Clint Chase of Portland, Maine, is far from the first small-craft designer to find inspiration in the marvelous “faerings,” or four-oared boats, of Scandinavia, and he certainly won’t be the last. But with his Drake design of 2009 he seems to have captured the point of the ancient workboat type in a way that works especially well for a particular kind of recreational user today: the oarsman.
He does so by making no pretense of trying to make the boat something that it is not. This boat isn’t going to sail well to weather. Period. The key to successful enjoyment of the type is to refrain from asking or demand- ing that it do so. Trying to graft a modern racing sloop capable of tacking through few compass degrees onto the historical roots of a faering has rarely worked well, and the attempt often merely corrupts the virtues that draw our attention to such fine craft in the first place. This design is for someone who is not at all afraid to break out the oars, since it is, first and foremost, a rowing boat.
Photo by Jake Chase/Jellyhawk Studios
Looking for a seaworthy boat suitable for fast solo or tandem rowing in open water, Clint Chase found his inspiration, as many small-craft designers do, in the faerings of Scandinavia. His lightly constructed plywood-epoxy Drake moves well under oars, but a small lugsail can be shipped for downwind sailing.
Drake is an uncommonly good rowing boat. By pro- viding a fast, comfortable, and enjoyable rowing platform, the boat succeeds in taking advantage of its lean hull shape and long waterline length to do what it does best. Like many good rowing craft, it is probably at its best set up for solo rowing—which some of us take to be an essential of rowing anyway. For going it alone, Drake has bronze outrigger oarlocks that flip out over the gunwale and lock into place, effectively increasing her 4′ 1″ beam by about 10″. Clint uses light and lovely 9′ spoon-bladed oars when rowing alone, with a lead pour in the inboard end serving as a counterbalance. For tandem rowing with his wife or a friend, he has installed four standard top-mount oarlock sockets on pads at the gunwale and uses 7′ 6″ oars.
The boat is open stem to stern, and remarkably clear of obstructions. The forwardmost rowing thwart is fixed and also serves as a mast partner. Two other thwarts—one a little forward of amidships and the other farther aft—are easily removed. The aftermost one comes out when Clint is rowing solo from the center thwart. When rowing in tandem, the crew installs the after thwart, then removes the center one to allow rowing from the forward fixed thwart after the rig has been taken down. In both cases, the boat trims very well fore-and-aft. The thwart transitions are easy, too, since each removable thwart is held by a simple turnbutton on each side. Both removable thwarts come out for sailing, providing a comfortable seating position on the floorboards, which—as is right and proper for a boat of this kind—run athwartships.
Photo by Tom Jackson
Two of Drake’s thwarts are easily removed to clear the cockpit for sailing.
Clint and I went for a tandem row in Great Cove, off WoodenBoat’s waterfront, one fine summer day, and I found the rowing to be easy and the boat very quick and responsive indeed. Rowing in a boat that moves so well always brings a smile to my face. I am convinced the reason people shun rowing in favor of such abominations as inflatable outboard dinghies is that they row boats that are poorly set up, badly designed, or both. It’s the same feeling as using a dull and thoughtlessly tuned hand plane to try to run a fine, fair curve on a plank edge of beautiful wood. The difference is between joy and misery. Rowing Drake counts on the joy side of that equation, and shaping a long, easy turn by merely pulling slightly harder on one side is akin to running the length of a plank with a comfortable block plane. We crossed the half-mile from WoodenBoat to a beach at Babson Island in what seemed to be no time at all.
Drake makes no pretense of being a good upwind sailer, however. The whole idea of these boats in the fjords of Norway was that when the wind was on your nose you’d always be better off getting the rig down and breaking out the oars rather than beating yourself up on tack after tack in narrow confines. What made the combination possible is that the old-time faer- ings not only rowed very well but also sailed well off the wind, too. Whatever their business was out of the fjord (fishing, mostly), the crew knew they would have a sleigh ride home with the westerly wind behind them. Simplicity was the key: often unstayed, their rigs used square, lug, or sprit sails that could be struck quickly and stowed inside the boat. And when the time came, the rig could be set up quickly to take advantage of a favorable breeze, upon which they would sail handily on any point of sail from a reach to dead downwind. In Drake, as no doubt in other faerings and derivatives, the sailor will always be tempted to test the boat’s ability to sail to windward—and then be well-advised to accept it as it is.
Drake’s sailing rig could not be simpler. Clint has merely specified a Shellback dinghy standing-lug sail of 58 sq ft. Shellbacks are ubiquitous and well known, so sailmakers can easily track down specifications if they don’t know them already. Not only that, but sails themselves are readily available—they can even be ordered right off the shelf at The WoodenBoat Store. The hollow spars that Clint has specified are uncomplicated, too. Plus, if you happen to already have a Shellback dinghy—maybe by having built one of the boats from a kit, for example—then you wouldn’t even have to buy another sail. Just transfer the bundled sail, mast, spar, and boom from one boat to the other, and away you go. The rig from a Nutshell pram (especially the larger 9′ version), though a little smaller, would work just as well, and that’s the sail we ended up borrowing on the day of our outing.
Consider Drake’s rig as providing a kind of dessert— a downwind bonus for having gotten your exercise for the day. “The idea is to blast to windward and come back under sail,” Clint says. “It’s the most perfect way to get on the water, to be able to do both without sacrificing rowing qualities. You have to know what you can do; you can’t expect to go to windward. The feel of the boat in a good breeze is definitely reminiscent of an Åfjordsfaering,” a particular type of faering that Clint had sailed on loan from Ben Fuller, a fellow small-craft sailor and curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine.
Since Clint’s boat has no centerboard and a long keel, its pointing ability will surely frustrate racing sailors. Clint took some of his inspiration for this kind of sailing not only from the Åfjordsfaering and modern faering derivatives that he had seen or sailed in Maine, but also from boat designer Paul Gartside’s open-water cruising skiff Bob, a 16-footer that also specifies a downwind-only lugsail. Clint took Gartside’s one-week Boat Design course at WoodenBoat School several years ago, and he came away inspired to try his own hand at design. Drake is the first he has completed that he considers ready to market, but others are in the works. A former high school science teacher, he attended The Landing School in Arundel, Maine, after becoming captivated by boats. Four years ago, he became an instructor at The Compass Project in Portland, teach- ing young people to build boats, which he still does part-time.
Photo by Tom Jackson
Made with 1⁄4″ marine plywood, Drake’s hull is light—about 130 lbs—and easily trailers behind just about any vehicle. Clint Chase uses a lightweight aluminum trailer, which can be detached from the vehicle and readily rolled down to the water singlehanded.
For Drake’s hull, Clint specifies 1 ⁄4″ plywood, either okoume or sapele, the latter being a bit heavier. He painted the plywood, avoiding sheathing to keep it light, though he would advise fiberglass-in-epoxy sheathing on the exterior for anyone grounding regularly on rough beaches. He has two options for flotation—built-in chambers or tied-down airbags—either of which he views as critically important to the safety of this design. “I was going for the aesthetics in this build,” he says, so for his own boat he chose off-the-shelf canoe flotation bags that can be tied down but easily removed to show her uncluttered interior. Construction is glued- lapstrake plywood, with three strakes per side on a Douglas-fir backbone. He emphasizes lightweight woods, perhaps spruce for frames and even cedar for the keelson and thwarts. Glued-lapstrake construction makes it possible to build a strong and light boat— perhaps 130 lbs for her 17’4″ length overall. The boat could be reduced in length to 15′ 5″, but Clint strongly advises keeping the 17’4″ length for optimal seaworthiness and speed.
The only pieces of hardware to speak of in the boat are the rudder pintles and gudgeons, which are silicon- bronze. These aren’t off-the-shelf items, and may present some challenge. An enterprising boatbuilder might learn bronze casting (WoodenBoat School has a course in the subject) to make them, or present patterns or specifications to a foundry or a machine shop, which would have no difficulty at all in fabricating them. Clint is thinking of having castings premade, as well, and he is even considering developing Drake as a kit.
In her handling, Drake’s steering is the only thing that may seem unusual. It involves a loop of line working through a short two-arm yoke mortised over the rudderhead. Many boats use the device of line-steering (see Coquina, page 62, and Beachcomber-Alpha dory, page 28, in this edition for two other examples). In my view, for this boat, no other would do. Sitting amidships is most comfortable, most practical, and puts your weight right where it needs to be. Getting used to the rope steering will take no time at all, and it will allow you to go forward to adjust the downhaul or grab your water bottle or the sunblock without having to abandon the helm.
Photo by Tom Jackson
Rowing works best when going to windward, but Drake sails well downwind or on a beam reach. The lugsail, which is the same as used in Shellback dinghies, is readily available and has uncomplicated rigging.
Clint has used his boat primarily in Maine waters. “I’ve gotten out into some open water outside the islands, with swells, and found it to be remarkably seaworthy,” he says. “The feeling of safety I get is more than I expected. At one point, I was rowing out Casco Bay with the tide with me. I knew there would be a tiderip out there and that it would get a little ‘interesting,’ but I got through that really remarkably safely, without water coming in.” Preparing for the Blackburn Challenge rowing race in Massachusetts (see www.blackburnchallenge.com), he did a 15-mile open-water row. “I learned a lot about rowing downwind with 2′ rolling, whitecapping seas—how much work it is to keep a boat on course. When I was drawing it, I stretched out the forefoot to get the waterline length I was looking for without having it ‘grab’ in following seas. During that row, I realized it was okay. I certainly had to stay focused and square to the waves, but the boat just felt great. The stern lifted up, and it scooted down on the seas, dropped into the next trough, and kept a steady rhythm.”
It all makes me want to go.
Substantial v-shape to her long, lean hull helps Drake track very well when under oars, yet her rocker makes her maneuverable and a good sea boat.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 and appears here as archival material. Plans are available from Chase Small Craft.
Here we have a distinctive, easily built, shoal-draft cruising yawl. The 25’3″ Black Skimmer floats in 10″ of water and sails handily in not much more. She stays with, or ahead of, most stock boats of comparable size on all points (including to windward)…and nearly always outdistances cruisers of similar cost.
Skimmer finds her heritage in the working sharpies of the Atlantic coast. In plain terms, these ancestors can be described as relatively narrow, flat-bottomed skiffs that have grown in length. Properly designed sharpies offer impressive performance in return for modest investments of time and money.
Black Skimmer comes from a happy coincidence of natural design evolution and contemporary materials (plywood and epoxy). The early 1970s found me in need of a shallow cruiser for exploring the hidden creeks that disappear into the shores of lower Chesapeake Bay. The available stock boats seemed too deep, too complex, and too expensive. To my good fortune, the late Philip C. Bolger was writing for Small Boat Journal at the time.
In each issue of SBJ, the Gloucester, Massachusetts, designer presented a “cartoon”…a preliminary boat design created to meet the specific requests of an individual reader. The images often were striking, and the aesthetics sometimes…well, surprising. But the proposed designs always seemed perfectly suited to the clients’ needs. The designer’s essays, which accompanied the cartoons, were filled with sharp wit and clear insight. It occurred to me that working with Mr. Bolger to devise a new boat might prove good fun.
Photo by Mike O'Brian
Black Skimmer awaits her first taste of the Chesapeake Bay’s tidewaters, the marshy and shoal-water environment for which she was designed. The year was 1973, the beginning of a long association between boatbuilder and author Mike O’Brien and designer Philip C. Bolger.
After some thought, I sent him a list of requirements for a sailing cruiser. The new boat should be easily, quickly, and inexpensively built; cruise a crew of two in relative comfort; float in less than a foot of water and sail, really sail, in less than two feet; be self-righting, self-bailing, and have positive flotation; and be able to take the ground absolutely upright without sustaining damage.
After only 10 days of anxious waiting, I found Bol- ger’s first cartoon in our mailbox. A rough sketch, penciled on a sheet of common typing paper, showed a 25′ leeboard sharpie with twin inboard rudders. The proposal looked fine, but the rudders with their purpose-made hardware seemed to conflict with the theme of minimum cost, and the blades likely would snag crab-pot warp all the way to the Eastern Shore and back. We agreed to replace them with a single kick-up rudder mounted outboard on the transom. After due thought, the designer found something in his cartoon that bothered him: the bow was “too prominent.” He lowered it.
The final drawings, which arrived just three weeks after the preliminary sketch, offered a few surprises. Bolger had moved the mizzenmast back hard against the transom and had set it off to one side in order to clear the rudder. The asymmetry seemed to make fine sense, but I worried that the farther-aft location of the sail plan’s geometric center would result in too much weather helm. Bolger explained the change: it seems that some boats of this type had been having lee-helm problems, and he’d warrant that Black Skimmer would have none. Indeed, as things turned out after the boat was built, the yawl balanced perfectly under sail (slight weather helm) with the leeboards hung precisely where the designer had drawn them.
Photo by Mike O'Brien
Leeboards, which give the design its lateral resistance, can be raised and lowered as needed based on conditions, point of sail, and water depth.The boat sails well in less than 2’ of water.
Yet another surprise appeared in the final tracings: a previously unmentioned bow-well appeared forward of the first bulkhead. Keeping any concerns about flooding to myself, I built the well as drawn. In a decade of sailing up and down Chesapeake Bay, that open well never took green water. It did, however, regularly carry dirty ground tackle, the bagged mainsail, and crew members who desired solitude.
Although Skimmer might appear radical to some eyes, she is composed of design elements that have been well tested through the years. Successful flat-bottomed sharpies nearly always show adequate rocker (longitudinal curvature) to their bottoms; and the heels of their stems are carried at, or clear of, the water’s surface. This configuration reduces crossflow at the chines, resulting in better performance in light air. When the breeze comes on, the steering remains docile and predictable. Flat-bottomed boats with insufficient rocker often seem prone to rooting, broaching, and other unpleasant behavior.
For lateral resistance, Skimmer depends upon leeboards, a large rudder, and hard chines with external logs. The leeboards contribute to Skimmer’s performance in ways that centerboards cannot match. Each leeboard needs to work on only one tack, so it can be shaped and positioned for maximum performance. The working board angles away from the hull and presents an efficient, nearly perpendicular face to the water as the boat heels to her sailing lines. A small amount of toe-in relative to the boat’s centerline can increase lift (some designers specify asymmetrical foils for the same reason), but Bolger cautioned against overdoing it. Leeboards don’t intrude on the accommodations, and they remain effective in extremely shallow water long after centerboards have retreated entirely within their trunks.
An idle leeboard, perched on the weather rail, provides 120 lbs of effective and uncomplaining all-weather ballast. Some sailors dislike the appearance of leeboards, but to me they have the look of folded wings when the boat is at rest—and I’m happy to be done with centerboard trunk maintenance.
Photo by Mike O'Brien
A sprit-boomed “leg-o’-mutton” rig makes sail handling easy. Note that the mizzen is offset to starboard to clear the centerline for tiller steering for the transom-mounted rudder. The bow-high attitude of the dinghy astern (a Bolger-designed Gloucester Light Dory) gives a sense of Black Skimmer’s speed.
Skimmer’s construction plan speaks to her designer’s ability to engineer a strong and clean structure. A few bulkheads combine with longitudinal stringers and the plywood skin to produce great rigidity without the clutter of extensive transverse framing. Almost every element in the design adds to the boat’s strength. Sliding-hatch rails support the deck, and leeboard guards strengthen the sides. This rigid box-girder hull could winter on a knife’s edge without distortion.
We’ll assemble Skimmer in “Instant Boat” fashion. Bolger provides drawings that show the expanded shape of the sides—that is, the sides as if taken from the hull and laid flat on the shop floor. We re-create these patterns at full scale directly on the plywood sheets that will sheathe the hull. Then we cut out the sides and wrap them around the bulkheads and transom, which act as molds. True lofting and building jigs are not needed.
This is fast work for experienced hands and easy work for beginners. With the help of two friends, I assembled the hull in one 11-hour workday (after four days spent cutting and finishing various components). Get- ting the prototype completely built and ready for her maiden sail required a total of 700 builder-hours, but she went together outdoors between paying jobs. Working straight through inside a shop, 500 hours should be sufficient to produce a plain but fair facsimile.
How does she sail? Skimmer will match most stock cruising boats of her length when beating to windward; off the wind, she’ll reach and run many of them out of sight. To attain the surprising windward capability, the mainsail should be cut fuller and with the point of maximum draft farther forward than is common these days. Sew the mizzen flat as a bed sheet—this tiny (64 sq ft) swatch of Dacron provides control rather than drive. We’ll often want to strap that sail down hard and forget it.
Considerable tension in the mainsail’s luff is needed for windward work, and the halyard alone cannot supply it. If we attempt to haul on the halyard with too much vigor, we might put an alarming arc into the mast…but the luff still will be too loose. We need to fit a powerful downhaul with at least a 3-to-1 mechanical advantage. When setting the sail, first we two-block the halyard and secure its fall. Then we lay into the downhaul to get the luff taut. Before you argue that this explanation violates several laws of Physics 101, let me say that the key lies in friction and the severe taper to this unstayed mast.
Photo by Mike O'Brien
A simple flat-bottomed shape, inspired by historical sharpies, makes Black Skimmer simple to build in plywood.
Skimmer shares one weakness with many other flat-bottomed sharpies. She does not like sailing in very light air and a slop leftover from the afternoon sea breeze or powerboat wakes. Here, a large headsail might help. The inverted “kite” sail headsail sketched on the plans never worked well. Perhaps a single-luff spinnaker….
This sharpie has no handling vices. Her off-the-wind manners in a stiff breeze and steep sea are comforting. When other monohulls begin their annoying, if not terrifying, rhythmic downwind rolling, Skimmer is rock steady. A powerful rudder and skeg combine with ample rocker and a shallow forefoot to make easy work of it. The self-vanging sprit booms help by reducing sail twist. And that rudder combines with the large leeboards and substantial rocker (with occasional help from the backed mizzen) to ensure reliable tacking. During my 10 years of sailing this sharpie, she never got caught in irons…not even once.
A professional builder should be able to deliver Skimmer for about the same price as a stock 22′ fiberglass cruiser, and she can be home-built for about half that cost. Whether or not that makes for a good investment depends, among other factors, upon how long and how well she’s kept—and upon the availability of buyers who agree with the words you’ve just read.
