Articles - Page 18 of 49 - Small Boats Magazine

Oarlock Extensions

People need to see where they are going; racing-shell rowers and hockey’s defensive players are about the only ones that don’t. For the rest of us rowers, there are times and places where being able to see the path ahead is really certainly useful.

Rowing in tightly constrained water or in the midst of boat traffic is challenging unless there is a cox steering the boat. So, rowers in Venice’s narrow canals and in Louisiana’s winding creeks and bayous stand and row facing forward, while lobstermen in Maine who work around rocks and ledges and in narrow coves and inlets set up their peapods or double-enders to be rowed facing forward.

Among the peapods that David Cockey and I studied at Mystic Seaport Museum, Maine Maritime Museum, and Penobscot Marine Museum there were several set up for forward-facing, stand-up rowing. What looks to be the last of a long line of working peapods is at the Penobscot Marine Museum. It was built circa 1950 for Orren Ames of Matinicus Island and uses a type of oarlock with an extended shaft above the shoulder and a long shank below it. The oarlocks with the boat are not a matched pair and are evidently from different makers, suggesting that there must have been enough demand for more than one foundry and machine shop to make them. Ames had specified that the sockets for the oarlocks would be right over the central thwart. This position worked only for rowing while standing and facing forward; the boat can’t be rowed from a seated position while facing backward.The shank on each of Orren’s locks is turned to a ¾″ diameter and is 6″ long from the bottom end to the shoulder. The shank slips through a ¾″ hole in a metal plate on top of the rail, and its end is captured by a “step” made of a block with another metal plate with a ¾″ hole. The locks raise the oars 4” above the shoulder. Elevated oarlocks like these are still available from Walt Simmons of Ducktrap Woodworking in Lincolnville, Maine. They also have a ¾″-diameter, 5 ¼″-long shank and provide a 6” lift above the shoulder.

Simple, do-it-yourself elevated locks can be fabricated from pipe with a 1/2″ inner diameter that can take an oarlock with a ½″ shank. A ½″ rod is inserted into the bottom end of the pipe to serve as the extension’s shank. These pipe-and-rod extensions might not be as sturdy as a one-piece cast lock, but you could use iron pipe for the extension if you keep it painted. All tubes and pipes—whether copper, brass, or iron—available from a hardware store will have an inside diameter bigger than an oarlock, so you’ll need to use something like G/flex thickened epoxy to hold them together (unless you can drill and rivet them, which is what was done on the old ones). These extensions slide through an oarlock socket or through a plate on the gunwale; either way, there should be a “step” to capture the rod’s bottom end. The location of the step can be on a thwart on a boat with nearly vertical sides, otherwise it may be determined by the point at which the rod makes contact with the planking. A bronze bushing set in the wooden base can prevent the base from wearing away.

With the extensions in the oarlock sockets, you can do a trial light row to see if you like the fore-and-aft placement. You may decide you want to have a socket a little farther forward, perhaps over the seat like many of the lobstermen have them, to put the boat in better trim. Once you decide, you can add a new set of oarlock sockets.

Wooden extensions are also common. These usually need an inwale separated from the sheerstrake by frames or spacers to create a slot. The extension’s “tenon” is sized to fit in the slot and may be slightly curved to match the angle of the planking. The bottom can rest on a thwart, but some are shouldered so that they rest on frame ends and the inwale.

The extensions, often made of oak, can be made wide enough at the top to take side-mounted sockets, or narrower to take top-mounted sockets. The height above the rail can vary; 8″ is the tallest we’ve seen in old peapods, but Maynard Bray, WoodenBoat’s technical editor, made a pair that has an extension 12″ above the rail of his peapod. He uses the same 7-1/2′ oars that he uses while sitting, but would prefer they were 1′ longer.

The choice of extensions, their height and mounting, is going to vary depending on your boat. The easiest modification is a fabricated metal tube and rod or cast lock system. A wooden extension could be easy to make for a boat with open gunwales, but a boat without slots between the inwale and sheer planks would need at least a wooden “partner” to hold the extension.

The oars normally used for the boat can also work with extended locks; you may have to pull the handles farther inboard, and that may pull the leathers away from the locks. If you have other oars, a pair 6″ longer may be a better match for stand-up rowing. Many of today’s rowing and sailing boats have high initial stability and are good candidates for stand-up push rowing, especially when the wind is light. You may enjoy the better view you get with your head high and looking in the direction you’re going.

Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.

Editor’s Notes

Eager to follow Ben’s lead and do some stand-up rowing, I made three sets of extensions, two for my 14′ New York Whitehall and one for my cruising garvey.

For the metal extensions to fit in the existing oarlocks, I found a good match with a 0.5″ bronze round bar and a brass tube with a 0.51 ″ inside diameter. I later found a 0.5 ″ brass round bar that would have cost a little bit less and should have worked, as well. The tube’s inside diameter turned out to be too small for the 1/2″ shanks of my locks, but that was easily remedied by drilling out a couple of inches of one end with a 1/2″ drill bit. The drill bit should have been a slip fit, but it shaved just enough from the inside to provide the right fit for the oarlock shank. The bronze round bar was oversized for the oarlock socket. I didn’t want to drill out the socket and make a sloppy fit for normal rowing, so I needed to trim one end of the rod to fit. A 1/2″ socket fitted to a hex-bit adapter and taped to the rod with Gorilla tape provided a way to spin the rod with a drill. A file was ineffective at removing metal, but a piece of 120-grit aluminum oxide sandpaper squeezed around the spinning rod worked very well. I did the trimming at the boat, and tested the rod frequently in the oarlock socket for fit. I left 2″ of the rod’s end in the socket untouched.

All that was left was to join the rod and the tube. The specified dimensions should have made a slip fit, but the rod was too large for the tube. I put the rod in the freezer for a half hour and then heated the tube in boiling water in a stainless-steel cake pan set on the stove top. The cold shrank the rod while the heat expanded the tube and the changes were just enough to get a tight slip fit. I was ready with a hammer and a block of hardwood to protect the kitchen floor. I acted quickly and pounded the 2″ of untrimmed rod into the undrilled end of the tube. It took just a few seconds for the two pieces to lock together and, once they were both the same temperature, they were as good as welded.

For lanyards to tether them to the boat, I drilled a hole through the new extensions at the joins. I fixed a piece of ipe to two steam-bent frames below the oarlock socket and drilled a 1″ hole in it to accept the bottom end of the shank.

The shanks have a tight fit in the ipe, so the extensions are stationary, and the oarlocks rotate in the tubes. These extensions raise the oarlocks by 6″, the length of the brass tubes.

The wooden extensions I made for the Whitehall raise the oarlocks 10″ above the gunwale. The 3/4″ oak I had on hand was thinner than the top flange of side-mount oarlocks, so I glued a piece of oak to the tops to make them thicker. I cut straight tenons at the bottom of the extensions; they rest against the sheer plank and butt against the lap with the next plank.

These tenons require cleats across the adjacent frames to hold the ends of the tenons in position. The alternative, seen in one of the photos in Ben’s article, is to cut the tenons to follow the curve of the frames, which has the advantage of allowing a longer tenon and a more stable extension.

My third set of extensions was based on an old photo Ben sent to me. It was taken in Oceanville, Maine, in 1902 and shows a half-dozen skiffs clustered around the bow of a schooner. One of the small boats is equipped with extensions, apparently made of wood, with round notches, open at the top, to accommodate the oars. I made a similar set for my cruising garvey, HESPERIA. They are 3/4″ oak, 5-1/2″ wide and 16″ long. For oars that are 2-1/2″ in diameter at the leathers, I made an oval opening 3-3/8″ wide. At the bottoms, cleats glued on one side capture the cockpit coaming of the garvey, and 1/4″ brass bolts hold the extensions in place. The coaming is part of the gunwale and is structurally quite strong. These extensions raise the oars 8-1/2″ above the coaming.

The oars I use for the Whitehall are spoon blades, and while they worked with boat extensions, they felt a bit awkward. Extensions set the oars at a higher angle, causing the blades to be more vertical in the water. Spoons are designed for a stroke just below the surface of the water and parallel to it; they move a short distance sideways to get in and out of the water. The steeper angle of the oars changes the way the blades move through the water and how deep they’ll go, and the spoon blades seem to create much more drag when used with extensions. The jury is still out: I need larger oarlocks to fit the pair of straight-bladed oars that should work with the Whitehall extensions.

The oars for my garvey have straight blades like the oars used by the peapods and other workboats equipped with oarlock extensions. Straight blades are often used with a dory stroke, in which the blades move through the water edge first and go well below the surface. That stroke is much better suited to the steeper angle of oars when using extended locks.

My wooden extensions work especially well with the garvey. It’s a stable boat with a beam of 6′, so it’s steady underfoot while I’m standing. The oval openings in the extensions allow the oars to swing through an arc more than adequate for a full stroke. Rounding the edges of the opening with a 1/4″ quarter-round router bit added to the range of motion. Getting the blades in and out of the water is as easy as it is when rowing while seated. At the catch and through the drive the handles are at shoulder level, and I just lean on them to provide power. Rowing in reverse is also uncomplicated and effective; I lean back and just hang by my arms from the handles. If the oar were to hit an obstruction, the extension doesn’t pivot like an oarlock does and could be damaged, but since I’m looking over the bow, it’s not likely I’ll run into anything.

The Garvey extensions are a great success.

You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.

Third Reef Foulies

Audrey, aka Skipper, has always wanted foulweather gear, but the most common foul weather we had along the Florida Gulf Coast was withering heat and humidity. That all changed when we moved from the Panhandle to the mid-Atlantic coast. Now, wind and cold spray have become part of our maritime weather, and this year she got her first set of foulweather gear, the Third Reef jacket and bibs from West Marine. They worked so well that I got a set, too.

The jacket’s outer shell has two layers of nylon and a laminate of polyurethane. The combination is windproof, waterproof, and breathable. The nylon fabric has a soft feel and is very flexible. The jacket lining is polyester tricot mesh, which dries quickly and wicks moisture to aid in breathability. Inside the jacket, all the seams are taped to make them waterproof.

The zippers are YKK Vislon marine-grade, with Delrin teeth for low friction, and resistance to wear, UV, and corrosion. Pull tabs provide easier operation with gloves or cold hands. The front opening and pocket zippers are waterproof. The two-way front zipper optimizes ventilation, and opening the bottom end a bit prevents restriction when sitting or bending at the waist. There are five conveniently placed front pockets; four are large enough to reach into with a gloved hand and one on the chest is sized for a small smart phone. The waterproof pocket zippers also have large storm flaps with Velcro fastenings that make the flaps easy to open. There are pieces of retroreflective tape on the hood, shoulders, and wrists, although the women’s jacket does not have the tape on the shoulders. The large tail of the jacket is made from ballistic nylon and provides excellent coverage when seated.

The high collar is lined with microfleece and houses a hood. The two-layer, high-visibility-yellow hood is large enough to wear with a watch cap underneath. It has an elastic cordwith slider for one-handed adjustment of the face opening, and a Velcro tab on the top to adjust brim placement. This adjustment keeps the hood in place when the wind is blowing. The hood turns with the wearer and doesn’t get in the way of over-the-shoulder glances. When not needed, the brim can be folded back out of sight. Inside the jacket there is an elastic cord -and-slider adjustment for the bottom hem, and similar adjustments for the waist cinch in both lower pockets. The outer cuff and inner liner sleeve have Velcro closures.

The jacket has an excellent tapered fit yet is sized to allow for wearing insulating layers underneath. Skipper is an experienced tailor with four decades of sewing experience, and she notes that the sleeves are cut like those of a good suit jacket, with a one-part upper sleeve and two-part under sleeve, which allows better mobility for tending to spars, hauling sails, and adjusting lines on our sailboats. The flat pockets and smooth outer shell prevent catching on cleats, oar handles, tillers, belaying pins, standing rigging, and the like. We found that the outer layer sheds water well. The jacket also has a nice weight and feel, is machine washable, and can be tumble-dried on low. There is a ring placed below the chest pocket to attach a lanyard for a whistle or an outboard motor’s kill switch.

The Third Reef bibs are also made of waterproof, windproof, breathable nylon with taped internal seams. The wide elastic shoulder straps are adjustable and can be released from the bib front. There is ballistic-nylon reinforcement in the seat, knees, and cuff backs, as well as Velcro on the cuff closures, which open wide enough to fit over rubber boots. The YKK waterproof zippers used on the thigh pockets get extra protection from storm flaps. The women’s bibs have two side-entry zippers; the men’s bib entry zipper is placed on the front of the bib and is backed by a gusset. The generous cut of the material at the hips and knees aids range of motion, which comes in handy when shifting weight and balance while on board as well as while getting in and out of boats at the dock and on the shoreline. Retroreflective trim above the knees helps in low-light visibility. Unlike the jacket, the bibs are unlined, which promotes quick drying and reduces weight.

To simulate a downpour and windblown rain, I’ve had Skipper spray me with the garden hose while I wore the jacket and bibs and performed a variety of boating tasks—I even went into the cold shower with the gear on—and have found no leaks.

The Third Reef line of foulweather gear has many well-thought-out features and does not feel restrictive or heavy, which makes it comfortable to wear for extended periods and affords plenty of mobility for all types of boating. While our Third Reef gear is new to us this year, Steve, our retired U.S. Coast Guard friend, has had his Third Reef foulies for about four years, and he reports that there have been no leaks and that the materials are holding up well.

Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about along the mid-Atlantic coast in a variety of motor, sail, oar, and paddle boats from 8′ to 19′. They are planning future expeditions for the James, Chesapeake, Delaware, and Mobjack bays, and the Outer Banks. They blog their adventures at Small Boat Restoration.

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.

Woodboy

Japanese saws—nokogiri—have long been favored by boatbuilders. Because they cut on the pull stroke, they can be made thinner, which makes the kerf smaller and the sawing easier. There are several types of Japanese saw, each for different purposes. My favorite has been the kataba, meaning “cutting on one side,” a small saw with a long rectangular blade. My first kataba saws had fixed blades set in wooden handles wrapped in rattan. The later versions had removeable blades, which was handy for storing the saw and for replacing the blade, but not while using the saw and needing to put it safely away between tasks.

The Silky’s Woodbay is an update of the kataba, with modern materials and new features. It’s a folding saw, and in a heartbeat it can go from 22″ long, with its blade extended and its teeth exposed, to 12″ folded, with its cutting edge protected from damage—and your hands protected from its sharp teeth.

The Woodboy’s blade is 10″ long and 2-1/8″ wide. A fine, uniform pattern of arcs on the sides indicate that the blade was machined, so I took my digital caliper to it. The back edge is 1/32″ thick and the middle is thinned to 1/64″. At its cutting edge, the blade is 3/128″ thick, so even though there is no set to the teeth, the kerf made by the teeth provides enough clearance for the body of the saw. It won’t bind.

There are 27 teeth per inch and they are shaped in the manner typical of Japanese saws. The gullets create tall, narrow teeth, and a bevel at the top of each tooth create a durable cutting point. The teeth are very sharp. I inadvertently brushed a knuckle across them and they didn’t just scratch me as I would have expected. They drew blood.

The teeth are evidently hardened and are an even match for a file. Neither one easily makes a mark on the other. The hardness of the steel and the diminutive size of the teeth make it impractical to resharpen the saw. Replacement blades are available. Unscrewing the pivot bolt to change blades takes on a few seconds.

The handle is aluminum, and its slot is lined with plastic to protect the saw’s teeth. On the outside of the handle there is a ridged rubber grip that is non-slip and comfortable to hold. A spring-loaded latch holds the saw open in two positions: parallel with the blade and angled up from it. The latter, according to Silky, is to provide clearance for the knuckles when cutting dadoes on wide boards. I may stick with my router and table saw for dadoes.

The saw does beautiful work and cuts quickly and cleanly through hardwoods and softwoods alike whether rip-sawing or cross-cutting. It leaves a very smooth finish with scarcely perceptible scoring and on ash and oak will leave a cross-cut end that is even shiny in places. The flexible blade is perfectly suited to trimming pegs and bungs. Pressing the blade against the wood’s surface with one hand and operating the saw’s slightly raised handle with the other, makes a flush cut without scoring the surrounding area. Folded, the saw fits in an apron or pants pocket so it doesn’t go astray.

My traditional kataba saws have served well for decades, but with the arrival of the Woodboy, it’s time for them to let the new kid take over.

The Woodboy is available from Silky for $66.99. Replacement blades cost $44.99. Other retail and online woodworking stores also carry the Silky line.

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.

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.

RIPPLE

Sean Russell grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario in a small beachfront cottage outside of Toronto. His bedroom window looked out over the lake’s ocean-like expanse of water and he recalls “that view was more valuable than anything. It opened up great vistas. I imagined you could set sail and arrive at the Caribbean or anywhere, for that matter.”

The cottage was remote enough from television and movies that books were the family’s main form of entertainment. His parents were voracious readers and his mother read a lot of books to Sean, so many that when he was 10 years old he decided he’d be an author someday.

That someday came and he published his first book, a fantasy, in 1991 at the age of 39. He later wrote a series of books—the Lt. Charles Hayden historical naval-fiction novels—about men-of-war in the age of sail. He created THEMIS, a fictional frigate, and could see it in his mind’s eye in great detail, but the ship existed only in his imagination.

He moved to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and now lives in just a short walk to the water. His imagination turned to smaller boats, ones that he could actually build and use. He created hundreds of designs for rowing and sailing craft, at first drawing them by hand, and later with CAD programs. In our May 2016 issue, he shared with us his SWEET PEA, an 8′ strip-built peapod. While SWEET PEA served as a tender for his sailboat, it wasn’t designed for that role, and Sean decided to design a new small rowing boat to replace it. It would be a dory skiff, large enough to carry four adults, along with a propane tank, and groceries, and still have ample freeboard. It had to fit on the deck of the mothership between the mast and windlass, which set the length of the tender at 9′ 1-1/2″. For stability, the beam would be 4′ and the bottom would be 34″ across at its widest point. The plywood bottom, garboards, and transom would be assembled with stitch-and-glue construction, but to dress up the sides with another curve, the sheerstrake would be added as glued-lap plywood.

Some dory skiffs have the transom widened and the run flattened to accommodate an outboard, but Sean would have none of that. He even narrowed the transom and gave the bottom enough rocker to keep it from dragging. “We don’t like the sound of outboards,” he says, “and we don’t want to carry the fuel. And oddly, I like to row. Why one needs an outboard to go even 300 yards to the beach is a mystery to me, but then today’s tenders, most of which inflate, row terribly.”

Sean reports that his dory skiff, RIPPLE, “is a robust, stable little craft and rows beautifully. I think it will make a fine tender and a great little boat for exploring anchorages.” Sean’s RIPPLE is about as far as a boat could be from his frigate, THEMIS, but while both spring from his imagination, only RIPPLE can truly carry him away from shore.

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 Morris 17′ Model A

I picked up a Morris today at an estate sale…” writes an enthusiastic Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) Forum user. Photos of a wood-and-canvas canoe with sweeping lines illustrate his entry.

“Nice find!” responds a voice from New York.”

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s stuff, but I’m going to anyway. Seriously nice boat,” rings another.

The posts roll on. “They are great boats!” And finally, “Can’t wait to see it on the water.”

Who was B.N. Morris, and why do his canoes inspire such reverence?

