I began building reproductions of traditional Inuit kayaks in 1978 after the first kayak I’d built—to my own design—taught me how little I knew about kayaks. The Hooper Bay was the first of the reproductions I built to explore the technology of Arctic cultures whose survival depended upon kayaks; it was followed by several Greenland-style kayaks. The most sophisticated of the designs I built to was an Aleut baidarka collected in 1936 and housed in the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology) in Berkeley, California. I visited the museum and was given access to the collection storage area to see the unskinned frame. It was beautifully carved, and each piece of wood was finely textured with the marks of the edge tools that had produced it. The baidarka was undoubtedly the work of a highly skilled craftsman and I was sure there was much I could learn by reproducing it.
My baidarka clearly showed that the Lowie specimen had been very fast and had remarkable seakeeping abilities. It sparked my curiosity about Aleut kayaking equipment; I next made an Aleut paddle and bilge pump. I was also intrigued by the bentwood visors the Aleut hunters wore. Called chagudax̂, they were beautifully painted and often decorated with long, arching, walrus whiskers. To keep the whiskers from interfering with throwing a harpoon, they were usually set on only one side of the chagudax̂. The visors not only shielded a hunter’s face from sun and rain, they also put his eyes in shadow to conceal them from skittish prey. And by some accounts, the underside of the chagudax̂ made distant sounds more audible.
Andrew sat with some of his work for formal portraits that were used years later for a posthumously published book, Chagudax̂: A Small Window Into the Life of An Aleut Bentwood Hat Carver. It was co-edited by his daughter, Sharon, and published in 2012.
As I was researching the visors, I learned about Andrew Gronholdt. He was born in 1915, on Popof Island on the eastern end of the Aleutian Island chain. His father was a Dane and a boatbuilder, and his mother was Aleut, or Unangan, as the people of the islands refer to themselves. Andrew learned woodworking from his father and later in life put those skills to use working as a shipwright. His interest in his Unangan heritage led to study of the chagudax̂. Andrew became the recognized authority on the making of them, and classes he taught spawned a revival of the skills.
The patterns painted by Andrew on this chagudax̂ are remarkably similar to those painted on a chagudax̂ collected in 1778 by an expedition to Unalaska Island led by Captain James Cook.
I was surprised to learn that Andrew lived in Edmonds, Washington, my hometown. I paid him a visit in 1993; he was 78 years old then, soft-spoken, cordial, and very willing to show me his work. He had both chagudax̂ in various stages of completion and a finished qayaatx̂ux̂, an even more elaborate type of headwear with a long bill and a conical shape with a closed crown. Several years later, when I was visiting the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural history in Washington, D.C., I saw that very qayaatx̂ux̂ on display in an exhibit of Aleut culture.
This photograph and those below by Christopher Cunningham
A chagudax̂ like this with a long bill and well decorated would be worn by an experienced and successful hunter. I saw this chagudax̂ first at Andrew’s home, and a second time, years later, on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution.
Andrew kept the decorative elements of his chagudax̂ true to historic examples, though they weren’t exact replicas of those preserved in museum collections. His long-billed visor here combined an ivory figure inspired by one chagudax̂ and painted patterns from another. Both of the originals are in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad.
I was daunted by the complexity of carving required by the qayaatx̂ux̂ and focused on the simpler chagudax̂. Andrew let me trace several of his patterns and showed me how he bent the shaped wooden pieces over bending forms he’d made of galvanized sheet steel.
Andrew had bending forms for chagudax̂ of different shapes. He did the steam-bending in his kitchen with a plastic sheet on the floor to catch the inevitable drips. His legs, here in the corner of the kitchen cabinets, are the only photograph I have of him.
This bending form has steamed parts clamped to it. Two C-clamps hold a small caul over the half-lap joint; spring clamps and homemade clothespin clamps pinch the wood to the form while it cools. The full- and half-patterns are the ones associated with this particular form.
To retain its new shape, the freshly bent wood stays on the form while it cools and dries. After the wood has taken a set, the size of the chagudax̂ can be fine-tuned a bit by adjusting the overlap of the ends at the back.
He told me he made walrus whiskers from nylon weed-whacker monofilament. To straighten it, he would stretch wraps of it on a board with two nails in it and warm the monofilament with a heat gun. To taper a straightened length, he’d put one end in a drill and spin it while pinching it with sandpaper.
For making artificial walrus whiskers, I wrapped weed-whacker monofilament between two nails and took the curl out of it with a heat gun.
Using Andrew’s dimensions, I tapered each half of the chagudax̂ from a thickness of 1/4″ at the center of the bill to 1/8″ at the end of the arm at the back. A plank with dowels set at the outline of each piece held it in place for planing. I used vertical-grain Port Orford cedar, leftovers from planking for my Whitehall.
The two halves of a chagudax̂ are joined by a half-lap at the centerline. With a block of wood clamped on as a guide, a rabbet plane cuts the lap.
Like Andrew, I used galvanized flashing to make my forms. The zinc coating keeps the steel from staining the steamed wood that gets wrapped around it. With this form, I would soon find out one of Andrew’s refinements that I had missed: the ends of the wooden cross pieces need to be cut down to provide room for clamps.
The holes for the lashing at the lapped joint are drilled at an angle to keep it centered over the seam both outside and inside. I glued the joints to make the lashing job easier.
After I finished painting my first chagudax̂, I started making a second.
While my chagudax̂ is a good match here for my Aleut baidarka, I’ve never risked wearing the visor while paddling it. As it is in the Unangan culture, the chagudax̂ is much more than a utilitarian object.
I was quite grateful for the time I spent with Andrew and went home equipped with what I needed to know to make my own chagudax̂. I made two, carefully painted both with Unangan-inspired designs, and adorned one with the faux whiskers. To give the glass beads used to decorate the whiskers a local touch, I made them by spinning molten glass on a bicycle spoke coated with kaolin as a parting agent. I collected glass from old debris uncovered by low spring tides: broken beer bottles for brown, a Noxzema jar for blue, and a Ponds Cold Cream for white.
I had put too much work into the two chagudax̂ that I’d made to risk damaging or losing them while boating, so I kept them as works of art and remained curious to know how they would work. I had been experimenting with PVC plastic cut from drain pipe to make megaphones and found that an 18″ section of 4″ drainpipe, cut down one side and heated for about 8 minutes in an oven at 170 degrees, would create a flat sheet 13-1/4″ wide—just a fraction of an inch shy of the tracing I’d made from Andrew’s patterns.
With my PVC visor, I heated the one-piece blank in the oven and molded it to my head for a perfect fit. The painted design is taken from the family crest brought from Scotland by my seventh great-grandfather.
After cutting the blank for the chagudax̂ from the sheet, I heated it again, a little less this time, and bent it into shape, let it cool, and then drilled and lashed the overlap. I painted the underside a dark brownish red, as Andrew did his hats. For the top, I didn’t adopt the Unangan patterns for my own, but used elements from my family’s private signal. After the paint was well cured, I custom-fit the visor by giving it a few minutes in the oven, then molding it on my head and letting it cool there. With contact along the entire perimeter, it has a comfortable fit, even where the bill’s edge makes contact with my forehead.
My PVC visor was quite plain by Unangan standards, but it proved to be eminently practical for cruising.
On my cruise at the end of last summer, I quickly grew to like the PVC chagudax̂. In bright, hot, sunlight it darkened the overhead glare in a much wider area than a baseball-style cap and protected the tops of my ears from sunburn. In a downpour, I wore it under my cagoule hood and was well shielded from the rain. And a chagudax̂, whether wood or PVC, doesn’t get soggy. It does indeed have an acoustic quality, though I noticed it mostly when I was motoring: when I looked down into the boat it made an almost startling amplification of the motor behind me. If the top of my head gets cold, I can wear a stretchy watch cap either over or under the chagudax̂. Thanks to Andrew, this versatile part of Unangan technology has found a place aboard my boat.
Andrew died in 1998 at the age of 82, and I regret that I had paid only one visit to him. There surely must have been more about Unangan culture and kayaking that he could have taught me. When I was doing more research at the time that I was getting ready to make my PVC chagudax̂, I read that he and Elisabeth, his wife of 65 years, had a daughter, Sharon. I searched the web for her and was ultimately able to connect with her through a Facebook page. I emailed her about my visit with her father and attached a photo of my chagudax̂, including the one I’d made from PVC drainpipe. I was a little worried about how she might react to taking Andrew’s inspiration away from the Unangan bentwood tradition and interpreting it in plastic. I was relieved when she replied: “You are a true Unangan! Our people made do with the materials available to them, right?”
In the late fall of 2018, I started doing what most folks in Maine do during the cold weather after our boats are put away: thinking about our next boat. My wife and I had just finished the summer with our 19′4″ Simmons Sea Skiff and started to make a list of attributes for the perfect boat to explore the waters of our home state.
We loved our Sea Skiff but it was not dry or comfortable in a steep chop, boat wakes, or the bone-jarring standing waves that form on the Piscataqua River. Our new boat would be heavier and have a more forgiving hull shape. It would be easy to trailer with a half-ton pickup and have a cabin with a V-berth for sleeping as well as an open cockpit for fishing and sitting out in the fresh air. It had to be something I could build in my home shop and, naturally, attractive. My wife and I love wooden boats and could not think of considering anything else.
Over that winter, I haunted a lot of forums and websites and found my way to a monthly newsletter by boat designer and builder Arch Davis of Belfast, Maine. It provided a wealth of helpful information, pictures, and testimonials about his boats, including the Jiffy V-22.
The following March, I happened upon a classified ad listing an essentially new boat, engine, and trailer at a very reasonable price. The pictures weren’t great but the boat was intriguing. I kept coming back to the ad and eventually realized the boat was an Arch Davis Jiffy V-22. The seller said it had only been in the water once, to break in the motor. The boat was powered by a 2011 Mercury Optimax 150-hp outboard that had just one hour clocked on it. I mailed a deposit, made the drive to see the boat, and bought it.
The boat is beautiful, with lots of gleaming mahogany and ash, and first-class fit and finish including lots of brightwork. Eventually we can foresee the cabintop and side decks being finished with paint or Dynel as most V-22s seem to be. This boat’s wheelhouse was not completely true to Davis’s design. Instead of a hard cabintop, the boat came with a bimini top and canvas sides.
Arch Davis
In this Jiffy V-22, built by John Edwards, the wheelhouse is built according to the plans. The tall windows and high cabin roof provide plenty of standing headroom at the helm.
The Jiffy V-22 is 22′ 6″ long, has a beam of 8′ 6″, and draws just under 2′. With its cabin, it is reminiscent of classic Maine lobsterboats, and is designed with a V-berth, a seat with access to storage space, and a small galley cabinet to accommodate a two-burner portable stove. Our cabin has shelving on each side for storage, space for a porta-potty, a long shelf along the cabintop on each side, and hatches in the cabin sole. Our boat has two opening side windows and a hinged skylight vent, all with screens. There is some storage below the cabin sole.
Dave Ranta
The cabin in the author’s boat offers berths for two. A panel covers the footwell when it’s time to turn in and the two cushions, here propped against the sides forward, complete the V-berth.
The cockpit area is large—6′10″ by 9′. The layout of our boat followed the recommended location of the wheel and controls. The design leaves open the options for cockpit seating and accessories. Forward, we have two high, fixed seats with footrests. The helm converts to a leaning post. The cockpit is set up to be self-draining.
The author’s Jiffy V-22, with its canvas wheelhouse in place, is equipped with a 150-hp outboard. It’s above the range specified in the design, but will get him home in a hurry if bad weather is coming in.
We have trailered our Jiffy V-22 with three different half-ton pickups. We’ve put in at five locations so far and found that we could launch and retrieve the boat with no issues at any of them. Launch time at a ramp is no more than five minutes; retrieval is a bit longer, 10 minutes, because of winching. We don’t back the trailer completely underwater at launch or retrieval: the boat rolls off easily on the ramp when launching, and when reloading, I winch it most of the way out of the water and up the trailer’s roller bunks. Arch Davis reports the displacement of the boat when loaded with fuel, passengers, and motor at 3,350 lbs. Estimated towing weight with the trailer is just under 6,000 lbs. Our boat sits high on our trailer because of the rollers and requires a 10′-high door to get in our shed. A different trailer set up could probably reduce that to a 9′ door height. We have a dual-axle trailer and it cruises well behind our truck at 65 to 70 mph on the highway.
Courtesy of Arch Davis
This Jiffy V-22, built by Robert Mason, carries a 115-hp outboard, the maximum power recommended. He reports the boat does 35 mph at 5,800 rpm, cruises at 25 mph, turns in its own length, and runs very dry.
Power for our Jiffy V-22 is a Mercury Optimax 150-hp two-stroke outboard. Davis recommends power in the 60- to 110-hp range, so we’re a bit overpowered. The original owner told me that sometimes he needed the extra power to get back to the ramp a little faster when the weather changed. I’ve never gotten to wide-open throttle when underway. At 6,000 rpm the boat does over 30 mph. I’m guessing it could get to 40 mph with this outboard, but speed for the sake of speed isn’t that interesting for us. The Optimax 150 weighs in at 455 lbs. A 115-hp four-stroke outboard ranges from 386 to 500 lbs. I’m not advocating for a motor of the size we have, but it does not seem to overload the boat.
Courtesy of Arch Davis
KAREN V, a Jiffy V-22 built by Alan Nephew, is rigged for fishing with rod holders port and starboard at the cabin-roof perimeter and a live-bait well hung from the transom.
The engine is fueled from a 40-gallon stainless-steel vented tank below the cockpit sole. Fuel consumption, of course, varies greatly with speed. The Optimax sips fuel at trolling speeds— just 0.7 gallon per hour—but, according to the gauges, guzzles 9 gallons per hour at high speed. We tested the boat on Casco Bay by running the boat as if it were a displacement hull traveling at 7 knots, and fuel consumption was between 0.9 to 1.2 gallons per hour. We’ll probably repower with a four-stroke motor in the 90-hp range someday.
Dave Ranta
The author’s Jiffy V-22, with its canvas wheelhouse in place, is equipped with a 150-hp outboard. It’s above the range specified in the design, but will get him home in a hurry if bad weather is coming in.
This is our first “big boat,” quite unlike the light, flat-bottomed or semi-V hull skiffs we’ve previously owned. Having a boat with a cabin and a V hull is new, too; in fact, we’ve never owned a boat that I couldn’t pick up one end or the other with another person helping me. This boat is a completely different experience. We love the way the Jiffy V-22 feels on the water. We can cut through wakes and chop with comfort. The boat is dry. It seldom takes a wave or spray that isn’t handled by the chine and windshield. We can get on a plane quickly but also enjoy taking it easy and traveling around at lower speeds. The boat handles well. It responds to small adjustments of the wheel and handles turns at higher speeds without skidding. It is also easy to dock, especially compared to other lighter boats we’ve had that are more affected by the wind.
Arch Davis
On the Jiffy V-22 built by John Edwards, handrails make it possible to tiptoe along the gunwale to get to the foredeck.
After a couple of shakedown cruises in and around the waters of Portsmouth Harbor, we’ve traveled up the coast from Kittery to Ogunquit, Maine, out to the Isles of Shoals, in Casco Bay from Portland out to Jewell Island, and have made several trips on Sebago Lake. It’s a comfortable ride while underway—we felt secure and comfortable on all of these trips. On one outing, we had six adults onboard for a day and the handling was fine; with all the power available, we saw no reduction in either speed or acceleration. Control was still good, and I really didn’t notice much difference while I was at the helm.
The cockpit feels safe and secure, and provides a good balance between being able to handle docklines and fishing gear over the side while feeling safe moving about in moderately choppy water. We did one overnight—our first ever—at Pepperell Cove in Kittery. The cabin is roomy enough for two to sleep and has enough extra space for the porta-potty and making coffee, etc. The opening windows and skylight that we installed allow for plenty of fresh air.
Dana Ranta
The Jiffy V-22 purchased by the author was built with a fabric top to enclose the helm. During fair weather it could be removed to take in the fresh air.
As I mentioned, our boat was built without the cabintop that Arch Davis designed and with a different, lower windshield. We have removed that windshield and I have replaced it with one that matches the original design proportions with the addition of a center window sash that opens to allow airflow into the cockpit. If I were building the boat new, I’d recommend at least one windshield window being openable; it got warm and stuffy on hot days when the top was up. We’ve decided to run the boat this summer with the canvas top, once again. Being mostly fair-weather boaters, we like the option of running the boat with an open top. In early- and late-season boating, there is likely a lot to be said for having the hard top. We’ll make up our minds on that after this season.
We’re happy with the Jiffy V-22. Arch Davis has designed a boat that can be trailered to the places you’d like to explore with the capabilities to handle the conditions you might encounter. We have never taken this boat on the road or the water where folks haven’t given us a thumbs-up or a “Nice boat!” shouted across the way. It really is a nice design.
Dave Ranta lives with his wife, Dana in Cape Neddick, Maine. Dave manages a utility construction team based in New England. Since moving to Maine in 1982, Dave has had a number of different small boats, all wooden. He and Dana enjoy fishing, lobstering, and taking the Jiffy up and down the Maine coast and to the large lakes.
Jiffy V-22 Particulars
[table]
Length/22′ 6″
Beam/8′ 6″
Draft/9″
Displacement/3,350 lbs
Power/65–115-hp outboard
[/table]
Plans for the Jiffy V-22, which include full-sized Mylar patterns, drawings, and building manual, are available from Arch Davis Designs for $325 plus postage and handling. Inquire for plywood kits.
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Conrad Natzio originally designed the 14′ Sandpiper for a workshop and demonstration at the Boat ’99 show in the United Kingdom. The first four of these attractive little sailing and rowing skiffs were built by groups of beginners with a bit of supervision over a four-day period at that show, using only the hand tools found in a typical do-it-yourselfer’s kit. The primary considerations in Sandpiper’s design were the ease and speed of construction. The Sandpiper is intended for sheltered, shallow water, and inland sailing or rowing. The weight was kept to a minimum to make trailering and launching quick and easy.
My 17-year-old son, Kyle, built the Sandpiper as his senior project that he needed to complete for graduation from high school. Neither of us had built a boat before, but a boat that could be built by beginners in four days gave us hope that we could complete the task in the four months left in the school year. Before ordering the plans, we spent a few hours taping together cardboard strips cut from cereal boxes to create some crude models and prove to ourselves that such an attractive hull shape could actually be achieved by using flat, straight-edged panels.
The plan set supplied by Conrad included two large plan sheets with scaled drawings, and a 10-page booklet—a reprint from Practical Woodworking, the magazine that sponsored the Boat ’99 project—with detailed instructions and helpful photos taken during the construction of the prototype. Our boatbuilding project was given a boost by a master-carpenter neighbor who agreed to become Kyle’s advisor for the project and let us move some of his power tools into our greenhouse-turned-workshop. While this gave us the advantage of having an array of tools considerably beyond the average household toolkit, as well as invaluable woodworking advice whenever we needed it, none of the techniques required to build this little skiff would be beyond the scope of the average skill set.
Photographs by the author
Instead of building the sides of the skiff around frames fixed to a strongback, the sides are bent and the frames are built into them. A long table extended with sheets of plywood supports the work; a strongback is not required.
Construction of the Sandpiper hull is fairly straightforward and requires four sheets of 1/4″ plywood and some 3/4″ lumber for frames and longitudinal elements. Neither lofting, strongback, nor building jig is required. A set of sawhorses that can be fastened to the floor bring the work up to a comfortable level and provides a firm foundation for any required planing or sawing. We made the frames out of 3/4″ Douglas-fir that had been milled from big-box-store 2x4s and then assembled to the plan dimensions with double plywood gussets. (When our carpenter neighbor noticed the finished 3/4″ pieces, he remarked that we could have saved a lot of time by just by buying 3/4″ fir flooring.) Most of the fastening was done with bronze ring-shank nails and polyurethane glue. The straight-edged side panels were glued up from two pieces of 1/4″ marine plywood, as was the bottom panel. To get the lengths needed for the sides and bottom, each panel required a butt-block joint, secured with glue and copper rivets. The 1/4″-thick butt blocks were hardly noticeable in the boat’s interior, and the smooth seams on the outside almost disappeared under a few coats of paint.
The straight-edged panels get their shape from the curve from stem to transom; the bottom gets its rocker and the sheer its sweep from the sides’ flare.
After the ends of the plywood sides were cut to the angle specified in the plans, the attractive hull took shape by bending them around the ’midship frame. We constructed the three main frames and the transom frame from our pile of 3/4″ stock, carefully choosing the best, knot-free pieces. Once the sides were bent and secured to the frames and transom, we flipped the hull over onto a pair of sawhorses to work on the external chine logs, which provide a wide surface for attaching the bottom. They, along with the plywood sides they’re attached to, need to be planed to create a flat surface to accept the bottom piece. A 4′ level was all it took to check the accuracy of the bevel. The oversized bottom panel is held down with weights and traced inside and out to create a perfect fit.
The completed Sandpiper was remarkably light. Conrad claims 132 lbs for the hull, and I think Kyle’s build came in very close to that weight. When doing any seasonal maintenance while the boat is on the trailer, I can easily lift one side up and slip a foam block or cushion under it to gain a little extra clearance over the trailer bunk. I can roll the skiff off the trailer singlehandedly, but I prefer another set of hands if I need to roll it over for any bottom work.
Trailering the Sandpiper is almost effortless, even with our four-cylinder car. It slides easily on the trailer’s carpeted bunks and, if we are planning to sail, we hang the rudder in advance. The design calls for an endplate of double-layered 1/4″ plywood, 4-1/2″ wide on the bottom of the rudder, which keeps it even with the bottom of the hull. The endplate gives the rudder a better grip in the water, especially when the boat is heeled while sailing. The twin bilge keels, as they are called in the plans, are 3”-deep runners on the bottom that are designed to give the Sandpiper windward sailing ability in thin water. They also serve as helpful guides between the trailer bunks to keep the boat aligned on the trailer during launch and retrieval. Set well away from the centerline, these runners turn the boat into a steady platform on the beach, and they help to protect the bottom when dragged over a log or gravel bar on the river.
With a solo rower aboard, the Sandpiper sits lightly on the water.
The three thwarts in the design provide ample seating, and Kyle has made river rowing outings with as many as five young people aboard. The center thwart and forward thwart serve as the rowing stations. We have never shipped two pairs of oars, and that likely would require a passenger in the stern for trim. The bilge keels keep the Sandpiper tracking beautifully under oars while the generous rocker in the hull allows for easy, graceful turns. The boat carries its way well between strokes. The 8’ oars we use are too long to stow beneath the thwarts, so we usually bungee them to the seat risers on either side. When the boat is rigged for sail, the bow thwart is crowded by the mast, but it is still usable as a rowing station for short pulls without dropping the sailing rig.
The bilge keels help with windward sailing in shallow water, but for sailing in deeper water, Conrad includes a scaled drawing for a Bolger-type leeboard, which leaves the space in the center of the boat completely open. A passenger can sit on a cushion between the forward and center thwarts and, with an extra cushion for a backrest, have a comfortable, safe position low enough to be clear of the foot of the sail during tacks or jibes. The absence of a centerboard trunk makes it easy to switch positions and stay on the upwind side. For our camping trips, we added two removable sections of slatted floorboards either side of the central frame to help keep gear and our rear ends dry. The floorboards would be useful for a solo camp-cruiser to provide a flat, dry platform for sleeping, but they also add some unneeded weight. Since we are mostly daysailing in protected waters, we leave them in the garage until they’re needed.
With three aboard, the boat still has plenty of freeboard.
Conrad gives some indications of possible flotation schemes for the Sandpiper in his booklet. Included with the plans are pictures of Conrad singlehandedly capsizing and refloating the boat, but it is evident that he is in shallow water on a calm day and probably standing on the bottom. There is room in both the bow and stern to build in airtight or foam-filled flotation compartments. We considered adding rigid foam under the thwarts or lashing inflatable beach rollers to the seat risers, and if more ambitious expeditions were anticipated, those type of additions might be wise. In our protected sailing grounds, we have not felt that those extra measures are necessary.
The plans provide drawings for a standing (balanced) lug sail or a spritsail sloop with a mainsail area of 57.6 sq ft and a jib of 12.7 sq ft; we chose the latter, and added a sprit boom to keep the sail in a better shape when going downwind while also keeping the cockpit free of low-hanging lumber. The spritsail rig appealed to us for its traditional look and the lightness of each spar. We anticipated a lot of close tacking while river sailing, and liked the idea of being able to back the jib to aid in those maneuvers.
The main is laced to the mast with the throat lashed to the masthead. While it can’t be lowered, removing the sprit and folding the sail along the throat-to-clew diagonal—known as scandalizing—is an effective way of reducing sail area. The jib has a halyard and its two sheets are led through cam cleats set in oarlock sockets (as learned from an article on techniques in this magazine). The mainsheet has evolved from getting looped behind the aft stub of the riser and changed from side to side on each tack, to running through a pulley lashed to the sprit boom and a fiddle block on a rope horse over the tiller.
The single leeboard slips over the gunwale; its two parallel legs, set inboard, straddle the central frame rib. The leeboard’s lateral area is especially effective for sailing closehauled and, with a little practice, the board can be raised easily when coming into a beach or to reduce drag when sailing off the wind. The leeboard sets parallel to the flared side, so it is close to vertical when set on the windward side, and sharply angled when to leeward, but we have not seen much difference in the leeway made from one tack to the other while leaving the board set on one side. The leeboard does not pivot, so we have suffered a few unfortunate groundings at speed that snapped one of the supporting legs. This season we will be experimenting with a pivoting board set on a robust frame.
The spritsail sloop rig carries 57.6 sq ft in the main and 12.7 sq ft in the jib. The sprit boom was added by the builder to increase the spread of the main on downwind runs.
The only major modification we made to the original design was purely an accommodation for this aging skipper. The sprit rig uses three spars (mast, sprit, and sprit boom), which all stow within the boat for trailering. For 10 years I was happy picking up all three spars with the sails laced on and slipping the mast butt through the forward thwart and into its step. But last year, on increasingly unsteady legs, I found it more difficult to get the mast raised safely. We have constructed an oak tabernacle so that I can easily and safely pivot the rig upright. With this new arrangement I hope to derive another decade’s enjoyment of this sweet little boat.
