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 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 WoodenBoat 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.
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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.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
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.
There is always an air of anticipation (and anxiety) when contemplating building a new design that you have never seen (much less been on board). Such was the case a few years back, when WoodenBoat School shop manager Jerry Cumbo and I were casting about for another boat to use as a shop project for the Fundamentals of Boatbuilding courses taught at the school. The design needed to be technically interesting, with plenty of different operations, yet not so complex that it would take forever to build. It had to be safe and handle well enough that it might be a candidate to join the school’s waterfront fleet, and at the same time be practical enough that a student might actually want to build one. And it wouldn’t hurt if it looked good, too. We already had the usual suspects on the floor—the dory types and East Coast carvel pulling boat types. We were ready for something new, but what?
That’s when Mike O’Brien, WoodenBoat’s senior editor and design guru, suggested Skylark by Paul Gartside. Mike had recently reviewed the boat for the magazine and liked the cut of her jib (and other parts, too). Skylark was designed for day-sailing in the sporty estuary and ocean waters off the Oregon coast. Gartside’s customer had a preference for the lug-rigged older British sailing dinghies, and that’s where the design began. The resulting plans looked great. With a 14′ length and a 5’8″ beam and tipping the scales at a beefy 550 lbs, Skylark is one big, little boat with plenty of freeboard and stability. A quick look at the design reveals hollow waterlines forward, an easy run of planks aft, and a broad transom that barely touches the water. She has lots of rocker so she would tack easily, and if need be, would be efficient enough to move decently with either oars or small outboard. Skylark reflects her British Isles heritage with robust construction featuring a heavy-duty skeg-type backbone, lapstrake…er, clinker (in the British parlance) planking fastened with square European-type rivets, a plethora of frames, and a profusion of reinforcing knees—at the transom, stern, and thwarts.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
Paul Gartside designed Skylark, a 14′ daysailer, in the tradition of the sailing dinghies of his native Britain. The boat is heavily built and robust, and is also a fine sailer. Rig options include the lugsail shown here, and a marconi sloop.
Paul also penned in a handsome sheerline—this being the top edge of the boat’s hull, in profile. It’s an important element in a boat’s shape. Get it wrong, and the boat’s looks will suffer considerably. Oftentimes, small, wide boats can have sheers that look powderhornish—meaning their sheers dip precipitously up forward. They can sometimes look outright dumpy, but in this case, the sheer is elegant and, in profile, evokes the look of a svelte yacht dinghy. Best of all was her practical, near workboat ambiance. There was nothing that demanded expensive wood and 14 coats of varnish. Nor did it request a blue blazer or an ascot. Instead, it said, “Just jump in with a few friends and go—and don’t forget to bring the dog.” We were sold.
We did, however make few East Coast modifications to Skylark’s specifications. To wit: We planked the hull with Maine white cedar rather than the Western red cedar, for a couple of reasons. First, the Maine cedar is a tougher wood that resists impact and stress better than the red. Second, we had a good supply of it. We also made the planking a bit heftier as added protection from the occasional rocky beach landing. The knees were to be made of local hackmatack root.
Also, originally the plans called for a galvanized-steel centerboard. To standardize the boat with the rest of the WoodenBoat fleet, we opted for a Dynel-covered plywood board (ballasted with a slug of lead) that could be hauled up with a simple lanyard and cleated off.
Then, there is the matter of which sail rig to use. Skylark can be built with a deluxe gunter jib and main rig (94 sq ft) or the basic standing lug (88 sq ft). Again, opting for simplicity, we went with the free-standing lug.
The result of our modifications is a boat that is possibly somewhat more heavily built than the original design, but the difference is nothing to write home to mother about. We didn’t log the time required to build ours, and it wouldn’t be a meaningful figure if we had, for it was built in a classroom setting. However, designer Gartside suggests that the boat will require 600 hours of a highly skilled boatbuilder’s time.
Fast-forwarding, the boat was built over a number of summers in classes taught by a few different instructors and fashioned by literally hundreds of hands of students and alumni and shop staff. The resulting boat was even better looking than we had hoped for. She’s elegant, in a practical way, with an easy-to-maintain finish. Her topsides are painted with marine enamel, and the interior has a bright, oiled finish. That oil, it should be noted, will not remain as bright over the years as it appears in the accompanying photographs. It will weather to black, but will be far easier to maintain than varnish.
And how does she sail? The waterfront staff have all given Skylark universally high marks. Her inviting accommodations are comfortable to be in and can easily sail with four adults aboard. With her standing lug rig with a single halyard, she is simple to get underway. Just jump aboard and drop the centerboard, and off you go. That’s what Al Fletcher, WoodenBoat’s waterfront manager, did at the end of last summer. His shakedown sail resulted in the usual tweaks to a new boat’s rig, but he had high praise for the design.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
Despite her weight—which is rather high compared with other boats of her size—Skylark will keep moving in tiny zephyrs. When the wind dies all together, you can lift the boom above head-height and break out the oars.
On an outing in 12 knots of breeze, Fletcher reported good offwind speed. Upwind performance that day suffered as a result of a too-short mast, which produced a rather severe wrinkle in the sail. He said, “The boat tacked without hesitation and we were never caught in stays, even with minimal forward movement.” Al’s conclusion? “This is a roomy, quick, and stable 14′ open dinghy that I believe will give an outstanding account of herself once we get the rig sorted out.”
By season’s end, WoodenBoat’s new Skylark had a longer mast, and she was well through her teething problems. It seems nobody can pass by her without stopping and commenting on her beauty and grace. She has proven herself fast, sailing well with a good turn of speed (even in light air due to her tall lug rig). She tacks well without hesitation, feels stable both at the dock and under sail, and has a delightful chortle as water travels over the laps. Like all centerboard hulls, Skylark can cruise where no deep-keeled daysailer would dare to venture. Her draft, board up, is but 10″; with it down, it is 3′ 4″. She beaches handily with the kick-up rudder. Notes one passenger of the boat, “It even smells good.”
Granted, a single design will not be the perfect choice for all. In fact, Al Fletcher notes that Skylark was brought into the WoodenBoat fleet specifically to fill the niche between a 17′ Fenwick Williams catboat and a 12′ Beetle Cat. Four adults looking for a fine afternoon on the water will find the elegant yet working-class Skylark to be a delight. She is just a lot of fun to sail.
Designer Paul Gartside draws his plans with an unusual level of detail and artistry. He’s well known for small, ocean-capable sailing cruisers based on the fishing vessels of the west coast of England, but his portfolio is much wider than that. His Skylark design is filled with traditional elements, and is not a simple boat to build. But she is a simple boat to sail.
