Many years ago, I was looking for a daysailer I could easily trailer, rig, and sail singlehanded. It had to look good, too, with some traditional aesthetics. Crawford Boat Building’s Melonseed Skiff fit the bill.
For over 30 years, Roger Crawford has been building his fiberglass version of the Melonseed Skiff in his small shop in Humarock, Massachusetts. He began when a decaying wooden boat, built to Chapelle’s lines in American Small Sailing Craft, was dropped off at his shop to be brought back to life. He restored the boat, took it sailing, and was so impressed that he wanted one of his own. He used the hull to make a mold he could build from, enlarged the cockpit, and increased the sail area. He has been busy building Melonseeds ever since, finishing them beautifully with teak rudder, tiller, rubrails, coaming, and floorboards, and varnished Douglas-fir spars. Anyone who has admired the lines in Chapelle’s book will recognize the low freeboard, hollow bow, curvaceous waterline, and enchanting tuck-up swooping from skeg to raked transom.
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
The spaces under the decks provide ample room for storing gear. A foredeck hatch facilitates access to items forward of the centerboard trunk.
Crawford builds his boats stout, with 1.5-oz mat, 0.5-oz mat, 32-oz stitched roving, and 10-oz cloth, doubled in the bottom, stem, and keel areas; the skeg receives 14 laminations. The deck is end-grain balsa core laminated between layers of 1.5-oz mat and biaxial stitched roving, with a nonskid finish that looks quite a lot like painted canvas. Solid fiberglass (without balsa core) in areas where there are through-deck fittings such as cleats, pad-eyes and oarlock sockets, assures peace of mind for years to come. The hull and deck are bonded together with epoxy, polyurethane adhesive, and stainless bolts and screws. Overlapped like the lid on a shoebox, the result is a strong, torsion-free unit.
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
The PVC centerboard will lower itself with its own weight; a cord and a clam cleat will control its depth and allow it to retract upon striking an underwater obstruction.
Crawford built his first 99 boats with the traditional scimitar-shaped teak daggerboard as recorded by Chapelle. Starting with number 100, the boats have a 1/2″-thick PVC centerboard raised and lowered by a simple pennant. He engineered the centerboard to have sailing characteristics as nearly identical to the daggerboard as possible. I have owned and sailed both versions and find a negligible difference between the two. The daggerboard trunk is entirely forward of the cockpit, whereas the centerboard trunk, at deck level, intrudes into the cockpit about 4″, an acceptable trade-off for the convenience of a board that self-stores, pivots when grounding, and offers infinite adjustment.
The shallow hull with a barn-door rudder that does not extend below the skeg makes this boat well suited to the shallows, and with a 6″ draft with the centerboard up, one can glide and slide over some very skinny water indeed—perfect for creek crawling.
Steve Siegert
There isn’t a thwart for rowing, so a couple of boat cushions will get the rower into a comfortable position high enough off the floorboards. The sail and all three spars for the sailing rig can be stowed below deck when they’re not needed.
Crawford has taken great pains to keep the boat as simple as possible, which makes getting on the water an easy proposition. Rigging is straightforward and the free-standing rig makes getting underway quick. The sail is kept furled around the mast and together they weigh about 15 lbs. Stepping the mast is a simple matter of inserting it through the partner on deck and into the step below. Hang the rudder on the gudgeons, insert the tiller, and reeve the single-part sheet through the block on the rudderhead. Unfurl the 62-sq-ft sail and insert the sprit end into the becket at the peak and push up to spread the sail. Cleat off the snotter with enough tension to give a crease between tack and peak (it will disappear when the sail fills). Clip the sprit-boom snap hook to the clew and tension and cleat the boom snotter. It’s customary to rig the sprits on opposite sides of the sail so that the asymmetry averages out. The sprit boom seems to cut into the set of the sail more than the sprit, making the favored tack the one with the sprit boom to windward.