A preliminary “cartoon” proposed dual rudders allowing the mizzen mast to be stepped on the centerline. For simplicity, the author favored a single rudder; Bolger’s solution was to move the mast aft, hard against the transom and offset to starboard. Black Skimmer’s accommodations are rather spartan but unimpeded by a centerboard trunk thanks to the use of leeboards.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010 and appears here as archival material. If you have more information about this boat, plan or design – please let us know in the comment section.
Before I write these From the Editor pieces, I obviously have to come up with something to write about. If nothing comes to mind quickly, I’ll look around my shop, the garage and outdoor places where I keep my boats, my digital photo albums, and the attic where I have all of my slides of boat-related projects and travels. If I come up empty handed in my searches at home, taking a boat out often helps. Visiting a new body of water can provide me with some fresh perspectives, so I may scan the satellite imagery on Google Earth. As I was doing that last week, I noticed Swamp Creek, a small tributary to the Sammamish River. I had rowed, paddled, and motored the river countless times and had never noticed the creek. Its entrance, just a dimple on the right bank, had been all too easy to overlook from the river. I decided to take my Whitehall there to see if I could find and row the creek.
Lake Washington is just 1/3 mile around this last bend in the Sammamish Slough. On this Friday afternoon, I had the launch ramp and the slough to myself.
The public launch for the Sammamish River is 1/3 mile upstream from its meeting with the north end of Lake Washington. The water there is quite still, and only when the bow was resting on the back end of the trailer did the current slowly push the stern downstream. I pulled the boat up next to the ramp on sand that was smooth a few feet up from the water’s knife edge. It must have been washed over by the wake of a boat that had passed long before I had arrived. I parked the trailer, shoved off, and rowed upstream.
This section of the river I’d seen before. A mobile-home park crowds the right bank with double-wides clad in white metal siding and capped by low-pitched roofs. On the left bank there are two-story houses set back from the river behind winter-bare 40′ high weeping willow trees, trunks and branches as jagged as lightning, and slender branchlets seemingly falling like rain.
The bridge for the wetlands restoration project was dropped in place by crane and is supported by concrete blocks set below ground level. There was just enough clearance for me to slip through.
The entrance to Swamp Creek was hard to overlook this time. It was right at the edge of the mobile-home lot and there was a low steel bridge blocking its entrance. On top of the bridge an excavator with orange boom and silvery hydraulic piston rods was pawing at the ground on the south end of the bridge. Containment booms, orange on the left bank and yellow on the right, lined the first 100 yards of the creek.
I stopped a few boat lengths from the bridge eyeing the clearance beneath it There seemed to be just enough room for the Whitehall, so I waited to catch the eye of one of the three workers, who were all wearing white full-brim hard hats and were occupied with something on the left bank. The excavator crept across the bridge and onto the muddy ground on the north side and the bridge was clear, but only for a moment. A tracked dump truck crossed the bridge and stopped at its south end; its cab and dump box swiveled like an Army tank turret to face the opposite direction and it poured out a load of crushed rock. Emptied, it headed back across the bridge.
A worker wearing a Day-Glo lime-green vest looked my way and asked if I wanted to pass through. I saw the excavator heading for the bridge and said I’d wait until its weight was off it. The worker signaled to the excavator operator to stop and motioned me to go through. I hooked my toes under the thwart ahead of me and leaned back over the open space encircled by the sternsheets. The bow slipped under the middle girder, the lowest point of the bridge, with little room to spare. The worker, looking at me face to face as I coasted by, called out “Limbo!” The thick flange at the bottom of the girder passed by 2″ from my face. When I emerged on the other side and sat upright, two workers were watching me. One, dressed in dark-green overalls, asked “What are you up to?”
“I’m a magazine editor and I have to write an editorial this weekend. I haven’t come up with anything yet, so I thought I’d row the creek to see if something would come to mind.”
Upstream from the bridge, on the right bank, there were two more workers, one with a clipboard in hand. Next to them were the tangled roots of a 15′-long tree trunk set on its side, its top sawn off. The trunk was one of a half dozen neatly and evenly spaced on the muddy slope of the right bank. They made it evident that the work being done was a restoration of the stream and the wetlands surrounding it.
I kept rowing facing forward to maneuver around branches of half-submerged trees and piles broken just above the water.
Almost lost in the grass above the right bank is a spring-tine harrow with one chest-high wheel remaining. The spring-steel support that once supported the seat is to the right of the wheel.
The creek ran straight for ¼ mile, and beyond the containment barriers the banks were mantled with thick mats of grass that winter had turned tan and softened so it could no longer stand. Clumps of it at the water’s edge, had been pushed downstream by a past high water and were ragged and curved like old straw brooms. The tips of the grass that touched the water gave the only indication of the stream’s flow—faint ripples that looked like paths left by water striders.
A sparse copse of spindly leaf-bare trees had lengths of corrugated black plastic drainpipe around their trunks, an indication that there were beavers in the area. A second cluster of trees a few dozen yards upstream had been surrounded by a fence of chicken wire and welded-wire mesh, but one of the wooden fence posts was broken and the section of fence it was holding up had collapsed. Only one of the trees in the enclosure was left standing; knee-high stumps were all that remained of the rest.
The end of the navigable section of Swamp Creek was just 1/3 mile upstream from its mouth.
A quarter mile from its mouth, the creek took a 45-degree turn from east to northeast and was cast in shadow by a stand of tall evergreens on the left bank. About 100 yards farther upstream, three locust trees on the right bank leaned across the river at a 45-degree angle, and their branches curved downward in dark lacy arches over the water.
Fallen locust trees were the end of the line for my row.
I slipped past them and in another 20 yards stopped at an impassable barrier of locust trees that had fallen flat across the creek. Their bark was rough and fissured like scored bread crusts. Two branches on the uppermost horizontal trunk were growing straight up, becoming trees themselves with branches of their own reaching out in all directions.
I pulled ashore to examine what appeared to be a path leading into the blackberry brambles. In the distance is the entrance to Swamp Creek, and a crane working on the wetlands restoration there is just visible against the sky and reflected in the water.
On my way back out, I stopped at the crook in the stream where there was a muddy streak leading from the water’s edge to a gap in the blackberry brambles on the left bank. While it looked like a footpath, there were no footprints and the muddied grass was not damaged but only pressed flat like slicked-back hair from the ’50s. It led into the brambles where no person could walk.
Where there were trees at the creek’s edge, the ground was clear but branches crowded overhead.
Another 120 yards farther downstream, I nosed the bow ashore where three blue spruce trees had their branches so thoroughly intertwined that no one tree could be distinguished from another. The ground beneath them was bare but for the umber-colored duff and looked like a good place to come ashore, but when I stepped out of the boat and climbed over the bank, I had to crouch down low to clear the plane of the lowest branches and even then, they scratched heavily across my back like a leaf rake.
On the way out of the creek I saw what must be a lodge for beavers.
There was a clearing beyond the trees, a field of tawny leafed grass with a few clusters still standing and the rest carpeting the ground. I thought I would be able to walk across to the Sammamish, and at first it felt as if I were walking on a mattress but a few yards in the mat yielded even more and soon I could feel myself sinking deeper with each step. I turned around and went back to the boat.
When I approached the creek’s entrance, the bridge was clear so I could get through quickly.
I continued rowing downstream. When I approached the bridge, the worker in the green coveralls was kneeling on the north side of the bridge, his front side bright with the blue-white light of arc welding. I passed under the opposite side and when I emerged, he had stopped welding and had his face shield flipped up over his head.
“What publication do you work for?”
“WoodenBoat.”
“Wind and Boat?”
I knocked on the Whitehall’s varnished gunwale. “WoodenBoat.”
As I rowed off, he flipped his shield back down with a nod of his head and went back to welding.
I shifted around to my normal rowing position, facing aft, and rowed back to the ramp. With the Whitehall strapped to the trailer and my gear in the truck, I drove home, still hoping something would come to mind.
Nelson Zimmer was born in 1922 and by the time he died in 2007, it is thought that he had produced some 500 designs, some of them while working for companies such as Chris-Craft and Toledo Ship Building. In 2018, Zimmer’s Utility Launch caught the attention of Peter Green, then an amateur boatbuilder originally from Ilfracombe in North Devon, England. Peter spent much of his career working in the oil and gas industry all over the world, and while he was based in the U.S., he built a Caledonia yawl. When the time came to move back to the U.K., he sold the boat rather than face the difficulties of shipping it. With a view to building another boat at some point in the future, he perused the designs in Fifty Wooden Boats, published by WoodenBoat. When he found the Zimmer Utility Launch, he immediately bought the plans.
Photographs by the author
Designer Zimmer writes “Since this little launch is only 20′ long on the waterline, it cannot be pushed much beyond seven statute miles per hour, after which she will leave her stern wave behind and begin to squat, to the detriment of increased speed.”
According to Fifty Wooden Boats, Zimmer’s inspiration “came from the many slim handsome launches and cruisers that silently and gracefully passed by his waterside home following the First World War.” He designed his Utility Launch to transport passengers and supplies between towns and remote fishing camps in Canada’s North Woods. It had to be seaworthy enough to deal with the chop it might encounter when crossing large lakes but didn’t have to do so at any great speed. “So, they needed a pretty decent cockpit for six to eight people and some supplies,” said Peter, “and then occasionally, I guess, two people would end up sleeping on board, so there was a cabin with a couple of bunks and a bit of indoor storage for anything that needed to be kept out of the weather.”
Although Peter had never really been into motorboats, he was sensitive to the fact that his wife had “gone off sailing totally,” and he thought that this sort of boat would be the only way to get her afloat. And he very much liked the look of the design.
He was thinking of it as a long-term project and so when, after retirement, he enrolled in the 40-week course at the Boat Building Academy at Lyme Regis, U.K., he had no expectation to build the launch there as he knew it was a fair bit bigger and more complex than the boats that the BBA normally produces. So, Peter was pleasantly surprised by the positive attitude of the academy’s staff; the Zimmer launch would be one of the six boats to be built by the 18 students enrolled in the 2021 40-week boatbuilding course.
Zimmer designed the launch with “an able hull, one which could cope with the chop from a fresh breeze or glide silently through the water to avoid disturbing the fishing grounds.”
The four sheets of plans for the Utility Launch include a table of offsets, lines and construction drawings, and details for the steering and throttle hardware. The original construction is for 5/8″ cedar or mahogany carvel planking on steamed 1″ × 7/8″ white-oak frames. The hull is also well suited to the strip-planking method Peter preferred as well as cold-molding.
Starting with the table of offsets, a full lofting process was carried out. Eleven molds at 2′ spacings were called for, but it was decided to add two intermediate molds at the bow to give one-foot spacing to ensure fairness there.
The molds were set up upside down and construction began. The plans call for a backbone of 3″-sided timbers, but the BBA launch had a sapele centerline that consisted of a keel batten made up of two 1/2″- thick laminations with an additional 1″ thickness over the aft 3′, and an inner stem made up of thirty 3/32″ laminations. The slightly angled 3/4″ transom—batten-seamed oak in the drawings, plywood in the BBA launch—was fitted with sapele fashion pieces around its inside perimeter. Then the 3/4″-thick bead-and-cove Alaska yellow cedar planking was laid around the molds, starting at, and parallel with, the sheer and working up over the bilge, letting it run out naturally over the hog and stem. None of the planks had to be steamed. The outside of the hull was then faired before two layers of biaxial cloth were applied with WEST System epoxy resin.
The outside of the transom was veneered with sapele, and the exterior centerline components were fitted. The outer stem has the same make-up as the inner stem, while the keel and deadwood were made up from pieces of solid sapele. Twin pieces of timber were fitted to leave a ¾″ square hole that would be a starting point for boring the larger round hole for the stern tube. Cheeks paralleling the hole on the outside strengthen the deadwood there. After further fairing, bilge keels—about 5′ long and a maximum of 5″ deep—were fitted. These were not called for in the plans, but Peter wanted to make sure the boat could take the ground satisfactorily.
The plans call for 1 ¾″-thick oak engine beds to support a Norwegian-built single-cylinder Sabb HG diesel of 6- to 8-hp. The floors supporting the engine beds are 1-1/2″ thick, while the rest are 1″ thick.
The helm is well forward in the cockpit, leaving plenty of room for passengers. Zimmer’s plans include a cockpit covering and he suggested “with the mellon hood indicated on the drawings and some camping equipment she can even double as an overnight cruiser.”
Zimmer drew the deck with 3/4″ × 1-1/2″ pine on white oak deckbeams. All of the BBA launch’s deck structure is sapele. The 1-1/2″ × 2-1/2″ sheer clamp was tapered slightly toward the ends and was glued and screwed to the inside of the hull. In the plans, it is fitted to the inside faces of the timbers. The forward cockpit bulkhead is 1/2″ plywood clad in 3/8″ painted sapele to give the tongue-and-groove effect of the 3/4″ V-groove staving the plans called for. Four beams support the foredeck and three support the aft deck. Carlins were jointed into the forward cockpit bulkhead and the next deckbeam forward, and into two deckbeams aft. A subdeck of two layers of 1/4″ plywood followed.
The plans specified a coaming of 5/8″-thick oak, presumably steam-bent around the forward end of the cockpit. Sapele was used at BBA and the curved section was achieved—without steam—with six laminations. Some 3/8″ iroko was used instead of oak for the covering board and for the straight laid decks, originally specified for pine. The 2″ x 1″ rubrail—iroko, opted for in lieu of oak with a metal half oval—had to be steamed over about 5′ of its length forward.
The coach-roof beams are made up of six laminations of sapele, giving a molded depth of 1-1/2″; two layers of 3/8″ plywood were laid over them, and then sheathed with ’glass and epoxy. It’s a more contemporary approach than Zimmer’s tongue-and-groove staving covered with canvas.
The design shows a pair of double-hinged cabin doors to give a particularly wide opening of about 55″ through the forward cabin bulkhead, but with a sliding hatch of the more conventional width of 26″. However, as there were no details showing how this might be constructed while keeping it structurally sound, it was decided to fit a pair of single-hinged doors with the overall width of 39″ for both hatch and doors.
The cuddy was designed not as a cabin but as a place to stow gear and take temporary shelter from a spell of wet or cold weather.
Inside the cabin there are two settees/berths, though their use as seats will be severely restricted by the engine. Zimmer provided footwells only 10″ wide on either side of the engine, and the engine Peter bought for the boat afforded even less room. Peter decided to position the settees farther forward and added trotter boxes in the cockpit to maintain their length for use as berths. Mini bulkheads at the settees’ after ends serve as backrests for sitting while facing forward and create storage space aft.
In the cockpit, the sole was made of iroko instead of pine as indicated in the drawings, and fitted 4″ lower than designed, because Peter felt it would otherwise be too high; and 3/8″ sapele ceiling strips were fitted on non-structural laminated ground timbers glued to the inside of the hull.
Instead of installing the Sabb HG single-cylinder diesel engine called for, Peter found a used Yanmar 2YM 15 two-cylinder diesel with just 44 hours for a good price. He also found a second-hand 16″ three-blade propeller to take the place of the 15″ prop drawn in the plans. The design also specified a pair of cylindrical 12-gallon fuel tanks under the side seats in the cockpit, but Peter has fitted a single 16-gallon plastic tank made by Vetus under the foredeck. The transom-hung rudder is controlled by a steering system which has three-and-a-quarter turns from hard-over to hard-over.
The rudder has a brass pipe for a tiller. It runs through a slot in the transom and is covered by the deck. A line attached to the tiller runs around the perimeter of the boat and takes several turns around a drum connected to the wheel.
After Peter’s launch, MON AMI, was completed, he and a couple of other BBA students took her to her new home in Plymouth, a sea voyage of around 70 nautical miles. He told me that the sea was “mostly like a mill pond but a bit lumpy round Start Point,” the southern tip of Devon, and that the boat behaved very well. This bodes well for his plans to occasionally take her to open sea in the vicinity south of Plymouth Sound. He mostly intends to explore the extensive but more sheltered bays and tributaries around Plymouth, where he and his wife will use her for anchoring, picnicking, and swimming, with the occasional night on board.
I joined him on a calm but cold day for a short trip. MON AMI’s top speed at her maximum rpm of 3,600 is about 6.75 knots. Her stern squats significantly then, but Peter says he won’t often exceed 2,800 rpm. That gives her a speed of 6 knots and a fuel consumption that he thinks will be about 0.8 gallons per hour. At the tickover speed of 900 rpm she does about 1.8 knots.
Peter hasn’t had a chance to weigh his boat, but she is definitely lighter than a carvel version with a Sabb engine would be. She floats high on the designed lines and feels a little tender, so he plans to add some internal ballast—a little at a time until she feels right. It seemed a little strange, at first, steering from so far forward, but I soon got used to it and the view looking forward could hardly have been more unobstructed. I asked Peter if he had felt vulnerable to spray in a chop, but with the rising sheer and flared bow sections, he said that hasn’t been a problem. The Zimmer plans show a spray hood at the forward end of the cockpit, and an overhead cover for the whole of the cockpit; Peter might add the spray hood, although it would certainly restrict visibility from the helm.
It is easy to imagine that the cabin will be very cozy for sitting and sleeping when lying peacefully at anchor, but with the engine noise while underway it could only really be thought of as somewhere to shelter in wet weather.
Nelson Zimmer, apparently, envisioned that the Utility Launch would be a “good, common-sense little boat,” and MON AMI certainly does seem to be just that.
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boat building and repair industry, and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
I have been obsessed with sailing and building boats for most of my life, but my wife, Luanne, told me when we met that she gets seasick on boats. Lucky for me, she became an accomplished kayaker and a competent co-captain aboard our Outer Banks 26, ROSIE. Living on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, we are surrounded by water and going anywhere off the island means either a kayak or a ferry. Working around ferry schedules gets tiresome and while a sailboat would be lovely, I had noticed that most of the sailboats in our area travel under power. When Luanne suggested we get a small power skiff to get around more fluidly, it was the first time I seriously considered having a powerboat. It would have to be fuel-efficient and aesthetically appealing, which, to my mind, means traditional lines.