Time passes and carries with it our memories of even the sweetest experiences. I admit to having forgotten a lot during the past 25 years, but every moment I’ve spent in the company of BLACKBIRD remains firmly burned onto the CD of my life in boats. She’s a nautical treasure and rubs up against the edges of perfection. She may be the most appealing example of her type, a minimalist outboard-powered cruiser for sheltered waters, and the reason (or reasons) she hasn’t spawned a single sibling remains one of the most baffling mysteries of our time.
Conceived in the early 1980s by Ken Bassett, Onion River Boat Works, and massaged into her final form by Phil Bolger, BLACKBIRD embodies the spirit of carefree mobility found in the lyrics of the Mort Dixon/Ray Henderson song “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Pack up all my cares and woe, here I go, singin’ low, bye bye blackbird.” BLACKBIRD evolved on the image of the 40′ launch ESCORT, which Al Mason designed in about 1940 when he worked at Sparkman & Stephens. Bassett latched onto the notion of building a simple, lightweight variation of the theme, which ESCORT so beautifully represents, while he watched slides of a friend’s cruise on the Rideau Canal system in Ontario, Canada. His preliminary drawings showed a hardchined hull that Bassett planned to build from plywood. He sent the drawings to Bolger for completion. Bolger shared Bassett’s admiration for Mason’s graceful launch, and he drew plans for a round-bilged hull measuring 23′ 4″ long overall and 7′ 8″ maximum beam.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
Likely the most beautiful outboard cruiser ever designed, the shoal draft BLACKBIRD can cozy up to a secluded island beach and let her crew step ashore.
Approximately three times longer overall than she is wide and, on the waterline, only a few inches shy of her overall length, BLACKBIRD is all about curves—the shadows and highlights of which define her shape as she moves through the water or swings to her anchor. She’s beautiful from every angle, but her relatively short overall length pushes the aesthetic limits. If we chop off so much as a foot, retaining the beam as drawn, we’d be in danger of creating a caricature. If we scale down the design by a foot—which also requires narrowing the beam—we may cramp her interior volume beyond practical use.
On the other hand, scaling up or lengthening her on the same beam would add far more than the numbers indicate. She would be faster, roomier, more stable laterally and longitudinally, more elegant, and more expensive to build or have built. In spite of our preferences—as drawn or longer—we can’t ignore the sound reasoning that established BLACKBIRD’s final dimensions. A lightweight 24′ boat handles easily on the water, tows without protest, and readily cooperates during launching and retrieving. All of these characteristics extend her cruising grounds and enhance her usefulness. I’ve often imagined towing BLACKBIRD to some obscure body of water many miles from home and camping in her during rest stops along the road.
Belowdecks, BLACKBIRD serves up a cozy space for one or two adults. We’ll label the accommodations, which comprise a V-berth, enclosed head, and a galley opposite, luxurious camping. It certainly captivated me. BLACKBIRD and I met for the first time at a marina in Grand Isle, Vermont. I’d driven north from Connecticut to meet Bassett and spend an afternoon aboard the boat. Arriving early, I went aboard and crept into the cabin like a jewel thief slipping into madame’s boudoir. Bolger has referred to the layout as “shipshape.” I have to call the ambience magical. I went forward, collapsed onto the V-berth, closed my eyes, and let the boat’s polite motion lull me to sleep. Her original owner cruised the shallow waters of south Florida and lived aboard for a number of months. Before that, he and Bassett took the boat from The WoodenBoat Show in Newport to Grand Isle via the Hudson River and Champlain Canal. In the tropics or during the summer months farther north, we’d spend more time outside than in, lounging on a beach chair in the cockpit, a large umbrella sheltering us from the sun. We’d cook on a portable grill, sip espresso that we made on the stove in the galley, and then toast the sunset with a snifter of fine brandy.
In keeping with the theme of carefree mobility, Bassett specified outboard power for BLACKBIRD—originally a 50-hp Mercury. So equipped, the boat is easier to launch and retrieve, is lighter in weight, and doesn’t require all the plumbing and through-hull fittings that an inboard does. Installing an outboard also is orders of magnitude less intimidating to an amateur builder. Mounted in a watertight well, the motor doesn’t intrude on our peace as we cruise up the river, nor does it interfere with our appreciation of BLACKBIRD’s simple beauty.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
Requiring only moderate power, the 23′ 4″ hull efficiently slides through the clear water of Eggemoggin Reach near Brooklin, Maine.
Devoid of styling gimmicks, BLACKBIRD combines the purposeful look of a workboat with the grace of a gentleman’s launch. Although a cynic could argue that the complex shapes, especially in the trunk cabin, are hard to build and unnecessary to the boat’s function, she’d lose a lot of her emotional appeal if those shapes were eliminated—at least the love-at-first-sight part. The smitten enthusiast, emotions aside, could argue that the soft shapes allow the wind to flow more easily over the structure. He’d be correct. We’re not concerned with the aerodynamics of high-speed racing boats, but we are concerned with how the strong surface winds affect the boat’s directional stability in open waters and her maneuverability under slow way in close quarters. Rounded surfaces are slipperier than are flat ones.
The same idea applies to shapes below the waterline. BLACKBIRD’s barely plumb stem caps a sharp entry, which shows some hollow in the waterlines through station No. 2. Beyond station No. 2, the hull swells out, losing deadrise and gaining buoyancy as we trace the waterlines toward the transom. The run is flat, and the deadrise diminishes to zero degrees at the transom. Bolger worked magic in the flow lines, because the boat runs cleanly at all speeds, doesn’t need spray rails, doesn’t require more than 50 hp for a satisfying top speed (about 18 knots), and doesn’t roll enough to notice. Her light weight and flat run quicken the motion, but not uncomfortably so, as I discovered during a breezy day on Lake Champlain and in seas of about 2′.
Under way, BLACKBIRD happily slips along at any speed you select. At displacement speeds, her sharp entry splits the waves, letting her buoyant midsection ride gently over the remainder. She lifts to maximum speed in a deliberate rush, as though hurrying were beneath her dignity. At top speed, she carries her chin about 18″ above the surface of the water, waiting to engage the crest of another boat’s wake or a roguishly large wave that sneaked into the train. BLACKBIRD tracks well upwind and down but, like any lightweight boat, wanders a bit as she spars with the waves. Beam seas and wind nudge her this way and that, but not alarmingly so.
A fairly long skeg helps BLACKBIRD with her directional stability, in a straight line and in turns, but it limits the radius at which she takes a turn at the higher speeds in her range. The skeg robs the propeller of solid water; the engine revs, the boat slows, and the helmsman feels silly. BLACKBIRD isn’t a hot rod and should be treated accordingly.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
BLACKBIRD combines timeless design with modern cold-molded wood-epoxy construction. She looks fine even when standing still and should never leak a drop.