Around the mid-1880s, B.N. (Bert) Morris set up his wood-and-canvas canoe shop on the banks of the Penobscot River in Veazie, Maine. A few miles south in Bangor, a decade earlier, Evan Gerrish had become the first commercial builder of this type of canoe in Maine—and perhaps the world. E.M. White followed Morris. All three companies predated the arrival of the Indian Old Town Canoe Company, founded around the turn of the 20th century.

The early wood-and-canvas canoes were direct descendants of the Penobscot birchbark canoes and, as with their predecessors, their design was pure utility; these were workboats used by guides and lumbermen. While the bark canoe is built on the ground starting with the bark skin hull and rails, the wood-and-canvas boat uses a form (somewhat like a cobbler’s last) and begins with the ribs and rails—uniform larger-scale production being one of the goals of the method. At the time, forms, also known as building jigs, were used to build peapods and skiffs in Bangor, but Gerrish was the first to link the form with the wood-and-canvas canoe. Earlier, all-wood canoes were being constructed in Peterborough, Ontario, and Canton, New York, utilizing forms, but Maine builders are believed to have devised their method independently.

Rollin Thurlow has been building wood-and-canvas canoes since the mid-1980s. He has taken measurements from and drawn lines for this 17′ canoe, a classic that Bert Morris designed early in the last century.

Bert Morris was the first Maine canoe-builder to adapt his design for the growing recreational market. As the company departed from the sleek native design (narrow beam, sharp entry), his boats became wider, fuller, and more stable. They acquired the elegant upturned sheer that would become Morris’s signature. Each detail led to a boat of uncompromised quality: Straight-grained, quarter-sawn planks were nailed snugly together (done to minimize swelling and to maximize strength), each with the appropriate number of tacks in a staggered pattern so not to crack the 3⁄8″-thick ribs. Rib grain was chosen for strength as well as aesthetic fluidity, and each rib (of the closed gunwale design) was cleanly tapered to fit into its mating inwale mortise. Rail grain was matched; decks fit tightly…the list goes on.

Sadly, in 1920 a fire destroyed Morris’s enterprise. At the time, he had 75 employees and was one of the largest and most respected canoe manufacturers worldwide. After the fire and for the last decades of his life, Bert returned to his roots and operated a one-man shop from his home.

After World War II, aluminum canoes chipped away at the wood-and-canvas canoe’s popularity, and by the mid-1960s fiberglass ruled the market. However, in the mid-1980s, a few impassioned builders led a wood-and-canvas revival. Among them was canoe-builder Rollin Thurlow. He chose the Morris 17′ Model A as one of the designs to help lead the charge.

Rollin carefully fits a deck piece around a steam-bent coaming. The coaming will be let gently into the inwales. Although closed (capped) wales were the norm very close to the time of this canoe’s debut in 1910, this model has open wales that enable better drainage.

Bearded, jovial, and quick with a laugh, Rollin is a humble grandfather to the wood-and-canvas canoe movement. Thurlow and his longtime friend, canoe-builder Jerry Stelmok, wrote The Wood & Canvas Canoe in 1987, a historical and how-to text now a mainstay in the libraries of most who have since plied the trade.

Rollin remembers fondly when (in his basement) he built the form for the Morris 17′ Model A—having taken the lines from a boat of 1910 vintage. For him, Morris came to symbolize the height of that romantic era in wood-and-canvas design. If the evolution of the canoe, hundreds of years in the making, were a hot fudge sundae, then Morris would be the shiny cherry perched atop that sweet bed of human ingenuity.

To paddle a Morris is to connect with living history. I had that opportunity on a backwoods pond a few minutes from Rollin’s shop. Several quick strokes brought the Morris up to speed. The breeze in my hair and an emerald wake put a smile on my face. The Morris holds its line with gusto, courtesy of its slight rocker (1⁄2″) and external keel (standard issue—7⁄8″ wide, tapering to 3⁄8″). The Morris has a relatively full entry that causes the bow to ride over the waves rather than crash through them. On that blue-sky day, I planted my knees against the ribs and rocked the hull to and fro as I glided over the quiet pond. The shallow arch of the hull (a compressed U-shape in section) gives the Morris stability without sacrificing comfort—it is an appropriate design for the average canoeist. I found it easy to pull a smooth vertical forward stroke along the edge of the gunwale, thanks, in part, to the 10 degrees of tumblehome. Open gunwales allow the boat, on land, to drain when rolled up on its side (before 1910, closed gunwales were the norm).

A traditional wood-and-canvas canoe is built on a sturdy form intended for mass-producing a single design. Here, ribs have been steam-bent over steel straps that wrap around the form—and planking has begun. Planks are fastened with small, solid brass canoe tacks that are driven through the planking and ribs, contacting the steel strapping below. This contact causes them to curl around and hook back into the rib from the inside, holding the plank fast to the rib.

The Model A was intended for general use. Its 17’1″ length overall allows for a nice blend of speed and legroom. Its 12″ depth provides some carrying capacity and enough freeboard to keep the waves at bay. The 33″ beam strikes a reasonable balance between performance and stability. At 85 lbs (dry weight), the Model A can be portaged by a single (albeit strong and determined) individual.

As I paddled, my eyes kept returning to the texture and shine of the hull’s cedar interior. The glow of the mahogany trim (rails, decks, thwarts, seats, and floor rack) and the long deck with its brass flag socket— dating back to canoe club days—give the Morris a regal finish (mahogany trim, exterior oak stem band, and long deck signify the Morris company’s Type Three finish).

A rather unique Morris detail is the cedar stem that splays (spreads) to 3″ at the heel. Stems of ash (7⁄8″ square) were the routine on other brands of canoes. It’s not completely clear why Morris deviated—perhaps because cedar is more rot-resistant than ash but, being softer, requires more girth.

Poling is a popular pastime among canoe enthusiasts.The Morris’s weight combined with her relatively flat bottom gives her good initial stability.This makes her an excellent choice for poling or for general use in calm waters.

This and the other details of a Morris canoe equate to a boat with lasting synergy. Subtleties such as plank fitting, matching grain, the shaping of trim, deck coaming, and copper seat spacers are independently easy to miss, but collectively they add up to the unique style of a Morris. “The canvas can hide a lot of things,” said Rollin. “But Morris canoes are always good wood underneath— the quality, the shape, the fits were all excellent. Morris was paying attention.” This attention to craftsmanship has found a kindred spirit in Rollin.

Peter Wallace, Rollin’s business partner and shop mate, poled around the pond in the Morris, his smiling yellow Lab keeping watch up forward. Peter reminded me of one of those starry-eyed sternmen floating the Charles River in Morris’s heyday. I imagined an onboard Victrola radiating love songs, enough cushions to keep the courtship cozy, and the canoe club pennant coursing in the breeze. Like those jubilant folks on the WCHA Forum, I too was entranced by a desire to capture a moment from another time; a time long ago and far away.

Rollin and I took one final spin. “A big part of a wooden canoe is just the appearance of it, the curves that a boat takes, the romance of it,” he said and then mentioned how wood tantalized his senses—the look, feel, and smell. “Maybe human development hasn’t progressed out of the woods that much, maybe we’re still attracted to wood that way.”

The upturned sheer (a signature of the Morris canoe) and long, sweeping decks are but a few of the elegant features that set this design apart from many other wood-and-canvas canoe designs. Construction drawings show information in quarters, rather than in halves, due to the canoe’s symmetrical ends. Body plan views show possibilities for two construction methods: stripping and traditional wood-and-canvas.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 — plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store.

Grey Seal

Big enough to cruise in…small enough to trailer…” The world of boats abounds in designers’ earnest efforts to meet this Catch-22 challenge; a quest in which accommodations, size, weight, seaworthiness, and looks are more often than not mutually exclusive. Some designers produce marvels of ergonomics; some, triumphs of efficient construction. Rarely do they succeed on all counts, though. Then came Grey Seal.

Twenty-five years or so back in the mists, Iain Oughtred sojourned at WoodenBoat, and during his tenure as designer-in-residence he was challenged to develop a cruising boat for the home builder. He delved into the centuries of European traditional boats he had filed away in his well-traveled mind and soon latched onto a Norse-style hull, as it was roomy, “floaty” (seaworthy), and could be built in ubiquitous plywood. While in his mind he was working up a sort of double-ended Folkboat, the resulting Grey Seal design hearkens strongly to a smallish “spidsgatter.” These haunting Danish craft had their genesis as 19th-century rough-water fishing boats and, in the first decades of the 20th century, evolved into cruising boats and eventually into several racing classes of varied sizes (see WB No. 78). The practical result of Oughtred’s blended genetic and acquired memories is a robust, shapely, seagoing sailboat that lives within reason on its own trailer.

Grey Seal is noteworthy for combining grace, strength, space, and performance. The construction is glued lapstrake plywood (1⁄2″ planking) with deep though widely spaced laminated frames that make for a seemingly bulletproof hull. By “bulletproof” I mean that Oughtred made Grey Seal’s hull sufficiently rugged to carry a 1,200-lb lead keel, stand up to a large rig in a hard chance, and also hold up well under the indignities of trailering. Key to her seaworthiness and livability is that while double-ended, she carries her beam well aft to a magnificently shaped, very full stern, a tell-tale of this talented designer’s eye. He includes many options in his detailed plans (12 sheets!), offering both keel and keel/centerboard versions, marconi or gunter rigs, and a wide variety of interior arrangements. While intended for the home builder, this is serious boatbuilding, full of big, heavy, curvy things—and not for the faint of heart. WATERDOG, featured here, was built by Craig Hohm, a talented and dedicated amateur.

Photo by Geoff Kerr

Grey Seal is a comfortable pocket cruiser. Her double-ended shape, strong sheer, and lapstrake planking hearken to her Scandinavian influence. Glued lapstrake construction makes her accessible to the home builder.

Upon completion of a Fundamentals of Boatbuilding course at WoodenBoat School, Craig built a traditional Catspaw Dinghy, which remains a happy family member. Craig and his wife, Sue, were then tempted by the idea of a trailerable cruiser. Pull out your atlas and put your finger on their Penn Yan, New York, home. Now trace a circle of a one-day’s-drive radius…you can imagine their inspiration within the wide world of cruising waters in range of a week’s vacation. As they researched the possible designs then available, Grey Seal rose quickly and definitively to the top for one simple reason: To them, she was the most attractive boat of the lot.

In retrospect (always the safest viewpoint for a boat- builder), Craig had the skills, space, budget—and the moxie—to pull off what turned out to be a five-year project. He and I are in agreement that boatbuilding skills are but half of the personal resources needed to complete a project of this scope. The remaining portion is composed of some combination of patience and resourcefulness. In other words, managing the project is as important as carpentry skill. This builder knew when he needed help, and sought guidance not only from the designer, but also from cadre of third-party gurus. Moray McPhail at Classic Marine in the United Kingdom provided invaluable assistance in specifying and supplying the rigging, including designing and fabricating tricky custom pieces like the tabernacle. Douglas Fowler, of Ithaca, New York, put his subtle skills to work building sails for the sophisticated gunter rig. Triad Trailers in New Milford, Connecticut, collaborated on a custom trailer designed not only to fit the hull but also to ease the challenges of launch, recovery, and storage. Craig also availed himself of the advice and assistance of professional boatbuilders, picking their brains at local and regional shows when deciding on procedures and products.

Six years of sailing WATERDOG have confirmed for Craig and Sue that their choice of design and concept of the boat’s use were good
calls. Having the best of both worlds, the boat spends the sailing season in a slip at a Keuka Lake marina just minutes from their home, a swan among the carpeted party barge toads. The Hohms can be underway for an impulsive sunset cruise in moments or, with just a couple of hours of prep and rigging, WATERDOG can be secure on her trailer and ready for a vacation cruise. Adventures to date include cruising Lake Champlain, the Thousand Islands, Lake Ontario, and the North Channel.

Photo by Geoff Kerr

House sides flow forward, past the cabin. Looking aft, the coaming also flows beyond its border.These exten- sions provide good toeholds, and their varnished surfaces lead the eye to a thoughtful interplay between painted surfaces, which contribute to WATERDOG’s stunning profile. A bright toerail completes the picture.

The tow package, which approaches 6,000 lbs, pulls readily behind a standard-sized, four-wheel-drive pick-up. A V-8, yes, but certainly not a monster truck, and well within reason as an everyday vehicle in the North Country. While trailer brakes are standard with a rig of this size, other keys to the rig’s success are the load- distribution bars which spread the tongue weight more evenly among front and rear wheels of the tow vehicle. This boat, its trailer, and a mildly oversized door in one bay of the Hohms’ garage allow WATERDOG to “hibernate” between seasons.

My singular impression of Grey Seal in the flesh is of a serious small ship. This vessel is a fully realized, full-featured cruising boat with adult-sized components carried on a small hull. She somehow manages to be robust yet graceful, and compact without looking “cute.” She is stoutly rigged without seeming overburdened. Hardware and rigging are sized and laid out for seaworthiness without looking too “epic,” one of Moray MacPhail’s particular fears. Her accommodations are spartan but functional. The Hohms have two individual berths that serve for seating and sleeping, each one fitted with a lee-side catch-all; a simple galley with a critically important gimbaled stove; and a full-sized marine head, installed without space-hogging partitions. Their choices make for open, weather-tight, and homey living for two.

The cockpit is an important domestic space on a boat of this size, doing double duty as the saloon. WATER- DOG’s custom “chuck wagon” awning encourages use of this space during wet and—as important—hot and sunny weather. While up to four adults could spend a comfortable day aboard, the boat is best thought of as a cruiser for only two, who will find her comfortable for serious, shall we say, medium-term cruising.

Photo by Geoff Kerr

WATERDOG offers a “cozy” sleeping space for two and a basic galley at the companionway. The gimbaled propane single burner attached to the stan- chion between berths makes getting the morning coffee an easier reach for the bleary-eyed.

Craig chose to include a two-cylinder 10-hp diesel that turned out to be a bit of a squeeze. (Oughtred’s drawings provide only the merest indication of engine details.) Consequently, WATERDOG’s mechanicals took a full year to spec, lay out, and install. With that struggle now behind, the reliable, amply sized auxiliary not only extends the Hohms’ cruising range and their ability to meet a schedule, but provides some peace of mind should conditions get dicey.

Some final thoughts about the options included in the design and the choices made for WATERDOG: Craig and Sue have found little or no difference in the boat’s sailing ability with the board up or down, so I’d be tempted to simplify construction and build the keel version which, being only slightly deeper, really wouldn’t make much difference in trailering or in cruising.

The rig options don’t really seem an option to me. The gunter rig is so much more attractive that, in my opinion, the marconi drawing should be discarded! Besides its good looks, the gunter rig’s shorter mast has less windage at anchor and is easier to step and unstep.

The Grey Seal design probably marks the upper limit of the “Small Boats” concept. Even a patient home builder will spend a considerable amount of capital to realize this dream, and having one professionally built will up the ante, big-time. She may well be worth it, though, for this superb vessel is as lovely and as capable as anything I could ever imagine. She captures the Norse spirit—but in an eminently accessible form.

Grey Seal’s lines promise a hearty, buoyant, and able boat. That hint of hollow aft in her waterlines contrib- utes to the lightness in the look of her stern.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 — plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store.

North Star Kayak

Rob Macks is a boatbuilder who is also a sculptor and educator. He has been building canoes and kayaks for more than 20 years, doing business as Laughing Loon Custom Canoes & Kayaks in Jefferson, Maine. His North Star design is a strip-built kayak that he has offered since 1993. It is based on the baidarka, a construct of the Aleut kayakers for their forays into the Bering Strait and other northern waters. Traditional baidarkas are skin-on-frame, and most builders conform to that building method. The initial structure devised by the native people involved strips of wood and bone lashed together with sinew and then covered with walrus skin. A modern version typically has a wood frame with a canvas “skin” sewn on, although George Dyson, who wrote a groundbreaking book on baidarkas and is a significant figure in Rob’s life, builds them using bent aluminum tubing for the frames and heat-shrink Dacron for the skin.

Rob’s desire to build the North Star actually was kindled by George Dyson, a scientific historian and kayak designer. In listening to one of his lectures, Rob was awed by Dyson’s description of the baidarka’s handling and speed. Inspired, Rob gave serious study to the type, which included hours and hours poring over anthropological drawings and making many pilgrimages to museums. Eventually, Rob came up with his own interpretation of this ancient watercraft.

Photo by Serafina Carlucci

Basing his design on the baidarkas (skin-on-frame boats) used by Aleut paddlers, sculptor and boatbuilder Rob Macks developed the North Star kayak, a stripped version of the type.

Rob tweaked the traditional design while staying true to its spirit. With length overall of 18′ 4″, a beam of 22 1⁄2″, and a weight of about 40 lbs, the North Star is quite a bit larger than a native Aleut kayak (which is between 16′ and 16 1⁄2′ LOA). The bigger size provides more stowage and carrying capacity, and also makes the boat more suitable for a larger paddler. The cockpit is a touch farther aft, but well positioned over the center of balance, which makes for convenient portaging. Rob has added quite a bit of rocker compared to the traditional design to make the longer boat turn easier. Hatches are set into the deck and held there with magnets to maintain the sleek form while still giving easy access to stowed gear.

The bifurcated bow and the pinched-off stern are the most noticeable elements of the North Star’s baidarka heritage. The bow serves two purposes: to cleave the waves in preparation for the more subtle and rounded hull shape that is to follow, and to keep the boat tracking straight through wind and waves. Forward of the cockpit the boat is full-bodied, like a fish. As you move aft of the cockpit, the stern begins to terminate relatively soon in a pinched-off shape that acts like a fixed rudder in a following sea. The short stern is also helpful in maneuvering, and reduces windage and the boat’s inclination to “weathercock” (veer into the wind).

Laughing Loon was the first—and may remain the only—company offering Aleutian region baidarka-style sea kayaks as hard-shell “strippers.” Rob’s style of stripping differs from other builders who use the method.

Photo by Serafina Carlucci

The “popsicle stick” paddle offers many advantages to the sea kayaker. A small hollow on the power face of the blade keeps the boat moving while its slender form spares it from being caught by sudden gusts. It’s also handy when the paddler needs to grab the blade for better leverage.

First, he uses 3⁄16″-thick strips as opposed to the conventional 1⁄4″. This is a small difference, but he contends that the addition of epoxy and fiberglass cloth gives the hull plenty of strength. The thinner strips make for easier bending and also make the boat somewhat lighter.

Second, Rob uses Northern white cedar below the waterline because of its extreme flexibility, while above the waterline he uses less (but sufficiently) flexible Western red cedar and Northern white spruce.

Finally, he uses a heat gun to ease his strips into all the beautiful shapes that he needs instead of torturing them into submission. The wood’s lignin is reinvigorated by the addition of the heat, resulting in an easier bend and one that will stay put when let go. This boat is perhaps a little more work and more time-consuming to build than other ’yaks, but as I have heard said, “slow is smooth, and smooth is good.” Rob believes that any builder, even a tenacious amateur, can successfully build the North Star, and he estimates that fast builders can do the job in only 300 hours.

Photo by Serafina Carlucci

While construction of the curvaceous North Star will present some challenges, the sight of her variegated strips under varnish and her agility in the water will make it all worthwhile.

Rob treated me to a paddle in the North Star on the Damariscotta River. There were not many huge waves this day, but we would have current to play with.

Stepping into the kayak, I was surprised at how much flex there was in the wooden hull despite its being sheathed in epoxy and ’glass—perhaps it’s because of that missing 1⁄16″ in the thickness of the strips.