When you board, either from the dock or the shallows, step toward the center floorboards. The boat can feel a bit tiddly until the firm bilge submerges. Once you’re seated on the floorboards, the boat is very stable.
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
The sheet is lead forward from a block on the rudderhead so the sailor can steer and hold the sheet with one hand. A cleat under the tiller can hold the sheet when it’s safe to secure it.
I find the ideal trim for singlehanding is to sit about even with the oarlock sockets, adjusting fore or aft according to conditions. The tiller comes naturally under your hand. Those accustomed to mid-boom sheeting will quickly adapt to the sheet running forward from the block on the rudderhead to your hand.
Once in the cockpit, there’s little need for moving about, other than changing to the windward side when tacking. This is not a boat that you stand up and walk about on. It wants your weight low and inside the cockpit. Setting sail is most easily done on the beach or the dock because the hollow bow and fine lines make it skittish if you go forward on the deck. I have done so many times, to furl or set the sail, or re-tension the snotter, but it does require good balance. If going forward is necessary, it’s safest to sit or kneel on the deck. Another person sitting aft in the cockpit will keep the stern down and help to steady the motion.
The cockpit is a little over 6′ long—big enough for two people and a picnic. There’s room up under the deck for a cooler, anchor, and other gear, and a 10″ x 10″ hatch gives access to the forepeak. The 7 -1/2′ oars store under the side decks. At 5′ 9″, I fit comfortably with my back against the coaming and feet in the lee bilge, with the reassuring sense that I’m down in the boat, not on it. Because seating is on the floorboards, knees, hips, and lower back need to be supple enough to tolerate that position. When sailing with a crew, the usual arrangement is to sit on opposite sides, facing in. This balances the boat nicely in most weather. In stronger wind, both skipper and crew sit on the windward side of the cockpit. The boat is very responsive to trim and weight distribution, so adding the weight of the crew to windward makes the boat stand up well to more vigorous breezes.
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
The Melonseed resists heeling well and often allows the sailor to sit on the downwind side in moderate breezes.
Despite the low-aspect, low-tech rig, the boat’s windward ability may surprise some folks. Although it doesn’t point like a Laser, it goes very well to weather. The spritsail doesn’t like to be strapped down too hard, and if it is, you’ll feel the stall. Give it a little room to breathe and the boat comes alive. It’s easy to find the sweet spot because the feedback from trim changes is immediate and obvious.
As the boat responds to a puff, the weather helm encourages it to head up, making it easy to naturally climb the lifts. Sailing fairly flat gives the best boat speed, but I find sitting out to windward in anything less than a Force 4 is unnecessary. In higher winds, sitting on the deck keeps the boat on its feet, reduces leeway, and maintains speed. When working to weather in a tie-your-hat-on breeze, you’ll need your foulies as spray sweeps the deck and cockpit and is tossed up into the sail. You’re plugged directly into the experience through the direct connection to sheet and tiller and the motion of the boat; the low freeboard and spray contribute to the sense of speed and adventure.
Because of the boat’s light weight, approximately 230 lbs all up, there’s little momentum to punch through steep chop hard on the wind. Easing the sheet and your course off the wind a bit will increase speed and deliver a palpable in-the-groove feeling. While it may require an extra couple of tacks, you will arrive at your windward goal far sooner than if you try to jam your way to weather.
When tacking, the natural weather helm does most of the work. I usually release the tiller with a slight nudge and let the rudder swing of its own accord. As the bow turns through the wind, I scoot over to the other side of the cockpit. By that time, the bow is falling on the new tack and I center the tiller and trim the sail. Coming about in a big chop requires that you sail through as opposed to relying on momentum to carry you.
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
The sail is not equipped with reef points as most owners don’t find them necessary. When the breeze stiffens, the peak of the sail gets twisted to leeward, spilling the wind. The twist reduces the effective sail area and lowers the center of effort, reducing the heeling force.