Bassett cold-molded BLACKBIRD of 1⁄8″ Western red cedar, the first three courses laid diagonally and the last longitudinally. He used Philippine mahogany for the keel, Honduras mahogany for the skeg, and ash for the stem. The method is well within the ability of amateur builders, and it produces a strong, stiff, and lightweight structure. Spiling—fitting the thin planks so they butt one another without gaps—and stapling to hold them in place while the epoxy resin sets require a great deal of patience. The bare hull, as Bassett and a handful of helpers lifted it off the molds, weighed about 500 lbs. The complete boat displaces 2,800 lbs.
Building the trunk cabin and windscreen taxes the craftsman’s eye and skills more than any other part of the boat. Bassett referred to the process as an exercise in free-form construction. The cabin’s delectable oval-shaped fascia rakes slightly aft, and its sides become perpendicular as they curve toward the cockpit. The coach roof slopes toward the bow and shows diminishing camber from the windscreen forward. Working in a relatively confined area, Bassett couldn’t get far enough away to really see the shape he was creating. “We would just put in a piece of wood and bend it until it looked like what we wanted,” he said.
Coaxing the many individual elements of a design into an engaging whole is the brass ring of design and construction. In BLACKBIRD’s case, the color scheme, working with the small riot of shapes, unifies the boat. “One thing becomes another,” Bassett said. “When you look at it, when you move around in it, when you steer it, you’re not just in a certain area—you’re in a whole boat.”
To meet BLACKBIRD is to love her, the way that strangers meet and, feeling as though they’ve known one another all their lives, stay friends forever.
Ken Bassett conceived the vision for BLACKBIRD based upon earlier work of Al Mason. Phil Bolger gave form to the idea on his drawing table, and Bassett brought the boat to life in his Vermont boatshop. The result: a truly classic design.
For plans contact:
Susanne Altenburger
Phil Bolger & Friends Inc.
66 Atlantic Street
Gloucester, MA 01930-1627 USA
(Contact information updated March 2022)
Ken Bassett retired and closed Onion River Boatworks in 2017.
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!
PETITELISA is a synthesis of Gilles Montaubin’s long experience with sail-and-oar boats. Unlike many boats of this type, she is not reminiscent of any traditional working boat type. Instead, she incorporates some very contemporary features. Montaubin, for example, has intensively tested the use of water ballast on many boat designs, and its use on PETITELISA allows her displacement to be adapted to varying conditions: whether propulsion is by sail or oar, whether her crew is solo or accompanied, and whether the sea state is flat or rough. Adding water ballast while rowing in choppy seas increases inertia and makes boat handling easier. Yet this varying ballast is accomplished without changing her overall trailering weight: emptying the ballast tanks is a snap.
Since his childhood, Montaubin has had an acute point of view on the world of boating, a world from which he has always stood aloof. During the 1960s, his father, an orthopedic surgeon, was an enthusiastic racing sailor and boatbuilding fanatic. At that time, the La Rochelle area had few yachtsmen, so everybody exchanged a lot of technical information gathered from the various boatyards and naval architects working in the surrounding area. Gilles served his boatbuilding apprenticeship accompanying his father and decided, after receiving a doctorate of sociology in 1972, to establish himself as a boat designer and builder in the backcountry.
He already had in mind some strong building and design principles: one-off units, simple, cheap, and fast, designed to suit specific needs and developed following his personal experience and that of his customers. Since then, Gilles has never broken his own rules. After a personal experience designing and building a 30′ plywood cruising monohull, his professional career really began, and in 1977 he designed a 40′ cruising catamaran, with which he cruised around Spain and Portugal. Then he began to design boats based on the local types surrounding his location in the heart of le Marais Poitevin, a famous French swamp area of the Atlantic coast. These boats were flatiron skiffs, which here are called plate, which is French for “flat.” But instead of following the tradition of building this type of boat with heavy hardwoods, he switched to concepts he learned from multihull ultra-light composite technology. In 1986, he entered a design competition organized by the French magazine Le Chasse-Marée with his own reading of a traditional plate, built in foam sandwich and weighing only 150 lbs, ready to sail.
Photo by Jean-Yves Poirier
PETITELISA’s powerful chine (the angle where her bottom and sides meet) is above the load waterline while rowing, making her, in effect, a narrow boat that moves easily with her two 9’ oars. She also has a movable thwart, allowing any rower to find an efficient position.
In 1992, he saw a nautical magazine that carried reproductions of postcards showing a misainier vendéen, a traditional cat-ketch lugger from the Vendée region. These images inspired him to create a modern interpretation of the type, which marked the beginning of a long line of cheap and fast sail-and-oar boats, all tested in various “Raids,” rowing and sailing races that have become popular throughout Europe, including Portugal, Scotland, Sweden, and Finland. In the 2006 Blekinge Archipelago Raid in Sweden (see WB No. 187), she placed first in her class. Such boats remain in accordance with Gilles’s way of life: discreet.
PETITELISA’s rig can be furled very quickly to adjust to the variable and ever-changing wind conditions of her coastal and inshore waters. Here, easy handling is the key for small-boat sailing security. She has also been designed to sail well to weather, for upwind efficiency is another important security feature on board sail-and-oar boats. At her owner’s request, PETITELISA has a centerboard, although Gilles usually favors the use of asymmetrical leeboards or a daggerboard angled in a trapezoidal well, a feature commonly found on racing dinghies.
Photo by Jean-Yves Poirier
Furling is easily done by rotating the carbonfiber mast using a 1⁄4” line fitted at deck-collar level.
The unstayed, carbon-fiber mast is built with two tube sections, the lower one 3 1⁄2″ in diameter and the upper one 2 1⁄2″. Some care is required to fit the mast in its step, because of its overall length of 26′ 3″. The two parts, however, can easily be taken apart for stowage in the cockpit while trailering. A screw in a notch interlocks the two sections of tubing for sail reduction, which is done by rotating the mast, just like a conventional roller-furling jib.
Weighing only about 26 lbs—including the sail—the rig is completed by a long boom. At first, Gilles designed a simple sprit, used only under full sail and stowed on deck if the sail is furled. Because he sails alone most of the time, the owner chose instead a curved laminated boom, with a gooseneck—which is a little bit awkward— fitted on deck behind the mast collar. Designed to reduce sail handling, the system works well but needs very long control lines and numerous cheek blocks.
The first time you climb aboard PETITELISA, you feel immediately secure because of her hull’s high initial stability. Based on a narrow sole with deep-V side panels, her double-chined plywood hull is much more sophisticated than it seems at first glance. The shape is a rather subtle and very efficient compromise, balancing low wetted surface, a long waterline length for rowing, and stability at first degrees of heel under sail. You can move around in the cockpit with the same kind of confidence you experience on board heavier and bigger boats.