One of the nicest things about the Sandpiper is the number of gratifying compliments it receives, whether launching in the Connecticut River near our home, in coastal waters around New England, or sitting on her trailer in the driveway. The building, use, and maintenance of this fine little craft have taught us all some valuable lessons and provided countless hours of enjoyment. It can carry a small family to less crowded beaches for a picnic, handle a little rough usage by a group of teenagers, and, with a few more minor modifications, may yet propel this older person gracefully into the sunset. Easy on the eyes, quick to launch and rig, it is just plain fun to sail.
Dan Pratt lives in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts where he almost swallowed the anchor 30 years ago to start a small organic farm. Canoeing on rivers, lakes, and ponds for over a decade left him wanting more than just the wind in his hair, and created a craving for wind in a sail. Having turned his back on small-boat racing and Buzzard’s Bay camp-cruising so many years ago, he was delighted when his youngest son took up boatbuilding.
Sandpiper Particulars
Length: 13′ 9″
Beam: 4′ 8″
Hull weight: 132 lbs
Sail area, sloop: 70 sq ft
January 2024: The designer’s website is no longer active but plans are still available. You can reach designer Conrad Natzio via email at [email protected] or by phone in the UK at +44 1394 382537.
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Maybe it was not meant to be. My cousin, Mark Kelly, and I were halfway through the second day of a nine-day trip from Alligator Point, Florida, to Pass Christian, Mississippi, sailing MYRNA C, my Norwalk Island Sharpie 23. On the first day, we had made only 17 nautical miles despite sailing for 10 hours. We had 310 nautical miles to go.
Photographs by the author
I trailered MYRNA C from Pass Christian, Mississippi, to Alligator Point, Florida, one month prior to the trip to maximize the vacation time Mark and I would have for sailing. Jim Hill let me keep my boat at his dock on the canal, which is just across the street from our family’s house. We made final preparations for departure here.
On this second day, the aluminum booms of the main and mizzen clanged against their blocks as we wobbled west, several miles off of St. George Island’s shore, which was visible only as an eggshell-thin line of sand, dotted with pastel beach houses. We had strayed farther out into the Gulf of Mexico searching for stronger winds, but the wind continued to fall away to a meager 6 knots.
The sun burned through the overcast sky and radiated heat like a stove in a sauna. A long, nauseating swell rolled from the southeast. The mainsheet hung limply over the lifelines and drooped into the water. The trip was at risk of turning into nine days of motoring and Mark, an avid canoeist who had done very little sailing, began to talk up the advantages of paddling.
He and I had conceived this trip in the summer, when the winter COVID surge was a theoretical risk. Amid life in endless quarantine, it had slipped my mind until we were catching up on the phone in December after I had been vaccinated and Mark expected his shot within days. Suddenly, a trip together seemed possible.
As we sailed across Apalachicola Bay on the second day, we spread the spinnaker out on the cabintop to dry. We had tried to fly it that morning in an attempt to continue sailing offshore in order to avoid the Intracoastal Waterway, but the wind was too low and the swell too high to keep it flying
As an internal-medicine resident in Los Angeles, Mark had been working the COVID wards, and was burned out. In my general-surgery residency in New Orleans, we were spared primary responsibility for COVID patients, but we did make the tracheostomies, place feeding tubes, and insert long-term dialysis lines for the sickest patients. Mark and I needed a break from seeing the dissolution of life from the virus. Both of us needed renewal.
But what we had found so far on our much-needed vacation was frustration. Defeated by two days of light winds and sail-collapsing swells, we turned on the outboard and headed for Government Cut, a man-made 500-yard-long passage through St. George Island. As we approached, two granite-boulder jetties reached out from the low, barrier island sand to lead us from the Gulf into Apalachicola Bay. On the east side of the Cut, blocky mansions leered imperiously over the inlet. From their second-floor porches, wooden steps poured down to boardwalks that stretched across the scrubby dunes and the bay to their docks and their boats. On the west side of the Cut, the other fragment of St. George was uninhabited; palmettos, sabal palms, and sea oats held the wild dunes in place despite storm surges washing over it and the constant scouring of wind and tides.
Once we motored clear of the island, we raised the sails again, more out of obstinacy than from anticipation of pleasant sailing. There still wasn’t much wind and we crept northward, making only around 3 knots. The bay’s water was dirt-colored and the sky remained dull and gray, amplifying the malaise on board. Mark’s enthusiasm seemed to be waning, but he stayed upbeat, perhaps to counter my worries over whether he was enjoying himself.
A dredging pipeline ran along the channel from the Cut to Apalachicola, attended by barges and tugs. The grease and rust, thick ropes and cast-iron cleats contrasted with our bright blue, dainty plywood hull and white sails. As we passed one barge, we saw two workers in tattered jeans, gray T-shirts, and survivor orange life jackets sitting on spools of cable. They were hunched over, gazing into their phones, oblivious that we were passing within 50’ of them. The indifference of the workers toward us underscored my growing feeling that our whole trip was flawed and futile.
Roger Siebert
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It took us two long hours to make the 6-nautical-mile crossing of Apalachicola Bay. The town of Apalachicola, occupying the point of land where the Apalachicola River spreads into the bay, was largely hidden behind tall, tan-colored reeds. Above the reeds, silver roofs flashed between runs of rolling pine. We passed under the Highway 98 bridge and started the engine again—the river’s current was too much for the meek breeze—and motored along a sleepy, salt-aged riverfront. Shrimp boats in every color of flaking paint lined the bank, tied up to listing, sun-desiccated docks.
We stopped in town for several dozen oysters and a few beers as consolation for two windless days, then continued up the river (which is part of the Intra-Coastal Waterway) at dusk, toward St. Joseph Bay. Starlight slipping through spindly cypress on the banks guided us up the main channel. The engine banged away like a lawnmower. Two hours later, we dropped anchor for the night in Lake Wimico.
After beer and oysters at Up the Creek Raw Bar in Apalachicola, we motored up the ICW at dusk. The railroad emerges from the swamp to cross over a swing bridge, which was in the open position for boat traffic.
Warm, yellow light glowed from the cabin as we raised the centerboard and rudder, reducing our draft to a scant 12″. Mark set out the cushions on his berth to starboard of the centerboard trunk. Forward, I put sheets over my half of the V-berth, the other half occupied by our bags. We fell asleep to the sound of the centerboard occasionally shifting in the trunk; the water and wind were still.
The cabin on MYRNA C is more like a floating tent than a yacht. She is just shy of the bare necessities.
We woke in the morning to fog so dense that we would never glimpse the shore of the lake. Mark pulled out the galley kit from the port side of the centerboard trunk. We put the Coleman stove just in front of the cabin hatch and got coffee going. The main boom was tied off to a stanchion to starboard to keep the sail away from the heat rising from the stove.
I wasn’t thrilled to be in the ICW, but Mark loved seeing the swamp up close. As we motored along Searcy Creek, he spotted several bald eagles, herons, and osprey.
The water remained still—not good for sailing, but excellent for making a hash of potatoes, onions, egg, and Manchego cheese while motoring. As I cooked, Mark steered us by GPS out of Lake Wimico and then 7-1/2 meandering nautical miles in Searcy Creek, flanked by dense stands of cypress and red maple standing over an endless swamp. The remaining 5-1/2 nautical miles to St. Joseph Bay were along the ruler-straight, Gulf County Canal, a 100-yard-wide cut flanked by clear cuts, building-sized piles of sand, and a shipyard. Osprey and bald eagles winged overhead, making do with what wilderness loggers had left behind.
As we emerged from the canal, men in waders wandered the turtle grass shallows of St. Joseph Bay casting for trout. The opaque, gunmetal blue water was motionless as if turned viscous and the air was thick with humidity. We motored across the dead-calm bay to St. Joseph Peninsula, where we tied up at the state-park marina to wander the powder-white dunes, at 35′, the highest in the state. As we walked the beach, the southeast swell that had frustrated our efforts to reach this place in the Gulf pushed foam up the sloping beach in lazy, draping ribbons.
The forecast that evening called for a nor’easter to bring winds of 15 to 20 knots, and we intended to sail overnight to make the most of it. I tried to prepare Mark for what the night might bring—wind-driven spray, enough tension on the sheets to make trimming a real effort, and the likely need to reduce the amount of sails we had up to go faster. It wasn’t getting through.
The now three windless days had given him the impression that sailing was only longing for wind that never seemed to come. I was nearing the same conclusion. If this front failed to materialize, then it was likely that our vacation was headed toward a bailout far short of MYRNA C’s slip in Pass Christian—and a mess of logistics.
But as we walked, the southeast breeze strengthened slightly. The undifferentiated gray sky formed billowy cumulus over the mainland to the north. The approaching low was sucking moisture toward itself. The atmosphere was charged with impending change.
Mark stopped and asked, “Do you feel it?” I did. We hurried back to MYRNA C.
Approaching across St. Joseph Bay, a nor’easter brought the wind we had been waiting days for.
After a gentle sail north on the bay side of the peninsula, we rounded the tip of St. Joseph Peninsula and passed through the 2-nautical-mile gap into the Gulf, just as the nor’easter was nearly on us, starting to spit rain, and accelerating the southeast breeze to a robust 15 knots. The booms were eased just beyond the lee rail, which was barely above the sea rushing around its curve. Mark and I were perched on the opposite gunwale and the windward chine below us was flying several inches above the water. We were making 6.5 knots: the stem churned a steady cream of white water and the trough of our bow wave stretched aft, just shy of the stern.
About ten minutes later, the front swept in. The sabal-palm-lined coast vanished behind the rain and the wind seemed to be pulled by its ear from southeast to the north. The breeze hissed through the masts and rigging. Whitecaps crowned every wave; foam sheared off the crests and streaked across the troughs.
The lee rail was now buried under the jade sea almost continuously—not how the MYRNA C likes to be. We needed a reef, stat. Mark brought the bow into the wind and handled the sheets and halyards as I crawled onto the foredeck, the EPIRB in my zippered life-jacket pocket and trailing a long tether, to drag down the crackling mainsail. As I tied two reefs into the main, I turned back to see Mark staring at me, as if astounded that he had decided to take time off from Los Angeles’ COVID ICUs to spend his vacation with a lunatic who would undoubtedly cost him his own life. It was about 5 p.m. by the time we got the reef in.
The wind had strengthened to 20 to 25 knots with higher gusts. MYRNA C, flying only her double-reefed main, felt spry despite these conditions, a special feature of sharpies as they have no heavy keel to make their movement in heavy seas laborious. Nonetheless, Mark was finding the sea state difficult. After briefly ducking into the cabin, he emerged to complain about the smell of gasoline, and then vomited into the cockpit. He then got back on the rail, his eyes fixed ahead. The only way through this was through it.
We started making our way west again. We were about 20 nm from the inlet at Panama City and 4 nm off the coast. Everything was gray now, and then, as the sun dipped below the horizon, just black.
The wind had shifted a little more to the east and we sailed on a close reach toward Panama City, whose lights appeared then on the horizon as an apocalyptic mauve glow. The only other lights were the flashes of green and red spray dashing in front of our navigation lights and our headlamps on the sails as we watched the luff.
We reached closer to shore along St. Andrews State Park, and in its lee, we were able to raise the reefed mizzen. We made 6 knots in the calmer waters. The city’s glow outlined sabal palms growing behind the dunes and farther west, condominium towers, dark but for a few lit windows, swirled with mist. Around 9 p.m., we reached the Panama City inlet. We turned on the engine with relief for once, and motored through the choppy ¼-mile-wide pass. Three small Coast Guard boats, whose lights we had seen coming in from offshore, overtook us. I wondered if the crews were surprised we had not called them for assistance.
Grand Lagoon, Panama City’s harbor, was pitch black, and its channel-marker lights were lost in a deceitful mashup with lights on shore. Mark and I had to yell to hear each other over the din of the engine and the wind. We first tried to tie up at the state park landing. Mark stood on the bow—his sea legs seemed to be coming in—dockline in hand. As we neared the dock, I could tell he was wavering between fending off or jumping on to land. He made the leap, but came up short. I heard the splash and then silence. Just to port, I saw his headlamp shining up through the water from the muddy bottom.
Damn, I thought, all that hard sailing and Mark knocks himself out right when we get to shore. I yelled, “Mark!” And then I could just make out Mark’s silhouette. He was standing in about a foot and a half of water. Fortunately, his headlamp had fallen off his head and only it was underwater. He was soaked and shivering. He got back on board and into dry clothes. This wasn’t going to be a good place to tie up.
I looked at the chart for other options. We decided to try Bay Point Marina. Back in the black harbor with our spotlight, we noticed that some channel pilings had no sign boards. On others, the reflective tape fluttered in the wind like tell-tales. Ahead, where we expected to see the lights of the marina, there was only more darkness.
We looked again at the chart and GPS. By those accounts, we were in the middle of the marina, but in reality, we were surrounded by open water. I later learned that the marina had been destroyed a couple years prior by Hurricane Michael, and all the pilings and docks had been pulled up to start fresh.
We threw off our anchor. Mark went to sleep without dinner. I made a peanut-butter sandwich for myself, then rearranged my area of the cabin into equally disorganized arrangements, burning off adrenaline from the day until I could sleep.
We woke to gray. The water was gray. The storm-tattered condominiums to the north were gray. The clouds were gray and drizzling. The northeast wind blew, unabated. Across the harbor to the southwest, in a cluster of marinas, boats bobbed in their slips, windward lines taut. Hundreds more boats were stacked in giant dry-storage racks; hundreds of thousands of horsepower, cold and still. On board MYRNA C, swinging on her anchor, we prepared for the day.
I suggested to Mark that we could take the sheltered ICW to the town of Destin, but the crucible of the night before had not daunted him at all. We would return to the Gulf, and this time hug close to the beach to exploit the north wind without subjecting ourselves to the chop.
Amid the gray, we raised our sails, still deeply reefed from the night before, and shot east back through the Grand Lagoon. We jibed into the roiling inlet, where the outgoing tide joined the northeast wind to drive MYRNA C, running wing-on-wing, to sea. A thin slab of slate-blue clouds lay across the horizon to the south. Gray clouds stretched up overhead all the way to the northern horizon where purple clouds assembled, a bullpen of rain bands to come.
With the temperature in the 50s and the wind blowing at 20 knots, Mark, right, and I bundled up for the run from Panama City to Destin.
The Gulf was lonesome. For the 45 inlet-less nautical miles between Panama City and Destin, we were the only boat making the passage. All day, we sailed past an endless white sand beach. Perched on top of the dunes, there was an equally endless stretch of beach homes and condominium towers, packed tight like books on a library shelf. They all looked empty today, spoiling the landscape for nothing. The wind tumbling past the buildings came at us in furious gusts separated by long lulls. We eased offshore to where the wind began to run free and steady again.
We ran a beam-to-broad reach and averaged 6 knots. The sharpie shines off the wind; its flat bottom more like a surfboard than sailboat. As the wind gusted upward of 20 knots, the boat strained to crest its bow wave. When I was at the tiller, my biceps burned from fighting the weather helm. Every 30 seconds or so, balance returned as MYRNA C hurtled down the face of a wave, soaring past her hull speed. We carried on this way for about 7 hours. Our top speed for the day was 9.5 knots.
Squall after squall renewed the winds on our starboard quarter, though the blows diminished over the course of the day. By late afternoon, our full spread of white sails was back aloft, bright against the sapphire of the sea and the still gray skies.
Choctawhatchee Bay was pouring out of the inlet at Destin when we arrived at 4:30 p.m. The murk of the bay carved a sharp demarcation through the limpid water of the Gulf. Despite the ebb flowing against us, we still made 5 knots through the 300-yard-wide entrance, though we soon after needed an assist from the engine to get under the twin-span bridge where the bay funnels into inlet. We then headed west for Brooks Bridge Marina on the ICW, where we planned to tie up for the night.
As we slipped through the shallows along the sandy, pine-lined bay shore of Okaloosa Island, we looked behind us, to the east, to see that the sky had darkened beyond anything we had seen all day. Beneath the towering clouds, an army of whitecaps advanced across the bay. A chill curled into the cuffs of my jacket sleeves. Then the rain came, pouring over us like ice water. The thrill of surfing down waves all day drained out the scuppers.
Since we were running downwind, we tried to sail through the squall with full sails but even though the unstayed carbon-fiber masts flexed to dump air, it wasn’t enough to hold off an untamable weather helm. We took down the main, and carried on with mizzen for a while, and then with just the motor to reach the marina. Freezing and beaten down, we huddled in the cabin. I called a friend of mine from medical school, Robby Ashley, who lives in nearby Fort Walton Beach. He came to pick us up for laundry, pizza, and a much-needed night on shore.
Robby had to get to the hospital for work by 6:30 a.m., so we got an early start the next day. Exhausted from the previous two days of sailing in the Gulf, we decided to take the well-protected ICW for the 35 nautical miles to Pensacola.
As we motored out of the marina, there was a northerly breeze blowing across the ICW, so we raised sails immediately. The first 10 nautical miles of the ICW here are called The Narrows. On the still water, we ghosted past bright green manicured lawns at the foot of brick and stucco homes. About a third of the way through, the channel takes a quarter-mile dog leg to the north. For 20 minutes, we tacked upwind in a 70-yard-wide channel between marsh islands to round the corner. Then, tall pines obstructed the wind almost completely, and our progress slowed to 1.5 knots. We heard the morning announcements from the PA system of a nearby school as if we were in homeroom ourselves. Songbirds flittered in the trees, singing. White egrets strolled the shore, poking in the marsh for breakfast.
The calm seemed inescapable, and I suggested giving up and turning the engine on. Mark questioned my purity and, being stubborn, I took the bait and we carried on under sail. Within a few minutes, the lee rail descended, and we were on our way again. We accelerated past Hurlburt Field Air Force Base, its runway allowing a roaring breeze to run free and blow across the channel.
After days of overcast skies, the sun finally warmed us up as we sailed down breezy and protected Santa Rosa Sound from Fort Walton Beach to Pensacola Bay.
The passage slowly widened, and soon we had made it through the Narrows and into Santa Rosa Sound. Overhead, the cerulean sky was covered by a thin, patchwork of clouds that the sun burned off as the day progressed. We made a joyful 5.5 knots on crisp, blue water topped with tumbling white caps. Santa Rosa Island lay to our south, a long, electric-white bar of sand, too skinny and low for homes or trees. To our north, the mainland shoreline, mostly pine dotted with modest beach homes, arced like velvet rope along a queue before running straight west toward the rendezvous with Pensacola Bay at Deer Point. There, we turned north to work upwind for Pensacola Harbor under a spotless sky.
Gusty winds in Santa Rosa Sound demanded frequent sail trimming and repositioning of crew weight.
That evening, we anchored in Bayou Chico, a mile from downtown, sandwiched between a tugboat base, a salvage yard, a highway bridge, and the very proper and trim Pensacola Yacht Club. An acrid, oily odor wafted over our still anchorage. Amid these implements and rewards of industry, we watched an osprey perched on a mast devour a catfish, blood dripping onto the deck below.
We sailed off anchor in the morning, tailed by the tugboats trudging to the day’s work. We slipped past the yacht club and emerged into another shining blue day on Pensacola Bay. We headed south for the Gulf with 10 knots of breeze on our quarter.
We made it out of the Pensacola Bay’s inlet—the 2/3-mile gap between Santa Rosa and Perdido Key’s slender eastern peninsula—and sailed into the emerald Gulf, and crossed over a shallow, sandy bar on the west side. The water was so clear we could see individual grains of sand on the bottom 3′ below us. But the wind soon died completely and our speed dropped below one knot. Unfortunately, we had to motor.
Needing a break from the engine on our way from Pensacola to Stone Quarry Bayou, we anchored in the emerald waters offshore of the Flora-Bama Bar and waded ashore to see what the fuss was about.
A few hours later, exhausted by the noise, vibration, and monotony of the engine, we anchored just off the beach from Flora-Bama Bar, a notorious live music venue situated on the Florida–Alabama state line. We waded ashore in waist-deep water, holding our dry clothes, wallets, and towels above our heads. On this cool day in early March, about three dozen snow birds (northerners who spend the winter in Florida) were playing Bingo in an outdoor covered area. The crowd was a far cry from the raucous spring breakers I had associated with the place.
Upstairs in a dim, neon-lit lounge, two gray-haired men strummed covers of songs by Merle Haggard, John Prine, and Hank Williams. We sipped cheap draft beer and downed a few dozen oysters. The wind strengthened in the afternoon, but it was from the west, useless to us: MYRNA C does not excel upwind. We stayed for another couple of sets. In the late afternoon, we motored 10 more nautical miles into Perdido Bay. Just before dark, we dropped anchor in tiny Stone Quarry Bayou, a 1,000′-long by 200′-wide pine- and cypress-lined cove.
After anchoring next to a shipyard in Pensacola, waking up to pine and cypress in Stone Quarry Bayou was a welcome change of scenery.
We woke up pre-dawn to get motoring through the ICW out of the way. As we prepared to leave, a fiery sunrise traced delicate pine trunks as they rose to filigreed crowns. By 8 a.m., we were done with the engine and had entered Bon Secour Bay, in the southeast corner of Mobile Bay.
We weren’t thrilled to be motoring after leaving Stone Quarry Bayou, but the still water at sunrise made up for the racket of the outboard.
With a steady 10-knot east wind, we pushed west, wing on wing, at 4 to 5 knots. For a couple of miles, we were shadowed by a lone man in a beat-up center-console tending his crab traps. His line of white buoys ran along the channel like a string of pearls. His black Lab stood in the bow, barking at the pelicans that swarmed the boat at each trap.
We crossed the vast lower end of Mobile Bay sailing wing-on-wing. For much of the way over, we puzzled whether the oil platforms there were still active.
We sailed steadily across the vast Mobile Bay, some 20 nautical miles. Old oil platforms dotted the horizon. A rust-coated small tanker with a Greek flag slogged up the bay—we had passed from Florida’s tourist beaches to the industrial coasts of Alabama and Mississippi.
On the west side of the bay, we slid under the Dauphin Island bridge in the Pass aux Herons with a 12-knot breeze at our back. We had entered Mississippi Sound, my home waters, after six days of sailing. I went below for a nap. My ear was pressed against the plywood hull and I heard chirping under water. I came back up on deck to find Mark, who was born in Wisconsin, grinning as a pod of a dozen dolphins swam alongside us. They stuck with us for two hours, Mark’s entire shift at the helm.
We used paper charts for navigation, and the handheld GPS to keep track of our top speeds. Here, Peter measured the distance across Mobile Bay.
With the exception of Dauphin Island to the east, the barrier islands in the Sound are National Seashore and so have remained undeveloped. Though not protected, the mainland from Mobile Bay to Pascagoula is lowlands and marsh with only scattered, small settlements. While the area appears pure and untouched, squiggly purple lines on the chart indicate pipelines running between the islands, rushing oil from offshore platforms north to refineries in Pascagoula.
Once well into the Sound, we headed northwest to the marshes between Pascagoula and the town of Bayou La Batre, which, from what we could tell from the binoculars, is home to a large shrimping fleet and a casino. We anchored in an old channel near a sandy, pine-lined road that ended in the ruins of a wharf. With the gray sky, pale marsh grass and sunless sunset, the place felt haunted. We imagined it was once the coastal access for an antebellum plantation.
Mark’s birthday brought strong winds and this sunrise as we hit the trip speed record, 10.7 knots, heading from the marshes near Bayou La Batre to Ocean Springs just after dawn.
We woke at 3:30 a.m. the next day to take advantage of the forecast strong northeast breeze to sail to Ocean Springs and then carry on to Cat Island.
We sailed off anchor in the dark, the sky faintly lit by the hellish glow of Pascagoula’s refineries, and headed south to stay clear of the shallows along the mainland. As we moved deeper into the Sound, the wind, uninhibited by the trees, gathered strength. Soon we were steaming along with full sails, wing-on-wing, in 20 knots of breeze, pushing an average of close to 8 knots.
At the first rays of morning light, we turned up to a broad reach. The weather helm became irrepressible. Mark, who was a sailing novice just a week ago, suggested a reef. I agreed that we were close to that, but I wanted to try to adjust the sails first. I eased the mainsail and immediately, a great burden was released from the boat. Perfectly balanced, with pressure on the tiller no more than if we were sailing at 4 knots, we accelerated to an exhilarating 10.7 knots. For 30 minutes, we careened down wave after wave on 10-knot runs until rising winds and shoals forced us into a heading further upwind that required reefing the sails.
We carried on past a tangle of navigation aids outside Pascagoula’s refineries and on to Biloxi Bay, which led us into Ocean Springs. The town sits on rolling hills that run right down to the water, a unique topographic feature in these coastal plains. Giant live-oak trees spread their canopies over streets and homes. The downtown is vibrant with restaurants and shops, though the pandemic seems to have taken its toll: the family-run deli I had eaten at the last time I was here was now shuttered. We had greasy egg-and-cheese bagel sandwiches at Lil’ Market and visited the art museum to see Walter Anderson’s watercolors of Horn Island, which he visited by rowing an unseaworthy skiff 6 nautical miles from the mainland.
It was by then early afternoon, and we needed to set sail to make the 12-nautical-mile open-water crossing to Cat Island, by nightfall. We cruised Biloxi Harbor, past its crowd of casinos on wharfs over the water—Harrah’s, Golden Nugget, Hard Rock, and Beau Rivage—before turning into the Sound. A 12-knot north wind carried us at 5 to 6 knots.
Smugglers Cove on Cat Island was our last and best anchorage.
Cat Island is T-shaped and, oddly for a barrier island, its beach runs north–south, which is perpendicular to nearby Ship Island and every other barrier island on the north Gulf coast. Midway along the beach, a 4-mile extension of high ground runs east–west with dense pine and live oak forest anchoring its spine.
We made it to Phoenix Shoal at the southern tip of the beach at 5 PM. We crossed the 2′-deep bar with the centerboard up and the boat heeled way over, taking advantage of our shoal draft to cut miles from the end of the passage. We settled up against the beach in Smugglers Cove as the sun fell below a cloudless horizon.