Turning comes from a combination of leaning and utilizing the paddle to get a longer lever arm. The paddle—a work of art in its own right—is an essential part of how this kayak works. Looking nothing like modern paddles with their large blades and carbon-fiber looms, this one is a short, light, spruce popsicle stick–shaped affair that isn’t inclined to be blown about as you use it. The slightly hollow, power face of the blade has just enough surface area to keep the boat moving. If you need more thrust for a particularly sharp turn, you offset the paddle by moving your grip toward one end to create a longer lever arm. Of course, you can do this with any paddle, but the nice thing about these paddles is that you can offset them more because your grip can encompass the narrow blade, which fits nicely in your hand.

As mentioned earlier, the North Star can accommodate larger people (it’s best for people who are around 6′ tall). It is slightly too large for me. So for people of smaller stature, Rob also offers the Fire Star (17′ LOA, 21″ beam, 35 lbs), a scaled-down version of the North Star.

Both of these boats are based on a time-tested design and are meticulously constructed with high-quality materials. Rob has a passion for his designs and a sincere desire to get people building them. He encourages success through a wide variety of teaching aids that cater to different learning styles. His 88-page instruction book has more than 200 photographs of the building process. His website is also filled with tips and techniques that range from how to rip the strips to what type of glue to use and why. He is also very accessible and personable.

The warmth of the varnished wood playing among all of those compound curves makes the North Star a real head-turner. But for Rob, a lot of this is about fun. He enjoys the creative process as well as the building and the helping. Having something beautiful to behold and make use of in paddling into a snug harbor at the end of a day is an amazing reward, but to Rob, that’s just the icing on the cake.

The North Star’s slightly compressed U-shaped sections strike a happy medium between stability and minimal wetted surface.The profile shows a generous amount of rocker—which reduces wetted surface even further and improves agility.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 — plans are available from Laughing Loon Custom Canoes & Kayaks.

Biscayne Bay 14

During the last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Nathanael Greene Herreshoff designed some of the most complex, graceful, and ultimately successful racing and pleasure yachts in existence. Part of his genius was to also apply these same design skills to smaller and simpler craft such as the Fish class, the ubiquitous Buzzards Bay 121⁄2, and the object of my affection (and this discussion), the Biscayne Bay 14. Apparently, only about a dozen of these sailing skiffs (model 908) were ever produced by the Herreshoff Mfg. Co., all in the 1920s.

After retiring (for the first time) in 1998, I built a pair of Biscayne Bay 14s (BB14s): mine, named MR.BILL, and one for a friend. My habit of building two at a time came from my own apprenticeship in the 1970s with master craftsman Gary Kincaid. This approach spreads the costs, shares skills and space, and can offer you a willing companion for adventures after launching day. I recommend the concept of “building buddies.”

My decision to build a BB14 was based on its heritage, performance, low cost, and ease of transport. Another plus is the optional use of modern materials to create a strong hull that can be day-sailed directly from the back- yard to the water. The choice has proven to be a good one for me. During the past decade, MR. BILL has sailed waters ranging from the Gulf of Maine to Buzzards Bay.

Photo by Darin Carlucci

The Biscayne Bay 14, designed by N.G. Herreshoff, is a delightful, low-cost daysailer that transports easily and is a good performer. Jim Austin built his for exploring Muscongus Bay, Maine, with his wife, Darcy.

The plans for the BB14 as sold by WoodenBoat are complete and are backed up by an optional handbook taken from step-by-step construction articles, including lots of helpful photos. There is the choice to build the boat with a fixed keel, which would probably improve windward performance over the shallow keel/centerboard option that we chose. With the centerboard, MR. BILL nests snugly onto a small trailer for easy transport.

Although perfect as a singlehander, the BB14 often carries my wife as well as me over the waters of Maine’s Muscongus Bay, allowing us to explore the mouth of a small creek, run up on the beach for a picnic, or slide gracefully down the faces of ocean swells coming in past Monhegan. But don’t be fooled: this idyll comes at a price. The BB14s were designed for the warm, shallow waters of Florida, and there they will perform wonderfully. However, up in New England, you must pick your weather carefully and be prepared for a refreshing splash or two when beating to windward. I’ve added a V-shaped coaming forward of the mast to aid in deflecting the icy water before it reaches me or the cockpit. Since we chose the centerboard option, the next time I retire we could easily tow MR. BILL south to a place where the temperature more closely approximates our age.

Photo by Darin Carlucci

The Biscayne Bay 14 is a great design to build as plans indicate or to modify according to individual use.

Construction of the shallow keel with centerboard slot is challenging. The shape is well defined in the plans and a mold is not too difficult to build, but if you’ve never melted lead before, it could be a daunt- ing prospect and best left to a professional. For the rest of you pirates, there’s treasure in old chimney flashing, used tire weights, bits of plumbing—or an old, abandoned iron bathtub in which to melt all this material. The process of casting is well detailed in easily accessed articles and books (see WB No. 89).

The hollow mast is fun to build as described in the plans. I used carefully chosen and dried lumberyard spruce 2×4s, 2×6s, and 2×8s, as they make a strong, light-weight stick, which has never failed me in years of hard use. There are other spar-building techniques such as “bird’s mouth” (see WB No. 149) that can be used if you love more complex geometry.

The BB14 design calls for a watertight compartment forward of the mast. As a longtime builder, I dislike parts of a boat that are inaccessible. As a long-time sailor, though, I love the idea of flotation in small boats. My solution was to create a space under the foredeck with an opening and an air bag. The bag can be inflated during use, and deflated and removed for inspection and maintenance. I keep a small picnic anchor and rode in the same space, which helps add a little weight forward to keep her nose in the water when going to windward.

To build my BB14, I used marine-grade Okoume plywood, local oak and spruce, bronze fastenings, and epoxy. My favorite tool for cutting plywood is a 31⁄2″ 9V-battery-powered circular saw outfitted with a plywood blade (for a thin kerf). The saw’s lightweight makes it quite handy, although you may want a backup battery for extended cutting. Finish was mostly marine paint with some show-off varnish on spars and coamings. All these materials have held up well with proper annual maintenance.

Photo by Darin Carlucci

With lots of sail area in the mainsail, she will perform well under the main alone for those times, such as sailing in harbor, when using the jib is a bother.

When arriving at a launch site, it takes me about 20 minutes to step the mast, bend on the sails, hang the rudder, grab the picnic basket and the PFDs—and off we go. I sewed up a boom tent to keep the rain out when the boat is stored outside and to cover the cockpit while underway on the road. I found an old jib that makes a serviceable 120-percent genoa for use when there are two people on board in light air or when the fever of competition overcomes my natural caution. The self-tending jib shown on the drawings is efficient and effortless in operation, but there seems to be a little too much weather helm in these dense northern breezes, so the larger jib is helpful for balance as well as speed. Another alteration I made was to provide additional support for the side decks. My playing weight is close to that of an NFL running back, and when the breeze pipes up it’s fun to hike out and get the most out of the boat; that’s when I’m thankful for the stronger deck.

I’ve enjoyed how well this design works if built exactly as the plans specify; at the same time, the boat provides a simple platform that begs for experimentation. Things I would never do to a Buzzards Bay 121⁄2 are fun to try out on a BB14 just because it isn’t too pedigreed to alter. After 10 years, MR. BILL has evolved to be quite different from my friend’s boat. Each has been customized by her owner. I owe a lot of fun and adventure to the genius of Capt. Nat—and to my many “building buddies.”

The Biscayne Bay 14’s well-drawn plans show why this daysailer is so inviting to build. The sections indicate that planking can be applied with a minimum of twist, and construction details provide an abundance of information to the builder.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 — plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store.

Caledonia Yawl

Built here at the WoodenBoat School, our Iain Oughtred-designed Caledonia Yawl, SWIFTY is a handsome and versatile double-ender, guaranteed to turn heads on any waterfront. She’s comfortable to sail in a stiff breeze and dazzles in light air and to windward.

Plans for Iain Oughtred’s Caledonia Yawl are available from The WoodenBoat Store.

Going Down the Road

For many people, trailering a boat is a good—and perhaps the only—way to get out on the water. Unfortunately, the trailer is often the very last thing the builder thinks about. After spending all that money and time building the boat, it is tempting to economize by buying a cheap, too-light rig. That’s a bad idea. A too-small trailer is not only short-lived, it’s also dangerous.

Like building the boat, the business of trailering begins with planning. The first step in formulating the plan is to check the tow rating of your vehicle to get an idea of how large a trailer you can haul. It’s best, however, to take those ratings with a grain of salt, for almost any vehicle will haul a glued-lap Whitehall a few miles over moderate terrain to the local launch ramp; such a scenario is unlikely to test the mettle of your automatic transmission’s cooling system or your radiator, or to push your tires to their limit. It’s quite another thing, however, to attempt towing your brand-new mahogany-planked Haven 12-1/2 (see page 90) with a 1978 Subaru through the Rockies in summer. In this case, a bit more consideration needs to be given to tow-vehicle selection and upkeep.

For example, an old friend, Bruce Armstrong, regularly takes his 20′ Tolman Skiff with outboard mounted from Southern California to Lake Powell in September. He reports running 70 mph in 100-degree heat, climbing 5,000′ grades in company with dozens of 18-wheelers. Bruce, noting “failure is not an option,” drives an industrial-strength 2001, 245-hp High Output Cummins powered Dodge 4×4 rated to tow 13,500 lbs.

While Bruce’s rig might be overkill for your situation, there are still many factors to consider when setting up for trailering. The following are some things to consider as you formulate your plan.

What Size Trailer?

Once you’ve determined your vehicle’s towing capacity, the next thing is to determine how much your boat weighs. For a small boat, if you don’t trust the weight specified in the design, this can often be done with simple bathroom scales. Another way to go is to place the boat on a borrowed trailer and take it to a truck scale. Bring the boat back home and weigh the trailer alone. Subtract this weight from the total boat-plus-trailer weight to give you the actual weight of the boat.

U.S. federal law requires that a trailer display its “Gross Vehicle Weight Rating” (GVWR), which is the total weight of boat and gear. When figuring the weight of the loaded trailer, be sure to include the boat, engine, gasoline (6 lbs per U.S. gallon), water (8 lbs per U.S. gallon), and gear. A useful margin of safety is that the total weight be no more than 85 percent of the GVWR. For larger boats, a tandem-axle trailer might be considered. They track better and are less prone to fishtail than single-axle trailers. Also, the extra wheels offer safer handling in case of a blowout.

Just as the trailer must be properly sized to the boat’s length and weight, the boat also needs to be properly braced, or cradled, by rollers and bunks—as least as well as when storing the vessel for winter. Boats are used to being uniformly supported by the water. When it’s out of the water, the boat has all the strain taken up at just a few places. Traditional wooden boats need more support than fiberglass ones. If necessary, augment the manufacturer’s standard equipment with homemade structures. Firehose-covered removable bunks will go a long way toward protecting the hull against the stress and strain of over-the-road travel; generally, they’re better than rollers, which tend to point-load a planked wooden hull, and thus cause damage. Outboard-powered wooden boats present a special problem, as the weight of the overhanging engine can stress the hull and even hog the keel. The transom should be directly and fully supported by a full trailer cross member.

Tongue Weight

Tongue weight is the weight of the trailer’s tongue at the vehicle. The general rule is that it be 10 percent of the total combined weight of boat and trailer. Too much weight on the tongue puts excessive stress on the towing vehicle’s suspension. Excessive tongue weight can also cause steering problems by reducing the weight on the vehicle’s front wheels. Conversely, if there is too much weight on the after portion of the trailer, it can sway and get twitchy, weaving back and forth. Weight can be adjusted by moving the boat back and forth, checking it with a scale.

Trailer Hitches

There are four classes of hitches; these are rated according to the weight (GVWR) they will be pulling. The ratings are as follows:

Class I: ……………………………………. 2,000 lbs
Class II: ………………………………….. 3,500 lbs
Class III: …………………………………. 5,000 lbs
Class IV: …………………………………. 10,000 lbs

Galvanized or Paint?

Unless the trailer is used only in fresh water, galvanized trailers will last longer and require less maintenance. Regardless of whether the trailer is galvanized or not, a thorough rinsing with fresh water after each saltwater immersion will also extend the life of the trailer. When rinsing, pay particular attention to the axles, which tend to rust more quickly than the trailer frame.

A Fitted Cover

A dandy trailer accessory is a fitted travel cover. This will keep the boat’s interior clean of road dirt during transit, saving cleanup time before launching. And, like those interior luggage compartment covers in passenger vehicles, a travel cover will also help keep expensive boat bits safe from prying eyes at rest stops.

A cover—especially a canvas one—is also great for helping to keep a wooden boat tight while it’s parked in the yard. Canvas ventilates when it’s dry, allowing fresh air in; when wet, the canvas swells a bit, keeping rainwater out.

Wheels and Tires

A tire or bearing failure going down the road at high- way speeds is bad news, yet in the rush to get going, often the running gear of a trailer is overlooked. To that end, let’s take a look underneath.

If you are buying a new trailer, consider one with larger wheels, as they do not have to work as hard as smaller ones. If you have purchased a used trailer, start by inspecting the tires. Do they have enough tread? Are they inflated properly to the manufacturer’s specifications? Inspect them for rot, cracking, and cuts. If in doubt, replace the tires. Trailer tires have thicker sidewalls than automobile tires. Be sure the previous owner did not mix bias-belted and radial tires; the trailer won’t track properly in this case. Take a look at the wheels: Salt water can raise the dickens with trailer rims. If they are rusty, give them a wire-brushing and look closer. If the wheel is too corroded and porous, it may not properly hold air. After cleaning, give the wheels a good coat of protective paint.

Over time, when launching, water can infiltrate the protective cover over the wheel bearings and cause them to wear or fail. It’s a good idea to annually jack up the wheels (one at a time) to check the bearings on the hub. Place a hand on either side of the wheel and rock it in and out to check for movement. There should be a slight amount of play, but if it is excessive the bearing may need to be adjusted or replaced. Some trailer owners use an aftermarket wheel-bearing protector like the “Bearing Buddy,” which is designed to keep a slight pressure of grease between the inside of the hub and the outside environment; this deters water infiltration into the axle hub. Bearing upkeep requires a couple of shots of grease before every trailer submersion. Savvy long-distance towers like my friend Bruce carry spare sets of bearings, tubes of grease, and adequate tools on long trips; they might also carry an entire hub-and-bearing assembly with them, mounted on a spare wheel and tire, ready to install by simply removing the cotter key and axle nut. Before going on a long tow, give the bearings one last inspection.

In many U.S. states, trailers with a GVWR of 1,500 lbs or more are required to have brakes on all wheels. If your trailer has brakes on the wheels, they, too, should be inspected. If you haven’t done this task in a while, it would be worthwhile taking the rig down to the local garage for the job.

Going Down The Road

With the inspections complete, we’re ready to hit the road. Before heading out, be sure the boat is properly tied down. At the bow, the winch cable and a safety stop line should be in place. There should be transom and ’midship tie-downs as well. Trailer hitch safety chains should be inspected. These chains should be attached to the towing vehicle with strong S-hooks or shackles. The chains should be crossed. They should be long enough to permit tight turns yet short enough to suspend the trailer tongue and keep it from slamming into the pavement if the hitch fails. Everything in the trailer should be properly stowed to prevent it flying out en route. Inspect the lights to confirm that they are, indeed, working. Check the wheel lug nuts and bring along your trailer jack, wheel nut wrench, breaker bar, and chocks. And don’t forget the roadside warning devices—reflective triangles, flares, etc. You’ll be glad you did.

While on the road, make a habit of checking on the trailer via the rear-view mirrors. Drive at moderate speeds and avoid sudden stops. You have probably doubled your customary wheel-base length—a good thing to keep in mind when passing or pulling through an intersection. Make wider turns at curves and corners. Because your trailer’s wheels are closer to the inside of a turn than the wheels of your tow vehicle, they are more likely to hit or ride up over curbs. Slow down when traveling bumpy dirt roads or when crossing railroad tracks. And allow more space for braking.

Stop and inspect the boat and trailer at regular intervals. Check the tie-downs and tire pressure. Feel the wheel bearing cover; it’s okay for it to be warm, but not hot. Inspect the hitch; it may need to be retightened. Are those lights still working?

Launching the Boat

A warm summer day can cause the local launching ramp to be a busy place, complete with lots of different kinds of boats and the corresponding personalities of those who own them. One thing they all have in common is that they all want to get into the water at the same time. It pays to be as organized as possible to expeditiously back the trailer into the water, pull the empty trailer out of the way, get loaded up, and clear the ramp.

Launching a boat is akin to landing an airplane: You are transitioning from one medium to another. If there is going to be a problem, this is a likely place for it to happen. So, it’s always good to plan ahead.

If you are new to backing a trailer, practice in a parking lot or field before getting to the launching ramp. While not difficult, it does take a bit of getting used to—whether you use mirrors or are able to crane your head around to see what is going on. Our man Bruce recommends the following: “When ready to start backing your rig, place your steering-wheel hand on the bottom of the steering wheel, look at your trailer in the rear-view mirror, and turn your hand in the direction you want your trailer to go as you engage reverse.” Back slowly, and if the trailer starts to jackknife, simply pull ahead a bit to realign the trailer and start again.

Launching your vehicle along with the boat is always considered poor form. It has been done. To avoid such an inconvenient situation, check the parking brake. Does it actually work, or is it merely ornamental and used only at vehicle inspection time? Try it on a steep hill. Putting a vehicle in “park” on a ramp and leaving the engine running is a seriously bad idea. Newspapers carry stories on a regular basis of cars driving off without their astonished owners who had dutifully “put their car in park”—on a level surface. It’s better to turn the engine off, with the transmission in park (or on a manual transmission, in first gear if the vehicle is pointed downhill, and in reverse if pointed uphill). If in doubt, have wheel chocks at the ready for insertion behind the rear wheels.

Remove all tie-downs and have everything (especially life jackets) ready to go, on the boat, before heading down the ramp. Have as much gear on board as possible, rig the mast (if you have one), have docklines and fenders ready, and (if it has one) test the boat’s engine ahead of time—especially if this is the first trip of the season— even if it ran great last fall. Disconnect the trailer-light coupling. Oh, and don’t forget the drain plug.

KATIE

Conceived at first as an 18′ open family daysailer for the Bryan family, this boat ended up growing a couple of feet in length and 6″ in beam to become a small cruiser with a cabin and overnight accommodations for two. N.G. Herreshoff’s Buzzards Bay 12 1⁄2-footer played a part, as those familiar with that design can readily see. These fine little boats have long captivated Harry and his wife, Martha, because they both grew up on the shores of Buzzards Bay, Harry in Westport and Martha in Padanaram and Naushon Island. Four of the original 121⁄2-footers of 1914 still sail from the island.

Joel White’s centerboard adaptation of the 12 1⁄2-footer’s larger sister (the Herreshoff Fish class), known as the Flatfish, also came into play since Harry’s new boat was more her size. For cruising, however, he needed something just a mite different. KATIE, built over a couple of years and launched in 2008, is the result.

Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz

Inspired by N.G. Herreshoff’s Buzzards Bay 12 1⁄2-footer and Joel White’s Flatfish, this 20′ cruiser, designed and built by Harry Bryan, cuts a handsome profile underway.

KATIE and Joel White’s Flatfish measure close to each other in hull and sail area, with KATIE being lighter by about 500 lbs, and narrower on deck by 6″. Harry gave her more freeboard and a larger cabin, and opted for a bowsprit for ease in handling and carrying the anchor. Her shorter forward overhang results in about a foot more waterline length. The big difference, and one sought for in her design is shallower draft. With centerboard raised, the Flatfish draws 2′ 2″, but KATIE is shallower by 6″!