Since the helmsman can reach all her lines, there is no need to walk on the foredeck, which is rather narrow due to the very fine entrance of her waterlines. This can lead to some difficulties for mooring or anchoring, although the samson post can be reached by leaning over the cuddy—and maybe a small hatch would improve the maneuver without adding too much weight.
The 17-gallon water ballast tank has been built into the bottom around the centerboard trunk. Its operation is more than simple: after launching PETITELISA, you open the small cockpit sole hatch close to the companionway, unscrew the drain plug, and wait for the tank to fill. A few minutes later, put the plug back in place and screw the deck plate back down. The plug can be removed again when hauling out to save some weight on the trailer. That’s all!
Photo by Jean-Yves Poirier
PETITELISA is ballasted by water, and filling the tank is very easy to do with a simple drain plug fitted under the cockpit sole. When hauling out, the plug is pulled again to let the water drain.
The small cuddy gives the crew a good chance to get out of the weather when necessary, but the designed cabin is too small to accommodate two usable bunks. It’s possible that moving the main bulkhead aft 4″ or so could improve things, but at the expense of cockpit space. Because the rowing thwarts are removable and the cockpit sole is perfectly flat, self-draining, and measuring about 8′ 6″ x 4′ 5″, two people could sleep there in good comfort under a boom tent. All cruising gear—and even a small galley—stows in the forward compartment. Because gear is not stored in compartments under the cockpit sole, the deck surface is kept perfectly watertight while sailing, but inspection ports allow some access to the flotation compartments.
Photo by Jean-Yves Poirier
The cuddy is nice for storage but too short to accommodate a properly sized bunk.
Firm on her chine, PETITELISA is a delight to sail, even in light air. Her high-aspect-ratio sail plan and low wetted surface area have something to do with this pleasant behavior. Closehauled, she points rather high to the wind, but, as usual with a catboat rig, it’s better to keep her off a little bit. Downwind, she is very stable because of the forward position of the rig, which literally pulls the boat as if it were on rails—but mind that boom!
Photo by Jean-Yves Poirier
Under sail, the chine adds stability at the first degrees of heel, and PETITELISA is wide at deck level to provide good ultimate stability.
No sail-and-oars boat is perfectly balanced between both propulsion modes, but PETITELISA seems to have reached a high level of equilibrium between usually contradictory requirements. Not bad for such a simple girl.
Gilles Montaubin designed PETITELISA to be the simplest possible boat but with good performance under sail and easy to row. Her unstayed carbonfiber mast is made of two pieces for light weight and easy stowage, and the only lines she has are her sheet, halyard, and furling line. The unusual boom rotates on a fitting on the cuddy roof, although a variation (shown in the accompanying photographs) has a curved boom rotating on a gooseneck forward of the cuddy, near the foot of the mast.
People are always drawn to the warmth and the visual texture of a varnished wood kayak, but the beauty of a plywood kayak can and should be more than skin deep. Not only do the sweeping curves of the Coho 17’s multichined hull and beveled deck offer up an elegance that sets a kayak like the Coho apart from mainstream composite and rotomolded plastic kayaks, but this stitch-and-glue kayak is also lighter and stiffer than fiberglass kayaks and plastic kayaks of similar size. Pygmy’s computer-generated panel shapes and laser-cut templates produce kit pieces that will come together in an exceptionally fair hull that will hold its shape for the life of the boat. [Update: Pygmy closed at the outset of the pandemic. —Ed.]
In Pygmy’s early kits, butt blocks were used to back up the joints required to make the full-length strakes. The blocks have been done away with, and the butt joints are now just glued and ’glassed. They are every bit as strong, a bit lighter, and make for a cleaner interior. The bottom of the Coho has a slight V through the midsection, enough of a crease to give the midsection plenty of stiffness. The triple-chined hull is lined off into four well-proportioned strakes. The deck has a central ridge that sheds water well and beveled side panels that keep the beam of the boat low and out of the way of the paddle.
At just under 40 lbs, the Coho is an easy lift and carry. You won’t find yourself muttering by the time you get it into the water. The cockpit opening was long enough for me (I’m a bit over 6′ tall) to get in seat-first. That can be an advantage over a small cockpit that requires you sit on the afterdeck and slide into the cockpit feet-first. If you bail out of the Coho after a capsize, you can crawl aboard, straddle the deck, and drop your weight into the seat. Most folks will have enough stability then to get their feet in without having to set up a paddle-float outrigger to stabilize the kayak.
Provided by Pygmy Boats
Striking from any angle, the Coho 17 kayak from Pygmy Boats weighs less than 40 lbs. The 17′ 6″ x 23″ boat will carry a paddler and his gear through rough water at good speed.
The self-inflating (Therm-a-Rest) seat pad is fairly comfortable initially, but the muscle tension required to keep the legs locked into the thigh braces can eventually lead to fatigue and numbness. The pad also makes for a slightly mushy connection to the boat. For one of my outings in the Coho, I replaced the pad with a minicell foam seat I’d sculpted for one of my own kayaks. My homemade seat is about 15″ long and about 3″ thick at its forward end. Its deep custom-fit contours are more comfortable in the long haul, and the support it provides under my legs keeps my feet from going numb. I also found that the solid connection of the sculpted seat made the Coho easier to control when edging the hull through turns or in surf. If you have rough-water paddling in your sights, carve your stern into a block of minicell.
Once afloat, I felt quite comfortable in the Coho. It has plenty of initial stability so I could set the paddle down and not have to think about keeping the boat upright. Even when the Coho and I were getting slapped around by waves breaking in the shallows, I was able to fiddle with my VHF radio while I had my paddle tucked under my elbow. The Coho has a strong righting moment when set on edge. Canting my hips, I could get the sheer submerged and still feel stable. Only when the coaming touched the water did I feel the stability taper off.
Underway, the Coho tracks well and the bow yaws very little between strokes. The long waterline and sharp ends that contribute to the Coho’s tracking ability will work against you when you try to turn, but a bit of edging will curve the waterline and lift the ends enough to get the hull to carve through a turn. Canting my hips to edge the Coho up to the limits of its stability allowed me to make respectably tight turns. At 17′ 6″ long, the Coho has an appropriate balance between tracking and maneuverability for performance touring. Pygmy offers a rudder as an option, but I don’t think the Coho needs one.
I did several speed trials in the still water using a GPS as a knotmeter. At a relaxed pace I could easily maintain 4.5 knots, a pretty brisk clip for not breaking a sweat. Taking my effort up a notch to an aerobic workout level, I could hold 5.5 knots. Going flat-out over about 50 yards, I could briefly bump up to 6.5 knots. That’s a good set of numbers for a kayak designed for cruising.