In the last year, because of the isolation imposed by the pandemic, I’ve spent some 10 nights anchored at Cat Island. Of all the barrier islands in Mississippi Sound, it is the only island where development, save a couple radio towers peeking above the tree line, is invisible. The only sounds come from the wind, waves, and birds. It is my place of total peace.
Mark understands the appeal. We kedged close to the beach and went for a short walk in the twilight before returning to the boat. It was our last night—and Mark’s birthday. We celebrated by adding a can of chickpeas and tuna to the mac and cheese.
The beach at Cat Island is expansive and silent.
The next morning, we didn’t rush to return to land. Mark was due to return to the ICU in Los Angeles, and I was headed to Houma, Louisiana, in the bayou, for two months on a rural surgery rotation. We woke at daybreak and went for another walk. The tide was way out, and the beach stretched wide like a desert, with sand so white it looked like snow. Trash cans swept from the mainland in the spate of hurricanes last fall, were half-buried in the beach. A large, rusting tank leaned against the dunes, the sea air doing its best to dispose of it. We crossed over the shoulder-height dunes to a sandy road crowded by forest that took us into the interior. Within minutes Mark spotted two birds on his bucket list: an American kestrel and a Mississippi kite.
The interior of Cat Island teems with birds soaring over marsh creeks lined with pine and oak.
Shortly after, we reluctantly hoisted our sails and eased away from our anchorage, headed 10 nautical miles northeast, home to Pass Christian, Mississippi. Despite nine days of constant motion and hard sailing, neither of us was exhausted. We had been renewed.
Peter Sawyer is a general surgery resident in New Orleans, Louisiana. He learned to sail when he was 11 years old at Camp Sea Gull, a seafaring summer camp on the North Carolina coast. He has been at it ever since.
The author wishes to thank his parents, Paul and Jonette Sawyer, for providing a home base for this trip at their home in Alligator Point, Florida, and for asking questions that needed to be asked. He apologizes to his mom for making her worry and to his dad for having to hear about it. He also thanks their neighbor, Jim Hill, who let him keep MYRNA C at his dock for a month prior to the trip.
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.
Skipper and I have been pushed around by boat trailers since we were kids, and between the two of us we have been taking road trips with boats for over a century. Gearing up for this year’s boating, we got together with our friend Eddie, a professional trailer builder, to compare notes on best boat-trailering practices.
The item at the top of our list is keeping the boat light. While a boat for cruising can carry a lot of gear when it’s in the water, it should not be loaded down with excessive weight while on a trailer. Eddie has seen bent axles as a result of overloaded boats, and Skipper and I, with plenty of experience repairing damaged boats, know that lightly built hulls don’t tolerate the extra load. And, for the sake of the trailer, the combined weight of the boat, the gear it has aboard, and the trailer itself should not exceed the trailer’s total capacity, which is noted on the manufacturer’s tag. We load as much of our cruising gear as possible—especially the heaviest things like fresh water, anchors, and trolling-motor batteries—in the tow vehicle. Shifting the weight will ease the stress on the trailer, improve its performance on the road, and keep the boat and its gear from getting damaged. Trailers for small boats may have springs but not shock absorbers, so the boat and the gear will get a much bouncier ride than you do in the towing vehicle. The impact of the boat on the bunks or rollers and of the gear against the boat can cause damage.
Photographs by the authors
Moving gear out of the boat and into the towing vehicle makes trailering safer. Along with the cruising gear we carry in the car is a set of tools for any roadside fixes the trailer might need.
The few items, such as rudders and oars, that are transported while on the cockpit sole get cushioned with beach towels. We use throwable cushions and our old PFDs as padding for the spars that ride in the boat and use docklines to tie them down. Sail ties secure the furled sails to keep them from flapping and wearing at freeway speeds. We use a transom-saver on our 15′ runabout’s outboard to keep its weight from straining the transom. When we trailer our 19′ sailboat with the motor in its inboard motorwell, we rig a line from the part of the transom that spans the well to the lower unit to reduce the effect of road bounce and stress on the motor mount. Centerboards should be secured and prevented from dropping in case whatever normally holds it retracted in the trunk fails. We have bunk rollers placed to support the keel at the middle to aft portion of the trunk slot to prevent the board from dropping down and leaving a trail of sawdust on the pavement. Locker and hatch lids should be locked or pinned lest they take flight on the freeway.
Full fuel tanks are heavy but not safe to carry in the passenger compartment of the towing vehicle; even the vapors coming from an empty can are unhealthy. Transporting them securely tied to a roof rack is advisable if the vehicle can accommodate them or consider carrying empty containers in the boat with a plan to fill them when you get close to the put in. Plastic containers will do less damage to the boat than metal gas cans.
Inflate the tires up to the maximum pressure indicated on the sidewalls. Air hoses at gas stations are inconvenient and often charge for the use, hand and foot pumps are impractical, so an electric inflator is a good investment in tire maintenance. Fill tires when they are cold, before you drive—the maximum indicated takes into account the increase in pressure due to hot weather and long highway drives. Check and fill the towing vehicle’s tires while you’re at it. Lug nuts usually stay secure as long as they have been properly torqued after a wheel change, but to be on the safe side, bring a lug-nut wrench along on the first tire check of the season.
Pull on the tops of the tires to check for loose bearings—there should be some play, but no more than 1/8″— and leave the window down for the first few miles of a trip to listen for a squeaky or crunchy bearing. It may need some grease. If it has the play required and grease doesn’t eliminate the noise, the bearing may be bad and unsafe on the road, especially at freeway speed. It’s best to head home and replace both bearings in that hub. (When one bearing fails, it usually heats up the grease, the grease fails, and then the other bearing is compromised.)
Ratchet-strap mechanisms are very powerful and should be used carefully to avoid damaging the boat.
Surprisingly, not all folks use boat straps aft or transom straps, but we recommend them. We use over-center straps or ratchet straps, because we have not had good experiences with the cam-buckle straps. Ratchet straps can exert more than 2,000 lbs of force; they should be snug but not so tight that they stress and crack the hull. We also tie a second line from the bow eye to the trailer bow stop to supplement the winch hook; some trailers come equipped with a safety chain for the bow eye.
At around 1 mile, 10 miles, and 100 miles, as well as whenever we stop, we check the boat and whatever is stowed aboard and tug all of the straps to see if they’ve loosened. We check the bearings and tire sidewall temperatures with a touch to make sure they’re not getting hot. We also check the lights.
A padlock on an outboard will help keep the mounting screws from vibrating loose on the road and discourage theft in a hotel parking lot; we use locks on trailer couplers as well. If you have a hitch receiver, a locking receiver pin or a cable lock from trailer to tow vehicle provides additional security against theft. A boat cover designed for trailering will prevent an open boat from becoming a swimming pool during a downpour, and provides a bit of security for any gear kept aboard during overnight stops. If you trailer an open boat without a cover, be sure the drain plug is removed, because there needs to be an escape path for water if it rains. Some folks have built and installed drain-plug keepers near the trailer coupler to serve as reminders to remove and install the plugs.
To deal with breakdowns on our long-range trips, we carry a grease gun, rags, either a spare set of grease-packed bearings or a hub with bearings already installed, along with the spare tire, a tire inflator, lug wrench, and jack. Our small toolkit contains boat registration, channel-lock pliers, screwdriver, duct tape, multipurpose tool, and is adorned with a BoatUS sticker with the toll-free number to call for tow assistance. We live large and pay for the BoatUS tow package that includes both water recovery and land towing for not only the boat trailer, but for the tow vehicle as well. AAA and Good Sam also offer boat-trailer towing with RV membership options.
Plan for a slower trip than you’d make without a trailer; it will be easier on the boat and easier on the nerves. Once in transit, Google Maps on your smart phone, your vehicle nav system, or other GPS driving aids will show real-time delays that factor into tactical trip planning. Maneuvering in tight spots requires skill; in rest stops we usually head to the trucks-with-trailers side for the added room and exiting without backing. At stores and gas stations we head for places where there aren’t any other cars. If we do get in a tight spot, instead of backing down or trying to turn the entire rig around, we’ll unhook the trailer, turn vehicle and trailer separately, hook everything back up, and be on our way.
As a former Marine aviator and a current Airline Transport Pilot, I have always had checklists to get me safely from place to place. Having one for trailering assures that Skipper and I arrive at the launch with boat and trailer in good shape.
“Clark” Kent and Audrey “Skipper” Lewis mess about with their small armada of 15 boats and four trailers. Their boat-trailer trips have included hauls from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific and back, and up to the Great Lakes. Next stop, the Chesapeake. A sample checklist can be found on their blog, Small Boat Restoration.
Eddie English of Milton, Florida, owns and operates Eddie English Co., Inc. creating custom boat trailers for the past three decades.
Editor’s Note
Trailer lights are my most frequent boating problem, so I’ve learned to check them often. When I go boating solo, it takes me a few trips from the car to the back end of the trailer to check the turn signals, tail lights, and brake lights. The first two functions are easy enough—those lights can be turned on—but for the brake lights, I need something to press and hold the brake pedal. I used to lean a brick against the pedal, but I’d always leave it at home—I wouldn’t want it flying around in the car in the event of an accident. I’ve since made four devices to press the pedal, and the two here have worked very well.
Photographs by Christopher Cunningham
This brake-light tester has a piece of plywood with a 1/2″-wide slot to slip onto the brake pedal. A pivoting stick 10″- to 12″-long works like a kick-down door holder. The sharp square edge at the bottom of the stick helps it grip the floor mat or carpet.
This 32″ length of 3/4″ dowel extends far enough beyond the steering wheel that, when its cord is tightened, it can depress the brake pedal. A skinny V-shaped notch in the dowel’s end holds the cord tight.
The 32″ dowel was too long to store inconspicuously in the car, so I cut it in half and used a 6″ length of 1/2″ plastic water pipe, sawn down one side to fit the dowel, as a sleeve to join the pieces. The ends of the dowel are tapered slightly to make them easier to insert into the pipe.
When the dowels are bundled with the pipe and wrapped with the cord, the device is easier to store. The notch in the end of the dowel keeps the cord tight.
If the trailer lights don’t pass muster, I have to find where the problem is. After reading the article Kent and Audrey wrote on LED trailer lights, I made the switch from incandescent fixtures, so burned-out bulbs and corroded sockets are no longer an issue.
A trailer-light tester can check the wiring connection on the towing vehicle.
I have an inexpensive tester that plugs into the vehicle socket. It will illuminate its LEDs to verify current coming for left and right turn signals, tail lights, and brake lights. If any of the tests fail, checking the fuses is easy enough and doesn’t require groveling at the back bumper. The trailer-light circuit can have its own fuses, so the vehicle’s tail lights aren’t always an indication that power is getting to the trailer plug.
If the fuses are good, the trailer-wire plugs may be the problem. The four-wire flat plugs I have don’t seem to age well and their contacts get corroded. I clean the pins with a brass-wire brush and the sockets with a cotton swab dipped in vinegar. The vinegar, a mild acid, will loosen corrosion and spinning the swab will wipe it off. On occasion, using a pair of pliers to pinch the plug to tighten the sockets is required.
Far too many times, I’ve checked the condition of the trailer just when I’ve hooked it up to hit the road. It’s best to allow time before departure for doing any maintenance and repairs.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
Several years ago, on a hot June day, my wife and I were hiking in the mountains well above treeline. Our path took us over exposed rock ledges, talus fields, and high south-facing meadows. We were without protection from the sun for most of the day and finally ran out of water; I was on the verge of heatstroke. All ended well, but I realized the benefits of a trekking umbrella, something I had seen quite a few times in the mountains but had ignored as serious equipment with practical applications, including for my boat voyages.
I did some research and found EuroSchirm, a German manufacturer that makes a wide array of umbrellas, including many specifically for trekking. They are thoughtfully designed, light, and made of tough composite parts. I purchased a Swing Liteflex, a 7.4-oz medium-sized non-telescoping umbrella that is 25″ tall and 39″ across. This one I originally intended for hiking, but it has seen use on my boats as well. I also purchased the extendable Swing Handsfree, which is 30″ tall in the retracted position, 43″ tall when extended, and 45″ across. This umbrella comes with two clasps that attach to the shoulder harness of a backpack so a hiker can, as the name suggests, walk hands free. While the attachment possibilities are intriguing, I was more attracted to the longer shaft as it would offer more options for lashing and positioning in my boat. The silver-colored, UV-reflective coat that would provide extra protection from bright sunlight was not easily available in the U.S. at the time I ordered the Handsfree, but it is now.
Photographs by the author
The Swing Handsfree, with its 13″ extension, was designed to clip into a backpacker’s waist belt and shoulder strap. In a boat, the extra length provides more options for propping or lashing the umbrella in place.
The umbrellas come with a nylon-sleeve case, which has mesh sides to allow water to drain and air to circulate. It would be wise to use the sleeve case when the umbrella is not in use, especially in the marine environment. I didn’t, and found that the polyester canopy of my Handsfree suffered some small holes when it snagged on corners or fasteners. The holes, fortunately, have not grown any larger. Otherwise, the polyester canopies are tough and light. The silvery UV coating on my Liteflex added very little weight and seems to be even more robust than the non-coated Handsfree canopy.
The umbrella frames are made of fiberglass composite and won’t corrode. They flex, rather than bend or break as aluminum or steel might. The umbrellas resist getting blown inside out, and feel solid in hand when it’s windy. The opening and closing mechanism is smooth and precise. The canopy stays taut across the frame, even in extended wet and windy conditions. The frame ends are tipped with plastic caps to avoid eye injury. The umbrellas are light and the company’s stated specifications are all accurate. The Handsfree is listed at 366 grams (12.9 oz) and this is exactly what my kitchen scale indicated when I weighed it.
With a “sail area” of about 11 sq ft, the Swing Handsfree can lend a hand on downwind passages.
The Swing Handsfree is now my main boating umbrella. The longer shaft, when extended, offers more options for securing it to the boat and its two adjustable fastening clips could be helpful on calm days when taking a break in the open with a strong overhead sun. Likewise, my passengers can use it to for shade or as a sail when I’m rowing downwind.
After four years, the extendable shaft on the Handsfree has started to become a bit cantankerous because the twist-locking mechanism has lost some effectiveness. EuroSchirm instructs customers to “turn the handle softly until locking—without violence” and this advice should be heeded. I have been quite gentle with my umbrella, but it now slips if I’m not diligent in unlocking and then locking the shaft. Access to the mechanism for a home repair seems quite difficult if not impossible.
The shorter Liteflex does not lend itself to being propped up in the cockpit, but it is my choice for handheld use while walking beaches and shoreline ledges on sunny and rainy days, as well as for quick use on the boat. One afternoon I was caught in a torrential thunderstorm in Casco Bay [say in Maine?] while cooking dinner. After quickly throwing canvas over my cockpit, I hunkered down for half an hour under my Liteflex and stayed completely dry while I enjoyed the storm.
Using an umbrella for cruising started as a novelty idea but quickly evolved as my standard practice. The EuroSchirm umbrellas stow easily, and their construction have put up with robust use. When the weather calls for shade or shelter, there is little else as satisfying as popping up the canopy and taking refuge underneath.
Christophe Matson lives in New Hampshire. At a very young age he disobeyed his father and rowed the neighbor’s Dyer Dhow across the Connecticut River to the strange new lands on the other side. Ever since he has been hooked on the idea that a small boat offers the most freedom.
The Swing Liteflex and the Swing Handsfree are available in the U.S. from EuroSchirm USA for, respectively, $46.35 ($50.50 for Silver) and $63.90 ($66.90 for Silver). For Germany, Spain, France, and the UK, visit EuroSchirm.com.
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.
One bright, windy morning on an island off the coast of Maine I finally decided I no longer wanted to cruise with my iso-butane backpacking stove. A cold front had passed the night before and the wind was coldly streaming in from the northwest. I was attempting to boil water for soft-boiled eggs, and the roaring flame sputtered inefficiently while I contorted my body around the stove to block the wind. Suddenly, while awkwardly repositioning myself, I knocked the top-heavy assembly over onto the rocks.
I wanted a stove that would be better suited to small-boat camp-cruising by providing a wide stable base, be more windproof, and yet remain neatly stowable where space was at a premium. I also wanted to do more cooking than just boiling water. After much research, the stove that met these requirements was the venerable Trangia 25-8.
Trangia, a family-owned Swedish company, has been making camping stoves since 1925. Their stoves and cooking hardware are modular, with most of the components nesting within each other for compact storage. Pots, pans, and kettles allow all sorts of camp cooking, from boiling water to pan-searing scallops or making chili. The Trangia 25-8 works with multiple burners and fuel types, and the wide base and windscreen make for a solid cooking platform that resists all but the most howling winds. A wide variety of other accessories expand the cooking options even more.
Photographs by the author
The Trangia system is designed to nest the stove parts and cooking pots in a compact package.
The Trangia comes in two sizes, the 27 which is smaller and suited to one person, or the 25, which is larger and better suited to two. The 25 is about 8-1/2″ wide and 4-1/2” tall when stowed. It comes with a frying pan, a 0.9-liter kettle, a 1.5-liter pot, and a 1.75-liter pot. The windscreen base assembly and the pots can be chosen in different materials depending on what the discerning chef requires. I chose the Storm Cooker 25-8 UL/HA for the ultralight aluminum windscreen and hard-anodized aluminum cookware. Plain aluminum, stainless steel, and non-stick coated are also available. All the items are also available separately so mixing and matching of different materials is possible.
The stove was designed in the 1950s around an alcohol burner. The back side of the base is perforated with holes to provide airflow to the burner while the shield protects the flames and retains heat
The wide range of fuel options is especially conducive to camp-cruising. The standard is the brass alcohol burner, which is compact and completely silent. Making coffee during a peaceful early dawn on the beach is a joy with this quiet burner and a welcome departure from other more powerful burners that disrupt tranquility. A simmer ring, with a pivoting metal plate, attaches to the top of the burner and allows flame regulation—perfect for cooking pancakes, which are easy to scorch on other stoves.
The Trangia system can also operate with canister fuel, shown here, and liquid fuel delivered by a bottle pressurized by hand with a built-in pump.
Using the alcohol burner aboard, however, is strongly discouraged as the open top of the unit is liable to slosh and send burning alcohol into the boat.* When I’m cooking on the boat, I use the Multi-Fuel burner. This burner can be used both for hand-pressurized white-gas fuel tanks or iso-butane cartridges that are readily available at most outfitters. The Multi-Fuel burner clicks into place where the alcohol burner is normally located and it provides a strong, steady heat without the risk of an upset and spilled fuel, but it produces more noise. Also available is the Gas-burner, which is less expensive than the Multi-Fuel burner, and uses only iso-butane cartridges.
The wide range of Trangia accessories increase customization options. I get a lot of use out of my 4.5-liter Billy pot. It is perfect for steaming clams and mussels on the beach and, when not in use, the Trangia fits neatly inside the Billy which is then in turn placed into my 5-gallon galley bucket with plenty of room to spare for the rest of my cooking equipment.
The Trangia stove system, with its wide and stable base, wind resistance, versatility and compactness, is a winning combination for small-boat cruising. It has become one of my most cherished pieces of kit, and has re-kindled the simple joy of cooking while camping.
*See the Comments below for more on the risk of using an alcohol burner in a small boat while afloat. Ed.
Christophe Matson lives in New Hampshire. At a very young age he disobeyed his father and rowed the neighbor’s Dyer Dhow across the Connecticut River to the strange new lands on the other side. Ever since he has been hooked on the idea that a small boat offers the most freedom.
The Trangia Storm Cooker 25-8 UL/HA is listed by Trangia for $112.20 with the spirit burner and $157.90 with the gas burner. Burners are available separately as accessories.
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.
Riley Hall was born and raised in Gig Harbor, Washington, a quiet town nestled around a narrow, mile-long inlet that shares the town’s name. The shoreline is bristling with piers and the water is dotted with boats at anchor. Surrounded by boats, it was only natural that Riley began building and working on them at a young age. He kept at it through high school and began restoring a 1940s-vintage canvas-covered cedar-strip rowing boat at home. For his senior-year project, he chose to work at the Gig Harbor BoatShop, documenting and disassembling hull #2 of the Ben Seaborn–designed Thunderbird.
After graduating, his interest in the restoration of old boats led him to move across the country to Rhode Island to study at Newport’s International Yacht Restoration School (IYRS). While enrolled there, he spent winter evenings and weekends restoring a 1963 Snipe. After graduating from IYRS in 2012 he got a job maintaining and restoring mostly classic racing yachts at Baltic Boatworks in nearby Bristol.
During the time he had been on his career path—restoring large yachts and working boats—Riley had been toying with the concept of small boats built from a single sheet of plywood. He designed and built his first one-sheet rowing skiff while home for Christmas in 2014. He had brought the paper patterns for the skiff with him to Rhode Island and shared them with Don Betts, a local boatbuilder who had built a 31’ six-oared Cornish gig, and the one-sheet skiff Don built led to two more, built with the help of a group of Sea Scouts.
After about six years at Baltic, Riley moved back to Gig Harbor in 2018 to take a job with Harbor History Museum. There, as a restoration/preservation specialist, he was put in charge of the volunteers restoring the 65′ purse seiner SHENANDOAH, which was built in Gig Harbor in 1925.
The SHENANDOAH project kept Riley busy during his working hours but left him with some free time and a creative impulse to design and build something new.
Working in the studio above his parents’ garage, he built three more one-sheet rowing skiffs, trying new iterations of the concept each time. The 2.5-hp four-stroke Yamaha outboard he had for his 16’ Calendar Island Yawl set him to wondering what kind of speed it could produce with a boat made of a single sheet of plywood.
Cocktail Class Racers naturally came to mind. Developed in 1939, they’re outboard-powered racing skiffs with a length of 8′ and a beam of 4′, just like a sheet of plywood, and limited to 6-hp motors—8 hp for racers who weigh over 200 lbs. They top out at 26 mph, far beyond the potential of Riley’s 2.5, so, with racing off the table, he was free to lavish attention on aesthetics and let visual elements from racing kayak, vintage bicycles, Beetle Cats, and ’50s nostalgia work their way into his design process.
Riley Hall
In Riley’s one-sheet scheme, the curve of the sides took their shape from the outline of the bottom.
He started with a wedge shape for the hull: a plumb stem to part waves and a flat run for planing. As he explored the shape with a model of stiff paper, the sides came together in a way that suggested a raised foredeck and stem with a reverse rake. The foredeck required a break in the sheer to sweep down to the stern, which, as Riley put it, “revealed a slightly strange shape, like little ears, between the side and foredeck standing out as rather odd and unconventional. I decided it was similar to what you see on racing kayaks, which look cool and go fast, so why not?”
Riley Hall
Riley built AVANTI in the space above his parents’ garage. The room was meant to be an art studio for his father but got hijacked by a climbing wall and a boatbuilding project. At this phase of the construction, the idea of adding fins to the coaming was taking hold.
Riley started construction in a workshop space over his parents’ garage. With the shape established by the model, Riley could take the pieces apart from each other to “expand” their shapes and scale them up on onto a piece of plywood. After cutting the full-sized panels from plywood and fairing the panels, he temporarily assembled them with Gorilla tape, fine-tuned the shape, and used the plywood “skin” of the hull to take measurements for the boat’s two frames.
After Riley had installed the foredeck and a Beetle Cat–inspired coaming, he invited his father, Curtiss, an art teacher at the high school Riley graduated from, for a consult on aesthetics. As soon as he laid eyes on the boat, Curtiss said, “It looks like a Studebaker Avanti.” The iconic Avanti, a high-performance car with a distinctive “reverse rake” on the front end of its side panels, was Studebaker’s swan song, released in 1962 as the company was closing down.
Curtiss’s comparison set the boat’s name, AVANTI, Italian for forward, and pointed to an automotive aesthetic direction for the rest of the project. Riley had been looking to Herreshoff’s boats for a suitable shape for the aft ends of the coaming, but nothing looked quite right on AVANTI. While the Studebaker coupe didn’t have fins, it was produced in the final years of the fin craze, and the combination seemed to work for the boat.
Riley Hall
The name plate is a copy of the one that adorned Studebaker’s Avanti coupes in the ’60s.
For steering, Riley opted for handlebars instead of a wheel. Cocktail Class Racers require that the drivers lean far forward to keep their bows down and they’re forced to wrap their stomachs around the wheels. Riley found a bow fitting at a marine thrift store that could have easily been a classic-car hood ornament; the nameplate his dad made, replicating the one Studebaker put on the Avanti, was the finishing touch.
Kathy Hall
AVANTI sits nicely on the water with the outboard’s 48 lbs and Riley’s 140 lbs aboard.
AVANTI emerged from the garage measuring 7′2″ long with a 3′ beam and weighing just 40 lbs. And with the little 2.5-hp outboard providing the power, AVANTI will get on plane and look good doing it.
Kathy Hall
Riley’s Aunt Stephanie provided the proper headwear and eyewear for sea trials.
As for Riley, whether he’s skimming across Gig Harbor aboard AVANTI, working on SHENANDOAH, or keeping busy with his free time, he’ll be making good progress in the same direction he always has, forward—avanti.
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.
Small-boat snobs, take heart. A census of any marina will reveal hundreds of large auxiliaries sitting idle most weekends, while easy-to-use kayaks and canoes are proliferating. Are very small sailboats the next big thing? A friend of mine with a serious cruising sailboat confided that lately, most movements of his boat are in the service of reaching a protected creek or harbor where his young family can deploy a fleet of kayaks and sailing dinghies.
Tiny sailboats offer ridiculous fun in proportion to their cost. For my purposes, “tiny” means “light enough to lift on top of my car even when I’m tired.” The lightest 15-footer requires some muscle to manage on and off the water; 8-or 10-footers require almost none. If I’m tired I won’t consider doing the trailer dance with a 15-footer, much less getting my 6,000-lb Folkboat under way.