If you get caught in irons, you won’t be there long. Because the mast is in the eyes of the boat, you can easily back the sail to swing the bow off. If you raise the centerboard and back the sail, the boat will pivot in place, a useful tactic when maneuvering in tight spots.
This boat will spoil you for jibing. The sprit-boom keeps the foot from rising and the single-part sheet runs smoothly through the block as you ease the sheet at the end of the jibe. Jibing is a casual affair in moderate conditions and doesn’t require much sheet tending. Higher winds demand more prudence and control. In Force-5 conditions, I opt for the “chicken jibe,” looping to windward to bring the boom across, then falling off on the opposite downwind tack. One of the benefits of the free-standing, rotating mast is that the sail can be luffed out forward of the mast to flag out ahead of the boat in certain situations, like easing into a lee shore landing in mild conditions.
Control downwind is good, as the sprit-boom exerts its self-vanging effect to limit the twist in the sail. There is, however, a golden rule: To prevent the white-knuckle “death roll,” don’t allow the peak to go farther forward than perpendicular to the boat’s centerline. Leaving a bit of centerboard down helps maintain directional control, and I usually scoot aft a trifle to give the rudder a little more bite. The tucked-up quarters and raked transom prevent the stern from dragging.
The hull’s theoretical maximum speed for the 12’ waterline is 4.6 knots, and the boat seems to get up to hull speed easily. I can’t confirm this with GPS data, but I once sailed on one tack for 8 miles, closehauled, in a 12–15 mph breeze. I loosely timed the leg, and the resultant math showed a bit over 4 knots, which I thought impressive for sailing closehauled into a chop. The boat really struts its stuff on a reach, with the bow wave bubbling along the side deck. In the right conditions running before the wind, it’ll plane for short distances, and sometimes surf down the backs of the waves.
Crawford’s early boats were equipped with reef points. Reefing can be done, but it requires rigging a halyard and longer snotters which complicates the simple setup. In those early years, Crawford decided that the reefpoints were superfluous because the boat is so capable in such a wide range of wind speeds. No one was using them anyway. In reality, if you think the boat needs a reef, you probably shouldn’t be out there. Scandalizing the sail by dropping the sprit and letting the peak of the sail fold over is useful in a hard chance, but pointing ability will be compromised.
Bruce Gordon
The 62 sq ft sail has enough area to provide pleasant sailing in light air. The spars are Douglas-fir and the trim, tiller, and rudder are all teak.
A 10–15-mph breeze is magic, but the Melonseed will ghost in a whisper and tromp happily to windward throwing spray in 20. I have sailed in mid- to high-20s with gusts over 30 and the boat took it in stride.
Capsizes are rare, and all I know of were caused by a cleated sheet that wasn’t freed quickly enough in a gust. The small clam cleat on the tiller can be used to relieve your grip on the sheet, but the sheet should stay in hand in all but the mildest breeze, cleated or not. The full bilges do a good job of resisting heeling once submerged, and the peak of the sail tends to depower as it twists off a bit in the bigger puffs. Solid water creaming alongside the coaming is your cue to ease off. But there is a point of no return, when solid water over the coaming fills the cockpit and you wish you had eased the sheet. The boat has flotation under the decks and will float upright when swamped.
On those days when the breeze is elusive, I “power-sail” through the flat spots with a few strokes of the leeward oar. It’s also possible to row off a lee shore in moderate conditions with the sail set. You can leave the sheet unclipped to allow the sail to luff without the chance of it wrapping around the tiller. Be prepared for the foot of the sail to take a swipe at your hat.
Roger Rodibaugh
The boom and the sprit are set on opposite sides to even out their effect on port and starboard tacks. THREE CHEERS, shown here, is the author’s Melonseed, hull #463 .