Provided by Pygmy Boats
This Coho enjoys a quiet day, but it will behave well in tough conditions. Should the worst happen, experienced kayakers can Eskimo-roll the boat. Solid stability and a relatively long (33″ ) cockpit allow for relatively easy re-entry if a paddler must take to the water.
On one outing I picked up a pretty good breeze, about 18 knots. Weathercocking is a common problem among sea kayaks. If you are paddling across the wind, the bow is pretty well locked in as it pushes forward into the water, but the stern, trailing in the turbulent water “softened up” by the passage of the hull, tends to get pushed downwind. The result is that the kayak veers into the wind. Rudders and skegs can easily neutralize this tendency by adding more lateral resistance at the stern. In a kayak that has neither, you can edge the boat to turn downwind or do sweep strokes to push the bow in line, but that can be tiring and annoying in moderate breezes, and dangerous in stronger winds if you can’t hold a course in the direction you need to go. Some kayaks are better balanced in the wind than others, and the Coho seemed to be among the former. The best test of weathercocking, oddly enough, is not out in open water where the waves have been kicked up, but in the lee of low-lying land where you’ll find wind without waves. In rough water the ends of the boat get lifted out of the water, and you can use these moments to make a quick sweep and a course correction. In flat water the entire waterline length is immersed and corrections are harder to come by. The Coho did very well in both circumstances, holding a course well with the wind on any quarter.
I moved out of the lee and into rough water, and the Coho was very steady and predictable in wind waves cresting at about 2′. I never had to slap down a brace for an unexpected loss of balance. In paddling around a point where crossing waves zippered over the shoals, throwing water well over my head, I often had so much water pouring over my eyes that I couldn’t see what was coming at me, but the Coho still stayed comfortably planted under me.
Provided by Pygmy Boats
Black elastic shock-cord deck rigging makes for quick and convenient storage of often-used or emergency gear. Note the red-and-gray bilge pump and the bright yellow paddle float tucked within easy reach on the after deck. Watertight hatch covers, each secured by three parallel straps, keep the large stowage compartments dry.
While I was paddling the edge of the shoal, a passing container ship threw its wake into the mix. The first wave to hit, the point’s shallow water pitched up behind me a steep 6–7′ feet. I didn’t get a perfect line down the face, so I surfed ahead at a bit of an angle. The Coho raced ahead of the wave and kept from skidding into a broach. At the end of the ride it was a bit of work to get the Coho turned around to head back out for more waves. It’s a lot of boat to spin around in the break zone. Once I got out for the next set of waves, the Coho accelerated very well so I didn’t have to work hard to catch good rides. In fact, I had so much fun surfing that when I saw a cruise ship coming up the shipping lane I stayed around to wait for its wake.
This latest version of the Coho has a recess in the after deck to bring the coaming down low. The extra clearance made it easier to do layback rolls. The Coho rolls easily but slowly—I think the sharp ends create a bit of drag to rotary motion. I did some wet-exit and re-entry drills. Dropping out of the capsized kayak was a cinch, and so was flipping the kayak upright and getting back aboard. Swinging my leg over the deck released some of the levers that tension the hatch-cover straps. You can easily remedy that by putting each lever in a vise and giving the end a solid whack of a hammer to put a bit of a bend in it.
The Coho is an easy boat to like. It looks good and is well-mannered in a wide range of conditions. The only quibbles I had with the Coho were with elements that the homebuilder can easily take care of when outfitting it. Give it the attention it deserves while you’re building it, and it’ll take good care of you.
The Coho assembles easily: Temporarily stitch together plywood panels with wire ties, then permanently “glue” the panels with fiberglass and epoxy.
Pygmy Boats has been closed since the outbreak of the pandemic and isn’t filling orders. The review is presented here as archival material drawn from the back issue of the print annual, Small Boats 2007.
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Every sailor has his own vision of the perfect daysailer. For many, this ideal boat is based on the Herreshoff 12 1⁄2, Nathanael G. Herreshoff’s iconic daysailer, which debuted in the summer of 1915. For others, it’s the larger Fish class or the still-larger Alerion—two more masterworks from the hand of Herreshoff. These boats have been the subject of imitation and interpretation ever since they hit the water over 100 years ago. The Flatfish, designed in the early 1990s, is Joel White’s version of Herreshoff’s Fish.
In 1992, I was looking for a boat to build for my parents, then in their late 60s. They weren’t going cruising anymore, so I was looking for their perfect daysailer. The boat had to be big enough so that they wouldn’t get physically knocked around, and it had to be trailerable. My folks wanted something they could sail on the Hudson and take to both Maine and the Chesapeake. As with any daysailer, the destination becomes less important while the experience of sailing grows. In other words, she had to look good and perform well.
Picking a boat is always a balance of beauty, performance, cost, and, in this case, opportunity. A conversation with Maynard Bray, WoodenBoat magazine’s technical editor, led to an offer to build the first Flatfish, a design project he was working on with Joel White. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The boat sounded perfect for my parents’ requirements, and I thought I could build it in a year of half-time work.
Photo by Alison Langley
Flatfish is Joel White’s adaptation of Nathanael G. Herreshoff’s century-old Fish-class sloop. The Fish class is a keelboat; the principal modification in the Flatfish is the addition of a centerboard—and the subtraction of some draft. The boat pictured above and on the opposite page was built by Chip Flanagan of Portland, Maine, who’s at the helm.
When I first spoke with him, Joel had just done the initial drawings. Joel’s objective was to make the Fish trailerable, while retaining all the wonderful qualities of the original. Designed toward the end of Joel’s career, the Flatfish incorporates his experience as a leading builder and designer, and “does no harm” to Herreshoff’s design. The result is a boat with elegant looks. Every curve is right. A few inches over 20′ long, she’s big enough to sail comfortably with six people, but small enough to be easily singlehanded. With a gaff main and a club jib, her simple sloop rig tacks with one move of the tiller and the change of a running backstay. The hull is heavy enough to stand up to a stiff breeze or to carry its way through flat spots and shoot directly into the wind up to a mooring. It’s also slippery enough to accelerate quickly and outpace most boats under 30′, and with the cockpit close to the water there’s a real feeling of speed.
The Flatfish is Joel White’s second direct interpretation of N.G. Herreshoff’s classic hull shape. The first, the Haven 12 1⁄2, has been built by hundreds of professional and amateur builders—my shop included. Shallower and broader than Herreshoff’s originals, both of White’s designs use a keel-centerboard arrangement to maintain performance while making the boats trailerable. There are differences between the Haven and the Flatfish, especially in accommodations, building time, and hull speed. The larger boat comfortably accommodates two more people, and the cuddy cabin allows for stowage and the possibility of a porta-potti. In use, the dockage and launching fees for the Flatfish will be higher. She’s trailerable, but not easily launched at a ramp. She really needs a lift to launch and some mechanical advantage to step the mast. Once rigged, both boats require the same work to get underway.