At about 9′ and 75 lbs, Karl Stambaugh’s Weekend Dinghy is in my “tiny sailboat” sweet spot. An adult of average strength can cartop it on anything with roof racks. If you have a pickup truck or van, it takes seconds to slide a little flat-bottomed skiff like this into the back for transport. With Karl out of town I had a chance to test this. He left the boat in his yard for me; I lifted the boat by the center thwart and swung it onto my shoulder for the 15-yard walk to my Ford Econoline van. I lowered the stern to the ground, propped the bow on the floor of the van, and slid the boat in. It took about 40 seconds. With practice, there’d be smoother choreography and less danger to my back or the boat’s finish. The cargo van swallowed the 9′ dinghy whole, the bow just reaching the front seat.
Photo by John C. Harris
At 9′ long and a shade over 3′ wide, the Weekend Dinghy will fit on top of most—or inside of some—vehicles.
At the marina where I keep my Folkboat, I eased the Weekend Dinghy out the back of the van and over the edge of the dock. Oars, sprit, water bottle, sandwich, and iPod followed. To get it out of the way, I mounted the mast in its step for the trip across the anchorage.
Most dinghies this size are prams, to yield maximum waterplane for stability and volume. Stepping down from the dock, I was reminded that this boat is pointy at one end—step in the narrow bow section, and the dinghy will go transom-over-chocks, wetting my trousers and voiding the iPod warranty. Be careful to step to the center in 70-lb boats! The Weekend Dinghy’s bow is handsome and improves handling on all points, but embarking crew should think of the boat as a 7′ 6″ pram with a bow fairing on it.
At the first oar stroke, I appreciated the extra bow. While a pram dinghy will make a sort of slushing noise under way, the Weekend Dinghy glides silently. I crossed the anchorage and passed my gear into the Folkboat. I stowed the 13′ 3″ mast and sail on the Folkboat’s port side deck. The mast isn’t much longer than a whisker pole, and not at all in the way even aboard the 26′ Folkboat.
Photo by John C. Harris
The Weekend Dinghy may be kept a simple rowboat, or rigged to sail.
As I tacked down the Rhode River in 8–10 knots true, the Weekend Dinghy towed without fuss. So little fuss, even, that when the painter slipped off the stern cleat, I didn’t realize it was gone. Nearby yachts started to swarm around the handsome dinghy bobbing in the channel, thinking it perhaps abandoned. Awakening, I crash-jibed and tacked back up, the distance affording me a chance to appreciate the Weekend Dinghy’s deep sheer from a distance, and to wonder how quickly I could build a replacement for Karl if the dinghy was plowed under by the monster sedan cruiser that was bearing down in the channel.
I could build one pretty fast. Quick building, in fact, was in Stambaugh’s design brief. Quarter-inch plywood sides are stitched to a 3⁄8″ bottom using plastic wire ties. Thickened epoxy bonds and seals the seams and forgives almost any tyro mistake. The three seats are 1⁄2″ plywood, and a single plywood frame amidships spreads the sides to a beam of 40″. A mahogany rail stiffens the sheer, and fiberglass fabric sheathing outside contributes to rigidity. A breasthook and quarter knees provide excellent handholds, and their compound bevels aren’t going to deter an amateur. The Weekend Dinghy’s near-instantaneous assembly has made it a popular subject for “family boatbuilding” glue-a-thons, where parent-child teams build a basic hull in three days.
Rowing, towing, and lost-dinghy exercises completed, I sailed back up the Rhode River and anchored off a popular beach. I rowed ashore for a rigging session. The Weekend Dinghy begins life as a basic rowing dinghy, and may be converted to sail with the addition of a daggerboard trunk and bolt-in maststep. Stambaugh’s mast partner scheme folds up and stows away in a few moments. You can have it in and out in a flash, clearing the forward thwart for rowing with a passenger seated astern. The 33-sq-ft leg-o’-mutton sail is laced to the mast, and there’s a sprit boom. No fiddly hardware; everything is lashed, keeping the rigging cheap and simple. In less time than it took to unbutton the Folkboat’s mainsail cover, I had everything set and drawing.
Photo by John C. Harris
This boat tows without fuss. It’s an ideal sailing tender from which to explore quiet anchorages.
For absolute simplicity of construction, the rudder is a plate of 1⁄2″ marine plywood. Simple rudders like this suit family boatbuilding events and impatient builders. But as I hung over the transom in deep water off the beach, trying to line up the pintles and gudgeons as the boat backed down under sail, it occurred to me that builders sailing off a beach would do well to spend an extra hour or two on a kick-up rudder.
The Weekend Dinghy bore off and sped away under sail with assurance. Light and easily driven, the dinghy’s handling was crisp on all points. Such a light hull doesn’t like being pinched, but I tacked through 90 or 100 degrees and didn’t hang up in stays. The sprit rig’s vanging effect yielded docile off-wind handling, with no twist in the sail to set the boat rolling.
This is carefree sailing. In really small sailboats, the weight of an adult overpowers the small sail in modest breezes. Keep your weight low and centered, and it’s very hard to have a mishap. Still, stay in warm water. Unless you glue some foam under the seats, there’s no positive flotation. If a boat this small swamps, self-rescue is unlikely, so keep a weather eye and don’t get too far from shore.
Photo by John C. Harris
The Weekend Dinghy, designed by Karl Stambaugh, is a quickly and simply built stitch-and-glue skiff.
Boats like this are “personal watercraft” for the enlightened. Sitting on the floor with the side panel providing good back support, you are inches above the water and 21⁄2 knots feels like 9 in a big auxiliary sailboat. In fact, 21⁄ 2 knots is about what you’ll see in light air. Think of that as a nice walking pace—you can cover a lot of miles on a Saturday afternoon. The boat’s too small to plane, except perhaps in heavy air with a 45-lb child prodigy sailor at the helm. But it’s such fun for a single adult. Bring a seat cushion, and disappear for hours of shoreline and marina exploration, burning no oil and bothering no one.
Alas, 8 out of 10 readers will ask if they can mount an outboard. Because the transom is lightly built and there is no integral flotation, the short answer is “No.” The long answer is, “Why would you sully such a boat with an outboard?” A noisy, expensive outboard motor that costs more than the materials is crazy on a boat that rows and sails this well. A sputtering outboard dinghy shatters the tranquility of a beautiful anchorage, whereas a nice wooden rowing and sailing dinghy enhances it.
A fleet of Weekend Dinghies darting around the harbor on the evening breeze is a beguiling vision. A cruising family should have two, or even three or four of these in tow, to be set loose upon reaching the anchorage for impromptu races and fleet actions. Sailors young and old will sharpen their skills. They may even give up the marina bills for good and spend their weekends in wholesome dinghies like this one.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2008 and appears here as archival material. Plans and kits for the Weekend Dinghy are available from Chesapeake Marine Design.
One might logically figure that drift boats just…drift. That the river current is their main source of locomotive power. And a long set of lightweight oars are more for maneuvering than for serious forward or reverse motion.
Jason Cajune, who designs and builds premium wooden drift boats at his Montana Boatbuilders shop near the Yellowstone River, says a lot of fly-fishing guides view their boats simply as a form of transportation rather than as a tool to help them catch fish. “I see a lot of guides take their clients down the river and drop them off on a bank to fish from shore. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
To be sure, rowing a boat upstream with three persons aboard can be strenuous and a good upper-body workout. The same can be said of working quickly from one side of the river to the other to get within casting distance of a good-looking eddy where a trout might lurk in the shadow of the bank, playing the current. In between these bursts of activity, manning a drift boat is indeed quiet, reverent work, the hull making no sound or leaving any wake as it moves at the same speed as the current. It’s not unlike a ride in a hot-air balloon—silent and seemingly inert, suspended in its medium.
Photo by Dan Spurr
Drift boats, whose lineage goes back to the McKenzie River type from Oregon, have proven to be nimble whitewater boats and excellent fly-fishing platforms. The Freestone Classic 15 model, by Montana Boatbuilders, is available in kit form.
The basic drift boat form evolved from various sources: among the boats that made their way from the East Coast to the West Coast in the 19th century were log-driving bateaux and fishing dories. These flat-bottomed types were later adapted for use on Oregon’s McKenzie and Rogue Rivers, where they were given considerably increased rocker to help them confront whitewater. Their ends are fine, and some early drift boats were double-enders. The stern probably would still be as pointed as the bow were it not convenient to lead an anchor rode over a transom. Drift-boat anchor systems are marvelously simple: a small grapnel-type anchor is suspended over the transom at the end of its rode, where it is remotely deployed and retrieved by the helmsman, who never has to leave his seat. A cam cleat secures the rode.
On a fine spring morning, Cajune and I floated one of his Freestone Classic models down the Yellowstone River from Pine Creek to Carter’s Bridge, a distance of about seven miles. To the east the jagged summits of the Absaroka Mountains were still snow-covered, and to the west the early sun shone on the sage-covered backside of the Gallatin Range, the soil reddening in the light. Ospreys and eagles flew over the river looking for the same thing we were: trout. It was, Cajune said, a “guide’s holiday,” one of those few precious days between the Mother’s Day hatch, which marks the traditional beginning of the summer fishing season, and the arrival of tourist fishermen from around the country and the world. I manned the oars while Cajune cast a streamer into the eddies forming along the banks. “Fish like slower water near shore,” he said, “because they don’t have to work as hard, and they feel safer from birds, but they also want to be near fast water where the food is.”
Photo by Dan Spurr
With the grapnel set, the drift boat stays put while the fisherman focuses on his casts. The athwartship timbers are fitted with thigh braces, giving two fishermen plenty of support while at anchor or while the oarsman brings them near the best fishing holes.
Because the drift boat is essentially flat-bottomed, construction logically lends itself to plywood, taking good advantage of its superb physical properties. Owing to their relatively small size—nearly always under 20′ and often less than 16′ long—many drift boats can have topsides and bottoms built from two sheets of plywood scarfed together. The 4′ width of standard plywood sheets has, to an extent, dictated the design of wooden drift boats. At Montana Boatbuilders, the choice is 9mm (3⁄8″) okoume mahogany plywood panels stitched and glued together, though stitched and taped is a more accurate description of modern methods in which narrow strips of fiberglass cloth or “tape” are applied to the seams on top of fillets, and wetted out with epoxy resin. In the finished boats that Cajune builds for his clients, the standard bottom is a sandwich of fiberglass and Kevlar over a honeycomb core, with an exterior covering of a 1⁄4″-thick high-density polyurethane material that can withstand a sharp strike from a rock. The inside of the bottom panel is given a coating of Speedliner, a rubberized material designed for truck bed liners. It won’t dent if a tool is dropped on it and also provides excellent traction. This type of bottom construction is optional with Montana Boatbuilders’ kits; the standard kit is built out of plain plywood. In either case, the bottom is the jig around which the topsides are formed.
None of Cajune’s designs have frames. The narrow, radiused transom of the Freestone Classic is made up of three layers of 3mm plywood. (For the kits, a simpler flat transom is included, but a builder wanting a radiused transom could laminate his own.) White oak is used for gunwales, bench seats, and most other trim, especially if it needs bending.
After a few miles on the river, Cajune handed me the rod in exchange for the oars. “Okoume is hard to beat for strength-to-weight ratio,” he said. “A good plywood boat is much lighter than one in fiberglass or aluminum.” And a lighter boat, he added, is easier to row upstream. “When you find a spot in the river you want to fish,” he continued, “a good guide will work the boat in a loop so he can return to the spot.” That means rowing upstream and across the current, which requires effort, but effort that is diminished by a lightweight, easily maneuverable boat. A light boat also is easier to hold stationary in the current, or, if you want to have a little fun, surf a standing wave.
Photo by Dan Spurr
Sawyer Cobra oarlocks are an accessory designed to work well with rope-wrapped oars for whitewater rowing.
Kits are available for the company’s 13′, 15′, and 16′ Freestone Classic models and the 15′ and 16′ Freestone Guide models, but not for the more complex Kingfisher and popular Recur ve design. The Recurve’s sheerline rises dramatically amidships. Forward and aft, the sheerline takes pronounced dips to reduce freeboard, making it easier to get in and out of the boat; drift boats aren’t accessed from docks, but from some pretty awkward places. Around here, the shorelines often are choked with cottonwood and willows. Cajune’s larger models have more beam at the chine—up to 58″ as opposed to 48″— and so are more stable, enabling an angler to stand more securely at the rail to reel in a fish. Beam at the oarlocks ranges from 64″ to 75″.
Cajune has invested in a small CNC (computer numerically controlled) machine for precision cutting of pieces. Kits include all necessary wood, fiberglass, fastenings, and epoxy. They’re designed for home builders who are expected to supply their own tools, sandpaper, paint, and varnish. A 60-page step-by-step manual with photos and drawings is included, and a DVD is in the works. Advanced woodworkers might simply purchase the plans.
When we hauled the boat out at Carter’s Bridge, a fellow sauntered up admiringly. “That’s a damned fine-looking boat,” he said. Such words are seldom bestowed on fiberglass and metal drift boats.
Montana Boatbuilders
Flat-bottom and straight-sided construction make plywood the logical planking material for a drift boat. A 60-page manual accompanies both plans and kits.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2008 and appears here as archival material. If you have more info about this boat, plan or design – please let us know in the comment section.
Boat nuts of a certain age still shiver with pleasure at the recollection of perky technicolor blondes in old Chris-Craft ads. A generation of boomers learned how to water-ski behind varnished runabouts, and these days they turn out at classic boat shows in big numbers to admire the restored beauties.
Already a monumental success in 1950, Chris-Craft thought to use up their mountain of mahogany scrap by cutting kits for handsome plywood power skiffs. It must have been some mountain; Chris-Craft claims that between 1950 and 1958 they shipped 93,000 boat kits in 13 different models sized from 8′ to 31′.
There’s only so much patience and money in the world for major restorations, and the pool of restorable Chris-Crafts is dwindling. Meanwhile, the people who grew up in mahogany runabouts are at retirement age and casting about for affordable projects. Captain Jim Shotwell, boatbuilder and activist member of the Antique & Classic Boat Society, sought to breed a new generation of classics by reviving the Chris-Craft kits of the 1950s.
Photo courtesy of James Craft Marine Services
James Craft Marine Services offers reproductions of the highly regarded Chris-Craft kit boats from the 1950s. The single-cockpit Comet GR is a “Gentleman’s Racer.”
Shotwell tracked down two 1950s Chris-Craft kits in the garage of a New Jersey yacht broker, still in the original packing crates. Research at museums and reverse engineering of completed Chris-Craft kits ultimately gave him a catalog of 12 kits from 8′ to 16′. He obtained permission from Chris-Craft to reproduce the designs, and set up a company called James Craft at his Nescopeck, Pennsylvania, shop on the banks of the Susquehanna River. So authentic are his kits that the Antique & Classic Boat Society accepts finished James Craft kits as “contemporary reproductions” for competition judging.
A 14-footer is one of Shotwell’s most popular models, and like the originals it’s available with several deck schemes. There’s a utilitarian open hull, the Dolphin, meant to be steered with the outboard’s tiller, and suited to fishing. Two decked-in versions, the Hornet and Zephyr, have wheel steering and speedboat styling, and look especially smart.
The Zephyr has a shapely single-chined hull with tumble-homed stern quarters, a shallow V amidships with noticeable compound curve in the sections, and as fine a bow as you can get by twisting plywood bottom panels onto a stem. Such shapes are meant for protected waters, but a 15-horse outboard (preferably a restored 1955 Evinrude) will pull a water-skier at speed.
Photo courtesy of James Craft Marine Services
James Craft Marine Services offers reproductions of the highly regarded Chris-Craft kit boats from the 1950s. The 14′ Zephyr is a double-cockpit runabout.
I have a huge collection of mid-century “Build Your Own Boat” publications put out by Mechanics Illustrated and Popular Mechanics. I love the beautiful inked isometric views of keels and stems and gusseted frames that, the old magazines promised, “Any weekend carpenter can build!” I wonder how much imprecation and salty language was invented by the average weekend carpenter as he beveled all of those frames and stringers. With an army of production-oriented workers at their disposal, Chris-Craft had the wherewithal to prefabricate frames and prebeveled components in their kits. The availability of a kit in which the multitude of bevels is already conquered for you must explain the staggering success of the kits at the time.
In his Pennsylvania factory, Shotwell has faithfully recreated the kits, including accurately beveled frames, stems, and knees. Frames and transoms are already glued up. Even chine logs and sheer clamps, which have rolling bevels, are machined in advance. With Shotwell’s pre-cut parts, construction techniques that were state-of-the-art in the 1950s are accessible to the average 2006 builder. All a Zephyr builder needs are a couple of 2x6s for the traditional ladder-frame building jig. Seven frames, a stem, an “inner keel,” and transom are set up on the jig within an hour or two of opening the box. Frames are made of fir, as are the numerous stringers. Bronze screws are used throughout construction.
Photo courtesy of James Craft Marine Services
The box the boat comes in contains beveled frames, which save the builder time and ensure accurate fit.
The plywood hull panels are cut to shape but will require trimming and beveling. Arguably the trickiest step in the entire assembly will be joining the bottom panels to the side panels. The bottom panels sit atop the side panels from the transom to about Station 2. At that point the builder cuts a jog in the panels and the lap joint becomes a butt joint. This is a neater way to build single-chined boats. The alternative is to expose as much as an inch of plywood end-grain in grinding the bottom panels smooth with the side at the bow. This challenging transition is largely ignored in modern stitch-and-glue boatbuilding but was a rite of passage for plywood boat builders for decades. It’s good to see this craftsmanlike approach back in circulation.
Photo courtesy of James Craft Marine Services
Intended for amateur assembly, these kits make fine projects for youth groups.
The original Zephyr was skinned with fir marine plywood, but Shotwell has substituted okoume, or sapele for those who want a varnished hull. The high-quality marine panels of 2006 are an unqualified improvement over the originals. So are the adhesives. In 1955 the kits were assembled with Dolfinite bedding compound between parts; 6 to 10 years was the stated span in which this goo would keep the water out. Unless the planking was protected with fiberglass, or completely rebedded, your Chris-Craft kit would begin to leak, and if not maintained, it would slowly dissolve into mulch. I’m guessing that’s what happened to most of the 93,000 kits. Modern Zephyr builders will use epoxy wherever wood meets wood. So strong is the epoxy that the bronze screws are largely vestigial; Shotwell suggests that temporary drywall screws could be used to hold parts together, removed when the epoxy cures, and the holes plugged.
Hulls are sheathed on the outside with fiberglass set in epoxy. The 7.5-ounce fiberglass cloth will resist dings and abrasion and provide a hard, smooth surface for paint or varnish. If you pickle the interior of the boat with epoxy, water will never touch wood and maintenance will be reduced to near zero.
Planked mahogany decks finished with varnish are part of the iconic look of the mid-century Chris-Craft, and are included in the James Craft kits. The planked deck is supported by frames, a kingplank, and battens backing up every plank seam. Bonded with epoxy, this scheme will never leak. A covering board sawn from solid mahogany sustains the look. Staining the mahogany is the best way to achieve the even coloration beneath varnish that distinguishes a real Chris-Craft.
Builders have the option to add an authentically styled windshield to their Zephyr; the frame is produced for James Craft in chrome-plated bronze. James Craft can supply, or help you track down, other bits of period hardware to complete the nostalgic reproduction of a 1950s nautical icon.
These construction drawings from the original Chris-Craft packages are included with all James Craft kits. They describe traditional plywood construction with a robust backbone and plenty of transverse frames: light, tight, and strong. Built of better materials than the originals, the James Craft boats should outlast their predecessors.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2007 and appears here as archival material. If you have more info about this boat, plan or design – please let us know in the comment section.
Shetland boats caught my fancy a long while ago, and Ian Oughtred’s careful interpretations of them retain their heart-catching beauty of line and also their incredible ability in turbulent water.
I remember trying to photograph boats at the delightful Scottish Traditional Boat Festival at Portsoy on Scotland’s Moray Firth, when a short steep sea had built up with wind against a four-knot tide. Every small boat there, every skipper, was frustrated, stopped in their tracks, sails and spars lurching—except for one. Iain Oughtred appeared in his lovely Ness Yawl, JEANNIE II, and slithered over the tops of the waves as if on some sort of buoyant magic carpet. Iain left the other boats standing, sailed rings around them, came back to see what was holding them up, like an irritating youngster who has completely outpaced the oldies. She was the only boat that day that photographed well, with hull, rig, and sails doing her credit. If I needed to get back to harbor in a turbulent sea and didn’t want to spend all afternoon doing it, I would feel confident that a Ness Yawl would not disappoint me.
Photo by Kathy Mansfield
Iain Oughtred has made a practice of designing—and using—lightweight, glued-lap plywood rowing and sailing boats inspired by the Nordic tradition.
The historic type on which the design is based, the Shetland Ness Yole, was known to do the same, never happier than in a tide race where the sea was tricky but the fish were running. The shape is so buoyant at the ends, so built like a fish with her rounded bilge and clean double-ended lines, that she bounces over the waves and picks up less friction than a heavier, deeper, or less shapely boat. The Ness Yawl is a different boat, without the shallow long keel and the very low freeboard for rowing, but her hull shape still has similar characteristics. She may crash down on a wave, but she doesn’t dig in. And she’s fast. That was important to a Ness Yole fisherman: his boat needed to help him retreat to harbor quickly before an Atlantic gale hit, and even these traditionally built boats would surf well above their hull speed. The fishing grounds were mainly to the west, so the boats rowed upwind into the prevailing winds, and sailed back either with a load of fish—or with that ballast being shed before the greater urge for self-preservation. The Oughtred Ness Yawl is even lighter, and her 15′ 8″ waterline length gives her speed and also safety. Even as she comes up to a beach, her pointed stern will lift to and split the following waves, tracking well and in control. A good small boat can manage in ideal conditions: it’s her ability in those other situations that can materialize despite the best planning that are the deciding factor in my choice of a boat.
Photo by Kathy Mansfield
Ian Oughtred’s own Ness Yawl, JEANNIE II, is rigged as a gunter sloop, one of several rig variations he has designed for the boat.
I can’t think of a better sail-and-oars boat. It’s the philosophy of the boat, the idea behind her. To go back again to her origins, no Shetlander back in the 19th century planned to sail her upwind with a square sail, and when a more weatherly rig came along, she still moved so fast with a pair or three of oars that precious time was saved. Her stern doesn’t take kindly to an outboard, and the extra weight would be wrongly placed. As with all boats, you work your sailing around the boat’s abilities. She’s a bit lean, you might think, for sailing, but in fact like all Shetland-style boats she stiffens up as she heels. The waterline beam is considerably less when upright than when heeling toward the gunwale. In steady winds she’ll quite safely sail heeled somewhat over, her crew central and sitting up to windward, though I prefer not much more than 30 degrees. Iain Oughtred sailed to windward in 18 to 20 knots of wind under full sail and found she did remarkably well on her ear, beating her main competitor at the finish line, and it saved him tying in reefs. Some of us might not be so keen, or so adept, but it’s good to know it’s possible.
It’s here that the mizzen could come in handy, which is one of Iain’s possible rigs, but she heaves-to nicely without the mizzen, and the extra sail area is so small, it doesn’t really have the drawing capacity. A sloop rig might be good, but it’s less amenable to carrying passengers with its boom and kicking strap (as a vang is called here) taking up valuable space. A yawl configuration could be nice, the jib and mizzen making a good combination in heavy winds, or a jib could be put up instead of the lug in worsening conditions. But the balance-lug rig that Iain suggests is such a satisfying sail, so user-friendly and simple, I’d be tempted to just stick with it. Even the owner of WAHOO, built with a standing lug and mizzen, concurs in that. The lug sail goes well to windward, pointing up about 45 degrees and much further in gusts, so there’s no real need for a jib. In almost no wind at all, the Ness Yawl is apt to drift downwind, making more leeway than headway. That’s not what she was designed for; why not get out the oars?
Photo by Kathy Mansfield
The yawl rig, with a balanced lug foresail, keeps things simple in the cockpit but, in this case, necessitates a bentwood tiller to clear the mizzenmast.
I can speak with some considerable experience of rowing Iain Oughtred’s Ness Yawls, sometimes under racing conditions, sometimes beating every other boat. This is more a feature of the Ness Yawl than my own prowess: she rows cleanly and quickly, tracking well. Just look at the boat shape: she’s lean and long, shallow draft with low freeboard, easy lines giving no turbulence. It’s good exercise and good fun, much greener than an exercise machine, and adds variety to a day out on the water. Not many dinghies will row this well, and it’s an added pleasure to owning a Ness Yawl.
Photo by Kathy Mansfield
For the Ness Yawl he uses as a “Raid” boat and for light-air lakes, builder Wolfgang Friedl of Vienna, Austria, increased NO NAME 3’s sail area by adding a jib set on a short bowsprit.
Few boats developed from a traditional working boat are as adaptable to small boat sailing as a Ness Yawl, and few are as much fun. It’s worth remembering, however, that it can be adapted to different requirements. The ALBANACH is a Ness Yawl that has been half-decked with built-in buoyancy fore and aft and movable lead ballast. She’s steady in most winds, and can be sailed that much more as a consequence. The ballast is removable for rowing or for light-wind sailing. Again she’s a beautiful boat, and that again is a joy of the Oughtred designs. They sail really well, but the delights of ownership are many and varied. It’s no surprise that the designs sell so well.
Iain Oughtred’s plans for the Ness Yawl are intricately detailed and thoughtful, and he offers enough variations on the sail plan to keep any builder thinking.
Paul Gartside’s plans for modest-sized cruising boats inspired by the Falmouth cutters of his native England should all come with one of those warnings from the Surgeon General, this one about the risks of indecision and the dangers of addiction. To look at one of the profile drawings too long leads to certain wanderings of the mind that can all too easily lead to reckless daydreaming. You start with something simple, say his 22′ 6″ centerboard sloop, and before you know it, you’ve said to yourself, well, if 22’6″, then why not 2′ longer? And if the 24′ 6″ cutter, then why not 29′ ? Before you know what hit you, you’re looking at the 30-footer and you’ve got yourself comfortably seated in that main saloon after a fine day’s sail, anchored down in some lovely cove somewhere with a good book and a glass of tawny port.