The Bryans’ New Brunswick home fronts on a cove that dries out at low tide, so Harry devised a nearly neutral-buoyancy cradle for KATIE that supports her and holds her upright while grounded. That’s why her keel is built level, without the usual drag, or downward slope as it approaches the rudder. It’s a setup that opens possibilities for others having access only to tidal waterfront. At only 2,400 lbs, this boat also offers a chance for distant voyaging as it can be towed many miles behind the family car or pickup to reach the mecca of one’s choice. Once there, you can overnight or go longer and enjoy exploring an entirely new area. Camping onboard while on the road makes sense and saves on motel costs. With a level keel to sit on, she’ll look just right on a standard flatbed or boat trailer without requiring special blocking to level her waterline. A couple of people should be able to step or unstep her 65-lb, 25′ mast without the aid of a crane.

There can be no doubt of a boat this shallow needing a centerboard, but Harry kept it small and shaped it, and the trunk in which it lives, to be as unobtrusive as possible. The trunk is so short and so low that it seems like a convenient footrest in the cabin. The higher, aft part of the trunk runs up under the bridge deck, out of sight and completely out of the way. Interestingly, but not surprisingly for one who values native cedar and avoids plywood, Harry has designed a cedar-cored, fiberglass-and-epoxy-sheathed centerboard.

Photos by Bryan Gagner

Two berths that run up under the foredeck provide comfortable refuge for short-term cruisers. The centerboard trunk, made as unobtrusive as can be, doubles as a companionway step or a footrest.

KATIE’s accommodations are minimal to be sure, but she’s set up with all the short-cruise essentials: Two berths run up under the foredeck and, aft, serve as settees over which there’s full sitting headroom. Against the cabin’s aft bulkhead on both sides are shelves and lockers that can be tailored to suit whatever galley gear a person chooses to carry or build in, while farther aft under the bridge deck on each side of the centerboard trunk is space for provisions and more cruising gear. Way forward, beyond the berths, is a platform for additional stowage under which (under hinged flaps) the anchor rode lives.

The plans show an afterdeck and bridge deck that are slightly higher than the fore-and-aft cockpit settees that run between them. But, in this first boat, the Bryans decided to bring all to a common height to encourage outside sleeping and napping. Storage spaces are located under the afterdeck and at the forward end of the cockpit, under the overhanging bridge deck, where gear will stay reasonably dry.

Because the cockpit is made deep for comfort and is therefore not self-bailing, rainwater collects there. But the bulkhead is watertight, so the cabin remains isolated and dry. In the future, to take care of the rain, Harry plans on an awning or a solar-powered bilge pump.

Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz

Robust construction details like her square-sided, no-nonsense bowsprit and heavy toerails inspire confidence that she is well built and seaworthy.

How does KATIE sail? By observing her in moderate conditions when we photographed her last fall, I’d say fast and fine, completely under easy control the entire time. From the designer/ builder, here’s how Harry describes it: “The helm is perfect in the conditions we had for the photo shoot. Martha and I had her out in a puffy nor’wester and found that a single reef did much to ease the helm. Ultimately, if the helm should prove heavy, 8″ or 1′ added to the bowsprit and a larger jib should balance things. These are probably just the worries of a new parent hoping his baby isn’t defective in some way. She seems fast even before the wind is strong enough to ripple the water.”

The bowsprit adds shippiness forward, particularly with an honest-to-God stock anchor hanging from it, ready to be dropped instantly and retrieved without depositing mud on the deck. The gallows aft also gives a clear impression that this is a serious cruiser despite her small size. You have no worry about the boom whacking you on the noggin when lowering the mainsail; the boom gallows takes care of that and provides a secure support for the boom while tying in a reef. It’s a great, but largely unappreciated feature.

Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz

At 2,400 lbs, KATIE is easily trailered and her 65-lb mast can be stepped and unstepped by two people, making her the perfect little getaway cruiser for adventures near and far.

KATIE has no engine installed. There’s a big, curved sweep (oar) in two pieces that can be used either for sculling or for single-oared rowing, with the rudder offset to compensate. Harry has also equipped KATIE with a self-contained Torqeedo electric outboard motor (see review in WB No. 205). Knowing Harry, and having a good idea of how well KATIE moves under sail, I doubt if either will ever see much use.

KATIE’s firm bilges, moderate deadrise, and decidedly “shippy” sheer relate the influence of N.G. Herreshoff’s Buzzards Bay 121⁄2 while her underwater profile indicates her kinship to Joel White’s keel/centerboard Flatfish. KATIE will prove a fine legacy to her forebears.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 — for more information, visit Bryan Boatbuilding.

Refuge in the Rain

Fritzie Sparks, my best friend’s mother, was fond of saying “Stress is the thing,” whenever the topic of illness came up in conversation. She’d tap the tips of her fingernails on the table or countertop to drive the point home. That was back in the ’70s, and it was just one of those things teenagers would find amusing about parents, but now that I’ve drifted into the older generation she once occupied, I can better appreciate her wisdom. In my teens the only things I recall being stressed about were acne and getting better grades than Mike Sharmin and Doug Shaffer, my high-school rivals. Now I have a long list of worries from an ongoing pandemic and pants growing ever tighter to meeting work deadlines and living in a 100-year-old house in an earthquake zone that’s bracing for the “big one.”

For the past month, as the gloom of winter’s coming has darkened the skies of shortened days, I’ve chosen to take refuge not from the rain but in it. I’ll put on a couple of pile jackets, a knit hat, and my cagoule and sit in the back yard on a boat cushion set on an upside-down 5-gallon bucket—an orange one from Home Depot. The raindrops falling on my hood sound like salt sprinkled into a paper bag.

I recently read that the sound of rain has a soothing effect that’s related to an elevated level of alpha waves generated by the brain. It’s a response that is also associated with meditation. I’d first heard of alpha waves when I was in college in the late ’70s and I was swept up in two trends that made short-lived marks on my generation: Earth shoes and Transcendental Meditation. I wore a pair of the first model of those shoes—with lowered heels and wide, squared toe boxes that looked like cartoon duck feet—when I took an off-campus class in TM. In my early practice of TM, I reached the bottom of the bubbles, as my instructor called reaching a state of thought-free wakefulness, just once. Having experienced that state of quietude and then being unable to reach it again, I meditated only sporadically in the years that followed.

Now, when I hear rain outside of my study and see the bright scintillas of rain on the garage’s flat tar-black roof, I’ll sit in the rain and do a 20-minute session of TM. The double dose of alpha waves seems to work. In the rain, I get to the bottom of the bubbles with a reassuring frequency.

On my first cruise up the Inside Passage, I frequently rowed for hours at a stretch and would often fall into a meditative state, listening to the metronomic rhythm of the oars. The memory of those pleasant days prompted me to switch my rainy-day practice from my orange bucket to the lapstrake Whitehall I’d built in 1983. I made a canopy for it not just as shelter from the rain but also as a resonator for it, to gather more sound than my cagoule can.

When I go rowing on Seattle’s Ship Canal, the rain and mist mute sound and color. The wail of cars and trucks rolling across the metal grate of the bascule bridge adjacent to the launch ramp is no more than a murmur, and the trees and buildings on hills flanking the waterway appear as if dusted with soot and ash. On the smooth surface of the water, raindrops make their chain-mail pattern of interlocking circles. I row with the sides of the canopy slipped up on the hoops and the rainwater pools in the folds overhead. With just an easy effort at the oars, I warm up in a few minutes and I can take my gloves and hat off, unzip my jacket to cool off, and still stay dry.

There are a few sections of shoreline that aren’t occupied by wharves or marinas where I’ll stop and tether the boat to a piling or nudge it onto a sandy shore, before lowering the canopy to better capture the rain’s soft sounds. I sit in my boat, quiet, alone, and out of worry’s reach.

Canopy Construction

A reader asked how I made the canopy. I bought a lightweight 6′x7′ tarp (finished size 70″ x 86″) made of 210D Oxford and two 10′ lengths of 1/2″ CPVC water pipe. The CPVC pipe is more flexible than PVC pipe and more tolerant of temperature extremes. The 1/2″ nominal size has an outside diameter of 5/8″. The Whitehall has a beam of 50-1/2″ and a 86″ length of pipe (equal to the long side of the tarp)created an arch with the headroom I needed for rowing.

I made a sleeves for the pipes by folding each of the long sides back 2-1/2″ and sewed the hem. The in the middle of the sleeve’s edge I used a hot knife to cut away a semicircle of fabric. The hole is needed for the guy lines that will pull the tops of the arches to the ends of the boat. Pulling directly on the pipes instead of a grommet or webbing loop is the only way to get a smooth canopy.

To secure the pipes to the Whitehall’s open rail, I threaded a 1/4″ braided line through each pipe, cutting the lines about 6′ longer than the pipe. With the lines through the pipes and the pipes in the sleeves, I tie one end of each line around the inwale and snug the pipe up against the rail. The extra length of the line lets me thread its other end through the open rail before flexing the pipe. I can then pull the line to bring the pipe’s end to the rail. I had initially thought I’d put rods in the ends of the pipes and then set the rods in the oarlock sockets, but that limits where I can put the canopy. The cord is much more versatile and unbreakable. I tie other cords to the pipe at the top of the arch where I cut the semicircle of fabric away, taking a few wraps around the pipe for friction. I loop the other end around something in the boat and use a taut-line hitch to position the arch and tension the tarp.

I had a piece of 1/2″ thick soft rubber that I cut into 1-1/2″ squares and drilled with a 5/8″ Forstner bit. Slipped over the ends of the pipes, they hold the tarp sides up when I need to see out.

Ptarmigan 17

Years ago, I had built and sailed a 14′ flat-bottomed skiff, but the time had come for something with more capacity, capability, and comfort. A few times my wife Ramona and I had been caught in rough conditions that made me feel more than a bit uncomfortable, and I didn’t feel confident heading out to distant shores with the little boat. And sleeping under a tented boom, well, I’d had enough of that. Still, it was nice to have a boat I could tow home and store in the garage where I could keep it in good repair.

Selway Fisher’s Ptarmigan 17, as drawn, met most of my needs and could be adapted to suit the rest. The options detailed in the plans took care of my wants, and the design appears to accommodate amateur builders with a range of skills and requirements. There are drawings for both stitch-and-tape and glued-plywood lapstrake construction. You can also choose between a simple catboat rig and a yawl rig. With all the options for customization, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 10 different boats built from the same set of Ptarmigan 17 plans.

Pat Beninger

The glued-plywood lapstrake construction accentuates the hull’s curves. Stitch-and-tape construction without the laps is an option included in the plans.

The boat’s optional yawl rig had piqued my interest. I liked the idea of sailing under a balanced helm if the conditions got too serious, and I thought that the smaller mainmast on the yawl rig would be a bit lighter to lift. The combination tabernacle-equipped mainmast, small cabin, and ease of trailering led me to finally choose this design.

The building package comes with seven sheets of construction plans and a 14-page booklet of instructions. Dimensions are metric. A concise building schedule outlines each step of the build with recommendations on the choice of plywood, instructions on using epoxy, and what fastenings to use. There’s a section on how to lay out and draw the side panels on the plywood, and how to draw curved elements using a grid pattern. Measured drawings for the molds, stitch-and-tape side panels, bottom panel, and stem are clear and easy to follow. You do not need to do any lofting to build this boat. There are detailed drawings and instructions on stitching and filleting. The plans are complete with details for building sub-components such as rudder, centerboard and trunk, and the tabernacle. The plans are cross-referenced with the instruction booklet and provide the recommended scantlings.

There are instructions for building an outboard well or a transom cutout. All specifications for the standing and running rigging are listed. For builders interested in making their own sails, there’s even a reference to a Selway publication on that topic. The booklet is light on details for the four-strake, glued-lap plywood version; however, there are several good books available on the topic.

Both of the Ptarmigan 17’s sail rigs are gaff-rigged. The single-mast catboat rig carries a sail area of 139 sq ft and includes the dimensions for an optional 24-sq-ft jib. The yawl rig’s total sail area is a little smaller at 135 sq ft, with a main of 79 sq ft, a jib of 36 sq ft, and a leg-o’-mutton mizzen of 20 sq ft. There are two reefpoints drawn on the mainsails. With the yawl rig you can douse the mainsail in high winds and sail with a balanced helm under jib and mizzen. The yawl—with bowsprit and boomkin —is almost 23′ in sparred length. The mizzen is self-tending and only requires attention when coming off the wind. The plans do not specifically address tackle, but we made our own blocks in keeping with the overall look and feel of the boat. There are several good articles on making your own blocks in various publications.

I found the plans for this boat detailed, complete, and accurate, and while a few questions did arise, they were quickly answered via email. When I started this build, I found many ways of keeping safe and saving time; the project took me five months of full-time effort.

The boat tows well behind an SUV or pickup truck, and the trailer does not require brakes for the boat’s 1,300 lbs. The flat bottom and shallow 6″ keel help keep the weight low in the boat. For trailering, I keep the bowsprit attached and secure the mast in a cross-framed 2×4 support; the gaff, boom, and mizzen are supported and strapped to the frame and the forward ends pass through the companionway.

Rick Crook

The yawl rig has an 18.9 sq ft mizzen, a 78.8 sq ft main, and a 36.6 sq ft headsail.

With some practice, the yawl can be rigged and ready to go in about 20–25 minutes. It saves time to tag the rigging to help remember where the stays go and in what order they go on. The mast is lifted with its three stays, three halyards, and the topping lift set in place. The foot of the mast is secured in the tabernacle. Lifting the rigged mast requires some effort but is manageable and made easier with the help of someone pulling on the headstay. I secure the jaws of both the gaff and the boom using 1/8″ braided nylon cord with several parrel beads threaded on. I lace on the sails, add the rudder and motor, take off the securing straps, and I’m set to launch. When hauling out at the ramp, I have a 2,000-lb single-speed hand-operated winch that handles the boat with ease. The boat always seems to attract a crowd filled with compliments, comments, and questions.

Steve Cormack

The plans call for open slats for the cockpit seating and sole. The builder’s modification to plywood enclosures provides convenient storage.

The 5′x 6′ cockpit will accommodate four but is most comfortable with one or two. With two, there’s plenty of room to hoist the sails and move around when coming about. The helmsman has a clear view forward of the small jib over the cabin. The mainsail is high enough off the cabin roof to have a clear view to port and starboard. All sheets and halyards are led aft into the cockpit and can be easily handled without the need for winches. The throat and peak halyards need a hefty tug. The plans call for 7mm (3/8″) halyards, which I find easy on the hands. The 65″ x 25″ footwell is 17″ deep. The trunk is 4″ wide and its cap is 12″ above the cockpit sole. It extends into the footwell 20″ and passes through the main bulkhead to within a foot of the forepeak bulkhead. The steel centerboard is raised and lowered with the help of a worm-gear winch that is operated from the cockpit. With the board down, the boat draws 3-1/2′.

Steve Cormack

The cabin has bunks for two. The centerboard trunk divides the footwell between them.

The cabin interior is 6-1/2′ x 5-1/2′ and is 52″ high at the crown. There are two bunks that run the length of the cabin and are 26″ at their widest. For sitting there is good headroom and ample legroom in the footwell between the bunks. Storage compartments are built into the underside of each bunk. It’s a simple interior, but it keeps you dry. The yawl cabin has a support post under the tabernacle that is about 16″ abaft the forepeak bulkhead. The tabernacle in the catboat version is supported by the forepeak bulkhead. The plans call for a sliding plywood hatch over the companionway, but I chose to make mine with a plexiglass top for added light in the cabin. There are two 12″ x 16″ windows on the cabin sides. If you wish to build a self-righting boat, the instruction booklet calls for adding buoyancy under the cockpit benches and forward of the forepeak bulkhead. An additional 160 lbs of lead can be bolted to the floor as extra ballast.

The boat’s 1,300-lb weight gives the feeling of stability—it is not tippy when you step aboard—and will carry through when tacking in light air. The Ptarmigan 17 was designed for inland lakes, estuaries, and coastal areas, and I have never felt uncomfortable in these waters. Adding one or two larger sails both on the jib and mizzen would be nice to have for sailing downwind and in lighter wind conditions. In windy conditions, the first reef goes in when the winds approach 20 knots. Anything above this and the main is doused and tied off. Even in these conditions the boat has never left me feeling unsafe; it feels stable and there is no need to put the rail in the water. The ride is generally dry, with little spray. Passengers in the cockpit can sit close behind the cabin to shelter from the elements. The rudder is shallow and extends 3’ beyond the transom. It controls the boat well in all conditions.

Steve Cormack

While the builder ultimately chose to use an outboard bracket, his Ptarmigan 17 has a built-in motorwell appropriate for a small outboard. The opening of the well is visible at the bottom of the transom.

The plans and notes describe an optional motorwell, set to starboard, but do not specify the size of the auxiliary outboard motor. A 2.5-hp is all Ramona and I need to get into and out of the harbor, or back home when the wind dies. I built the motorwell to house an electric trolling motor but found that I needed more power, so I switched to a small gas motor that I set on a transom-mounted bracket. The motorwell could easily accommodate the 2.5-hp outboard.

When I decided to build this boat there wasn’t a lot of information on how the boat would perform. A few pictures and a description by the designer were all that I had. My experience with a smaller boat helped refine my requirements for the new boat, which the Ptarmigan 17 met: capable of crossing the larger lakes in almost any condition, easily towed behind our pickup, and equipped with a dry bed to crawl into at night. I did make some modifications, such as building a self-draining footwell and building fiberglass-covered benches to drain the rainwater over the side. To provide more storage space, I extended the forward ends of the side benches, covering the centerboard trunk with more seating. Now I can leave the boat unattended at a mooring without having to worry about the cockpit filling with water.

If you’re looking for a small cruising sailboat to explore far and wide, that you can easily trailer and store at home in between adventures, then you should take a close look at the Ptarmigan 17. Just be ready for the many admirers you’ll meet along the way.

Steve Cormack is a self-taught amateur builder with a workshop in Pender Harbour, British Columbia. He started building boats nearly 40 years ago and has completed several small plywood kayaks and strip canoes. In addition to the Ptarmigan, he has built a Handy Billy motorboat (which he uses for day trips), and a Selway Fisher Blackswan 22 for cruising. He is currently finishing a 32′ Lake Union–style dreamboat based on a Katherine 30, designed by William Hand Jr.

Ptarmigan 17 Particulars

[table]

Length/17′

Beam/6′ 11″

Hull depth amidships/2′4.5″

Draft, board up/1′2″

Draft, board down/3′5″

Sail area, cat/139 sq ft

Sail area, yawl/135 sq ft

Maximum headroom/4′6″

[/table]

Plans for the Ptarmigan are available from Selway-Fisher (£195 print, £175 PDF) and Duckworks ($236 print or PDF).

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!

66 Canoe

Kids grow up, and grow out of not only their clothes, furniture, and toys, but also the boats you build for them. Who knew? The first boat I built was a cedar-strip double-paddle canoe which could carry one of my kids and me comfortably. However, I had four kids at home. I built a second boat, a small skin-on-frame kayak, from plans for one of my daughters when she was a teenager. My two youngest daughters were the most interested in paddling, so the kayak worked well for several years until they outgrew it.

I wanted each of them to have their own boat to help them develop their paddling skills and independence. I could have built them each a cedar-strip, but I knew from experience that skin-on-frame would cost less, be ready sooner, and most importantly be something they could each easily carry on their own.