The building process of the two boats is almost identical and is well documented in Maynard Bray’s book Building the Haven 12 1⁄2. That said, the Flatfish is a lot more boat to build than the Haven. There’s more of everything— building molds, planks, frames, deckbeams. There’s also the cuddy cabin. Comparing the displacement of the hulls minus the ballast, one of White’s own cost-estimating techniques, provides a good indicator of the relative work involved in building the two boats. The Flatfish weighs 1,300 lbs compared to the Haven’s 800 lbs—a factor of 1.625. I found this ratio to be even a little low when applying it to building hours. The time required to build a Flatfish is closer to double that for a Haven, probably because the shorter boat can utilize more one-piece planks and smaller stock. Both the Haven and the Flatfish are designed to be built using the Herreshoff method, which involves one mold for each steamed frame. It’s a lot of work for a single boat, but it makes for a very fair hull and certainly works well for a production boat. It also makes a boat that lasts. There are many hundred-year-old Herreshoffs still sailing. This boat requires 22 molds for the Herreshoff method, while it probably take less than half that number for a conventionally planked carvel hull.
On the water the Haven is evenly matched with its sibling Herreshoff 12 1⁄2. Joel wasn’t able to achieve the same parity with the larger boats. The Flatfish is slightly faster than the Fish. We proved this by match-racing my folks’ Flatfish with an original Fish. Both had new sails and the better helmsman was in the Fish, yet the Flatfish just slightly outpaced the original. (I think the centerboard is the culprit, providing better windward ability.) The profiles of the boats are very similar; there’s a slight difference in the run aft. The real difference is the Flatfish’s broader beam. It’s especially noticeable when the two boats are side by side, on shore or in the water.
Another design goal was to make the boat trailerable for easy transport and storage. My parents’ boat has logged several thousand miles on its trailer. The hull seems no worse for the wear. She also has spent every winter stored in the backyard under a temporary garage. Having her at home allows for convenient maintenance and really makes the boat a part of the family.
Photo by Alison Langley
An original Herreshoff Fish, SHARK, near Noank, Connnecticut. The Fish is narrower and deeper than the Flatfish; the greater beam of the Flatfish compensates for the reduced stability caused by the newer design’s shallower keel.
The boat sails wonderfully well with its gaff rig. She points well, has real power on anything close to a reach, and has low heeling moment. White also drew a marconi rig, but I have no experience with it.
Almost ten years of sailing has exposed only one design flaw: We haven’t found a good way to add an outboard or other auxiliary power, aside from an oar. The transom rake is the main culprit. Electric motors can accommodate the rake, but they lack enough power to punch the boat into a real breeze. Side-mount brackets allow for a gas motor, but the motor swamps when the boat rolls. The stern-mount bracket used on the fiberglass 12 1⁄2 s built by Cape Cod Shipbuilding also tends to dunk the motor in any sort of sea. With all solutions, the motor needs to be removed for sailing and stored in the boat; otherwise, it fouls the mainsheets. Cutting an outboard well into the bottom planking has also been tried, but it’s very intrusive and it slows the boat. The best solution is just to sail off a mooring, plan well, and pay attention to wind and tide.
With the Flatfish design, Joel White followed the engineer’s maxim of not putting one extra piece of wood in the boat, and the designer’s rule of not placing one extra line on the drawing. The design does everything it’s supposed to do: It provides a sweet-lined, capable, transportable boat.
I’d certainly like to live in a house on a rock-lined coast with my boat on a mooring that I can see from my back window. I don’t. This boat’s combination of trailerability, good sailing qualities, and classic elegance (along with rental cottages) makes that world accessible. It’s a wonderful boat to sail off a mooring on the morning’s outgoing tide, take a picnic lunch, and catch the incoming tide as the breeze dies at the end of the day.
Aficionados of the Herrehsoff 12 1⁄2 and the Haven 12 1⁄2 will recognize these boats in the Flatfish’s lines and sailplan (just as the Flatfish is a modification of the original Herreshoff Fish, the smaller Haven is a modification of the 12 1⁄2 ). The Flatfish is trailerable, but most sailors will want to use a Travelift to move the boat onto a trailer.
This article appears here as archival material. Boat plans ere available from The WoodenBoat Store, but are currently out of stock as of August 2024.
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It’s easy to lose track of time in an attic. None of the things stored in all of the attics I’ve known are needed for daily life and only a few of them, like Christmas decorations, will ever get used. What makes the things stored in attics worth keeping are memories. During summer family vacations in Massachusetts, I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ attic. Behind a door in one of the upstairs bedrooms was a steep flight of stairs, painted white, that led to what was to me, as a young boy, a cavernous room. It stretched the full length of the house and had a vaulted ceiling, intricate with rafters and collar ties. The stillness of the space and the angled shaft of sunlight from a narrow sash window setting the dusty air aglow made the attic seem like a cathedral. What I remember most about the things stored there was my grandfather’s Army uniform, especially the stiff leather puttees, molded to fit the shape of his calves. It was one of the first things in my life that gave me a sense of history and the value of things that came well before my time.
The attic in my house is not nearly as grand, just a low wedge of space tucked under the roof on the north side of the house. While it is lined with kraft-paper-backed insulation, it is just as much a repository of memorabilia. Many of the cardboard boxes there are filled with photographs—prints from my teens and twenties, and slides for the years since then. There are so many albums, trays, and sleeves full of slides that I keep a light box on the floor, butted against a windowless end wall.
A few days ago, I stooped through the chest-high attic door to find something, I don’t now remember what, and sat down next to the light box. It comes on when I flip the switch for the attic lights, and the clutter of slides on the table gleamed with patches of color, like a crude stained-glass window. I was drawn to a group of warm pale-blue rectangles, slides I had taken during a 2002 kayaking trip to Palau in the Western Pacific.
I set a loupe over one, and as I leaned close and peered in, the tropical island waters and a palm-fringed beach enveloped me, as if I had fallen, like Alice, through a looking glass. I went from slide to slide, then pulled a box of slide sleeves, looking through the hundreds of images I had taken during five days of kayaking there with my friend John. Each look at Palau’s luminous sky and water lifted the weight of this oppressive winter.
Despite its location in the tropics, Palau had its own season of darkness in the fall of 1944. The Japanese held the archipelago and had fortified the islands with artillery and extensive networks of caves. Despite the stronghold’s dubious strategic value in the Pacific Theater, the American Armed Forces launched an attack on the morning of September 15, 1944, the first wave of what became known as the Battle of Peleliu, after the island at the south end of the archipelago. It was supposed to be a quick fight, but it went on for 73 days and cost thousands of lives. The assault was codenamed, prophetically perhaps, Operation Stalemate.