Jim Mitchell had been through many boat design-and-construction sequences before he started thinking about one of Gartside’s designs. Mitchell’s own boatbuilding goes back to his teenage years, and he had already worked with designers and builders: many years before ELF he had had Joel White build the 45′ Pete Culler–designed scow schooner VINTAGE, and later he modified a Bill Garden–designed power cruiser to produce KINTORE (see WB No. 140). He probably had his design-gazing habit pretty well under control by the time he started looking seriously at the Gartside portfolio.
He knew what he was after, and as with his previous boats he had a very specific goal in mind. This time, he wanted a sloop of modest proportions, something a little larger than the smallest of Gartside’s impressive family of cruising designs. But he didn’t want anything too large, either. He started off with transcontinental cooperation on adapting design No. 106 from Gartside, who lives in Sidney, British Columbia—an echo of Mitchell’s previous collaboration with Garden, who also lives in Sidney. Mitchell, who lives in Camden, Maine, redrew the plans to make the boat large enough for two (the other being his wife, Lolly) to cruise in relative comfort.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
ELF is an ample and seaworthy cruising boat, well outfitted for voyages of as much as a month at a time, with such amenities as a canopy to keep the sun off the cockpit. She is small enough, however, to be moved by trailer to the next cruising grounds.
Now right here, it’s best to take note of the inclination of almost everyone who looks at boat plans to want to just change a little here, add a little there, reconfigure this, and end up moving everything around. Stock answer: don’t do it. Mitchell’s engineering background combined with a lifetime of sailing, cruising, and boatbuilding gives him an unusual skill set and an ability to communicate in the right language with the designer. He had already been through several boat construction projects (including providing some 50 design sheets for KINTORE). Even with this background, his changes didn’t represent any radical departure from Gartside’s design. Other than making the design larger by 8.333 percent, he had clear interior priorities in mind: among them a little more galley space, a semi-private head, a heater, and more storage space.
The Mitchells planned to be gone cruising for long stretches of time. They didn’t just want to cruise the coast of Maine; they also wanted to be able to go far afield— perhaps a month in the Bahamas. They wanted the boat to be small enough to just fit within the maximum legal width limits for highway trailering (although the boat must be lifted onto the trailer by a Travelift). At the same time, it had to be within the substantial towing capacities of their truck so the boat wouldn’t have to be shipped overland.
The result is a 24’41⁄2″ double-ender that is the “just right” fit for the way the Mitchells like to sail, which is to say cruising. The enlargement retains the fine proportions of Gartside’s design No. 106, including its trunk cabin profile. For a solo sailor or a couple with weekend or one-week voyages in mind, no doubt Gartside’s original 22’6″ version would suit the purpose equally well.
Mitchell was able to work out a cabin plan that uniquely suited his ideas about what ought to be the fitout for comfort and practicality for his cruising needs. Below decks, the V-berths are forward, with neatly worked-out storage lockers and shelves on each side. In the main cabin, the space is divided amidships by the centerboard trunk. Rather than getting in the way, the low-profile trunk provides a convenient perch while preparing a meal in the well-laid-out but compact galley to starboard or the navigation table to port. The navigation table flips up to allow access to a plumbed semi-private head underneath. The port side also has a locker, a useful counter with drawers under, and a cabin heater. Deck prisms help bring light below.
Photo by Tom Jackson
The practical and comfortable layout of ELF’s interior reflects Jim Mitchell’s tastes and his extensive experience with cruising sailboats.
With her cold-molded hull (built at French & Webb in Belfast, Maine), ELF’s interior volume is high for a boat of this type. Her coach roof has substantial camber, giving her good inside sitting headroom yet keeping her cabin sides relatively low so as not to throw her outside appearance out of balance.
The Yanmar diesel remains out of sight under the bridge deck, which has an access hatch, thus keeping the cabin clear of any encumbrance. With sound buffering, the engine stays comparatively quiet for a boat this size.
Over the past few years, the Mitchells have followed through on their plans, taking ELF everywhere they wanted to. They’ve crossed the Gulf Stream out of Florida, picking their weather window with care. They’ve spent a month or more at a time in their favorite cruising grounds of the Bahamas, extending their season from their usual Maine waters. The ability to tow the boat by trailer has kept open a whole range of cruising possibilities for them despite the boat’s relatively small size.
They have made very few changes over the years. For one thing, the boat demonstrated too much weather helm with its original rig. So Mitchell added 14″ to the length of the bowsprit and had a new, larger jib built. That seemed to solve the problem. Other than the usual fitting-out to make a cabin a home, they haven’t changed a thing in the interior layout and wouldn’t do so even if given another chance. The only remark they have is that the boat, after some weeks of cruising, can seem just a little too small. But if the weather’s fair, the large cockpit, rigged as it often is with a tarpaulin to keep the sun off, provides the best living room imaginable.
Photo by Tom Jackson
With pinrails at the mast base, parrels at the boom jaws, running backstays, bulwarks, and deck prisms for light below, ELF has many touches to keep a traditional sailor happy.
The gaff-headed mainsail is small enough to be manageable. Together with trailerability, the ease of handling the rig was one of Mitchell’s primary considerations in choosing a boat of modest size. This year—remarkably— Mitchell turned 80 years old, so he wanted a rig that wouldn’t tax his strength too much. The main raises easily with its throat and peak halyards.
It must be said, though, that if you’re the kind of person who goes aboard a boat like this—with its two main halyards, running backstays, and jackyard topsail—and you say rather dubiously, “Lot of lines to pull,” you might not be happy with this rig. Personally, I much prefer it. Years ago, I told someone that driving a highway at 55 mph “isn’t driving, it’s rolling.” Similarly, if I don’t have something to do with sails and lines while under way, it’s not sailing, it’s going for a boat ride. It’s just a matter of inclination and preference.
I joined the Mitchells for an afternoon of light-air sailing, which is not the best way to show the mettle of this type of boat, with its relatively heavy displacement. I had enough of a taste to know that she handles like a much larger boat—when first aboard, you’re tempted to ask whether she is a 26-footer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mitchells have heard her mistaken for a 30-footer. Mitchell feels that at about 12 knots of wind speed ELF is at her happiest. She has seen much more, but she handles comfortably with the main alone in relatively heavy wind, and Mitchell says she has an uncommon ability to tack without missing stays even under just the staysail alone.
I don’t sail gaff rig nearly as much as I’d like, considering it’s my favorite rig to look at, so I sometimes have difficulty interpreting trim on a gaff-headed mainsail in very light airs on an unfamiliar boat. But I could feel that ELF moves purposefully even then. She isn’t going to win the races, but that is just about the last thing the Mitchells have in mind.
ELF has been everything the couple hoped for: seaworthy, comfortable, stable, and secure, with shallow draft giving her the ability to seek out those secluded places that keep cruising sailors willing to round just one more point of land, to find just one more perfect cove.
Paul Gartside’s drawings of a modest-sized double-ender caught Jim Mitchell’s eye, and working with the designer’s approval he enlarged the boat for greater comfort in the accommodations. Mitchell’s revised sail plan (right of the two above) is proportional but was revised to include a slightly larger jib set on a longer bowsprit. His accommodations revision reworked the interior a bit to include, among other things, a semi-private head and a cabin heater. Mitchell and his wife, Lolly, have extensively cruised the boat, which they can haul on a trailer.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2007 and appears here as archival material. If you have more info about this boat, plan or design – please let us know in the comment section.
If yours is a small professional shop, one with a self developed specialty product, and that product is a humble skiff—a wooden, outboard-powered utility skiff, to be precise—then you’ll have to launch a lot of boats, successful boats, before that singular product acquires a regional reputation. In time, the boat may take on your name. With luck, and the publicity conferred by print publishing, the boat may transcend the geography of its origins and assume an identity known nationally; in effect, it may achieve brand recognition.
Alton Wallace’s West Pointer is one such craft. The Tolman skiff is another. Since 1973, Renn Tolman has been refining an all-purpose, typically open workboat generically referred to as an Alaskan skiff.
I’ve been a student of Alaskan skiffs for about as long as Tolman has. But where my interest was remote—from the opposite corner of the country (Maine)—Tolman pursued his on location, having settled in Homer, Alaska, in 1971 after a teaching career in Rhode Island. He brought with him woodworking skills, a passion for long-range fishing and hunting in boats of his own making, and what became a constant quest for the perfect skiff for Alaska’s coastal waters. Not least, he retained an ability to teach—except now the subject is skiffs rather than American history. Today, Renn Tolman has not only put his name on an Alaskan skiff, he’s probably defined it.
Photo by Philip Walker
Renn Tolman designed his eponymous skiff as a workhorse for rugged Alaskan environs. The boat has proven to be adaptable to a wide range of locales—and to a wide range of configurations. AGLOOKIK, was built by Philip Walker for use around the North Wales island of Anglesey —“a wild and beautiful place,” says Philip.
I’ll do the design history in brief. Once in Alaska, Tolman started with a traditional tombstone-stern dory fitted with an inboard motorwell. It was the slowest boat on the bay, but he liked its looks, and appreciated the sea-worthiness of its sweeping sheer, flared sides, and ability to carry loads. So he switched to so-called dory skiffs: first a Carolina, and then a local type, the Cook Inlet, and then a Carolina crossed with an Oregon Dory. The latter were faster boats, but they were flat-bottomed and thus a hard ride in any but calm conditions.
It wasn’t just design, though, driving Tolman and his partner, Mary Griswold (the pair turned professional within 10 years of arrival in the state); it was also materials and construction. They adopted filled-epoxy adhesive and epoxy resin–impregnated fiberglass cloth fairly early. The big breakthroughs came when they changed to longitudinal framing (as practiced by veteran Homer builder George Hamm), and combined it with then-new stitch-and-glue construction. Tolman’s overall system—specifically: a few sturdy stringers and a minimum of athwartship structure; stitched-and-glued plywood panels; epoxy saturation and fiberglass sheathing—enabled Tolman and Griswold to produce durable skiffs competitively. Equally important, it made possible an economically built V-bottomed hull form, which vastly improved the ride quality.
Within another 10 years Tolman had standardized on a customizable design he’d devised through considerable trial and error, and produced in two lengths: 18′ and 20′. Both sizes share the same hull; the 18 is simply a 20 with 2′ removed in the afterbody. This boat, the quintessential Tolman skiff, is characterized by a shallow V-bottom (8 degrees deadrise at the transom), flared topsides, high bow, strong sheer, and full-length spray rail. Lightweight and easily driven, a Tolman hull can be fitted out in a great variety of configurations—set up for beach cruising, say, with tiller steering. It can be rigged with center-console controls, or configured for recreational or commercial fishing (removable binboards, and net-hauling gear with net-kindly gunwales), or perhaps be given a small cuddy.
Photo by Mark Abb
Mark Abb of Camden, Maine, built this center-console model.
Some 20 years on, Tolman had built enough of these boats to write a book about them, A Skiff for All Seasons: How to Build an Alaskan Skiff, published in 1993. I reviewed it in WoodenBoat magazine that year (No. 113), recommending both the book and the boat—but challenged Tolman’s claim that an amateur could complete one of his skiffs in the 300 hours predicted. Well, shortly after that issue of the magazine appeared, a letter arrived from Chris Banas, an industrial-arts teacher and first-time backyard boatbuilder in Kenai, Alaska, who’d built the 20′ hull in 300 hours, “plus 50 hours for extras, 350 hours total. Those are after-work hours—a notoriously inefficient type of hour,” Banas wrote. He enclosed a photo of the finished product, at wide-open throttle, with family aboard—minus Banas himself. “I needed a skiff that was light enough for my wife and kids to handle on and off our beach, yet stout enough to handle a day in our water-taxi business, which involves remote-site drop-off and pickup. This skiff is it. We couldn’t be happier with her. The fact that repairs and modifications can be made in the field is an additional bonus in our situation.”
And not long after Banas’s letter, Mark Abb, former shop manager at WoodenBoat School, started a 20′ Tolman skiff on speculation, at a rented shop in Brooklin, Maine. Abb corresponded with Renn Tolman on certain construction details; Tolman connected him with Banas. Abb had prior boatbuilding experience, though not in stitch-and-glue. “I used fir plywood, but won’t do that again,” he recalls. “Turned out fine, but was an effort to sand and finish well.” Tolman also connected Abb with a buyer, once the project was well along. According to Abb, who sea-trialed the skiff before delivering it, Renn Tolman “designed a solid-riding, dry, no-frills skiff with a capable appearance to match. I was pleased with the stiff bottom; full-length stringers allowed no oilcanning [deflection of the bottom panels].”
Abb continues: “I liked the versatility for building the boat’s interior, and may have ‘corrupted’ things as a result. But the last report from her owner—a Nantucket [Massachusetts] fly fisherman—was thumbs up. He re-powered with a Honda 90-hp four-stroke [Abb had installed a 70-hp two-stroke] and said it goes. I never heard if the extra engine weight was an issue.
“All in all, a straightforward project that yields a great boat within reach of those with limited experience. Mine took more time than described, but that was a result of building on spec to my own wants, and then working to suit the buyer. Regardless, I’m glad with the way it turned out, and have no reservations about building another.”
Photo by Jim Shula
Jim Shula of Buxton, Maine, built this Tolman Skiff for use as a trailerable camp cruiser.
In 2003, Renn Tolman wrote a second book, Tolman Alaskan Skiffs: Building Plans for Three Plywood/Epoxy Skiffs. And, he secured the publishing rights to his first volume, which had gone out of print. Note that Tolman’s name is not only on the cover of the new book as author, it’s now also on the boat. And the new book’s format is larger, since the readability of his drawings was a point I’d addressed in my WoodenBoat review of book one. More to the point, the Tolman skiff has evolved, along with— and in part, because of—the technology that powers it.
Tolman’s 20′ model is the new “Standard.” A lengthened version (21′ 4″ ) with wide chine-flats, introduced in 1993, constitutes a second model called the “Widebody.” The third and latest skiff model is the “Jumbo”; it’s 22′ in length, with a deeper-V (12 degrees deadrise at the transom) and additional draft and beam. A new feature for these boats: all sorts of optional superstructure, particularly for the Widebody and Jumbo skiffs. Jake Berry, a builder in Sedgwick, Maine, just completed a Tolman cabin skiff for a customer in, of all places, Alaska.
Two significant things have not changed since Tolman’s first book: the basic design and construction of a Tolman skiff; and the extraordinary amount of clear, concise, practical information Tolman provides the builder—amateur, semiprofessional, and professional alike. His books are arguably the most comprehensive treatment of a single family of small-craft designs in the technical literature of boatbuilding. Having designed, built, repaired, and modified his self-styled Alaskan skiffs, exclusively, for several decades, there is hardly a detail of planning, construction, outfitting, rigging, operation, and maintenance that Renn Tolman hasn’t thought through, or been apprised of by one of his customers. And he explains all of it: how to build this or that part; what alterations to that part, if any, have been made over time, and why; and which of the many individual elements (storage and flotation compartments, demountable seats, assorted cockpit and splash-well arrangements, an ergonomic center console, cactus-shaped rod racks, etc.), offered up as measured drawings with related commentary, can be added, or not, to your boat.
Tolman’s discussion of four-stroke outboards—plus the increasingly common smaller auxiliary, or kicker— and their potentially deleterious effect on weight distribution is extremely thorough. He tells you exactly which engines (as of manufacturers’ model year 2003) are suitable for his transoms, and why. Tolman’s boats are, by definition, outboard powered, but he’s more honest about coming to terms with these new power plants than are many ’glass and aluminum boat manufacturers, who’ve been reluctant to incur the expense of revamping their production molds and jigs to accommodate four-strokes.
Tolman skiffs are built directly from the book Tolman Alaskan Skiffs, from which these drawings are taken. The book is a chapter-by-chapter instructional on hull construction and layout; numerous configurations for several hulls are offered.
While this essay of mine was not intended to be a book review, it’s virtually impossible now to separate a Tolman skiff from the all-important text that describes how to build one, how to choose the one to build, how to customize that choice, what tools are needed, the shop space required, the list of materials, sources of supply, and the time it will take to complete each step of the building and finishing process. Tolman Alaskan Skiffs is available from the WoodenBoat Store. A Skiff for All Seasons can be ordered from Kamishak Publishing (Homer), while supplies last. As Tolman says, “All the important information in the first book is included in the second, but you may find the former more entertaining reading, and there are some different photographs.”
Final testimonial: Tom Beaudoin, a boatbuilder pal from way back, was drawn to the Homer area from Maine years ago, as a base for hunting and fishing, much as Renn Tolman was. The two became friends. When Tolman and Griswold upgraded to a new 20-footer from an 18-footer they’d logged thousands of distant-bay and tidal-river miles in, Tom Beaudoin bought their well-worn 18.
Happy is he who owns Tolman’s own skiff.
Renn Tolman’s book Tolman Alaskan Skiffs is available from the WoodenBoat Store, P.O. Box 78, Brooklin, ME 04616.It includes plans and detailed building instructions for three different models of this boat.
In 1953, German-born Hannes Lindemann had just begun practicing medicine in Liberia and had in mind to settle into a comfortable life as a doctor when he met Alain Bombard, a Frenchman and fellow physician, who had taken an interest in survival at sea. In the fall of the previous year, October 19 to December 23, Bombard sailed a 15′ Zodiac inflatable 2,700 miles from the Canary Islands to Barbados. Hoping to address issues that led to the poor survival rates of sailors who took to lifeboats during World War II, he intended to survive by living off what the sea provided and took few provisions. He had a net to gather plankton for food, and for drinking, he had a press for extracting water from the flesh of fish; he’d mix it with seawater to extend it. Lindemann, doubting some of the claims made by Bombard following his voyage, “decided to use my own body to experience the problems of the shipwrecked; problems of nourishment, keeping the body healthy, avoiding the dangers of the sea, and, ultimately, keeping the mind healthy.”
Lindemann’s first crossing of the Atlantic, made in 1955 in a 25′ dugout canoe, took 65 days, and while he had worked out solutions to many of the physical challenges, he had not solved the mental difficulties. “I had been in dire despair several times during the crossing. I had been on the verge of giving up, especially when I lost my rudder and the two sea-anchors. Consequently, I set out to prove that one can and must prepare mentally if one is to succeed in any extraordinary feat.”
The preparation for his experiment in survival included what he called Psycho-Hygiene Training to “anchor auto-suggestions deep in the subconscious so that they would automatically come to assist in difficult situations.” For six months he did mental exercises, reciting to himself: I’ll make it, Keep going west, and Never give up. “Thus, my subconscious was prepared to withstand all enticements of a more comfortable life.”
For a second crossing, Lindemann upped the ante by choosing an even smaller boat—a Klepper Aerius 17′ folding kayak—for the voyage. “I congratulated myself on having chosen a folding boat, for now, I would be able to relive exactly the feelings of a lonely castaway; I would share his sufferings, his hope and despair. I would, in fact, have to contend with even greater discomfort than a person afloat in a life raft of a plane or a ship’s lifeboat. By suffering to the utmost in the elements, I could test the durability of the human machine…”
Lindemann set out from the Canary Islands on October 20, 1956, in “a mood of complete self-confidence.” With his two sails raised and an outrigger providing additional stability, he had gone only 3 miles when a pilot boat approached him and ran over the kayak’s outrigger, breaking the paddle that supported the float. The long ordeal of preparing for the crossing had left him “limp, tired, and depleted,” but his inner voice began repeating “I’ll make it, I’ll make it” and rather than head back to the harbor to deal with the setback, he set his bow to the west and continued.
During his 72 days at sea in the cramped quarters of the kayak cockpit, Lindemann did indeed “suffer to the utmost.” Waves driven by a storm lasting several days capsized him twice. Both times he was rendered unconscious and only came to after he had surfaced. The first of those capsizes happened at night and he had to wait for the morning light to right the hull. For nine hours he clung to the upturned kayak in the dark, all the while being hammered by waves as high as 27’. “My spirit grew weak and seemed to want to leave my body, but…I’ll make it and Never give up broke through time and time again and enabled me to persist.”
On December 30, he reached St. Martin on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, and stepped ashore on unsteady legs and weighing 54 lbs less than when he had started. He spent the night in a hotel, and the next morning got back into the kayak—Keep going west—to spend 50 hours sailing to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where a group of his friends was waiting for him.
Dr. Lindemann signed the copy of LIFE that Peter Schwierzke gave me: “Chris from Hannes Sept. 3 Port Townsend”
Lindemann wrote about his two Atlantic crossings in Alone at Sea, which was first published in 1958 and republished in 1993. I was the editor of Sea Kayaker magazine at the time the book’s second volume was released, and I included a profile about Lindemann in the Fall 1993 issue. Shortly after that issue came out, I met Dr. Lindemann in 1993 at a sea-kayak symposium in Port Townsend, Washington. He was 71, a tall, slender figure in a black jacket, with his hair turning silver around the temples. I had with me a copy of his book and the July 22, 1957 LIFE magazine with his picture on the cover, both given to me by Peter Schwierzke, a Klepper importer and the friend of Lindeman who encouraged him to republish Alone at Sea. I introduced myself to him, and he kindly signed both the book and magazine. My time with him was brief, as he was walking to one of the lecture halls to give a presentation.
Peter Schwierzke
In 1993, while speaking at the sea-kayak symposium in Port Townsend, Dr. Lindemann was holding a copy of the Fall issue of Sea Kayaker magazine. We had given that issue to the attendees and in it was a profile about him.
Michael Collins, Sea Kayaker’s publisher, was more fortunate. He and a dozen other kayakers attending the symposium sat with Lindemann in an impromptu gathering and asked him questions about his crossings. Sea-kayak symposium goers are, as a rule, interested in equipment and techniques in the spirit of adventure, but he emphasized that neither of his crossings was a challenge simply for challenge’s sake, but motivated by a drive to learn things that might help people survive, to save lives. Michael had seen the LIFE article when he was a boy, and it was one of the influences that led him to build part of his career around sea kayaking. He recalls that meeting Lindemann almost 30 years after reading the article, and being in the presence of a man he had idolized from a young age did not leave him with a sense of awe, but rather with a feeling of calmness. To a person, everyone in that fortunate symposium group expressed the same feeling after meeting with Lindemann.
I spoke to Peter Schwierzke by phone recently about the time he spent with Lindemann. One of the first things he said when bringing up memories of his friend was, “when I think about talking to Hannes it calms me down.” Years ago, while he was in Sacramento, California, working as an importer and distributor of Klepper kayaks, he had a few quotations from Lindemann posted in his office where they would be regular reminders. One was Stress, eine selbst gewählte lebensform von leben oder leiden (Stress, a self-chosen way of life or suffering). “Hannes made a lifetime study of positive thinking,” Peter recalls. Lindemann wrote books on the topic: Autogenic Training (based on the method he used to prepare for his second crossing) in 1975, and two years later Anti-Stress Program: This is how you cope with everyday life.
Dr. Lindemann was once asked what was the most important thing he had aboard the kayak during his Atlantic ordeal. He didn’t hesitate to answer: “Optimism.” It’s a good piece of advice whether you’re crossing an ocean or just getting through your day.
Dr. Hannes Lindemann passed away on April 17, 2015 at the age of 92. The most recent edition of Alone at Sea, from Polner Verlag, is no longer in print but copies are available from internet sources. The full text of the 1958 edition is online at The Internet Archive.
I was 17 in the spring of 2020 when I decided that I would build my first wooden sailboat. I had two major criteria for this summer vacation project: the boat had to be small enough to build and store in my garage, and it could cost no more than $1,000. I also hoped the boat would comfortably fit two adults, be easy to trailer, and serve as a light daysailer on protected waters, with oars as the auxiliary power.
After reading a set of books loaned from a local boatbuilder, I decided on the 15-1/2′ Surf Crabskiff. Phil Bolger designed it as part of his first line of Instant Boats, and his intention was to create a design that a novice could build as a first boat. He began with his Elegant Punt design and extended its lines forward beyond the bow transom to a raked stem, and aft beyond the stern to a narrow, dory-style tombstone transom. The result, a 16′ cat-rigged sharpie, performs well under sail and oars, and can be built inexpensively by a complete beginner. The Surf was just what I was looking for, and I ordered the plans.
The plan set includes two 22″ x 34″ pages of drawings, and three pages of typed instructions, which are very explicit. Dynamite Payson’s book, Instant Boats, includes a step-by-step description of how to build a boat very similar to the Surf. There are also photographs of each step of the process—helpful for those of us who are just learning the vocabulary of boatbuilding.
The hull is designed for simplified chine-log construction, which eliminates the necessity for a strongback or jig. All the plywood parts except the rudder fit onto just four 4′ x 8′ sheets of 1/4″ plywood. The plans state that “marine grade” is preferred, but that high-quality exterior-grade plywood will serve. I used marine-grade okoume. For the lumber, the plans call for “almost any timber hard enough to hold nails and not too oily, acidic, etc. to hold glue.” I bought a single 10′ x 3/4″ x 12″ clear pine board, four SPF 2x4s, and used old, maple shelves for the rest. The small amount of wood, combined with the minimal epoxy compared to other types of construction, allows for economical construction, even with premium materials.
William Skelly
The external chines are quick to install and easy to bevel to accept the bottom panel.
The construction predates the shift Payson made to tack-and-tape in his later Instant Boat books, but I found it even more straightforward. The chine logs are external, making them exceptionally easy to install and then bevel to accept the bottom panel. All of the bevels in the boat are constant, not rolling, so they are easy to shape, and the epoxied joints between plywood pieces are reinforced with pine framing, eliminating the messy job of applying filets and fiberglass to the intersections.
The Surf has two large flotation tanks—one in the bow and the other in the stern—which were designed to be fully enclosed by the decks and bulkheads. To put these spaces to good use, I installed watertight hatches. I installed a pair of 8″ deck plates in the foredeck and made a rectangular wooden hatch for the aft deck. I store a manual bilge pump, anchor, line, and other small items in the forward compartment; the aft compartment is large enough to fit a cooler. I also did away with the decorative gammon knee and bowsprit. The sailing rig doesn’t require them and they would have made the boat too long to fit in my garage.