When I ran across a YouTube video of Brian Schulz of Cape Falcon Kayak using his 66 Canoe system to build three skin-on-frame canoes that nested together, I was immediately sold. I’d be able to transport three boats without having to purchase a larger vehicle or a trailer.

The 66 Canoe design is not simply a set of plans for a handful of different static models of various sizes, but rather a video class to guide the builder through a series of decisions about length, beam, depth, rocker, sheer and cross-section to create a custom-built canoe to meet the builder’s needs, all without the need for making and modifying molds. Brian gave the system its name after he found the double-paddle pack canoe that the pack canoe that inspired it involved 66 percent of the time, cost, and weight of one of his skin-on-frame kayaks.

Photographs by and courtesy of the author

Sitting in the canoe may seem more comfortable at first, but the kneeling position seen here provides more stability by keeping weight low and affords more control of the canoe.

His detailed plan sets and video courses are an interesting and very effective way to build compared to building from plans or even during an in-person workshop. I chose to build three solo canoes, and used the medium, large, and extra-large sizes recommend by Brian for nesting. I did’t have any hull-design expertise, so I just used his dimensions for my canoes, though. I reduced the beam of each by just 1″ built all three concurrently, which saved some tool-setup time, and allowed me to practice a task on my boat, before completing the same step on my daughters’ smaller boats.

I used western red cedar for the longitudinal members and stems, ash for the outwales, and white oak for the ribs. For steam-bending, Brian highly recommends white oak that has not been kiln dried. He notes a couple of sources that will mill and ship suitable-quality bending oak. I located a mill in my area of southern Michigan where I could pick out white-oak boards that were sawn just a day or two earlier.

The extra-large canoe can easily carry two paddlers.

Brian is continually innovating and shares his new developments almost immediately on his Instagram account, and once developed, works it into the plans and videos. After I finished my boats, he announced a method to incorporate some mild tumblehome into the design, and shared the results and methods.

The basic skills and operations for the 66 Canoe build are relatively simple, and while I have built both a cedar-strip and a skin-on-frame boat before, neither of those builds had the level of detailed instruction as in the Cape Falcon Kayak instructional videos.

The construction process begins with laminating three boards together to shape the stock for the gunwales in the vertical profile curve of the sheer. The two gunwales are then rip-sawn from this lamination; the rib locations are marked out on them and cut with a plunge router. Spreaders shape the gunwales in plan view, either symmetrical (maximum beam amidships) or asymmetrical (maximum beam forward or aft of center).

Stems and keel are lashed on and the amount of rocker is set. Then, based on the measured beam, sheer, and rocker at each rib location, Brian has a formula for calculating the lengths of the rib stock. A story stick records each measurement for easy transfer to the rib stock. The videos eliminate any confusion, as every step of the process is shown plainly. The rib-length formula can be tweaked slightly to create different hull shapes, which are explained in the plans. Since I was building three canoes, I stuck with the default formula on my extra-large canoe and then tweaked it slightly for my daughters’ canoes to give them a slightly fuller and flatter shape for extra stability.

The sailing rig’s mast is designed to be easily and quickly raised and lowered. While under sail, the canoe can be propelled as well as steered by the paddler.

With the videos providing guidance, steam-bending was simple. Brian explains how long to steam your particular bending wood and demonstrates how to bend the ribs without using forms to achieve the necessary shape in each area of the canoe. It’s easy to detect and correct asymmetry by eye. Any remaining small deviations are faired by lashing the stringers on immediately after steam-bending the ribs.

The amount of rocker can be adjusted slightly while lashing on the keel and finishing the stems. After the seat-mounting blocks are added, the frame is sealed with oil and allowed to dry. I used Corey’s Pine-Tar Boat Sauce; Brian strongly recommends a skin of 9-oz 840 X-TRA Tuff Ballistic Nylon and the two-part urethane coating also offered at The Skin Boat Store. The skin can be colored for a traditional appearance and the coating is very tough.

Stem bands of brass or plastic are added to protect the canoes’ most vulnerable parts of the skin from abrasion. I had used acetal-copolymer but later switched to a moisture-resistant HDPE on the middle-sized canoe to improve its tracking due to that material’s taller profile.

Seats can be installed right against the bottom of the gunwales, or a bit lower using spacer blocks. I use 1.25″ spacers in the extra-large canoe, and 7/8″ in the large. Dropping the seat in the medium canoe, the smallest of the three, makes it difficult to fit my size-11 feet underneath while in the kneeling position, and could create a safety issue.

To protect the lashings from abrasion, I use a closed-cell foam pad in the bottom of the canoe as recommended. Flotation is provided by securing 4″-diameter foam noodles along the insides of the canoe with ball-bungees, which can be easily removed to nest the canoes.

When boards are attached to the gunwales to create a catamaran configuration, the space between the canoes can allow for paddling between them.

Other optional items include a small pop-up sail, boards to catamaran canoes together, and a rowing outrigger and oars. I’ve made and used the sails and catamaran boards but have yet to make the rowing setup. I logged about 180 hours of construction time for three canoes, catamaran boards, and sails.

The ability to nest the three canoes and transport them on top of my compact hatchback is wonderful. The nested canoes made it possible to take all three plus my cedar strip on a trip from Michigan to Grand Teton and Yellowstone parks.
While it’s easiest to load the canoes with two people, I am able to do it alone because my vehicle has a low roof and the canoes are so light. At the boat launch people watch amazed as we pull off canoe after canoe from the roof. It takes 8 to10 minutes to install the seats and flotation in the two larger canoes.

I’ve paddled all three boats in the fully upright seated position, but mostly now only do this when the boats are connected as a catamaran. I just enjoy the kneeling position more.

The performance of my three nesting canoes is just graduations of stability and speed. Which one is just right probably depends on your size and weight. Brian had the three medium/large/extra-large variants listed as having ideal paddler weights of 125/175/225 lbs with maximum capacities about double each of those weights.

I’m 6′2″ tall and about 180 lbs, and I knew that the largest canoe was probably a bit too large for me, but I didn’t want to make the smallest canoe much narrower than 27″ for my youngest daughter. This is one of the trade-offs for the ability to nest the canoes. There is a 2″ minimum difference in width in order for the full-sized canoes to nest inside each other (1.5″ minimum for pack canoes). Similar minimum differences apply for length.

To my surprise, when paddling by myself, I found that in most conditions I enjoy paddling the smallest of the canoes. I thought it would be too unstable, but in the kneeling position the canoe is stable enough for me to feel confident and is very quick with a nice glide. It tracks well, as would be expected with my weight in this smaller boat.

The middle-sized canoe is a bit more stable and slightly slower, and the largest canoe marginally more so on both counts. And because it’s so lightly loaded with just paddler and no gear, the largest canoe can be more difficult to handle if the wind picks up. The largest canoe will likely be perfect for canoe-camping, something that my older daughter and I are eager to try out, and it will be the one that I build the rowing outrigger for first. Its stability and size make it ideal for this option.

The middle-sized canoe has more rocker than the largest canoe, a result of my experimenting with a bit too much progressive rocker at the ends. I immediately detected its loose tracking, but that was easier to correct than too little rocker. I improved its tracking with slightly thicker stem bands.

While I have only paddled the canoes for one season, I have not pampered them. I routinely run them up onto sandy or gravel beaches and treat them as I would any piece of outdoor gear: with respect to my investment of time and money, but not agonizing over every scratch or bump. They have shown no significant signs of wear yet. The lashed construction and tough, flexible skin absorb and spring back from impact rather than cracking as a more rigid hull might.

I built catamaran boards for the canoes, which allow me to connect two or even all three together. The speed seems marginally slower, but steering is easy. The minimum 18″ space between the connected canoes allows for paddling between them. This is an amazingly fun way to paddle together. The canoes essentially become a high-performance raft with excellent stability. You can see and chat with your companions face-to-face, rather than looking at their backs as in a tandem canoe.

The catamaran arrangement is very well suited to using the optional sailing rig.

I made sails for all three canoes of about 1.2, 1.6, and 1.7 square meters, following Brian’s video instructions and plans. I have no experience in sailing, but in my few sea trials the sails are a fun way to catch a downwind breeze and, when a nice, sustained gust comes along, it certainly pushes us at least as fast as workout-level paddling. I haven’t had much sailing on a reach likely due to my inexperience. In the catamaran configuration, and with over 3 square meters of combined sail area, a nice downwind run is pretty darn fun. My next project for the canoes will be making the oars and outriggers that are covered in another one of Brian’s courses.

The 66 Canoe plans and the video-course method of instruction are far more thorough than a book or plans only, and would be an excellent approach for a first-time builder. Brian’s system allows you to stick with a basic, general-purpose canoe, experiment with a sleek racing design, or a wide and stable fishing canoe. Access to his extensive experience is icing on the cake.

They are among the lightest canoes available and more durable than people assume. They nest together for easy storage and transport, and garner compliments wherever we go. They allow two of my daughters and me to paddle together or independently, and to explore sailing, and canoe-camping. It will be quite a while before we outgrow these canoes.

Adam Eckhardt of Flatrock, Michigan, has been a maker of things all his life. Prior to these three 66 canoes he built a Guillemot Kayaks MicroBootlegger and a Yostwerks Sea Pup kayak.

66 Canoe Particulars for M, L, XL

[table]
Length/ 13′ 9.5″, 14′ 9″, 15′ 9″
Beam/ 27″, 29″, 31″
Depth at center/11.25″, 12.13″, 12.75″
Weight/ 28.6 lbs, 32.0 lbs, 34.6 lbs

[/table]

The Skin-on-Frame Canoe Building Course from Cape Falcon Kayak is a 12-hour online video course. It includes a downloadable 30-page PDF plan and licensing for the purchaser to build unlimited canoes for personal use.

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!

Downed Trees and Muddy Feet

As always, there had been a rough sketch of a plan: a 7- or 8-mile row, heading generally northward through the meandering sloughs and backwaters of the Chippewa River delta, the largest contiguous floodplain forest in the Midwest. From there, it would be an easy float down the main river channel to its junction with the Mississippi. Two or three nights aboard, a wandering pilgrimage through 30 square miles of river bottom forest and wetland bisected by only a single road. No need to pack the sailing rig—oars alone would do.

The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. With no charts available, I downloaded a set of detailed topo maps, printed them at 2″ to the mile, and ran them through a laminator. A bit smaller than restaurant placemats, and stiffened nicely by the laminating, they’d be perfect for one-handed use in a small boat—a trick I filed away for future trips. Even better, the maps seemed to suggest that the route I had imagined might actually exist. From a launch ramp 50 yards off the south side of Highway 35, a reasonably open channel paralleled the road eastward for a mile or two, snaking back and forth beneath a series of bridges before entering a thin but apparently continuous ribbon of river leading farther north.

This channel—Buffalo Slough—ran generally northward along the eastern edge of the delta for several miles, swooping through a series of bends and hairpins and pond filled backwaters to connect with another winding channel—Little Buffalo Slough—that diverged from the 300-yard-wide main channel of the Chippewa 10 miles upstream from the river’s confluence with the Mississippi. I’d anchor there, behind a half-mile-long island at the entrance to the slough, and then have an easy downstream row on the Chippewa. After a second night somewhere near the river’s mouth, I’d close the loop with a rambling track through the lower delta: up Government Light Slough to Smith Slough and on to the ramp, maybe. I didn’t overthink it. A certain degree of ignorance is a necessary component of these ventures, the best plans only vague brushstrokes to be filled in later, a new revelation at each stroke of the oars.

But there are plans, and there is reality. After two hours of rowing back and forth beneath the highway after launching from the ramp, I had failed to find the entrance to Buffalo Slough. Instead, I found a series of obscure channels blocked by downed trees, low water, and strainers, any one of which might have been Buffalo Slough. I hadn’t been able to go farther than a hundred yards up any of them to find out.

Trying to bring a boat like FOGG up Buffalo Slough was ridiculous, really. The channels were barely wide enough for oars as they were twisty, and thickly overgrown. It was the kind of delightfully pointless and uncomfortable outing I might have invented for myself as a kid, when every drainage ditch was a potential adventure, and every thicket an incitement to exploration. Long shallow stretches forced me to wade upstream, pulling the boat behind me like a dog on a leash—hard-earned, sweaty, knee-deep-mud-and-crawling-through-branches yardage. I had to climb ashore and line the boat through a few tight spots where logs or low branches prevented the use of more conventional tactics. This wasn’t a river—it was a forest. Craggy-barked cottonwoods lined the shore, with well-spaced silver maples, basswoods, and ash trees farther inland. Birds were singing everywhere, only occasionally visible as they flashed from tree to tree. Squirrels chattered loudly, scampered off when I got too close, and chattered some more.

No matter what my carefully assembled maps might have suggested, the sloughs and channels here were shifty things—erratic; devious; not to be trusted. The few inlets that weren’t blocked completely grew steadily narrower and shallower as I fought my way upstream, until all that was left was a trickle of muddy water between undercut banks. I finally gave up, leaving the boat firmly aground in a side channel to explore on foot.

Tall maples and basswoods broke the late afternoon light into a rustling green-gold shiver overhead, and the damp sand of the slough bed was a jumble of tracks: the split-wedge marks of white-tailed deer, web-footed beaver prints, and the peace-sign slash of blue heron feet. The forest floor was pure floodplain and flat as a parking lot, too damp and shady to support much undergrowth—only a scattering of mayapples, and a few trilliums just starting to open into bright three-pronged stars. Farther into the woods, knee-high ferns brushed my legs with a feathery shushing at each step. Circling back to the boat, I found more tracks in the riverbed behind it: the rail-straight line of a keel dragged through the sand, and my own barefoot prints at the water’s edge.

I eventually abandoned the idea of finding Buffalo Slough and headed downstream instead, planning to anchor a few miles south of the ramp in Smith Slough, or Government Light Slough, or some nameless adjacent backwater at the edge of the delta. I’d spend the night just above the Mississippi River and come up with a new plan for tomorrow.

Now that I’d given up on finding a northward route, the channels grew wider—the size of small rivers, and easily rowable—and my map seemed accurate enough. The Burlington Northern rail line ran through the delta on a series of bridges and causeways, and the first bridge I passed under provided a reliable fix to confirm my admittedly hazy dead reckoning. I knew where I was, mostly, if not where I was going.

I let the boat drift along at a moderate pace, using the oars more for steering than for propulsion, stopping ashore wherever I felt the urge, or could find a relatively mud-free landing. Other than constant birdsong and the intermittent rumble of passing trains, I was caught up in a wide and rivery stillness: the faint drip of water off the oar blades, the hush of the current rippling along the banks, the breeze stirring through wide expanses of reeds at the water’s edge. After 2 or 3 miles, I pulled into a quiet backwater 20 yards wide, a still pond tucked beside the channel like a mirror sinking slowly into the mud. A few cottonwoods lined the bank, 40′ tall and leaning far out over the water. Their reflections broke into wavering ripples as the boat glided toward shore. I slid the bow up onto a low island at the edge of the pond and stepped out into thick mud.

Even well back from the river, where bright green shoots of new grass created the illusion of a carefully tended lawn, the bank was too muddy for tenting. My camp chair, a recent and dangerously hedonistic concession to comfort, sank a few inches into the earth when I sat down, and wouldn’t settle onto an even keel. The “lawn” quickly became a cattle-pen quagmire of muddy footprints as I unloaded my gear. After a supper of rice and red beans, I dragged the boat to a level position, barely afloat at the edge of the pond, and set up a thwart-height platform and small tent for sleeping aboard. I scraped most of the mud off my feet—or some of it, at least—and crawled inside at full dark. I woke again well after midnight to see a foggy glimmer of sky just visible through the leaves, and a bright half moon caught in the treetops.

By morning, after a long scrutiny of maps in the flickering light of a dying headlamp the night before, I had decided on a new plan. I’d continue down Government Light Slough to the Mississippi—less than a mile now—and then upstream past the mouth of the Chippewa River and into the western arm of the delta, an inkblot swirl of channels, oxbows, meanders, and sloughs that might allow me to piece together a loop after all. Fortyacre Lake, Chimney Lake, Swinger Slough: a devious back-channel route leading to the western bank of the Chippewa River a few miles upstream, almost a mirror image of the route I’d originally intended. From there, I could continue down to the Mississippi, up Swift Slough, maybe, and get back to the car.

I was happy there was still the chance for a continuous loop, however irregular and wandering it might prove. The thought of returning the way I had come would seem like a defeat, and a lost opportunity. But did the loop I saw on paper actually exist in the ambiguous and twisty delta? I had no idea.

The first leg of the day’s journey went quickly. Within 20 minutes of starting out, I reached the end of Government Light Slough and entered the Mississippi. Behind me, flat forest; ahead, wide open water, and the tall bluffs of the Minnesota side. Blue skies, bright sunlight—startlingly bright after the channels of the delta. I rowed 400 yards across the river to the mile-long ribbon of Drury Island and beached the boat as a passing barge tow sent its wake crashing onto shore. Once it was past, I headed upstream again. The current here was sluggish, and it wasn’t difficult to keep the boat moving.

Just past the western tip of Drury Island, a line of high dunes came into view on the Wisconsin shore, steep slopes of bare sand rising 70′ from the river, half again as tall as the cottonwoods lining the bank beneath. Fake dunes, I knew. The Chippewa River runs through the sandy soils of northern Wisconsin for almost 200 miles, draining an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Much of the sand it carries drops to the riverbed where the Chippewa empties into the Mississippi. Fifteen thousand truckloads of that sand are dredged from the Mississippi River here every year and piled onto the bank in a Sisyphean effort to maintain a 9′ channel depth for commercial traffic.

I couldn’t resist a climb to the summit of the sandpile. I beached the boat, buried an anchor on shore, and headed up the slope. The sand was rough and grainy on my bare feet, and I slipped backward at every step, losing momentum, but the sun-warmed sand was already too hot for me to stop moving. When I finally reached the top, I found a barren topography of sand stretching 500 yards from east to west, far above the floor of the delta. To the south, on the Minnesota side, steep bluffs rose 500 feet above the Mississippi, capped with a thin layer of pale sandstone. To the north, the sand heap dropped abruptly to the Chippewa’s floodplain, offering a view into the forest canopy from above, leafy and green with early summer growth. A bald eagle launched from a tree below me, climbed into the sky with a ponderous rhythm of wingbeats, and angled across the river toward Minnesota.

I returned to the boat in a series of gravity-boosted leaps and bounds that carried me an improbable distance downslope at each step, nearly sending me tumbling headlong a few times. I was tempted—briefly—to climb up again for another go. Instead, I shoved off and continued upstream.

After rowing another half mile up the Mississippi’s eastern bank, I beached the boat at the mouth of the Chippewa River, set up my camp chair under a canopy of cottonwoods on a stretch of flat, firm sand, and read a few pages from George Birkbeck Hill’s Johnsonian Miscellanies, Volume II, a collection of wide-ranging anecdotes and aphorisms related to Dr. Samuel Johnson, one of the leading literary figures of 18^th-century England. As an English teacher and writer, I had always felt a nagging obligation to learn at least something about him, so when I found the book in a dusty corner of a used book store, I bought it. With Volume I missing, I could appease my conscience without the bother of reading the whole thing. Besides, a collection to dip into at random seemed better suited to my lack of ambition than James Boswell’s 1,500-page opus, The Life of Samuel Johnson, which sat beside it on the same shelf. Perhaps most important of all, Johnsonian Miscellanies cost $4.50; the Boswell was priced at $65. A little learning may be a dangerous thing, but drinking deep seemed prohibitively expensive.