John and I didn’t reach Peleliu, where the worst of the fighting took place, but there were traces of the battle scattered among the islands to the north.
A few hundred yards from one of the islands we camped on, a Japanese fighter plane—a Zero—rests on the Ngaremediu Reef in just 6′ of water. It is upright and the cockpit is open; I sat in the seat once occupied by the pilot when he was shot down.
An engine and propeller blade are all that is visible of another wrecked fighter plane. The tip of the blade was taken by a souvenir collector armed with a hacksaw.
On one of the islands, John and I hike a trail that led past what was once a gun emplacement. Two of the artillery barrels remain, half buried.
Along with the barrels there were several artillery shells.
The trail ended at a lighthouse at the top of the island. The concrete tower was cratered by scores of bullets and, at the top of the lighthouse, an upright on the guardrail had been hit. The steel rod was a thick as my thumb and plowed through as if it were clay. The path the bullet took was very nearly horizontal, so I imagined that an American fighter plane firing 50-caliber machine guns must have been skimming just above the treetops, coming straight for the top of the lighthouse.
A few yards from a well concealed concrete machine gun bunker, dozens of beer bottles were scattered along the trail through the forest. They had been left by the soldiers assigned to guard a narrow passage between islands and now many of the bottles were inextricably wrapped in tree roots.
During the battle, bombing, flamethrowers, and firefights stripped Peleliu bare of its forests, but Peleliu is now as it had been before the war as are all of Palau’s roughly 340 islands. In the half century that had passed by the time John and I visited, the artifacts of war—steel and concrete—had yielded to time and decay and were already being overrun by trees and brush, seaweed and coral. The islands were exceedingly beautiful and peaceful. In the middle of the Rock Islands, John and I landed on Eil Malk Island and hiked a winding trail through dark woods to Jellyfish Lake. Sea water circulates through the island’s porous limestone to refresh the lake and yet the bedrock has isolated the lake from the Pacific Ocean for 12,000 years. The species of jellyfish that now inhabit the lake, having no need to defend themselves, evolved to abandon stinging tentacles. John and I swam underwater surrounded by them, being careful not to disrupt them. The brush of their delicate watery bodies was so soft and smooth as to be almost undetectable.
There was so much to see in Palau from our kayaks, during walks in the woods, and while swimming. The days passed by much too quickly and to sleep seemed like a missed opportunity. I spent a few hours one night walking an exposed reef by moonlight.
John and I paddled two sit-on-top kayaks. This one that John is in was a double and used during passages between campsites to carry our supply of water and a cooler for our food.
Many of the islands we passed were made inaccessible by mushroom-like overhangs of sharp-edged limestone. Those that had beaches, like this one, provided beautiful places to stop.
In a salt-water pond encircled by one of the small islands we found mudskippers, fish that climb trees.
This school of fish made a swirling sumi ink painting in the shallows.
The underwater world was anything but quiet. A loud crackling noise, which sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies right after milk is poured into the bowl, was made by pistol shrimp snapping their claws. They have one large claw that closes so fast that water cavitates around it. The sound comes from the water imploding back into that empty space. The resulting shock wave stuns their prey.
Fish and coral were almost everywhere in the waters of Palau. There was so much to be seen underwater that we spent almost as much time snorkeling with our kayaks in tow as we did paddling them.
I had come to Palau to write an article, so I always had a pencil and waterproof notebook aboard the kayak. As it became evident that there was so much to see underwater, I began taking notes while snorkeling.
With water as warm as bathwater, it was easy to get off the kayak and explore the shallows on foot.
Most of the mangroves are clustered close to shore with their roots intricately interwoven. These two are striking out on their own at the edge of a vast intertidal sand flat.
This beach where we camped was beautiful by day and even more interesting at night. I woke up to a full moon in the middle of the night, got dressed and walked well over 100 yards on a reef bared by the tide. Many of the tiny tide pools I passed held small fish captive.
“…and one pill makes you small.” In the woods I found these improbable plants that had leaves up to 3′ long, each on their own stalk, some rising well over 8′ tall.
The broad leaves had an intricate architecture to support them.
In the midst of the woods a single yellow flower grew from the the bark of a tree.
The aptly named St. Andrew’s Cross spiders are kind enough to mark their webs with a large white X, making it easy to avoid walking face first into an otherwise invisible web.
A brief downpour rinsed the salt from our skin and we could sip the cool rain as it trickled down our faces.
Two islets, each only a dozen yards across, were connected by a limestone arch less than 2′ above the water.
On our last day, a 5-mile passage across deep, open water to Carp Island, distance diminished all of the islands to streaks on the horizon. I put on my snorkeling gear, slipped off the kayak, and dove down until I could no longer see the surface, only the same bright blue in every direction, with nothing to indicate up, down, or distance.
The slides in my attic, aside from briefly transporting me to a different, exceptionally pleasant time and place in my own life, brought some comfort in a winter whose long shadows have been further darkened by a pandemic and political strife. A broader view of history, offered by the woods and waters of Palau, holds a promise that, in time, enemies can become allies and battlefields paradise.
This past summer, as I was returning from kayaking to the public ramp at Port Hadlock, Washington, I saw a friend of mine who was studying at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding (NSWB), which is situated right next to the ramp. He told me that I should see a boat that had just been put up for sale by the school. I wandered over to the boat, which was sitting on a trailer: it was a piece of Maine, a John Gardner-designed Down East Workboat. Just three years before, I had moved from coastal Maine to the Pacific Northwest, so I well knew the boat and its traditional hull shape. I had been looking for a small motor launch ever since moving to this northern area of Puget Sound, and here was, to my mind, the perfect boat for my needs and certainly a practical boat for anyone wanting a solid and seaworthy small boat for coastal waters.
E. T. Becker/Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding
The original workboat had unusual frames 5/8″ thick and 1-3/4″ wide, proportions that gave them the look of canoe frames, and the planks were fastened with clench nails, just as canoe planks are. The steam-bent frames in the new construction have a squarer cross section and provide sufficient thickness for the screws holding the planking.
Working boats with this hull shape have plied the coastal waters of Maine for over a century. This Gardner version is 18′ in length, but stretch it out a bit and it becomes a Pulsifer Hampton 22 center-console inboard. Stretch it out a bit further to 20′ or 30′ or more, put a cabin and pilothouse on, and you have the iconic Maine lobsterboat. This hull design has evolved over the years in the Maine waters and boatshops to handle highly variable and oftentimes challenging coastal conditions, so I knew that it would be just right for Puget Sound. If you’ve ever seen a lobsterboat race, when heavy workboats can be moving at over 50 knots, you know that this is a capable design! Needless to say, I soon bought the NSWB boat. I named her MOON LADY, an English translation of my mother’s Chinese name, and to follow the Maine tradition of naming working boats after wives, mothers, sweethearts, and daughters.