I started my Surf in June 2020 and finished in November, working many full days during the summer, and otherwise on evenings and weekends. I went a tad over budget (I could have come under my projected $1,000 if I’d bought the inexpensive materials recommended in Instant Boats, but I opted for better plywood, a pricy two-part primer, and bronze fasteners throughout). The materials for the boat, including epoxy and hardware, cost me about $1,200.
The bare hull weighs in at about 120 lbs, so you might be able to cartop a Surf, but I built a trailer for mine. Since the boat is so light, even a small car will find it easy to tow, and two people can carry it from the trailer to the water, eliminating the challenge (for me at least) of backing the trailer into the water. To launch, I simply pull up next to the ramp and have a partner help me carry the hull to the water.
Tom Nallen Jr
The rudder, as designed, has a fixed blade, and can only be shipped when there’s water deep enough for it. Making the rudder with a kick-up blade will ease beach launches.
Stepping the mast, with the sail furled around it, is easy alongside a dock or at the water’s edge with the bow resting on the beach. The fixed-blade rudder, however, cannot be mounted at the beach. After I step the mast and put the gear in the boat, I row to deeper water where I can ship the rudder. The transom is so far from the cockpit that it’s a sprawl across the aft deck to attach the rudder. If you are planning for beach launches and landings, make the rudder with a kick-up blade. I am currently modifying a weighted kick-up rudder to fit my transom hardware. There is a single, fully removable leeboard that slips over the side amidships; it frees up space in the cockpit that would otherwise be taken up by a daggerboard trunk.
There is ample room for two adults. The cockpit is divided into two sections, with the ’midship frame and its half bulkhead as a partition. To sail, the occupants sit on the bottom of the boat, one in each partition. Moving from one side of the cockpit to the other, while tacking, is merely a matter of shifting one’s weight because of the narrow beam. The Surf is exceptionally stable, and I have been able to keep mine level even in a 15-knot wind with just one of the two occupants hiked out. The ride is dry, pushing through motorboat wakes at hull speed.
The Surf is a joy to sail. The plans call for a sheet that goes straight from the end of the boom to the skipper’s hand, but to ease the strain of holding it, I use a one-part tackle with the sheet led through a block on the boom end and eye-spliced to a brass swivel, which is clipped to a rope traveler. While the traveler limits the tiller to an overall arc of 60 degrees, I have found that’s plenty. With its light weight and rocker, the Surf responds instantly to the helm. Because the boat is so light, it doesn’t carry much way when tacking, so to avoid getting caught in irons, I bear off to pick up speed before coming about. When tacking, I choose to leave the leeboard in place instead of shifting it to the leeward side. The difference in performance is negligible, and it simplifies tacking.
Downwind, the sprit boom keeps the sail flat, and lifting the leeboard off the gunwale and bringing it inboard helps to pick up some speed. Head-to-head against a Sunfish, the Surf (with a passenger) outperformed the solo-sailed Sunfish both upwind and downwind.
Tom Nallen Jr
The sprit boom sits high above the heads of the seated crew, so it won’t hurt anyone during an unexpected jibe. The leeboard slips over the rail and in moderate breezes does just as well set to windward as to leeward.
The leg-o’-mutton sprit sail has only two controlling lines—the sheet and the boom’s snotter—which makes sailing the Surf very simple and fairly safe. The sprit boom stays above the heads of the crew while coming about. Even in 17 knots of wind, the only punishment for an uncontrolled jibe is a slap from some sailcloth. The tack is secured low, very close to the foredeck, so the foot of the sail obscures the view forward. My sail has a “window” to help me see what’s ahead. While the drawings for the sail do not include reefpoints, the unstayed wooden mast bends and spills air if there is too much wind. I estimate 15 knots is the border of what is too much wind for the Surf. I once went out in 17 knots, but felt that was pushing it. To furl while afloat, I undo the sprit, and bundle the sail around the mast. Held by a few sail-ties, this arrangement keeps the windage down enough to row back to the launching point.
George Skelly
For rowing while at the aft station, sets of cleats fastened to the sides of the boat provide a purchase for the feet. For a bit more power a footboard could be installed between the cleats on either side.
For rowing, there is a removable fore-and-aft bench for the forward compartment. There are two pairs of oarlocks: one aft for rowing without a passenger aboard and another forward to balance a guest sitting in the stern. The standard formula for oar length indicates 6′ 9″oars would be the match for the boat’s 41″ beam; the 7′ oars I’ve used have buttons on the leathers that make for a bit of extra overlap at the handles. That required a hand-over-hand rowing style I wasn’t yet used to. The Surf turns easily and carries its way well after each stroke, even against the wind. After gliding for about 1.5 boat lengths, the Surf would start to veer, but as long as I kept rowing and paid attention I could make the boat go straight. Putting a bit of weight in the stern should improve the tacking. I will note that I am not necessarily a good judge of rowing performance, and the only other boats I have rowed in my life were either rubber dinghies or fiberglass rectangles. In comparison to those boats, the Surf rowed wonderfully. It felt much easier, even though I have yet to get used to hand-over-hand rowing. I primarily sail my Surf, so all I personally need in terms of rowing performance is enough to get me back to the beach if the wind dies. The Surf exceeds this requirement.
George Skelly
The plans call for a rower’s bench that runs fore and aft along the centerline, making it easy to switch between the rowing stations while remaining seated.
Although I have only sailed my Surf, christened COURAGE, for one season, the boat has already given me many adventures. Its performance suits my purpose nicely, but the Surf’s strongest point is that it is not demanding to own. A sailboat doesn’t have to trap you with yacht-club fees, endless maintenance, or a hefty price tag. The Surf is a boat that a novice, like myself, can build with little prior knowledge, then say, “Let’s go sailing,” hop in the car, and head off to another adventure. No fuss, no fees, just wind and water, wood and sailcloth.
William Skelly is an 18-year-old high-school student who lives in Carlisle, Massachusetts. He has been sailing since he was 14 when he took a “Learn to Sail” course on the Charles River at Community Boating in Boston. He has since continued his sailing education at Community Boating and elsewhere, and sails during the summers and on weekends during the sailing season.
Surf Crabskiff particulars
[table]
Length/15′ 6″
Beam/3′ 7″
Sail Area/59 sq. ft.
[/table]
Plans for the Surf Crabskiff are available from H.H. Payson & Company for $45. Harold “Dynamite” Payson’s Instant Boats, which details the type of construction used in the Surf, was published in 1979 and is out of print, though copies are available on the web. Payson’s Build the New Instant Boats has been in print since 2010, but it is an introduction to tack-and-tape construction, not the fasteners-and-glue approach used for the Surf.
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!
Although I had owned boats from 10′ to 34′ and captained boats up to 74’, I had never built one. I had experience fixing boats—mostly fiberglass repair, paint, gelcoat—and one day, I decided I was going to build. I began by researching designs and building techniques. Low maintenance and low cost of operation were my top priorities, followed by comfort, seaworthiness, and appearance. There were many designs that caught my eye, but I kept coming back to B&B Yacht Designs. Their boats all appeared to be well-thought-out, practical designs and not just something arbitrarily drawn in a computer program. It was clear to me that designer Graham Byrnes understood the dynamics and build-ability of wooden boats.
I came across an article in WoodenBoat No. 211, listing the five finalists in a design contest titled, “The Pursuit of Pleasure at Two Gallons per Hour.” The winner was Graham’s Marissa 18, an 18′ center-console skiff built in plywood. It was visually appealing and looked like it would be efficient, consuming just 2 gallons of fuel per hour and seaworthy enough for me to feel safe in 2′ to 3′ chop.
I contacted B&B Yacht Designs and purchased the CNC-cut kit. I went with the kit instead of building from the plans, not only for CNC accuracy but also to save time, as I would have a limited amount of it to complete the project.
When I drove to the B&B shop in Vandemere, North Carolina, to pick up the kit, I had a chance to meet with Graham and take a look at a finished Marissa. He was extremely helpful and answered the multitude of questions that can come from someone who has never built a boat before. He asked me what motor I planned on installing. When I told him it would be an Evinrude 60-hp E-TEC, he recommended moving the console forward as well as adding an extra layer of fiberglass, or starting the sheathing with a heavier single layer on the bottom. With such a powerful motor, at the top end of the recommended range of horsepower, the boat could be subject to heavy impacts while taking chop at top speed.
Trey Williams
The egg-crate construction of the frames, stringers, and cockpit sole provides a solid base to build the hull on.
The plywood pieces in the kit are all high-quality BS1088 okoume, and the additional lumber, purchased separately, is straight-grained, knot-free southern yellow pine. Each side, bottom, and chine-flat panel is assembled from three pieces with precision-cut finger joints. The boat is built on a jig that uses the cockpit sole and an egg-crate grid of the frames and stringers that support it. The build is a bit different than a traditional strongback-and-mold setup; the sole rests on sawhorses and supports the three frames, two bulkheads and the stem, eliminating the need for any further temporary support structure. The hull side and bottom panels get glued and screwed to the transom, bulkheads, and stem and, after the epoxy cures, all screws are removed.
The build went as expected—exceptionally smoothly. All panels bent home exactly where they should have; I believe this is a result of the thoughtful design. After I assembled the hull, it ended up being remarkably fair.
I ended up moving the console forward 8” on both Graham’s recommendation and my own preference. I’ve had no problems with the way it is now, but if I were to do it again, I would consider moving it an additional 2” to 4”, just to have more cockpit space in the stern. After sea trials and much consideration on whether to sit or stand at the console, I opted to stand—it feels more natural to me and offers better visibility than sitting. I purchased an aluminum leaning post with built-in storage and rod holders. It is the perfect width for me and almost seems as if it were custom-made for the boat. It has space underneath to store a cooler and a pad on top for an elevated seat.
Also on Graham’s recommendation, I used heavy 1208 biaxial ’glass on the inside of the hull, bulkheads, and stringers—instead of just giving them a coat of epoxy to seal them. On the outside, I put 10-oz ’glass over a reinforcing layer of 1208 on the keel and chines.
Trey Williams
The chine flats are an effective means for keeping spray from getting into the boat when it’s on a plane.
After fairing, priming and painting, it was time to outfit and rig the boat. I installed hydraulic steering for the 60-hp Evinrude E-Tec. It was more expensive than a cable system but well worth it for the smoother feel and minimal steering effort. Finding the right prop took some time since the boat is relatively light compared to fiberglass production boats and the 60-hp E-Tec has a larger gear case and lower gear ratio.
Once everything was installed it was time to have the predelivery checks done on the motor and rigging and to see if it was watertight. I have the Marissa on an aluminum torsion-axle trailer with bunks cut to match hull rocker for full support. It tows with no issues and is easily launched and retrieved singlehanded.
Trey Williams
The author, preferring to stand at the helm rather than sit, equipped his Marissa with a so-called post to lean against.
The moment of truth came when the Marissa went into the water for the first time and sat exactly where the plans specified. Stability is good, but if two large adults stand on the same side, the hull will lean quite a bit; that is expected given the beam and the deadrise at the transom. After a few trips, dialing things in and getting used to actually being in a boat that I put together, it was time to move from a calm river and the Intracoastal Waterway to some more open water. My experience of crossing boat wakes gave me high hopes for the Marissa in some real waves. Once I got out in some light chop in open water, my hopes turned out to be well founded. The Marissa really did perform as expected. It cut through the waves at any angle, and the water is thrown down and away by the generous chine flats.
Courtesy of B & B Yacht Design
The Marissa is designed to take outboards from 25 hp to 60 hp. The boat here is running a 40hp motor.
The boat handles beautifully in most anything I’m comfortable taking on in an 18’ boat. It turns exceptionally well when I’m cruising winding rivers, and on hard turns at speed the boat just locks in and corners like it’s on rails. The first real trip I took was down and across North Carolina’s Currituck Sound, where it can be a slick calm one minute and steep chop the next. On the outbound crossing, the Sound was nice and calm, and the Marissa cruised easily at 20 knots burning just over 2 gallons of gas per hour. The return trip was a little different. The afternoon sea breeze had kicked up 2′ to 3′ chop, as it typically does in the summer. I didn’t know what to expect, but I wasn’t too concerned since I was pretty confident in the Marissa’s abilities. I thought it was a good test and yet it was a pleasingly uneventful return trip. With the boat cruising at 20 knots, the water just split and went down and out, no pounding of any sort (but that was expected as it was a following sea). Once I was farther from shore and among the largest waves it was time to see how it handled different angles. I was most surprised to see that the best angle was straight into the waves. They just split at the bow and were pushed away and down. Taking them on a bow quarter at 20 knots was a bit much for me. The ride wasn’t at all jarring, but there was a bit more movement than would be comfortable to me for long periods. Slowing to 15 to 17 knots, the excess movement head-on is almost gone.
Courtesy of B & B Yacht Design
This Marissa 18 is outfitted with a seat instead of a post
The boat stayed remarkably dry in all angles to the waves. The only times I’ve noticed spray coming over the sides have been when the wind is at least 15 mph and on the beam and, even then, just a small amount would occasionally blow up. Overall, I think the Marissa is one of the driest boats of any size that I’ve owned. I can just squeeze out a top speed of 30 knots with only myself aboard and I feel that’s plenty fast. I spend most of my time cruising 4,000 to 4,500 rpm at about 19 to 23 knots and burning 2 to 2.5 gallons per hour, depending on how many people are aboard. An all-day fishing trip burns just 5 to 7 gallons of gas.
Courtesy of B & B Yacht Design
The seat built into the center console provides a good place for a passenger without obscuring the view forward from the helm.
So far, I’ve taken my Marissa from lower Chesapeake Bay down to Stuart, Florida, and a few places in between. Typically used in the lower Chesapeake Bay and Currituck, Albemarle, and Pamlico sounds, the skiff does exactly what I expected and even more.
The boat is well suited to my uses and perfect for my home waters. I smile every time I get aboard. I appreciate the performance and the affordability of operation, and enjoy the feeling of operating a boat that I built. I think a Marissa can be built by most anyone with a general understanding of working with wood, epoxy, and fiberglass. If you’re looking for a design that is efficient, looks good, and is safe and comfortable, this is a great option. I plan on building another, slightly larger, B&B design in the future to get back into fishing bigger waters and offshore.
The first boat Trey Williams learned to operate was a plywood skiff his grandfather had powered by an Evinrude 18-hp outboard on the Currituck Sound in North Carolina. He purchased his first boat, a 14’ flat-bottomed aluminum johnboat, before he could legally drive a car. Many boats came and went after that, eventually leading to getting his 100-ton masters license and running large boats for a few years. He doesn’t foresee a time when he doesn’t have some kind of boat. He lives in southeast Virginia and has his pick of many bodies of water within a short distance from home.
Marissa 18 Particulars
[table]
Length/18′ 0″
Load waterline/15′ 3″
Beam/6′ 10″
Draft/8.75″
Horsepower/25 to 60
Displacement/1680 lbs
[/table]
B&B Yacht Designs offers the Marissa 18 plans, with full-sized Mylar templates, in either metric or imperial, for $260. A kit of CNC-cut plywood parts and the required solid wood for the stem and keel is available for $3,620. Additional kits for epoxy and hardware are also available.
Editor’s note: We published a previous review of the Marissa 18 in Small Boats 2011. It was written by WoodenBoat Senior Editor, Tom Jackson, after Graham Byrnes paid a visit to the WoodenBoat waterfront with his Marissa 18. In the review here, Trey Williams provides his perspective as a builder and owner of a Marissa 18.
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!
I set out, boat in tow, well before dawn to get from my home in New Hampshire to Rockland, Maine. John, coming from Vermont, had started his drive even earlier. We needed to be on the water by 10 in the morning to make the crossing of Lower Penobscot Bay and get to the narrow entrance of The Basin on Vinalhaven at slack tide. The forecast looked promising for the 10-nautical-mile crossing. With a wind out of the south at 12 knots, we could make good speed on a broad reach out of Rockland Harbor and across lower Penobscot Bay, a stretch of water that is known for foul weather and steep seas. This was the first challenge to overcome on our trip, which was to be a circumnavigation of North Haven Island, Vinalhaven’s northern sister and the smaller of the two Fox Islands. A few years prior, I had circled Vinalhaven from Rockland with my Sea Pearl and wanted to explore more of the area. John, after hearing about that first trip, was eager to do something like it with me.
Roger Siebert
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Rockland Harbor, 2 miles wide, didn’t have much wind. Across Penobscot Bay, Vinalhaven was made invisible by fog but for the motionless pearl-white blades of the island’s wind turbines stabbed skyward. Soon after we ghosted off the ramp with a weak southwestern breeze, the peak of John’s mainsail suddenly came undone. Sail and boom came crashing into the boat, and it took another 30 minutes to get sorted out. The current in Penobscot Bay was in a strong flood, flowing northward, and instead of the good sea breeze we expected there was a weak southeasterly wind. A straight shot across to Vinalhaven proved impossible and by the end of the crossing we were pressed to the ragged granite north end of 500-yard-long Dogfish Island, more than a mile and a half north of where we wanted to land with no time-efficient way to sail against the current. We hurriedly struck our rigs and rowed, frantically, the final 2.5 miles.
As I rowed around the forested southern point of Ledbetter Island, John, rowing his 14′ lug-yawl-rigged Ilur, WAXWING, was not far behind and just off my starboard quarter. As we pulled into Hurricane Sound I nervously glanced at my watch. The Basin, a 1-1/2-mile-long, forest-lined inland cove, is nearly a saltwater lake but for a current-swept 150’-wide entrance, with a bare bedrock outcrop blocking the middle third. It offers engineless mariners very short windows of slack tide to enter or exit. John and I had about 15 minutes until the top of the tide, and the gates into The Basin were just shy of a nautical mile away. I reckoned my boat, MUSSELS OF DESTINY, a 19’ Caledonia Yawl, was moving at about 2 knots. WAXWING, slightly faster under oars, passed on starboard. Either we rowed into The Basin at slack tide or we would be shut out for the night. Rowing against the swift outflowing current would be impossible.
We pulled closer to the narrow northern entrance channel with the outcrop rising from the water on one side and a 10′-high stone slab looming over the other. I had slammed my Sea Pearl 21 bow-first into that slab during a failed attempt to enter The Basin a few years earlier. I had lost control of the boat against the powerful current which had swept it aside as if it were dust.
As John and I drew near the channel we passed a lone lobster buoy tilted in our favor. The last of the flood tide split around the entrance’s 50′-wide guardian into two streams that would rejoin behind it and then, just 125 yards farther east, split again into two channels around a tree-capped islet—south to the main channel and north to a shallower one. Since it was high tide, I had suggested earlier to John to go south through the wider, more navigable pass around the outcrop, and then north around the islet.
John slowed his rowing tempo and WAXWING smoothly accelerated into the pass; soon MUSSELS was also in the grip of the current and pulled forward, sliding effortlessly past the slick, dark, seaweed-fringed outcrop and around the rocky islet with its few craggy trees.
Christophe Matson
The fog rapidly cleared as we searched for a suitable anchorage in The Basin. It took a day of hard rowing to get to this place, but it was well worth the effort.
In a few moments, we were delivered from the close, damp confines of the entrance and into the expansive flat-calm embrace of the cove. The fog had cleared and sunlight poured onto us. We rowed another third of a mile to the east side of The Basin and dropped our hooks into 40′ of water about three boat-lengths north of an island just 400′ long and wide.
Christophe Matson
The nearly omnipresent fog rolled back over The Basin while John prepared his dinner in WAXWING. Surrounded by a wooded shoreline and as the only boats in The Basin, we were immersed in silence and total seclusion.
John transformed WAXWING from travel mode to camp mode while I settled onto the floorboards; a new, rapidly approaching bank of fog closed in around us and turned the sun silver as it settled lightly on the spruce tops.
Christophe Matson
Sunrise on our first morning on the trip and the fog was already thin, a promising start to the day. John still had WAXWING buttoned up with his custom tent.
The next morning, we woke to the fog, which the rising sun rapidly burned off. We waited for the ebb to ride out of The Basin on the current and back into Hurricane Sound. The plan was to then head north, through the tight Ledbetter Narrows on the north end of the island of the same name, and then through Fox Islands Thorofare to the east side of Vinalhaven where we would overnight in Seal Bay.
John Hartmann
The interior of WAXWING in camp mode is a crowded yet tidy arrangement with the wet gear and the sail bundle to starboard to keep clear of John’s sleeping quarters to port. A mosquito net helps ensure a good night’s sleep, uninterrupted by bugs.
While we waited, I swam around seaweed-draped ledges and dried off in the brilliant sunshine while John puttered about WAXWING under his silver-colored sunshade umbrella. After an hour, the low sound of dashing water cascading out of The Basin faded. We donned our life jackets and rowed around the islet to the exit. We captured the last of the current and calmly zipped downhill out of the cove and back into Hurricane Sound.
Christophe Matson
The fog burned off as we waited for the tide to go slack so we could exit The Basin and start our circumnavigation of North Haven. John took refuge from UV rays under an easily deployed umbrella; I took advantage of the excellent swimming conditions.
In the Sound, we sailed north through Ledbetter Narrows, which are only 120 yards wide and brooded over by a two-story 19th-century farmhouse with brilliant white walls. A mile and a half beyond, we approached the Sugar Loaves, two conical, burnt-ochre towers of rock wispy with thin patches of faded, salt-burned grass and standing proud over the entrance of Fox Islands Thorofare. The wind continued to increase as the day warmed and, setting our sails wing-on-wing, we increased our speed. I sat in the bottom of MUSSELS and listened to the water chuckling on the lapstrake hull become a constant rush. Watercraft traffic started to pick up, with motorized pleasure craft outnumbering lobsterboats. As we came around the curve of the Thorofare, North Haven Harbor came into view.
John Hartmann
On a downwind run, MUSSELS made easy work of Fox Island Thorofare en route to the harbor at North Haven.
Cluttered with recreational and commercial boats alike, the village of North Haven seemed like a city. Zodiacs whined back and forth across the Thorofare, club sailboats were making sail, and larger boats making the east–west transit through the Havens were pushing rolling wakes. John and I stayed south from the main channel, held our tongues as one power cruiser steamed ahead in displacement trim and gave us a rocking, bantered with the sailors in the club sailboats, and soon left the harbor behind us with relief. On the east side of the Thorofare, the wind filled in from the east. We gradually sheeted in our sails until we were sailing upwind, tacking tightly around Widow Island, and headed southeast for Seal Bay, 2 miles away.
Christophe Matson
After our long ghosting through the east side of the Fox Island Thorofare, John and WAXWING sailed upwind toward Seal Bay in East Penobscot Bay in a welcome breeze.
Hen Islands, half a mile away, marked the east side of the only deepwater entrance into Seal Bay. Under full sail, MUSSELS’ gunwale was pressed against the surface of the water, but I decided to forgo reefing. John was behind me and an outboard skiff with a family aboard pulled alongside him. The two children clung to the sides of the skiff and watched John as he hiked out and clawed WAXWING upwind. Wings of gossamer spray erupted with every plunge of his bow into the water. The skipper of the skiff gave John a thumbs-up and peeled away toward North Haven.
It was now late afternoon, and the tide was almost high. A sandbar connects the small islands that make up the Little Hens, and in a pocket cove created by it we would be protected from the southerly and could stop for a much-needed snack. Every 10 minutes a sailboat or recreational trawler would enter Seal Bay through the deepwater entrance on the west side of Little Hen, all under power. In the midst of the traffic, John and I tacked back and forth along the channel attempting to make way to where we wanted to drop anchor. John was a few hundred yards behind me. On my last tack, I scraped around the boulder just north of the sandbar and pulled into the 100’-long anchorage. I dropped my anchor into the clear waters with the white shell bottom glowing brightly underneath.
The wind here was but a light touch on the cheek and the sun overcame whatever sea chill I had felt working to windward. I went for a quick swim, and John pulled in next to MUSSELS.
In a few hours, the place we had anchored would be all sand and mud flats and we wanted something less exposed and protected for the night. We decided on a nook on the east side of Davids Island, a third of a mile to the south. The shores of the island were steep, rocky, and backed by close stands of trees and the descending sun silhouetted the jagged profile of the forest. I sailed deeper into Seal Bay, and approached our anchorage from the south. Wing-on-wing she galloped north over the shallow mud bar that lay in the shadowed 30-yard-wide gap between Davids Island and Little Smith. John was waiting for me with cold beer in a well-protected anchorage ringed with tall sharp-tipped spruce trees that formed a wall around us. I set my anchor into 15’ of milky, jade-green water and caught the bottle that John lobbed from WAXWING. A dusky-blue wall of twilight rose up from the eastern horizon and night fell quickly. Through the dark, scattered gunshots and the staccato exhaust of ATVs somewhere in Vinalhaven’s backwoods rang out over the calm bay.
Up at dawn, we waited for the flood that would push us north. John was eager to show me Butter Island, a favorite location from his past journeys. It lay about 8 miles due north from our anchorage, and we were hoping for a good sea breeze to get us there, but after a tantalizing bit of sporty upwind sailing in 12 knots of breeze between Hen Island and the 20′-high cliffs of Bluff Head, the wind dropped to a whisper. We could still ghost along faster than we could row, so we settled down with towels draped over our legs and feet to protect them from the broiling sunlight.
The wind would fill the sails for a few minutes, fall away, then rise again. During a few of the moments of calm, I slipped over the rail to swim and escape the heat. Leaving MUSSELS to drift slowly, I dove down into the clear water stopping some 6′ from the surface to look up at the dark oval of my boat and the shimmering column of air bubbles I had trailed behind me. Over the course of three hours, in fits and starts, we made it to the pass between Fling Island—a ¼-mile-long oval of rock, meadows, and trees—and Eagle Island, its larger neighbor, ½ mile to the east. Finally, in the 1/2-mile-wide channel between Eagle and Butter islands, a steady breeze ruffled the water. At Butter’s southeast point, John and I were swept around The Nubble, a 50-yard-wide dome of pale granite rimmed with dark seaweed that looked like a medieval monk’s tonsure. We turned north into a cove sheltered by The Nubble and nudged the stems onto a ¼-mile-long crescent sandy beach studded with cobbles.