As it turned out, the unhurried pace of the 18^th-century prose and the book’s lack of a continuous narrative thread seemed to mirror my erratic wanderings and ill-defined goals quite nicely, though I doubted Dr. Johnson would have thought much of my trip—at least, not if Hill’s portrait caught the true measure of the man: “He thought that that happiest life was that of a man of business…and that in general no one could be virtuous or happy, that was not completely employed.”

It would have been a nice campsite—level sand for tenting, plenty of shade, and a sheltered harbor for the boat—but the western arm of the delta lay just across the Chippewa River, and I was still fixed on the idea of a loop. A mile of rowing, maybe, would get me to Fortyacre Lake, the first possibility that looked worth exploring. I packed up my chair and the book and shoved off.

Fortyacre Lake went about as expected, a series of winding passages that were more forest than river. There were overhanging branches and leaning cottonwoods, side channels too overgrown or too shallow to enter, a few herons wading the reedy shallows, and finally, a dead end. I ate a late lunch aboard, grounded comfortably on a sandbar, and returned downstream to the delta’s edge to find Chimney Lake.

Here I had better luck. The channel leading into the floodplain was hidden behind a screen of reeds, and took some finding, but it kept going. Soon enough I was into a corkscrewing creek that I guessed must form the downstream end of Swinger Slough. I rowed from the aft thwart facing forward so I could weave around sandbars and downed trees without needing to turn my head to see where I was going, but it was a trade-off. The current was fast enough to require strong rowing, and pushing on the oars limited my power.

I was in no hurry, though. It was only about 3 miles along the slough from the entrance to Chimney Lake to the main channel of the Chippewa River, and the absence of downed trees and brush made up for the slow pace of upstream rowing. I pulled into a quiet corner of the woods at the foot of a railroad bridge—another definite position fix—and walked the tracks for a while, balancing on the rails as long as I could, looking for cast-off railroad spikes. The railroad causeway was the highest ground for miles, a long straight line slashed through the forest. Eventually I returned to the boat for lunch—or was it supper? I didn’t care.

By 7 p.m., with plenty of daylight left, I made the turn into the upper arm of Swinger Slough. From here the route paralleled Highway 35 eastward to the Chippewa River, less than a mile ahead. By now, though, I understood that distance was not a relevant measure in the floodplain. After all, the dirt ramp I had launched from was just 2 miles farther down this same road. Through all my river wanderings, I had been covering an as-the-crow-flies distance of less than a mile per day.

FOGG, however, was no crow. No matter how twisty the channels were, I had no choice but to follow them. From here, though, it would be a straight run to the main channel of the Chippewa River. There was a fierce current against me, but with the end practically in sight, I kept rowing east along the highway, up Swinger Slough—until, with the bridge over the Chippewa River in sight 100 yards ahead, a series of downed trees blocked the channel from bank to bank.

Was the channel completely blocked? I didn’t want to believe it. It had taken me all afternoon to make it this far; I wouldn’t believe it. But there it was: three leafless and spindly fallen trees, spaced a boat length apart, just tall enough to stretch all the way across the slough—roots on the north bank, treetops on the south. Another dead end.

And yet, it might just be possible to drag the boat over the first tree, where the base of the trunk dipped low in the water. Once the idea had planted itself in my head, it proved hard to abandon. I rowed closer. Yes, it might be possible. I tested the depth with an oar—waist deep. It was probably stupid to try. FOGG weighs well over 300 lbs loaded, and I could barely flip the empty hull for painting, even with my wife to help me. But here I was, in sight of the Chippewa River, the last easy link of the loop.

It wasn’t easy. I managed to climb into the water and shove the bow up onto the first log, then scrambled over to the upstream side of the downed tree. The water there was neck-deep, with no firm footing to pull from. Fine. I climbed up beside the boat and manhandled FOGG farther onto the log. From there I see-sawed the boat up and down, and back and forth, walking it across the tree trunk the way you’d move a heavy cabinet across the floor, hoping the Douglas-fir backbone was strong enough to hold the hull together despite the wrangling. It must have been 10 minutes before the boat finally slid free on the upstream side of the log.

I had cleared the first obstacle—the first of three. And the next tree, higher out of the water, would be harder. I rowed up to it—awkward to do with so little room for the oars and with such a strong current flowing—and tested the depth. My 8′ 8″ oar sank all the way to the handle before touching bottom. There would be nowhere to stand for the initial heave up onto the tree trunk.

The bridge that crossed the main channel of the Chippewa was just ahead, a few yards off the right-hand bank. I could even read the green and white highway sign planted on the shoulder near the crossing: Chippewa River. It seemed a cruel blow to force an ending here.

Best to do a bit of scouting before committing to one option or the other, I finally decided. I tied the boat to the tree and climbed ashore. “Ashore,” I immediately discovered, consisted of a broad field of stinging nettles stretching 100 yards along the bank. I was wearing shorts and sandals, and a thin T-shirt. But the river was just ahead, so I waded into the nettle patch, crushing down the stalks with my feet, stomping a path. Nettles sprang back with each step to needle my legs and arms, burning and prickling my bare skin.

I finally reached the end of the nettle patch, hot, itchy, and tired. My survey from the slough bank proved that it would be nearly impossible to wrestle the boat over the second downed tree—I had known that all along, really—and the third tree was even worse. For a moment I had the mad thought of crossing the channel, dragging the boat onto the southern shore—it was cattails and reeds there, and relatively flat—and rolling it past the downed trees along the marshy ground, using my plastic boat fenders as rollers. In the end, it wasn’t prudence or foresight that saved me, but only the discovery that I had left the fenders back at the car. It would be an ignominious defeat, then, with just enough time to turn downstream and find a campsite before dark.

The return trip—after I had dragged the boat back over the downed tree—was an easy downriver ride. I let the current carry me along mostly unaided, using the oars only for occasional course corrections. What had taken me several hours on the northward leg took less than an hour on the way back.

Even so, I had turned around none too early. The sun was almost hidden beneath the treetops as I emerged at Chimney Lake, with only a narrow arc of white-orange showing at the skyline. Soon it was gone altogether. I rowed past the delta’s shadowy wall of trees as the evening faded to a purple twilight. The surface of the water grew dark, a pitch of blackness interrupted by the glimmering reflections of the first stars appearing overhead.

I spent the night at the mouth of the Chippewa River, at the campsite I had found earlier. Flat sand, tall cottonwoods, a convenient downed log for a supper bench—perfection, or close enough to it. I sat for a long time outside the tent listening to the chuckle of water as the river slid by, and the murmuring of the cottonwoods, and the long sad whistling of passing trains along the Minnesota shore. Bats swooped and dodged at the water’s edge, and the stars seemed to pulsate with a distant hum. The boat rocked gently just offshore, the painter a long pale swooping curve from bow to riverbank. Somewhere a fish jumped and fell back into the water with a splash that seemed bigger than it should have been.

“Life must be filled up,” Dr. Johnson insists—a remark that had stuck in my head from the pages I’d read earlier that day—“and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.”

It didn’t seem like such a bad bargain to me.

Tom Pamperin is a freelance writer who lives in northwestern Wisconsin. He spends his summers cruising small boats throughout Wisconsin, the North Channel, and along the Texas coast. He is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly and WoodenBoat.

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.

Outboard Winterizing

For some of us, the end of the boating season is the time to turn our attention to the maintenance of our small outboard motors. In our fleet, we have three motors ranging from 2-1/2 to 25 hp, and with the coming of winter we need to make sure they will run properly next year after sitting idle for several months.

Putting the outboard away for the winter begins with some basic maintenance. Flush the cooling system as you normally would by running the motor with either the lower unit in a bucket of fresh water or muffs clamped on the lower unit’s water intake with a hose supplying fresh water. Flush the motor long enough to ensure that water circulates through the entire cooling system. Running the motor will also warm the oil, making it easier to drain the oil for the change that will follow. Our 25-hp motor has a thermostat, so we have to run the motor long enough for the thermostat to open to let warm water flow out of the discharge port. Once finished with a flush, keep the outboard vertical for a bit and let the water completely drain out of the port, so that there is no water left inside to freeze over the winter.

While the engine is still warm, but not hot, open the crankcase drain port to drain the oil. A four-stroke’s oil must be changed every 100 hours, or annually. See the motor’s manual for what type of oil the engine requires and how much it takes to fill it. Two-stroke outboards do not have oil in the powerhead crankcase and don’t require an oil change, but the spark plugs can foul quickly due to the buildup of the oil that is mixed with the fuel. Spark plugs are cheap, and they should be changed during your winterizing maintenance.

The lower unit’s gear oil must also be changed every year, or every 100 hours. There are two gasketed bolts: the top one is the vent only; the bottom is for draining and filling. Check to make sure the drained fluid is not cloudy, which would indicate water intrusion and that the propeller-shaft seal may need to be replaced.

Propellers must be removed at each service interval because the shaft needs to be lubricated and the shaft forward of the prop must be inspected for fishing line that isn’t otherwise evident and can damage the seal.

Gas degrades with time and is a common problem for outboards that have been improperly stored without being serviced first. Drain the gas with a siphon or hand pump (don’t invert the motor to pour it out) or run the motor to fuel exhaustion. Drain the carburetor, as well. The internal jets and orifices in small carburetors are sensitive to the gummy residue created by stale gas. Fuel that has been left in the tank for several months also loses some combustibility and will not make a motor happy come time to start in the spring. Remove the drain screw at the bottom of the carburetor bowl to drain any remaining fuel.

To prevent corrosion inside the motor, consider using marine fogging oil for the cylinders if the motor is to be laid up for extended periods. The pressurized spray is injected into the air intakes while the motor is running and then, with the spark plugs removed, into the cylinders; pulling the starter cord distributes the oil.

The water-pump impeller should be changed every three years, whether it looks serviceable or not. The rubber vanes lose flexibility and effectiveness with age. The impeller maintains the water flow that is essential to cooling the motor, and nothing can kill a motor faster than excessive heat. Service manuals and YouTube videos are available online to illustrate the process of removing the lower unit to access the water pump for a variety of makes and models. Removing the lower unit also provides an opportunity to lubricate the mounting bolts so they don’t permanently seize in place with age and corrosion. You can also lubricate the lower unit’s driveshaft so that it does not freeze into the powerhead’s driveshaft. All threaded fastenings should be coated with a marine-grade Tef-Gel anti-seize compound.

Check the steering and tilt mechanisms, and use a grease gun to lubricate points as needed. Look at throttle linkages, especially the mount’s retaining hardware, for general condition and corrosion.

The in-line fuel filter (or water-separator filter, if there is one), should be changed every 100 hours or annually. It is essential to keep fuel as clean as possible.

Check the sacrificial anode on the lower unit and clean it if it is scaly; replace it if a significant amount of it has eroded.

Make sure that the motor’s exterior gets a freshwater rinse; when it’s dry, touch up any paint chips, and put a coat of wax on the powerhead cover. Coat exposed metal inside the motors with Green Grease, a true waterproof grease, and treat external metal surfaces as needed with a corrosion preventative such as WD-40 but take care to not spray it onto rubber components. For rubber fittings and seals use a synthetic-based grease, not one that is petroleum-based.

Four-stroke outboards must be stored either vertically or lying down in the position shown in the manual. If you lay them on the incorrect side, the crankcase oil can get through the air intake and fill the cylinder, causing hydraulic lock and damaging the motor. Two-stroke outboards can be stored in any position. If possible, stow the motor on a sturdy stand and protect it with a non-abrasive cover in an area where critters can’t get into it, lest the motor become a food cache for mice and squirrels, who also like to chew on wires, or attract the wasp-like mud daubers, who are known to plug cooling-system discharge ports. If your motor uses a battery, put it on a smart charger.

With our three motors well taken care of, when the next nice day rolls around in the springtime, we will be ready to head out on the water, confident in the health of a vitally important propulsion system.

Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about with their small armada in the Tidewater Region of southeast Virginia. Steve Baum is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran who spent a career on the water surrounded by ships and small boats, and then embarked on another career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to ensure that our waterways are safe for boating.

You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.

Magswitches

To do efficient and accurate work on a table saw, there are several accessories required beyond the miter gauge and the rip fence that ordinarily come with it. To secure feather boards, stops, and special fences, I’ve used clamps to hold them in place, but the undersides of the table and its extensions didn’t have flat surfaces to accommodate clamp jaws. The same problem makes it difficult to clamp accessories to my bandsaw and drill press tables. When I happened upon Magswitches on the web, they seemed to be the perfect solution, promising they could “secure custom jigs & fixtures anywhere on your table top” with just the twist of a knob.

The Magswitch company’s wide array of devices are built as magnets that can be turned on and off. Most of the products are meant for industrial use; the smallest of them, called MagJigs, are designed for the home woodworker. Inside the steel housings of a MagJig are two cylindrical magnets, one fixed to the housing and the other rotated by the knob at the top of the device. When the poles of the magnets are set north to north, south to south, the magnetic field is activated; when the poles are set in opposition, their magnetic fields almost entirely cancel each other. The steel housing takes care of the rest, and a MagJig that is turned off won’t even pick up fine steel filings.

I bought three sizes of the MagJig: the 60, 95, and 150. The pair of 150s came in a Starter Kit with a Universal Base and the Reversible Featherboard. There is one more in the MagJig series, the 235. The numbers for each device refer to what the company calls its “magnetic hold force” in pounds. That force is for pulling the MagJig straight up from the surface and will vary with the thickness of the ferrous metal it’s attached to. A thin sheet of steel won’t capture the magnet’s entire field and the MagJig won’t have its full holding power. The cast-iron top of my table saw might not capture the entire magnetic field either, but because it is where I’d use the MagJigs, that’s the holding power that matters to me.

To test each MagJig, I used a digital hanging scale to see how much force it would take to pull the MagJigs off my table saw. I threaded a loop of nylon line through the magnet’s two mounting holes and used the scale connected to a boom vang to pull the MagJigs straight up from the table saw. The 60 popped off at an average of 31 lbs, the 95 at 62 lbs, and the 150 at 106 lbs. So for my purposes, the MagJigs all fell short of their nominal strengths.

When using MagJigs for fences, guides, and feather boards, the holding force that matters is not vertical but lateral, so I anchored the vang to a point level with the table saw top. With a loop of cord around the base of each MagJig, I used the vang to pull it sideways. The 60 slipped at 9 lbs, the 95 at 16 lbs, and the 150 at 22 lbs. The company recommends that the MagJigs be used in pairs to keep forces from rotating them, so I made a loop for the feather board fixture with its two 150s holding to the table saw top. It slipped at 40 lbs.

For practical applications I found the MagJig 95 and 150 useful in the shop. The 60 just had too little hold force; the note on the packaging—“secure custom jigs & fixtures anywhere on your table top”—overstated its abilities. The 95, fitted to a block of 3/4″-thick oak, made a useful stop for light work on the drill press. It also worked to hold a bracket for a vacuum hose. The 95’s packaging had a picture of a pair of them used with a feather board, a use I’d recommend only for light work.

The 150s, with their base and feather board, lived up to my expectations. They hold the feather board in place with enough pressure to keep the workpiece against the rip fence. The feather board offers stiff resistance to kickback, but I could pull the workpiece backward (with the saw turned off). The feather board I made from a 2×4 doesn’t let the workpiece move backward.

The universal base, with the MagJigs in place and the feather board removed, has a straight back edge that can be used as a fence on the cast-iron tables of my bandsaw and drill press. My favorite application of the base is as a guide for ripping on the bandsaw. I can saw to my drawn pencil line until I have the angle of the workpiece set to accommodate any blade drift and then set the base and activate the magnets with one hand.

The universal base with the MagJigs does have limitations. The placement of the device is limited to the area of the table it is being applied to. The base takes up some extra room, especially when the back side is used as a fence. You can make your own jigs with 3/4″ stock. The 150s require a 40mm hole, and a Forstner bit of that size is available with some MagJig sets. I used a 1-1/2″ Forstner bit and elongated it by drilling the first hole, shifting the wood by about 3/32″ and drilling again to shave off one side of the hole.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the MagJig 60s. I may put a bridle and a cord on one to fish for drill bits that roll off the wall side of the workbench. Their bigger brothers will answer a higher calling in the shop.

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.

MagJigs are manufactured by Magswitch and available from selected retailers. The MagJigs here were purchased from Amazon: the pair of 60s cost $39.99, the single 95 cost $26.50, and the pair of 150s with base and feather board cost $72.00.

Sealskinz

Here in Seattle, Washington, boating season officially opens on the first Saturday in May with a grand parade of decorated boats. Thousands of people turn out for the celebration. The end of the season closes without fanfare, and only a few of us keep boating as the months of cold and rain set in. Even in midwinter, the weather here isn’t often cause for misery as long as you dress properly.

Feeling the chill often stars at the extremities: the feet, hands, and head. Protecting these areas from weather has been the mission of Sealskinz since the company’s founding in 1996. Their waterproof, windproof, and breathable socks, gloves, and hats are designed and manufactured in Great Britain. I started using Sealskinz socks in 1998, and they have performed well and held up for many years of sea kayaking and bicycling.

I have a new pair of Sealskinz socks now as well as their gloves and a knit beanie. They are all composed of three layers; the inner and outer layers differ with the article, but the inner layer of all is a membrane that is waterproof, windproof, and breathable. While there are outdoor fabrics with the same characteristics, Sealskinz products set themselves apart with a membrane and fabrics that stretch.

Sealskinz socks come in ankle length, mid length, and, my favorite, knee length. I find boots awkward for boating and prefer to wear low-cut boating shoes and let knee-high socks take care of keeping my feet dry. Apart from the cuff, the Sealskinz knee-highs have a seamless inner layer with a merino-wool blend in a continuous knit that varies in thickness from toe to heel to cuff. The uppers have a tight, nubby knit for warmth; the toe and heel have a thicker layer of looped yarn for cushioning and extra warmth. The outer layer is nylon with elastane. The socks slip on easily, fit snugly, and there’s enough stretch to tuck pant legs comfortably into them. In the cold and rain they’re very pleasantly warm, and they keep my feet dry while wading at the launch ramp.

The Waterproof All Weather Ultra Grip Knitted Gloves are made of materials like those in the socks but have a finer knit. Like the socks, there is a seam at the cuff, but by some miracle of knitting machinery, there are no other seams. The seamless, stretch construction provides a noteworthy advantage over gloves sewn of non-stretch fabrics. The gloves don’t bunch up or crease, creating pressure points that can lead to discomfort and hot spots. The palm and fingers have small dots of rubbery substance for a non-slip grip without compromising the stretch of the fabric. When rowing on a rainy day, I have a comfortable grip on the handles with just as much grip as I have with bare hands. The tips of the thumb and index finger on both left and right gloves have a speckled gray material that is compatible with touchscreens. They work best when fingertips are pushed well into the ends of the gloves.

The knit acrylic exterior of the Waterproof Cold Weather Roll Cuff Beanie Hat looks just like an ordinary knit beanie, but it has the protection of the Seaskinz membrane. The interior layer is a polyester fleece. The hat is deep enough that it can cover my ears with the cuff, and although the cuff is sewn front and back, the sides can be unfolded for even more coverage. I have other beanies, but they’re not as warm and not effective when it’s raining or a strong wind is blowing; the Sealskinz beanie offers good protection no matter what the weather is doing. You can add to its uses with the LED-equipped version of the hat. It has an opening in the cuff that holds a USB-rechargeable headlamp.