Gardner drew the design in 1981, basing it on old photographs and measurements of an 18′ workboat from Washington County, Maine. He described the design as a double wedge, the first wedge being the sharp high bow and the second a wedge turned flat for the stern. This creates a practical workboat that has a foundation of a broad stern set firmly in the water to support the weight of a powerful outboard for speed, along with a sharp entry and planing hull for maneuvering easily through chop and messy currents. Its 18′ length and 6′ 4″ beam help make the boat seaworthy for coastal waters and give it plenty of open work space. Gardner describes the build in detail in Chapter 7 of the second volume of his Building Classic Small Craft.
E. T. Becker/Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding
The full-length keel provides good tracking without impairing the boat’s ability to turn smartly.
The boat here, built by instructor Jody Boyle and his students at the NSWB, was constructed directly from Gardner’s instructions with few changes made to the design. It was lofted from his lines drawings and offset tables, then built upside down, with carvel-planked 5/8″ red cedar on flat, white-oak canoe frames 5/8” x 1-3/4″ on 8″ centers, as often used on the Washington County workboat. Gardner suggests that thicker, more typical frame stock could be used, and notes as well that the boat could be built lapstrake.
Denis Wang
Gardner’s plans do not include details for the interior outfitting. The new boat was given side benches from transom to forward bulkhead and a single thwart well aft of amidships.
While MOON LADY has a white-oak transom, which was Gardner’s preferred transom wood, it is 1/4″ thicker than the 1-1/2″ stock he listed. The stouter transom does well supporting my heavier, four-stroke outboard motor or, for that matter, any of today’s more powerful outboards. The transom also has large quarter knees as well as a keel knee.
Instead of the 3/8″ plywood specified by Gardner for the foredeck, MOON LADY has tongue-and-groove cedar planks covered in Irish felt and painted canvas. The same cedar planks replaced the 1/2″ plywood indicated for the forward bulkhead. All the interior wood is oiled and there are no varnished surfaces, whereas most traditional Maine workboats are painted. For safety and security, Gardner specified a removable watertight panel for access to the bow compartment, but this build has louvered frame-and-panel doors instead, which help to air out the enclosed space. Gardner’s book had no information on seating arrangements beyond a pine 7/8″ x 10″ thwart at station 6, so Jody created a layout consisting of a single thwart with side benches on both sides running the full length of the cockpit. The plans call for 5/8″ pine floorboards with the center one removable to provide access for bailing, and a ceiling of pine or cedar from the floorboards to the risers.
Denis Wang
The rubbing strip on the stern was part of the boat documented by Gardner; the spray rail forward was an addition made to the new boat after sea trials.
This Down East Workboat is Coast Guard rated for six passengers and a 45-hp outboard, but I’m using a 2020 25-hp, four-stroke Yamaha. With this engine, the boat planes easily at 12 knots at one-third throttle and has a top speed over calm water of 15 knots. As I had expected, the boat is adequately seaworthy for a traditional skiff designed for coastal waters. In chop and small waves, the boat holds its line very well due to its full-length keel yet can turn smoothly and sharply as needed with a high degree of primary and secondary stability due to the broad tumblehome stern. Spray over the bow isn’t a problem except when plowing at speed through steep chop or boat wakes and, even then, is only a light spray. The boat can hold the full capacity of six persons in comfort and with plenty of extra space for gear. I’ve also outfitted the open section with four large, inflatable beach rollers secured under the side benches for flotation. The ample storage compartment under the foredeck holds much of the gear needed on a small cruising boat: extra lines, anchor, flotation, fire extinguisher, manual pump, portable toilet, tools, cushions, and life jackets. A 12V battery for navigation lights and two small bilge pumps are secured in the bow compartment to help keep the bow down by countering the weight of the motor, gas tank, and skipper in the stern. One of the modifications I made is adding oarlocks for emergency rowing capability.
As one can imagine for a boat of this size, it is easily moved on the road with a 1,000-lb load of both boat and trailer. I keep the outboard in place during towing and in its nearly fully lowered (third notch) position without bracing and for good clearance above the road. I and one other person easily launch or load the boat on its EZ Loader trailer.
Steve Stanton
With a 25-hp four stroke, the Workboat has a top speed of 15 knots.
I’ll use MOON LADY as a coastal cruiser throughout Puget Sound and the rest of the Salish Sea, while overnighting aboard as needed at anchor or at marinas. It’s a practical and safe boat for crabbing and fishing, as well. During the frequent light-wind periods of the summer months in Puget Sound, MOON LADY will tow my sailboat, an 18′ L. Francis Herreshoff Carpenter, thus extending that boat’s range in the Sound, the San Juan Islands, and even Canada’s Gulf Islands. With the workboat’s speed and interior space, it will do well as one of the support chase boats during the Salish 100 small-boat cruise in the summer on Puget Sound.
I never thought that one day I would be exploring Puget Sound with a boat meant for Maine, but thanks to the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, I have a Down East Workboat and look forward to many miles of pleasurable cruising. I heartily recommend this well-founded Gardner design. It’s an affordable and capable boat for protected coastal waters.
Denis Wang lives in the Puget Sound coastal town of Port Hadlock, Washington, as a recent transplant from mid-coast Bayside, Maine. Now retired and actively engaged in small-craft boating and permaculture gardening as hobbies, he was a researcher in oceanography and marine ecology as well as a science department administrator and teacher at independent secondary schools in Colorado and on the East Coast. Denis has been an avid sailor in both large and small boats for most of his life and has been an officer in the Down East and Puget Sound chapters of the Traditional Small Craft Association. Recently, he has been a volunteer in helping to organize the Salish 100 cruises of the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend.
Denis would like to thank the student builders at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding for their fine work: Bill Billingsley, Nick Dighiera, Brandon Adams, Sam Trocano, Alex Ashley, Gabriel Partridge, Bobby Ferrar, and K Woolfe. During the project, which spanned more than six months, four students, on average, were working on the boat at any given time.
Down East Workboat Particulars
Length/18′
Beam/6′ 4″
Inside depth amidships/2′ 9″
Drawings, offsets, construction details, and descriptions were originally included as a nine-page chapter, “Down East Workboat,” in John Gardner’s Building Classic Small Craft, Volume 2, published in 1984 and now out of print. A more recent edition, Building Classic Small Craft: Complete Plans and Instructions for 47 Boats, combines Volume 1 and Volume 2, and is available from The WoodenBoat Store for $40.
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Riley Hall
Riley Hall
Riley Hall
Kathy Hall
Kathy Hall