Butter is privately owned and to camp on the island requires permission, which we had not obtained; our plan was to spend the night at anchor just off the beach. Within minutes of our arrival we heard the soft sputter of an ATV in the woods lining the beach. A lanky man in a well-worn button-up shirt and sun hat strolled out from between the trees and introduced himself as the island steward. We asked if we could leave our boats on the high-tide line and sleep in them. He appreciated that we knew permission was required and granted our request. With that taken care of, he asked to take a look at our boats.
Christophe Matson
Looking south from the top of Monserrat Hill on Butter Island, John and I could see Eagle Island in the middle distance, Deer Isle on the horizon to the left, and, directly below, The Nubble and the beach where we anchored the boats, barely visible here. The expansive view was an abrupt shift from the previous three days of seeing everything from sea level.
We had two hours to high tide, so we set the boats on their anchors and then walked a soft, pine-needle-strewn island trail to Monserrat Hill, a 150′-tall, treeless point in the midst of golden grasslands dotted with low, gnarled shrubs. From the summit there was a commanding view over East Penobscot Bay. The undulating terrain of the islands filled Penobscot Bay to the west, with the Camden Hills poking out over the last wooded ridge. To the southeast, the 500′ summits of Isle au Haut were barely peeking over the top of Eagle Island, and North Haven was a wide, black band on the southern horizon. In the east, Deer Isle with its many coves lay its undulating flank open to us. At sea level, we had been focused on navigating from landing to lobster pot, cove to cliff, rock to bay, but here we were surrounded by sweeping perspectives of a coast studded with island jewels.
There is a memorial bench— a thick, curved slab of polished granite—dedicated to Thomas and Virginia Cabot, who bought the island in the 1940s to keep it available for public use. A bronze plaque, recessed in bare bedrock, bore a poem written by Thomas: “…I bid you sit and rest a bit, to count your share in worldly care…” Beyond the plaque, far below us, our two boats, tiny in the distance, lay at anchor, protected by The Nubble. After taking in the views, John and I headed down the trail to secure them on the high-tide line.
In the thick of the night, scattered lights glittered from between the trees on Deer Isle, 2 miles away across the bay, while the Milky Way carpeted the sky. I slept covered by my mosquito netting, without a fly cover, and through brief moments of wakefulness noted the drift of constellations across the sky. At some point deep in the night, I woke to a pair of voices, one high, one low, coming from what seemed miles away, singing an ethereal song that merged with the gentle lapping of the water on the cobbles. Hours later, when the sun rose blazing over Deer Isle, warming my face, I remembered nothing but fragments of a tune whispered on the breeze.
John Hartmann
John and I both deployed our beaching legs for the overnight stay on Butter Island. I decided to forgo the tent fly and only used my mosquito net. At sunrise, we woke to a rising tide.
John and I readied the boats to get underway and departed the beach on Butter Island for the longest leg of the journey—the 13 miles back to Hurricane Sound and the entrance to The Basin. This would complete the circumnavigation of North Haven and put us back in a comfortable anchorage for the night. There was a fresh morning breeze between Eagle and Butter islands, and we skimmed off on a broad reach for Sloop Island, a touch over 2 miles away. Low-slung and wave-swept with a pocket stone beach on the east side, Sloop, little more than a chain of three grass-topped rock outcroppings, appeared to be an inviting place for lunch on a nice day, but not much else, so we skirted around the island’s south end. We took a bearing for Webster Head, a tall prominence on the northern point of North Haven and at that moment, the wind died completely, and the water flattened as if suddenly gelled. We stowed our rigs and rowed for North Haven and continued southwest down its coast, a series of unremarkable nameless points that left us wondering how far we had come and how far we had to go. Granite-gray beaches, all about ¼-mile long, were divided by blunt angles of layered rocks capped by broken stretches of forest 10’ up. Every few hundred yards we would get a brief glimpse between the trees of a solitary house before it would disappear, and another would show itself.
Eight miles and two hours after leaving Sloop, we arrived at a 1/8-mile gap in the shoreline, the entrance to Pulpit Harbor. We paused by Pulpit Rock, a 15′-tall, guano-streaked, lava-black crag guarding the harbor’s entrance, and discussed the prospect of lunch. The harbor looked enticing, with the sun playing on the water between lobsterboats and pleasure craft, but we decided to press on another 2 miles to Bartlett Harbor. The passage went a bit faster with a current now pushing us along, and landmarks were easier to identify— distinctive headlands and, cupped between them, beaches in various sizes and shapes that were easily matched to the chart. At Bartlett’s oblique, 1/4-mile-wide entrance, I came around a rocky spit that lay uncovered by the low tide and anchored in tight alongside a solitary column of stone that lay just under the surface. I noticed other interesting rock formations in the clear water and took the opportunity to snorkel a bit.
I slipped over the side of MUSSELS and found some skittish ruddy-brown Jonah crabs, a multitude of urchins, and, between rock walls, a few canyons just wide enough to swim through. After my brief explorations and my teeth beginning to chatter; I pulled back over the gunwale.
John had started to row his way out of the harbor and around the corner. As I took a few minutes to set things straight in my boat, I noticed that the tide had come up a fair bit and MUSSELS had swung closer to the reef. She was now over the ledge that I had laid her next to. A swell started to enter the harbor around the point and the boat began to heave up and down. The rudder, which had its blade kicked up, landed heavily on the rock column, which was now directly underneath the stern. I made my way forward to take in the rode and pull MUSSELS away, but I was too late; the rudder came sliding up out of the gudgeons and flopped over into the water. I stepped back to the stern to retrieve it, and fortunately the haul-up line was still cleated to the boat so the rudder didn’t wander off. The long tiller extension was awkwardly wrapped under the port side of the boat and pinned between the skeg and the reef; I needed to get out of the boat to extricate it. I stepped carefully over the starboard side onto the narrow ledge and wrestled with the heavy rudder’s long and awkward appendage. I noticed that the nylon bushing that fits in the gudgeon was at my feet, in thigh-deep water. Without it, the rudder can bind and, while I had spares in my tool kit, I didn’t want to get back into the boat for a replacement bushing and leave the rudder afloat and unattended. The swells continued to increase and with one hand fending off the boat, I dropped the rudder and attempted to dive between my knees for the bushing, but the boat came at me and her boomkin swept me into the deeper water behind me. I grabbed at the gunwale to keep myself from plunging down between rock walls and planting my bare feet on those sea urchins lurking below. MUSSELS swung back into the harbor and I landed again on the rocky perch. I gave the boat a good push outward and grabbed for the bushing while simultaneously making a wild grab for the rudder. Successful, all that remained now was to hold the bushing in place, precisely align the two pintles to the gudgeons and install the rudder, all the while furiously tap-dancing to save my feet from the skeg, which repeatedly slammed down on the rock. I leaned against the boomkin to keep MUSSELS held off, secured my feet, and then lifted the rudder to vertical. The pintles dropped into both gudgeons simultaneously, an incredible stroke of good luck. I clambered into the boat and rushed to the bow to pull MUSSELS forward before we could be forced to go through the entire act a second time. I energetically rowed away from the spit and as I came around the corner, I saw WAXWING. John, with a look of exasperation on his face, was gesturing with upward palms. We rowed on.
Two miles later we rounded Stand-In Point at the southwest end of North Haven and faced a daunting 1-1/2-mile crossing of Fox Islands Thorofare before we could get back to Ledbetter Narrows and Hurricane Sound. The Thorofare, a 7-mile east–west passage between North Haven and Vinalhaven, was congested with ferries, commercial boats, barges, and pleasure craft and the water was tumultuous with their wakes. The wind, finally appearing, was rising from the southwest at a paltry 5 to 8 knots. We raised sail and started our march across the Thorofare. The chaotic waves slammed the spars against the masts and did little to help our forward progress. John mixed in a combination of sailing and rowing, dropping and raising his rig. I had slightly more success sailing, keeping my sail lightly tensioned and using my body weight to heel MUSSELS to leeward so the weight of the spars could keep the sail from slatting. Slowly and painfully, we made it behind Dogfish Island and from there, with the wind suddenly nonexistent, we rowed into Hurricane Sound and made for Ram Island just outside the entrance to The Basin.
We could hear the dull rumble of water surging into The Basin—high tide was still a few hours away. We did not have the energy or focus to attempt to challenge the strong current, so we anchored in a 70’-wide cove between Ram and the spruce-tipped islet to its west. The holding ground was good and the bar that develops at low tide would protect us from swells that can come in from the south.
Christophe Matson
At the end of our longest day—from Butter Island to Ram—John curled up with a drink on the warm ledge and checked the next day’s weather forecast. We were both spent and not up for anything but taking it easy.
John and I, exhausted by the rowing and rough crossing, climbed wearily onto the smooth, beige slabs of rock that ring the island and soaked in the warmth of the sunlight radiating from the stone. We cooked dinner together, a mix of Indian food and rice from a bag, and listened to the forecast for the following day. It called for light winds, not enough to assure an easy passage back to Rockland, and neither of us relished the idea of rowing the 11 miles, most of it an open-water passage, back to the mainland. We decided that we would wake early and ride the flood current into The Basin and take a day off, before sailing back to Rockland.
The next morning arrived bright and clear as we rowed effortlessly into The Basin at the end of the flood. Surprisingly, there was some nice early-morning wind inside the cove, and we raised sails and scooted around the islands on perfectly flat water. I looped some lazy-eights between two islands and then found a suitable anchorage between a ledge-lined island with round boulders scattered around it and islets that would be joined at low tide with jagged rocks. I dropped the hook in 20′ of water and choked the rode tight so MUSSELS wouldn’t swing too far and get high-sided when the tide went out. I made coffee and watched John in WAXWING poke around the cluster of islets and through narrow slots, cutting through the sun-speckled water.
John Hartmann
Before heading back home, we spent a long day relaxing back in The Basin. John set up WAXWING’s cockpit with a break-apart camp chair and an umbrella for a cozy reading nook and spent the day lounging.
Soon, John dropped anchor nearby and settled into his morning routine. It was only 10 a.m. We idled away the day reading, sleeping, and swimming. John made some very welcome gin-and-tonics in the afternoon and we watched the sunset turn the ripple of clouds above our heads into brilliant gold and crimson that was reflected in the water around our boats.
Christophe Matson
WAXWING hovered in the reflection of a brilliant sunset before our return home the next day. That night brought overcast skies and hard wind from the east.
During the night a sudden wall of wind from the east hit our boats. It was an uncommon direction and MUSSELS strained at her rode. I got up and let out a few extra feet of scope. The stars were gone, masked by an overcast sky. My bunk, laid high across the thwarts, left me exposed to the wind and, wrapped in my sleeping bag, I felt it buffeting my face. I dragged my pad and bag into the bottom of the boat and contorted myself between the centerboard trunk and side-bench uprights. There I uncomfortably waited for the gray dawn.
When we had enough light, John and I moved rapidly to get to the entrance of The Basin for the end of the ebb. As it was, The Basin was already emptying far faster than it had been at any previous time we’d seen it during our trip. We cautiously entered the northern branch of the exit, and as we drew closer to the current speeding toward the outcrop in the middle of the gap, we deployed our anchors. The boats quickly took up the slack and hung tight to their rodes. We studied the way the water curled around the outcrop and John, once a river guide in times long gone, took careful notice of where the water raised and dipped, where the eddies were located, where the traps could be, and where we should enter the main flow. He detailed the strategy to get our boats through safely: we would enter high using the eddy just east of the islet to draw us south to the main flow, taking care to stay in the central portion of the flow and not get drawn into the eddies along the sides or behind the boulder. John went first, taking hard strokes, pausing, then swinging upstream. He pulled for the main current. WAXWING shot bow first into the gap, descended the sluice, and in an instant disappeared behind the islet. I cinched my life jacket tight and pulled MUSSELS into John’s route. The large eddy played with the retracted rudder, and the tiller pulled and pushed me while I fought to compensate as the bow was forcefully drawn toward the exit. I threw myself into the oars to enter the main channel bow first and watched The Basin disappear astern behind the closing gates of rocks and trees. MUSSELS was swept down the rapid and shoved out into Hurricane Sound.
We pulled for a quarter of a mile into less turbulent water and raised sails. MUSSELS spread her wings with a velvety pop and we ran downwind across Hurricane Sound, around Ledbetter Island, through the Lawry Narrows, and out into the open water of Penobscot Bay. I aimed the bow toward a tiny block on the mainland horizon—a concrete grain tower marking the ramp on Rockland’s waterfront. To the east, Vinalhaven receded into a dark streak on the horizon under a rolling charcoal sky.
Christophe Matson lives in New Hampshire. At a very young age he disobeyed his father and rowed the neighbor’s Dyer Dhow across the Connecticut River to the strange new lands on the other side. Ever since he has been hooked on the idea that a small boat offers the most freedom.
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.
I had never thought that stropping a newly sharpened edge on a cutting tool did much. A few swipes back and forth on a piece of leather would break off the tiny burr left by the stone and that was about it. I knew that when barbers used straight razors they stropped the blade before giving a customer a shave, but didn’t take the hint that stropping is the key to a truly sharp edge.
Leather, I’ve learned, contains silicates—mineral cousins to the silicates in garnet sandpaper—which serve as an abrasive for honing metal. Horsehide has a higher concentration of silicates than cowhide and was the material favored for straight-razor strops. The steel edge of a straight razor is so fine that shaving can distort it and a strop works not only by wearing away a bit of metal, but also by pressing wobbles straight and burnishing thick and thin areas to make the edge uniform again.
The blades of woodworking tools are sturdier and need the help of stropping compounds added to the leather to speed sharpening. Some of these abrasives come in wax bars with different grits, each with a different color. Two of the most common compounds are white—aluminum oxide, comparable to a 2,000-grit stone—and green—chromium oxide, comparable to 6,000 grit.
Photographs by the author
Each strop gets two pieces of leather with one side flesh side out and the other grain side out.
The strops used for woodworking tools are not loose straps like the barbers use, but stiff leather mounted on wood blocks, usually with one side having the finished surface (grain side) out, the other side with the rough surface (flesh side) out. Vegetable-tanned leather is often favored for strops because it has a high concentration of silicates, but any stiff leather will work when stropping compounds are used. If you have any latigo left over from putting leathers on your oars, it will work well as a strop. I had a roll of stiff 1/8″-thick vegetable-tanned leather—bought at a thrift store—and used it to make a few strops. For the blocks to support the leather I used scraps of 3/4″ vertical-grain Douglas-fir, then glued slightly oversized pieces of leather to them with contact cement and trimmed the leather with a sharp knife.
I glued the leather to the wooden bases with contact cement and used a heavy steel roller to assure good, uniform bonds.
For most of my strops, the rough flesh-side gets an application of white compound and the grain side gets green. It doesn’t take much compound to charge the leather. Just rub the stick over the leather until the compound gives its color to the strop. If the compound begins to gather in lumps, warming it up (I used a heat gun) softens it and you can rub it smooth with your fingers.
My finished strops have been trimmed and are ready for use with or without compound.
Stropping is for honing an edge that has already been properly shaped with a sharpening stone. The strop will smooth the scoring left by the stone and make the edge noticeably sharper, and the edge can be maintained with the strop many times before it’s time to return to the sharpening stone. Since stropping removes very little steel, your blades will not age as quickly as they would if only sharpened by a stone.
I got acquainted with stropping with these four strops. From the bottom, a large paddle strop with no compound, a medium paddle with white compound on the flesh side and green on the back, a small paddle made by Hutsuls with green and white compound. At the top a block strop with red rouge buffing compound on the grain side and emery on the flesh side
Blades are moved across the strop with the edge trailing, or, if you’re working with a large blade that’s better worked while stationary, the strop is pushed away from the edge. To do an initial stropping of a stone-sharpened blade, I start with the flesh side, charged with white compound, and do 30 strokes on one side of the blade, then 30 strokes on the other, then repeat the process on the grain side with the green compound. It is important to use a light touch and let the compound do the work. The leather is soft enough to make the surfaces of the micro-bevel along the edge slightly convex, making the edge stronger. Pressing the blade against the leather will exaggerate the effect, blunting the edge.
Small blades can be worked on the strop. This nata is being gently pulled from left to right, away from the cutting edge.
The work the strop does is right along the cutting edge, so you use the same angle as you would for the micro-bevels when finishing work with a stone. If you need a clear indication of where the strop is making contact, color the edge with a black permanent marker. The strop will uncover bright steel and alcohol will clean up the remaining dye when you’ve finished.
Stropping this large nata was easier moving the strop over the edge; it is being pushed to slide past the cutting edge.
The compound will turn black with the fine particles of steel it removes from the edge. It will continue to work through many sharpenings before it needs to be recharged. When the accumulation of compound needs to be removed, it can be scraped off. Alcohol works too, but may not be good for the leather. For scraping, I use a new replacement blade for a utility knife, held square across the strop and perpendicular to it.
One test of a sharp edge is slicing into the edge of a piece of paper. Stropping brought this axe up to the challenge.
A good test of a truly sharp blade is holding the edge of a piece of paper in one hand and slicing into it with the blade with the other hand. A sharp edge will slice cleanly through. An edge that needs more work will leave a fuzzy edge, tear the paper, or not cut into it at all. A really sharp edge will shave arm hair.
I did two trials with power stropping, one with a leather belt on a benchtop belt sander and the other with a 1″-thick wheel I made from eight layers of vegetable-tanned leather and mounted on a motor I use for a cotton buffing wheel. While both could bring a blade up to sharpness for the paper-cutting test, neither made the blade sharp enough to shave arm hair. That required finishing the edge with the handheld paddle strops.
A leather belt for my Harbor Freight 1 x 30 sander, charged with green compound, does a quick job of honing blades, but didn’t get them quite as sharp.
I glued circles of leather together with contact cement to make a 1″ stropping wheel. The edge of the wheel seems quite hard in comparison to the flat leather faces on my handheld strops. And the high speed didn’t seem to be a quick way to a sharp edge.
Leather strops and compound are now part of the sharpening arsenal in my shop and the system has helped me redefine what a sharp edge is. My woodworking is much the better for it.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
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Over the years, we have used small marine batteries for trolling motors, cold-cranking our outboard motors, and powering onboard electrical systems. Our experience with basic battery chargers has been disappointing, with unexpectedly dead batteries leading to canceled or postponed trips. Recently, we switched to a smart, onboard, marine battery tender and have been very pleased with the reliable performance of our batteries.
Batteries for small boats may be used for just a few days and then stored for extended periods, so it is essential to have a system to maintain the batteries’ charge during storage. An ordinary battery charger charges at a high rate—whether the battery needs it or not—which can sometimes damage it. But a smart battery tender assesses the battery charge state and varies its charging modes to provide the proper level of charge. Most chargers are not designed to be used in the wet marine environment, which means charging the battery only when the boat is in dry storage or by removing the battery from the boat to charge it in a dry location. Some chargers are also large, generate excessive heat, and are not suitable to be kept aboard the boat and carried afloat, while well-designed battery tenders are compact and charge at a slower rate and lower temperature. Some chargers have to be disconnected when the battery is fully charged, then reconnected after the charge level drops while a good battery tender can be left connected for extended periods, and extend the life of expensive marine batteries.
Photographs by the authors
The tender’s indicators provide full status reports on the battery’s state of charge.
For the past year, we’ve had a ProMariner ProSport HD6 installed aboard our vintage Sorg 15 runabout to maintain the 12-volt battery we use for powering the electric start on the outboard, running lights, USB port, and automatic bilge pump. The ProSport HD6 is a heavy-duty 6-amp tender that will charge one 12-volt battery. There are also tenders available in ProMariner’s same series of chargers to manage a bank of batteries with a pair of charging wires for each battery whether they are separate, in series, or in parallel.
The HD6 has a button to select use with flooded-lead, absorbed-glass-mat (AGM), or gel batteries. It is compact, designed for onboard use in the marine environment, shock resistant, and waterproof to the IP67 standard: a 30-minute submersion at 1 meter. After a day on the water, we can plug the HD6 into the shore power on our dock and forget about it; the lower charge rates and tri-surface heat sinks minimize the concern we previously had about leaving a hot charger in a wooden boat.
We installed the tender on the back of the stern seat’s folding backrest. It stays with the boat and only needs to be plugged into shore power to take care of the battery.
The feature of our HD6 that we appreciate most is the LED display, which provides information on charging modes, battery status, and charge completion status. The digital tender operates through five stages of charging: analyzing battery status, charging and conditioning, auto-maintain, and a pulsed mode for storage recondition. These stages are indicated by mode lights on the tender: a blue pulse for Analyze, red for Charging, amber for Conditioning, green for Auto Maintain, and green pulse for Storage Recondition. The tender has a green light to indicate a full battery and a red light for a fault condition—reverse polarity, poor connections, or high or low voltage. Progress of charging is also shown in 20-percent increments. Two additional features are an AC input power light and System Check OK light.
The HD6 was easy to install and is intuitive to operate, and it has saved the purchase price of at least one replacement battery so far. It has reliably ensured that our battery was topped up and ready for use, even after our annual extended hurricane-season boat storage.
Audrey and Kent Lewis have changed homeports from Florida to Virginia, and are planning future messabouts in the Tidewater region in their armada of small boats, which includes their vintage 1959 Sorg 15 lapstrake runabout, WILLOW.
I bought my first Japanese tool in the late 1970s shortly after I started building boats. It was a kataba saw that I had purchased at Toshiro’s Hardware in Seattle’s International District. The store’s owner, Frank Toshiro, asked me what kind of woodworking I was doing—I told him boatbuilding—and if I had used Japanese saws before. When I said I hadn’t, he took from the display case a slender saw with a straight stick-like handle and a rectangular fine-toothed blade. He put a piece of 1×2 pine on top of the counter and sawed an inch off the end. I was already impressed by how quickly and cleanly the saw cut, but then he took the piece that he had just sawn off and pressed it back on the end of the 1×2. It stayed there. The two sides of the cut were so smooth that air couldn’t get between the pieces and a partial vacuum held them together. That sold me on the saw and, over the years that followed, I bought more saws, sharpening stones, and my favorite chisel, a Kote Nomi crank-neck with a laminated blade that took a razor-sharp edge.
Photographs by the author
The Kakuri sheath (top), made of thin plywood and faux leather, protects the blade well, but is not made as well as the nata. I’d keep it in a backpack to make it last. The Silky sheath is quite sturdy and made of aluminum and tough plastic and will carry the nata in either orientation for left- or right-hand use. The belt loop clips into the back side, so the sheath can be removed without taking the loop off your belt. Both sheaths have a loose fit on the blade and rattle a bit when carried on a belt.
The Japanese tools looked different and often worked in different ways, but they always took very sharp edges and were easy to use. My two most recent purchases have been no exception. They are natas, outdoor tools that look like short machetes but are used as hatchets. I have a 165mm single-bevel nata from Kakuri and a 240mm double-bevel nata from Silky.
Both natas are very sharp and and can quickly whittle feather sticks for fire starting.
The Kakuri nata is made in the traditional form. It has a short tang pinned in a 7″ oak handle; a steel ring around the throat pinches the two parts together. The 165mm (6-1/2″) blade is made of 1/4″ steel, and the tool has an overall length of 14″ and weighs 1 lb 3.6 oz. It has a single bevel for a right-hander. The single bevel is favored by arborists, and used with the flat side next to the trunk when trimming branches. That worked quite well for doing a neat job pruning the pear trees in my yard, though I was interested in the single bevel for using the nata like a drawknife.
The Kakuri’s very sharp edge and 16-degree bevel make it a remarkably quick chopping tool.
The Kakuri’s single bevel makes it work just like a drawknife, though it requires care when holding the end of the blade.
The Kakuri, with its single bevel, can veer a bit when starting a split with a baton, but it quickly works its way into the wood. (The rock isn’t where I did the splitting.)
The Kakuri is rather heavy as a galley knife, but its sharp blade does fine work, even with a ripe tomato.
The listing on Amazon, where I bought the Kakuri, says only that the blade is made of “top grade Yasuki steel,” a reference to a city in Japan with a long history of producing steel from local iron sands, steel that was used for traditional Japanese swords. Faint lines on the nata’s blade suggested that it was laminated, with the edge ground into a different piece of steel measuring 1″ wide and 1/16″ thick. The only confirmation of a laminated blade are the characters stamped on the side—鋼付—hagane-tsuke or “with steel,” indicating that the mild-steel body of the blade has a high-grade steel for the edge. That steel can take a very sharp edge and hold it well. The Kakuri nata was quite sharp straight from the manufacturer, and a bit of stropping made it sharp enough to slice through paper held on edge. The steel was durable enough to stay that sharp after doing some chopping and splitting.
Silky’s Nata 240 is a contemporary tool with a 240mm (9-1/2″) blade of 7/32″ SKS-51 steel (listed as stainless but strongly magnetic); the overall length is 16-3/4″ and it weighs 1 lb 9.9 oz. Mine has a double bevel; a single right-hand bevel is available from some outlets, but Silky no longer makes it. The Silky has a full-tang handle with a two-piece rubber grip that is removable so the blade can be replaced without having to purchase a new handle and sheath.
The Silky got through this branch in four strokes. I inadvertently hit the thumb-like branch angled upward and cut through it as if it weren’t there.
The Silky is very effective when used as a drawknife. The large blade makes for a good hand grip on the end and the double bevel provides good control over the cut.
The Silky was especially good for baton-aided splitting. The long blade provides a good target for the baton and the rubber handle all but eliminates the shock to the hand.
The rubber handle is easily removed if the blade ever needs to be replaced.
The Silky comes with a sharp edge and can be stropped to pass a paper-cutting test. It still was able to cut paper on the edge after doing a bit of chopping and splitting, though not as cleanly.
I took both natas into the woods and used them on some maple and red cedar windfalls. They were impressive chopping tools. On one 2 ½” cedar branch, both got through with four strokes in a matter of seconds. Using the natas in drawknife fashion made it easy to strip bark; the Silky’s double-bevel blade worked just as well as the Kakuri’s single-bevel, whether bevel side up or down.
With a maple windfall as a test piece, I used, from left, the Kakuri and Silky natas, a Gränsfors Bruks hatchet, and a Silky Bigboy saw.