These Sealskinz products have made my outings in the off season much easier to enjoy. They are well designed, perform well, and, if my previous experience with their ’90s-era socks is any indication, can last a long time.

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.

The Cold Weather Roll Cuff Beanie, All Weather Ultra Grip Knitted Gloves, and the Cold Weather Knee Length Socks are available from SealSkinzUSA for $40, $55, and $55 respectively. SealSkinz offers a variety of waterproof hats, gloves, and socks.

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.

Whitehall Tender

AMERICAN BEAUTY is a Whitehall Tender that was built by students at the WoodenBoat School and designed by the Rice Brothers from East Boothbay, Maine. Back in the 1800s, Whitehalls were used as a commercial craft, ferrying materials and crew to shore from large schooners and square-rigged ships. Eventually, the Whitehall entered the recreational world and remains a favorite of amateur boatbuilders to this day.

A Twin Cities Boat

Ontario’s twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo both have downtown parks that surround small lakes. Waterloo Park, founded in 1893, was built around Silver Lake and upon completion was dubbed the “Jewel of the City.” Three years later and two miles distant, in what must have been a bit of twin rivalry, Kitchener created Victoria Park by transforming a plot of swampland on the site into Victoria Park Lake. Kitchener officials declared that the park built around the lake was “The City’s Crown Jewel.”

There was, unfortunately, a bit of a lapse in civic pride through the 20^th century and both lakes filled with silt from the creeks that fed them. Waterloo’s “Jewel” became known as Mud Lake among the locals and was so foul in the summer of 1995 that hundreds of waterfowl that had settled upon it died of botulism. In the fall of that year, motivated by the dead ducks, the city created a seven-year plan to dredge the lake and restore the wetlands around it. Kitchener eventually followed suit and decided it was time to dredge Victoria Park Lake, and in 2011 scooped over 85,000 tons of sediment from the lake bottom.

In between the two lakes, on the Waterloo side of the twin-city divide, is the home of Matt Morris. He’s an avid cyclist and the Iron Horse Trail, a bike path that connects the lakes, runs right by his house. The ride north to Silver Lake is slightly less than a mile; south to Victoria Park Lake is over 2 miles. He visits the lakes often and has been watching ongoing improvements to both parks.

On one of his rides to Victoria Park he noticed a blue and white sign at the lake’s side. On it were three icons: one with a swimmer and another with a fish swimming under a hook and line. Each of those was crossed with a red X. The third icon pictured a sailboat—without an X. “Each time I was in the area,” he writes, “I started to dream of building a boat that I could tow behind my bicycle.”

Matt’s dreams remained dreams until Waterloo announced plans for some dredging and the installation of a boat dock at Silver Lake. He would have two lakes he could enjoy with a boat. That set him in motion. While he first thought about buying a kit for a two-piece rowboat, he realized that designing his own boat, and making it nest in three pieces would make the project much more interesting. He began by sketching shapes and construction details for a skin-on-frame nesting boat in a blank book.

His first idea was to make a boat with transoms fore and aft and curved sides. He made scaled patterns from paperboard cut from a Froot Loops cereal box and a Blue Moon Belgian White Ale carton. Unhappy with the shape and the nesting function, he chose to work with an overall plan form of a trapezoid. He could divide it into three smaller trapezoids that neatly fit one inside the other. Packed for travel, the boat would fit in the back of his square-back car or ride on a bike-towed trailer.

With his plans and patterns finished, he cut the boat’s six meranti plywood bulkheads at a friend’s woodshop; the bandsaw and belt sander made quick work of the largest parts of the boats. Stringers set in chisel-trimmed mortices established the shape of the three sections. Matt steam-bent ash frames inside of the stringers and clamped the intersections while they cooled and set. When the ash was dry, he epoxied the intersections of frames and stringers. Kevlar roving, applied on the diagonal like the pattern on an argyle sock, reinforced the framework. Matt applied a skin of 9-oz Dacron and coated it with a two-part urethane.

The boat goes by the name UB1000 as Matt’s first version of his Urban Boat. He equipped it with oars and a sail and built the trailer he had envisioned for getting it by bicycle to and from Silver Lake and Victoria Park Lake, documenting the whole process on his blog. He now enjoys rowing and sailing the lakes that are just minutes by bike from his home. The launching of his boat on the two lakes is, perhaps, the realization of the twin-city’s Field of Dreams vision: If you dredge it, they will come.

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 Chebacco Boats

There were three original Chebacco boats, all designed by Phil Bolger for Brad Story. Story was a friend of Bolger’s and a boatbuilder, now retired, of considerable talent in Essex, Massachusetts. All three boats feel very much alike on the water. I’ll make a point of differentiating between them when appropriate, but otherwise comments are true for all three. In fact, on a day of racing them against each other, and trading back and forth to see if any small differences were the result of the people aboard, it was really easy to lose track of which one I was actually on at any one time. They’re that similar. (A fourth, raised-deck version recently joined the fleet.)

The first was an extension—literally—of Bolger’s 15’ Harbinger catboat that Bolger designed for Story in 1975. It was done more to the New York style rather than Cape Cod so that it would row better and need a smaller sail plan. The lines are slack-bilged, especially below the waterline, with significant flare. It’s a fair, easy, dish-shaped, easily driven shape that developed into the sandbaggers. It offers amazing performance in the usual light air of New England (and New York) summers.

The first Chebacco was Harbinger with a 5′ stern fairing and a small mizzen. She was a cold-molded stock design built to order at Story’s shop. The added length gave Chebacco a significantly higher top speed than her predecessor, even better ghosting ability, and allows for a really big cockpit and a small, but quite comfortable cuddy.

Other than the mizzen, the rigs of the first Chebacco and Harbinger were essentially the same unstayed gaff cat with a very short luff, and a long gaff and boom. The shape of the main allows for a short mast, which in the cold-molded Chebacco is a very good thing. It passes through the cabintop and into a step on the sole of the cuddy. It takes some commitment to lift even a mast this short into place and luck or patience or another person to get it into the step. Lengthening the mast for a longer luff, or (even more to the point) to get a vang on the boom, only makes the process harder.

These are corky, light, playful boats on the water. They move effortlessly in light air, heel easily but slowly, accelerate quickly, and become very stable as they settle onto their flared sides. They balance beautifully until well off the wind. In fact, the boats can be steered with the mizzen sheet alone anywhere from a beat to a beam reach. They tack in 95 degrees steering with the mizzen sheet, 90 degrees with the tiller. They become harder-mouthed off the wind, but not offensive. The end plate on the shallow rudder works.

Despite how easily the Chebaccos move, they feel quite deliberate. The tiller is firm, her motions smooth rather than flighty. They feel more like keelboats than light trailer boats. Restful rather than athletic, but not boring, these boats feel much bigger than their 20′ and 1,000-lb displacement would suggest.

Above the waterline they are all volume and open, uncluttered space. The Chebaccos’ cockpits run almost the full width of the boats and about a third of their length. The cockpit size is enhanced by depth and a broad expanse of cockpit sole. The floor space and depth invite getting up and walking around, or sailing with the tiller propped against a hip.

The benches are chair height and width, and are angled down and outboard at just the right pitch. The coamings form high seatbacks. The forward faces of the seats are also angled—wider at the sole—to make for more foot room. The boats are delightful to be aboard.

These kinds of boats have to provide more pleasure than almost any other kind. The list of what makes them so wonderful is long, but let me indulge myself, as they also seem to be surprisingly rare.

They are small, simple, and light enough to launch, rig, and sail alone. They don’t need a slip or mooring, and so save the expense and open up many more areas to sail. They don’t waste a week of spare time fitting out in the spring or putting up in the fall. They don’t demand a whole day if there’s only an hour or two to sail, but they are plenty comfortable for the full day if it’s available. They are sailing within 15 minutes of reaching the ramp.

They’ll take a party to a low-tide beach for a picnic. They sail in the most delightful places: water that’s shallow and close to shore, full of minor dangers and great discovery and sport. They are light and shoal enough to push off a mud bank. They can tow a dinghy, but don’t have to. They can be rowed at a reasonable pace, standing, with long sweeps, or can be sculled over the transom, or can take an outboard.

They sail backwards steadily and predictably, or sideways for that matter, should you want to get into tight places or show off. They spin in their own length under sail. With some tweaking, they’ll steer themselves. These boats are capable enough for semi-open water. They’re fast enough to cover distance. They lie-to like a duck under the mizzen alone should a mistake be made with the weather.

They have a dry place for cold crew members, a shaded place for sunburned or sleepy crew members. They have plenty of storage to keep gear aboard and ready to go, but not underfoot.

Young children will find everything aboard to their scale and will feel much their own people, able to sail the boat and not be bored. Adults, too, will feel everything to their scale. What a difficult combination. Everyone aboard will feel safe.

They are strong, stable, dry, and capable. They’ll take adventurers off for a weekend of camping on the water in far greater luxury than most campers put up with, let alone backpackers. And at the end, it’ll only take a half hour to put the boat back on the trailer and pack it up. And everything is aboard, locked up, and ready for the next opportunity to get out.

Despite all of the virtues listed above, the cold-molded boat got to be too expensive to build. Sales dried up. Story went back to Bolger for a less expensive design in plywood that had all the same properties, plus some added conveniences. It was an opportunity to improve a great boat.

The sheet-plywood boat that resulted retains the plumb ends, the broad transom, large cockpit, and uncluttered cuddy. The rudder was moved inboard to allow a free-flooding outboard motor well on centerline so the motor can be both convenient and out of the way. The huge centerboard of Harbinger was replaced with a much smaller board and a full-length, very shoal keel, though the draft remained at 1′. The keel allows some progress to be made with the board all the way up. It also stiffens and strengthens the flat bottom.

The mast on the plywood boat steps through a slot in the cuddy’s housetop. Place the heel in the step and walk the mast up. Since it’s so easy, the mast is 3’ longer, the boom and gaff shorter. Sail area is about the same, though the rig looks better. And it might be faster.

In almost all ways the plywood boat is more functional, convenient, and usable. Aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder. The sheet-ply boat is all angles. Her upper chines are very much in evidence, her sheer- strake plumb, like her ends. I find her, too, very beautiful, but in a different way than her cold-molded sister: where one is smooth and sensuous curves, the other is cutaways and angled flats. Perhaps an acquired taste, but striking from any angle.

Story liked her well enough, but wondered if he couldn’t do a more traditional-looking boat from lapstrake plywood for the same price and time in labor. There are some people who he thought might not like the look of the sheet version. What extra time he used in fitting the planks, he’d save by not having to ’glass and grind. Bolger drew the third Chebacco.

The lapstrake boat has an apple-cheeked, Brit- ish look to her. Her deck and rig are identical to the sheet-ply boat. The materials cost is the same. Labor time worked out to be about 10 hours more. On board, it’s hard to know the difference between the two plywood versions. The sheet boat might feel a little more tender initially, and harden up more definitely when she gets her upper chine in. But it’s hard to say for sure. We never had more than 12–15 knots of air. At 15 we might think about taking the first reef. At a steady 18 we definitely would. It would be interesting to see if the two boats still felt the same as the breeze came up.

Story did get Bolger to draw one more Chebacco boat. This one was a 25-footer, lengthened to provide better accommodations in the cuddy. It’s plywood lapstrake, and looks very much like the others. I’m not convinced that the added length is not a mistake, though. Too much of a trade-off in convenience, both on and off the water. But that’s the subject of another article.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 and appears here as archival material. Plans for the 19′ 8″ x 7′ 5″ tack-and-tape version are available from H.H. Payson & Company.

The Ladybug Pram

The Ladybug pram, a small dinghy with a wheel permanently fixed in a case in its bow, allows for a nearly seamless transition from the water to a beach, all the while keeping its passengers’ shoes dry. The boat can be built in either a 6′ or a 7′ model. I first spotted it at The WoodenBoat Show at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, in 2008, on a visit to designer-builder Harry Bryan’s booth. The prototype Ladybug was perched on the grass in front of Harry’s display. Sitting there on its bottom, with oars-cum-wheelbarrow handles at the ready, the boat’s concept spoke for itself. Harry and I had barely exchanged pleasantries when I handed him $25 for a sheet of plans, and began set- ting up the project in my head. I needed this boat, as I’ll explain in just a minute. But first, allow me a short digression to illustrate this boat’s niche.

Fifteen or so years ago, I went on an evening outing with friends in a 24′ sloop in Maine; they were considering buying the boat, which the builder turned over to them for a few hours. We set out halfway through the tide’s ebb, rowing to the mooring from a gravelly beach—which had grown significantly wider when we returned to it at dead low tide after sailing. The prospect of lugging that dinghy up the beach after our pleasant sail was sheer drudgery. As we were considering our approach to the job, the sailboat’s owner-builder appeared on the beach in his pickup truck, drove to where we were standing, and stepped out of the cab without saying a word. He looped the beat-up fiberglass dinghy’s painter around his bumper hitch, returned to the cab, and stepped on the accelerator pedal. He hit stride at about 20 mph, the dinghy bouncing along behind him.

Photo by Bryan Gagner

The Ladybug pram, with a knobby tire permanently mounted in its bow, eases the transition from water to land for beach-based sailors.

It was an impressive, albeit utilitarian, approach to a common problem: Many mooring-based sailors and powerboaters work from the shore without a pier and float, and they need a reliable dinghy system. Some use outhaul anchors, leaving their dinghies afloat and hauling them in to shore when needed. Some use dollies. Some use pickup trucks. And some use brute force, straining their backs and compressing their lumbar discs into sciatic-nerve-tweaking protuberances (ask me how I know). Very few people these days use wheel-barrow boats—an old concept that Harry Bryan revives with the Ladybug.

My wife, Holly, and I live near a gravel beach at the foot of a field with poor road access. We maintain a fairweather mooring off this exposed beach, and for several years have accessed this mooring with a dolly-mounted dinghy. It’s an adequate approach to the beach-dinghy problem, though it typically requires a trip overboard in knee-deep water to secure the dinghy to the dolly. It also requires some awkward lifting of the boat to place the dolly under it. And, the boat must be strapped down before its trip up the beach, lest it be rattled frustratingly askew of the dolly.

The difference in using the Ladybug for this transition from water to land is profound. The boat’s bottom has a pronounced rocker, or longitudinal curvature, at either end, allowing it to settle on dry land before the rest of the boat grounds out. The flat bottom forces the boat to sit bolt upright when it takes the ground, making it easy to step out and onto the beach. If you’ve backed onto the beach—my preferred approach—then you simply feed the oar handles through their respective holes in the transom, cleat the oar blades to the boat’s thwart (the oars are retrofitted with wooden cleats for this purpose), lift the transom, and back the
rest of the boat out of the water on its wheel.

Photo by Bryan Gagner

Ladybug has ample freeboard when carrying a sole rower; she’ll carry an additional passenger in calm conditions.

Ladybug’s basic dimensions are based upon a William Atkin dinghy called Tiny Ripple. Holly and I built our Ladybug over the winter in an unfinished spare bedroom in our house. We borrowed the building jig from one of Harry’s WoodenBoat School classes, so I can’t comment on the moldmaking and jig construction—except to say that if you know how to use a tape measure, saw, and screwdriver, you probably won’t find this job too mentally or manually taxing.

The bow and stern transoms are laid out according to dimensions on the plans, fixed to the jig in their exact locations, and then beveled to accept the planking. The planks—just two per side—are likewise laid out according to dimensions shown on the plans, though their shapes can also simply be traced from the jig. The two planks are joined together by a riveted lap. Once they’re fastened, the bottom edges of the garboards are beveled to accept the bottom planking.

Harry offers three different options for the bottom: (1) a single layer of cross planking, with splined edges; (2) a sheet of plywood; and (3) two layers of thin planking, diagonally laid. The third option, in my opinion, is the best, as it makes economical use of short stock and creates a watertight panel that doesn’t rely upon swelling to achieve its watertightness, which is a good thing for a dinghy that spends most of its life on land. Holly and I took a slightly different approach to option number three. Since we had a stack of cedar of adequate length and generous width, we laid the first course of planking athwartships, and placed the second layer (each was 5⁄16″) fore-and-aft. Stuck together with thickened epoxy, the result is a two-ply sheet of cedar plywood.

With the transom, planks, and bottom in place, the boat is removed from the jig, flipped over, and fitted out. The fitout is pretty straightforward stuff: a handful of frames to improve the stiffness of the sides; a stern seat, a rowing seat and its supporting thwart, rails, oar-locks, and knees. The rowing seat is unconventional, as it is oriented fore-and-aft. This allows micro-adjustment to the boat’s longitudinal trim, without requiring the rower to switch thwarts.

The wheel is an off-the-shelf item from Seitech, manufacturer of small-boat dollies. For about $90, you purchase a knobby tire, a plastic rim, an aluminum axle, and nylon bearings. Then you make an axle bracket from plate bronze or stainless steel and oak or locust. The whole thing is affixed to the bottom with four screws, which allows for easy removal for servicing. The wheel lives in a case in the bow which, when viewed when the boat is in the water, could be mistaken for another seat or a gear locker.

Photo by Bryan Gagner

The boat’s bottom can be built in one of several different ways, depending upon available material and personal preference. Here, a Ladybug bottom is being cross-planked in a single layer of cedar, edge-fitted with splines.

How does this amphibious dinghy perform? To be fair, we should consider it in both of its media and in the context of its intended purpose; this is a utilitarian dinghy, not a performance rowboat. It rolls over coarse terrain and short meadow grass very well. One can actually load a fair amount of gear into it and use it as a cart. Launching, depending upon the slope of your beach, is easy, too. I’ve found it best to load and unload over the stern transom. Typically the boat is afloat by the time I’m aboard, and little poling is needed. But, if a shallow-sloping beach requires it, a push on the beach with one of the oars is usually all that’s needed to get into navigable water. I lucked into a set of beater oars a few years ago, and these now belong to our Ladybug; it would be rather hard on the conscience to press a pair of new Shaw & Tenney spruce oars into such service on a rocky Maine beach. A dedicated pole would be handy.

And how does she perform on the water? The rowing ergonomics are fine, she glides between strokes, and I forget the wheel is even there. Ladybug is a small boat. Harry has piled three adults into his, and recommends such loading only in dead-flat water. In chop, while settling ourselves into the boat, Holly and I took a small amount of water through one of the oar holes—just once, but enough to warn us of the possibilities if we pushed things too hard in poor conditions. I spoke with Harry about this, and he had been thinking of some sort of flapper cover to stem such flow. I think that’s a good idea, and am mulling over the possibilities in neoprene. The rails are closer to the water than I’m used to; I would not feel comfortable in this boat in a significant chop with a large passenger aboard. I have, however, rowed it in breeze and chop alone, and feel perfectly safe in such conditions.

As with any small dinghy, loading and unloading at the mothership require careful weight distribution. One must adhere to the convention of unloading the ends of the boat before the middle. I’ve found standing from either of the low-slung seats to be a bit of a chore, but I’ve also been spoiled over the years by higher thwarts and larger dinghes. I wouldn’t change the position of Ladybug’s thwarts, as her rowing geometry is quite good as specified.

Photo by Bryan Gagner

For overland transport of the boat, Ladybug’s oars must be retrofitted with wooden cleats; these notch over the thwart, securing the oars to the boat.

Ladybug tows well behind a bigger boat. Her bow is rockered so high that the wheel rides clear of the water—except when surfing downwind. Then, it does have a tendency to catch the surface and spin as the boat scoots down the face of a wave, but with no bad consequences. An ample skeg keeps her tracking straight.

