933 the river cut across a narrow neck of land and bypassed the town. What is left of Bachelor Bend is now Lake Ferguson, which opens onto the river. It would have been a 4-mile row for me to get to the center of town, a chore I wanted to avoid. I pulled LUNA into the brush by a grain elevator, walked to the road, and put out my thumb. My appearance may have put off the first several drivers. It was cold and windy, and I walked about a mile before a man in a truck picked me up. He asked what I needed and bypassed his usual route to drop me off in front of the post office. After mailing the letters I’d written, I walked to a grocery store, hurried through the aisles dropping the usual staples into the cart—Fig Newtons, bread, cheese, apples, Grape-Nuts, crackers, V-8, beef stew—and a new item, canned barbecued chicken.
I hadn’t approached a local newspaper to offer my story for a while, and called the Delta Democrat-Times. A reporter named Alice met me in town. She got her story and photos, and I got a ride back to the boat.
I didn’t have to spend nights on board the sneakbox as I had on the Ohio River. Instead, I had plenty of space in my three-man dome tent to relax during the long evenings.
I rowed out the channel to get back on the river, where the wind had dropped a bit but was still good for a shove, and 10 miles downstream I arrived at a nameless island at sunset. Its upstream end was a long, low point of white sand. As I stood on the beach looking for a good place for the night, windblown sand whirled around my boots and made small dunes in their lee. Farther downstream I came ashore again near a small cluster of trees that would provide the tent protection from the wind. I set up camp as the last crimson light of the day bled into night. In a fire made of driftwood from the beach and dried limbs from the woods I cooked a can of beef stew. After dinner I was ready for sleep and filled the cookpot with river water to soak. I’d wash it in the morning. It was a cold night, but in the tent’s bubble of still air I slept well.
Retrieving my spoon from the solid block of ice in my cookpot would take a bit of effort. Melting the ice on the stove would consume a lot of fuel, so I had to chip it free.
When I emerged from the tent in the morning, I saw that the water in the pot had frozen solid. Through the lens of ice, I could see the silvery shimmer of my spoon against the carbon-crust remnants of last night’s dinner. As I dismantled the tent, I shook the ice from it. Flakes of ice fell from the inside walls, and the frost on the outside rose in a cloud of white powder. I stuffed the tent in its bag with bare hands to keep my gloves dry. The painter, strung taut between LUNA’s bow and a tree, was rigid with ice. I bent it into a coil of irregular triangles and set it on the afterdeck with the cookpot to thaw during the day’s rowing. Out on the river there were small patches of ice that were invisible until the waves in my wake lifted their edges. Clumps of brown river foam, as stiff as baked meringue, fractured when I hit them with the blades of my oars.
On a day that was so cold that my boots didn’t keep my feet warm, I put on extra socks and grocery bags.
I usually warmed up after rowing for a while, but as I traveled south from Greenville, my hands and feet stayed cold. I couldn’t do much about my feet with my rubber boots on. I took them off, put on another pair of wool socks, and put grocery bags on over them. I had brought pogies to keep my hands warm, but they were cumbersome when I had to switch from rowing to the many other tasks on board, so I wore my gloves.
North of Vicksburg, an olive-drab aluminum jonboat skimmed across the river to LUNA. The skipper, Dan, had been hunting ducks, and the limp bodies of a dozen ducks were lined up on the thwart ahead of him. For 4 miles we drifted together holding onto one another’s boats. The conversation turned to the history of the area. The Civil War had ended only a decade before Bishop rowed the Mississippi, but Dan talked about it as if it had ended last week. His face flushed red with anger about the calumny of the Yankees as we passed the wooded point where Union troops had come to do battle. He pointed across the river to the woods on the left bank. “Over there, Grant, the plodder, tried bringing his gunboats down the bayous. Course we was ready for him with guns around every bend. BOOM!” He motioned downstream where Grant tried to reroute the river around the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg. He pointed to the opposite bank where Confederate guns fired upon Union soldiers as they labored in vain over their diversion canal. “BOOM, BOOM!” Dan’s cannon shots echoed in the woods along the shore.
Within a year of Bishop’s rowing by Vicksburg, a flood did in hours what General Grant’s troops could not accomplish in three months, and the Mississippi cut a new course. Vicksburg was left on a stagnant reach of the old riverbed. Soon afterward the Yazoo River was diverted to keep Vicksburg’s harbor open to the Mississippi.
The gloves I’d lent to a volunteer on the Ohio River came back to me with an invisible coating of poison ivy oil.
During the cold spell, something was going wrong with my left eye. It was very itchy, and my eyelid had swelled up so much that it was in a permanent squint. I stopped at a fuel dock on the right bank and explained my problem to the woman working there and asked if I could use the restroom mirror to take a look at myself. I looked a bit like I’d been in a fight, but I only had the swelling, not the bruising of a black eye. When I got back on the river it occurred to me that my gloves were likely the cause of the problem. At Payne Hollow on the Ohio River, I had lent them to a young woman who had been part of a crew cutting firewood for Harlan and Anna Hubbard. She must have pulled poison ivy off the logs. I had evidently been rubbing my eye with my gloves on and had gotten the poison ivy oil on my eyelids. I hadn’t been taking my gloves off when I had to take a leak either, so my eye wasn’t my only problem.
Christmas Day called for dressing in red—balaclava, pogies (rowing mitts), and spray skirt—and hanging a red wool stocking.
On Christmas Day, I stopped early to give myself time to set up a comfortable camp and relax for an afternoon. I found an island of sand and willows with a high perch for my tent with a clear view across the river. The sky was cloudless and the air still, and there wasn’t another person or a sign of civilization in any direction. And I was, as the Germans put it, wunschlos glücklich, wishlessly happy.
Fourteen years earlier, I had done my first solo backpacking trip at the age of 18. Since then, I had increased the challenges of my wilderness adventures, hiking farther, staying out longer, and graduating from summer to winter travel. I was driven to see not only what I was capable of but also if I enjoyed my own company. I continued on that same path with boating, and my cruise with LUNA was the culmination of 14 years of making my way under my own steam. None of the challenges I’d faced on the Ohio and the Lower Mississippi had ever made me wish I were anywhere else. On the bad days I had persevered, on the good days I sang.
As I drew near to Natchez, I had another jonboat encounter. Two of them buzzed up to LUNA; the first skimmed by, the second slowed down and passed alongside. There were three camouflage-clad men aboard about my age. I said, “Hi.” The helmsman replied, “You’re the craziest thing I’ve seen so far.” With a smile I countered, “I haven’t said two words and you’ve already decided that I’m crazy. It’s hardly fair.” That got him laughing. He promised to meet me at Natchez and buy me a drink before he zipped away. I stopped in Natchez for supplies and mail but never saw my jonboat acquaintances. On my way downstream, just past the Natchez-Vidalia Bridge, I rowed past a barge that was sticking up in the middle of the river: 175′ of it underwater, resting on the bottom, and 20′ angled up over the water.
The Lower Mississippi has no locks to restrict the number of barges in a tow. There can be as many as 42 rafted together—seven rows of six barges side by side—covering an area of nearly seven acres. Occasionally one gets loose, like this one just downstream from Natchez, and is lost.
For the next 26 miles there was nothing more to see than winding riverbanks blanketed with trees, a landscape I imagined was unchanged from what Bishop had seen 110 years earlier. I stopped for the night on the left bank of Dead Man’s Bend. Before I set up camp, I walked through the woods at the water’s edge to see what was in my new neighborhood. I found a shack high overhead, perched on 20′ stilts. It was built on the outside of the bend where tapered ridges of sand, left by rushing high water on the downstream side of every tree, looked like drifted snow.
I set my tent on a spot of high ground where a knot of trees held the soil together with the mesh of their intertwined roots. In the logjam heaped against the trees there was plenty of bone-white driftwood for my campfire. A white plastic bleach jug was lodged in the pile, and I brought it back to camp. I cut slits arranged like a capital H in its side, bent back the two flaps, and set a candle in the jug held to the bottom by a drop of hot wax. With the candle lit, the jug glowed like a fluorescent light bulb and, with the luxury of bright light, I spent the evening answering the mail I had picked up at Natchez.
The winter days were short but having fewer hours of daylight kept me from expending too much energy rowing and gave me time to enjoy sunsets over the river.
There was a thick cloud cover in the morning, and after I rowed 2 miles from camp I was in the fog. I kept going, but when I strayed too far from shore the banks disappeared, and without that reference it was as if the river had stopped moving and LUNA had been brought to a crawl. When I heard the throb of twin diesels of commercial traffic in the channel, I hurried back to shore. If the tows were moving, the fog was close to the ground and the skippers had a clear view from their wheelhouses, three stories above the river. I rowed the inside of Graham Bend, which wasn’t as slow as it could have been because an island hooked a lot of current to the inside.
Below the bend it was quiet, and I headed across the river into the fog. I thought that I’d be able to see the opposite bank as the one I left behind disappeared, but I soon reached a point where I could see nothing. I kept the wake trailing behind me as straight as I could, but I was still anxious. I scrambled for the compass in the seat box and pulled due west; I came up to the right bank quickly. After 27 miles I put in at the Fort Adams Landing, at the foot of a bluff, and discovered that many deer carcasses had been dumped over the bank. There were hooves and heads poking out of the sand, ballooned entrails, and white sheets of waterlogged hide. A fresh carcass in the water was wreathed in red. It had been raining most of the morning and my clothes were soaked, but this wasn’t a place where I wanted to stay to get warm.
I crossed the Mississippi state line into Louisiana and rounded the 9-mile bend that curves around Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. I kept to the far bank. At the next meander, Tunica Bend, I heard an upbound tow through the fog. I stayed close to the right bank, and after it had passed and was so far away and so quiet that I would be able to hear any other traffic, I headed across. In midstream, I emerged from the fog bank and saw a church and a few buildings on the left bank, an unusual sight because, aside from the bluff cities and settlements, so much was hidden behind the levees.
The Como Plantation was a ghost town. But, while it seemed abandoned, there were no signs of vandalism so someone must have been taking care of it.
I pulled LUNA out on a sandbar downstream from Como Bayou, which was a creek I could almost jump over, and walked through the woods toward the church. A hard-packed dirt road led across a wooden bridge spanning the bayou to a gate where a sign said that this was the former Como Plantation, adjacent to what was once the river port of Brandon. The white clapboard church had a belfry capped by a small cross. Inside, it was gutted and empty except for a pile of large cardboard tubes for molding concrete piers.
The uninhabited Como mansion was an elegant building influenced by ancient Greek architecture.
Across the road were a general store and a brick-fronted Bank of Pointe Coupee, both empty. A few dozen yards from the church was the mansion of the one-time plantation. It had a clapboard piedmont supported by four slender fluted columns, two stories high, with Corinthian capitals that each had three tiers of curved leaves.
On the Ohio River, I didn’t have a single campfire. The Mississippi, with its sandy beaches and abundance of driftwood, offered the luxury of warmth at the end of a cold day.
The rain had eased to a drizzle but was still falling, so when I returned to the river’s shore, I stretched my tarp between two trees above the beach, set the tent under it, and got a small fire going to dry out my pants and other wet clothes. As a treat, for dinner I had two cans of beef stew.
I was up early and underway quickly—it was a Saturday and I wanted to get to the St. Francisville post office, 26 miles downriver, in time to pick up my general-delivery mail. There were a few cars and trucks, some occupied, in the landing’s parking area at the end of the road that led to town, and I wanted to leave LUNA in a less public place. I rowed up Bayou Sara, past a few derelict tugs and wrecks that were hauled half up on the banks, and came to a launch ramp that looked like a safe place. A mint-green pickup that I had seen near the ferry landing drove up and stopped at the top of the ramp. After I had tied LUNA to a tree trunk, I walked to the truck and the driver rolled down his window. “Didn’t I see you back at the landing?” I asked. He nodded, and we introduced ourselves. Johnson was waiting for a friend to come back in from duck hunting, but he had some free time and offered to take me to the post office. The post office, as I’d feared, had closed at 10 a.m., but Johnson’s mom had worked for the postmaster, Miss Clara. We drove to Miss Clara’s house on the edge of town, but she was out. Johnson then took me to a grocery store and parked to wait for me. As I entered the store, I realized that I’d left my wallet in the boat. Annoyed with myself, I returned to the truck, ready to give up. “How much are you going to need?” Johnson asked. I said about $15. He gave me $20.
Near the grocery store was a billboard featuring Rosedown Plantation where tourists could see 120-year-old azaleas. Johnson saw me staring at the sign and said his ancestors had lived there. Johnson was Black.
On the way back through St. Francisville, a well-groomed town graced with well-preserved Antebellum architecture and broad live-oak trees draped with Spanish moss, I asked Johnson if things had changed much in the town over his lifetime. “No,” he said, “it’s just the same. Place is run by Jim Crows. Jim Crows don’t want it to change, so they keep it the way it is. I’m heavy into politics, you know. It’s time for some changes.” He didn’t say what kind of changes, but it was easy enough to guess. His bitterness was well-restrained but evident in what he repeated several times as he drove me back to the boat: “It’s time for some changes.”
When we got back to the ramp, I asked Johnson to wait a moment while I retrieved my wallet to repay him. I appreciated the loan and valued even more his kindness and his willingness to share a glimpse of what life had been like for him in the South.
Eleven miles downstream from Bayou Sara, I climbed to the top of the bluff to a plow-corrugated field. Near a lone pecan tree in the middle of the field, cradled in the soil, I found a lead Minié ball, speckled white with oxides, that may have been fired during the Civil War. Bishop wrote that the bullets gathered in Vicksburg after the war amounted to 300 tons of lead. One-hundred twenty years after the war the harvest of lead still continues and for some in the South, the war has not yet been put to rest.
From Bayou Sara I rowed 24 miles to Solitude Point and set up my tent among trees that leaned precariously over the river. After the sun had set, the glow of Baton Rouge lit up the night sky to the southeast.
Solitude Point was the last quiet camp I had on the Mississippi River. At Baton Rouge the banks were a tangle of steel pipelines, storage tanks, and refining towers hissing plumes of steam. The river strained through the pilings beneath the long loading docks. The depth of the channel increased from 12′ to 40′, to accommodate the oceangoing tankers and freighters that steam 230 miles up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to Baton Rouge. For a small rowing boat, Baton Rouge was a 5-mile-long gauntlet of wharves, ships, tugs, and barges.
Baton Rouge is 230 miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, but it is a deep-water port crowded with ships from around the world, many at anchor, like this ship from Bombay, awaiting their turn at the docks to load or unload cargo.
The air that hung over the river was thick with the smell of diesel exhaust, and there was a constant drone of immensely powerful engines. Tugs backed and filled, their superstructures swaying heavily as they bullied barges into position. The froth of prop wash swirled out white around their sterns. Several of their captains, hard-edged men in visored caps, opened the doors of their wheelhouses to stare at me, and some even pointed cameras my way. One traced spirals in the air at the side of his head with one hand and pointed at me with the other. Another was more direct.
“Are you crazy?” he shouted.
“I must be,” I hollered back.
“Awright!” He jammed a fist into the air.
I rowed a strong, steady pace, churning a wave at the bow that hissed like frozen French fries plunged into hot oil. On the stern of a tug headed upstream, a roustabout with sledgehammer pounded out my cadence on the steel deck.
After I cleared Baton Rouge, there was still wilderness between the levees east and west where I could camp.
The following day I rowed by Plaquemine too early for any stores to be open. I made a stop mid-morning at Bayou Goula, where a church steeple and plantation-house chimney peeked over the levee. I walked 1⁄2 mile along the levee from where I left LUNA. In a neighborhood separated from the plantation manor by vine-choked woods raucous with birds, the houses were in sad shape. Clapboards that had rotted away revealed the backsides of interior walls. Some houses showed traces of paint, but most of the wood siding was bare, gray, and fissured. And yet there were brightly colored curtains in the windows, and the sound of music seeped through the walls. I flagged down a car and asked the driver, a young man, about stores. Without hesitating he told me to hop in and took me to the grocery store and then back to the levee.
About 15 miles downriver from Bayou Goula, I looked over the bow and saw twin flashes of reflected sunlight about a mile away. It had to be another rower, the only one I’d seen since I set out from Pittsburgh. I pulled hard to catch up and closed the distance quickly. The boat was an outboard skiff with a windshield, not much longer than my sneakbox, with gear heaped all over the boat. The oars had scraps of plywood added to extend the blades, and the nails were bent over and hammered flat against the plywood. I pulled alongside and said, “They tell me only a fool would row down this river.” This didn’t evoke a smile, even from one fool to another. The boat was, somewhere under all the junk, aluminum, painted white and red. I pulled my oars in and grabbed the gunwale. “Where are you from?” I asked. “Seattle,” he said. I introduced myself and shook hands with James.
He was middle-aged and had lived in Woodinville, Washington, a half-hour drive from my hometown. He’d been married and had a welding business. “My wife went kapooey, my business went kapooey, and I went kapooey. I made a contract with God then.” He sold his truck to a man in Idaho, and made arrangements with the buyer to send payments to James as he traveled. James bought a bicycle (which was now lashed on the skiff’s foredeck) and pedaled east. A few weeks out he called the man in Idaho; there had been a forest fire in his area, and things looked pretty grim. James told him not to worry about the money he owed, James didn’t want it. The next time James talked to him, the man in Idaho said, “You won’t believe what happened.” “Oh, yes I will,” James replied, “I’ve been praying for you.” James told me, “The fire came up to that man’s property and went around it; his place was untouched in one of the biggest forest fires Idaho’s ever had.”
James had been traveling since September and looked haggard. His eyes were bloodshot and thickly wet. The Coast Guard in St. Louis had noticed him and asked to see his life jacket. “I don’t need one,” he told them, “I’ve got this,” and showed them his Bible. When they pressed him, James showed them the PFD he carried. “They wanted to stop me being dangerous to my own safety.”
On the gunwale was a square of rusty steel that used to be a paddlewheel that James turned by bicycle cranks and a chainring amidships, but he’d given up on that and had started rowing. Behind the windshield was a pile of orange sleeping bags set out to dry after the morning’s dew. He slept aboard the boat under a canopy that pulled back from the windshield. In the bottom of the boat was a matted coil of multicolored braided 1 1⁄2″ line too large to be of any use on a small boat; it appeared to me that he slept on it. Trailing from the stern at the end of a short line was a huge white plastic bottle, empty now, but James said it would hold 25 gallons of fresh water when he reached the Gulf. At first, he had been called to go to New Orleans, now it was to the Gulf of Mexico or the Bermuda Triangle: “I don’t know what I’ll find when I get there or if I’ll die on the way. It’s whatever the Lord wants.”
The current carried us into Smoke Bend and through a line of eddies that set us spinning like dancers. As the sun circled around our heads the bill of his baseball cap cast a shadow that licked across his face. James said he had talked to grizzly bears and a moose during 40 days in the wilderness. “You know how dangerous a moose is,” and he spread out his hands to indicate a huge rack of antlers. “He stuck his huge head in my tent smelling me. Animals aren’t afraid of me. People are.” James told me that he had studied under a Japanese samurai and after eight years of study he was able to defeat his master and to tell who was coming up behind him and what good or evil they intended.
In the midst of our conversation, we both looked upriver at the same instant. There was nothing on the river and there was only silence. Then I could hear a low thrumming. We both had spent enough time on the river to sense tows before we were aware of hearing them. Despite our obvious differences, the Mississippi had given us something in common that few people share. I wanted a picture of James and his fantastical boat, but I could not bring myself to put a camera between as. We shook hands and pushed off. “Remember me” was the last thing he said before turning his bow downstream. I was close to tears as I watched him fade into the distance over LUNA’s stern. We had traveled the same river, but it had brought me joy and James pain. I didn’t take my eyes off his boat until that last flash of his oars was erased from the horizon by the shimmering heat in the air.
At Donaldsonville, I was taken to the store and back by a man named Tal, who worked at a barge fleeting operation. He told me of the recent grounding of the stern-wheeler MISSISSIPPI QUEEN. Striking a barge, she had a 25′ hole torn in her hull but that wasn’t enough to sink her. The captain had run her onto a bar around the bend and she was taken off and down to New Orleans for repair.
I made camp on the downstream side of Point Houma with my tent set on a narrow perch above the river. At the door of the tent, I cooked my dinner, a two-can mix of beef stew and barbecued chicken. When it was hot, I brought the pot inside and zipped up. Before settling down to eat I smeared my company of mosquitoes against the walls. Only one had already had its fill of my blood and left a 2″-long black streak on the blue nylon wall.
Later in the evening, I heard a noise like an avalanche of empty oil drums. I unzipped the door and peeked out over the river. A few dozen yards away a ship was sliding downriver but all I could see was its superstructure, like an office building on the move. The ship was moving stern-first with three tugs rumbling at its port flank. There was little to see of the tanker, only the lights above the sheer. The hull was invisible, just a long hole in what had been an illuminated skyline. The tugs spun the tanker end for end in the middle of the river and then pinned it against a dock on the far shore. I crawled back into the tent, smeared a new batch of mosquitoes on the walls, and snuffed out the candles for the night.
At the town of New Sarpy, 25 miles upstream from New Orleans, there were several boats tethered to the banks, and the men aboard them were making long sweeps in the river with nets on hoops at the ends of long poles. When I pulled ashore next to one of the boats, the fisherman in it kept his rhythm while watching me come ashore. He had a full dark brown beard, and his hair was bound by a red bandanna. He was bringing up five or six quivering silver fish with almost every sweep. “Where you come from?” he asked. “Pittsburgh,” I said. He introduced himself as Tom and nodded to Joey, his 11-year-old cousin, who was seated by a fire of broken wooden crates. Tom had already filled five of the bentwood bushel baskets in his boat. When he asked if I’d seen a lot of dip nets upstream and I’d said I hadn’t, he was pleased. He would get a better price for the shad. When I headed out again on LUNA and drifted past Tom, still intent on his fishing, he asked, “Where you come from again? Pigsburg?”
Jane Cunningham
I arrived in New Orleans in the rain and was taken home, with LUNA, by my father’s cousin and his daughter.
In the last 20 miles to New Orleans, I wove in and out of anchored freighters from Hong Kong, Singapore, Bergen, and Tokyo, but most of them were from Monrovia. I arrived in New Orleans in the early afternoon of a bright New Year’s Day. I brought LUNA ashore for a break at the home of my father’s cousin, Joe, and his daughter Jane. They took me and LUNA home with them so I could rest up, spend some time with them, and see a bit of the town.
The Cunningham household in New Orleans made for a very pleasant stay for both me and LUNA.
Jane Cunningham
After my break with relatives in New Orleans, I resumed rowing in a drizzle.