I went online and started searching for a suitable power skiff to build. One of the first boats that came up on my search was a gorgeous 20′ lobsterboat-inspired design by Graham Byrnes of B&B Yacht Designs. It immediately checked the boxes of beautiful and traditional. I found that Graham was known not only for his eye-pleasing boats of all kinds, but also for innovation in design. In 2009, he won a WoodenBoat magazine design competition for a fuel-efficient 18′ powerboat. I was intrigued by Graham’s work and sent for his Outer Banks 20 study plans. After much discussion, Luanne and I decided something a bit larger would be better for multi-week trips. While Graham also had an Outer Banks 24, a slightly stretched version sounded perfect. I asked him about lengthening the 24, and a few weeks later he had designed the Outer Banks 26 from the keel up. I was smitten by the drawings and ordered the plans.
Photographs by and courtesy of the author
The egg-crate construction gives the hull strength without a lot of weight.
The Outer Banks 26 shares many features with the smaller B&B Outer Banks designs with their Carolina-style bows, which look good and help keep water off the deck in a chop. The stern has a nicely curved transom and sweet tumblehome. Graham selected a modest monohedron deadrise of 12 degrees to provide a good balance between a smooth ride and modest fuel consumption. As I pored over the drawings in the plans, the artistry that Graham blends with his technical skills became more apparent: subtle changes in the size of the oval ports to match the proportional changes in the trunk cabin height and a pleasing arch in the pilothouse door are good examples. Some of these features add to the complexity of the build, but the end result is worth it.
I was pleased to see that Graham had specified a 90-hp outboard as the main power source. Compared to most other boats of this size, that is a small power plant. A few of my boating friends shook their heads at the meager outboard that was expected to push a boat of this size on plane. With a designed displacement of 3,360 lbs, the Outer Banks 26 is relatively lightweight, and I could only hope they were wrong. Here are a few words from Graham to explain some of his design philosophy for powerboats of this type:
With a small motor you need less fuel, and with a light hull you can still get a comfortable interior and meet our target speed. Our design interest was to avoid the greed for speed and aim for the best economy accepting a decent cruising speed. I like to make around 20 knots at about 75 percent full power. This should allow you to run fairly flat at about 3 degrees trim and is quieter while not flogging the engine and having another 25 percent reserve power if you need it. A dead-flat bottom is the most efficient planing shape, but it is not very seaworthy or comfortable. I find that with 12 degrees deadrise aft I can keep the twist out of the planing area and get a pretty fine entry angle for minimal pounding in a head sea. The pounding loads between 30 and 45 knots are huge. I design the structure for 30 knots plus a safety factor using egg-crate construction, and follow aircraft techniques. The topsides are more Maine than Outer Banks, with her fairly plumb bow with generous flare blending to tumblehome aft. This shape cannot be achieved in folded ply, but if you care about aesthetics, it is worth the extra work. It also gives the builder better accuracy and control of the shape.
The plans specify okoume plywood for planking and bulkheads, yellow cedar for stringers, and fiberglass and epoxy for sheathing and fillets. The bottom is 12mm in thickness and joins with the egg-crate structure to provide a strong hull. The topsides are planked using the Ashcroft method with two, diagonally overlapping, and staggered layers of 4mm okoume plywood. The exterior and bilge are sheathed with fiberglass and epoxy. Everything has three coats of epoxy to seal the wood.
The pilothouse has plenty of light and lots of storage for comfortable cruising.
Graham provided me with a clean slate for designing the accommodations, so I drew from other boats and my past living aboard experience. B&B liked the arrangements and has incorporated them in the current version of the plans. The cockpit provides seating for four with an outboard-motor cover that unfolds into a small table. Below, to starboard is a compartment for a self-contained composting head. The galley features a Wallas stove/heater, which is one of the best acquisitions we made for comfort aboard. The helm seat hinges forward when not in use, yielding more counter space. To port is a wet locker and a dinette with seating for two. The forward seat changes height and direction from the dinette to become the first-mate’s seat facing forward toward a small chart table with a fold-out writing surface. There is a hanging locker to port and a shelved locker to starboard, sharing storage with some of the electrical circuitry. We have found the amount of storage aboard more than meets our needs. The forward cabin has a large V-berth with ample headroom and exceptionally comfortable sleeping.
The cabin is warm and inviting with Western-red-cedar paneling. Opening a hatch over the berth allows anchoring to be done from inside the cabin.
One of the on-deck features that I asked Graham to include in the design is an anchor well in the bow. Experience has taught me how handy and secure this space is for dealing with ground tackle.
ROSIE, named after my late mom, was launched around three years after I laid her keel. Launch day for a new boat can be equally exciting and frightening. Being the first boat built to a design requires a great leap of faith that your dreams, hard work, and money are going to lead to success.
With a group of friends watching, ROSIE slid gracefully into the water and floated perfectly on her lines. Luanne, a friend, and I motored away toward our slip, which is around 12 miles from the launch ramp. After a few miles of slow, break-in speed I gave the throttle a bit of juice and she was on plane before I knew it, seemingly effortlessly, with no discernible transition point.
A 90-hp four-stroke provides the power. When the boat was at its lightest, before cruising gear was added, it could do 26 knots.
As I became better acquainted with the boat, I became more enamored with her performance. We like to cruise at speeds between 12 and 18 knots and had an initial fuel consumption of 4.4 nautical miles per gallon. ROSIE’s top speed was around 26 knots. Comfort and fuel economy are far more important to us than top speed and quick hole shots (full-power acceleration from a dead stop). When she was launched, ROSIE was the lightest weight she will ever be, thus her fuel consumption and top speed would naturally diminish as we added more toys and gear.
We have had three seasons aboard ROSIE. Since her launch, we have added a 9.9-hp kicker, trim tabs, a 9′ tender and hoist, radar, solar power, two stand-up paddleboards, and more. She carries 44 gallons of fuel in her main tank for a range of about 150 nautical miles, and we often have two to three just-in-case five-gallon jugs of gasoline with us. We also carry 24 gallons of water in four separate jugs dispensed with a foot pump. With these additions, she drinks a bit more fuel. Consumption has increased by around 15 percent and she has lost around three knots of top speed, but ROSIE is still quite efficient and plenty fast for us.
The boat’s shallow draft broadens the anchoring options, often making it possible to get away from the crowd.
We spend a lot of time aboard ROSIE during our cruising season, mostly two to three nights at a time, and have taken her up to Desolation Sound for a three-week cruise. We have found her to be the perfect size for the two of us. After three weeks aboard, neither of us felt cramped or was eager to get off. She provides a very dry and smooth ride. I think Graham has found a sweet spot in design and performance yet again. She seems to strike a chord everywhere we go with other boaters often asking if we have restored this old beauty. I take that as a compliment. I smile almost every time I see ROSIE, and my head is almost always turned toward her when I walk away. I would call her a complete success. She does everything I had hoped for and more.
Ken Katz lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada, with his wife, Luanne. He spends much of his time building, paddling, and cruising aboard the “fleet” he has created. He also builds furniture but has found it doesn’t float well.
Plans for the Outer Banks 26 are available for $420 from B&B Yacht Designs. Inquire about kits. Options include an extension to mount the outboard behind the transom—which extends the overall length but gives more room in the cockpit.
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!
As I stood on a mid-morning in July at the edge of the Rock Lake Creek, the sky was a bright blue with not a wisp of cloud and not a whisper of a breeze. The water on this mile-long meandering stretch of the South Madawaska River was clear but tea-stained by tannins and the only ripples were from the aluminum skiffs and canoes that had already left the dock. On the banks, forests of cedar, pine, and birch crowded the river and several trees leaned well out over the water, as if pushed by the trees behind them. The banks themselves were masked by a solid wall of scrub brush growing down to the water’s edge.
Photographs by the author
Derek would use the 32-lb strip-planked canoe I built using blue insulating sheet foam for strips rather than cedar. The canoe in front of me is one of three skin-on-frame versions I built of my Wee Bonnie series. The design has its roots in the Wee Lassie canoes built in 1880 for George Washington Sears—aka Nessmuk—by the Rushton Boat Works of Canton, New York. The dock and ramp at the Rock Lake Access Point serves recreational canoeists and residents of lakeside cabins—their outboard skiffs are limited to 20 hp by Algonquin Provincial Park rules.
My son-in-law Derek and I readied our canoes on the trampled grass at the Rock Lake Access Point set midway on the mile-long section of river between Rock and Whitefish lakes. The gear we shuttled from the car was for our four-day adventure in Ontario’s Algonquin Park; the solo canoes were Wee Bonnies that I had designed and built based on Mac McCarthy’s Wee Lassie II. I would paddle the nylon skin-on-frame boat while Derek would use the fiberglass-sheathed blue Styrofoam version. Our outing was an annual retreat for us, but this year was bittersweet. A third paddling companion, Phil, had to cancel at the last minute, and the fourth member of our usual crew, Rob, who had paddled with us for the past seven years, had passed away in February.
Rock Lake Creek, a section of the South Madawaska River connecting Rock Lake to Whitefish Lake, downstream to the north, made for a very pleasant first leg as Derek and I paddled quietly in the stillness.
We launched and settled into a cadence through Rock Lake Creek, a winding section of the Madawaska that leads to Rock Lake. Our destination for the day was Pen Lake, 3.5 miles downstream from the launch. The slow-flowing creek was still shrouded in the cool shade of morning, while the trees along the western side were in the amber glow of full sunlight. A few water bugs scooted away across the water’s surface as our canoes cut through the still water. Wisps of mist hung in the shaded bends of the river and the still, black water mirrored the thickets on both banks.
We paddled less than 1/2 mile before we entered Rock Lake. A group of paddlers in fiberglass canoes was milling about the gentle arc of sandy shoreline near the Rock Lake Campground. Derek and I headed south past cottages that dotted the western shore—some had solar panels on their roofs; the power grid does not reach the shores of the lake.
Late in the morning, a light breeze puffed up from astern ruffling the lake and making the paddling easier. A mile into the 3-mile-long lake the shoreline curved away to the west and steep red granite bluffs towered up over the water into a massive 100′-high wall draped with gray lichen.
Scattered cumulus clouds ghosted across the sky as the breeze strengthened and scuffed the ripples on the lake into waves that tried to push our sterns sideways. Derek and I paddled up to speed and had fun surfing ahead of the crests.
Roger Siebert
.
The last mile of Rock Lake is a long, narrowing bay occupied by the South Madawaska River, with high bluffs of granite blanketed with white pine, spruce, and eastern red cedar on the east and low wetland with areas carpeted by lily pads on the west. When we heard the rapids tumbling down from Pen Lake and rumbling like distant thunder, we knew we were close to the portage.
We coasted ashore on a low shelf of tawny red granite cross-hatched with fractures. I stepped out of the canoe and carefully shifted my weight onto the slippery, muted-green algae clinging to the submerged slope of rock. A little more than 100 yards to the south, at the end of the inlet, the rapids poured out from the woods, dappling the dark-brown water white with clusters of bubbles.
The low granite ledge made for easy landing at the Pen Falls portage. We’d make the 410-yard carry in two trips, one for the canoes and another for the gear.
The portage to Pen Lake, marked by a yellow vinyl sign that was wrapped around a tree trunk and bore the black silhouette of a single carried canoe, started a few yards away from the water’s edge in the woods. The 410-yard trail was the only portage for us and we were ahead of schedule, so we decided to make two trips. For the first haul we carried packs and then returned for the canoes. A torrential lightning storm had passed through the night before and had left the trail very muddy—ankle deep in places. Long, meandering boardwalks of graying planks set on timbers surrounded by roots and rocks all flocked with moss kept us above the areas that are perennially wet, but we still had to tiptoe through some thick muck on the rain-soaked path. The trail wound around spruce and hemlock trees as it paralleled the rapids a couple of dozen yards downhill from us. Flat rocks rising above the level of the mud often offered dry steps when we most needed them, but they could trip us up, especially when carrying the canoes, if we didn’t pay close attention.
The portage trail had planked walkways over the low areas where mud could be a problem during rainy weather. The short portage was a pleasant walk beneath the canopy of the trees while listening to the sound of the rapids filtering through the brush.
The Pen Lake end of the portage had a wooden dock jutting about 50′ from shore into a long narrow cove with thick brush lining both sides. Launching easily, we pulled out into the cove, staying well away from the channel to our left that flowed into the rapids.
Back in the canoes again after the portage with the sound of rapids toward our port side, we paddled into the narrow entrance of Pen Lake. Some dark clouds started to appear, but the weather didn’t deteriorate.
The 70-yard-wide cove opened into a bay at the north end of Pen Lake, separated from the main body of the lake by a small peninsula and an island, each about 200 yards long. While there is an open passage to the east of the island, we took the shortcut between the island and the peninsula; between the two, at the south end of this shorter passage, there is a barricade-like line of boulders. Paddling in single file, in water only inches deep, we squeezed between two jagged boulders and slipped into Pen Lake’s 3 miles of open water. The wind had continued to build over the course of the day and when funneled between the high bluffs of rock and trees lining both sides, the northerly propelled us down the half-mile-wide lake.
We headed for our intended campsite, concealed somewhere in the unbroken eastern edge of the shoreline forest about three-quarters of the way down the lake, but as we drew near, we could see that some other party had beaten us to it. We paddled back to a campsite we had passed earlier. It was a site veiled by thick brush until we got right up to it and could see how spacious it was. At the water’s edge was a partially submerged row of large granite blocks, once a continuous shelf, now separated by erosion-widened parallel fractures. Above, resting on the ground at the front of the trees surrounding the campsite, was a lone rough cube of granite 5′ high and 7′ wide.
At our campsite there were some large freshly cut logs off to one side, but it was mostly a large open area in the midst of the woods. The stone fire pit was surrounded by log benches which is typical of campsites in Algonquin.
At the back of the campsite a row of fir logs 10′ long and about 20″ in diameter lay in a broken row next to a stool-high stump. The tree had been recently cut and still had some fresh boughs on and alongside of the logs. Usually, any tree that has the potential to topple or has been damaged by a storm will be cleared up by the park crews to ensure the safety of the designated campsites. Eventually these logs will either go to firewood or be positioned around the campfire for seating.
The fire pit, ringed high with neatly stacked stone, had been blackened by countless fires. The ground around the pit was covered with wood chips left by axes chopping firewood. Three bark-bare logs were set up as seating.
The whole campsite area was clear of brush and had a thick blanket of white-pine needles (which seemed strange considering that most of trees were firs, many with trunks more than 2′ in diameter). Any branches within reach had been pulled down for firewood.
Derek set up his tent while I stretched my hammock between a pair of trees. By the time we had finished setting up camp and gathering firewood, we had both worked up a sweat. It was time for a swim. Broad granite ledges at the lake’s edge extended underwater; I edged down to a lower shelf and made a shallow, skimming dive. I gasped as I hit the water; the day’s north wind had churned up the shockingly cold water from the depths of the lake. After our dip, Derek and I climbed out of the water to dry off and warm up on the sun-bathed ledges. On the far side of the lake, less than a half mile away, a hill covered in the luscious greens of cedar, pine, fir, and balsam was flecked with shimmering white and yellow birch. The cove across the lake was a thin, luminous line of grasses and lily pads separating the forest from the water.
As Derek and I lounged in the sun, a few loons swimming just offshore ducked under the water and disappeared. When they resurfaced, they spread their wings as if to shake off the water. A pair of mergansers with rusty-red heads swam toward the base of the rock shelf, saw us, and quickly moved away.
That evening we fired up the camp stove and I warmed up a precooked frozen chicken breast that had thawed during the day’s trip and added a spinach salad with lots of berries; Derek cooked steak and beans. As we prepared our meals, two red squirrels, used to associating campers with food, circled around us getting braver and closer looking to steal any morsel they could.
Supper over, it was time to hang the food bag in a tree well outside our campsite. Black bears and raccoons inhabit the area, so hoisting the bag up 12′ was the safe thing to do.
Before turning in for the night, Derek and I sat at the water’s edge as the color ebbed from the sky and waited for the stars to shine. Planets were the first to emerge from the twilight: Venus gleamed above us and to the northwest Mars was a small glimmer of red. A single satellite, as bright as most stars, made its unwavering passage across the sky. It was not long before the full moon rose and its bright orange glow swept across constellations, making them unrecognizable. Moonlight brought the landscape out of darkness making it brighter by the minute. We decided to hit the sack.
The morning was bright with a clear sky except for the dusty streaks of high clouds. There was not even a breath of wind, and the water was calm. I made a cup of coffee and sat on the granite ledge as the morning air warmed. In the stillness the lake mirrored sky and the silhouette of the far shore. I heard what I thought was a frog croaking, but it was the sudden burst of a large hummingbird darting behind me. An invisible loon on the far shore then let out a loud squawk; a far cry from the haunting, hollow whistle that loons are known for.
I noticed two large animals poke out of the far shoreline and start to wander in and out of the shore brush. They were too light in color to be moose, too big perhaps to be white-tailed deer. Derek joined me and he guessed that we might be seeing elk, which had been reintroduced to the park in 2001.
With breakfast over, it was time to ready the boats for a day trip to check out Clydegale Lake, farther south of Pen. The portage to Clydegale was over a mile away but a pleasant paddle with a north breeze behind us again. We paused near a pair of loons as they dove, disappeared, and resurfaced a dozen yards away.
Behind Derek is the torrent of water crashing from Clydegale Lake to Pen Lake. He left his gear and his canoe at Pen to do some paddling there while I explored Clydegale.
It took just a few minutes to carry my canoe along the 300-yard portage to Clydegale. Derek walked with me without his canoe; I was going to paddle alone on Clydegale while he would do some exploring on Pen. I walked with him back along the trail to go down and explore the rapids of the 1/10-mile-long section of the South Madawaska River that flows from Clydegale into Pen. The thunderous rapids crashed and foamed over blocks of granite. Beneath the thick canopy of the trees overhead, a high rock wall on the opposite side funneled the rapids around a sharp bend above the tumble into Pen.