This little dinghy lives up to its promise; it’s changed the way I get on and off the beach. Every time I slide those oars into their wheelbarrow position and roll the boat to the water, I feel a glimmer of satisfaction spiced with disbelief that the transition from shore to sea could be so easy.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 and appears here as archival material. For more information about the Ladybug Pram, visit Bryan Boatbuilding.

Swallow Boats’ SeaRaider

Swallow Boats is a purveyor of boat kits in Wales. Their SeaRaider combines the best features of the fastest and most seaworthy Raid boats into one new boat. The boat originated in Scotland—one of the best places on Earth to put a small boat through its paces. In the space of a week on this country’s lochs and coast, one is likely to meet a wide range of weather conditions, from varied wind strengths, both upwind and downwind, to sudden rain squalls or katabatic gusts coming off the mountains. This drama is always complemented by enough soft breezes and sunshine highlighting the dramatic Scottish scenery to make one wish to stay longer.

The week of competitive sailing and rowing originally called the Great Glen Raid, now Sail Caledonia, has given Claus Riepe from Hamburg, Germany, and many other sailors, builders, and designers a unique opportunity to watch small boats perform under sail and oar and against each other. Any design or building faults, any glitches or lapses, soon become obvious. Claus thoroughly enjoyed the Raid concept, a week of competition and camaraderie in cruising areas that can be deep sea, shallow lagoon, or narrow canal, and he enjoyed his present boat, but he’d never sailed it in company with other boats of similar appearance. All week he and his crew had sailed their best and rowed their hearts out but were effortlessly overtaken by one boat after the other, always ending up toward the rear of the fleet.

“It was a sobering shock,” he admitted. “I first tried to upgrade with every trick I could think of—taller rig with more sail, carbon spars, booms, sliding fairleads—but all to no avail.”

He ordered a new boat, but that didn’t work either. Now ready for a complete change, he remembered Swallow Boats near Cardigan Bay in Wales, known for their small boats with a lovely sheer and performance, and their offer to design and build custom boats.

It was about this time that Matt Newland joined his naval architect father, Nick, at Swallow Boats, after a stint in London, bringing with him an engineering education from Cambridge University, designing skills on 3D CAD software, and the experience of working for a time with yacht designer Tony Castro. Claus visited them and described his dream boat, similar to a Drascombe Longboat but with better upwind ability, a self-tacking jib for singlehanding, room for four oarsmen on Raids, a mizzen that can be handled from within the cockpit, a strong rudder that does not have to be removed before beaching, good watertight stowage, self-draining ability, excellent buoyancy and righting capacity, and more.

The Newlands relished the challenge. Quickly they realized that water ballast was a necessity to achieve a light boat for rowing and racing, and a safe boat with self-righting capability for shorthanded sailing in varying conditions. After just two hours of discussion, a firm order was placed. All through the design process designer and client stayed in close contact, and together developed some innovative ideas and solutions.

The water ballast, for a start, is carefully thought out. “A false floor,” Matt explained, “is sited just above the waterline and inclining aft slightly, so the cockpit can self-drain through self-bailers or a simple twist hatch into the outboard well. A tank underneath this floor can take up to 660 lbs(330kg) of water, equivalent to the weight of four adults lying in the bilges.” Two inflatable buoyancy bags in the tank can be partly inflated to fine-tune the amount of ballast water taken on, a far more versatile system than multiple tanks. “And in effect,” Claus points out, “the boat has several different personalities. I can fish off the west coast of Ireland in a steady boat, or race with a crew in a light boat with its sail area of 196 sq ft and 21′ 10″ length for plenty of fun and excitement.”

There is an ingenious method for filling and emptying the tank. A forward-facing self-bailer within reach of the helmsman means the water can be flooded in, and three self-bailers mounted the right way around can remove it when the boat is moving as little as 3 to 4 knots. The water can also be pumped out with a conventional bailing pump, a small electric pump, or drained off as the boat lifts onto a trailer. I watched a capsize demonstration in Scotland when the water-ballast tanks were full: the boat self-righted so quickly from a complete knockdown that little water entered the cockpit and the crew were back aboard and sailing within two minutes.

Once Matt was happy with the design, he had all the plywood parts cut out by computer-controlled router. “This not only saves time,” he explained, “but also ensures the hull is designed accurately and fits together exactly.” She was built right-way-up over a four-mold construction jig. Her bottom panel is sheathed inside and out with heavy 16-oz (450g) biaxial glass, and the whole hull is epoxy-coated. The construction method is largely self-jigging and relies on internal structure like bulkheads to form the shape and provide stiffness.

Several custom-made pieces of stainless-steel hardware were commissioned for the boat, including the massively strong rudderhead (plywood blade), the tiller joint, and the mast tabernacle. Matt applied his engineering skills to the tiller design—always a problem when a mizzenmast is in the way. Under the aft deck a stainless-steel push rod with stainless-steel ball sockets at each end gives fine-tuned responsiveness without any slack. It feels slightly heavier than an ordinary tiller, but one quickly gets used to it.

The resulting boat is a modern classic, with the graceful looks and lines, lovely sheer, and elegant use of varnished wood for spars, gunwales, and slatted seats that are part of the ethos of the Swallow- boat range. It was important for Claus that they could both design and build his new boat. The SeaRaider has the lean shape and flat run aft of a racing dinghy of the 1960s, her transom narrowed to reduce wetted surface to improve rowing ability. Primarily she is a sailing boat; with a firm turn of the bilge, good form stability, and a flat run aft, she is well able to plane in the right conditions, as we found. She weighs just 716 lbs when the tank is empty, fully 440 lbs less than Claus’s old fiberglass boat of the same length. So, she’s lighter to maneuver, tow, launch, and retrieve, yet just as robust. The boat has an outboard well, sited inboard on the centerline where it should be, with a slit just for the propeller that simply closes with a flap when not in use. The maximum power is 5 hp, but a Honda 2.3-hp short-shaft is sufficient.

The boat, named CRAIC after the Irish word for a good sociable time, was so brand-new when Matt trailered her up to Sail Caledonia to test her, that even Claus had not seen her and was still sailing his old boat. I liked CRAIC’s slim shape and the versatile yawl rig that can cope with strong winds.

The gunter mast can be stepped or lowered down in its hinged tabernacle, its topmast and the mizzen spar being light carbon fiber enclosed in luff pockets like a windsurfer. This reduces turbulence on the leading edge and adds a bit more sail area, and CRAIC sails very close to the wind. The self-tacking jib is set on roller-furling gear and tacks easily with its club boom. For stowage, the mizzen wraps on its round carbon-fiber mast; the mainsail can be similarly furled if the gooseneck is disengaged. The sprit on the mainsail means that the spar is well above head height, yet the sail is well supported. Slab reefing is still possible, with cringles near the mast, or the main can simply be dropped. CRAIC rows well, her topsides are low enough, and the rudder slightly down gives directional stability. The thwarts are removable to clear space for sailing. Everything works so easily.

I joined CRAIC the day of her first real trial early in the week on Loch Lochy, on a crisp early summer’s day, the mountains circling the loch rising blue-green into the sky. The wind was gusty, between 8 and 18 knots, and designer Iain Oughtred had been invited to take the helm. The wind died as the race started but then returned strongly, and we set off on an exhilarating tacking duel with the Beetle whaleboat replica MOLLY, 6′ longer than our boat. Claus watched with incredulity as his new boat took off through the fleet “like a knife through butter,” he later told us, and left the rest of the fleet behind.

Our delight simmered down as the unsettled weather and the mountains began to throw longer and heavier gusts our direction, and whitecaps became trailing spume. Gusts up to 33 knots were coming our way, but Iain was curious to see what CRAIC was capable of and kept heading up, spilling a bit of wind when needed. We could have reefed the main, of course, or taken it down entirely; she sails well under jib and mizzen.

We turned onto the downwind leg, and Matt clocked 8.7 knots on his GPS before the boat with its four crew suddenly rose up a few inches and started planing. There was too much spray to read the GPS, but Matt had already reached speeds of over 10 knots in her in Wales. “It’s like a Nantucket sleigh ride, coasting behind a whale,” I thought to myself as I held on tight to my camera. At the next buoy we stopped to put in a reef, and by the time we reached our destination, the wind was an indolent breeze.

But CRAIC’s star had risen, Swallow Boats had achieved their biggest design breakthrough, and Claus was bursting with pride that he had been part of the project. Since then the boat has sailed in Raids in France and Italy, its design adapted to the BayRaider and cabin versions, selling through Europe and now to the U.S., and Claus’s pleasure has only increased.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 and appears here as archival material. Swallow Boats is now Swallow Yachts and the Sea Raider is no longer in production. See their website for current models.

The Kingfisher Power Dory

Richard Wilson is a boatbuilding instructor. His smart-looking wooden power dory, Kingfisher, grew out of his desire for a practical inshore craft suitable for sportfishing, flatfish netting, and scuba diving. As a bonus, it also happened to be a good boatbuilding project for his students, which could be completed within the time frame of his course.

Wilson, a master tradesman with years of experience, became a director of his family’s boatbuilding company, Brin Wilson Boats, in 1974, when his father died. In partnership with his brother, he ran the company until 2000, when they made the decision to sell. Today, Wilson is a marine technology tutor at Auckland’s University of Technology, UNITEC.

Wilson owns a vacation home at Marsden Cove, north of Auckland on the shores of Whangarei Harbour, a large, deeply indented, flooded river valley with plenty of the shallow inlets, tidal rivers, and extensive sand flats typical of New Zealand’s northernmost regions. Finding himself without a larger boat for the first time in many years, Wilson decided to design and build a dory after being bitterly disappointed in a lightweight 14′ aluminum runabout he’d bought to explore Whangarei Harbour and beyond. “I hated it,” he explained. “It was noisy, hard-riding, and unstable. And there was no room in it!”

Wilson’s first love is wooden boats. He became interested in design at a very young age. Over the years, ten yachts and three launches ranging between 36′ and 41′ in length have been built to his designs. So designing and building a boat of his own was an obvious solution. The dory is his first small design.

“I wanted a boat with a stable hull that was easily driven by a 20-hp outboard, easily handled by just one person, and easy to build. Kingfisher fits all those criteria.” The boat is a traditional-looking dory with a flat bottom and a double chine. Its high bow, sweeping sheer, moderately raked flat transom, and an outboard motor mounted in a well all contribute to its attractive, clean lines. The decision to mount the motor inboard was partly driven by aesthetics—Wilson feels it’s a better-looking boat in profile if the outboard doesn’t show—and partly by function.

One of Kingfisher’s regular tasks is to set nets for flounder, sole, and other flatfish which abound in Whangarei Harbour, for which her shallow draft is ideal. With this in mind, a raised platform is fitted across the boat’s transom to facilitate setting and retrieving a net over the stern. Working nets over the transom is always the safest procedure, but difficult to achieve with a conventional transom-mounted outboard, which gets in the way and constantly tangles in the net. Aboard Kingfisher, working nets is easy, as is accessing the engine when the boat’s afloat. When the engine’s kicked up it remains inside the line of the transom and well clear of the bottom of the boat.

Kingfisher’s construction is in 9mm and 6mm plywood, her topsides lapstrake planked. The bottom is fiberglass-sheathed to just above the upper chine, and all the boat’s timbers are sealed, epoxy glued, and then painted. Wilson uses single-part paint rather than more advanced two-pack systems, as it is more environmentally friendly and requires a less complex application and touchup.

The main floor—the sole—is also fiberglass-sheathed and then painted with a mixture of one-part paint and Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) to provide an effective nonskid surface. The solid wood in Kingfisher is macrocarpa, a type of cypress, of which there was a supply in Wilson’s workshop at the time of construction. It is commonly used by boatbuilders in New Zealand; North American and European builders will no doubt require a substitute. A subsequent boat was built using yellow cedar, which bends well, is durable, and is a bit more dense than macrocarpa or red cedar.

Kingfisher’s trim is in mahogany, again because it was available to the school at the time of building. Wil- son prefers teak, which can be left to weather, but it’s expensive. The second boat doesn’t use teak either, for the same reasons. (Mahogany does, however, have the advantage from a boatbuilding perspective of requiring several coats of varnish—another skill for Wilson’s students to master.) The students also fabricated the boat’s solid-lumber details, like the knife holders and wooden bow roller, giving them experience in joinery details.

One of Kingfisher’s more interesting features is a sealed floor suspended 4″ above the bottom and 2″ above the upper chine line—effectively an airtight double hull with a volume of 0.5 cubic meter. Aside from offering a flat floor above the waterline inside the boat, which self-drains via two 2″ holes in the transom, it provides buoyancy and security should the outer hull ever be breached. The boat is also easy to clean, as it can simply be hosed down from the inside. Another benefit of the double-chine sealed-floor design is the form’s stability at rest. According to Wilson, a scuba diver can pull himself over the side of the boat with no risk of capsize. Indeed, the boat heels no more than a few inches. Certainly two adults can move around Kingfisher with impunity, barely altering her trim.

The boat is designed to be transported atop a conventional flatbed utility trailer. Most New Zealand households have access to light general-purpose trailers of this type, used to transport bulky or heavy goods, garden waste, and rubbish. The dory sits on the trailer resting on its twin timber keels, spaced 2′ apart and running the full length of boat’s flat bottom. The keels are 43⁄4″ deep and capped with aluminum rubbing strips to protect against wear and tear from contact with the trailer or when taking the ground.

The keels allow the boat to be pulled up a beach or left to sit on the hard when the tide recedes. They also provide lateral stability when the boat’s underway and give a certain amount of protection from damage in shallow water. When the boat’s on plane, air trapped in the tunnel between the keels acts as a cushion, softening the ride.

Kingfisher made easy work of a short, wind against tide chop on Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour, easily soaking up the bumps and delivering a reasonably smooth, dry ride. With two people aboard she achieved a top speed of 14 knots, as recorded on the accompanying photo boat’s GPS. Wilson has managed a maximum of 15 knots with three adults aboard and 12–14 knots with four in ideal sea conditions.

Wilson likes to drive standing up, which is safe enough because the boat is so stable; this steering posture offers better vision forward. When planing, Kingfisher rides on the flat run aft with her bow well up in the air, an impression reinforced by her sheerline. If he’s by himself, the designer employs a simple tiller extension so he can stand or sit farther forward, helping to trim the boat.

In rough conditions, Wilson sits on the timber cross- seat just ahead of the engine box, one of two, painted, solid-wood thwart seats, each pierced with four holes to accommodate fishing rods. Additional angled plastic rod-holders are screwed to the gunwales for a total of 12. This man is serious about sportfishing.

Kingfisher is a remarkably large-volume boat. Unlike some dories, she carries plenty of beam, especially amidships, and her raised floor offers more usable surface area than would be the case if the outer skin were the floor, as is usual.

The interior layout is simple and uncluttered, but very workable: an enclosed locker—essentially an extension of the engine box/well—runs fore-and-aft between the seats down the middle of the boat. A lift-off watertight lid reveals stowage for a portable plastic fuel tank, life jackets, lines, fishing gear, and longer items such as oars and fishing rods. Two inspection hatches in the lock- er’s floor give access to the boat’s airtight under-floor compartment.

Between engine well and storage locker, and part of the same fore-and-aft structure, is an open-topped battery locker. The battery is housed in a proprietary plastic box to protect it from spray or water sloshing around in the lockers, which both drain aft into the engine well. Up under Kingfisher’s short foredeck there’s a self-draining anchor locker below floor level. The solid-wood anchor roller and bollard on the curved foredeck are attractive and functional features.

Kingfisher has been a successful design in every respect: she’s proven to be a capable, safe, stable, and seakindly boat with excellent load-carrying ability. She is economical to run. The design is relatively easy and inexpensive to build, and Wilson’s UNITEC students are able to complete the boat, from lofting to launching, working three days per week over thirteen weeks. Along the way, they learn a useful range of traditional and modern boat-building skills. Best of all, Wilson has created a great little boat that perfectly meets his needs.

This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 and appears here as archival material. The contact information in that Profile is no longer valid and we presume that plans are no longer available.

Disappointment

Clayton Wright, who built the pedal-and-propeller powered skiff featured as our Reader Built Boat in this issue, put an extraordinary effort into inventing a drive system for the boat only to discover during sea trials that it fell far short of his expectations. “The boat is back in the basement,” he wrote, “I’m going to throw a sheet over her and try to put her out of my mind.”

Most of us who have built boats choose a design and a means of propulsion for it that have been well tested; the pride we take in the project isn’t dashed on launch day. It’s a rare occurrence to build a boat that is deeply disappointing, but it has happened to me too.

The third kayak I built was a replica of a type built on Alaska’s King Island. A couple of years earlier, in 1979, I had built a Hooper Bay kayak and had developed an appreciation for traditional construction, and the King Island seemed like a worthwhile project. I don’t recall now what plans I used, but there were drawings and scantlings in Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America and I could study the specimen that the Washington State Historical Society had in its museum in Tacoma.

King Island is situated 40 miles from the Alaskan mainland just south of the entrance to the Bering Strait. The waters there are notoriously rough, and the kayakers needed to travel long distances and carry heavy loads home after a successful hunt. Their kayaks have been described in glowing terms: “Of all the Bering Sea kayaks, this type was reportedly the best made and strongest…a great kayak for a person intent on distance paddling.” It seemed like the perfect choice to fulfill my dream of cruising among the San Juan Islands.

I wanted my King Island to be as close to the original as I could make it, so all the wood that went into it was driftwood that I gathered from the beaches near home. I split spruce for the gunwales and keel and Western red cedar for the stringers, cut the deck beams and carved the bow piece from Alaska yellow cedar crooks. I used power tools as little as possible and trimmed the pieces to shape with a drawknife, planes, and spokeshaves.

I made a few additions that I thought would be useful for cruising including accommodations for a foot-controlled rudder, a maststep and partner, and a mast and yards for a small squaresail. I couldn’t use seal skin to cover the kayak, so I used #10 duck and sealed the fabric with airplane dope. I’d already carved a single-bladed paddle for the Hooper Bay, so I was ready to launch.

Getting aboard at the beach was awkward, and when I shoved off I knew something was wrong. The King Island was very unstable. It would roll to one side, I’d brace, and it would roll to the other. The dreams I had for the kayak quickly evaporated.

Unlike the Hooper Bay kayak, which had ribs that were flat across the bottom, the King Island’s ribs were curved and the round bottom wouldn’t provide any stability until the hull had more than my weight aboard to settle deeper in the water and immerse the flare of its sides. With a cruising load the King Island might have offered the stability I needed, but I didn’t want to weigh it down every time I went paddling. I later read somewhere that the King Islanders put beach-stone ballast in their kayaks; I didn’t like the idea of filling a canvas-skinned kayak with rocks.

My King Island kayak went into storage for decades at home under the eaves or a tarp. The skin eventually rotted and two years ago I tore it off and put it in the trash. I hadn’t had a good look at the frame in decades and I was pleased by what I saw, especially the beautifully curved yellow cedar bow piece. In every facet left by the spokeshave on the ribs and deckbeams I could see my 30-year-old self at work. It reminded me of the aspirations I had then while building the boat, not of the disappointment I felt after launching it.

Whether or not Clay gets satisfying performance out of his pedal-powered skiff, he may, in time, come to see and enjoy the beauty and ingenuity of the boat he built. Things may not always turn out as we intend, but doing good work is always its own reward.