Jane Cunningham
In a goodbye salute to my New Orleans family, I stood up in LUNA , making my boat look even smaller.
It was raining when I set out again three days later. In less than a mile I had rowed from a drizzly overcast into a dense fog that blanketed the New Orleans waterfront. Rowing against the current to hold my ground ahead of a tethered barge, I peeked around it to see if the river was clear alongside of it. There was only fog. I let the river carry me into the ash-gray murk.
“You wanna die you just keep doin’ what you’re doin’,” came an amplified voice from a shadow above the decks of the barge. Suddenly I could see a tug bringing another barge in against the wharf. The tug’s skipper spoke again over the loudhailer. “Why don’t y’all set a spell until you can see where you’re goin’.”
I retreated upstream and threaded my way through the pilings to a debris-littered slope of sand between wharves. An hour later the fog appeared to have thinned, and I crept back out to the river. I drifted, listening to the noises around me. I slipped by the stern-wheeler DELTA QUEEN and along the gray-green flanks of a freighter. The intensity of the noise ahead increased. Above the fog I could see three lights on a vertical staff, the mark of a dredge. I pulled quickly against the current to keep from being drawn into the web of cables and pipelines that usually surrounded a dredge.
I called out to a crewman aboard a tug that was made fast to the pilings of a high wharf and asked if I could wait out the fog with them. I spent the rest of the day with him and his crewmates aboard SANDRA KAY watching TV and snacking in the galley.
After being squeezed between a tugboat and a row of pilings, LUNA survived with only a bent brace for the oarlock stanchion; it was easily straightened.
I felt the tug shudder, and one of the crewmen bolted out the door as the rest of us followed. A tug had come alongside SANDRA KAY and pushed her stern into the pilings, closing the gap where we had tied LUNA. The sneakbox was pinned and it took three of us to dislodge her. A brace for the starboard oarlock stanchion was bent, but there was no other structural damage. With LUNA secured across the tug’s stern, we returned to the galley.
After LUNA was nearly crushed between SANDRA KAY’s starboard side and the wharf pilings, the crew and I moved her to the tug’s stern.
The fog lifted at 11 that night and the navigation lights across the river streaked the full width of the black water with red, white, and green. After SANDRA KAY got a call to escort a tanker up from the Mississippi Delta, I cast off from the tug and paddled into the forest of steel pilings beneath the Canal Street Wharf. With loops of line from bow and stern, I tethered LUNA in a space between four pilings. I cleared a space in the cockpit and spread my pads and sleeping bag in the bottom of the boat. Though I had rowed fewer than 7 miles since morning, the day had left me in a condition to sleep through anything. I crawled into bed wearing my life jacket and fell asleep jostled by the syncopated rhythm of the waves beneath the wharf.
In downtown New Orleans, the pilings under the Canal Street Wharf made a refuge comfortable enough to get a good night’s sleep.
At dawn, amber sunlight slanted under the wharf and woke me. After I had stowed my bedding and gathered the four mooring lines, I slipped out from the thicket of pilings to the river. Drifting with the current past the three tall black-slate-shingled spires of the St. Louis Cathedral opposite Jackson Square, I set the oars in the locks and pulled the last mile to a canal that would take me beyond the banks of the Mississippi River and out into the wide waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats. Some of the passages here were taken from stories I wrote for Nor’westing and Small Boat Journal in the late 1980s.
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.
Last year, I moved to a new home where, for the first time, I have a garage. The extra sheltered space got me thinking about buying a small skiff for rowing and sailing, but my new one-and-a-half-car garage posed some storage limitations. The overhead door would prevent me from hanging a boat directly above the car. There is floor space off to the side of the parking area, but my family needs that for bicycles and storage. I began to scheme about a way to lift the boat off the car and slide it sideways to hang over the storage area. What came to mind was a scaled-down version of the overhead bridge cranes used in factories to move heavy materials around.
Photographs by the author
The lifting mechanism is attached to a beam that has a pair of ball-bearing trolleys attached on top. The trolleys run within the slot of the Unistrut channel fixed to the ceiling joists. Once the boat is raised to the desired height, the ball-bearing wheels allow it to be manually pushed sideways along the channel.
Having purchased a 14′ wherry that would fit the overhead space, I looked for lift hardware. There are several boat lifts designed for garage storage, but nothing that could move a boat both up and over. I considered barn-door hardware and stumbled across similar rolling hardware made by Unistrut for its slotted-steel channels, which are commonly used in construction projects for structural supports. The company offers ball-bearing trolleys that run inside the strut.
The trolleys are fastened to the ends of the upper beam . The black and orange lifting line runs across the top of the beam and down around 1″ sheaves. On this end, the working end of the line is led through a cam cleat.
The channel comes in 10′ lengths, which is long enough to move the lifted boat from the car off to the side of the garage door. I installed two channels about 5′ apart. Fastening the channels directly to the overhead framing required a low-profile fastener that won’t block the trolleys. SPAX ¼″ washer-head Powerlag screws span the slot well and have plenty of strength. The four-wheel trolleys I bought have a load rating of between 300 and 600 lbs, and each of the Powerlag screws has a tensile strength of 1,600 lbs, so my lift system would easily support my 100-lb boat.
I positioned each lag screw at the end of the oval fastener openings in the channel to maximize contact between the screw head and the strut. After I inserted the trolleys into the channel, I fastened a block of wood in each open end of the channel to prevent them from falling out.
The lifting line is set up in a loop. At the standing end, it is fastened to an eyebolt below the trolley. From there it leads down to the lower beam, around a sheave, along the lower beam to a second sheave, back up to the first of two sheaves in the upper beam, along the center channel, and finally back out to the cam cleat.
The trolleys have flanges that are fastened to glued-up plywood beams constructed to create a center channel for two 1″-diameter sheaves for ¼″ line and the line that runs horizontally between them. For each of the two lifts, the line is anchored to an eyebolt fixed to the bottom of a trolley on one end of the upper beam, then led down and around the two pulleys in the lower beam, and then back to the upper beam and around its two pulleys, creating a loop. The loop, with its four sheaves, provides the same mechanical advantage as a block-and-tackle with two sheaves. A cam cleat mounted on the end of the upper beam provides control of the line for raising and lowering while a horn cleat on the lower beam provides a secure belay for the line.
The beams are constructed of glued-up plywood, leaving a center channel for the pulleys and line. Seen here is (left) the line as it comes down from the eyebolt and passes around the sheave on its way to the far end of the beam and (right) the end of the line as it is led back down from the cam cleat on the upper beam to be secured—for safety—to the horn cleat on the lower beam.
I raise or lower one end of the boat at a time and find it best to work in 12″ increments, alternating between the bow and the stern. For safety’s sake, I tie off to the horn cleat after each move as a backup to the cam cleats. The boat usually remains level while being lifted but when I lower it, one side tends to descend faster than the other so I re-level the boat after I cleat the line. Once the boat is at the right height, I can slide it laterally with a shove or two and, while the motion of the trolleys is not silky smooth, the ball-bearing wheels roll easily in the channels.
Raised and moved to the side, out of the way of the overhead door, the 14′ wherry is safely stored overhead, leaving floor space for family bikes and other gear.
The boat is stored at the back of the garage where it is off to the side of the overhead door’s tracks. Before I can lower it onto the car’s roof racks, it needs to be moved sideways along the channels, and then shifted forward on the lift’s beams. Once the weight of the boat is held by the roof racks, I loosen the lift lines completely so that the lower beams can be slipped aft and off the stern of the boat. Moving the car forward a few feet helps get the forward beam under the stern. If my boat is on a trailer, most of this maneuvering is unnecessary.
The lift allows me to store my boat where it doesn’t occupy space needed for other things and to load and unload the boat by myself. As with moving any heavy object, the key is to move slowly and methodically. I’m always happy to have help whenever it is offered and with an extra pair of hands, using the lift is a breeze.
Paul West lives in a townhouse in Seattle, Washington, and manages capital projects for parks and recreation facilities. He rediscovered rowing a few years back and now rows every week at The Center for Wooden Boats. Paul hopes to camp-cruise with his wherry next summer.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
When it comes to contemporary wooden boat construction and repair, epoxy is essential. As versatile as good marine epoxies may be, no single formula is best suited for every job. We are big fans of Thixo Flex, a flexible variant of TotalBoat’s Thixo, a thickened epoxy.
Thixo Flex has several favorable attributes: it can be used on oily woods, dry, damp, or wet surfaces, and a wide array of materials including (according to the Total Boat website): “fiberglass, aluminum and other metals, glass and ceramics, and most plastics, including ABS, PVC, HDPE, LDPE, and polycarbonate.” It can be sanded, drilled, primed, painted, and is resistant to vibration and shock.
A flexible epoxy becomes especially useful when joining dissimilar materials. Dissimilar wood species, for example, will expand and contract at different rates when affected by moisture or temperature changes. An epoxy that cannot move with such variations may lead to failed bonds. Thixo Flex—fully cured—creates a bond very nearly as strong as regular Thixo while offering 15 percent more elongation.
Photographs by the authors
A high-thrust caulk gun makes it easier to push the thickened epoxy components through the mixing tip.
We have used Thixo Flex with excellent results on almost all elements of boat construction and repair, from trunk bedding mahogany to oak, attaching teak knees to sapele plywood, fir frames to mahogany plywood, and solid mahogany rubrails to sapele plywood. It can also be used to make fillets and to wet-out epoxy-compatible fiberglass cloth or woven roving. It takes a little longer for the thickened epoxy to soak into the cloth, but it has better gap-filling qualities than does thin epoxy. At 72°F, Thixo Flex has a working time of 75 minutes, can be sanded in 7 to 10 hours, and is ready to take a strain in 24 hours.
Inside the static mixing tip, a series of baffles fold the white and brown components back on themselves until they emerge tan and fully blended.
Thixo Flex’s resin and hardener are contained in a single cartridge and dispensed simultaneously with a high-thrust caulk gun. The components are blended as they flow through a mixing tip, so there is no need to measure resin, hardener, and fillers. The tip of the cartridge can be cut to several diameters to allow for precise applications on small components to larger amounts in laminations that require a lot of epoxy in short order. The cartridge system does come at a higher price than an epoxy with resin, hardener, and filler in separate containers, but that cost is offset by being able to dispense only the required amount needed on each small project—there is no guessing on how much epoxy will be needed, and thus no wasted product. The amount of epoxy remaining in the mixing tip is usually significantly less than would be left over from conventional mixing and stirring in a cup. When we are done with a task, we store the cartridge with the old tip left in place; when we come to the next project, we simply replace the old tip with a new one. Thixo Flex has a shelf life of one to two years.
With its easy dispensing and ability to bond such a wide range of materials and to create lasting bonds between dissimilar materials, TotalBoat’s Thixo Flex now occupies a permanent space on the shelf of our little workshop.
Audrey, aka Skipper, and Kent mess about with their 15 boats in the Tidewater area of Virginia. Their adventures are logged at www.smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com
Thixo Flex is available from TotalBoat in a 250ml cartridge with two mixing tips for $33.99.
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.
Brothers Ian and Justin Martin, the owners of Adirondack Guideboat since 2012, build elegant wooden and composite guideboats. They also make cherrywood oars for the guideboats, in the traditional style, which calls for pinned oarlocks that secure the oars and prevent feathering. They recently applied their skills to making spruce oars for boats that use conventional horned locks. These are offered in three lengths: 7′, 7′ 6″, and 7′ 10″. Justin recently shipped a pair of the 7′ 6″ oars for me to try.
Photographs by the author
Begging to be used: The new spruce oars from Adirondack Guideboat are designed for horned oarlocks—instead of pinned guideboat oarlocks—and accommodate rowers who prefer to feather their oars.
Each oar’s loom is made of two pieces of 1-1⁄4″-thick Maine-grown spruce that run the full length of the oar from grip to blade tip. Two laminates on either side of the loom together form a blade that measures 24″ long and 6-3⁄8″ across at the widest part. The glue lines are tight and straight and the shaping smooth, fair, and symmetrical. It took me a while to notice that care was taken to match the laminates—the patterns of the grain in one oar are mirrored in its mate, a pleasing indication of the level of attention to detail. The face of the blade is shaped with the obvious curve along its length and a subtle curve across its width that’s about 1⁄8″ deep.
The blade’s slender profile is well suited to getting into the water cleanly at the catch. Despite their delicate appearance, the blades are strong enough for hard rowing and large enough for good power.
The center of the blade is just 9⁄16″ thick, providing a thin profile for minimal fuss getting into and out of the water. The throat is 15⁄16″ wide, which gives the oar a delicate appearance, but the 1-1⁄2″ depth has the strength required for hard rowing. Each oar weighs close to 3 lbs, and the difference between them is only a little over one ounce. The oars are finished with four coats of brushed-on spar varnish.
At the leathers, the oars are a perfect fit for standard #1 horned oarlocks—loose enough for easy feathering while still being contained within the lock’s opening; slide the oars inboard, and as soon as the leathers are clear of the lock, the oars can be lifted up and out.
The handles are simply tapered out from the looms and left unvarnished for a comfortable, sure grip, even when wet .
The 7′ 6″ oars were well matched to my 14′ Whitehall and a pleasure to row with. The 10″ leathers offered a wide range of gearing to meet different conditions. Close to the buttons is the spot for speed on a downwind run, the middle is suited for calm to moderate conditions, and close to the outboard edge lowers the gearing for working to windward. With the Whitehall’s 4′ 3″ beam at the center rowing station, the grips have about 12″ between them when the buttons are next to the locks, and a 3″ overlap when the outboard ends of the leathers are in the locks. For most of my rowing, done mid-leather, there was a comfortable 2″ space between the grips.
The 10″ sewn-on leathers allow the oars to be moved in and out in the locks to change the gearing to match the rowing conditions. The glued-on buttons keep the oars from sliding out through the oarlocks.
The glued-on leather buttons kept the oars from slipping out through the locks and, with a good rowing technique, don’t need to ride against the locks. To get the best out of the oars, the leathers should be well lubricated (I used tallow) to eliminate friction in the locks that would interfere with effortless feathering.
The blades, with their slender profile, slipped neatly into the water at the catch and came free at the finish just as effortlessly. A hard pull during the drive didn’t make the blades flutter; they stayed where I planted them. The looms had enough flex to soften a strong, quick catch and kept a slight bend through the drive, as they should, and then released that stored energy at the finish. I never felt that I was applying more power than the oars could manage.
The looms will bend during a fast catch and a hard drive, a feature that eases the strain on the rower and gives the oars a lively feel.
My backing stroke can be a little less graceful than my forward stroke because I don’t use it as often, but the blade profile made me look good by being so easily moved in and out of the water. And I could effectively move the Whitehall sideways by sculling one blade well below the surface, where the thrust generated is close to horizontal rather than downward. The blade was well behaved, and I didn’t have to keep a tight grip to control it.
The Martin brothers have taken a welcome step by expanding their focus beyond guideboats and guideboat oars. For those of us who enjoy oars that feather, their new spruce oars are pretty to the eye, light in the hand, well behaved in the water, and inspire good rowing.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The Spruce Oars are available from Adirondack Guideboat for $399 (7′), $439 (7′ 6″), and $479 (7′ 10″). Options include traditional leathers, plastic Douglas-style collars, and cherry blade tips.
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 was raised in the tropical paradise of Jamaica and was just a child the first time my father took me sailing on a Hobie 16. There was something magical about the way it glided through the water while I relaxed on the trampoline, joyful under the summer sun. My favorite part was being refreshed by the cool ocean spray when my dad steered into the waves.
Jan Anderson, Jan’s Marine Photography
Rules established by the International Hobie Class Association keep all Hobie 16s equal, so sailing skills alone determine which crews are the fastest.
In the 1950s, Hobie Alter, designer of the Hobie 16, made a name for himself in surfboards and was the first to make them with fiberglass over foam cores. When he turned his attention to sailing, the results were no less revolutionary. He introduced his 14′ sailing catamaran, the Hobie 14, in 1967. Created as a fun, affordable, and lightweight boat, it was dubbed “the people’s boat.” Within a few short years of development, the Hobie 14 was quickly adopted into the racing scene around the world and became the largest class of catamaran. The Hobie 16 was introduced in 1971, and now, over a half-century later, it is the most popular of all the Hobies. More than 135,000 Hobie 16s have been sold, the design was enshrined in the now defunct American Sailboat Hall of Fame, and it thrives as a world-renowned racing class.
Almost identical to the original 14, the Hobie 16 is built for two people and is equipped with a second sail and dual trapezes so both crew members can hang their weight well outboard. It is easy to rig, launch, and sail. With its 148.2-sq-ft main and 55.1-sq-ft jib (both fully battened), and its lightweight construction coming in at 320 lbs, the Hobie 16 can reach speeds approaching 24 knots in ideal conditions. Cutting neatly through waves upwind and surfing them downwind, it thrives in breezy and wavy conditions.
Jan Anderson, Jan’s Marine Photography
The asymmetrical hulls—straight and vertical on the outboard side and curved inboard—create lift, and as the windward hull rises, the lift generated by the leeward hull diminishes the leeway made by the catamaran.
The Hobie 16 has asymmetrical hulls that are nearly straight on the outside and curved on the inside so that the downwind hull, the one most deeply immersed, provides lift to windward. The shape of the hulls eliminates the need for daggerboards and meets one of the designer’s primary requirements: the ability to sail directly off and onto the beach. It’s one of the many reasons the boat is loved by so many.
Jan Anderson, Jan’s Marine Photography
The anodized aluminum mast rotates and has a teardrop cross section, features that improve the airflow across the mainsail.
When setting up the Hobie 16, the most difficult task is raising the mast. While this can be done singlehandedly, I have never been successful. A crewmate, and even a third pair of hands, makes it easy. Once the mast is up, it is stabilized laterally by the shrouds while the forestay is connected to the bow bridle. Fortunately, after doing this process once, it is easy to master.
When rigging the sails, I usually start with the jib, attaching the tack to the chainplate connected to the bridle between the bows of the boat. I then attach the jibhead to the halyard with a bowline, clip the five hanks to the forestay, and thread the jibsheets through the travelers and cam cleats. After attaching the halyard shackle to the mainsail, hoisting the main is fairly straightforward but does benefit from a second set of hands to feed the luff into the mast track. Each rudder connects to the stern with a pin and a split ring.
Courtesy of Hobie
The Hobie 16’s ability to be sailed off the beach was a major factor in its rise of popularity.
The light weight of the Hobie 16 means that I can singlehandedly push and pull it across a beach. I will typically hoist the sails on land, push the boat into the water, jump on, and as soon as I’m aboard, I’m sailing. Returning, I drop the sails while in the surf and then pull the boat onto the beach. Hobie hulls can handle rough landings, and many people sail their boats directly onto the beach—even while sheeted in and driving hard. The 16 can also easily be launched from a trailer at a ramp.
Underway, the Hobie 16 is very sensitive to tiller movement, and oversteering may often lead to an accidental tack or jibe, or send you straight into irons. However, it’s easy to get out of irons, even when singlehanded, by backing the sail and directing the tiller to the same side as the sail until the bow turns away. The boat is then quick to pick up speed again.
For recreational sailors, the trampoline provides comfort and relaxation, and for advanced sailors it prevents bruises during high-speed tacks and jibes. While spray rarely comes over the bows because of the way they cut through the water, do not expect to stay dry because the trampoline does not offer protection from spray coming directly from underneath.
Jan Anderson, Jan’s Marine Photography
The Hobie 16 is designed for a crew of two. Even with both crew members on the trapezes, it’s possible to fly a hull. Sailing with one hull out of the water eliminates the drag created by the wetted surface and increases the potential for speed.
Going fast and flying a hull, as you might expect, can lead to a capsize. I’ve never capsized a Hobie without getting dropped into the water, so be prepared to go for a swim. But righting a Hobie 16 is easier than it might seem, indeed, the boat will frequently right itself because the trampoline acts like a sail when the wind blows under it, allowing a crew and skipper to just climb back aboard. On the rare occasion a Hobie 16 does not right itself, I first loop the righting line (which is attached to the base of the mast) around the windward hull. Then my crew and I stand on the leeward hull, lean back, and pull the boat upright. Because the Hobie 16 is designed to be crewed by two people, when sailed solo on breezy days it is quick to capsize and difficult to right alone. Regardless of the occasional dip in the ocean, every Hobie 16 sailor, from beginner to racer, exhilarates in the rush of excitement that comes from sailing this fun-packed multihull.
Because the Hobie 16 can reach very high speeds, especially on windy days, the boat can be overpowered and reefing the sail is important. Reefing the mainsail is easiest when done on the beach. Five reefing lines are required: a tack downhaul leads from the lowest eye on the luff to the eye at the base of the mast, a clew outhaul leads from an eye on the leech down to the boom, and three reefpoints secure the excess sail around the boom.
Jan Anderson, Jan’s Marine Photography
When the wind speed reaches about 12 knots, both crew members often take to the trapezes.
While the Hobie 16 is popular with thrill-seekers, it is mainly used as a summer recreational boat. Even on quiet days, the Hobie sails smoothly, especially when using light-wind techniques such as shifting crew weight forward to reduce drag or to leeward to heel the boat and angle the mast so gravity can give the sails their airfoil shapes.
Ultimately the Hobie 16 is a versatile boat that can be easily rigged for brief outings, day trips, or multiday adventures loaded up with camping gear and food. Despite being only 16′ 7″ in length, it is surprisingly spacious and, although designed for a crew of two, can comfortably accommodate three adults or a family of four. It is a great boat for family outings with kids; on glassy days the trampoline is a very comfortable place to take a nap or gaze into the water at the marine life. Indeed, if you’re not into racing, bring plenty of sunscreen, water, and snacks and just enjoy cruising under the summer sun.
For me, the joy of Hobie 16 sailing comes with breezy days: when I’m hiked out on a trapeze, I feel like I’m flying.
Zoe Knowles is a lifelong sailor and a published author. She was raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where she was first introduced to dinghy sailing through local youth sailing camps and went on to become the youth sailing instructor at the Montego Bay Yacht Club. At the age of 16, she was the youngest sailor to race in the 2015 Pineapple Cup, an 811-nautical-mile race from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Montego Bay. Now 24, Zoe is an academic working in higher education in Florida but often returns home where she still cherishes sailing with her dad.
In 1901, Thomas Fleming Day, who founded The Rudder a decade earlier, conceived a boat that would bring ocean voyaging to the common man. Simple enough to be built by amateurs, small enough to be singlehanded, and big enough for long passages, the Sea Bird yawl still beckons those with a sense of adventure.