Venturing out into Clydegale by myself was peaceful. There were only a few camps on the lake, and I saw only one with campers; I welcomed the uncommon sense of just being alone. The occupied campsite was on the east shore and perched about 15′ above the lake on the top of a cliff-like rise. The climb up and down could be a bit tiring, but the great view of the sunset would be worth the effort.
The northeast breeze had strengthened and propelled my canoe quickly down along the east shore and to the end of a narrow, 100-yard-long rocky peninsula fringed with scrub brush. I ducked into the small cove in its lee, and floated untouched by the wind. White pines towered over the point and in the still air of their lee, the sunlight felt very hot on my head and bare arms and the perspiration started to roll down my brow. The water here was dotted with the green circular pads of lilies and their white and yellow star-like flowers. The cove to the west stretched far inland changing from fields of lilies to low grassy wetlands to verdant hills in the distance.
Exploring the rest of the 3-mile-long lake would take hours and the wind would slow the return to the portage, so I paddled toward the west shore on a northwesterly course to avoid going directly into the wind and waves. I pushed hard against the foot brace to get the extra power I needed.
It took a bit of effort to get back to the portage and then another push to paddle upwind on Pen Lake to return to camp. Derek was already there, sitting on the large granite block above the shoreside shelf.
At the end of the portage, I set my canoe down at the muddy entrance into Clydegale Lake. The narrow north end of the lake is a shallow, peaceful place with lily pads almost completely surrounding the passage.
After I pulled my canoe ashore, we searched for firewood to get us through the evening. It had been rainy for the past month, and I worried that there wouldn’t be any dry wood, but we found some well-dried cedar and birch.
Our chores done, we took a quick, brisk swim. The northeast wind made it a bit chilly as we sat to dry off on the ledge. As dark clouds quickly moved in, four loons out in the lake called back and forth. A bald eagle glided past in front of us some 50′ above the water and the loons cried in panic. The eagle soon disappeared in the distance. A blue heron flew toward us only to make a sharp turn away when it saw us sitting on the rocks.
Our camp on Pen was not where we had planned to stay—that site was occupied—but it had plenty of room and great seating for watching the sunsets and stars.
There was a quick shower that evening, and the sky cleared up enough for some stargazing. The clouds that remained blocked the moon enough that the open part of the sky was filled with stars. The Big Dipper was right overhead. We stayed up until 11:30. It was a luxury to sit out in the open air—the mosquitoes were hardly noticeable. In years past, we had to retreat to our tents to avoid them.
The morning was as still as it had been the previous day and we were eager to venture along the far side of Pen Lake to the cove where we had seen the deer or elk the day before, at the mouth of the Galipo River. The cove was covered in waterlilies and bristling with bamboo-like stalks that had had their tops bitten off, probably by moose, several inches above the water.
The expansive cove on the west side of Pen Lake was covered with waterlilies. Paddling the shallow water here required some caution to avoid colliding with deadheads hidden just below the surface.
As I paddled among the stalks, they scraped the canoe’s nylon skin and made a muted version of the sound made by hand-cranked sirens used at hockey arenas to excite the crowd. The paddling became more difficult as I moved into an area of watershield, an aquatic plant with floating leaves like waterlilies that so completely covered the surface of the water that my paddle would bounce off them.
The blockage that deterred the Galipo River’s flow from Welcome Lake into Pen Lake was probably a beaver dam’s tangle of logs, but it had just enough head for the water flow to carve a channel through the lilies and sand and still allow for a crystal-clear view of the channel bottom.
I worked my way along the shoreside wetlands to a 12′-wide channel the river had carved out. The sandy bottom a couple of feet below was clearly visible. I turned into the strong current and paddled upstream toward the sound of falling water. The meandering stream bounced me off the channel edges, which were no more than wetlands of brush and lily pads. Rounding a bend, I found the source of the noise: a large log tangled with branches blocking the river, likely a beaver dam. Water tumbled over and through it, creating plenty of turbulence. I turned around and scooted out with the current. I rejoined Derek and we turned north out of the cove and headed for an island just 50 yards wide, making our way behind it by sneaking through the boulder-strewn shallows that connected it to the mainland.
This small island at the north end of the cove sat just a few dozen yards from shore loosely connected to the mainland by a string of boulders. We were able to paddle between them on our way back into the main body of the lake.
Cutting back across the lake to our camp we pulled the canoes carefully up and away from the rocky shore. We spent the evening warmed by the campfire and did a bit of stargazing before we hit the sack.
Morning came with an overcast sky and a breeze that was just a hint of movement coming from the south. We cleaned up camp, loaded the canoes, and were off with an early start, thinking the southerly might bring some showers or even a storm.
The following breeze made for an easy paddle and felt nice as we headed north. It was not too long before the breeze increased to a steady wind, raising waves we could surf.
On our final day we squeezed through the boulders at the north end of Pen Lake; the 6″ depth of the water was all we needed to make it through. The light southerly breeze helped us to glide through the opening as we headed back to the portage to Rock Lake.
In no time we were cutting between the boulders at the north end of the lake and gliding into the wooden dock of the portage. We had the portage to ourselves and wasted no time getting to Rock Lake for our final push, enjoying the good fortune to have the wind always at our backs.
Phil Boyer retired in 2017 after working 38 years in R&D in the telecommunications industry. He now keeps busy teaching karate at two local clubs and building boats. He has been around boats his whole life, starting with paddling as a kid. At age 11 he built a sailing pram with a bit of help from his father. In 2006 he began building solo canoes and now has four of them, featured in the August 2019 issue. Phil’s interest turned to building SOL CANADA, his solar-electric boat, in 2015. His next build will be a solar-electric version of the Power Cat he read about in the March 2016 issue of Small Boats Magazine.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
At the conclusion of a complex build, the energy, ingenuity, and budget for an elegant floorboard installation is sometimes lacking. In a traditional dinghy it is not unusual, for example, to see floorboards fastened directly to the hull’s steam-bent ribs.
Photographs by the author except as noted
My traditionally constructed Hvalsoe 13, 15, and 16s are cedar-planked lapstrake hulls with 3/8″ by 3/4″ oak ribs bent from gunwale to gunwale across the apron.
A very solid structure is achieved when thwarts are anchored to the centerboard trunk, and to the gunwales with hanging knees. The boats don’t have floor timbers, which provide a flat surface for floorboards in some boats, because they reduce valuable internal depth and stability.
While it may be common practice with plank-on-frame construction of this sort to fasten floorboards to the ribs, the floorboards are then a nuisance to remove, and repeated removal of the screws will damage the oak ribs. I’ve seen this death-by-floorboards phenomena in a few small boats.
A better solution is required to avoid treading all over the cedar hull, and to promote maintenance and longevity. My answer is a set of four easily removable panels conforming to the shape of the hull interior. I make the panels using the same materials that go into the hull construction—3/8″ clear vertical-grain, freshly cut western red cedar, and bending oak identical to the hull ribs.
I begin with center floorboard pieces that mimic the outline of the apron. They are set forward and aft of the centerboard trunk, just touching the hull ribs.
The center floorboards are secured with a minimum number of screws to cleats that are fastened to the apron.
Mahogany “bridge” pieces on each side of the centerboard trunk straddle a hull rib where the floorboard panels will butt together. The bridge pieces will hold the panels out from the trunk and capture the ends of the panel ribs, and stand slightly away from the trunk to avoid creating a trap for water and debris.
caption
At bow and stern, the finished panels are held at the appropriate spacing from the center floorboard by oak tabs fastened to the hull’s ribs. These spacers also align and ensure that the center floorboard pieces easily return to their original position after being removed for maintenance.
The individual floorboards will mimic the curvature of the first three hull strakes, with the overall panel footprint falling somewhere above the third hull strake. Rib stock to join the individual floorboards into panels is first cut roughly to length to cover this area, erring on the long side. Each panel will have four ribs. The floorboard ribs are steamed, then bent freehand until they fit nicely around the bottom of the boat. They are located alongside the hull ribs to prevent forward and aft movement of the finished panel. The tips of these short ribs extend to slip under the center floorboard and bridge piece. I slide them under about 1″ and ease the bottom corner so that the rib can rock up and down a small amount when the panels are removed. For now, the new panel ribs are left long at their upper end. They are clamped to adjacent hull ribs with small shims to provide space that will ensure the panels can be easily removed.
Starting with the first course alongside the centerline and trunk, the individual floorboards are shaped to mimic the run of the first three hull strakes. I use thin plywood for pattern stock, and a combination of scribing, spiling, and eye work to arrive at the shapes. For example, the lower edge of the first floorboard course can be scribed directly alongside the center floorboard.
The top edge of the first course might be spiled, or scribed with an offset block, to roughly follow the garboard/broad. One begins with a general sense of layout and proportion, the eye to follow.
Gary Brewer
I bend the individual planks freehand right out of the steambox. The hot red cedar is quickly molded to shape, first with a twist, then forward-and-aft curvature. This is all done outside of the boat within a few moments.
Gary Brewer
Forward, the floorboards are considerably over-twisted immediately out of the steambox.
There is just time for a couple of test fits before the plank relaxes perfectly into the shape of the hull.
Floorboard planking proceeds, working out from the centerline, and butting forward and aft courses over the ’midship hull rib spanned by the bridge pieces.
While fastening to the panel ribs, the courses are separated by temporary 3/4″ spacers. This is wide floorboard spacing. The gap is keyed to heel rests which I have designed, featuring a tongue projecting below the floorboard to brace against a rib. The 3/4″-wide tongue provides more bearing than a 1/2″ tongue. The floorboard spacing can be whatever suits an individual builder.
After all three floorboard courses are fastened to their respective panel ribs, the completed panel is removed from the hull, and the outboard rib ends are trimmed flush. A slight under-bevel and easing here of the rib end will later help ensure the panel easily slips in and out. With 3/8″-thick cedar and 3/8″-thick ribs, I use 5/8″ screws. I prefer full-thread stainless-steel sheet metal screws for their firm bite.
With the panels in place, 3/8″ by approximately 5/8″ hardwood margin strips are bent in place cold and fastened to the hull ribs just outboard of the panels. While I use about a 1/4″ spacer to set the margin strip clear of the panel, the gap could be even a little less.
The panels should easily lift out, then drop back into place with the lower rib ends tucking under the center floorboards and bridge pieces.
To secure the panels in place and prevent them from being floating by bilge water, I fabricate small swivel tabs out of 1/2″ brass half-oval. The tabs are fastened to the margin strip at each corner of the panels—eight tabs in all. When done right, the panels lie down in the hull without being held by the tabs, but there may be a little spring at one end or the other of a panel.
One element favoring this arrangement is that the hulls of this line of boats are clench-nailed through laps and ribs, so there are no roves obstructing the lay of the floorboards. If your boat has the planks riveted at the frames, you can put the floorboards in place, then tap them against the frames to get the peened rivet heads to dent the floorboards. Use a small gouge to create hollows in the backsides of the floorboards to accommodate the roves. The panels need to slide outboard a wee bit as you remove them. You would need to accommodate for this movement when making these divots on the underside of the floorboards mostly, I think, for those roves closest to centerline.
The panel system prevents damage to the boat’s ribs and planking and offers quick, easy access to practically all of the interior hull. Removing and installing the floorboard panels involves no fastenings, no tools, no guessing, no springing into place, and no errant holes. Maintenance of the boat is encouraged rather than discouraged, and the large area covered by the floorboards is a plus for small boats that are often sailed while sitting on the floorboards.
Eric Hvalsoe grew up in a boating family near Seattle, Washington, and got glimpses of the San Juan and Gulf islands, and northern British Columbia waters, at an early age. He later revisited some of these destinations, including the Broughtons, in sea kayaks and, most recently, traditional sail-and-oar craft. As Hvalsoe Design, Eric has been designing, building, repairing, restoring, and maintaining wooden boats since 1980. His home and shop are located in Shoreline, Washington. Eric teaches traditional boatbuilding and lofting skills at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats, where the collection includes some of his designs: the Hvalsoe 13, 15, and 16. His family of sail-and-oar designs has expanded to include the Hvalsoe 18. For a while longer yet, Eric hopes to continue exploring the Salish Sea in non-motorized craft.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
Skipper and I have trailered and cartopped our assortment of boats from an 8′ punt up to a 22′ Catalina to and from a lot of launch sites across the country, so we know our way around more than a tie-down or two. We have used rope and several different types of webbing straps with varying levels of success and have recently come across an answer for all of our tie-down needs: purpose-made straps from CustomTieDowns.
A well-designed strap for a small boat will secure the load without damaging the boat. We have come to prefer straps of 2″-wide webbing because they distribute loads evenly across the decks and gunwales of lightly-built small boats. A common ratchet strap with 1″ webbing can easily be overtightened and exert forces up to 2,000 lbs across a small contact area. If a narrow strap concentrates too much of a load in the wrong spot, it can damage not only the finish but even the structure of the boat.
Photographs by the authors
A set of 2″ polyester straps provide a strong connection to the trailer while spreading the load out over the points of contact.
CustomTieDowns offers webbing straps in polyester, nylon, and polypropylene. The materials have different ratings for load and UV resistance. Polyester is the best material for straps that will be used in the marine environment, having the highest load ratings, high UV resistance, and good resistance to mildew, rot, and abrasion. It also has the lowest water absorption and minimal stretch. Nylon webbing is mid-grade; it has more stretch when wet and gets tighter as it dries, so it can’t be relied upon to keep a constant tension. Polypropylene is the lowest grade because it has even more stretch, the lowest abrasion resistance, and the lowest load rating.
CustomTieDowns offers polyester webbing straps in widths from 1″ up to 4″ in a variety of lengths and colors. High-visibility orange or red may be good colors to use for gunwale tie-downs to help prevent launching while the boat is still strapped to the trailer (not that we’ve ever done that). CustomTieDowns sews the strap ends with UV-resistant thread, which prevents a weak point that can develop over time. We’ve had a winch strap let go when sun-weakened stitching failed.
CustomTieDowns provides a variety of attaching hardware including S-hooks (with and without retainers), loops, flat hooks, snap hooks, bolt plates, angle-bolt plates, grommets, J-hooks, spring fittings, and spring hooks with D-rings. These options are helpful since trailers and their attachment spots vary. We prefer vinyl-coated S-hooks because the vinyl coating helps protect against dinging a boat’s finish. Vinyl-coated S-hooks are offered with load ratings of 500, 1,500, 3,000 or 5,500 lbs and are made from chromium-molybdenum alloy steel tubes in several diameters. CustomTieDowns matches the hook to the overall strength of the tie-down ordered, unless the higher-strength, larger hook is specified by the purchaser. Other hook material options include 304 stainless and zinc-plated steel.
The quick-release buckles are easier to use than ratchets and not as likely to put too much pressure on a boat.
CustomTieDowns has a variety of buckles to choose from. In the past we have used ratchets, cam buckles, and over-center buckles from other manufacturers. Our favorite CustomTieDowns buckle is the standard quick-release. It’s steel with a resin finish on the frame and zinc on its wire bale. A stainless-steel version is available, but it has a lower working load and breaking strength. The quick-release buckle allows easy adjustment of the strap length and, once the strap length is set with the correct tension for transport to the launch area, it is preset for the return trip home. Skipper also has a much easier time manipulating the quick-release buckle than a ratchet strap. I do not like the metal ratchet mechanism, especially on the narrower straps; it is time-consuming to operate and can be difficult to tighten and release with cold, wet hands.
One good option with any CustomTieDowns buckle is to also order a nylon protective pad for use under the buckle. The fixed-end length of the strap that is sewn to the buckle can be ordered in a length that will put the buckle in a position most convenient for one’s use and keeps its metal edges away from surfaces that could be damaged.
The polyester webbing comes in 11 colors so you can use color coding to differentiate one strap from another and more easily grab the correct strap from a pile in the back of the towing vehicle.
CustomTieDown straps are well made and ship fast from Oregon. Having the right strap for the job gives us comfort in knowing that our boats and gear are secure and saves us time when we are getting ready to haul our boats to and from the water.
Audrey “Skipper” and Kent “Clark” Lewis have traveled with boats to the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and now explore the littoral areas of the Middle Atlantic states. Their longest trailer haul (so far!) was 1,384 miles. Their messing-about in boats is blogged at Small Boat Restoration.
The model 3108 2″ quick release tie-downs (starting at $12.09) with quick-release buckles and protective pads are available from CustomTieDowns.com along with a wide array of other options.
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.
Many small boats don’t have room enough for storing excess gear, so the best equipment will serve more than one purpose and spend less time just taking up space. Ordinary boat fenders are meant to serve at the dock but the rest of the time they’re only along for the ride. Impact Fenders, a company based in Durango, Colorado, has come up with something different: fenders that make themselves useful not only at the dock but also underway and ashore.
Photographs by the author
The fenders can be bent and then hold that shape to wrap around the rail and provide all-around protection at the dock.
The Impact boat fenders measure 27″ × 12″ × 2″ and have a covering of 32-oz, PVC-coated polyester over closed-cell recycled polyethylene padding. Inside the fender’s foam core there is what the company only identifies as a “pliable material.” It can be bent and hold its shape, a feature that helps protect my boats. The gunwales of my smaller boats are often below the level of the docks that I’ll tie up to, and ordinary fenders, tied to the boat and hanging against the side (beneath the gunwale), leave it unprotected. With Impact’s fenders, I can bend the tops to wrap around the gunwales for full protection.
As a rowing seat pad, the Impact Fender works surprising well.
The fender makes a surprisingly good seat for rowing. I thought the foam might be uncomfortably hard and create hot spots for my sit bones, but it was just right for supporting my weight and relieving the pressure points. The pads are 2″ thick and elevate me more than my other rowing seats, but that doesn’t crowd my stroke much. The fenders cover a wide area, which allows me to shift from side to side if I need to level the boat, won’t slide out of position, and on cold days act as a good insulator and are pleasantly warm. The fenders make an excellent camp seat on shore, too. Unlike my fabric-covered throw cushions, the Impact fender doesn’t absorb water and can easily be wiped dry.
The fenders are ideally suited for kneeling, which I tend to do a lot of while boating and cruising. My knees complain more than they did a few decades ago, and the Impact fenders provide good support and a welcome relief from the discomfort of kneeling on a hard surface.