As a chopping test, I put the natas up against my Gränsfors Bruks carving axe on a 3-1/2″ maple windfall. The axe, which weighs 2 lbs 3 oz and has a 4-1/2″ blade, broke through with 30 strokes in 30 seconds. The Silky took 39 strokes and 41 seconds. I wasn’t expecting the Kakuri to measure up to the larger and heavier competition, but it cut through the maple with 34 strokes in 27 seconds. I think the Kakuri’s surprising performance might have been due to its fine 16-degree bevel. Both the Silky and the axe have a slightly blunter 20-degree angle. One of the online reviewers of the Silky nata mentioned that sawing is much more efficient than chopping, so I used my Silky Bigboy folding saw and got through the same piece of maple with 41 strokes in 20 seconds.
For splitting kindling, the natas are again very effective tools. With the long blades you don’t have to be quite so accurate as with the short blade of a hatchet, and both the Silky and the Kakuri have enough weight to make splits in small pieces of wood. For larger or knotty pieces of wood that don’t come apart in a single swing, striking the back of the blade will drive a nata through. An axe may bury itself before the wood splits, and you may have to raise both axe and wood to strike the chopping block to continue. The extra length of the nata can leave the tip of the blade sticking out from the wood, providing a place to strike with a baton to continue driving through.
Both the Kakuri 165 and the Silky Nata 240 are very effective tools for campcraft. And just as I was quick to convert from my western push saws to Japanese pull saws, I’ll make the switch from hatchet to the Japanese nata.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Barry Jensen built his first boat, a Sabot sailing dinghy, 55 years ago, when he was just 14 years old. As an adult, working as a librarian in Victoria, British Columbia, he built more boats: a 14′ plywood Petrel sailboat and a couple of cedar-strip kayaks, to name a few. And, while it was in him to retire after a 34-year career doing work that actually put food on the table, he hasn’t been able to shake his habit as a serial boatbuilder.
Photographs by Barry Jensen
The workboat documented by John Gardner was carvel planked, but Barry decided that he’d strip plank the hull.
It would then come as no surprise that when he flew across Canada to see the sights of the country’s Atlantic seaboard, he came home with one lasting impression: lobsterboats. He turned, instinctively perhaps, to his home library and eventually found his way among the neatly ordered volumes to call number 623.8202 GAR V.2, Building Classic Small Craft, Volume 2, by John Gardner, and landed on chapter 7, page 91: “Down East Workboat.” The boat there was developed in Maine’s Washington County, right across the border from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, and was similar in form to the Canadian Cape Island lobsterboat, native to Cape Sable Island on the south coast of Nova Scotia.
The newly rolled hull rests on the dolly that will trundle it back into the shop. The mattresses at left cushioned the hull for the operation.
While the provenance of the design appealed to Barry, the carvel planking did not—it was not a method he had tried—so he decided on cedar strip, a method he had used on his kayaks, a 7′ pram, and a hull to turn his soft-bottomed inflatable into a RIB.
Foam for flotation filled the spaces between the framing members that would support the cockpit sole.
He bought 20′ 1×6 cedar boards from a local lumberyard, cut his own 1/2″ strips, set up the molds, and went to work. His son, Junichi, lives close by and is a good man to have on the job, not only because he works for the B.C. provincial government on building and safety standards, but also because he is a fine anecdotal argument for serial boatbuilding as a genetic condition. Junichi’s first boat, a 13′ strip-built peapod, was featured in a Disney movie filmed in British Columbia. More recently he rebuilt a 14’ cedar Peterborough runabout and converted a 16′ Atkin-designed rowboat that he’d built into a 12′ runabout.
Rather than work out the accommodations on paper, Barry decided on the dimensions and went straight to framing.
Barry and Junichi gave the fully planked workboat hull two layers of 6-oz ’glass and epoxy, and when the time came to flip the hull upright, Junichi arrived with an old mattress. Then father and son, with the help of several neighbors, rolled it from strongback to cradle.
With a bit of plywood defining the shapes of the cabin and pilothouse, the workboat begins to look like a lobsterboat.
After Barry ’glassed the interior, installed two 2×6 stringers, foam flotation, and the cockpit sole, he began to design the forecabin and pilothouse. He had read that there were many compelling arguments why he should not add a cabin and wheelhouse to an open boat, but he had one compelling argument why he could: “It’s my boat.” He set the length of the cabin at 6′ 6″, long enough for a comfortable berth, then mocked-up the pilothouse with 2x2s. When the roofs and walls were in place, Barry installed a solid door with a lock, sliding windows, seats, and the controls at the helm.
The addition of the cabin and pilothouse converted the workboat into a successful pleasure cruiser.
Launch day started with a celebration at the house, attended by family and neighbors, and then moved to the launch ramp at Brentwood Bay, a handful of miles (plus a few more digits in kilometers) north of Victoria. The boat was christened C H K, after the first initials of his three grandkids. A borrowed 20-hp two-stroke was the boat’s first outboard, and when Barry decided that wasn’t enough power, he bought a new 20-hp four-stroke.
C H K has cruised to Desolation Sound and will have plenty of British Columbia coast to explore in the future.
Barry and C H K are in the heart of beautiful cruising grounds. The summer before the pandemic, he cruised the B.C. coast north some 150 miles to Desolation Sound, and then kept closer to home last summer and meandered through the Gulf Islands. This coming summer, he hopes to travel farther, vaccinations permitting—and if he can put off building his next boat.
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RASCAL sped across the riffled waters of Long Island Sound. Her mahogany foredeck glowed from the depths of its varnish, and her stainless-steel cutwater sparkled through drops of water streamlining into mist. Driver and passenger sat low on a simple rolled leather seat, legs stretched out nearly parallel to the cockpit sole. A tall person could reach over the side and touch the water as it rushed aft at better than 50 mph. Memories of my first ride in RASCAL still raise goose bumps after 15 years.
At 15′ in length and weighing about 1,000 lbs with a full fuel tank and cockpit, RASCAL is a cheeky little boat— “pleasantly mischievous” is one of the ways Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines the name—powered by a 60-hp Mercury outboard. If Colin Chapman had designed and built boats instead of Lotus automobiles, a boat of RASCAL’s character surely would have been among them—the Lotus Super Seven of the waterways.
Photo by Polly Brown
Rascal, a 14’10” outboard runabout that you can build in the backyard, strives to capture the cachet of big mahogany speedboats—without their mechanical complications and great expense.
Designed and built by Kenny Bassett, Onion River Boat Works, RASCAL offers more bang for the buck than just about any other runabout a father and son could build over several hundred hours of nights and weekends. They will build her of plywood—4mm for the topsides and decks, 5mm for the bottom—ripped into strips 1″ wide and laid diagonally over frames and stringers. That’s the easy part. If they want to capture the gloss and romance of traditional mahogany runabouts, they’ll plank the topsides with 1⁄ 4″ solid mahogany, perfectly lined off and set in epoxy. Although this method taxes the skill and patience of an amateur builder, it’s far from impossible. In fact, Tom Donahue, an electrical engineer living in Connecticut, recently completed a Rascal. Before this project, he’d built nothing more demanding than a couple of birdhouses. Donahue knows, maybe better than anyone, that whoever builds a Rascal must let patience guide them throughout the project, especially during the varnishing. The finishwork will likely require as much, or more, time than the construction.
The final result, though, is worth the wait. RASCAL rides atop a shallow-V bottom. Her steep entry warps into a flat run and ends at the transom in a deadrise of about 7 degrees. A delta-shape pad keel from station No. 2 aft to the transom provides a perfect planing surface, allowing RASCAL to make the transition from displacement speed to full plane in a single heave—absent the “hump” we associate with deep-V hulls and their slightly shallower modified-V sisters. Chine flats emerge from the waterline at station No. 4, which corresponds with the forward edge of the cockpit. They rise gracefully and embrace the stem about halfway up the bow, forming a line that plays with light and shadow to create visual interest forward of the cockpit. These chines also deflect spray.
RASCAL’s exceptional proportions mask her size when she stands alone in the slip or speeds across the water. Only when she’s parked next to a larger boat does she reveal her compact dimensions. The outboard’s power head, like a welt on the forehead of Julianne Moore, may diminish our first impressions from exquisite to merely beautiful, but familiarity ought to heal the wound. Bassett was aware of this possibility, so he painted the cowling of the outboard on hull No.1. A lustrous solid black accented by the name RASCAL in chromed script made the power head an integral part of the design, further defining the boat’s character and purpose.
I’d met Bassett at the Riverside Yacht Club in the town of the same name located two train stops east of Greenwich, Connecticut. He’d traveled from New Hampshire to demonstrate the boat to a prospective buyer and invited me to join him for a test drive afterward. Bassett fired up the three-cylinder Mercury, which was still warm from his demo, engaged forward gear, and idled us into the channel.
Photo by Polly Brown
Powered by a 60-hp, Mercury outboard motor, RASCAL scoots along at better than 50 mph.
At rest and under slow way, RASCAL lightly tap-danced to the rhythm of cat’s-paws stirred by the breeze. This lateral motion is common to other runabouts I’ve driven and seems to be a characteristic of the bottom’s shape and the boat’s low center of gravity. I love this little dance, because it conveys a restless energy—the promise of speed. Most runabouts fulfill this promise, whether they are blindingly fast or simply pleasingly rapid.
Few powerboats involve us in their playfulness as completely as does a fine runabout, and RASCAL’s length and light weight intensify all of the sensations—save one: the rumble of an inboard engine, V-8, or straight-six barking epithets from the chrome tips of a through-transom exhaust. When I drove the original RASCAL, a 60-hp Mercury two-stroke outboard powered her, and I admit to being disenchanted by the ring, ding, ding voice coming from the transom. Sure, I knew better. I had road-raced two-stroke motorcycles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and understood their potential to entertain the speed demon in all of us. I knew also that this lightweight outboard was the key to RASCAL’s personality.
Never mind Gar Wood’s neat 16′ Speedster inboard runabout or, to be more contemporary, Donzi’s lovely Sweet 16 sterndrive, only an outboard would give Bassett everything he wanted—simplicity of installation, ease of maintenance, purchase price, light weight and performance. Although outboard-powered classics never gained the cachet of their inboard sisters, they’ve written a richly colorful history for themselves in racing and more sedate forms of boating. In RASCAL, Bassett has combined the spirit of the all-conquering Switzer Craft hydroplanes and utilities with the look and presence of a Gold Cup raceboat.
After we cleared the mooring field and the no-wake zone, Bassett trimmed the outboard’s drive leg and pushed the throttle to the stops, sending us in a single rush to a speed of 50 mph. In the open water, RASCAL skimmed atop a foot or so of chop, doing her best imitation of a Lotus Super Seven tearing along a country lane in the north of England. Hard left, hard right, the little boat put her shoulder into the turns and carved perfect arcs. A tiny skid fin, at the leading edge of the planing surface and projecting to a depth of 2 3⁄4″ from the pad keel, helped RASCAL hold her line and speed in these turns. Without the fin, she would drift wide—her way of asking the driver to back off the throttle. We played until our faces ached with indelible grins and the electric tilt and trim on the outboard quit working.
Photo by Polly Brown
Designer-builder Ken Bassett drives RASCAL at speed. The playful runabout isn’t the easiest boat to build, but she rewards careful work with fine performance and head-turning appearance.
We met again later in the summer—this time on Candlewood Lake, near Danbury, Connecticut. This lake is an impoundment and is very narrow in many sections. Wind-blown waves and the wakes of powerboats bounce off the shorelines and march directly back toward the center of the lake. Picture the inside of a washing machine, the agitator of which moves rapidly up and down. Even during the week, motorboat traffic on Candlewood resembles the madness of I-95 between New Haven and Greenwich, so we looked for relatively quiet water to time her acceleration and top speed in fresh water. We recorded 2.7 seconds from 25 to 35 mph and a maximum speed of 52 mph.
My turn to drive. The cockpit is intimate, the steering wheel small, and the gauges are located in a panel at the center of the dashboard, similar to the arrangement in a 1952 Jaguar XK120. The seat is a paragon of simple design and construction, a pair of leather-covered foam cushions resting on nylon webbing. As drawn, the cockpit ought to accommodate a reasonable variety of human heights and widths. If I were going to build a Rascal, I’d figure out a way to make the seat adjustable fore-and-aft.
The unassisted cable-operated steering was quick, and RASCAL’s response nearly instantaneous. At first, the boat’s quickness startled me, so I eased back on the throttle until I got the feel of her handling. In those washing machine waters, she preferred staying on top of the conditions, so the faster we went, the smoother was her ride. RASCAL reacted predictably to changes in the outboard’s trim. Trimming in brought the bow down to engage the waves; trimming out raised the bow, transferring the load to her planing surface under the cockpit. She never porpoised, chine-walked, or tried to get airborne. One owner of a Rascal has clamped a heavily modified outboard onto the transom and regularly sees 70 mph. He has reported that she remains free of handling vices.
Like a pleasingly mischievous friend, RASCAL defies anyone to resist her charm, her playfulness, and friendly manners. She may not be the easiest boat to build, but rendering the two-dimensional drawings into all her wonderful three-dimensional shapes may make you as giddy as does driving her.
Ken Bassett retired and closed Onion River Boatworks in 2017; there are no plans available for RASCAL. The review is presented here as archival material.
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With his Stir Ven design, a 22′ LOA centerboarder, François Vivier took first place in the “neo-traditional” category of a 1997 design competition organized by the French magazine Le Chasse-Marée. His main design objective was to balance the aesthetics and appeal of a purely traditional sailboat with a modern hull’s efficiency of construction, maintenance, and overall performance. Nine years and twenty-five boats later, it seems that he has fully reached his initial aim.
Designed at first with amateur builders in mind, Stir Ven has been refined several times, and the design is now being built professionally by the north Brittany boatyard Grand Largue, which produces versions ranging from a do-it-yourself kit to a fully equipped, ready-to-sail boat. Vivier’s very detailed drawings and instructions do not mean that Stir Ven’s lapstrake plywood-and-epoxy hull is an easy one to build, especially for beginners. Previous experience with a smaller lapstrake project—a Tom Hill design could be a nice training project—is more than recommended.
Photo by François Vivier
Under a single reef, a boat built to François Vivier’s Stir Ven design bravely beats to windward in a good breeze of the type that usually prevails during the Rencontres du Morbihan, a yearly meeting of traditional boats in south Brittany, France.
The Stir Ven hull is 22′ long, 7′ 3″ wide, and has a 397-lb cast-iron centerboard. Her lapstrake planking is 3⁄8″-thick marine plywood, with 5⁄8″ bulkheads. The main structural elements, including the deck, floors, watertight compartments, and frames, are all constructed of 3⁄8″ plywood. Her cockpit sole, rudder, and rear hatch are slightly thicker, using 10mm plywood (about 7⁄16″) that is easily found in France but may be less standard elsewhere. The backbone is made of the hardwood sapele, with wood-epoxy technology used all over, fillet joints included. Long common in America, such composite construction techniques are making some inroads among the traditional wooden boat builders in France, where even today a majority favors mechanical fastenings and cotton caulking. In old countries, things change perhaps more slowly than they might….
The Stir Ven sail plan shows a powerful, gaff-rigged mainsail of 204 sq ft. Two halyards easily hoist the high-peaked gaff, which sets nearly vertical. Her 75-sq-ft genoa gives her an efficient total of 279 sq ft of sail area. For working downwind, an optional asymmetrical spinnaker can be fitted to the end of a small—but not very aesthetically pleasing—bowsprit.
Photo by François Vivier
The boat is intended more for sailing than for rowing, but two healthy guys, each with a long oar, can maneuver in harbors or protected waters. A transom-mounted outboard, which stows in a cockpit locker, can take over when they’ve had enough.
Once launched, Stir Ven is quickly and easily rigged. When trailering, the mast, which is both light and short, lies flat on deck, resting in the tabernacle with the shrouds and forestay lashed down. Once the mast heel is fitted in the tabernacle, the mast can be hoisted by one crew member hauling on the forestay, which attaches to the stemhead fitting. After the shrouds and forestay have been tensioned properly, the sails have been hanked on, and the rudder has been shipped, you are ready to go. The tiller swings under the afterdeck, leaving plenty of free space on deck for the mainsheet tackle and the horse traveler. It’s difficult to imagine a simpler operation. Two people can get the boat from trailer to sailing in less than half an hour. Before setting sail, however, you have to remember to lower the heavy centerboard.
Photo by François Vivier
An amidships winch is needed to raise and lower the 397-lb centerboard.
After her initial heel, Stir Ven stays firmly on her bilges and holds a perfect trim until the wind reaches about 12 knots. If the wind is heavier, the huge main has to be reefed to keep the helm in balance, but even at high angles of heel the centerboard is heavy enough to keep the boat steady in the gusts. For ultimate security, Vivier has designed enough buoyancy in enclosed compartments forward and on both sides of the cockpit to make Stir Ven unsinkable. Some real-world testing has since demonstrated the efficiency of the design. Her tiller is always light and responsive, without any tendency toward weather helm.
To a purist’s eye, the optional spinnaker may seem to be an incongruity in conjunction with a gaff rig, but it greatly improves downwind performance and is small enough to be easily mastered, even in a good breeze.
Stir Ven’s rig is set up in a way very similar to a big dinghy, and deck hardware has been kept to a minimum for simple handling. It will not scare newcomers. For the construction, however, parts such as the stemhead fitting, the mast tabernacle, and the main horse traveler may have to be professionally manufactured in bronze or galvanized steel. The small traveler adds a traditional touch on the after deck and improves the set of the mainsail. The main and jib halyards are made off to cleats mounted on the tabernacle, but it is also possible to lead them through turning blocks to cam cleats mounted on the cabin roof on each side of the companionway, so that all of the lines will be within easy reach of the cockpit.
Photo by François Vivier
The Stir Ven cockpit is designed for two people to sleep on the sole, and a huge cockpit tent with full headroom can make the design into a comfortable camp-cruiser.
The small, cambered cuddy cabin is very low and does not protrude too much above the sheerline. The cabin is big enough to accommodate two usable bunks but lacks locker space. An optional cockpit tent erected on hoops greatly adds to the crew’s comfort when camp-cruising, providing a sheltered living area with full 6′ standing headroom in the cockpit. At night, two berths can be made up on the cockpit sole. The cockpit is not self-bailing, however, so any water remaining from the day’s sail will have to be pumped out. The cockpit’s size and depth, on the other hand, help children and beginning sailors feel immediately at ease and protect them from spray.
All heavy gear—water cans, fenders, and so on—find their natural place in compartments under the cockpit gratings, but they are not protected from water. The mooring line and anchor can be conveniently stowed in a forward locker, closed by a flush-mounted hatch. A bigger box just aft of the rode locker can be used to store the outboard motor, together with its portable gas tank. Because they contain heavy gear, those two lockers have been judiciously located far from the ends of the boat. Another detail betrays Vivier’s care in design: rather than using a conventional—and ugly—outboard motor bracket, he has provided a simple and stylish transom cutout for the motor, which can be removed and stored in the locker when not in use.
Photo by François Vivier
Some fittings, notably the bronze stemhead casting and the fairlead for the anchor rode, may have to be professionally made.
“I have been sailing since my childhood in the ’60s, a time when boats were mainly built of wood, designed by a naval architect, and built by experienced craftsmen,” Vivier says. “My passion for boats comes from that era, now considered as prehistoric. Since then, I have been studying ship engineering and architecture, and worked a long time for the biggest French shipyards and maritime transportation companies of the Atlantic west coast. My career ended as IRCN director (Institut de Recherches en Construction Navales— the Research Institute for Ship Building) where I have gained through experience a deep technical and practical knowledge of all types of boats, for leisure, fishing, commercial, or military uses. But for 25 years, my ‘secret garden’ has always been traditional boating, sail-and-oar, and amateur small-boat building. This led me to design for my pleasure various sailing or rowing boats, all inspired by tradition, but easy to build with simple tools at home. In 1981, I was one of the founders of Le Chasse-Marée, a yachting magazine that right from its first issue was promoting a new sailing philosophy, summed up in a simple slogan: ‘Naviguez autrement,’ which translates as ‘sail in a different way.’
“Soon after Le Chasse-Marée’s founding, I designed l’Aven, the first French sail-and-oar stock design, 80 of which have since left the yard in Loctudy. In 1985, I drew l’Aber with home-builders in mind and developed a large range of various sailing and rowing small boats. Today, the now affordable CNC technology (computer numerically controlled cutting) and yacht design software are the best tools to develop new building kits. Their high level of precision greatly simplifies and shortens a lot of usually painful and boring boatbuilding tasks, and in order to answer to an increasing international demand, I am now translating my building instructions notebooks in English—but the measurement system is still metric.”
With a jib, a genoa, a high-peaked gaff mainsail, and an optional asymmetrical spinnaker tacked down to a stub bowsprit, Stir Ven offers the sailor lots of variations. The jib sheet reeves through a fairlead to a cam cleat, but the design indicates that once the centerboard is lowered, the amidships winch can be freed to trim the jib.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2007 and appears here as archival material. Plans for the Stir Ven 22 are available from Vivier Boats.
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In 1987, as Chip Miller was learning how to build wooden boats at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, he became interested in Alton Wallace’s design for an open skiff. Contacting Wallace, Miller arranged to have a look at one of his original hulls. He measured that hull, carved a half model, and—using the model in the traditional way and working with another student—built a full-scale version of Wallace’s skiff in the museum’s shop. He liked the result, and after a few years’ work in various Maine boatyards, he concluded it was time to build this seaworthy design again, using up-to-date techniques.
Where to begin? He still had his half model, and the Maine Maritime Museum still had the set of molds Miller had made and used there for his student project. “They didn’t want them,” he was told when he inquired about the molds. He promptly retrieved them, presumably saving these critical ingredients of his own boatbuilding dreams from the kindling pile or the dump.
Photo by Doug Wood
Six River Marine based this tough and shapely skiff on a highly regarded workboat designed and built by Alton Wallace. Chip Miller gave the new boat more freeboard, less flare, greater breadth, and slightly increased length.
Six River Marine, the company Miller formed with Scott Conrad in 1994, got its start as a mobile marine service. Miller and Conrad “packed their tools in a van and set about letting folks know of their services,” according to Six River’s informative web site. They had to work under some fairly miserable conditions during this time.
The West Pointer came into the picture about 10 years later, long after a roomy former chicken house in North Yarmouth, Maine, had replaced the van as Six River Marine’s principal place of business. Miller and Conrad had built up a storage, repair, and restoration operation that concentrated on boats built from the 1920s through the 1960s, some of which had won show honors for the quality of the restoration work. The student half model of the Wallace skiff lay in Miller’s office, reminding him daily of the handsome boat he had built nearly 20 years before.
The boat Miller built at the Maine Maritime Museum in 1987 was conventionally planked and a few inches shorter than the version he began building in the North Yarmouth shop. “More freeboard, less flare, increased beam, and increased length” is how he describes the result, which is 18′ 6″ overall, draws 7″ with its outboard motor up, and displaces 1,100 lbs.
Photos courtesy of Six River Marine
Unlike its strip-built workboat predecessor, the new Six River West Pointer is cold-molded with cedar, mahogany, and epoxy.
The big difference between the West Pointer 18 (20′ and 22′ versions are planned too) and its museum-built predecessor, however, is in the construction. Miller settled on cold-molded veneers over laminated mahogany frames, using two 1⁄8″ layers of cedar and one of mahogany, sheathed on the outside with resin-impregnated Dynel cloth and coated with a one-part urethane paint. The veneers are laid at right angles to each other in “planks” of varying widths, glued together with epoxy while being clamped with a vacuum-bag. He describes the result as “a rigid one-piece structure made completely of wood not fiberglass.”
The resulting hull, Miller asserts, is lighter in weight than its conventionally planked ancestor, and considerably easier to maintain. The company’s brochure for the West Pointer notes that the cedar and mahogany used for veneers is rot resistant and completely sealed with epoxy: “The result is a solid, impervious structure. With proper maintenance, rot won’t have a chance to get started.”
Photo courtesy of Six River Marine
Vacuum-bagging the hull as the epoxy cures results in a rigid one-piece structure that is free from voids.
The 18’6″ model that came out of the shop in 2005 is decked forward with a curved coaming running down both sides, from the foredeck all the way to the stern. Side decks are about 8″ wide, and the coaming looks low enough to permit a person to sit on the narrow deck for a while without discomfort. There is a center console equipped with a stainless-steel destroyer-type wheel and throttle and the usual gauges, plus convenient grabrails to port and starboard. The helmsman’s seat—gray-painted plywood—is positioned far enough aft to allow the skipper to stand or sit at the console (company photographs always show the helmsman standing, suggesting the West Pointer’s roots as a traditional workboat). There’s storage in the locker under the helmsman’s seat and under the foredeck.
This is a custom-built boat, and the configuration of hull No. 1 is only one of the possibilities. “In keeping with Six River Marine’s reputation as a custom boat builder, every hull is built to order,” states the company brochure. Alternate configurations might include a dodger, more decking, a windshield, additional rubrails, a different style of coaming, various seating arrangements, even a steering arrangement other than the center console. And, of course, the level of finish— less paint, more varnish—is up to the customer as well. Hull No. 1 is white with gray decks and interior, set off with a varnished coaming, grabrails, and console trim—very workmanlike, with just enough varnish to make it interesting.
The company recommends a 50-hp outboard, although at the customer’s request the first hull was equipped with a somewhat larger four-stroke Honda. A 50-hp motor, Miller says, will push this hull at 25 knots. It may be too early to know much about customer satisfaction, but the Maine buyer who commissioned hull No. 1 reportedly sold it to another buyer after a season and the boat is now with its second owner in Stuart, Florida. The original customer, meanwhile, has returned to Six River Marine and ordered a second West Pointer for himself.
Despite its curvaceous topsides, the West Pointer 18 shows an essentially flat bottom. The good-looking skiff has great initial stability, which can be useful for work and play.
This Boat Profile was published in Small Boats 2007 and appears here as archival material. For current information on the West Pointer 18, contact Six River Marine, 160 Royal Rd., North Yarmouth, ME 04097; 207–846–6675.
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© Fowler Portraits
© Fowler Portraits
This photograph and those below by Christopher Cunningham