She was originally a centerboarder, but Day soon added a deep keel for ocean passages, including an Atlantic crossing he made in 1911. With The Rudder’s publicity, plans, and instructions, the design soon caught hold. Hundreds have been built. Day’s vision turned out to be unusually lovely for a hard-chined hull, in plans formalized by C.D. Mower and Larry Huntington. Boats of this type have cross-sectional shape consisting of nearly straight lines rather than the svelte curves of racing craft. Sea Bird’s sweeping chine curve rises high forward and aft and just kisses the waterline amidships. The shape is complemented by her gaff-headed yawl rig. In 1981 WoodenBoat, working with Mystic Seaport, had the plans redrawn by Dave Dillion (see WB No. 43), and the seven-sheet set of plans, which includes the deep-keel option, is still available through The WoodenBoat Store.
Joel Page
At 25’ 7 1⁄2” overall, the centerboard version of the Sea Bird can—with effort—take to the water each spring from a launching ramp, with her 1,300 lbs of ballast added later.
I first saw a Sea Bird in a photograph published in a book I’ve long forgotten. Taken from astern in a calm harbor, the picture captured the distinctive transom, which was intriguing to draw and immediately made me imagine building the boat. Some years ago, sailing into Robinhood Cove, Maine, I saw a boat that instantly brought me right back to that photo. She had a rightness about her. This particularly fine Sea Bird, I learned, was built by Alex Hadden in nearby Georgetown.
Hadden launched his centerboarder in 1988. He had come by a marconi rig complete with masts, sails, rigging, and hardware, from a Sea Bird that had been cut up, and he planned to build the boat for sale. The project launched Hadden’s business, but not the way he intended: somebody with an aged Sea Bird hired him for a reconstruction instead. It was his first commission, but he ended up keeping the boat he hoped would be his first sale.
After sailing the boat for years, Hadden has concluded that his 361-sq-ft marconi rig (which is not included in the plans set) would be best suited to the deep-keel version, and the original gaff rig, with its 383 sq ft of area but a lower heeling moment, would be a better fit for the original centerboard version. He compensated for the marconi-centerboard combination by using 1,300 lbs instead of 1,000 lbs of internal lead ballast to keep her on her feet. He has considered changing to gaff rig but loves the simplicity of the triangular sails.
Joel Page
Hadden has devised A-frame sheer legs for stepping his masts before launching.
There’s that word again: simplicity. If Hadden has learned one thing about the Sea Bird in more than two decades, it is to make things ever simpler. During a recent deck replacement, he eliminated both a large bridge-deck hatch and a foredeck hatch. He removed his built-in VHF radio, together with its masthead antenna and wires, in favor of a handheld model. His red and green side lights are fitted into shroud-mounted blinds that take a little time to reinstall every year, but “It’s less obtrusive than pretty much anywhere else I can think to put them. And they work better up there, if you’re actually out sailing at night.
“The whole effort was to make it as simple and easy to paint as possible, because that’s all I do is paint,” Hadden said. He has strived to remove deck fittings. “If it’s not absolutely necessary, I don’t want to even look at it. You’re either sanding or you’re reminded of when you were sanding.”
The Sea Bird seems to scream it like a gull’s cry: Simplify, simplify. It’s a good antidote to life’s increasing complications.
Hadden launches his boat each year from a trailer, which is very unusual for a 25′ 7 1⁄2″ LOA boat that displaces some 6,000 lbs. It takes some effort. For example, he raises the rig while still ashore, and his bread-pan-sized lead ballast castings have to be transferred to the boat by skiff, one at a time, in what has become an annual ritual. But he pays nothing for haulage. He has the vast satisfaction of independence.
Having a deep keel would free up cabin space, true, but at a price: “There goes your hauling out on the trailer. There goes going happily wherever you want without navigating, which I enjoy. I can explore, and you really don’t have to worry, you’re just going to hit the centerboard.” He once poled the boat up a creek too narrow to turn around in, and next morning poled her out stern-first. He tells me this as we sail within what seems an arm’s reach of the cove’s rocky shore. “You wouldn’t be doing this if you converted this to a keel boat.”
Jonathan Taggart
With low freeboard, a proportional low-profile cabin trunk has everything to do with the Sea Bird’s appearance and also its function, giving the helmsman a clear view forward.
In the light and fluky breeze, she responded well to occasional puffs. She answered the tiller easily, with the feel of a larger boat. She tacks easily. Hadden has made only one change to the rigging: he brought the jibsheets inboard of the cockpit coaming instead of making them off to cleats on their outboard faces. “I brazenly cut holes in the coaming, just so when you are heeled over you can control that from the inside.” She ghosted along, only surrendering when the ebb made it clear that the current, and not the wind, was in control that afternoon. The Yanmar diesel carried us the last few hundred yards to the mooring.
“My favorite times are when it’s kind of dreary out, windy, and you’re going through the chop and the waves are hitting the bottom of the jib and streaming down,” Hadden says. “That’s when I’m saying to myself, ‘Okay, this is like the paintings.’” She handles best in about 15 knots of wind. Her mizzen is fairly large for a yawl, so it gets reefed first. In high winds, Hadden douses the jib and mizzen and sails on a reefed main alone.
Tom Jackson
Spartan accommodations encourage a simplicity of lifestyle that matches the boat’s overall theme.
The boat doesn’t pound in waves, and Hadden has actually found advantages in the hard chines. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s a hard chine,’ and that’s one of the reasons I think people don’t bother with it. But this particular boat, if you got rid of the chines, you’d lose it. That’s the best thing about it, is the chine line, the shape it makes. If you rounded that, it’d be fine, probably, but you’d lose a lot of the look. But when it gets rough out, t’s throwing the waves and all the water off to leeward. It’s a great thing.”
Hadden used 1″ Atlantic white cedar planking over oak backbone timbers and frames. “Structurally, these sawn frames are great. They’ve got big screws in them, they’re really deep, there’s a lot of them. I can’t imagine anything falling apart.” After it takes up, the hull does not leak. His original deck did, though, because the tongue-and-groove pine moved a lot and cracked the paint of the canvas. He replaced it with plywood sheathed in Dynel set in epoxy to better keep the water out. He couldn’t bear, however, to part with the traditional canvas sheathing over his coach roof, which fared much better because it was planked in fine cedar.
Jonathan Taggart
The bridge deck provides comfortable seating and makes the cockpit a sociable size.
Some Sea Bird builders made unfortunate design changes, especially involving the trunk cabin. For Hadden, even his new deck altered the purity of the boat’s profile perceptibly. “This is only a quarter of an inch lower, but I can tell the difference when I sit there in the window and look out at it. It’s not much. I got over it. But people who haven’t done it much, they’re always going, ‘Oh, who’s going to see an inch, inch and a half, two inches.’ So in the Sea Birds, a lot of them, the cabins were inches higher and wider.” Some extended the cabin aft, eliminating the bridge deck and with it the most comfortable place to sit topsides. Some clumsily squared off the cabin and used oversized portlights. Some changes were more drastic: “In the one we rebuilt, the stem was plumb, and had a big knuckle. The boat’s not drawn anything like that.”
The cabin, dominated by the centerboard trunk, provides rudimentary shelter, not comfort. In reality, it isn’t any smaller than those of many other small cruisers, a type that invites clever and inventive tinkering.
For example, because the chine knees intrude into the bench seats, Hadden fitted removable boards between the seat edges and trunk sides to make more comfortable sleeping platforms. Like many builders, Hadden is rife with ideas for greater interior comfort and practicality. But he mostly takes short trips these days, so those cruising solutions can wait. For now, he’s content to simply sail, just the way Thomas Fleming Day imagined it all.
Thomas Fleming Day had ease of construction and limited expense in mind when he conceived the hard-chined Sea Bird yawl, yet the centerboarder proved herself in 1,000 miles of cruising in her first season in 1902. Redrawn by Dave Dillion for WoodenBoat in 1981 to rejuvenate interest in the type, the plans include the original gaff-rigged mainsail and ample detail for amateur construction.
Sea Bird Particulars: LOA 25′ 7 ½”, LWL 20′, Beam 8′ 1 ½”, Draft, board up 4′, Draft, board down 1′ 11″, Sail area (original gaff rig) 383 sq ft, Ballast (internal) 1000+ lbs, Displacement ~6000 lbs
Harry Bryan’s Rambler 18 is a handsome lap-strake runabout designed to carry the whole family for a daylong outing —exploring the coast or perhaps visiting friends on an offshore island. Though just 18′ in length, she’s big enough to take everything a couple would need for a week’s camp-cruise. Weighing 900 lbs, it should trailer easily behind the family car and launch without causing undue strain on the engine.
Bryan specifies a 9.9-hp, high-thrust Yamaha outboard motor, which gives better fuel economy than a larger engine. The boat’s hull design trades speed over the water for a gentle ride through the water. While the large-diameter propeller will push Rambler at speeds up to 8 knots, the optimum speed for cruising is about 6 knots—fast enough to reach your destination, but slow enough to enjoy the scenery.
The bow’s narrow entry slices through the water so the boat doesn’t pound—softening the ride through the chop. There are no white knuckles and no hanging on for dear life that one might have experienced in the past with the slapping of a planing hull. The hull’s after sections have no deadrise, providing some lift. The hard chine aft adds stability, both at the dock and at speed. The keel has significant rocker; it rises to the waterline at the transom, reducing the wake and making the hull more fuel-efficient than heavier boats at slightly over hull speed.
Typically an 18-footer, powered by a 90-hp outboard, carving circles in a lake at full throttle, will use up to 8 gallons per hour, burning through roughly $32 in one hour at today’s price of nearly $4 a gallon. The Rambler 18 will carry you to new waters and back, running all day at 6 knots, burning about half a gallon per hour, or just $16 for an eight-hour day.
Robin Jettinghoff
A spacious cockpit will seat six and accommodate all their gear for a day on the water.
The Rambler’s hull has a sweet sheerline accentuated by a softly sweeping coaming that curves aft from a raked windshield. Bryan built the boat upside down starting with an oak keel fastened to a stem and forefoot of black locust. The frames are attached to the keel next. No molds are needed as the ½” copper-riveted lapstrake planking can be fastened to the 7 ⁄8″ × 2″ sawn oak frames. All other fastenings are bronze. The hull has a spray rail at the stem just above the waterline to help keep the cockpit dry. This rail extends aft about 6′ to where the chine becomes visible. The hull sections change from a smooth curve at the bow to a near right angle at the transom.
Bryan says this boat could be built using glued-lap plywood. Another option would be to use sheet plywood for the topsides; however, the bottom would have to be built of two layers of laminated plywood strips in order to achieve the correct shape. While underwater the bow’s entry angle is fine to cut through the chop, above the chine it flares outward, to deflect spray. To add comfort for the crew, the windshield has large windows to port and starboard for protection from spray. The cockpit has two spacious seats forward for the driver and a passenger. Benches running fore-and-aft behind these seats will comfortably hold four adults facing each other thwartships. This arrangement allows the crew to walk down the hull centerline, unobstructed by seats, without disrupting the boat’s trim. An accessible cuddy under the foredeck will hold all the gear they’ll need for the day or a weekend. The transom is high, and forward of it is a splash well. Both of these features help prevent the boat from being swamped by a following sea. The motor tilts into the splash well when it’s not in use. The transom’s sweet tumblehome section echoes the equally sweet curve of the sheer.
John Marples
The Rambler 18 has a splash well in front of the motor to help prevent the boat from being swamped by a following sea. The motor tilts into the well when not in use.
Like many of Bryan’s boats, the Rambler 18 just invites you to touch her, to rub your hand along her, to climb aboard. As you sit in the driver’s seat and grab the wheel, everything about her is effortless. As you pull away from the dock and throttle up to speed, everyone aboard can anticipate a comfortable ride. Passengers will be able to talk easily to each other over the relatively quiet engine. If your destination is a beach, Rambler’s shallow aft sections allow her stern to be brought right to the water’s edge, once the outboard is kicked up, for unloading of passengers and their picnic and swimming gear.
Bryan has designed three other Ramblers—at 16½’, 20′, and 23′ long. All three of them carry inboards, and the larger models have covered wheelhouses. His Handy Billy, available in 18′ and 21′ lengths, is another outboard launch design that is seaworthy, comfortable, and fuel-efficient. The Handy Billys are built with batten-seam construction and carry their outboards in a well. The Handy Billy was conceived to offer a low-powered alternative to the average 68 hp of North American boats. The Rambler 18 continues this theme, but with the dramatically lower power needs of a displacement hull.
Martha Bryan
Bryan chose a 9.9-hp high-thrust outboard motor, which has a larger propeller than a standard motor. It will move the Rambler 18 at 8 knots.
Bryan conducted his sea trials for the Rambler 18 in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, in May 2012. He reports that she easily ran against a 4 knot current in the famously swift waters of Woods Hole, and out into the choppy bay beyond. The four adults aboard that day reported a safe, dry, and comfortable ride.
Later in the season, I joined Harry for a ride in the Westport River in Massachusetts. The wind was light but there was a strong current. Rambler was easy to maneuver, turning smoothly in tight circles, accelerating and decelerating without significant changes in trim. Our top speed was about 8.5 knots, but most of the time we easily cruised at an economical 6 knots with two adults aboard. There were five of us aboard for a short run, and her performance did not change noticeably with the added weight.
Martha Bryan
Rambler’s maple windscreen sweeps aft on both sides of the cockpit, protecting passengers from spray.
Racing around at top speed is not the only way to travel in small powerboats. The Rambler 18 is for people seeking comfortable cruising, not the exhilaration of speed. Riding in this boat is a pleasant and relaxing experience. But the boat is also large enough and powerful enough to handle modest currents and choppy seas while keeping everyone aboard dry.
On his website, Bryan has a quote from boat designer Andre Mele, whose book Polluting for Pleasure caused quite a stir in the recreational powerboat world almost 20 years ago. Mele said the recreational boating industry has been selling adrenaline and glory to the males, and white knuckles to the wives and children, for years. The Rambler 18 is a stable, comfortable, and economical alternative to this mass-market phenomenon.
Plans and completed boats are available from Harry Bryan, Bryan Boatbuilding, 329 Mascarene Rd., Letete, NB, E5C 2P6, Canada; 506–755–2486; www.harrybryan.com.
About five years ago, when I needed to make room for another boat in the garage, I moved one of my Greenland kayaks out and tucked it under the eaves on the north side of my house. It wouldn’t be as well protected there as it had been in the garage, but it would be out of the sun and only occasionally subject to rain. Perched with its bow resting on a downspout and the aft deck on a bracket clamped to the power meter’s conduit, the kayak’s cockpit crossed the windows of my study and its stern hung over the back door. While it was never out of view, it was soon out of mind.
Photographs by the author
Protected by the eaves above, the kayak hung in plain sight and yet sadly out of mind. Over time the neglect began to show.
While I “saw” the kayak several times a day, I’ve been blindered by routine and paid no more attention to it than I did the gutter above it. One dim gray afternoon this winter, a patch of color caught my eye and I finally took notice of the kayak. Half of its starboard side was no longer white but a mottled olive green where it had been hit by the rain. In that moment, I was struck by an ache for how forlorn the kayak looked. In The Wind in the Willows, when Mole first saw Rat’s boat, his “whole heart went out to it at once,” but while Mole had been moved by a boat’s beauty, I felt sadness for the kayak’s sorry state. Perhaps there is something inherent in a boat, no matter its state, that can evoke feelings normally reserved for living beings.
Beneath the kayak, in the meager shelter of the same eave, lie a snow shovel, a spade, leaf and garden rakes, and a lawn edger. They are all showing the effects of exposure to the weather—rust, peeling varnish, wood turned leaden gray—but “forlorn” has never come to mind when I see them. While I can let my yard and garden tools deteriorate to the point where I’d discard them and buy new ones, I couldn’t let that happen to the kayak. Even though I had no use for the kayak, as I did for the tools languishing on the walkway below it, to let all that work done with care by hand come to an end through neglect was unconscionable.
Where the butyrate-dope covered canvas skin was exposed to the rain, it had torn itself apart.
I set up a ladder and climbed up to take a closer look at the kayak. Along the sheer the canvas skin had pulled apart in a jagged 18″ tear, revealing the still-blond spruce gunwale beneath it. When I peeked into the hull through the cockpit opening, I expected to find a bird’s nest but saw instead a paper-wasp nest the size of a cantelope hanging from the keelson in the stern. I counted that as lucky—the wasps hadn’t made a mess of the kayak as nesting birds surely would have.
If I had been more observant, I would have seen wasps flying in and out of the kayak cockpit. Their nests are only used once; I don’t know how many years this one has been in the kayak. Even if this one is recent, it’s empty during the winter and I’ll be able to remove it.
The frame was in very good shape, and the warm scents of oak and spruce filled the hull’s interior even in the cold winter air. The mortise-and-tenon joints between the deckbeams and the gunwales were as snug as they had been when I’d made them, and even the pencil marks I had made on the gunwale at those joints were still dark and sharp.
The kayak’s canvas skin and braided seine-twine lashings were materials I had stopped using decades ago when I switched to nylon and artificial sinew. Seeing the seine twine, I found I couldn’t remember building or paddling the kayak. I went to my study and checked some 30-year-old photos of kayaks I’d built, but the one under the eave didn’t appear in any of them. All of my other boats have histories that deepen my connections to them, but the absence of that connection didn’t diminish the feeling I had that this kayak deserved better.
The interior of the kayak was in good shape. Indeed, the framework of oak and spruce frame and the braided seine-twine lashings looked almost as good as new. The deck beam in the foreground is the foot brace and it shows little wear, an indication that I hadn’t paddled the kayak often.
I’d once had the same feeling for a boat that wasn’t even mine. A few years ago, a handsome 14′ cedar-on-oak lapstrake rowing skiff sat strapped to a trailer parked on the street a block from my home. It had no cover, and through the fall and winter rains it often filled with so much water that I feared the weight would tear the hull apart. That boat certainly deserved better. After a spell of rain, I’d walk to the boat with a 10′ length of garden hose and set it up as a siphon to empty it. The skiff survived the winter and disappeared in the spring. I never knew who built it or who rowed it.
While people may feel affection for inanimate objects—cabins, cars, furniture, works of art—what designers and builders put into boats make them unique. On the water, a boat gives back what it is given on land. And for boaters, being on the water requires trust of a kind that isn’t required of anything on land; it is easier, perhaps, to put that trust in something we feel is more than a senseless object.
The kayak will come down from the eaves and get the care it deserves. New Year’s Day is a celebration of what lies ahead, and my kayak has served as a reminder for me to see without blinders and to give attention to those easily overlooked, forgotten, and left behind.
Our house overlooks Irondequoit Bay, which opens into Lake Ontario near the city of Rochester, New York, and for a couple of years my wife, Carol, had been expressing a desire to have a powerboat. We already had five boats of various sizes—two sailboats, two canoes, and a kayak—that I had built over the previous 16 years, but they were all too small to be kept in the water and required time and effort to haul to a launch ramp and set up for an outing. There is a small marina below us on the bay, and Carol’s dream was to have a powerboat we could keep moored there so that any time we wanted, we could walk down to the boat, climb in, and go for a ride. She was quite happy to buy something, but I, of course, said, “Oh, we don’t need to do that, I’ll build you one.” That rash offer led to a three-year project.
My choice of design was determined by the size of my basement workshop and its French doors. I decided on the Nexus 21′ Planing Dory, designed by David Roberts of Nexus Marine in Everett, Washington, which was the largest boat that I could get out of my basement. I ordered the plans, which include drawings for the dory with a cabin and a transom-mounted outboard, and for the open boat with a motorwell. A construction drawing is numbered and cross-referenced with a 12-page construction guide. A table of offsets is available—in feet-inches-eighths, Imperial decimal, and metric—for builders who’d like to do the lofting. Those who’d like to skip the lofting can order full-sized Mylar patterns for the frames, stem, and other small parts. A person with some boatbuilding experience should be able to build this power dory with this comprehensive plan set.
Andrew Kitchen
Construction of the straight-sided Planing Dory is not complicated, although the framing does require some skills that first-time builders may find unfamiliar. The plans give detailed instructions for the build, especially regarding the substantial framing from which the dory gets its strength. However, the interior layout is less specific, allowing builders to make their own design choices.
The boat has slab sides of 9mm plywood and a flat 12mm bottom, so in many ways it’s a straightforward job, not much more demanding than carpentry. Unlike the boats I’ve built before, this one depends on substantial framing for its strength. The frames need to be beveled, something I didn’t have to worry about with my other boats, which had all been built around molds. I lofted the hull before starting the build, so I was able to lift the bevels directly off the lofted lines and pre-bevel all the frames before assembling them and setting them up on a ladder frame. The beveling was simple because with a slab-sided hull there is not an appreciable change in the angle along each limb of the frames, and the minor variations can be dealt with once the frames are in place on the building form.
The plans suggest 1-1⁄2” vertical-grain Douglas-fir for the framing, but it is hard to come by in good quality here in upstate New York. I chose sapele because it was locally available, affordable, and takes epoxy well. Mahogany was too expensive, and I was leery of using white oak—I had read warnings about using standard epoxies with it. I was happy with sapele but, like many hardwoods, it will bind and snap screws if the holes are not carefully prepared and the screws lubricated. All fastenings in this project were 316 stainless steel, as suggested in the guide.
The recommendations in the plans for construction are well thought out. I was particularly impressed by the measures taken to eliminate opportunities for rot to develop in the finished boat. For example: each frame consists of three straight futtocks butted together with epoxy and reinforced with 12mm-plywood gussets screwed and glued to both sides of each joint. The gussets bridge the inside corners of the frame, and the pockets created are filled with carefully shaped wedges of hardwood, eliminating a place where water would be prone to collect.
Andrew Kitchen
The small cabin allows passengers privacy when changing and, with its semi-V-berth, somewhere cozy and comfortable to relax. A head may be installed at a later date.
The boat is built upside-down on a ladder frame. The construction is straightforward. The only challenge I found as a solo builder is the sheer weight of the bottom. I used 1⁄2″ sapele plywood as recommended by the plans, and this involved three 4′ × 8′ sheets. Luckily, two I-beams run across the ceiling of my workshop, allowing me to install two chain hoists; they made lifting and positioning the bottom easy.
I covered the exterior of the hull with 6-oz fiberglass cloth and epoxy. The plans call for a 1-3⁄4″ x 2″ oak skeg and 3⁄4″× 1-3⁄8″ oak skids bedded with 3M 5200 sealant and screwed through to the frames. I painted the hull before turning it over, starting with a two-part epoxy primer, followed by a linear polyurethane topcoat and a water-based bottom paint to minimize vapors (my workshop is directly under our bedroom). Over the last four summers the topcoat has held up well. I scrape down the bottom paint and refresh it each season. Our local waters are not the cleanest and the dory’s waterline acquires a thick layer of scum, but otherwise the bottom stays remarkably clean.