For lounging, a pair of fenders can make a comfortable and warm seat and backrest.
The 32-oz, PVC-coated polyester material that is used for the fender cover is very tough and holds up well to abrasion. I hand-sanded a small spot on one of the color samples with 80-grit sandpaper for six minutes and, while some of the coating powdered away, I didn’t get through to the woven fabric at the core. I have a heavy-duty dry bag made of similar material that did wear through to fabric at some corners after many trips through airline baggage handling.
The fenders are available in nine different colors.
I used one of the color-sample pieces I received to see what it might take to damage it. I put it on top of some foam to duplicate the structure of the fender. Hitting it hard, repeatedly, with a hammer claw barely scuffed the surface. Stabbing it forcefully with a Phillips-head screw made a minute dimple on the front side and a correspondingly small welt on the back. A straight-blade screwdriver with sharp corners made more of a mark, though smaller than a pinhead, and did not puncture the material. Sharp edges and points—a razor-sharp axe and a pinpoint awl— did penetrate the material, but hazards like that are rare in the outdoors. If a fender does get a hole in its covering, it won’t be any less functional: the closed-cell recycled polyethylene foam will not absorb water and will still be fully functional. And while the covering is tough, keep in mind that it is less than a millimeter thick and will last longer if not abused.
The fenders work well for protecting the bottom of the boat from a gravelly beach. They also keep it in place while a cylindrical fender would let the boat roll downhill.
Impact makes Landing Pads of the same 32-oz PVC-coated polyester. They’re designed to be placed on shore to protect the bow of a boat pulled up onto the land. The fenders can be used for the same purpose. My bright-finished Whitehall needs protection from rocks and grit, and the fenders don’t show any signs of wear from having the boat dragged over them. I’ve used cylindrical inflatable fenders for hauling boats out of the water, but the ones suitable for dockside use are a bit undersized and while they eliminate drag by rolling, they often veer off center. It’s hard to keep the boat on them. The Impact fender offers a more stable protective surface.
Each Impact fender comes with a strap and buckles for the stainless-steel grommet set in each end. The buckles have rubber covers to keep them from damaging finishes. While they work as well as any strap, threading the end through the buckle is a bit fussy. With a line I just have to tie a knot to secure the fender, but I can do that quickly, even in the dark.
Impact Fenders has come up with boat fenders with a difference. It’s a difference that will ensure they spend less time stowed and more time put to good use.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The Boat Fenders are available from Impact Fenders in two sizes, medium and large. The medium size, reviewed here, is priced at $85.95. [The price listed here was initially in error. The correct price is now shown. —Ed.]
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.
"From an early age,” writes Paul Sesto of Aurora, Ontario, “my father filled my head with dreams of sailing,” and those dreams have stayed with him. Growing up by Lake Erie in Port Colborne, Ontario, Paul learned to sail at 12. At the age of 14 he learned coastal navigation and two years later, celestial navigation. While in high school, he wanted to be a naval architect and design sailboats, but there were no such programs offered in Canada, so his university studies were in science. The doodles in the margins of his class notes—sailboat profiles—made it clear that his thoughts tended to drift in the direction of his dreams. After graduating, he managed an adult sailing school, and at 31, returned to school to study mechanical engineering and did his fourth-year thesis with a prominent sailmaker in Toronto.
Paul designed his boat with a CAD program, which provided patterns for all of the plywood pieces.
Despite his decades of sailing, Paul had never had a boat of his own, not even a canoe, let alone a sailboat, but he found temporary satisfaction in designing and building model sailboats. Some were meant to be sailed, but since they were models he could only take the helm by radio control.
Photographs by and courtesy of Paul Sesto
Paul had access to 3D printers through his job and used one to print a model of his design.
The Flight of the Phoenix, a 1965 film featuring Jimmy Stewart, encouraged Paul to build a real boat. Stewart played the role of Frank Towns, pilot of a twin-engine cargo plane forced by a sandstorm to a crash landing in the middle of the Arabian desert. Everyone on board survived, but there was no chance they’d be rescued. One of the passengers, Heinrich Dorfmann, an aeronautical engineer, proposed making a flyable aircraft from what remained of the cargo plane. Only when the group had finished the project did Towns learn that Dorfmann’s work had been only with model airplanes. Dorfmann defended the cobbled-together aircraft, saying “the principles are the same.” That stayed with Paul and got him thinking that if he could make model boats, he could design and build a boat he could sail.
After the three sections had been assembled, Paul nested them for the first time. They fit together just as they did with the printed model.
The size of his boat would be limited by the space he had available for building it, which was the living room of his one-bedroom third story apartment. And the only place he would have to store the finished boat was the 4′-long, 3′-wide back end of his Toyota hatchback. The boat would have to be sectional.
While TRIO could be assembled in Paul’s living room, there wasn’t much room left for anything else.
He started the project early in 2017 with scale models, working out the sizes and shapes of three pieces that would nest in one another. He further developed the shapes with a CAD program, and to test the nested design he made scale models both in wood and on a 3D printer. His older brother Michael, a 3D graphic designer, offered support for the project with his refined sense of aesthetics and his own knowledge of sailing and design. Michael also bought a 12′ origami-folding kayak so he could join Paul on outings when his boat was finished. Satisfied with the design, Paul used the CAD program to develop the panels and print full-sized patterns.
Nested, TRIO fits in the back of his Toyota Matrix Hatchback, along with a folding cart to roll it to the water.
A sectional boat is usually built in one piece with double bulkheads (where it will be cut into separate pieces), but Paul didn’t have enough unused space in his living room to be occupied by the 12′ boat for weeks, so he built it in three separate pieces. This also avoided having to scarf 8′ sheets of marine plywood to make 12′ panels. He worked on a pair of folding tables and cut sheets of 4mm and 6mm plywood to shape with a Japanese pull saw, then drilled the holes for stitch-and-glue construction with a cordless drill.
The cart and a pair of stands hold the sections at a convenient working height for assembly. The bolts that hold the bulkheads together are all above the waterline.
After the three box-like pieces were finished and tested for fit—both assembled and nested—Paul moved the project to his parents’ garage, two-and-a-half hours away in his hometown, for the remaining woodwork, paint, and varnish.
TRIO was launched as a paddle vessel while awaiting her sailing rig, which Paul (pictured here), would make during the winter following her first season afloat. The inscription on the corner of the transom includes the signatures of Paul, his father Adam, and his brother Michael.
Paul’s 86-year-old father, Adam, had taught both sons to work with tools when they were young, but as they grew up he was occasionally less than enthusiastic about the projects they took on: “Don’t you have anything better to do?” But when he saw Paul’s sectional boat taking shape in his garage, Adam was happy to pitch in. He took on the job of painting and varnishing, which is one of features people admire most about the boat. Paul is quick to mention that it’s his father’s handiwork.
Ontario’s Humber River, only about 20 miles from Paul’s home, winds though many parks on its way to Lake Ontario at Toronto.
In July 2017, TRIO 12, as the boat was christened, was launched. The three sections, from bow to stern, measure 44″, 52″, and 48″ each and came together to make a 12′ hull with a beam of 33″ and a depth of 13″; it weighs 70 lbs. TRIO 12, of course, refers to the three pieces, but also to Paul, Adam, and Michael, the three who invested their time, energy, and pride in her building.
Paul’s 74-year-old uncle, Paul Misner, is a canoeist and offered to take TRIO out so Paul could see how his boat looked while in use.
Paul spent much of that summer taking TRIO 12 out with a double-bladed paddle. He often went with Michael and his kayak, spending time together just as they did in their teens and 20s. During the winter that followed, he put together the sailing rig: mast, leeboard, and kick-up rudder with a push-pull tiller. He bought an Optimist pram sail, rigged it as a lugsail rather than a spritsail, and for additional stability he bought an outrigger kit with inflatable amas.
While Paul had sailing in mind as he designed TRIO, he took a keen interest in fly fishing.
Every year since then, from early May to mid-October, TRIO 12 and her sailing rig and cart have stayed in the back of Paul’s car, ready to go on a moment’s notice. “At 55, I proved to myself I could design and build my own sailboat,” he writes, “The boat has transformed my life, and just like when I was a kid, I can’t wait for the ice to melt and to get out on the water again.”
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.
It had been nearly 20 years since I stepped into a Penguin when I toted one down to Bristol (Rhode Island) Yacht Club last winter for a day of “frostbite” racing. I had owned a Penguin years earlier, and I had been able to buy it back, intending to restore it to sail with my daughter some day. But in the meantime, a good friend from Long Island offered the use of his Penguin, which had hung from his garage rafters for 15 years. “I’d love to see her sailing again,” he said. I pieced it together that brisk Saturday and made it out to the race course just in time for the first start.
Maybe it was the nostalgia that had me so excited to be surrounded by so much varnish in such a little boat, one of five wooden Penguins on the starting line that day. Or perhaps it was because my co-skipper for the boat, which is sailed double-handed, was Tim Fallon, team race world champion and Beetle Cat guru from Cape Cod. Either way, watching the plumb bow punch through the dark northwesterly wavelets and feeling the windward chine lock into a wave downwind as we leaned out to weather was just plain ol’ fun and more challenging than I had remembered.
The Penguin has been one of the most prolific home-built classes in the country. “Every time I look at one of these beautiful boats, I smile,” said a 70-year-old gentleman on the pier that afternoon who had raced them in the 1950s.
Photo by Peter Airlie
Designed by Philip Rhodes in 1933, the Penguin has had an enduring legacy as a racing dinghy, with more than 9,700 built. The plywood, hard-chined boats are simple to build.
Philip Rhodes designed the Penguin in 1933 as a contender for the frostbiting fleets of Manhasset Bay and Larchmont, New York, but his design lost out to one by Olin Stephens. The boat, 11′ 5″ long with 72 sq ft of sail, has hard chines, making it easy to plank with plywood. In 1938, Rhodes dusted off the design when a group of Potomac River sailors approached him for a frostbiter. They built 12 boats together in their basements and raced on winter weekends.
“Yachting magazine sent a reporter to cover one of the regattas in 1939,” says Charles Krafft, whose father completed hull No. 6 in that original fleet. “The magazine was in competition with The Rudder, which had just published the plans for the Snipe. So they did a piece on the Penguin and told where to get plans. It went from a few fleets to a national class overnight.”
More than 9,700 Penguins have been built. Hull No. 1 is on exhibit at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Most of the boats are wood, whether built by amateurs or professionals. The class remained popular for winter racing for more than 40 years, until the advent of self-rescuing fiberglass racing dinghies.
“It’s hard to sell a Penguin as a safe, fast boat,” says Jonathan Bartlett, a Maryland sailmaker who got into the class to teach his two daughters how to race. “If you roll over, you’re done.” Later, fiberglass Penguins based on one built by Bill Burtis had false bottoms that allowed self-rescue. They proved fast in the Long Island fleet, Krafft says, so wooden Penguin owners lost interest. On the Chesapeake, however, class restrictions neutralized the benefits of the ’glass boats, and the fleet remained comparatively strong.
“You hear less about the Penguin now than in the 1980s,” Krafft says. There were 25-boat fleets on any given winter Sunday in western Long Island Sound and 35-boat international championships. “We had a surge in the 1990s with baby boomers who grew up sailing them taking their kids out,” he says. “Now those kids are older.”
Photo by Peter Airlie
Intended as a family-friendly racing dinghy, the Penguin was outshone by light fiberglass boats that came later, yet the design is appealing for teaching sailing and racing, and for daysailing. Frostbite fleets are still active in several states.
Fleets survive in Maryland, Illinois, and Rhode Island, but the design is being rekindled. Bristol Seacraft in Rhode Island started building wooden Penguins in 2008 and is now the only registered builder of what owner Al Nunes sees as a family-friendly classic design. A few years ago, the John Gardner School of Boat Building in Annapolis, Maryland, built a handful of Penguins.
Construction plans, too, are available at $50. The design is the same, Krafft says, except that the rudder profile has been altered. Aluminum masts are allowed, although the rotating wooden wing masts are works of art and are also considered competitive in light breezes. A computer-cut kit for a self-rescuing plywood boat to help spark new interest has also been discussed.
Bud Daily, who has been involved with the class since the early 1980s when he was a sailmaker on Long Island, says the allure of the boats is as much about the people sailing them as the design itself. “The original concept was a family-oriented boat,” he says. “That’s what has always appealed to me. I sail with my wife, and it also gives me an opportunity to teach someone sailing in a competitive environment.” He adds that the boats are not super fast, and with a rotating wing mast and with every sail adjustment leading to the crew, there is a lot to do.
Like many racing dinghies, the boats are easy to sail but hard to sail well. “It humbles a lot of folks,” says Bartlett, referring to the oversized centerboard and hard chines that the boat can trip over in gusty conditions. “If you can sail a Penguin well, you can sail anything.” It is a simple boat. “It’s not a Laser. But for the nostalgia and classic look, it’s hard to beat it.”
Photo by Peter Airlie
A Penguin maststep offers several alternatives for increasing or reducing mast rake, much like more modern racing dinghies.
“It is a classic design,” Krafft says, “very responsive. It doesn’t have the high thrills of other modern dinghies, but it is a beautiful boat to sail for someone who wants to step into a classic little boat.”
Penguins in garages and backyards around the country are just waiting for someone to renew them. Boats in poor condition are often free, and sailable ones can be bought for around $500, but those are snapped up pretty quickly. Pristine boats can sell for $2,000. Some have finely varnished interiors and others have flaking paint and cracked floorboards. For some reason, however, they all sail around the same speed, Krafft says.
The class has weathered the onslaught of new designs over the years by being a keepsake, something you cannot bring yourself to throw away. The fact that stalwarts have maintained the class association while other classes have gone belly-up has also buoyed the reputation of the boats.
Photo by Peter Airlie
Penguins have enough lines to keep active sailors happy. Uncommon in sailboats of today is a continuous line affixed to a tiller-like device so that the rotating mast can be adjusted as needed to improve the sail’s angle of attack.
“We’re trying to protect the integrity of the class,” Krafft says. “It doesn’t matter if you are a racer or use your Penguin for daysailing, we’re a place to ask questions, look for parts, or share experiences.” He says he gets e-mails from California, Washington, New Orleans, Tennessee, New England, and Canada from owners put- ting together or maintaining their boats. Like Bartlett, I bought mine back so I can take my daughter racing in a mellow environment when she’s old enough. I also see it as an opportunity to enjoy sunny winter afternoons with friends and their children, since we rarely race anymore and miss being on the water.
They seem like silly little boats at first, and certainly now are considered obscure. But that seems to be the attraction of many little wooden boats—their uniqueness, and rareness. The best part about the Penguin is that whether you are hiked out with a friend inches away from a competitor or sitting on the floorboards on a lazy summer afternoon, you are surrounded by a little bit of sailing history and a lot of class.
King Boat Works is a name that is synonymous with some of the highest-quality wooden rowing shells available in the world today. Behind the company name is Graeme King, who has been designing, building, and rigging rowing shells for more than 45 years. For the past 23 years, he has been working out of his own shop in Putney, Vermont. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Kingfisher, a single shell designed by King. A few years later, her sistership, the double Kookaburra, came on the scene. Named for feathered friends from the designer’s native Australia, these birds can fly.
The Kingfisher shell, like her namesake, is sharp-nosed, sleek, and fast. While the kookaburra is not a cousin to the kingfisher in the wild, the double shell of that name mimics the Kingfisher design. Because the Kookaburra is essentially an elongated version of the Kingfisher and most of its elements are identical, I will omit the Kookaburra from much of the following discussion.
Photo by Karen Wales
Graeme King (shown) has devoted his career to designing and building wooden rowing shells. He developed the Kingfisher single for the home builder who desires a fast and elegant recreational shell.
King shells are among the most sought-after shells in the world. The wait for one of Graeme King’s round-bottomed, stressed-skin shells can be years. Not every- one needs—or wants—such a high-end shell, especially for leisure-time rowing. So King designed his V-bottomed Kingfisher with the intermediate-level home builder in mind.
Boat design is a study in compromise. It is in choosing well during the initial stages of the design process and then balancing those decisions with well-thought-out compromises that sets a great designer apart from an average one. Here, King’s gifted eye and long experience with rowing shells come into play. He has been very successful, I think, in finding that sweet spot between making the Kingfisher just wide enough to keep her from being too tippy yet skinny enough (and sharp enough) to slice through flat water like a hot knife through cold butter.
In an apples-to-apples comparison of round-bottomed shells, a beamier hull will usually be slower but will have better initial stability than a skinnier one. Realizing the futility in trying to reinvent the conventional shell’s round-bottomed hull shape for the home builder, King opted instead to employ a V-bottom and hard chine in the Kingfisher design. This makes all the difference to a person with limited boatbuilding skill. It also renders a boat that is easier to use than a conventional shell while giving up only a small percentage of the speed.
Getting into a narrow, round-bottomed shell is no easy task. Some background in tightrope walking and logrolling would be of help—and I am not proficient in either one. The Kingfisher’s V-bottom, hard chine, and generous waterline beam of 1’4″ combine to provide a solid feel underfoot while boarding. She’s still a shell—so it remains important to pay attention—but, by comparison she’s easy to board and to balance in the water, even if you have little or no experience with a sliding-seat rowing shell.
The Kingfisher can be used in less than flat-water conditions, within reason. She’ll do fine on a rippled surface in a breeze. I have read that she has successfully negotiated up to 2′ open-bay swells, but in my opinion, putting her in these conditions is begging to take a dip. Unless you have had a lot of experience with this type of craft, you should avoid using the Kingfisher on anything but glass-smooth water until you get used to the boat.
Photo by Karen Wales
The Kookaburra is a double version of the Kingfisher. Like its predecessor, the Kookaburra double is a fast and able recreational shell. Long, quiet expanses such as straight rivers and oblong lakes provide the best conditions for this type of craft.
While some would argue that any sport could be taken up at any age, few are as practical to take on later in life than sculling. It offers full-body strengthening and an outstanding aerobic workout without overtaxing any of the joints. The Kingfisher is a forgiving and fast shell to row. I can’t think of a better fit for someone who is new to this type of rowing. For a pair of rowers, the same holds true for the Kookaburra.