Although you can row with the rig struck down inside the boat—the 10′ spars fit entirely under the decks—I prefer to leave the rig ashore if I’m rowing just for the pleasure of it. The boat carries well between strokes, tracks well, and isn’t knocked off course by a cross-chop. There is no thwart—sitting on a couple of cushions puts me at the right height. Crawford has an optional foot brace that bolts to the floorboards with wing nuts and can be positioned specifically to suit the rower.
Since I keep the boat in the garage and haul it to the water for each sail, ease of trailering is an important consideration. With the spars stowed in the boat alongside the centerboard trunk, the Melonseed makes a neat, streamlined package for towing. The boat and trailer total less than 500 lbs, so it’s an easy pull even for a compact car.
The combination of easy trailering, simple rigging, sure-footed wholesome performance, and traditional aesthetics have made Crawford’s Melonseed Skiff the perfect daysailer for me and has delivered decades of enjoyable, uncomplicated time on the water.
Roger Rodibaugh, despite living in landlocked central Indiana, has been sailing for 50 years. He credits the sailboat on top of his first birthday cake with starting it all. He recently retired from chiropractic practice and sails his Crawford Melonseed Skiff, THREE CHEERS, on Summit Lake and Prairie Creek Reservoir. He’s looking forward to the sailing season of 2021, which will be his 30th in a Melonseed.
The afternoon sun dipped behind a tight row of cottonwoods on the landing a mile up the Willamette River from downtown Corvallis, Oregon. It was the first weekend of October, and a few beams of light slipped through the leaves to reach the floating dock where I was packing CLARABELLE, my 17′ fiberglass Jersey Skiff. Despite the shade, my shirt was damp with sweat and stuck to my skin. I stowed two ice chests, a large sack of briquettes, a stove, a stovetop espresso maker, a few bottles of wine, oars, a sleeping bag, and a bivy sack. Jon and I would be well-stocked for our two-night, 37-mile row downriver to the town of Independence.
Roger Siebert
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At the end of the dock, a lanky teen in a baseball cap and knee-length shorts cast his fishing line next to a tree that had fallen into the water, reaching a few leafy limbs and branches out over the river. Across the ramp from the dock, a rocky wing dam angled into the river to separate its swirling current from the still water at the foot of the boat ramp. A bare-chested man with graying brown hair waded in waist-deep water along dam, his arm draped over a blue and black water tube to steady himself over the uneven rocks. His companion, a woman in blue shorts and a white shirt, was sprawled over her tube, gazing into the water, her face inches from it, while spinning in the eddy at the edge of the river’s swift current.
Jon had left CLARABELLE’s trailer in the parking lot above the boat ramp, and again backed his jet-black panel van down the ramp. His boat, a 10′ plywood Union Bay Skiff he and his wife had built, was small enough to fit entirely inside the van. He had named it H2ONUS after the baseball Hall of Famer, Honus Wagner.
The stumpy skiff emerged already packed with oars, dry bags, axe, and a charcoal grill. We slid the boat into the water, Jon tossed me the painter, and I tied H2ONUS in front of CLARABELLE while he parked the van.
Photographs by the author
Jon, aboard H2ONUS, drifted away from the dock where CLARABELLE waits to follow. I’d row CLARABELLE solo until our rendezvous with our friend Hart in Albany.
Jon trotted down the gangway and climbed aboard H2ONUS. He pushed away, scraping his starboard oar across the dock. The skiff drifted toward the wing dam, and Jon took a few gentle strokes to spin the bow downriver. Once past the rip-rap, he reached aft to take a full stroke, and as he lifted his hands at the catch, his knuckles caught the lid of the charcoal grill. It flipped over the gunwale, landed in the water upside down, and floated in the eddy. With a laugh, he backed up and retrieved it, then with the long strokes from his sliding seat launched himself into the mid-river current.
The carbon-fiber sliding seat aboard H2ONUS would seem out of place in a 10′ skiff with some loose weathered lumber serving as a stretcher, but all three of us rowed for the University of Puget Sound crew and were devotees of sliding-seat rowing.