Once the boat was right-side up, I cleaned the inside, put fillets of epoxy along every seam, and spread two coats of epoxy over the interior. Up to this point I had followed the design to a T. The Planing Dory was designed as a versatile craft that would adapt well to many uses on the Washington State coast. Some builders finish the dory as an open boat with the outboard either mounted in a well or on the transom. Others add the cabin and windscreen detailed in the plans to protect the crew. My goal was to build a boat for use motoring to a beach for swimming or to a waterside restaurant on our local bay on New York’s Lake Ontario shore, so I made some modifications to the design. I reduced the height of the cabin and gave the windshield a more streamlined look. I also added a deck and coaming around the cockpit to soften the lines and protect passengers from spray.
After framing the cabin and side decks, I painted the interior before adding the 3⁄8″ okoume plywood cabin walls and 1⁄4″ okoume decking. With the major construction finished, the trim, windshield, and cockpit furniture remained. This part was challenging but fun. I had free rein as far as design was concerned: the plans leave interior organization to the builder, recognizing that the uses to which the basic hull can be put are as diverse as the people who choose to build it.
My aim was to build a versatile day boat. The cabin has an upholstered semi-V-berth, with room for someone to change into a bathing suit in private. No head or porta-potti has been installed at this point. The cockpit provides seating for six people. The accommodations were finished bright with a water-based TotalBoat Halcyon Marine Varnish.
Andrew Kitchen
At 21′ LOA even the cabin-version of the Planing Dory has a roomy cockpit, spacious enough for six people. With lockers beneath the bench seats and the open cubbies under the two forward seats there’s plenty of storage.
It had taken me just a couple of months shy of three years to get the boat essentially finished. I still had to install the steering mechanism and an electrical system—a new experience for me. I left the installation of the 40-hp Honda outboard to the dealer.
Carol Kitchen
With the cabin, the dory can be a comfortable cruiser. The plans include drawings for the dory as an open boat with the motor moved forward into a well, a workboat option suitable for fishing, scuba diving, or hauling.
Early in the spring of 2018 the boat was finished, and ready for the engine installation. That summer we were off to Mystic, Connecticut, for The WoodenBoat Show and a vacation on Masons Island, south of Mystic. After some maiden trips north on the Mystic River and south to Fishers Island Sound, our little craft now sits in the marina below our home.
Owning a powerboat has been a new experience for me—my previous experience had been exclusively with oars, paddles, and sails. Learning to dock the boat was the steepest part of the learning curve. Fortunately, the dory is a sturdy little craft and has handled the punishment with aplomb. The flat bottom provides reassuring stability, a benefit when it comes to carrying people with little experience of boating. I have recently added a bimini, which provides shelter as well as a handhold when coming aboard.
With the usual complement of just the two of us aboard, the dory’s performance is quite lively and remains so with four aboard. I’ve taken as many as five passengers; with six of us aboard, acceleration and top speed are predictably reduced. The flat bottom does pound in a chop, particularly in water disturbed by the crossing wakes of high-speed powerboats. Carol and I are not into speed, so we usually take the dory out in the evening when the traffic has thinned and slowed and the bay is peaceful. When driven hard, the boat does throw up a bit of spray, but not an excessive amount. It carves a turn well and doesn’t skid; in our confused waters I don’t push too hard to avoid the risk of the boat tripping over its outside chine.
Carol Kitchen
The author’s dory is powered by a 40-hp outboard, well within the range of 25 to 50 hp recommended for the design. The top speed listed is 25 knots.
Flat-bottomed boats can lack directional stability in a head- or crosswind until they have some way on. There is not much lateral resistance up forward to hold the boat on course, especially with a cabin in the bow adding to the tendency to weathercock. We get stiff breezes in our area, and a couple of times the bow has pivoted downwind as I was leaving my slip. Backing into the wind provides the maneuverability required at low speeds in tight quarters until I have enough space to turn and get up to speed.
The Nexus Planing Dory has expanded our boating horizons and provided some wonderful experiences for Carol and me, our family, and friends.
Andrew Kitchen grew up in England in the 1940s and ’50s when the only boats he knew were wooden ones. He used to devour his grandfather’s yachting magazines; his favorite parts were the centerfolds featuring the lines of the latest ocean racer or cruiser. He didn’t understand them completely, but they held him mesmerized. In his teens Andrew sailed on the Norfolk Broads with a school sailing club and day-sailed in the English Channel with his family. A half-century later he retired from a career in teaching mathematics and computer science. His first project was to build Iain Oughtred’s J II Yawl, the forerunner of the Arctic Tern. He then averaged one new boat every three years. His current project is Doug Hylan’s Siri, an 18′ canoe yawl. It’s a version of the Iris, which first caught Andrew’s eye 12 years ago when he saw its drawings in W.P. Stephens’s 1898 book Canoe and Boatbuilding.
Originally used as a beach-launched fishing boat, the No Mans Land Boat, named after an island near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, is a seaworthy double-ender. Several have been documented, and this one, built by the author, is based on a Beetle builder’s half-model from the 1880s.
As s working-sail fleets faded after the turn of the 20th century, astute observers in numerous corners of the world recorded their last remnants. The old way of building—carving a half model and then measuring it—was still very common, so without photography and field documentation, many boat types simply would have been lost. The No Mans Land Boat was certainly one of these.
In the 1930s, these double-ended cod-fishing boats caught the attention of historians Howard I. Chapelle, M.V. Brewington, and others. The Smithsonian Institution, where Chapelle became a curator, has a rigged model built by a No Mans Land veteran. In the 1950s, another historian, Robert Baker, found an 1880s boat and restored it for his own use; that boat and another now reside at Mystic Seaport Museum, and Baker documented both. So plans for the type exist, and they are as enticing today as ever.
The hulls are extraordinary. In the best of them, the sheerline has a lovely upward sweep forward and aft, and the section lines aft have shapely reverse curves culminating in a steeply raked sternpost. They are commodious, inviting the imagination to wander.
Martha’s Vineyard cod fishermen used them at nearby No Mans Land Island and praised their seaworthiness. They were drawn ashore at day’s end, and their sharp sterns facilitated relaunching stern-first into the surf. At season’s end, most were left ashore when the families moved home. They were well-built by capable craftsmen, including Joshua Delano of Fairhaven, who is said to have built 50 or 60 of them, and by the Beetle family of New Bedford, renowned whaleboat builders.
Jonathan Taggart
Having the foresail tack made off to the stemhead is efficient and powerful, but best reserved for long tacks.
They had straight keels with a lot of drag. Centerboards were offset, running through the garboard and alongside the keel. This preserved the integrity of the vertical keel and made beach stones less prone to jamming the slot. They were two-masted—using the parlance “foresail” and “mainsail,” as in schooner practice, not “mainsail” and “mizzen,” as in ketches, despite the diminished size of the after sail—and they were sprit-rigged, though some carried gaff foresails. In the March 1932 Yachting, William H. Taylor has a quotation—maddeningly unattributed—calling the type “almighty able, and they’d claw out to windward through anything that blew.”
With good looks and a solid reputation among seasoned mariners, these boats naturally have caught the attention of modern boatbuilders. But this is not the boatbuilding project for a beginner. Experience is essential and a good deal of determination highly advisable.
To begin, all the plans present problems. Two of the finest-looking hulls have no construction plans at all. One, a hulk by an unknown builder, was documented by Frederick H. Huntington and published in the April 1932 Yachting. The other was drawn from an 1880s Beetle half model documented by Chapelle, published in American Small Sailing Craft (W.W. Norton, 1951). The Huntington boat, which Roger Taylor wrote about in Good Boats (International Marine, 1977), has a sail plan that invites change (more on that below), and the Beetle has no sail plan.
Rosemary Wyman
FAR & AWAY is rigged with a dipping-lug foresail, ordinarily with its tack made off to the stemhead. But with its tack made off to a belaying pin at the mast gate, it can sail as a standing-lug, simplifying tacking in tight quarters.
The Huntington boat is handsome, no doubt. But far and away my preference—for the boat eventually launched as FAR & AWAY—is the Beetle. Chapelle captioned the drawing with this: “No Mans Land boat of the more powerful type designed to sail well.” He had me right there.
Construction takes a lot of thought and a lot of decision-making. A builder who is adept at the drawing board could develop a full construction plan. I did not: I started building, making decisions only as I needed to. If you are lost without a construction plan, it would be best to develop one or get a boat designer involved. Otherwise, look to Mystic Seaport’s plans catalog. The two boats in the collections there were both fully documented by Baker; although I don’t think either has as fine a shape as the Huntington or the Beetle, one of them, ORCA, a Delano construction from 1882, has great potential. However, she was batten-seam planked, which is uncommon these days. And, as always, workboat interiors might not suit modern purposes.
In construction, be faithful to the hull form. The challenge will come primarily in steaming and bending the planking aft, where the lovely and enticing reverse curves can be alarming while shaping and hanging lap-strake planks. Careful lining off and patient work pays.
Having the centerboard offset to one side not only prevents jamming—as valid today as it was a century ago—but also makes the boat trailer well. The long, straight keel settles nicely into rollers. A tongue extension may be needed for launching, though, depending on the ramp’s slope. The straight sternpost makes shipping the rudder easy.
Robin Jettinghoff
A straight, raked sternpost makes shipping the rudder easy. The author cast all his own bronze fittings, including pintles and gudgeons.
The large, open cockpit is commodious—on my boat, which is a little less than 18′, I’ve had six aboard quite easily, and four in comfort routinely.
The Beetle boat has a one-sheet plan showing lines, details of the centerboard (which I altered in everything but length and placement), stem profile, rudder profile, maststep locations, mast diameters (which I increased), and mast rake (which I did not change). This plan leaves a great deal to the imagination. I used a Scandinavian-inspired style of sawn-frame construction, and because each frame has rolling bevels and is joggled, or given something like a lightning-bolt shape to fit to the inside of the lapstrake planking, the process is a bit like fitting 50 or 60 breasthooks. I built that way because I wanted the challenge of doing it—and, rest assured, it was a challenge. I also wanted a stout boat. I used a deck and coaming layout, plus a mast gate style, derived from Bristol Bay sailing gill-netters. I set my seat riser height by getting in the boat and seeing what was comfortable, with a mocked-up coaming and long oar. I put in side seats but stopped them short of the forward thwart so that rowing two-abreast would be easier. My floorboards are athwartships, a style I noted in Sweden. My sails adopted some French practices.
Like most workboats, No Mans Land Boats were designed to carry a load. They also carried inside ballast, some of which could be discarded as the catch came aboard. Published sources mention sandbag ballast, stone ballast, or “a couple of hundred pounds of ‘handle iron’ pigs,” in the case of the March 1932 Yachting article. Today’s drive toward ever-lighter plywood construction and very light scantlings supported by tenacious glues might not work well here. My boat is built heavily, but I nevertheless added 150 lbs of internal ballast to get her down on her lines, and she might take a little more. She’s a bear to row—not unlike, say, a large Norwegian faering. I often row alone, and in a flat calm I’ve hit 3 knots. But instead of rowing solo into the teeth of a blow, I’ve set the hook and waited more than once. She’s primarily a sailer. Built exceptionally light, she’d need quite a load of ballast, which could make her quite stiff and a very different kind of performer. In my view, extremely light construction is overrated for a sea boat.
The existing sail plans, too, need revision. The original rigs made it easy to work amidships while hauling a catch. More sail—with easy reefing—makes more sense today. Maynard Bray, WoodenBoat magazine’s technical editor, owns MIRTH, a boat built to the Huntington design in the early 1970s, and he feels that her foresail should be larger. His advice helped when I was developing the sail plans for FAR & AWAY (see WB No. 202). I chose a dipping-lug foresail that would probably never be his cup of tea, but such variation is what taking on a challenge like this is all about. Experiment. Play. Try something, and if you don’t like the way it works, try something else.
The authentic sail plan also has a mainsail “club,” a baseball-bat-sized boom laced to the after third of the foot of the sail—which most of us today wouldn’t want flailing about overhead. Note also that a gaff rig like MIRTH’s requires at least a headstay and perhaps one shroud per side. To my thinking, that negates the advantages of an unstayed rig, which is easy to strike when necessary, for example when she’s on a mooring and a gale is forecast. In use, I find I make my foresail a kind of hybrid: when short-tacking, I take its tack aft to the mast gate to make it a standing lug sail. On long boards, I gain a half a knot or more by dipping the sail and setting the tack to the stemhead. My mainsail is boomed and so is MIRTH’s; it’s the best way to gain an effective sheet lead on a double-ender. A rope traveler gets the sheet over the tiller.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
MIRTH, owned by WoodenBoat technical editor Maynard Bray, was built by Arno Day and Joel White to the Frederick Huntington plans published in Yachting magazine in the 1930s. Her gaff rig requires a forestay and one shroud per side.
FAR & AWAY surprises me, and others, above all by her speed under sail. Sailing to weather in company with a friend’s modified Herreshoff H28, I better than matched him tack-for-tack. In the Small Reach Regatta and elsewhere, this heavy old fish boat holds her own and then some against other displacement hulls. I think that has everything to do with her hull shape and her ability to carry a large rig.
In tacking, I free the foresail sheet, put the helm down, and haul the mainsail simultaneously. As she comes through the eye, I free the mainsail and sheet in the foresail. This works in all but the heaviest weather—in gusts up to 30 knots, I’ve had trouble tacking, partly because I was towing a dory and partly because I had struck the main to reduce sail and couldn’t use it for balance. I might try a small triangular storm foresail or build in a balance reef—a diagonal reefpoint from the upper reef line on the leech to the heel of the yard. But that’s just another of a long line of pleasant puzzles presented by a boat that is teaching me a new way of looking at everything I thought I knew.
Beetle boat plans are available from Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Ships Plans. Frederick Huntington’s plans were published in the April 1932 Yachting and in Roger Taylor’s Good Boats (International Marine, 1977).
Tom Jackson
The one-sheet plan for the Beetle No Mans Land Boat, published as Plate 63 in Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft, has lines, offsets, and details (not shown) of the rudder and centerboard. Without construction plans or a sail plan, building the boat calls for judgment and experience. The sail plan shown is the final choice of several developed by the author.
Smithsonian Institution
No Mans Land Boat Particulars: LOA 17′ 8″, LWL 16′ 5 ½”, Beam 6′, Draft (board up) 1′ 6 ½”, Sail area 194 sq ft (as shown)
On December 2, 1875, Nathaniel Holmes Bishop launched his sneakbox, CENTENNIAL REPUBLIC, on the Monongahela River and rowed along the south shore of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into the headwaters of the Ohio River. On November 9, 1985, I launched my sneakbox, LUNA, on the Allegheny River and rowed along Pittsburgh’s north shore to the confluence with the Monongahela, that same Mile 0 of the Ohio. Bishop spent the next four months traveling 2,600 miles to reach Cedar Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast. I’d follow the route he detailed in his book, Four Months in a Sneak Box.
from "Four Months in a Sneak Box" by Nathaniel Holmes Bishop, 1879
This illustration from Four Months in a Sneak Box convinced me to get on the Ohio River a month earlier in the year than Nathaniel Bishop had so I could avoid getting blocked by ice.
Photographs by the author
On November 9, 1985, I entered the Ohio River at the confluence of the Allegheny River, flowing under the bridges at left, and the Monongahela, merging from the right at Pittsburgh Point. On December 2, 1875, Nathaniel Bishop had been blocked at this spot by ice that had flowed from the Allegheny.
Six miles downstream from the confluence, I arrived at the first of the Ohio River’s 20 dams and locks, but I had to head ashore so I could walk up to the lock office to get someone’s attention. The entrance to the lock was jammed with debris. I had no radio—handheld VHFs weren’t practical for small boats then—the recreational boating season was long over, and my 13-1⁄2′ boat easily escaped notice.
When I pulled the boat up on the mud, which was more a greasy ooze than wet dirt, I lost my footing and struck the bow with my shin. The cold-molded hull resonated with a sound like a splitting maul hitting a wedge with its handle. A pink bruise swelled up in seconds and looked like an extra kneecap.
In Verona, on the day before I launched, I spread all of my gear out on the floor of the Sylvan Canoe Club’s meeting room. Neatly packed, it would all fit in the sneakbox without having to carry any excess gear on deck.
I got through the first lock, and then the second one 7 miles downstream, before pulling ashore at a riverside park. I set myself up for the night in a picnic shelter with a table for my bed. Driving 2,500 miles from the Seattle area to Pittsburgh, a distance equal to the cruise that I had ahead of me, and getting equipped to launch from the Sylvan Canoe Club in Verona had worn me out. After the first day’s 27 miles of rowing, I was exhausted. Not long after I crawled into my sleeping bag, a heavy rain slanted into the shelter on a stiff breeze. I lay there cold and utterly dispirited until exhaustion turned to sleep.
This new adventure was my second following in Bishop’s wake. In 1983, inspired by his book, Voyage of the Paper Canoe, I’d paddled a paper cruising canoe I’d made from Québec to Cedar Key, a distance of about 2,500 miles that took four months to cover. I had travelled with a partner then, but for the sneakbox voyage I was eager to go it alone. Doing the trip in the winter, as Bishop did, would be a better test of my skills and endurance. I just hadn’t expected to be put to the test on the first night.
I had built my sneakbox, LUNA, to plans in Howard Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft. The original boat had been built in 1880 and was described as “an old professional gunner’s sneakbox of a superior model.” It was 12′ 2/3″ long with a beam of 44″. Bishop’s sneakbox, CENTENNIAL REPUBLIC was 12′ long, 46″ in beam, and weighed 200 lbs. I wanted a longer, lighter boat and stretched Chapelle’s sneakbox to 13′ 6″ and cold-molded it with western red cedar. Bishop’s daggerboard trunk was centered and forward of the cockpit; the Chapelle design has it set to starboard just outside the cockpit coaming. The offset board had no effect on sailing performance and made the space under the foredeck more easily accessed.
I couldn’t bring myself to get up at first light though I had been awake in the dark of early morning. I loaded the boat and set out without eating breakfast. As soon as I was on the water it started raining lightly, covering the river with interlocking concentric rings like chain mail. There were a lot of factories lining the river, but only a few had lights on. On the left bank, two nuclear power plants with five 500′-tall concrete cooling towers billowed sugar-white clouds of steam.
I was soon out of Pennsylvania and in between Ohio and West Virginia looking for a place to go ashore. In Chester, I rowed up to the East Liverpool Yacht Club and set the nose of the sneakbox on the launch ramp. As I walked into town, I passed a couple who looked at me with the intensity of residents checking out a stranger in the neighborhood. After I found a pay phone to call home, I passed the same couple on my way back to the boat, and the man asked, “When’s the last time you had pizza, Chris?” George and Gladys had seen the article about my voyage in The Pittsburgh Press, had recognized my boat on the ramp, and had just left a bag of food for me there. They offered me the use of the East Liverpool Yacht Club for the night. It was near 4 p.m. and sunset was just an hour away, so I took them up on it. They helped haul my stuff into the clubhouse and after they left, I ate the ham sandwich, fried chicken, corn chips, and Cheetos they’d given me.
The following day, I covered 46 miles, a remarkable distance considering I averaged 25 miles per day on the Inside Passage where I didn’t have the advantage of a steady current in my favor. I stopped at Wheeling, West Virginia, and hauled LUNA out on a broad park lawn on Wheeling Island. I spent the night in the boat and woke to lightning and thunder at 3:30 in the morning. Soon the rain was hammering on the hatch cover with the sound of lead shot spilled down a staircase. I tried to sleep, but the lightning flashing tail light red through my eyelids and the crack and rumble of thunder kept me awake.
Roger Siebert
.
At 6 a.m. I started getting dressed, in the boat, a particularly painful process. To slip into my pants I had to lift myself by pressing my spine onto the edge of the cockpit coaming thereby lifting my hips. Getting my shirt and rain shell on was not too difficult, but once I had slipped into my life jacket, it took another three or four minutes just to get into my slicker. Getting fully dressed took almost half an hour.
I never saw any other recreational boats in the 28 days I was on the Ohio and barge traffic was light, so light that I always had lock chambers to myself. At the entrance to some of the locks there were pull chains that small boats could use to signal the lock keepers of their arrival. However, most had been disabled. Thus, if a lock keeper didn’t happen to catch a glimpse of me, which was usually the case in the fog, I’d have to land on the riverbank upstream, secure LUNA, and walk up to the lock keeper’s station. They were often surprised to see me arrive on foot, but always quick to open the gates. There were two locks at every dam, both 110′ wide. The smaller locks are 600′ long and the larger are 1,200′, which accommodates a tow with up to 15 barges.
The river had risen 1′ or so overnight and the sneakbox was nearly afloat. The daylight seeping through the fog was beginning to fill in the dark around the lights of the city. I passed under two bridges in Wheeling as a hard rain began to fall; crystalline stalks of water rebounded with each rain drop catching the morning light while the river glowed a fluorescent white.
Downriver I stopped at Powhatan Point to buy postage stamps. There was a pumpkin floating downstream as I pulled up Captina Creek along the edge of town. High water had pushed the banks of the creek up into the lawn of the park that bordered upon it. I rowed into a small pool cupped between two hills on the rolling lawn and tied the painter to the trunk of a mop-headed willow. I idled in town by shopping for food and buying stamps and post cards.
A mile from the point I caught up with the pumpkin, spinning idly in a back eddy behind a line of riprap sticking out from the right bank. As the river level continued to rise over the first two weeks of my month on the Ohio, the type of river trash changed. At first there was driftwood swept from riverbanks, then yards and playfields were stripped of basketballs, tennis balls, baseballs, a set of football shoulder pads, and an aluminum baseball bat which floated upright like a spar buoy. It would not be long before the turbid water breached porches and pilfered coolers, toys, and furniture.
Tired and hungry after rowing upwind for a long straight stretch of the river, I looped the painter around a large driftwood branch and let it tow me upwind as it drifted downstream.
There had not been much traffic on the river and by the time I reached the Hannibal Locks at mile 124, the gates hadn’t been opened for a while to let tows and debris pass through. I worked past stumps with their roots fanned out over the water, empty wooden cable spools, felt-tip pens, light bulbs, and plastic spoons. The small pink hand of a doll reached up through a dark brown patch of crumbled tree bark. One of the lock keepers had been watching me from high up on the lock wall. “Seen any West Virginians out there?” he asked. “I heard on the news that 53 of them got swept away and may be coming downriver. Keep an eye out for ‘em.”
When too much debris accumulated at a lock entrance, the lock keepers would open the upstream and downstream gates at the same time and let the river flow unimpeded through the chamber. After the logjam broke up and passed through, the gates were closed again.