Years ago, I spent some time working for Graeme. One of the perks of the job was taking the early-morning row in a Kingfisher on the Connecticut River, not far from the workshop. Recently I had the privilege of reliving the experience—now paired with Graeme in the Kookaburra. For me, it was like riding a bicycle built for two behind a skilled racer. We shot downriver at an exhilarating pace. The Kingfisher (or Kookaburra) is, of course, not as fast as her U-sectioned counterparts, but she can attain up to 93 percent of the speed of the best competition shells of similar length. Considering all that she has to offer in terms of ease of construction and seaworthiness, that loss of speed is a small price to pay, particularly for the recreational rower.
Photos by Karen Wales
King builds the specialized sliding-seat mechanism and outriggers required by the Kingfisher and Kookaburra. Lightweight oars are purchased separately.
Both plans and kits are available for these boats. Skin and bulkhead pieces are made from 3⁄32″- and 1⁄8″-thick plywood. King also makes seats, slides, and stretcher fittings as well as welding up his own riggers out of stainless-steel tubing. These riggers yield light and strong suspension platforms that place the oarlocks and their associated point loads far from the hull, then spread the loads into the hull as the oarsman’s powerful stroke levers him along the water’s surface.
Decks are of heat-shrink Dacron. All it takes is a few staples and a household iron to achieve a drum-like quality in these taut-skinned decks. Applying it is simple and satisfying. Later on, varnish will seal the weave and give the deck a smooth, hard finish.
Photo by Karen Wales
Here is hull No.1 of nearly 1,000 Kingfishers that have been built over the past 25 years. Her sapele plywood hull glistens in the afternoon sun.
Using a kit will make the building process easier. It will alleviate some hair-pulling and help ensure that the boat will come in at her proper weight, perform well, and look nice. Even if you’re usually not a kit person, you may wish to reconsider when contemplating building either of these shells. If building from scratch is your preference, I still suggest purchasing riggers and hardware (seat, slides, and stretcher fittings) from King.
A few words about portaging and hauling: Both the Kingfisher (42 lbs) and Kookaburra (65–70 lbs) can handily be carried by two people. Either design lends itself well to portaging. Cartopping is also possible— even for the 27′ Kookaburra—which makes a statement around town, to be sure. For cartopping, either craft should have its own cradle, so that it can be upside down. It must be well anchored to the cradle and the cradle lashed securely to the car. Complete the job by tying lines from each end of the boat directly to the car. Follow this advice, and you shouldn’t have any difficulty in hauling. Just be sure to watch those turns!
Either the Kingfisher or the Kookaburra will offer a challenging and enjoyable building experience as well as a lifetime of fun on the water. Graeme King’s exceptional abilities and his enduring dedication to his craft continue to enrich all of us who are interested in these fine-lined rowing boats. He is a rare bird, indeed.
Keel, stringers, and 3⁄32”-plywood planking are attached to 1⁄8” permanent, bulkhead-type frames. The hull is further strengthened with trusses. Detailed plans include many full-sized patterns and a suggested building jig.
A V-bottom and hard chine give the Kookaburra (and Kingfisher) better initial stability than that of round- bottomed competition shells.This hull configuration makes these shells easier to build, too.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2010. Plans for the Kingfisher and Kookaburra are available at The WoodenBoat Store.
Built here at the WoodenBoat School, our Joel White & N.G. Herreshoff designed Catspaw Dinghy is an all-purpose boat that’s easy to row and sail. The Catspaw Dinghy is a popular boatbuilding project for amateur builders; it represents classic, small-craft construction.
Joel White’s Catspaw Dinghy is an adaptation of Nathanael Herreshoff’s Columbia Dinghy.
JESSE performs best under fairly sizable oars — 7½′ or better—and has two rowing stations.
The Catspaw Dinghy is an easy boat to trailer or haul on the back of a pickup truck.
Plans for Joel White & N.G. Herreshoff’s Catspaw Dinghy are available from The WoodenBoat Store.
I was planning on being an artist. I took art classes during my last two years of high school, got my bachelor’s degree in art in 1975, and in the years that followed, continued drawing, and sculpted a couple of clay busts. Portraiture was the direction I was headed, but I got sidetracked by backpacking and bicycle touring. I eventually grew tired of lugging a heavy backpack and while on a bike tour from Seattle to Los Angeles and back, I got hit by a car in Salt Lake City and then repeatedly run off the road on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. That left boating—I wouldn’t have to carry anything, and the “roads” would be a lot wider. I read books on boatbuilding by John Gardner and Pete Culler and decided to build a Chamberlain-designed 14′ Marblehead dory skiff to cruise north along the Inside Passage. According to a note I made in a journal I was keeping at the time, I started construction on July 12, 1978.
While the kayak was the first real boat I built and launched, it was just a warm-up to this Marblehead dory skiff. The book resting on the upturned bottom of the boat is a blank book I started in 1973, while an art student on exchange to Smith, an all-women’s college in Massachusetts, and stopped making entries in 1980. In that time my focus had shifted from art to boatbuilding.
While I was building the dory skiff, I made this watercolor. It marks a moment in my transition from art to boats.
I knew that it would take me a while to build a traditional plank-on-frame boat; a skin-on-frame kayak would get afloat faster and give me experience on the water while I was building the skiff. I studied Chapelle’s chapter on Arctic kayaks in Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, cursorily, and drew a kayak of my own design that was a mishmash of elements I’d picked out of the book. I’d watched my father build a fuselage-frame rowing wherry and designed my kayak for that method, using plywood frames and stems with longitudinals screwed and glued to them. I tacked a canvas skin to the frame and waterproofed it with tan Gacoflex, a liquid neoprene coating.
I finished the kayak in July of 1978. Sitting in the back of my boyhood home, it is surrounded by things that my father made: the racing-shell slings holding the kayak, the picnic table, and, resting on the lawn, a barbell that was a dowel set in cement in concrete drainpipe. I grew up believing that there was never a reason to buy the things we could make.
I launched the kayak on July 20, 1978. It wasn’t anything special, neither fast nor stable, but it got me on the water. I launched the dory skiff on a rainy afternoon on February 24, 1979. I christened it GAMINE after a winsome character played by Paulette Goddard in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern Times. The following year, in the summer of 1980, I fulfilled my dream of cruising the Inside Passage.
Skinny Beach, a 1-1/2-mile-long strip of gravel and sand between the railroad tracks and Puget Sound, was within walking distance from home and where I launched the kayak on July 20, 1978. The paddle was one my father made for whitewater kayakers at the school where he taught. It had fiberglassed 1/4” plywood blades set at right angles to each other. This beach supplied driftwood, mostly red and yellow cedar, for many future boatbuilding projects.
My kayak lasted a few years before the skin succumbed to mildew. By that time, I had learned a lot more about boats and could appreciate all the knowledge and skill that went into the design and construction of traditional craft. I tore the rotting skin off my kayak and took a chainsaw to the frame—an acknowledgement perhaps, of my lack of understanding of the wisdom carried by old boats. I turned my attention to building reproductions of Arctic kayaks and plank-on-frame working boats to see what they could teach me.
Getting the kayak afloat was the first step in preparing for cruising the Inside Passage with the dory skiff I was building. The Calkins-designed Bartender at left belonged to the family whose yard I crossed to get to the beach. The other boat belonged to a neighbor and was the waterskiing boat for the group of us who spent summers at Skinny Beach.
That blank book in which I recorded the dates of my beginnings as a boatbuilder starts with an entry dated November 1973. It has several sketches for silk-screen projects I was exploring for a serigraphy class I took during my junior year of college. A few pages in, I had sketched my left hand. Beyond that were drawings developing a system for perspective on the spherical surface of the Earth. A rough portrait of my mother is on the page preceding the spread with my first notes about my kayak and dory skiff. All of the drawings beyond that, without exception, have something to do with boats.
To get the kayak to and from the beach, I made a cart of bicycle wheels and a frame of scrap aluminum. It was just a ½-mile walk through the neighborhood. The phone pole and wires at left mark the border between the shoreside homes and Puget Sound.
The last entry in the book, dated March 31, 1980, contains this note: “The gunning dory [a boat I built for my father] is coming along well. Sanding, oiling, sewing, and rigging are all that remain.” The lure of building boats had hijacked my career as an artist. Today, here at my home, I have 17 boats that I’ve built. I may be reaching the point that I have enough of them and can devote some time to drawing.
I am not a sailor. When I was a boy, our family had an aluminum fishing boat with a small outboard. Later in life I went sailing on a local lake with a friend on a Hobie Cat for an hour or two. That was the extent of my sail training. These days our family spends a few summer days at a cabin in Michigan’s Les Cheneaux Islands. Surrounded by crystal blue water, islands, rock beaches, and active teenagers, it was easy to conclude that a sailboat would be a welcome addition at the cabin despite our lack of sailing know-how. As a builder and wooden boat enthusiast, the decision to build a wood sailboat was not difficult.
We chose to build the Sand Dollar from Arch Davis Design. It’s an 11′ flat-bottomed skiff that can be rigged to sail, rows well, and looks good with its plywood lapstrake sides. I had recently built a 21′ Widebody Tolman Skiff and was eager to try a different building method and to have a boat I could transport on the top of our vehicle. Limiting the number of boats we own is not a priority; limiting the number of trailers and the associated paperwork and maintenance, is. I was also excited about a boatbuilding project that would take much less time than the three years I spent on the Widebody.
Arch Davis designed the Sand Dollar for first-time builders, including those with no previous woodworking experience. As he notes, he took great pains with the lines, building a model to refine the shape. The result is a very pretty, practical little boat that will satisfy both the novice and experienced boatbuilder.
The Sand Dollar plans includes 16 sheets of drawings, a Mylar sheet with full-sized patterns, and a 75-page manual. Study plans, an instructional DVD, and various kits are also available. We found the building manual to be comprehensive with step-by-step instructions, drawings, photos of the building process, a list of required materials and tools, and even a glossary of terms that might be unfamiliar to a novice boatbuilder.
Photographs by the author
The center thwart and the flotation compartments’ tops are installed before the hull is planked, making it much easier to trim them to fit by planning them flush with the longitudinals.
The Sand Dollar requires three sheets of 6mm marine plywood—we used meranti — as well as lumber for the various other pieces. The boat is built upside down on a simple jig. The stem, transom, bulkheads for flotation chambers fore and aft, and two temporary frames are set up on the strongback, and the keel, chine logs, stringers, and seat risers are bent over them. (While the fore-and-aft framing members enable a much easier lapstrake planking process, we discovered after the boat was in use that the stringers and seat risers make the boat more difficult to clean. I normally tip the boat on its side to spray the debris and spiders out. The stringers and risers prevent the dirt and water from freely draining out through the open inwale.)
A sheet of plywood is laid over the assembly and cut to shape to become most of the bottom. The forward part of the bottom is joined to it with a 4″-wide plywood butt strap. The use of butt straps, applied while the pieces to be joined by them are on the building jig, simplifies the building process by avoiding the need to scarf plywood panels together.
The manual suggests installing the seats before the side planking so that the seat shape can be determined simply by scribing along the outside edges of the seat risers instead of having to measure and cut them to fit inside the boat, as you would if they were installed after planking. A mast trunk is installed between the keel and the forward seat top. After the seats are installed, which includes the tops of the flotation chambers, the sides are planked. The laps aren’t beveled, but gains are cut in the ends. Screws and epoxy join the planks at the chine, lap stringer, and riser. After the skeg deadwood is scribed to fit the bottom, it is fastened with screws and glue.
The hull is removed from the strongback and flipped over for installation of the center thwart’s knees and a small foredeck with mast partners. While the plans call for half-round guards at the bottom of the sheerstrake, we left them off and opted to install just the rubrails at the top. The sheer’s inner side is finished with an open gunwale using evenly spaced 2-1/2″-long blocks. The plywood tops of the fore and aft flotation compartments get dressed up with ¾″ lumber. The plans include drawings and instructions for both a centerboard and daggerboard case. We went with the more easily built daggerboard case.
The kick-up rudder has 1/2″ plywood checks and a 3/4″ lumber rudder blade. The manual advises shortening the top pintle to avoid having to get both pintles lined up over their respective gudgeons at the same time. The longer pintle goes in first, then the top one, and both come to rest properly on the gudgeons.
The drawings and instructions cover the making of the centerboard or daggerboard, kick-up rudder and its tiller, and spars. The Sand Dollar design offers a choice of a gunter rig, a standing lug rig, and a sprit rig. All three rigs have short spars and an unstayed mast. We went with the standing lug with a sail area of 49 sq ft. We opted to buy a sail kit from Sailrite and sew the sail ourselves. After sending the sail measurements to Sailrite, we received a kit with everything we needed and detailed sewing instructions. Once the sail was finished, the rigging was pretty simple. The sail is laced to the boom and yard, the mainsheet attached to the boom via a double block, and the halyard attached to the yard.
The plans provide drawings and instruction for a pivoting centerboard as well as the daggerboard shown here. The author opted for the easy construction of the daggerboard but would switch to the centerboard if he were to build the boat again.
When we finished our Sand Dollar, we cartopped it to our cabin. For our family, the easy-to-use things are the ones that get used often and the Sand Dollar is definitely in the easy-to-use category for a sailboat. It takes two or three of us to carry it to the water. The sail, rolled up around the boom and yard, follow along with the mast, oars, daggerboard, rudder, and tiller. The sail is unrolled and the halyard is run through the sheave at the top of the mast. The mast is dropped through the foredeck and into the trunk in the bow seat. The yard is raised until the boom jaw hits the mast collar, and the sail is tensioned; the halyard is cleated off at the base of the mast. The mainsheet is threaded through the blocks and the rudder with its tiller is installed on the transom.
I do not have a lot of experience sailing other boats, but the Sand Dollar is quite responsive. When the wind gusts just a little, the boat heels immediately and feedback is quickly felt via the tiller and the mainsheet. In strong or gusty winds, it is easy to make quick adjustments to either the mainsheet or tiller. I have never checked its speed with a GPS, but for the way we sail it, it is certainly fast enough. I like to sail just fast enough to hear the water gurgle along the hull and feel a surge of power every now and then. At 11′, the Sand Dollar is a small boat. When I sail solo, I sit on the windward side of the center thwart facing aft with one hand holding the mainsheet and the other on the tiller. This works well. When I sail with one of the children, they sit in the stern and man the tiller. They have to be nimble to move around the tiller while coming about.
Three rigs are detailed in the plans: a sprit or a lug rig, both carrying 49 sq ft of sail, and a gunter rig with 55 sq ft.
When I took our teenage daughter for her first sail in the Sand Dollar—her first sail ever—we happened to execute a successful capsize test. We did our usual upwind leg and turned for the downwind run back to the dock. The sailing was going just fine until we suddenly had an accidental jibe. The boat ended up on its side with us swimming. The boat didn’t fully capsize so it was not difficult to right by pulling on the high gunwale while pushing down on the daggerboard. Once upright, it was full of water up to the top of the daggerboard trunk. The two flotation tanks provided enough support for us to get ahead of any water coming in the daggerboard slot. It did not take much bailing before the slot remained above the water level and we were able to scoop most of the water out. The episode was a little shocking at the time, but it was a good learning experience. We learned not only about accidental jibes but also how the Sand Dollar can recover from capsizes. If I were to build the boat again, I would opt for the centerboard rather than the daggerboard. We occasionally forget to insert the daggerboard after leaving the beach or to retract it when coming into the beach. Not having it inserted is not so bad and we do enjoy the surge of speed once we do deploy it. Forgetting to retract it coming into a rocky shore is an entirely different experience.
The Sand Dollar is designed with two rowing stations: one in the center for solo rowing and another in the bow for bringing a passenger along.
With a single rower, the boat is well balanced, tracks well, and the transom does not drag. The trim of the Sand Dollar, as with other small boats, is sensitive to weight placement whether rowing or sailing. The Arch Davis Designs description of the boat notes “you can put a small outboard on the transom if you wish,” but we have not, so far.
There are many features that make the Sand Dollar attractive to a builder or sailor. It is a well-designed, good-looking, safe, versatile, small skiff with well-thought-out and comprehensive building plans. It is easy to store and transport, and its simple rig is not intimidating to the beginning or young sailor. For our family, it provides a great way to spend a relaxing day on the water.
Sam Smith is an engineer, farmer, and builder living in the Great Lakes area. Boats and boat plans are his endless source of observation, study, dreaming, and building, and he and his family enjoy using the boats he has built to explore the great outdoors together.
Full-size plans for the Sand Dollar are available from Arch Davis Designs for $135. Arch Davis Designs also offers study plans for $12 and instructional DVDs which sell for $35. [The prices first presented here weren’t accurate. They have been corrected. —Ed.]
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!
The Port Aransas Skiff, or Port A Skiff as it is known, has been serving its namesake seaside community for well over a century—before either the town or the boat even had that name. Although the pass between San José and Mustang islands connecting the Gulf of Mexico with Corpus Christi Bay was named Aransas Pass by the 1830s, the town at the entrance of that pass wasn’t called Port Aransas until about 1910.
Skiffs built along the Texas coast in the early days differed depending on the conditions at each port or bay and the uses the skiffs were put to, so the various skiff designs were often referred to by the names of those locations. Some boats, however, took on names of unique design aspects, such as Port Mansfield’s long and narrow “Banana Boats” with their pronounced forward rise, or the names of those who built them, such as the “Bubba Skiff” version of the Port A Skiff.
The Port A Skiff was originally made of solid planks and sailed or rowed into the flats and shallows on the bay sides of San José and Mustang islands for duck hunting, crabbing, or using gillnets or trotlines. As workboats to bring heavy loads of fish home to both table and market, they were built stout enough to take a beating. The boats had rocker both forward and aft then, though with transom sterns, and their oars were about twice as long as the boat’s beam. Tholepins were often used instead of less economical oarlocks.