CLARABELLE’s gear was still a mess; I’d sort it out when the river began to carry me downstream. I clambered on the foredeck, kicked off the dock, and drove her stern-first through the eddy. I soon caught up with Jon, who had stopped rowing to secure the grill lid with a bit of cord.
Away from the riverbank’s shade, the slanting afternoon sunlight stung my bare arms. I unrolled my shirt sleeves down to my wrists and took a long drink from a six-liter water bag. Black cottonwood, white alder, and willow leaned out from the banks; their leaves ruffled in the light wind and muffled the sound of traffic on a highway leading to downtown Corvallis. Jon and I traded leads, but stayed close enough to carry on a conversation. The Willamette curved through a bend from northwest to northeast, at its apex taking us past the Marys River, a tributary flowing into the Willamette from the left bank, and then under the steel girder highway bridge set on four concrete pillars. Water roared as it rushed past the logs caught on their upriver edges. Cars sped by above us. Annoyed by the noise, I bent my oars to put the racket behind me.
Beyond the bridge, I caught glimpses of buildings in Corvallis through gaps in the trees and brush on the left bank. A mile beyond the last bridge, the river followed a sweeping turn east for several miles, and the hiss and rumble of the traffic faded astern. On river right floated the long dock and white twin-hulled coaching launches of the Oregon State University crew, and for the next 1-1/2 miles, between the trunks of the trees lining the bank, I watched golfers traipsing over rolling hills of close-cropped grass.
Just downstream from the Oregon State University boathouse, Jon rowed past a bit of graffiti to encourage the OSU Beavers crew. The lid to the grill is contemplating another leap overboard.
A single scull approached us and when Jon and I drew even with it, the sculler turned from his gaze over his slender shell’s stern. We waved. He acknowledged us with a nod, keeping his hands fixed on the oar handles. “Wanna race?” asked Jon, deadpan. “I’m just learning,” replied the young man, sounding apologetic, and missing Jon’s joke. Jon and I rowed across to the left bank to a shallow bar. Below us pebbles sparkled like gold as the light played through ripples in the water.
Well downriver, more white-hulled racing shells flocked around a motor launch where the coach barked something I guessed was a starting command. In a few minutes, a dozen sculls raced past us, the launch close behind.
Four miles of more or less straight river ended in a mile-long U-turn called Half Moon Bend. Dark green water carved the outside bank, baring the roots of the bushes that grew on top of it.
Even if Jon and I were to stop rowing and drift, the 3-mph current would still have us in Albany by sundown, well before our rendezvous to pick up our friend Hart the following day. I checked the satellite view on my phone’s Google Maps. A second mile-long U-turn, sending us eastward again, would take us to Tripp Island, and by the time we’d finished studying the map, the island was in view. We shipped our oars, rafted the boats together, sipped wine out of enamel cups, and let the river do the last of the day’s work.
We had pulled H2ONUS and CLARABELLE ashore to make camp on the upstream side of Tripp Island, and it would have been a perfect spot but for the sound of a gas engine pumping the river water into a farmer’s field.
We landed at the head of Tripp Island, a 1/3-mile-long, lens-shaped island that split the river. Set back from the shore uprooted trees were piled in a jumble a head higher than my 6′ 6″ frame. Long strips of bark hung from exposed trunks bleached white by the sun. Shrubs crowded the slender north channel, reducing it to an inlet. It would have been a fine spot to camp except for the roar of a gas-engine pump lifting river water to a field beyond the trees.
Our camp on the downstream side of Tripp Island was spare but quiet. Jon kept watch on the grill and took in the last few minutes of the evening light.
We drifted in the 90-yard-wide main channel to the downriver end of Tripp Island, where the only sounds were of rippling water. The downstream end of the filled-in north channel created a protected cove; our bows cut through its still water and then several feet into a mat of floating algae before grating on the gravel shore.