The flooding was not uncommon for this time of year. Bishop wrote: “The water had risen two feet and a half in ten hours, and the broad river was in places covered from shore to shore with drift stuff; which made my course a devious one, and the little duck-boat had many a narrow escape in my attempts to avoid the floating mass.”
At the entrance to this lock, a logjam prevented me from rowing into the chamber. I tied the tail end of my 33′-long heaving line to my painter, swung the golf-ball-weighted monkey’s fist around my head and let fly. The two lock keepers could then drag me across the debris into the lock chamber.
The signal light changed green but I was stuck in a tightly packed raft of wood 20 yards from the opened lock doors. “Can I throw you a line?” I called up to the two lock keepers now watching me. They nodded. I tied the painter into the tail of my 33′ heaving line and slung the monkey’s fist up at the wall side. The rope-wrapped golf ball zipped by the head of one of the lock tenders at eye level and draped the line over the shoulders of the other. The one who wound up with an armful of line smiled at the accuracy of my throw, the other was wide-eyed at nearly being cold-cocked. They hauled away along the wall of the lock and LUNA skidded up over the drift and into the lock while I kept her away from the rough concrete walls with the butt of an oar. From the downriver end of the lock I rowed a quick mile to New Martinsville and spent the night at the Magnolia Yacht Club.
I was in no hurry to be on the water at first light the next morning. It had been a rainy night and at 3 a.m. I’d had to get out of my warm bed, and pull on my cold, wet boots and pants to check the boat. The river was up another foot, so I jockeyed the boat up the mud enough to give me the rest of the morning to sleep.
At midday I stopped at Sistersville, a town with two boat ramps on the river. I hauled out in the middle of the upstream ramp that looked less like a ferry dock. I bought some post cards at an old soda fountain in town. The ceiling was high and its lighting dim. The proprietor, a man in his 70s, was smoking a cigar. Two men, his contemporaries and, I suspect, his loyal customers, were seated on pedestal stools talking quietly but looking at me. I still had my life jacket on over my bright yellow slicker and under my bib front rain pants, looking not a far cry from a circus act.
I walked to the city hall to take advantage of the restrooms and on my way back to the boat, I stopped in at the office of The Tyler Star-News, the town newspaper, to offer them my story. A little press had always been helpful on my long cruises. The editor called in a young cub reporter and the two of us stood squared off to one side of the editor’s desk.
He asked me why I was making this trip. I answered: “A man named Bishop traveled this same route in 1875.” It had the sound of an answer and people often accepted it as one, but I really expected someone to say, “So what?” I suppose a more honest answer would be that I like finding solutions to problems, but I didn’t set out from Pittsburgh looking for trouble.
“Well,” said the cub, “I guess it wouldn’t hurt if we took some pictures.” We drove down to the ramp and after posing for two photos I rolled the boat down the ramp on my collection of boat fenders and pushed out into the current. While newspaper articles had been helpful during my paper-canoe adventure—we were often warmly received by readers who saw us paddling by—I was traveling twice as fast with the current’s help beyond a newspaper’s reach by the time an article would come out. I stopped dropping by newspaper offices.
Bishop writes of the origin of the sneakbox: “Captain Hazelton Seaman, of West Creek village, New Jersey, a boat-builder and an expert shooter of wild-fowl, about the year 1836, conceived the idea of constructing a boat for his own use a low-decked boat in which, when its deck was covered with sedge, he could secrete himself from wild-fowl while gunning. Seaman named the result of his first effort the Devil’s Coffin.” The sleeping accommodations aboard LUNA were snug for a living being. Without lilies for my open-casket tableau, I had to settle for bananas.
I stopped for the day in the woods on the left bank just upstream from the town of St. Mary’s and took a sponge bath that evening. Lacking a sponge (except the one to soak up bilge water), I used a bandana to both wash and partially dry myself. The rest of my drying I did in my clothes. I didn’t wash my hair. No matter how it may have looked, it felt pretty good after being rinsed incidentally almost daily by rainwater.
The mud on the river banks was deep, as thick as shortening, and as slippery as grease. The two dark-blue shapes at the lower left are my socks. The mud had created so much suction that it pulled my boots and socks off when I got stuck and I couldn’t move except by stepping out with bare feet.
My clothes needed washing, especially my wool pants, and the pair of socks I had worn continuously for five days and four nights. Mud got on everything I wore and everything in the boat. It had even climbed from my boots up the inside of the legs of my rain pants. After I crossed a muddy ditch to get to a supermarket on the Kentucky side of the river, I had wiped my boots thoroughly on the mat at the entrance, but the pant legs sprinkled muddy outlines of my boot heels on the floor. Only when I got to the checkout counter did I see that I had left a path on every aisle I’d walked.
Shortly after noon, I left St. Mary’s under thinning clouds through which I could see a well-filtered outline of the sun. I took advantage of the warm breeze to air out my boots and socks. Though I was rowing into the wind, the odors of whatever I stowed on the afterdeck or in the cockpit circulated up to my face. The smell of my bare feet, socks, and boots were like the breath of an old dog in poor health. It only went away when I put my socks and boots back on.
At the Willow Island Locks, the lock keeper shouted at me to tie up on the bollard, the one recessed in a slot in the lock wall that floated down with the water. I was sitting in the middle, away from the walls, where I preferred to be. I threw a line up over the bollard and held it in one hand while I made a sandwich with the other. The day went well, 37 miles, a short distance, as I got off the water early in Waverly at 4 p.m.
I hadn’t brought a spoon and it wasn’t pleasant eating Grape-Nuts with milk, a favorite breakfast, without one. Necessity drove me to make a spoon out of one of my film canisters.
As at most of the places along the river, the docks had been hauled up on the bank for winter, but I found a ramp and a park picnic shelter with a roof, a table, and a chair. I badly wanted Grape-Nuts for dinner. Two days earlier, I had bought a box and was looking forward to having that crunchy cereal for breakfast, but I hadn’t packed a spoon. I’d been improvising with a sail batten but while that worked for rice pilaf, it let all the milk run out of the Grape-Nuts. I tried to slide the cereal from the cup with a ball-point pen, and then with my fingers, but fared no better. That had been getting my days off to a bad start and when I got to Waverly, I was on the verge of knocking on doors to beg for a spoon. On the picnic table where I’d scattered my gear, I had an empty Kodak film canister. I went to work with my pocketknife, turned it into a spoon, and that evening finally had my Grape-Nuts with milk in every mouthful. That small pleasure had an outsized impact on my frame of mind.
I started the trip rowing with the ends of my fingers, the way I usually row, but after a while my fingertips were sore and blistered. I shifted to the middles of my fingers until they wore out and then moved on to my palms. They each developed hot spots, but my fingertips were then ready to use again.
During this break-in period, I took hold of the oar handles with the same care that a shot-putter uses to settle the shot in hand, twiddling my fingers to sit on the oar squarely so that there was only compression pressing the layers of skin together, not the shear that would pull them apart. After a few strokes the stinging went away, and I could pull. The blisters I got started out white, especially when the skin was wet, and with time turned a bit yellow, then brown when the separated layers of skin fused back together.
I was on the water at 7 a.m. from Waverly and it started raining five minutes later. Heading toward Reno, I ran into a thick fog being swept upriver by the wind. There was not much to see in Reno, except a sign saying “George Washington Slept Here,” and all I saw of Marietta from the river was a McDonald’s sign rising over a mound of tires heaped on the bank.
I bought a spoon in Belpre and then rowed across the river to Parkersburg, an uninviting city walled in against the floodwaters, where I met Harry, who was working on a sternwheeler he had been building for seven years. He gave me a ride to the post office and back so I could collect letters sent to me via general delivery.
The Ohio took a sharp turn around Belpre from south to west and then divided on either side of 3-1/3-mile-long Blennerhassett Island. The river arced south again around a mile-long bend crowded with factories that made the air smell like plastic. A southerly was making a steep chop on the next gentle curves of the river and I kept close to the shore where there was less wind.
I pulled into Hockingport, walked to the general store—the only store in town—and picked up some cookies, bread, and canned soup. In the next few miles downstream, I ate the whole package of the cookies.
The box I used as a seat in the sneakbox also served as a seat ashore. It had a watertight door for access to the frequently used gear that I kept inside it. I knew from previous long cruises that my memories didn’t always paint a complete and accurate picture of the experience, so I made a point of taking pictures of myself on days when I was feeling worn out.
At the Belleville locks, no one responded to the recreational-craft buzzer, and once again I had to tie up the sneakbox and walk to the operations building where I met lock keepers Tom, Bob, and Aaron. Tom and Bob showed me around the lock control system, which bristled with a lot of lights, dials, and buttons. They gave me access to a shower and after I toweled the steam off the mirror over the bathroom sink I was surprised by how terrible I looked. My eyes were bloodshot, unshaven I looked like a fugitive, and my neck was chafed cherry red by the collar of my raincoat, getting scraped every time I turned my head to see where I was going.
Tom offered to put me up for the night, so I secured the boat up away from the water on a small beach strewn with rock and wood debris. I was tired and thought I had put in a full day of rowing, but it was only 2 p.m.. We drove to the 75′ mobile home where he introduced me to his wife, Regina. Their schedule wasn’t governed by nightfall, and it was near midnight before I got to bed. I heard the furnace come on twice during the night and all the heat made me sweat and gave me nightmares.
In the morning Tom woke me at 7, gave me a bowl of cereal, showed me his motorcycles—all 20 of them–and took me back to my boat. He stayed to watch me row off. Having someone to say goodbye to made it a better morning than most.
The wind had shifted north and brought the cold. With a long stretch of south-flowing river, I considered sailing all morning and looked for places to put in and get the sailing gear out of the boat.
During a break of blue sky, sunshine, and warm air, I took my socks and boots off to air out my feet. The soles of my feet and my toes were black with sloughed-off rubber. I pulled into Ravenswood to find new boots. I bought new socks and boots, 1-1/2″ taller, clean, and sweet smelling.
The high water flooded the mouth of Sandy Creek where it flowed into the swirling Ohio River. A railroad bridge made of timbers black with creosote spanned the tributary. I set my camera and tripod up midspan, returned to the boat and triggered the camera with a radio-controlled remote.
I rowed to the downstream end of town and pulled LUNA up on a lawn alongside the railroad bridge that crossed Sandy Creek. Before heading back out on the river I set the camera on the bridge to snap a picture of myself rowing out to the Ohio.
Since this was already turning out to be a short day, I took the time to extract the mast, sprit, boom, centerboard, and rudder. Before the sails were even up, they were spotted with mud and black grease from the oars. There was barely enough wind to push me out of the creek into the Ohio but a bit of a breeze came up as I headed toward an upriver tow. I inched to windward as it went by then fell off to sail through its wake.
I’d put an access port in the transom that allowed me to carry LUNA’s mast, sprit, and boom below decks. The spars were out of the way there but setting the rig up took a long time. I sailed a few times but bends in the river made it impractical and the spars would spend most of their time stowed until I got to the Gulf of Mexico.
Two miles downriver I gave up on sailing and dropped the sail, sprit, and boom before rowing to a stretch of the riverbank called Hughes Eddy. The still-standing mast was flailed by a few branches before the hull hit the mud. I swung one leg out and sank in mud to within an inch of the top of the boot. I shifted my weight back in the boat and had to curl my toes upward to help release the boot out of the mud. I rowed downstream and found a dirt ramp where the mud was only 10″ deep. Every step I took was still a struggle and as greasy mud spread everywhere I struggled to keep my frustration and anger in check.
Afloat again, I wiped the mud from the decks, boots, and cockpit as LUNA drifted. As the boat came back into shape, I recomposed myself. I rowed hard enough to burn up some energy, but not so hard that I would tear up my hands. At Letart, the river turned north, into the wind, and I pulled a slow 2 miles into the Racine locks.
There wasn’t any turbulence when locking downstream, so I took advantage of my time in the chamber by having a bite to eat. I braced my feet against the floating bollard and held LUNA in place with a loop of red line connecting an oar, tucked under my legs, to the bollard. The usual fare was a cheese sandwich with mustard and sliced tomatoes or cucumber. The wool pant legs that served as my kitchen counter couldn’t be sponged clean so they stayed speckled with dried tomato seeds and mustard.
I locked down with a loop of line around the floating bollard and an oar under my legs, leaving both hands free for sandwich making. The light was fading as I got out of the locks, so I looked for a place to get off the water. I found a small dirt ramp near two empty houses and a house trailer with a broken window. I set up my blue tarp on one of the porches and put my sleeping bag and pad under it. Cold and tired, I was eager to sleep and put the day behind me.
During the night a bright light flashed repeatedly on the tarp. I worried that it might be someone wondering what I was doing on private property, but realized tows were sweeping spotlights across the river looking for the reflective channel markers.
As usual, it had rained in the middle of the night and again as I was loading the boat. A week of rowing had loosened the bronze oarlocks. I had lubricated them with Vaseline, but rain washed it out. The only two moving parts in the boat were slowly turning each other into a black paste of powdered bronze. Hearing the locks knocking all day long quickly got annoying. I made stops at Pomeroy, a one-street town squeezed between the river and a row of 250′ hills, and at Point Pleasant, a walled-in town with room to spread upstream from the Ohio’s confluence with the Kanawha River, but had no luck finding grease for the locks.
It started raining again as I passed under the bridge at Point Pleasant. I was to the point that I tried to ignore it and didn’t put my slicker on. Maybe it would stop. I sang a lot during the day to keep myself company. I didn’t know all the verses to “Poor Wandering One” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, but there was no one to complain about my singing what I did know over and over.
Most of the boats in marinas were hauled out for the winter and empty covered slips were great places to spend the night. I took advantage of a laundromat near this marina to wash my clothes.
I rowed along the Gallipolis riverfront and up Chickamauga Creek to the Gallipolis Boat Club and stopped for the day around 3. All but five boats had been hauled for the winter and even the covered slips were empty. I coasted into one with a shag-carpeted floor. The door was locked by a hasp on the outside, but I managed to lift the nail out of the hasp with a piece of electrical wire. I walked into town and did the laundry and some shopping. It felt good to get into clean clothes; I’d been wearing the same things for a week. Back at the slip I cooked leek soup with rice and walnuts, pulled wet gear out of the boat to dry, and sponged the cockpit clean.
Some heavy downpours had rattled the corrugated metal roofing soon after I settled in after my walk into town, making me especially glad to be clean, warm, and dry, but at dusk the sky cleared to reveal a bright crescent moon—even its dark side was visible—and its sharp upper cusp pointed at a bright pinpoint of yellow light, Jupiter or Saturn. The only things this camp lacked were running hot water and company. My recent conversations had been incidental and short.
My hands had become callused enough to make rowing comfortable, and my feet had stayed dry in the new boots, but I needed a break in the weather and a chance to visit some people to renew my energy. The rain made everything harder, washed the scenery to a dull monotonous gray, and kept people indoors.
It was a cold night. The chilly wet air settled over the creek and seeped into my sleeping bag. I lit the stove and heated up a pot of water to pour into my screw-top water bottle, slipped it into a sock, and pushed it to the bottom of the sleeping bag. I pressed my feet around it but its warmth only made the rest of me feel colder.
At dawn, I rowed out of Chickamauga in a thick fog. An upriver breeze poured its cold around the back of my neck and seeped into the gap left by a short-tailed shirt. I couldn’t row hard enough to generate any heat and the faster LUNA moved, the colder the air felt. I took one of my pogies (gloves made to fit over hands and oar handles) off one hand and tucked it under my hat to hang like the tails on a French Legionnaire’s cap then tucked a spare sock in my collar.
In the trees there were several great blue herons, balanced improbably on legs as slender as pool cues. Smaller birds perched nearby with their feet clenched like burls around the branches. The mist made the air heavy, and I could feel its resistance as if I were snowshoeing in powder snow. Visibility was poor; I listened for the hiss of lead barges in tows and the sound of water tearing at snags projecting from the bank. I slipped by Racoon Creek where the muddy Ohio swirled its silted water in the creek’s translucent green pool like cream stirred into coffee.
I rowed into a new chart and discovered I was just 2 miles upriver from the Gallipolis dam and on the wrong side to enter its lock. I crossed over, listening to the sounds sifting through the thick fog. There was the rumble of a tow’s distant engine. I turned my head from side to side to silence the wind’s whisper in my ears. The rumble of a tug’s diesel engines comes from the rear of a tow and the bows of the lead barge can be more than 550′ from the engine noise. Beneath a lead barge’s long overhang there is only a quiet hiss of water being pushed under. That’s what I was listening for.
I had been warned about staying too close to the banks here when a big tow comes through. If barges are locked through it in two sections, the tow will push the first section into the bank and leave it parked there. I saw chains with links as big as footballs and hooks for barge hawsers, but I slipped by without having to evade any barges.
The industrial area around Huntington and Ashland thinned out as I went down river. The limbs of flooded trees combed plastic bottles and jugs from the water. The hills eased back from the river, leaving wide bottoms beyond the banks. As it grew quieter, I heard what I thought might be the air mattress squeezing out air or the stove leaking fuel. I crawled into the cockpit headfirst to find the source of the sound and realized the hiss was the sound of the current sweeping gravel along the river bottom resonating in the hull.
I spent the night in a marina in Ironton, where I was given permission to sleep on the docks. I met Carl, who had been hanging out in his boat. He borrowed my cookpot to boil up a couple of steaks in plastic bags and when he returned the pot, he brought me a beef stew meal in a bag. On his way home he brought me an electric blanket and two extension cords. I plugged into the shore power and tucked the blanket into my sleeping bag. It was heavenly.
When the sun came out and the air temperature was pleasantly warm, I was eager to get out of clothes that I had been wearing day and night. During one long cold spell I slept in the same clothes I wore during the day for more than a week. My pants got so sticky that I had to pull them away from my legs in order to sit down.
The morning sky cleared, and the south wind brought warm air. After a stop in Sciotoville, I spread all my clothes on the afterdeck to dry and rowed undressed to dry my skin a bit. Four miles downriver, I passed by Portsmouth at what I thought was a discreet distance, but I think I unsettled an old couple out for a stroll along the river. If they had been naked that certainly would have been evident to me, so they must have seen that I was. I waved. They didn’t wave back.
The floodwaters gave me access to places that would be high and dry at normal water levels. I didn’t press far into this cornfield, but it looked like I could have rowed a mile or more before reaching high ground.
Coming up on the Scioto River at the west end of town I had to keep tight to the Ohio’s bank to allow room for a huge tow to pass. The Scioto runs through a wide valley where the hills on the Ohio side are set well back from the river. A flooded cornfield stretched almost two miles from the river to the hills. I rowed into it and set the boat among the stalks for the coziness of it.
For several chart pages there were no towns marked, only river navigation lights, day markers, and creeks. Tangled gossamer threads drifted across the river. A butterfly flew by over the stern. It could have been summer, but there were no leaves on the trees and the ash-colored contours of the ridges of the landscape were clearly visible under the latticework of trunks and branches. By the afternoon the warm air was rippling the horizon.
I stopped for the night at the riverfront home of the Bowden family. Timmy, 10, gave me permission to spend the night in his treehouse.
Fifty miles of rowing from Ironton put me in Vanceburg. I got dressed for landing. Tucked in a dent in the shoreline where the water spun debris in an eddy, a lawn sloped into the water. Fifteen feet from the water’s edge was a treehouse. I landed and asked at the house farther up the bank if I could pull off the river for the night. A Mrs. Bowden said that would be fine. Her son Timmy trotted to the door to have a look at me. “Is this the man in charge of the tree house?” I asked him. “Would it be all right if I camped in it tonight?” Timmy was beaming with the honor of hosting a stranger.
As I was tossing gear up into the house, a 6′ by 5′ platform, with one wall, a roof, and a roll-down shade, 10-year-old Timmy came down with hot chili, a can of Sprite, a cup with ice, and crackers wrapped in tin-foil. I’d done 159 miles in the past three days, without making myself miserable. The weather had been good, the river fast, and I’d been happy to spend whole days on the water. Things were looking up.
At 6:45 a.m. the next morning, Timmy walked me to a café to buy me breakfast. He ordered biscuit and sausage for $1. I ordered three pancakes, hash browns, and orange juice. His dad joined us and after breakfast the two of them saw me off. I pulled through the half-submerged leafless brush, through the back eddy, and into the driftwood-crowded Ohio.
The day was remarkably warm. Even the cheese was sweating. After 55 miles of rowing, I stopped at Big Locust Creek. Along the banks were two small docks in front of trailer homes all locked up for winter. I set up to sleep on the porch attached to one of the trailers. On its door was a sticker: “The owner of this property is armed. There is nothing inside worth risking your life for.” I took a chance on sleeping with his porch roof over me. I wouldn’t be inside, and it was going to rain again.
The accommodations at Ninemile Creek were meager and it was just as cold inside as outside.
I had a short day’s row, just 22 miles to Ninemile Creek where I found an abandoned shanty that had so many gaps in its walls of weathered boards that it was little better than sleeping out on open ground. The temperature dropped to about 25 degrees, and while I slept well enough, getting up was painful. My whole body ached with cold and my hands stung. The river had dropped about 3′ overnight; to get afloat I had to drag my boat down the bank past signs that said Danger, No Fishing, No Swimming, Sewer Effluent.
I was on the water by 7:30 and rowed hard to warm up. As the sun rose behind a bank of high clouds there was a thin vapor on the water. The breeze spun columns of mist 10′ tall and carried them like undulating towers of dishes across the river.
I ferried across to Brent where Harlan and Anna Hubbard built the shantyboat made famous by his book, Shantyboat. I put ashore at a ramp leading through a tunnel under a single railroad line. There were two old houses there; one had a light on. I rang the bell and an elderly lady came to the door. She remembered the Hubbards and said they were living downriver in some hollow. As I walked back to the boat, I remembered Payne Hollow and found on the chart two creek valleys where they might be. The Hubbards were two days away.
Cincinnati, surrounded by bridges, was striking in the morning sun, but no place for a small boat. Fourteen miles downriver at North Bend, I was headed south with a good breeze behind me. I deliberated over taking the time to get the spars out but put the mainsail up near Petersburgh and sailed to the next chart where the river takes a 90-degree turn. I ran about 3 miles making 8 mph over the bottom. I crossed the 500-mile mark and at dusk arrived at Rising Sun. I was again tired to the point where I would stand for long spells trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing. After I bedded down I slept well.
In the morning the light coming through the clouds turned water and land gunmetal blue. About 9 a.m., I pulled into Patriot and picked up some food in a well-stocked general store where the shelving leaned toward me as I walked by on the creaking wooden floor.
I hammered away at the headwind through the middle of the day. My right hand was sore, and the middle finger numb. The ramp at Warsaw was blocked by logs and I finally got off at Craig’s Creek. There I met Dan and his wife, Marsha. They knew of Harlan Hubbard and called up a friend, Carl, an Ohio River historian. Carl told me where I’d find Payne Hollow.