Starting in the 1880s, when the tarpon sportfishing industry took off in the area, the boats were also used to row clients out along and beyond the original Aransas Pass jetty to the islands’ gulf sides. Although tarpon are not particularly palatable, they fight hard, leap from the water with brilliant sunlit flashes of silver-dollar-sized and -colored scales, and can reach masses rivaling those of the people catching them. They can be so large, in fact, that landed ones sometimes drape across both gunwales of the boats, head hanging toward the water on one side and tail on the other.
The Port A Skiff’s life as a tarpon boat ended by the 1920s, after Farley Boat Works opened in Port A and began building open-cockpit 16- to 28-footers with inboard engines specifically designed to take clients out for tarpon. The Port A Skiff continued to be used in the flats and bays, however, where the powerful inboard boats could not go, and indeed, once the tarpon population precipitously declined in the 1960s, the skiffs survived while the inboard tarpon boats did not.
The Port A Skiff was arguably the perfect boat for a coastal fishing town, easily built of common materials, handy under oar and sail, capable in local conditions, and simple and easy to maintain. They were designed and built locally, often on the beach or in a backyard, and have evolved alongside the inception of plywood and affordable outboards and the passage of legislation outlawing gillnets and otherwise limiting commercial fishing in the bays. Most notably, the skiff’s transom widened and its aft rocker flattened to support the weight of outboards and get on plane. The modern Port A Skiff is primarily a recreational boat used for duck hunting and for fishing for red drum, speckled seatrout, and flounder.
Many builders have contributed to the Port A Skiff’s evolution, not only with adaptations for incorporating plywood, fiberglass, and outboards, but also with personal touches. The first modern Port A Skiff was likely built around 1960 by John “Bubba” Milina Jr., a local fishing guide who built boats from the 1940s until shortly after the turn of the 21st century. In his younger years he sometimes visited Farley Boat Works to watch them build boats. The most famous version of the Port A Skiff, however, is likely the School Skiff, built from the late 1970s until about 1990 by the local high school shop class under the guidance of “Coach” Doyle Marek, who based his boats on Bubba Milina’s. Many of Coach Marek’s students, now adults, still have their skiffs.
In an interesting turn of events, after closing in 1973, Farley Boat Works reopened in 2011 as a nonprofit with the goals of preserving the historic shop and its surviving boats and teaching traditional local boatbuilding, and it is now where the Port A Skiff is almost exclusively built, at its Rick Pratt School of Wooden Boat Building. One of the shop’s first orders of business upon reopening was to invite Coach Marek to teach their volunteers how to build the Port A Skiff and ensure that the knowledge and skills necessary could be passed to yet another generation of boatbuilders.
Individual builders differed in opinion on subtle details, such as the exact shape of the stern or whether the splash rail should parallel the sheer or the chine. Someone with an educated eye can identify a Bubba Skiff, a School Skiff, or other variations of the Port A Skiff from such details.
The boat is not made from a set of plans or on a strongback—unless you consider the floor at Farley Boat Works a strongback—but from a few flexible measurements and experience and by eye, tweaked to suit the individual boat’s intended purpose. All the boats, however, stem from a single free-built system using two 16ʹ lengths of scarfed plywood, with one split into two 2ʹ-wide lengths for the boat’s sides and the second left 4ʹ wide for the skiff’s bottom. Mahogany is usually used for the stem, chine rails, gunwales and inwales, spray rails, and other framing; treated pine for the keel and keelson; and additional plywood for the transom, bow deck, center dry box, and rear seat.
Harry Martinez
The floorboards are made of 1/2″ plywood and are supported by the chine logs only, which allows the bottom of the boat to flex. A few screws and finish washers hold the floorboards in place and can be removed to get access to the bottom.
The side panel ends are cut at predetermined angles. The sheer is cut along a curve and the bottom remains straight. The sides are glued and screwed to the stem and then to the transom. The rake of the stem and transom rarely vary from boat to boat, and the straight rabbeted stems are crafted to create ample beam and buoyancy forward and still allow the boats to be built within the dry-bending limits of plywood.
A temporary stretcher frame pushes the tops of the sides out, giving the bottom its rocker and the sides their flare. Move the frame forward, and you get more rocker there and a flatter stern. The bottom edges of those sides should sit flat on that workshop floor from the transom to about half to two-thirds of the boat’s length going forward. The sides’ flare should create a beam of no more than 5ʹ 5ʺ, and the forward rocker should leave a 6ʺ to 9ʺ gap between the workshop floor and the forefoot.
Some builders choose to shorten the boat’s length to 14ʹ or stretch it to 18ʹ or widen the bottom from 4′ to 5ʹ, by adding a 6″-wide strip of plywood on either side. The bottom should not be widened more than that because it’s designed as a “floating bottom” that flexes when underway.
Another dimension some builders decide to veer from is the 20ʺ to 24ʺ height of the sides. This height, combined with the flare and splash rails, provides a bone-dry ride in most conditions. Lower sides, however, are an advantage for flounder fishing, which involves repeatedly stepping out of and back into the boat at night to wade with a multipronged spear and spotlight while trailing the boat by its painter. Poling and fly-fishing can also benefit by adjusting the sheer height to balance windage and prevent weathercocking while sneaking up on red drum.
In the earlier days of planing Port A Skiffs, a hook was added on the bottom at the stern to help keep the bow down when motoring. This could be achieved after fiberglassing the bottom, with a few additional layers of ’glass aft, each layer starting at the transom then ending several inches less than the previous one to build up the subtle hook. Or it could be achieved after the hull is turned bottom side up but before the bottom itself is added, by cutting a bit of a curve into the chine edges of the sides aft. Modern skiffs may leave the bottom flat aft and control the boat’s trim with trim tabs and the outboard’s trim function, which have the advantage of being able to impart the effect of a hook only when needed.
The standard Port A Skiff is a flat-bottomed boat and as such can pound in a chop, and the shallow waters around Port A ensure that pretty much any wave action comes in the form of a chop. Experienced skippers ease their speed and adjust their trim and angle of attack into the waves to make it a less bumpy ride. Although the boat’s splash rails, outer gunwale, and flaring sides keep the cockpit dry in most conditions, trying to nose the bow down too far in a chop can turn it into a wet ride, particularly with the lower freeboard of a poling or floundering version of the boat.
Roger Siebert
Hull number 2 is a basic model with seating in the bow and on two thwarts. The center thwart is supported by a pair of bulkheads and the enclosed space is accessed by a flush hatch.
Interior layout is one area of great variability, with some relying on an aft thwart and tiller, while others add console-mounted steering and controls to move the skipper’s weight forward and to absorb the impact of any particularly bad chop with the skipper’s legs instead of with jarred teeth and spines. Some owners also keep their fuel tanks beneath the foredeck to help with balance.
As another tactic to reduce pounding, recent builds of the skiff have added some V to the bottom, first in what can be considered the second generation of the modern Port A Skiff, adding the V only forward, where the bottom’s forward rocker is, but also more recently, in the boat’s third generation, all the way aft—albeit an extremely shallow V aft of the rocker to prevent losing one of the skiff’s greatest assets: its shallow draft.
Roger Siebert
TRIFECTA is a well-appointed contemporary Port Aransas skiff. The center console is equipped with instrumentation and a handhold. The outboard is operated with a tiller in the same manner as older skiffs, but with a much larger outboard.
The standard 16ʹ × 4ʹ Port A Skiff can plane with two people aboard with a 20- to 25-hp propeller-driven outboard. One problem with skinny waters, though, is that propellers and flats tear each other up. It’s troublesome and costly to constantly replace props and torn-up flats disturb an ecosystem that has historically provided boat loads—literally—of the very fish many recreational boaters are in search of.
Second- and third-generation Port A Skiffs minimize this problem with a tunnel in the bottom aft, a recess that raises the midpart of the bottom of the transom and allows the outboard to be set higher. Or a boater can go even further and eliminate the prop and skeg entirely by opting for a jet-drive outboard. The aptly named TRIFECTA, the prototype third-generation poling version of the Port A Skiff, incorporates both. Without that skeg or the standard Port A Skiff’s 1ʺ × 6ʺ keel, though, the boat can tend to slide sideways during turns, so reducing speed and extra care while turning is in order.
With the load properly balanced and the outboard shut off and lifted or trimmed to raise the prop and skeg, the Port A Skiff can be poled in as little as 6ʺ of water. With a tunnel or jet drive, a skiff can cruise in close to the same depth and plane across even less. In fact, if the skipper’s not careful, the boat can come off plane in water shallower than it needs to get moving again. If that happens and the boat has that shallow V in the bottom, it can be heeled to float on either of its flat bottom panels and slowly accelerate in a tight circle until the boat lifts itself enough to get moving in a straight line again.
Roger Siebert
The tower in the stern provides a perch for poling and a better view of the fishing grounds. The outboard is equipped with a jet drive that adds little to the draft and isn’t bothered much by hitting bottom.
There is another price to pay for a tunnel or jet propulsion, in the loss of some efficiency, requiring more horsepower to get to the same speeds, but adding transom extensions can provide the necessary additional buoyancy to compensate for the added weight of a more powerful outboard.
Lighter stitch-and-glue plans and CNC kits for the Port A Skiff have been on Farley Boat Works’ wish list for some time, but in 2017 Hurricane Harvey destroyed their initial notes, and then the pandemic delayed restarting those plans. At present, the options for someone not already intimately familiar with the boat to build one is to use the manual from Farley Boat Works for the standard 16ʹ × 4ʹ version or to go to Port A and get started on the boat in their shop. The hull can come together in only a few days, and after ’glassing and painting the bottom, the hull can be trailered home for fitting out and finishing.
Building a Port A Skiff at Farley Boat Works has many advantages. For the cost of materials and about $100 a month, a boatbuilder gets ample space inside the shop for the project and access to the shop’s tools and, if desired, the guidance and assistance of the experienced volunteer staff. And in the process, you support Farley Boat Works and its parent organization, the nonprofit Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association.
The Port A Skiff is actually many skiffs, its current generation only one of a long, still-evolving line of craft serving just as many purposes and served by just as many builders. It is a time-tested, highly adaptable boat that can take you into the skinniest of water, where you can hook or gig the same fish that the flats and bays have provided Port Aransans for nearly two centuries.
Roger Siebert is an editor in Austin, Texas. He rows and sails on local lakes and trailers to the Texas coast when he can.
Port Aransas Skiff Particulars
Length: 16′ to 18′
Beam: 5′ to 6′
For more information about the construction manual and arrangements to build the Port Aransas Skiff at Farley Boat Works, contact Ashley Harris, the Executive Director for the Port Aransas Preservation and Historical Association with oversight of The Farley Boat Works and The Port Aransas Museum and Maritime Museum. She can be emailed at [email protected]
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!
No one was around when I shoved off the dock in my wherry, and I was glad of it: the current from the tannin-stained water of Florida’s Carrabelle River pushed the boat back into the dock before I shipped the second oar. On the second attempt, I narrowly escaped the dock’s ragged, rusty metal corner and luckily got turned into the current with both oars in the water.
Photographs by the author
The boat is packed and ready to go at a ramp on the left bank of the Carrabelle River. It’s February and the marina is largely deserted.
The banks of the river were lined with wooden docks set parallel to the shore, like sidewalks along a street, with boats moored with their sterns to the docks. The small town of Carrabelle, with its low buildings and tree-lined streets, was in full view on my port side. Across the river was the wooded shore of Timber Island.
In 2014, as I was building my boat, an Expedition Wherry from Chesapeake Light Craft, I envisioned tucking my camping gear under the hatches and taking it cruising. For the boat’s first seven years, I rowed many places but always as day trips. This time, leaving Carrabelle, I had my tent, sleeping bag and pad, food, five gallons of water, and a five-gallon bucket full of oak firewood.
The heavily laden boat took longer to get to speed, but the dark current was pushing me along—I had lucked out and had an outgoing tide, which made for a quick row downriver. The channel buoys leaned away from the current and water mounded against the pilings alongshore. As I rowed, the sliding seat whispered, eddies spun from the tips of the oar blades, and the bright rays of February sunshine warmed my back; it felt good to be on the water. The river narrowed and the outboard skiffs slowed well before they passed me. I stayed out of the channel as much as possible and hugged the white sandbanks of the low-lying dredge-spoil islands at the mouth of the river.
Roger Siebert
.
The open water of St. George Sound lay ahead, and I rowed out of the calm of the river into 12 to 16 knots of wind from the east. The bow started tossing a bit of spray and the boat moved around under me as if brought to life. To the southeast, 3-3/4 miles across the sound, Dog Island was a thin line on the Gulf of Mexico’s sharp-edged horizon. Dog Island and St. George Island farther south are two barrier islands nestled in the crook of the Florida Panhandle. Both had many options for camping and, once I reached them, I could plan the days as they arose according to the weather and my energy. I took off my hat and secured it to a line and put on my rain jacket. I checked to make sure my cellphone with a navigation app was secured in its waterproof case and tethered to the boat. I set a course for Dog Island, checked the compass bearing, tugged on the straps to tighten my PFD, and dug the oars in.
A dredged channel runs directly from the mouth of the river to East Pass, the 1-¼-mile-wide gap between Dog and St. George islands. I rowed clear of the channel markers to stay out of the way of other boats and settled into a steady pace. I quartered into the waves and wind, staying a little more upwind than I had intended to counteract the sideways force of the wind and waves. Waves pushed the bow around and I felt the wherry skitter under me. Once in a while, the bow would slap and spray splattered the back of my rain jacket and hood. The occasional spray didn’t feel cold yet; I still felt the warmth of the sun on my legs and jacket. I checked the sky and saw some high wispy clouds.
I had settled into a steady rhythm of oars, seat, and boat until, wham! In an instant, the boat slewed to port with a screech of metal, and a shudder of the rowing frame. An electric surge of adrenaline flushed through me as the boat came to an abrupt stop. What the…? A barnacle-encrusted post the size of a telephone pole loomed over me within an arm’s length. I knew that I was outside the clear passage assured by the dredged channel, but I didn’t expect this lone, unmarked and isolated navigation pole in the middle of open water, let alone to hit it with the outer 2″ of the port outrigger with the full force of a heavily laden boat.
Just barely visible in the center of the photo is the post I ran into. After the collision, I lost ground as the easterly pushed me back toward the mainland. Dog Island, my destination, hugs the horizon in the distance.
The 15-knot breeze and the 1′ to 2′ waves pushed me away from the post; the outrigger had left its mark, a swath of crushed barnacles with white bits of broken shell in a yellow smear of eggy innards. I craned around in the seat and scanned for damage. The boat was unscathed and the port oar and oarlock still seemed solid, but the outrigger’s stay was bowed up and the outrigger wing was bent back. With the oar blades in the water the boat was stable in the waves and chop, and I took a quick look around to make sure I was out of the way of other boats and wouldn’t get run over (and hoped that no one saw me row straight into a post). That was all to the good; the bad news was that I couldn’t swing the oar handle aft past the bent backstay and get the blade in the water at the catch. Using the Allen wrench that stays in a holder on the rowing rig, I reached out over the water to unbolt the stay. Waves dipped the whole operation—hands, wrench, bolt, and nut—under water but I removed the strut without losing anything. I tucked the oar handles under my knees to keep the boat stable and searched for a way to pry the backstay straight in the sturdiest parts of the rowing rig. I managed to reduce the bend by half and reinstalled it. I bailed the cockpit—the waves and chop had slopped a couple of gallons aboard—released the oar handles from my knees and began rowing. My repair had worked, and I avoided having to go home to explain a one-hour expedition.
I reached the sandy shallows of Dog Island under a bit of blue sky and waded the boat around sandbars to get a couple of hundred yards west, away from the last of the houses on the eastern part of the island.
I tried to breathe again and rowed. The weather conditions and the bent stay made the rowing unpleasant, but I’ve been in much worse and I felt safe. I managed to get in a rhythm and sustain it even while I looked over the bow—frequently. The low profile of Dog Island started to look closer than the mainland, and I soon entered its lee and slipped out of the worst of the waves and wind. Ninety minutes and about 4 miles from Carrabelle, I wandered through some shallow areas against the island, hopped out of the cockpit, and pulled the boat up on a sandbar 10 yards off the shoreline, a gentle slope washed smooth by the waves leading up to dunes just a few feet high.
Power lines and poles run down the middle of the Dog Island, a half-mile long isthmus connecting the east end and the middle of the island. The open Gulf of Mexico is less than 100 yards away on the other side of the dune-like neck of land. The water in the lee, on the bay side of the island, was merely scuffed while spume was blowing off the waves on the Gulf side.
The sun was shining through a thin translucent veil of high clouds and the lee made a pleasant relief from the wind. I wandered to the deserted beach at Ballast Cove on the sound side of the 6/10-mile length of the ruler-straight sandy isthmus connecting the northeast and central parts of Dog Island. Sand dunes undulated across the island, rippled like wind waves on ocean swells, dotted with tufts of beach grass and low shrubs with webs of crooked stems. In the distance, scattered both east and west, a dozen or so houses stood on stilts. Two utility lines running the length of the island hung in long parallel curves, one above the other from poles without crossarms.
The tides were negligible, just inches between the high and low; tethered by the painter, the boat is set for the night at the water’s edge. Cannonball Point lies at the far end of Ballast Cove and the clouds are rolling in, ready to unleash a torrent of rain.
Whitecaps out in the sound coupled with plenty of potential tent sites convinced me that the 5-mile row for the day was good enough. I waded in cool, but not cold, knee-deep water along the shoreline, coaxing the boat down the beach around shallows and sandbars. About 100 yards from where I’d landed, I slid the boat out of the water on the shore’s white sand and planted my small anchor 50′ up the beach for a little insurance. I made camp in the lee of a chest-high dune and hauled my gear from the boat to the tent.
As the sun set on my first campsite, the wind was blowing from the southeast, but my tent was in the lee, sheltered by the dunes.
I walked across the island. It was only 110 yards to the gulf side—I counted my steps. Halfway across, the wind picked up and whipped the scattered dry grasses back and forth. Dry sand skittered back and forth on the sandy surface in no apparent direction. A broken stalk of dry grass was blown back, forth, and around making a perfect circle in the dry sand.
On my first walk across the island, I found this pattern of concentric circles traced in the powdery sand by a wind-whipped blade of dried grass.