From a distance, these plants looked like a mat of algae. When I got close enough to examine them, I realized it was Azolla, also known as duckweed fern and mosquito fern.
I waded into the calf-deep water blanketed with thousands of greenish-yellow fernlike plants so small a half dozen could fit on a quarter. Their pale tips glowed pink in the setting sun.
For dinner, Jon cooked corn on the cob and enchiladas—the meal his mother taught him how to cook the summer before he went to college.
We had brought bivy sacks instead of tents, so making camp was easy. I scoured the bar for firewood while Jon poured briquettes into the grill and squirted a stream of lighter fluid over them. He pulled homemade enchiladas, green chile sauce, and golden-tasseled ears of corn from the cooler. All of it went on the grill. The enchiladas sizzled in a cast-iron pan, chile sauce bubbled in a stainless-steel pot, and the corn husks smoked over the glowing briquettes. After sundown, I mentioned that the only thing missing was something sweet. Jon opened the cooler and produced a half-gallon freezer bag stretched full of his wife’s homemade chocolate-chip cookies.
The afternoon we started our outing felt like summer, but we woke up to a river transitioning to fall. The yellow and orange bivy bags had been our quarters for the night.
I woke up long before morning. Pinholes of starlight pierced the sky, and the moon, not quite full, glowed through the clear cloudless night to shimmer on the water. At dawn, as I emerged from my sleeping bag, dew slid down the creases in my bivy bag. A blanket of fog blended the trees across the river into a single gray silhouette. I checked my phone for a message from our friend Hart. He had been on the road since 4 a.m. and was still a few hours away from meeting us in Albany. I made several rounds of coffee while Jon cooked eggs and bacon to put in between English muffins with cheese.
After breakfast, we slid CLARABELLE and H2ONUS into the fog. We passed a stretch of black basalt rip-rap along the river’s edge. A blue heron, disturbed by our approach, leaped downriver and did so several more times as Jon and I made our way downstream. Two kingfishers darted over us with a trill. As the fog ascended we pulled just hard enough to warm up without building up a sweat. Lost in the rhythm of the strokes, I put several hundred yards on Jon, then stopped to let him catch up. A silvery fish, larger than an oar blade, leaped from the river, twisted in the air, and slapped down with a splash.
Hart got up before 4 a.m. to drive through the fog to meet us near Albany on this sandy bar just south of the confluence of the Calapooia and Willamette rivers. He got there earlier than we did and had enough time to visit the local farmer’s market and pick up steak, strudel, and flowers for Jon’s birthday.
We approached the confluence with the Callapooia River where powerlines crossing the Willamette spanned slender lattice pylons built on top of massive, rusting, twin-column piers that once supported a bridge. Hart was standing on the sandbar and had with him a dry bag, sleeping bag, and paper grocery sack. Jon and I landed the boats and waded ashore. Hart showed us what he’d brought in the sack: steak, fresh German strudel, and a bouquet of gold, coral, yellow, and maroon dahlias from the farmer’s market in Albany. He handed the flowers to Jon and wished him a happy 40th birthday.
After five hours in the car, Hart was eager to take to the oars and row us out of the fog and into sunshine.
Since Hart would join me in CLARABELLE, I repacked the equipment and adjusted the sliding seats and stretchers so both of us could row. I had brought two seats, each equipped with eight roller-blade wheels. The seat I’d been using had been squeaking for the past few miles; a quick submersion always quiets it, so I dunked it in the water, but as I pulled it from the river one wheel was missing. It was underwater lying on the brown rocks in the middle of a sprinkle of white Teflon-rod bearings. I collected the pieces and looked at the seat. A worn-out nylon washer had let the wheel slip off the axle bolt. CLARABELLE would carry on with just one of us rowing.
There was plenty of time to cover the modest number of miles we had ahead, so we let the river carry the boats while we took it easy.