The next lock was just 1-1⁄4 miles downstream. I pushed on past Vevay and Ghent, stopped for food and water in Carrollton, and arrived at Brooksburg at sunset under a wash of color in the sky that ranged from peach at the horizon to lavender above. The gibbous moon spattered on the water with mercurial reflections. I rowed by moonlight to Indian Kentuck Creek where I found a float with an aluminum skiff resting upside down on it. I shoved the skiff to one side and suspended my tarp over it and my tripod.
My feet were cold as I cooked dinner and never warmed up. When I slipped into my sleeping bag, I couldn’t sleep. At midnight I put on more clothes and put my pogies on over my feet. If I stayed motionless, I could keep a veneer of warmth around me, but I still couldn’t sleep. I waited for sunrise.
I had never spent a night so cold as the one I spent on this raft. My sleeping bag had a silvery coating on the inside to reflect heat, but it had worn off after a week and turned itself into a summer-rated bag. I slept in my clothes, but that did little to fend off the cold that settled into this inlet just a few dozen yards from the river. As the frost settled during the night I didn’t sleep at all. I just waited for first light so I could break camp and start rowing to warm up.
In the morning, everything was white with a bristling fur of frost. It took 15 minutes to get up the nerve to unzip the sleeping bag and let my envelope of lukewarm air drift away. As I got dressed, the tarp dropped mica-like flakes of ice on me. To keep my gloves from getting wet I stuffed the tarp into its sack bare-handed. My fingers quickly turned stiff and red. I was under way by 8 a.m. and by 9, the morning sun was dimmed by a zinc-gray membrane of high haze. In the muted light I rowed past a Kentucky shore that had a metallic gleam of frost as if the entire landscape had been electroplated in silver.
Payne Hollow was just 17 miles downriver. When I arrived, the only thing marking the place was an aluminum johnboat pulled up on the sand in a thicket of leafless saplings. As I rowed ashore, LUNA grated over a rock and I knew from the sound that there would be some damage. I pulled ashore, lifted the gunwale to check the hull, and found a deep gouge that had torn through the fiberglass and into the red cedar planking.
I found Harlan and Anna at home and introduced myself. They were both in their 80s, white-haired and soft-spoken. They invited me in. There was a grand piano in the living room and objects that they had made were everywhere. A kerosene lantern had as its chimney a Mason jar with its bottom removed and its lampshade was made from paper and baling wire. Resting on the pole rafters overhead was a popcorn popper made from wire door screen and a can that once held ham.
With all of my gear in the Hubbard’s johnboat, I could work on LUNA and repair the damage a submerged rock had caused when I came ashore.
I mentioned that I had damaged my boat as I arrived and asked if I could repair the boat, camp overnight, and leave the next morning. They insisted I stay as their guest and Harlan showed me the room where I’d sleep. It had a sink in a drawer that slid out like a flour bin with a drain to send the wastewater through pipes to the garden. The doors were hung at an angle so they would swing close. Harlan explained that the furnace in the cellar pumped heat up through a grating in the floor and circulated hot water in a convection system that “warms the cold corners of the house” with two air-conditioner tube-and-vane radiators.
In the afternoon, I emptied the sneakbox, set it on edge, and put a fiberglass-and-epoxy patch over the damaged area. That evening, after dinner with Harlan and Anna, I washed up in my room. The kerosene lanterns in the living room went out one by one. I heard the two of them saying goodnight to each other and the house fell quiet. It had been a long time since I’d slept in a bed, and to be doing so under the Hubbards’ roof was something I never could have dreamed of.
After an early breakfast, I began packing while it was still dark. Harlan came down to the shore to see me off and, with one last shove, LUNA slid down the mud as I crawled on her foredeck. The trees were bare: their leaves had fallen and blanketed the hillside with the color and texture of rust. White sycamore trunks at the water’s edge stood out against the dark-barked maple and locust. As tows appeared, pilothouses, barges, and wakes serrated the Ohio River horizon.
Sunday in Westport was quiet. Two men and a boy in full camouflage costumes drifted downstream from the launch ramp while the men took turns pulling the starter cord of a reluctant camo-painted outboard. The store was not open, so I dropped two letters in a mailbox and left. Four miles downriver, where the river swells to over a half-mile-wide at Grassy Flats, the outboard was still drifting and one of the men was still pulling the starter cord.
Thirty-five miles downriver, I approached Louisville. I was tired and my right hand hurt. I kept to the Kentucky shore looking for a place to stay for the night. Behind Towhead Island, I rowed into a marina and drifted by a large twin-hulled cruiser and a man aboard asked if there was anything I needed. I introduced myself to Wayne and told him I was looking for a place to get off the water. He motioned me to I tie up by the office barge. Joe, the harbormaster, said the charge was $8 for one night. I was about to leave and camp in the mud on Towhead Island for free when Joe said Wayne had taken care of my bill. Wayne offered me the use of his boat and after I loaded my gear in his boat a short, bearded man named Gabby appeared and gave me a bit of beef stew. He and his wife and Joe visited on and off that evening. Joe said that when he first saw me, he thought I was “just another nut. This summer two guys paddling a canoe upriver asked to stop and rest at the harbor. They was going to Scruffy’s, it’s a fish-and-shrimp place, dontcha know. Hell, those two guys got a Scruffy’s right in town where they was a-comin’ from. I looked at you and thought ‘here’s another guy headed for Scruffy’s.’” While it was well past my usual bedtime when my last visitors left, I used the marina’s pay phone and had a pizza delivered. I had a very late dinner and stayed up until 1:30 a.m.
I was up at 8:30 and once on the water I headed for the lock in Louisville. The small-craft horn was too feeble to be heard by the lock keeper, so I had to walk to the station. He wasn’t keen on letting me enter the lock. It wasn’t the first time that I’d had to make an appeal to a lock keeper who had seemingly forgotten there is no turbulence in the lock lowering downriver traffic. He asked how much freeboard I had. I explained that the sneakbox was fully decked and he gave me the OK.
Taking a break from the river, I rowed facing forward into Mosquito Creek. If I’d arrived closer to quitting time, I might have stayed. I had no run-ins with mosquitos here or anywhere on the Ohio River, one of the advantages of cold-weather travel.
I stopped at West Point for groceries, got back on the river about 4, and continued rowing into the evening. Mosquito Creek was the sort of place I was looking for, a deep creek wide enough to row up, deep enough that a drop in the river wouldn’t leave me stranded in the mud, but I gambled that there was still enough light left to add to the day’s mileage and find another creek farther downstream. Otter Creek had a railroad bridge over the ravine and a few signs posted on the trees that I couldn’t quite make out but looked like unwelcoming warnings.
At Rock Haven Bend there had been a train derailment that left eight gondolas piled up at the riverbank at the foot of a black avalanche of coal. I drifted by in the last of the daylight and got my flashlight. The chart showed two more creeks 3-1/2 miles downriver. I found the draw where the first one should have been but no water leading away from the river. Rock Run, by flashlight, appeared too small and clogged with brush.
I kept going well past dark. I ferry-glided across to the Kentucky side where there was a distant streetlamp and crept along the bank and found that Doe Run was a creek wide enough for LUNA but there were two nearly submerged trees blocking the entrance. I could have slid over them but a drop in the river overnight would have blocked me in.
I made another 1⁄4-mile crossing of the river to look for Flippins Run but couldn’t find it, either. The lights of Brandenburg on the Kentucky side provided enough light to spot the mouth of Buck Creek. I tied LUNA into a line strung between two trees and cooked dinner on the afterdeck. I settled into the cockpit for the night with the spray skirt cinched over me and held up by the tripod. It started raining and the spray skirt proved to be a leaky roof. I was a bit wet but managed to fall asleep. I slept late and didn’t get on the river until 8. There was a heavy overcast and reports of heavy rain and thundershowers.
My food supplies were getting low and I thought I could shop at Mauckport, just a mile downriver from Buck Creek, but it wasn’t visible from the river. A southerly was with me, and I made good speed to New Amsterdam, but it was also hidden from view.
About halfway down the Ohio, the tendons in my right wrist were inflamed, which made it too painful to row. I taped my hand to the oar handle so I could pull without having to grip it. I rowed like this for three days and that gave my wrist time to heal. When I was hobbled like this I was careful to avoid getting into situations where I might quickly need both hands.
My right hand had continued to bother me; the tendons deep in my palm and forearm ached and my middle finger would often go numb. To take the strain off my hand I taped it to the oar. It seemed to work but only a few dozen strokes later it began to rain. I had to untape my hand to put on my cagoule.
I wanted to get into Leavenworth, but its ramp was too steep and the wakes of tows were swirling around it. I rowed another 1⁄2 mile to a small muddy creek and walked back to town. There were no stores, but I found a café where I ordered a fish sandwich. When I got back to the boat and taped my hand to the oar I was feeling terrible while pounding into the chop of a headwind. After the day’s 31 miles of rowing I stopped in Alton and tucked into a 50-yard-wide tributary mouth for the night.
Leaving Alton, my hand was still sore and weak, and I was not looking forward to rowing, but taped up I managed to get 22 miles downriver to Rome, a cluster of a few dozen houses scattered among cornfields. I crossed the river to Stephensport and set up for the night on the banks of Sinking Creek in the shadow of a tall brick chimney that was all that remained of a house that had burned down.
I slept well, woke dry and warm, and didn’t get up early. I started loading the boat at 7:15; pretty lazy. The river was up 1′ overnight. I took a short paddle up the creek around high-banked bends. Woodpeckers rattled trees all around the hollow. I made a quick stop in Cloverport to picked up Grape-Nuts and Gatorade. As I locked down at Cannelton I met Rosemary and Chauncey as they peered into the chamber. They offered to treat me to a Thanksgiving dinner, so I secured the boat out of the way at the downstream end of the lock. They drove me to Tell City, where they watched as I took advantage of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The reports I listened to on my weather radio included information about the river levels, and I had to set the sneakbox up to allow for the Ohio rising or falling a couple of feet overnight. Here at Muddy Gut at mile 732, the river was on the rise, which was much less concerning than a falling level, which could leave me stranded in the mud.
At Troy I rowed across the river into Muddy Gut. Its banks were steep, so I decided to sleep in the boat rather than trudge gear up to flat ground. I ran a line between two trees on opposite sides of the creek, tied the boat in under it, and drew a tarp over the line and around the boat. I had more room than I would with just the cockpit tent set. I was settled in at 6 p.m. I would be in this footlocker-sized cockpit for the next 12 hours. The weather reports predicted flooding for the next five days with temperatures dropping into the 20s.
The river rose about 2-1⁄2′ overnight and by morning the line supporting the tarp was just 9″ above the deck. I got underway early, 6:45 by my clock, but I suspected that I might have passed into another time zone; my evenings were seeming a little out of sync. With the river picking up speed, and my right hand healed, I made pretty good time. The biggest tow I’d seen yet went by, 35 barges, five abreast and seven end to end. The land had flattened out considerably and as the water level rose, sky and river were separated by a thin band of land, often bristling with mown cornstalks. On some reaches, the stern of my boat occupied more space than all the land I could see.
By Owensboro I had already covered 24 miles and it was looking like I would have a long day’s run. Along the banks in these lowlands, there were all sorts of summer dwellings elevated on stilts 10′ above ground level as protection against flooding. Even trailers, camper-converted city and church buses, and mobile homes had their wheels hanging in air. Houses with a ground-level floor had a sacrificial look to the lower half, either concrete block or screened-in porches that could be submerged without damage.
The Newburgh locks quickly lowered LUNA 10′ and before 3 p.m. I already had 50 miles for the day behind me. I pulled hard and timed my passage between day markers as LUNA’s wake caught the light and sparkled. I did 2.7 miles in 21.5 minutes—7.7 mph over the bottom. The river gets credit for some of that.
I was hoping to pick up mail in Evansville, but when I rounded the bend 3 miles upstream, my heart sank. I saw skyscrapers and church spires rising above a concrete wall, not a place well suited to LUNA. I rowed past a partially submerged wharf and coasted by some “Diagonal Parking Only” signs up to their necks in the floodwaters and pulled the boat on my throw cushion to keep it off the concrete waterfront access road. I trotted into town. I asked seven people for directions to the post office and never got the same answer. I ran, dodging cars and ignoring stop lights, and made my way deep into town where I found the post office. I got my general delivery mail and ran back to the river and was relieved to find the boat untouched. Sweat was splattered all over the front of my life vest and I was wheezing and coughing.
I carried a dome tent for camping ashore, but there was rarely firm, dry, level ground where I could set it up. I regularly slept in the sneakbox under an improvised shelter from wind and rain. Here, I set my nylon tarp over an oar supported by my camera tripod.
It was time to call it a day, so I headed straight across the river to a vast undeveloped shore and landed 61 miles downstream from my last camp. On the beach I cooked up a can of beef stew then set LUNA up for the night with the blade of one oar propped up with the tripod and the tarp oar to shelter the cockpit.
The following day I rowed 50 miles to a point of land across the river from Uniontown. I made camp on a raft that had been pulled into a grassy field. It blew hard all night, and I didn’t get much sleep. In the morning a front pushed through with rain, lightning, and thunder. I was warm under the tarp but getting wet as the rain drove underneath it, so I got up and started to break camp. The wind-lashed river was very rough, I wasn’t going far (if anywhere at all), but I needed a better place to stay. As I was beginning to break camp, I saw a lone barge coming downriver, obviously adrift. A towboat was chasing after it. With the wind blowing hard across the river the barge was headed straight for my camp. I checked LUNA, she was 15′ from the water’s edge and protected by maple trees standing in a few feet of water.
A storm brought winds so high that a barge was torn away from its moorings on the Kentucky side. It plowed ashore on the Illinois side where I had camped. Its overhanging bow pushed over a tree that came down to one side of the raft where I made a shelter under my blue tarp. The sneakbox, with its red dodger showing here, missed being crushed by a few yards. A tugboat, its wheelhouse and port running light showing behind the barge, had chased after it and took control of it only after it had ground to a stop.
The barge would have to get through them first to get to LUNA. Unloaded and sitting very high in the water, the barge was an impressive mass of steel moving at the pace of a fast walk. The bow nosed into a stand of maples. They shuddered and bent. The top of one came down before the barge eased to a stop. The towboat, the WALLY ROLLER, approached the barge to get a line on it. The 138′ towboat throbbed with the 4,200 horsepower of its two diesels. I stood on the riverbank only 20′ away from it, watching the deck hands muscle a hawser onto the barge. The captain on the PA told them “Get on with it!” as the ROLLER was drifting into the branches. I moved back in case any more treetops might break off. The tow pulled the barge into open water, secured it, and took it back to the dock at Uniontown.
I took all the drama as a sign that I should stay off the river. I walked downstream looking for a better place to camp. I came upon a school bus turned camper, and its owner, Bill. We talked for a bit looking out at the water, which was a real mess. He had a shanty a little farther downriver and said I was welcome to stay in it. During a lull in the wind, I rowed to it and Kenny, another regular at the camp, met me there. He and Bill were going to move the bus and Kenny’s trailer to high ground before the rising river cut the road off.
While we were in the shanty, I happened to look out to the south and said, “Wow, look at that dark cloud!” In that moment, the river below it turned white, as wind shredded the wave tops into spray. I was out the door in an instant to pull LUNA farther from the water. Just before I got to the sneakbox, I heard a loud crack above me as the top 15′ of a tall maple snapped off. I made a quick detour to keep from getting hit by it and it crashed to the ground 20′ from me. I started dragging the boat and, with Kenny and Bill helping, got it under a porch roof to protect it from other windfalls.
I’d been given permission to use this fishing camp while waiting out a dangerous wind storm. The wood stove gave me a chance to dry out all my gear and get a good warm night’s sleep.
The wind had shifted from south to west in the span of a single minute. It was 11:40 and the air was suddenly colder and the temperature would continue to drop into the teens. Kenny drove into Mount Vernon to get some groceries and when we got back the wind was still strong, the water frighteningly rough, and the river still rising. He and Bill left, leaving me with the shanty for myself. It warmed up with a fire in the stove and I had a sponge bath and some soup. The rising water had slowed down, but if I were to be flooded out, I could row over the fields to the north to high ground. The weather radio report was for more high wind so I might have another day here, if the water didn’t run me off first. By 8 p.m. I was very tired after the last night’s lack of sleep.
The fishing camp I was staying in had plenty of firewood but nothing with which to split it for kindling. Before the river had risen, I had seen a hatchet in one of the other camps. I feared the advancing water would be higher than my boot tops so I tied a milk crate to one boot and a child’s classroom chair to the other. I made the trip to the camp and back without getting my feet wet.
It blew hard all night, and I had another day waiting out the wind. It finally dropped after 36 hours of making a mess of the river. It was still very cold—in the 20s with a drop to 10 degrees expected that night. The water was still rising, though not as fast as during the last few days. In the shanty I caught up with some eating, writing, and sleeping.
The entrance to Cave-in-Rock was flooded, so the only access to it was by boat. The gap in the stratum at water level was where I rowed in. If I had stood up in LUNA there, my head would have been even with that shelf of limestone.
The weather had settled down by the morning of my third day across the river from Uniontown. I rowed the 38 miles to Cave-In-Rock where the access to the cave by land was cut off by the high water. The entry, a narrow slot at the bottom of the 50′-high opening, had enough water to float LUNA but not enough width for the oars. All through the 19th century, the cave had been a base of operations for river pirates and a refuge for boatless miscreants. A natural opening in the roof of the cave provided light and served as a natural chimney. It would have been a wonderful place to camp, but it’s a state park and I was more inclined to abide by the rules than had its former occupants.
Cave-in-Rock is 50′ tall, 40′ wide, and 120′ from its entrance to the back wall. A hole in the top provides light.
From Cave-In-Rock, the mouth of the Ohio River was an even 100 miles away. At the confluence, I’d turn south on the Lower Mississippi and speed south away from the advance of winter. I kept moving.
The following day, I passed through the busy port of Paducah, another city best bypassed, and stopped at Joppa on the Illinois side of the river. I didn’t need a ramp to land there. The town’s waterfront park was flooded, and I could just haul out anywhere on the lawn.
Joppa’s riverside parks had been flooded by high water, but the water level was below my boot tops, so the picnic tables worked for me.
The high water had come within a few inches of the picnic-table seats. Square barbecues, their steel dark with rust and soot, stood like channel markers among the trees. The levee that separated the town from the river was capped by a single line of railroad tracks that led to a second bridge that had burned and collapsed into the water.
At the near edge of town, patches of a two-story building’s gray paint had peeled away from equally gray wood. Its twin screen doors’ frames held the last of a screen mottled with rust and as delicate as a camp-lantern mantle. Over the door was a chalky metal sign, “Hop on in for Bunny Bread,” but not much was hopping in Joppa. Across the street a hand-painted sign misspelled “Notory Public” in letters that would have more appropriately spelled out “Clubhouse, no girls.”
Three blocks into town I was wrapped in an eye-watering stench of fermenting manure that wafted from a trailered agriculture implement, a long barrel open along its length on top. Inside was an axle with lengths of chain to flail a load of soupy cow manure and send it flying in all directions. I had to squeeze my nostrils closed. I crossed the street to the grocery store and picked up a can of beef stew. On a shelf of breakfast cereals, an orange box of Wheaties caught my eye with its picture of Olympic-champion gymnast Mary Lou Retton, fists thrust above her head, her smile wide and radiant. I caught myself staring and suddenly her radiance and enthusiasm made me uncomfortably conscious of my grubby appearance and my fatigue. Having that box of cereal in the boat would only make me feel worse.
At the end of my last full day on the Ohio, the only place I found to get off the river was a wide-open flooded field. I wore my cagoule to shield me from a bitterly cold wind.
I’d made a cover that was supported by the cockpit hatch and a pair of struts. It was effective in keeping me warm and dry when it was the best choice for a cold and windy last night on the Ohio, but it offered very little space for moving around. In the morning, the water covering the field here had iced over.
On my last day on the Ohio River, I had reached the 980-mile mark on my charts and could see the Mississippi sweeping the horizon on the far shore opposite the Ohio. I pulled ashore in Cairo with my empty two-liter soda bottle to get some water before pushing LUNA’s bow into the river that would carry us 870 miles to New Orleans. I found a tavern that I thought would let me have some water and walked in. The moment I stepped inside conversations stopped and everyone turned to look at me. I hadn’t brushed my hair or shaved for several days and was wearing my faded PFD and my mustard-speckled wool pants. As the bartender kindly filled my water bottle, a man at the bar wearing brown and green camouflage looked me up and down:
“What the hell you been doin’?”
“Rowing.”
“Is that all?”
I told him that I had rowed from Pittsburgh and was next headed for New Orleans. He looked away across the bar top.
“I feel sorry for you on that damn Mississippi.”
Coming in the February issue: The Lower Mississippi River; March issue: The Gulf of Mexico.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
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.
After years of building and sailing open camp-cruiser sailboats, my wife, Anne, and I had become less enchanted with crawling around under a tent at anchor. We were also noticing that over the course of our 30 years of sailing, conditions had changed: Canadian summers were hotter and midday winds were undeniably stronger. Spending time in our smaller open boats was no longer the simple, easy fun it once was and, while it might be hard to admit, we were no longer two sprightly 30-year-olds. It was time to look for a bigger boat.
Gunkholers at heart, we didn’t want to give up sailing in the shallows. So, we were not looking for a fixed-keel boat. We were looking for a boat that could stay on a home mooring most of the time, but we still wanted to be able to trailer it for short trips away. Finally, we wanted a boat with a low-aspect rig and a comfortable cabin.
Matt Singer
Distinctly British in appearance with its wide lapstrake planking, straight stem, mild tumblehome, and traditional gaff-cutter rig, the Cape Henry 21 is nevertheless all-American as its title—it was named after the headland at the southern end of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
Years ago, we had come across drawings of Dudley Dix’s gaff cutters, the Cape Henry 21 and the Cape Cutter 19. We remembered them now and, digging them out again, still liked what we saw. More research revealed both to be solid sailboats, self-righting and self-bailing, shoal-draft yet capable of coastal cruising. We were sold. We decided on the larger Cape Henry (CH21) and commissioned Keith Nelder at Big Pond Boat Shop, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, to build the basic hull. We would take care of all the spars, hatches, paint, varnish, and finishing ourselves. The partnership worked perfectly: Keith delivered the bare hull in nine months—on time and on budget—and six weeks later we launched ELVEE into our home waters of Mahone Bay.