My bare feet sank in the dry powdery sand. After the repetitive and restricted movement of the rowing rig, my legs enjoyed the freedom of wandering the dunes. The oceanside beach was steep, by Florida standards, where the highest point of land in the whole state is 345′. I was glad to still be wearing my rain jacket, which had blown flat against my chest. The surf was studded with foamy whitecaps and the wind was pushing the blue-green waves as high as 5′. A half-dozen light gray birds with black heads huddled behind quivering tufts of grass to find refuge from the wind, though their feathers ruffled in the gusts. Although I could see perhaps a dozen houses 200 yards away, there was not a person in sight. High clouds gathered and pushed across what was left of the pale yellow sunlight as the afternoon grew late. The warm pinks of sunset cast a faint glow through the thickening clouds. As the sky faded to gray, I put on a fleece shirt under my rain jacket, built a small campfire in the sand with the oak firewood I’d brought, and watched the night close in around me.
Through the long night, the wind carried the sound of the surf crashing on the ocean shore across the island; wind whipped the tent’s rain fly and a steady rain pounded on it. The noise kept me company in a wild kind of way. Worried about the boat, I checked it during the night by unzipping the rain fly and shining the flashlight through the midnight murk and falling drizzle. I didn’t get much sleep, but at least the tent didn’t make matters worse by leaking.
In the morning, the rain let up, but the fog rolled in. The wind had made for a rough night, and my mind was as gauzy as the bay.
At dawn, the rain diminished enough for me to reach out of the tent to boil water for coffee and a bowl of oatmeal. The wind had dropped to 10 to 15 knots, with the boat and me in the lee. The crash of heavy surf on the other side of the island still filled the air. I could barely see the boat, even though it was just 50′ away, and St. George Sound was lost in an opaque and seemingly infinite fog. I wasn’t interested in rowing blind and navigating with a compass, so I waited to see if it would lift.
With a liter of water and a couple of protein bars in my pockets, I set off on foot to explore the west end of the island. I had on my fleece pants, a couple of shirts, a rain jacket, and bare feet. On the gulf side, with a stiff wind behind me, the waves tumbled, roaring, on the beach and the wind rattled the hood around my face. I didn’t see any sign of another person anywhere, and there were no footprints in the sand other than mine and those left by a skittish flock of sandpipers. After I had walked about a half hour, the island widened a bit, bulging out 1/3 mile from the straight Gulf of Mexico shore to Cannonball Point, and then narrowed even further into another isthmus that separated the gulf from Shipping Cove with a 100-yard-wide strip of sand. I passed two houses set on 10′-tall pilings above the isthmus’s beach sand that stretched uninterrupted between the gulf and the sound. The island widened to the northwest again, forming Dog Island West, which curls to the north pointing back at St. George Sound and the mainland. As I turned the corner where the Gulf shore meets the shore bordering East Pass, gulls and pelicans were huddled in the lee of the blunt, 1/2-mile-wide wedge of sand dunes and brush that makes up the far west end of the island. I knew that St. George Island was somewhere in the distance to the west, just over a mile away, but I couldn’t see it through the fog.
Protected from the wind a bit, I warmed up as I headed north and continued around the western end of the island and back to the Shipping Cove side. The sky cleared a little to reveal the cloud-masked disc of the rising sun a third of the way up in the sky. But an hour later, as I was getting close to the campsite, the clouds turned slate gray and the pitter-patter of rain started. Raindrops dotted the sand and disappeared. I picked up the pace and arrived at my campsite with just enough time to organize lunch and dinner and stow my gear as best I could before the rain threatened to soak everything. As the rain fell harder, I gathered the drybags that had what I might need and retreated to the tent. It was 1:22 p.m. Fortunately, I had loaded six library books on my Kindle before leaving home, and with the wind whipping the surf into froth, and the rain drumming on the tent, it was looking like I might need more than one book to pass the time ashore. I started reading Jack, a novel about a tormented romance in a fictional Iowan town.
Overnight, the wind clocked 180 degrees, and my tent was out of the lee and in the northwesterly’s teeth. I had pulled the boat well up above high-tide line, so I worried less about it, but the wind howled across the island and the waves battered the shore. With every gust, the tent flapped, shuddered, and shook. The rain drummed on the rain fly. I spent another restless night, but I was dry and warm and the boat stayed where I had put it.
Friday dawned windy under a cloudy, drizzling sky. The wind persisted but the rain was letting up. I read more of the book, which transported me to join a tormented Jack and his girlfriend trapped in a cemetery. Their escape was going to be long in coming, so I returned to my own confinement and made coffee. Visibility across the St. George Sound was poor, and the wind was onshore and above 15 knots.
I walked east along the main road to the island’s transportation hub, a wooden ferry dock and a row of old cars parked on the sand in the midst of pines and stunted oak.
There would be no boating, so I got ready to spend the day on the island. I decided to walk Dog in the other direction. I headed northeast along a road of packed sand and broken seashells. This largest part of the island was a mix of wetlands and patchy forests of scrub oak and pines. Hills lumped up out of the sand. The houses were set back from the road to be close to the beach on the southeasterly side of the island. While none appeared to be occupied, most of them were neatly maintained. One house appeared to be little more than a pile of boards and old house fixtures pieced together on a plot with a view of the gulf. The sand track wended inland where several other sand roads converged.
The clearing in the woods is not a meadow but an airport. The grassy landing strip looked a little rough to me, but it only costs $10 to land here; $15 if you want to stay overnight.
I followed the widest track and passed a stretch where cars and trucks flanked the road leading past a garbage station and the entrance to the nearby Nils Pehrson Airport with its 1/2-mile-long landing strip of grass and sand to the ferry dock and the docks of the Dog Island Yacht Club. It was clearly the hub of the island but the only people I saw were a couple, at a distance, boarding their boat and heading north out of Tysons Harbor, the ¼-mile-wide notch that cut almost all the way through the largest part the island.
On the walk back to camp, a rusting 20-year-old Ford truck passed me, and the driver stuck his hand in the air for a wave. In the 6 miles that I walked, he was the only person I saw on the road.
When I reached camp, the northeast wind was still blowing over 15 knots. Grasses bent in the wind and the surf was pounding the sand, sending spray flying. My tent lurched away from the gusts. The sun was a circle of dusty white in an overcast sky but cast no shadows. The visibility was at least a mile, and I felt antsy. I struck camp with the thought of moving toward the southwest end of the island and finding a less windy place to camp. I took my time and packed carefully, balancing the boat with the load and launched without getting too wet. Only a few strokes into the sound, a wave sluiced over the whole boat and dumped 6″ of water into the cockpit. I stopped to bail; a frustrating task, as the rowing unit blocks easy access to the bilge for my gallon-jug bailer.
Clouds marched overhead, the wind gusted just shy of 20 knots, so it was a slog to get outside the surf driving the boat onto the beach. When I finally got far enough off the beach, I was able to turn with the wind and start to enjoy the rowing a little more. I rowed with the wind for 45 minutes from Ballast Cove, around Cannonball Point to Shipping Cove. A hundred yards from Dog Island West’s northwest point, I saw above the beach a dip between scrub-covered dunes where I might get the tent out of the wind. When I pulled ashore, the wind was sweeping the clouds away from the sun. I unloaded the boat and carried my gear to the sheltered spot I’d seen. I set my rain-soaked, sand-gritty gear out to air-dry.
I dug a pit in the still wet sand and fired up more of my good oak firewood that had been kept dry in the wherry’s hold. After dinner—grilled salmon crumbled over freshly cooked pasta—things were feeling a bit more normal after all the rain, wind, and stifling humidity. The clouds had dried up and disappeared and the sun, suspended over the bright metallic blue water of St. George Sound, turned orange red as it slanted toward the horizon. It was soon gone, and Venus gleamed in the twilight, followed by stars, one by one. Before the campfire’s coals winked out, a half-moon appeared on the horizon and dimmed the stars with its glow. Under the clearing night sky, it was going to get much colder. I was already wearing all my clothes: four shirts, a down jacket, fleece pants, knit hat, and some cheap cotton gloves. I crawled into the tent and slipped into my sleeping bag wearing the whole ensemble and even then, I had to close the top of the bag around my head with just my face exposed to the chill. I stayed just warm enough to fall asleep and stay asleep through the night.
In the morning there was a bit of frost on the rain fly. It was still windy, and I stayed tucked in my sleeping bag until the sun came up. I got up—I didn’t need to get dressed— and had breakfast huddled behind the tent, out of the wind, with my hands wrapped around a cup of hot coffee and a bowl of steaming oatmeal in my lap.
Later that morning, I was pretty sure I could be more comfortable out of the wind if I pulled around the corner of Dog Island West. I broke camp and launched in waves as high as 3′. After shipping a water into the cockpit, I rowed around the northwest corner of the island into a utopian calm bathed in sunshine, with just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes off. For an hour I rowed effortlessly while the boat split the still water and left a fan of ripples spreading in the lee. I found a sugar white sand beach at the southwest corner of Dog Island West. St. George Island was clearly visible to the west, 1-1/4 miles away across East Pass. The Gulf of Mexico waters to the south were variegated shades of blue, speckled with whitecaps tumbling and torn from the tops of the waves. I tucked the tent up against some waist-high dunes on the east edge of the peninsula and schlepped the gear farther than I wanted to between boat and camp. The effort afforded me a camp out of the wind and warmed by the bright warm sun. I spent the day doing what I need to do more of: idling. I took walks in both directions, looked for a cockleshell for my wife’s garden, and sat in my camp chair. In the lee, pelicans squabbled amongst each other and fluffed themselves. Some took flight, circled above the water and then made a screaming dive into the ocean. They came up, beaks-first, and with a little shake and neck stretch, down went their dinners.
At the second campsite, I tucked the tent in a little swale on a Dog Island West beach to keep it out of the wind. The sun had returned, but I could feel the temperature dropping fast. The point that separates Shipping Cove from East Pass can be seen at the far end of the beach, and the mainland lies about 3-1/3 miles away across St. George Sound.
That evening I was grateful for the well-protected campsite: I was out of the wind again and even a bit warmer than the previous evening. I burned the last of the firewood in a sandy hollow and watched as the sun cast beams of pinks and reds as it set. The stars unfolded once again across the sky, I picked out Vega, the Big and Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, and Castor and Pollux while the half-moon rose over the eastern horizon.
With dinner cooking on the camp stove, I soaked up warmth from the fire. After the sun set, the cloudless sky glowed an electric blue.
By sunrise, the wind was churning out of the east, and some waves were spiking tall enough that spume was blowing off their tops. The homeward leg to Carrabelle would be on a north by east heading, cutting across the easterly wind.
I struck camp slowly, as slowly as I could to wait out the wind and extend the time I could spend on the island. After a short row from my camp on the East Pass shoreline to northwest point of Dog Island West, I beached the boat and wandered up the dunes to see the crossing better. The higher vantage point revealed whitecaps, spume, and steep, short-troughed waves. I kicked around the sand dunes, wandered the beach, lay in the lee of 3′-high dunes, and soaked up the sun’s warmth, and waited. And waited. The weather continued to batter the sound. It may have been my imagination that it was getting better, but before the overcast sky became any darker, I double-checked the hatch covers, secured my gear in the cockpit, checked the rowing rig, tugged the straps on my PFD tight, and launched into the soup.
It not only looked miserable, it was miserable. Short, steep waves stopped the boat in its tracks. The largest swept over the boat. But I found that I could crab across the wind and waves just as well as row against the wind. Little by little, I made progress. The cockpit was swimming in seawater. I lost way too much ground each time I stopped to bail, but it had to be done or the volume of water sloshing in the cockpit would make the boat unstable. But I could put the oar handles under my knees with the oar blades just under the water to keep the boat secure and stable and free my hands for bailing.
Back at rowing, a little progress turned into more. And then a little more. When I had time to look, I was halfway across the sound. As I got closer to the mainland, the waves flattened out a bit and the wind eased. Hot from the exertion of rowing, I peeled off my knit hat and tossed it into the bottom of the boat. Dog Island grew more distant with each stroke of the oars and all but vanished when I rowed into the river mouth at Carrabelle.
This trip, as I had imagined it, didn’t have two and a half days of rain. It didn’t have five days of wind over 15 knots, or temperatures dipping to low 40s and even the upper 30s. I didn’t row nearly as many miles as I had imagined, ran into a pole, and bent up the outrigger. I met no one, but the sun, moon, and stars, the sand and the sea kept me company, and I returned to the Carrabelle boat ramp feeling every bit as renewed as I had hoped I would be.
Bill Hutton has been building, sailing, rowing, paddling, and driving small boats since he and his brother and father couldn’t get one of their “winter build boats” out of the basement one spring without taking out the double door and frame. In his 20s, he thought he was going to sail around the world in the BOC sailing race. That never came to pass, but he did sail solo from Elfin Cove, Alaska, to Victoria, B.C., nonstop, for practice. Over the years, in addition to small boats, he worked with mostly Native Alaskan students in Alaska schools, fished commercially for halibut and salmon, walked the mountains, ran some rivers, bicycled multi-day routes, and enjoyed adventures with his wife and family. He now lives in Florida for most of the year.
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.
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.
David Cockey
The two extended oarlocks on the left belong to the Ames peapod. The clearly different shapes suggest that they were designed by different companies. The tallest of the group is the Standing Oarlock Horn from Duck Trap Woodworking. It raises the oars 6” and like the Ames locks, it has a 3/4” shank. At right is a standard oarlock with a 1/2” shank.
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.
David Cockey
The Ames peapod has its only set of oarlocks positioned over the center thwart and could only be rowed standing up. The extended locks raise the oars 4” above the rail.
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.
Ben Fuller
As a test of this extension, I clamped the 1/2″ bronze bar horizontally in a vice with 3 ½″ jaws then slid a 6″ piece of 1/2″ (nominal) copper tube onto the shaft. I had cut the eye off an oarlock which left me with 1-1/2″ bearing, so I had 4-1/2″ of shaft in the pipe. The vice jaws are 3-1/2″. With 45 pounds of lead hanging on the recurved area of the oarlock horns, I put a straight edge on the tube and could see no deflection. With the bit of slop in the system, I would have seen point loading at the junction of shaft and lock. Potting both shaft and lock in G/flex would take out the point loading. Sitting on my erg with a seat fixed and pulling with one hand, I peak at about 50 lbs with an average of 35 lbs per stroke while pulling as hard as I can, much harder than I would normally pull.
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.
David Cockey
The wooden extension is fitted with a top-mounted socket and a standard oarlock. The “tenon” at its bottom slips between frames and between the inwale and sheer plank. It is curved to follow the sweep of the frames and clear the planking lap. When the tenon is fully inserted it tucks behind the riser and its shoulder rests on the rail.
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.
David Cockey
The wooden extension here is made for a side-mounted socket. Its tenon is most likely straight and follows the sheer plank as far as the lap with the next plank. A wooden cleat on the thwart keeps the tenon tight to the sheer plank.
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.
Photographs by Christopher Cunningham
To trim the 1/2″ bronze rod to fit the socket, I spun the rod with a drill and a 1/2″ socket. A folded half sheet of 120-grit aluminum-oxide sandpaper was effective in removing metal; you can see the bronze powder in the sandpaper.
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.
A hole drilled through the extension provides an attachment point for a lanyard.
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.
I drilled a small hole in the oarlock for a lanyard. The cleat at the bottom of the shank is screwed to two frames and is shaped to hold the tenon against the sheer plank.
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 top of the socket fitting has four holes for fastenings, and while the two holes in the side flange can take screws (visible here), two screws through the socket’s top flange won’t hold well in end-grain. I used machine screws instead wood screws and the nuts for them are captured in the two holes in the side of the extension.
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.
At the top of the extension, I glued on an extra piece of wood to create the thickness required to provide a seat for the entire flange at the top of the socket fixture. The cleat at the bottom, screwed to two frames, is shaped to press the extension’s tenon to the sheer 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.
Penobscot Marine Museum
The text attached to this photograph reads: “Clam diggers and Schooner E. A. WHITMORE, at the Oceanville, Maine, clam factory dock. Photo taken in 1902.” In the center, silhouetted by the shadow of the schooner’s port bow, is a crab-claw-like extension, one of a pair on the skiff in the middle.
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 wooden extensions for my garvey have cleats across the bottom to fit above and below the coaming. Single bolts hold each extension in place.
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 oval opening provides enough room for the oar to swing.
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.
The oars I use with the garvey work well with the extensions. The long leathers, which are positioned to make contact with the thole pins while rowing from a seated position, also protect the oars while rowing with the extensions.
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.
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.
Photographs by Audrey Lewis
The jacket’s front zipper is protected by a Velcro-fastened storm flap. West Marine offers the jacket in red (shown here), yellow, gray, and blue.
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 bibs have hand warmer pockets with water-resistant zippers on the chest and cargo pockets on the thighs. The gray model is shown here; yellow is also available.
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.
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.
Photographs by the author
Extended, the Woodboy is 22″ long. The blade is in the straight position. A second setting angles the blade up from the line of the cutting edge.
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.
When the saw is folded, the saw easily fits in a pockets and its teeth are well protected.
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.
The fine teeth have no set and leave a smooth-sided kerf. The samples here are , from left, western red cedar, Alaskan yellow cedar, Douglas fir, and two pieces of white oak. Two of the pieces have kerfs from rip sawing.
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.
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.
Photographs courtesy of Sean Russell
The seats are glued-up 7/8″-square strips of fir and yellow cedar. The seats are slotted to make them lighter. Two adults could sit side-by-side on the center thwart so one of its strips is 2″ deep to provide extra stiffness.
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.
The finished skiff tipped the scales at just 85 lbs.
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.
RIPPLE has two rowing stations so the boat can be properly trimmed with different loads aboard. The spruce oars were made by Barkley Sound Oars on Vancouver Island.
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 homemade 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe For Full Access
Flipbooks are available to paid subscribers only. Subscribe now or log in for access.
Photo by Jake Chase/Jellyhawk Studios
Photo by Tom Jackson
Photo by Tom Jackson
Photo by Tom Jackson