The CH21 can be built by an experienced amateur builder. The plans are very detailed, but I would highly recommend getting a CNC-cut kit. Such a step will make little difference to the overall cost of the boat, but the precision-cut panels make assembly much faster and easier. Even with the kit, I would put the required skill level for building the CH21 at “above beginner.” At the very least a builder will need good woodworking skills and confidence in reading plans.
The hull, four strakes of 10mm plywood, is built upside down on a form with stringers that will reinforce the laps. Diagonal kerfs cut halfway through the plywood on the inside faces of the garboards ease the twisting at their forward ends. Thickened epoxy later fills the kerfs. The result is a strong, light boat. The plans list all the hardware required including the tabernacle, chainplates, motor mount, centerboard, winch, and other odds and ends. Internal ballast consisting of 816 lbs of lead-shot ballast set in epoxy either side of the centerline provides additional stability.
Ryerson Clark
The Cape Henry 21 has a reputation for being a good performer in most wind conditions, especially in light airs when it will ghost along while other, larger boats struggle to make headway.
The CH21 is a remarkable sailer. Dudley has said that it will sail in wind that won’t even move smoke, and we have experienced just that. Often, our Cape Henry will be making slow but steady headway while bigger boats are drifting to and fro with the tide. It is a dry boat. We seldom get water or spray aboard, and with its fine entry it cuts through waves and wakes with ease. The powerful high-peaked gaff rig and headsails make the CH21 easy to balance, and much of the time it steers itself with just a light touch to the tiller if a correction is needed.
There are two headsail options: staysail with genoa or staysail with yankee jib. With the genoa the CH21 is considered a sloop, with the yankee a cutter, but in either option it is designed to set two headsails at once, except when reaching. We have used both options and are unable to state a preference. We don’t change them out on a day-to-day basis; instead, we set one combination for a whole season and leave it at that. Both genoa and yankee are tacked to the end of the 4½′ bowsprit, while the staysail is rigged inboard on the forestay. In a light to moderate wind, we will use either genoa or yankee, but when the wind becomes stronger or gusty, we will furl the larger headsail and bring out the staysail. As the wind builds further, we reef the main as needed and the boat remains perfectly balanced under staysail and the main with two reefs.
As drawn, the CH21 carries a 6-hp outboard in a motorwell where it is out of the way and beneath the tiller. We have used both a 2.3-hp and a 4-hp gas outboard but have recently converted to an ePropulsion 3-hp (equivalent) electric outboard. Each of the three engines moves the boat effortlessly, and the hull slips through the water with ease. We also scull with our version of a yuloh, a Chinese sculling oar, which we store in the cabin for backup propulsion. Unhindered by wind or current we can scull along at just under 2 knots.
Ryerson Clark
The cockpit is spacious and comfortable for two adults and a sleeping dog. The sole grating is a later addition to keep feet dry when water comes into the cockpit from the outboard well. The electric outboard has replaced the 6-hp gas outboard recommended by the designer and has proved more than adequate when called upon.
We have been happy with the outboard-well arrangement. It keeps the engine easy to handle and does away with the need to hang out over the transom. The cockpit self-drains into the well, although we have found that when heeled and going hard to windward, the well can scoop seawater into the cockpit, but never more than just enough to wet the bottoms of our feet. We have resolved this issue by building a cockpit grating that not only looks nice and “shippy” but also keeps our feet dry.
The cockpit is large enough for four adults when daysailing, and for a crew of two there is enough space to really stretch out on the long, wide seats—a comfortable spot for an afternoon nap. We made a screened tent that hangs from the boom and covers the cockpit; it gives us an additional mosquito-free living area when at anchor.
Ryerson Clark
Two quarter berths stretch aft beneath the cockpit. In the main cabin the berths double as comfortable seating. The centerboard trunk divides the main cabin but does not make the space feel cramped. However, a bilge keel version of the Cape Henry 21 is available.
Down below there are two large quarter berths that extend aft beneath the cockpit seats. At 7′ 3″ by 24″ they are long enough for even the tallest of sailors, and wide enough that you don’t feel jammed in. The berths run forward into the main cabin area and offer extremely comfortable seating for two; four friendly adults can sit without feeling too crowded.
Ryerson Clark
In the galley area there is space for a sink, stove, and plenty of locker space. Forward, the V-berth has more storage beneath and, to starboard, a composting toilet. The flush-decked cabin has full sitting headroom out to the sides.
There is space for a built-in stove on one side of the cabin and a sink on the other, with storage above and below. But this is a flexible space that can be arranged in various configurations and, if preferred, owners can forgo the fitted stove and cook in the cockpit on a portable stove instead. Up forward, the V-berth is 6′ 3″ wide and 7′ 3″ long and has ample storage space beneath for extra gear. We have a composting head beneath the V-berth to starboard.
The cabin is flush-decked, providing full sitting headroom right out to the sides of the cabin. We have found living in the cabin for weeklong trips is easy, comfortable, and roomy. Indeed, guests are always surprised by the spaciousness down below. The only alterations we have made have been slight adjustments to the storage and berth arrangements.
We have daysailed our Cape Henry 21, christened ELVEE, in sheltered harbors and bays, shallow coves and inlets, and have used her for extended coastal trips along Nova Scotia’s rugged coast. We are pleased with her performance and happy that, thanks to her, we have surely extended our sailing for many years to come.
A founding member of the The Small Wooden Boat Association of Nova Scotia, Ryerson Clark and his wife, Anne, have built 20 wooden boats, ranging from kayaks to small sailboats, while also helping countless other people get started on their own boatbuilding projects. During the sailing season Ryerson, Anne, and their dog, Maggie, can be found aboard ELVEE, exploring Mahone Bay and along Nova Scotia’s coast.
Our family of five has a fleet of sea kayaks in Maine that we transport a few hundred yards down the road and through a lupine field to reach the harbor. In the beginning, we carried them by hand. Then a kayaker friend loaned us a couple of stern-mounted carts with small wheels. They were an improvement over carrying the boats and were okay going down the road, but in the meadow the wheels tripped and dragged, and could pull themselves off. Even on pavement, we still had to lift the bulk of the weight of each kayak at the bow.
It also bothered me that those carts could only carry one kayak at a time. Since we often paddled with four or five of us, I longed to be able to transport several at a time so we could spend our time paddling, not walking back and forth transporting boats.
Photographs by Jim and Elizabeth Root
When not carrying boats, the cart looks and functions like any other simple yard cart, appreciated by all the family.
I pondered the idea of adapting a garden-cart to carry boats. I was put off by the price of the ready-made versions, and having a good stack of scrap wood left from old projects, I decided to figure out my own kayak carrier. My kids have always laughed at my frugal inclinations and love to say that our family motto should be: “We don’t need to buy that, we can make it.”
I started with what I thought would be a working prototype, so I didn’t try to get fancy. I thought I’d refine my design with something more elegant but, 15 years later, it’s still working perfectly, and I have yet to make it look nicer or to change anything: it just works. For most of the construction, everything was simply fastened together with drywall screws. I used a little glue where I thought some extra strength might be good. The cart looks crude enough that I don’t worry about leaving it out in public while we’re out for the day paddling: it’s always been there waiting patiently for us when we return.
Jim Root
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My thinking was essentially to have a box of 1⁄2″ plywood with a steel rod for an axle attached underneath with two U-bolts. The large wheels, like those on garden carts, would easily roll over soft ground, bumps, and tall grass. Set on top of the box would be two crossbars long enough to carry two kayaks side by side. I had a couple of pine 2×6s that were about 5′ to 6′ long, which would drop into slots on either side of the box. Angled cutouts would cradle two kayak hulls and prevent them from rocking or sliding sideways. Cutouts on the bottoms of the crossbars provide extra clearance for gear heaped in the cart. Strips of old rubber doormat on the tops of the crossbars protect the hulls from scratches. Each crossbar also has two little scraps of wood nailed to each side, just inside the box sides, that keep the crossbar itself from shifting from side to side on the box. The plywood box is 48″ long, 25″ wide, and 12″ deep but the dimensions can be adjusted to one’s particular needs.
At the end of each crossbar is a small screw eye which anchors a bungee to hold a kayak in place. The other end of the bungee is stuck in a 1⁄4″ hole in the center of the crossbar. I wouldn’t pull kayaks down a highway in this way, but for walking in our quiet village, the arrangement for securing them is more than adequate.
The 20″ wheels are available as replacements for garden carts. I found a pair of nylon wheels with pneumatic tires on sale for $15. I liked the idea of the nylon because we’d be using the cart around salt water. There are many online sources for similar nylon wheels, some pneumatic, others non-pneumatic. A pair costs about $60. I bought a 3′ length of 5⁄8″ plain steel rod (to match the 5⁄8″ wheel bearings) from a hardware store to serve as the axle. After the rod is cut to length, a small hole is drilled through each end of the axle hitch pins to hold the wheels, with washers on both sides of them.
I made the tongue and a vertical stand to support it with lengths of 2×2; a pair of gussets of 3⁄4″ pine join the two pieces. Another piece of 3⁄4″ pine, inside the cart and set parallel with the stand, provides a backing for the screws that fasten the brace-and-tongue assembly. Set in a mortise at the forward end of the tongue is a piece of walnut that serves as a handle. Rounded off and sanded smooth for comfort, it is the only nice wood on the entire cart. The finished cart weighs about 35 lbs.
It’s not just boats that make use of the cart, sometimes it’s the living passengers that take priority.
When we set out for the shore, we put all our gear—PFDs, dry bags with cameras, clothes and extra gear, water bottles, lunch cooler, and the rest—in the cart’s box and then we load the kayaks on the crossbars.
The kayaks are best positioned on the cart with their weight slightly forward of the axle: if they are too far back, the whole cart wants to tip backward and will not rest on its kickstand; too far forward, and you’re going to work too hard lifting while pulling. With just a slight amount of the weight shifted to the front, lifting and pulling the cart requires practically no effort at all. The kayaks can also be pushed from the rear when paddling companions lend a hand on uphill stretches. Compared to every other means we’ve tried, transporting boats on the cart requires only a fraction of the effort.
Transporting kayaks between the house and the water used to require multiple trips and a good deal of effort. Now, up to five kayaks can be carried together and with little more effort than a gentle push from behind and minimal pull from ahead.
Two kayaks can be easily transported by just one of us. I don’t use the cart’s handle as it gets buried in between the boats—I grab the bow toggles and use them, instead. If we want to transport a third kayak, we lay a couple of PFDs across the two bottom kayaks as padding and center the additional kayak on top. The most we’ve ever carried is five kayaks.
I’ve imagined making a variation of the tongue that could attach to a bike. Given flat enough terrain, one could likely pull a couple of kayaks or a small boat a long way with ease
Although designed and built with kayaks in mind the cart is also used to transport a Nutshell Pram (and grandchildren). A notch cut into the rear end panel of the cart holds the boat upright and stable.
The cart is also perfect for walking our Nutshell Pram the 1⁄4 mile to the town landing. A narrow slot cut in the back wall of the cart holds the skeg, the pram’s painter is tied to the cart tongue, and the dinghy stays solidly in place even while going over the bumps along the way. Again, properly balanced, there is almost no effort to pulling the loaded cart; any boat that can be lifted by two people could balance on it. Our 20′ × 30″ triple sea kayak rests very comfortably on the cart, as does our canoe. I haven’t made a second, wider set of crossbars, but with them the cart could carry two or more canoes.
In winter the crosspieces are removed, the cart is cleaned out, and it’s stored on end in a corner of the boatshed.
With each season, this humble cart has more than proved its worth. With the crossbars removed, it is a handy and functional multi-use cart. It’s great for garden and yard work, for carrying boating gear or loads of firewood, and for taking grandkids and dogs for rides. We put it away standing on end in the boat shed, tucked into a small space. The crossbars simply hang on the wall on a couple of nails, bungee cords dangling until our kayaks need to get out on the water again.
Jim Root splits his time between a home in Barrington Hills, Illinois, and Round Pond in mid-coast Maine. He is now retired after a career in communications and advertising. He finds subjects in Maine for his passion for painting landscapes and boats. You can see his paintings on his website.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
Skipper and I have been towing boat trailers for several decades, and almost all the vehicles we’ve used to get to the water were equipped with 2″ frame-mounted receiver hitches and drawbars.
Whether the trailer is being towed loaded or unloaded, a drawbar can knock and rattle inside the receiver, which not only makes a lot of annoying noise while driving but also causes wear on both the receiver and drawbar. This is especially true with light boats, light trailers, and light tongue weights where the drawbar isn’t consistently pressed tight in the receiver. The dents and scratches caused by the movement of the drawbar can lead to corrosion and a reduction in the integrity of the hitch system.
Photographs by the authors
Ball mounts, like the one at top, have a very loose fit in the towing vehicle’s receiver. An ordinary hitch pin and spring clip will hold the receiver and mount together, but only loosely. The Silent Hitch Pin, below, not only eliminates the play between them, it also serves as a theft deterrent.
We recently found a device that reduces that wear and eliminates the noise, the Silent Hitch Pin by Let’s Go Aero. It installs easily in minutes. The hitch pin has a heavy-duty steel block with a threaded hole and an attached spring. When inserted into the receiver, the spring is compressed and holds the block in place once it is aligned with the holes in the sides of the receiver. A 5⁄8″ partially threaded steel pin with heavy-duty flat washer and lock washer is inserted through the holes and, with its threads engaged, pulls the steel block and the drawbar snug against the inside of the receiver tube. The pin’s hex head is tightened with a 5⁄8″ wrench (not provided) to 30 foot-pounds, which prevents the drawbar from moving or vibrating inside the receiver. The washers allow the pin to be tightened without scratching the side of the receiver. A steel 5⁄8″ sleeve, inserted through the other side of the receiver and the spring inside it, captures the pin, reinforces it, and reduces its potential for movement.
The threaded block has a spring to hold it in place inside the ball mount, aligned with the holes for the pin. When the ball mount is inserted into the receiver (not shown here) on the towing vehicle, the holes for the block, the ball mount, and the receiver can all be aligned to allow the pin to be inserted.
To finish things off, a 90-degree swivel lock snaps on without requiring its key, easing installation. The lock adds extra security for the hitch, the trailer, or any other racks that are receiver mounted, like our canoe loader. The lock has a nylon cover and weather-resistant dust cap. We recommend a squirt of dry lubricant for the lock and threaded block to limit corrosion. Drawbars should be removed when not towing to limit corrosion inside the receiver and eliminate the whacking of shins.
The Silent Hitch Pin is rated for Class IV towing—up to 12,000 lbs gross trailer weight (GTW) and 1,200 lbs tongue weight. While this is overkill for the Class III receivers on our two tow vehicles, which are rated for 3,500 lbs GTW and 350 lbs tongue weight, the pin offers additional peace of mind when a trailer is rattled by railroad crossings or hammered by potholes. We also tow with a higher-rated drawbar and hitch ball, but always keep the gross trailer weight well below our receiver’s limit. Safe, secure, and quiet—that’s how we like our towing.
Audrey (Skipper) and Kent Lewis have trailered the nation from California to Virginia, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Niagara Falls since 1969. The current number of trailers for Skipper’s armada is six, with one being a multi-role utility trailer.
For years I have been looking for the “perfect” life jacket for the small-boat sailor. I mostly daysail in my John Welsford Navigator, but have been on a few extended sailing adventures, often in water that’s cold and deep, as in Lake Superior. Before embarking on more singlehanded camping adventures in remote areas, I needed to find a life jacket that had all the features I consider most important.
First, I wanted a life jacket with inherent flotation. In most self-inflating jackets, the majority of the flotation is in the front, which impedes reboarding from the water. Also, they typically have little, if any, storage, even for small items. Some may see pockets as nonessential, but if I end up in the water in an emergency situation, I want to have a radio, knife, or even a small flashlight with me.
I was in search of a life jacket with a built-in harness. My greatest fear when sailing alone is tripping and falling into the water, only to watch my near-perfectly balanced boat sail away from me. I also think a leg strap is essential. My body shape is apparently incompatible with most life jackets: when I’m in the water in any position other than floating on my back, life jackets work their way up my body, becoming not only uncomfortable but also less effective.
And then, there’s the comfort factor. If I’m wearing a life jacket for long stretches of time, it has to be comfortable!
Photographs by the author
The Salus Coastal comes with built-in harness—two D-rings attached to a webbing belt. The optional leg strap is equipped with a swivel snap hook that clips to one of the D-rings. The attention to detail—multiple storage pockets, fleece-lined handwarmers, mesh shoulders, and neoprene collar—results in a life jacket that is both comfortable and effective.
After a good deal of research, I have found the Salus Coastal Vest with Safety Harness, which seems to meet all my requirements. With 15.5 lbs of flotation, it keeps me comfortably afloat and with the optional leg strap I can float high, in a vertical position, and the jacket does not ride up. It is comfortable, with a small neoprene collar, mesh over the shoulders, and padding in the back, which is pleasant when leaning against the coaming. There is a spacious zippered pocket on each side of the jacket front (the zippers are tucked under a tab, so they won’t get caught on things), and two fleece-lined handwarming pockets. On the left side there is an additional pocket with a smaller opening and an elastic closure that comfortably holds my VHF radio, and below the left shoulder a utility tab that can be used for a knife or beacon. Finally, there is a built-in safety harness.
Happily, I haven’t yet had to rely on the Coastal in an emergency situation, but I have tested it while underway. With the boat sailing well, I clipped on the harness and dropped into the water. My brother was onboard but under instruction to do nothing unless needed. As expected, my Navigator sailed on, but the harness kept me securely attached and I was able to pull myself back to the boat and climb on board.
The optional leg strap prevents the life jacket from riding up when the wearer is in the water and the pocket on the left side is large enough to accommodate a hand-held VHF.
The jacket is comfortable to wear for lengthy periods and has become my preferred PFD. It is manufactured in Canada and certified by Transport Canada, but is not U.S. Coast Guard approved. To be legal in U.S. waters, I keep a USCG-approved life jacket on board. It’s a concession to regulations that I’m happy to make if it means having a PFD that is both a pleasure to wear and has the features I need to help keep me safe.
Tim Ingersoll is a middle school special education teacher from Superior, Wisconsin, who enjoys exploring the local waters in his self-built Welsford Navigator. He has more than a decade of experience as a small-boat and basic-keelboat instructor, and has spent a lifetime enjoying time on the water canoeing and sailing.
In the late 1980s, Gavin Watson built a boat. It wasn’t his first—he had previously built a plywood dinghy and a 16′ fiberglass sailboat of his own design, but it was his largest to-date: a 30′ cold-molded Stratus 927, a racing/cruising sloop designed by the late Alan Warwick. Gavin was living in Connecticut at the time, and during the long construction project, he met Andrea, his wife-to-be, at a country dance. When she learned he was building a boat, Andrea mentioned that she had previously worked as an interpreter at the Small Boat Shop at Mystic Seaport. Gavin’s interest level went up several notches. When the 30-footer was complete, the couple moved aboard.
For a year, they lived a life afloat, but after experiencing the cold Connecticut winter, and dealing with the necessarily limited space, they concluded that they were not meant to be permanent liveaboards, and moved ashore and into a small apartment, which, as Gavin recalls, “seemed absolutely vast.”
When they started a mobile boat-repair business the apartment became unworkable and they moved to a lakeside cottage in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The 30′ sloop was sold, but over the years, other boats were built, including two 22′ trimarans and a 27′ carbon-fiber double kayak.
The Watsons summered on North Haven Island in Maine and, for several years, Gavin, Andrea, and their two children sailed in an F27 trimaran, and later a Maine Cat 30. They explored the local waters and islands of Penobscot Bay and ventured on longer voyages along the coast from Maine to Connecticut.
Photographs courtesy of Gavin Watson
Adding a mizzen to the Guider’s sail plan gave Gavin the ability to heave-to effectively, a valuable advantage for singlehanded sailing.
Time passed and, as is the way with families, the children grew up, left home, and established their own independent lives. The Maine Cat 30 was sold, and Gavin found himself facing a new reality: “Nobody,” he recalls, “was interested in cruising anymore.” Nobody but him.
As he contemplated other pastimes and browsed the internet looking for inspiration, he happened upon the dinghy-cruising videos of British adventurer, Roger Barnes. He was captivated. “It seemed like a pretty cool way to go,” he says. “If nobody else wanted to do overnights with me, I didn’t really need a big boat. Exploring the nooks and crannies and being able to pull the boat up on a beach looked like a cool idea.” Gavin had found the next step in his boating evolution—he would become a small-boat cruiser.
The coast of Maine is a magical playground for small-boat sailors. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Maine’s coastline is the fourth longest in the country, with almost 3,500 miles of bays, inlets, and island shorelines to explore. In summer, the days are long, the nights cool, and the breezes predictable. For the boat with a shallow draft, there are almost endless numbers of sheltered anchorages and beaches for overnight stays. Gavin was in the right place…all he needed now was the right boat.
Gavin put two collars on each oar. The inboard collars are placed in the locks for rowing in the conventional manner: seated and facing aft. The outboard collars set the oars at a higher angle for rowing standing up and facing forward, a better method for navigating tight spaces.
Building the PERIWINKLE Sail-and-Oar Cruiser
He settled on the Guider, a lugsail sail-and-oar cruiser from Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC). At 18′ 9″ LOA with a 6′ beam and minimum draft of 9″, the design seemed ideal for the singlehanded coastal cruising Gavin had in mind. He ordered the kit.
Despite all his previous building experience, Gavin had never before built a kit boat and was unsure how long it would take. He planned to build it through the winter in his two-car garage in Connecticut. But when the kit arrived in early April he couldn’t resist and began “casually working on it.” He was amazed to see it come together with speed. So much so that he soon realized if he continued he would have nothing to occupy the coming winter months. He downed tools and walked away…until October when he began working in earnest.
The Guider is designed to be built stitch-and-glue and CLC recommends the kit to “builders who are already comfortable with epoxy, fiberglass, and stitch-and-glue boatbuilding.” They describe the finished boat as being specifically designed for camp cruising and say that, while the boat is “fast and handy under sail and oar, there’s an emphasis on safety and camp-cruising comfort.”
As designed, the Guider is essentially an open boat with a 6′ 6″-long cockpit. But, perhaps inevitably for someone with as much on-water experience as Gavin, he introduced some modifications.
Enamored by the sails of the Norwegian Færder snekker, Gavin opted not to go with the lugsail designed for the Guider, but instead created a roller-furling version of the snekke sail with a flexible fiberglass diagonal batten in lieu of a snekke’s sprit and a similar vertical batten to shape the sail when reefed.
First came the cabin. Influenced by his earlier years of cruising in larger boats, Gavin wanted to be able to “easily crawl in under cover if I arrived in a harbor and the weather was unpleasant. I do have a boom tent, which gives me sitting headroom in the cockpit, but if I want to stay dry, I don’t have to set up the tent.” The cabin addition significantly reduced the size of the cockpit but, says Gavin, there is plenty of room for two adults to sit without getting in each other’s way. The raised cockpit coamings—which he added for protection against water running in off the deck—“are extremely comfortable and the spacing is perfect for bracing my foot against the opposite seatback.” He did raise the seats 4″ to accommodate additional buoyancy.
Other modifications included replacing the ¼″ aluminum centerboard with a larger 165-lb, ½″ stainless-steel one, which increases the boat’s righting moment. He also added 240 lbs of internal lead ballast. CLC recommends 200 lbs (or more if sailing lightly loaded). Gavin kept the general design of the rudder, which, as described by CLC, is “doubtless one of the more controversial features of the new design. Although it complicates the build slightly, designer John C. Harris likes the trunk-rudder for its efficiency and good looks. But most of all, to avoid having to grope awkwardly over the pointed stern to adjust the more typical kick-up rudder.” Gavin increased the rudder’s depth by 3″ and “beefed it up structurally.” He also gave the leading edge a more pronounced angle to encourage “lobster trap lines to slide off”—a significant consideration in Maine waters.
The mizzen’s roller-reefing system is evident here. The boom tent has several battens that create more headroom for sitting on the side benches.
But perhaps the most immediately obvious of Gavin’s alterations was to the rig. In March 2015, Small Boats had published an article on the Færder snekke, a traditional racing workboat from Norway. The class carries a distinctive boomless spritsail and Gavin was impressed by its simplicity, large relative area, and general appearance. For his Guider, he settled on a yawl rig, but the mainsail is a modern interpretation of the sprit rig. “The Færder-snekker rig inspired the shape of my mainsail,” says Gavin. “But I wanted something I could furl very quickly.” Thus, Gavin dispensed with the sprit but gave the sail its highly distinctive shape by introducing two full-length vertical fiberglass battens. The mizzen is a more conventional boomed leg-o’-mutton. Both sails have pocket luffs, slipped over carbon-fiber masts stepped into tubes. The masts rotate on nylon and Teflon bushings, allowing the sails to furl around them.
PERIWINKLE was launched in late June at Pulpit Harbor, a well-protected anchorage on the northwest side of North Haven. Gavin made the maiden outing and sea trials on Penobscot Bay. “I did tests in some rough weather to see how it handled, and I was pleased with it.” The trials also included sleeping aboard. “The first time, it took a bit of getting used to the boat listing to the side I was sleeping on. I am not used to sleeping on a slope, but I eventually got comfortable with it. The second time, I deliberately chose a cold night just to test out what it would be like inside. With the canvas cover on the cabin opening zipped up it was quite comfortable temperature-wise.”
Last fall, Gavin trailered PERIWINKLE sail-and-oar cruiser back home to Ridgefield and made a few improvements based on the sea trials. He’ll relaunch PERIWINKLE this spring and his new chapter as a solo small-boat cruiser will begin.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
The small city of Rockland, Maine, has a big harbor with a strong working tradition. Although the unmistakable aroma of the fish-processing plant at the harbor’s north end is long gone, Rockland is still home to a handful of gritty commercial fish piers, some lobsterboats, herring trawlers, a few working boatyards, a Coast Guard station, a seaweed processing plant, the Maine State Ferry Service terminal, some day-charter boats, and a fleet of traditionally rigged windjammers. A harbor that can embrace all that activity is also big enough to be plagued by a significant chop that can build up inside the breakwater. Predictably and practically, the working boats there run to the large size.
An exception to that rule is the new black work skiff that’s attending the fleet at the Apprenticeshop, a Rockland-based school for traditional boatbuilding and home to the Rockland Community Sailing program. Designed by accomplished local yacht designer Mark Fitzgerald and built by apprentices in the shop, the 17′ skiff is one of the better small yard boats I’ve operated. To start with, it feels like a workboat: heavy, stable, and predictable. While these aren’t characteristics I necessarily look for in a light recreational runabout of similar size, they are welcome in a workboat that I would normally think of as a bit undersized, especially to operate in the chop of Rockland Harbor.
With a 5′ 6″ beam, the boat appears narrow, and I feared that she’d be tender. But her mild deadrise of just 12 degrees at the transom means there’s a lot of buoyancy down in the chine, blessing her with admirable initial stability, even with my 200 lbs climbing over the narrow side deck. The boat has a designed displacement of 1,600 lbs.
When I visited Rockland in July, the Apprenticeshop crew was just launching an engineless 30′ one-design Haj-class sloop for the season, and director Eric Stockinger generously invited me to run the new skiff. I was already late to meet them at the shop’s launch ramp, so had little time to familiarize myself with the boat. There was no need to. It’s an advantage for a workboat that will be used by many different operators to be dead simple, and this boat is. I traced the fuel from the portable tank through a filter to the 20-hp outboard. There was no fuel shutoff or keyed ignition to worry about. I pumped the inline fuel bulb a couple of times, set the tiller throttle to start, and fired up the engine with a single pull of the start cord.
The Apprenticeshop
The AS-17’s framework is of white oak. Planking is of white cedar—two layers of 3⁄8” on the bottom, and 5 ⁄8” lapstrake on the topsides.
The Apprenticeshop
The deck’s rugged framing, which shows in this photograph, will soon be sheathed in plywood. The load on the heavy towing bitt is transferred to the keel via heavy knees.
Running over to the ramp at displacement speed, the boat tracked superbly, and I could rummage briefly for some lines to make fast to the Haj once I got alongside. While thus engaged, I couldn’t help but appreciate that the boat is uncluttered by thwarts, bulkheads, or a console. While that spare interior may not be ideal for most recreational vessels, it’s exactly what I want in a workboat where lines shouldn’t snag and line handlers shouldn’t stub toes or bark shins on furniture that’s just in the way.
As I nudged alongside the sailboat’s port quarter, the well-fendered work skiff didn’t bounce off as a lighter vessel (especially an inflatable) would. I stepped forward and made lines off, one to a stout galvanized cleat on the side deck (Stockinger noted bronze would look better, but economy is a necessary virtue in these times) and one to a sturdy samson post set in the short foredeck and running down to the keel deadwood for support. We backed away from the ramp, turned on the Haj’s short keel, and headed to the dock without fuss.
The beefy coaming around the long cockpit allows for lines to be handled from anywhere in the boat and run clear of obstructions. The only exception is the intentionally oversized oak towing bitt, supported by a natural hackmatack knee installed amidships. A line from even halfway up its height leading to a tow aft clears the low-profile outboard and allows the skiff to turn unimpeded without unhooking.
The Apprenticeshop
The AS-17 in its element: Tending to a Haj-class sloop that’s just been launched for the season.
The AS 17 Work Skiff was born of necessity as the Apprenticeshop’s need for a rugged utility boat grew to a critical point in 2011. The 40-year-old school and sailing center has an extensive series of floating docks to maintain as well as an ever-changing fleet of traditional boats and the community sailing fleet.
“We needed another workboat,” Stockinger said. “We didn’t want plywood, and we wanted something as open as possible.” At the same time they needed a boat that would be quick enough to serve as a tender for the youth sailing program, so a strictly displacement hull was out of the question. “A pretty little launch with fine lines and varnish just wouldn’t do it,” Stockinger said.
The quest for an appropriate model led not to a particular boat but to local yacht designer Mark Fitzgerald, best known for creating imaginative new powerboats with traditional aesthetic qualities for composite construction. The thinking was that the new workboat should look traditional but have the capacity to perform at high speeds, and this was a combination Fitzgerald had achieved many times before. The trick would be having him design it to be built with traditional heavy plank-on-frame construction.
Aaron Porter
While designer Mark Fitzgerald specifies a top-end horsepower of 90, the Apprenticeshop’s new AS-17 is driven by a modest 20-hp Yamaha—an adequate amount of power for a boat meant to work around the waterfront.
“They’re so steeped in tradition,” the designer said. “I was honored when they asked me.” So Fitzgerald met with the apprentices and instructors who would be build-ing and using the boat to explain his ideas and gather more of theirs. Another consideration for the Apprenticeshop was the desire to have a model that they might offer for sale to potential clients. To that end Fitzgerald presented them with two models of the AS-17: a work skiff and an island commuter. The latter is essentially the same boat with 4″ additional freeboard to allow for safer, drier travel among Maine’s coastal islands.
Second-year apprentices Matt Dirr, Sophie Meltzer, Duncan MacFarlane, and Jeff Steele built the work skiff in the winter of 2011–12. Stockinger said they had to remind Fitzgerald that they wanted to build things “the hard way” incorporating labor-intensive details such as notched stringers that are valuable lessons, not hindrances, to efficient building. The boat was built upside down using the white oak frames as molds. In an effort to dispense with any athwartship support from bulkheads or thwarts, the sawn frames were made particularly heavy and gusseted with plywood at the chine and keel intersections. The keel and stem are of solid white oak, the bottom is two layers of 3⁄8″ white cedar planks laid longitudinally with the seams staggered and a coat of thick old paint spread between the layers, and the topsides are lapped 5⁄8″ cedar planks. The narrow decks required apprentices to build a complex supporting structure of deckbeams before applying a plywood deck. Fastenings were bronze screws, and copper rivets in the lapped topsides. A thick oak coaming and rubrail finished the deck edges.
Aaron Porter
A bow pudding made of 1/2” manila line makes the new AS-17 a real pushboat, and adds an elegant touch.
“We were planning on hitting things with this,” Stockinger said by way of explanation after listing the robust materials and scantlings. That expectation informed the boat’s finish as well. Inside, the frames, planking, and Douglas-fir sole are simply oiled. They’ll weather with age, and the dings of dropped tools and flung gear will just add to her working character. The topsides are painted in one of my favorite practical finishes: Rustoleum flat black, a paint that hides the scrapes and gouges a working boat can’t avoid, and can be touched up with the scuff of a scouring pad and a dab of paint from a chip brush. As a finishing workboat touch, two apprentices artfully hitched a charmingly accurate bow pudding—a fender—of ½” manila line.
Running at speed with the 20-hp engine, the AS-17 Work Skiff makes 15 knots with the confidence-inspiring stability of a much larger boat. Fitzgerald said the new boat could handle 70 to 90 hp easily, and that’s the sort of power he’d suggest for the recreational version. As an able coastal runabout with real seakeeping ability and speed potential, this boat could be a slightly smaller rival to the Albury Runabout profiled by Maynard Bray in Small Boats 2010. As a versatile small work-boat, this model is hard to beat.
Mark Fitzgerald generously donated his designs for both models to the Apprenticeshop. For questions about commissioning either, contact Shop Director Kevin Carney at [email protected].
The AS-17 is a stoutly framed and beefy small skiff. Her diminutive size and 5’6” beam suggest a tender boat, but deep chines and 12-degree deadrise at the transom make her surprisingly stable. While conceived to be a workboat, she’d also make a great recreational runabout.
On Monday, September 1, 2014, the first issue of Small Boats Monthly was released. That issue’s six articles profiled a sailing outrigger canoe and an outboard skiff, reviewed a flashlight and an anchoring bungee, and featured an Alaskan sail-and-oar cruise and a family-built skiff. The next issue added the Technique feature articles to the mix, and the editorials followed just over a year later. In 2018, we branched out from covering only wooden boats to including aluminum, fiberglass, and inflatable boats. Our Series section began the following year with a video series and Boat Profiles originally published from 2007 to 2013 in the print-only Small Boats annual, which preceded web-based Small Boats Magazine.
#96 to #47
There are now more than 900 articles on the Small Boats Magazine website, all of them available to every subscriber, and all of them made possible by our contributors and readers. While those of us who produce Small Boats take pride in reaching this 100-issue milestone, we’re simply one nexus between those who have a passion for small boats and those who wish to offer something about them.
#48 to #1
For Nick Grumbles, builder of our Reader Built Boat in this issue, the nexus was the 2019 Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. There he met Larry Cheek, a Small Boats contributor and a serial boatbuilder with several boats to his credit. Nick had no experience with rowing and sailing, let alone boatbuilding, but he was eager to learn. Larry had started out in the same way, driven by an inchoate passion for boats and undaunted by a lack of knowledge and experience.
In 1978, when I attended the first of those festivals in Port Townsend, I had already built my first boat, a skin-on-frame kayak that I had designed, and its chief virtue was pointing out how little I knew about boats. At that festival, I attended a presentation given by David Zimmerly about traditional Alaskan kayak construction. I talked to him afterward and he must have sensed the fascination he’d awakened in me and gave me a photocopied draft of his then-unpublished book, Hooper Bay Kayak Construction. It filled me with an appreciation for traditional boatbuilding and was such a clearly written and illustrated guide that I wasted little time in building a Hooper Bay for myself.
While my connection with Zimmerly gave me the benefit of his knowledge, it was John Gardner, known to many as the dean of American small craft, who gave me the encouragement that those new to boats need to keep discouragement at bay through the inevitable challenges that arise. In the late ’70s he was the technical editor for National Fisherman, a tabloid that my father subscribed to. I eagerly read the column Gardner wrote because it often included photos of amateur-built boats. I mailed him prints of my Hooper Bay and the Marblehead skiff I’d built soon after the kayak. He published both in National Fisherman with this in the caption: “Chris has taken to boatbuilding like fish to water.”
Over the more than four decades since then, I’ve moved through the nexus that joins those in the boating community with enthusiasm to those with experience. Wooden boat festivals, tabloids like National Fisherman, magazines like WoodenBoat and the now long-defunct Small Boat Journal, and books by the likes of John Gardner, Howard Chapelle, and Pete Culler have enriched my life and obliged me to return the favor, just as Larry felt compelled to pass on his knowledge to Nick.
Small Boats is meant to serve in the same capacity, a nexus that provides encouragement and experience to anyone with an interest in small boats. With this 100th issue our thanks go out to the contributors and subscribers who have given us a place in this community.
Afterword
Following the launch of the 100th issue, my son, Nate, presented me with a peanut-butter jar filled with 100 red-cedar Whitehalls he had carved and painted.
In November 2019, my husband Fredrik and I were looking for a small boat for a long expedition in remote areas of Alaska. We needed a boat we could row, sail, and beach. We began our search by visiting Gig Harbor Boat Works, where the Salish Voyager was still in the design stage. We rowed their Jersey Skiff, which has the same hull shape, and liked it. As we were about to leave, Falk Bock, the production manager, mentioned that a cruising version of the skiff, the Salish Voyager, was in the works and might fit our needs perfectly.
The Jersey Skiff and the Salish Voyager are both modern interpretations of boats from the late 1800s—small rowing and sailing vessels for fishing off the New Jersey shore. The story goes that these seaworthy little craft, which could be launched and recovered through the surf, were also used for rescuing shipwrecked sailors and salvaging their cargo.
Safety was the prime consideration in the design and building of what was to be an expedition boat. In August 2020, Hull #1 of the Salish Voyager had its first sea trial and became Gig Harbor Boat Works’ demonstration boat. Our boat is Hull #2.
In June 2021, we met our new boat in Haines, Alaska, and began putting it and ourselves through our paces. We did a 10-day shakedown before embarking on our 14-month, 1,500-mile maiden voyage.
The Voyager, built of hand-laid fiberglass and reinforced with a variety of core materials, was easy to load and unload from a trailer and, with a little practice, we could rig the boat with its simple balance lugsail, in 15 minutes.
We were able to roll the 440-lb boat above the high tide line by pushing it over two inflatable beach rollers—although three would have been easier. For steeper beaches, we rigged a system with a long rope and two pulleys set up with a three-to-one mechanical purchase. We were to be sailing in a region that has a 20′-plus tidal range, and it was critical to have a boat that could go dry conveniently in a variety of situations. Because the Voyager has a box keel, it rests upright on the beach. For extra protection on rocky beaches, we took advantage of the optional stainless-steel keel rub strips. Despite the relative ease of beaching, we discovered that anchoring off was even easier: on all but the stormiest of nights, we used 300′ of rope to create an outhaul system to hold the boat offshore while we camped.
When we boarded the unloaded boat for the first time, the initial stability felt a bit unnerving but, when we tried to capsize it, the secondary stability turned out to be amazing. Walking the gunwales was easy; tipping the boat over for capsize-recovery practice was not. I finally managed to capsize the boat by standing on a gunwale and pulling on the mast. The aluminum mast and boom are hollow and airtight and prevent the boat from turning turtle. The ample flotation in the hull’s multiple compartments ensure that the hull sits high in the water when on its side. Climbing onto the daggerboard allowed me to quickly right the boat. A rather non-athletic scissors kick brought me back on board over the side.
Our capsize practice was done in calm water with the boat unloaded, but it left me with a sense of confidence. The cockpit, which is self-bailing, didn’t take on much water. Pulling the plug in the recessed scupper let the majority of the water drain out. When loaded for an expedition, the boat would float considerably lower, and more water could remain in the cockpit. However, it would still float high enough to recover from a capsize with a manageable amount of bailing.
Photographs by Fredrik Norrsell
When seen from above the ample storage and uncluttered cockpit are apparent. Storage beneath the side benches and foredeck is accessed via the large circular hatches. The cockpit’s raised floor keeps feet and gear dry. The aft sliding seat allows a second crewmember to either row while facing aft, or steer facing forward.
Our Salish Voyager carried everything we needed for well over six weeks at a time—food, camping gear, cameras, and an extensive collection of books, maps, fishing, and crabbing gear. The cruise-laden boat had the stability we needed to be able to stand up, change clothes, and move about the boat. This proved key to our comfort during our long journey.
The hatch in the cockpit floor gives access to a shallow compartment for storing extra fuel, canned goods, and beach rollers. The pry-out hatches on the side benches have a low profile and don’t interfere with seating. During this downwind run, the daggerboard is set forward of the mast and a plug is put into its trunk to keep water from splashing into the cockpit.
We had a round 10″ hatch in the bow, four 8″-diameter hatches on the side seats, and one long, shallow, 10″ × 20″ hatch in the floor that we used for extra fuel, canned goods, and beach rollers. Gig Harbor Boat Works offers several different hatch-cover types and arrangements. We were happy with the larger Beckson pry-out deck plates we chose for the side benches, because they were nearly flush and didn’t interrupt the seating surfaces as the raised flanges with rubber lids would. We installed a few tie-down points on the deck to help secure larger items, such as the tent, sleeping bags, and cooler.
When furled the sail, boom, and yard are raised above head height while the daggerboard is stowed forward of the mast. The bow and stern rowing stations have plenty of room between them but the rowers still have to focus on rowing in synch to avoid clashing oars.
The Salish Voyager has three sets of oarlocks and tracks on the parallel-sided benches support the sliding seats. The boat can be set up for either one rower in a center position or two rowers fore and aft. We didn’t experiment much with the center position as there were almost always two of us in the boat. Being able to keep moving while one person attended to making lunch, changing clothes, looking ahead on the chart, or simply taking a coffee break was helpful. If only one person was rowing, the forward position was the most powerful. When rowing, it was important to keep cadence with each other. If we were too far out of sync, we could—and did—occasionally clash oars. During our cruise, one of us could row at about 2 1⁄2 knots in calm water with a negligible current. The two of us together could row at 3 1⁄2 knots and keep it up all day. If wind or current were against us, having two rowers made the difference between hard work and attaining an enjoyable glide.
We always rowed with the mast in place and the bundled boom, yard, and sail suspended above head level and well out of the way. To minimize windage, we kept our bundle tidy and tight with four quick-release straps, but some weathercocking was inevitable. On one occasion we had the opportunity to row into a cave. It took us only ten minutes to remove the mast and sail and leave it on the beach. (It is not possible to row with the mast and/or the sail bundle inside the boat.)
Fully laden, the Voyager drew about 8″. As former kayakers, being able to row in shallow water close to shore was important to us. We were glad to discover that our minimal draft allowed us to maneuver around icebergs and through tricky reefs. For especially tight situations, one person looking forward and manning the tiller while the other rowed worked well.
The Salish Voyager is as suited to light breezes as it is to stiff blows. The single balance lugsail, generously sized at 100 sq ft, is easily rigged and controlled when singlehanded. The two sets of reefpoints allow the boat to be sailed comfortably as the wind pipes up.
With its 100 sq ft balance lugsail, the Salish Voyager performs well in a light wind. While we could often make way faster under oars than under sail, some days it just felt good to be lazy. One of my favorite ways of making way was “motorsailing.” With a mild headwind, one of us would take to the oars and the other the tiller. The oars felt exceptionally light as we flew along at 3 knots, about the same speed as if both people were rowing. Plus, with the extra speed the rowing provided, we could point higher upwind with the sail.
Over the course of two summers, we had about a 70/30 rowing-to-sailing split, which is considered good for our area. Our average sailing speed was between 3 and 4 knots. Top speeds were close to 5 knots, the theoretical hull speed.
The wineglass transom, deep skeg, and fine entry all enhance the Salish Voyager’s performance under oar. When sailing, the oars can be stowed up on the side decks, captured in their oarlocks. This keeps them both out of the way and also readily to hand if needed. Here the lugsail has its first reef tucked in.
The Salish Voyager has two sets of reefpoints, which allow for reducing the sail by 25 and 50 percent. This helped keep high winds from overpowering the boat. In a 10- to 15-knot tailwind, we sailed downwind in a following sea, double-reefed, at a manageable 4 1⁄2 knots. Both Fredrik and I are conservative by nature and reef early but even so, on a long trip it was inevitable that we would get caught out in winds that were stronger and gustier than we may have wished. At these times, we kept the sail tightly bundled. We put one person on the tiller and the other on the oars. Rowing provided more momentum than the bare mast could provide, and improved steerage, until we could find a lee or a safe haven.
When Gig Harbor Boat Works was designing the Salish Voyager they heard from several people who were looking for a beach cruiser that they could sleep aboard. For one person, sleeping aboard the Salish Voyager is easy, just lie down on the floor—there is 6′4″ of space between the daggerboard case and the aft bulkhead. As a couple, we experimented with making a platform at seat level. While this worked well and felt completely stable, we didn’t devise a good way to keep out the rain and bugs, so we chose to camp ashore in a tent.
In maritime endeavors we are kept safe by a balance of judgment, skill, and a good seaworthy vessel. The Salish Voyager proved a great choice for our expedition. It held up well in tough conditions for 14 months straight. It is a boat that a novice can handle, yet even after more than a year, I consider it a better sailer than I am a sailor. We can, and will, continue to grow into its capabilities for quite some time.
Fredrik’s life as a nature photographer, and Nancy’s work as a writer and author of Riding Into the Heart of Patagonia, blend well together. They are currently working on the book Going Wild: A Summer of Paddling, Living, and Eating Wild. Small, self-propelled boats have always been part of their life as lifelong wilderness guides and outdoor educators.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
Benjamin Mendlowitz