I plopped into the stern with my legs over the sheer and let my toes drag in the water. Hart took to the oars and rowed us under a pair of steel bridges that connect the tree-lined fields on the west side of the river with the wooded bluffs of Albany. The tops of old brick buildings poked up just above the treetops.
About an hour after we picked up Hart, the low clouds cleared and the bright sunlight falling on the dense green vegetation gave the river a subtropical look.
Downriver from town, the bank sank down into low farmland. At the cutbank of the first bend a tree had fallen into the river. Stripped of leaves, the branches waved up and down in the current, a ghostly greeting. We tied the boats together and let the Willamette weave us through the bottomlands at its own pace. The fog continued its ascent, and by the time we reached the first island, 6 miles downriver from Albany, the sun was high in a cloudless sky.
We rowed into sunshine just a few bends downriver from Albany. We landed for a quick exploration of this long, skinny island. Unlike a lot of the other islands, this one’s rocky bars were overgrown with grass and brush, turning them into small meadows.
Thick brush and prickly blackberry brambles covered the island, and we wandered around with a machete, looking for a path to the wooded center simply for exploration’s sake. We rowed to the south end, a skinny half-flooded meadow jutting into the river. The gentle current draped green wispy string algae over freshwater mussel shells as long as my finger. Their incandescent mother-of-pearl sparkled in the sun.
I didn’t know mussels also grew in fresh water until I was an adult. I see them now in many places and haven’t lost my fascination with them.
Jon was eager for me to try H2ONUS to see what I thought about his sliding-seat rowing rig. He hopped in CLARABELLE, and Hart moved to the stern. I planted myself on the carbon-fiber seat in H2ONUS and set my feet against the two pieces of lumber Jon used as a stretcher. It rested on a backpack in the stern and was otherwise unattached to the skiff. On the port side sat the charcoal grill. I took a few short strokes with the 9’ hand-me-down oars. The finish brought the handles in below my belly button and the blades just cleared the water on the recovery. I lengthened the strokes and at one catch, just as Jon had, I caught my knuckles on the edge of the grill lid and tipped it into the river. I retrieved it, rowed with short strokes to CLARABELLE, and tied the boats together. I asked Jon if he would let me shorten his oars and he agreed.
Even when we were rowing, we were in no hurry. Jon was alone at the oars while Hart relaxed in the stern and I took a tow in H2ONUS.
Jon rowed CLARABELLE with me in H2ONUS in tow until we reached the Willamette’s confluence with Santiam River. The satellite view on my phone app showed two sandbars that looked like they’d make a suitable campsite, but thicket covered half the island and ran right to the edge of the bar. Across the river from the bar was a rocky beach. We landed there and found the rocks covered with a layer of dusty gray silt. Across the river was a dark overgrown chute of the smaller Little Luckiamute River. We stayed only long enough for Hart to change positions with me. Jon continued to row.
The prettiest bluffs we saw were just upriver of Buena Vista. A lot of the other high points along the riverside were hidden by brush and trees but these were bare and all the layers of sediment were visible. Jon was in no rush to pass them by.
On river left, the bottomland rose to bluffs. Clumps of bushes sprouted where the bluff met the river, and layers of yellow and brown hard-packed soil rose 30′ or 40′ to a sagging cap of green ivy and blackberry with a crown of evergreens towering above us and shading most of the river. One of the trees leaned on the verge of falling into the river. We had floated in the shade for a half mile before the Buena Vista ferry came into view. It was squat boat with a low pilothouse painted white, yellow, and blue. Wires spanning the river supplied the power for the ferry’s electric motors, and a block rolling along a cable had a leash attached to the ferry to hold it against the current. Its only passenger was a black truck heading east. Once the ferry was clear of mid-river, Jon pulled hard to get us past the ferry while it unloaded. To the west we caught a brief glimpse of Buena Vista—a small scattering of buildings up a hill from the west ferry landing, backlit by the setting sun.
There has been a ferry crossing at Buena Vista since 1852. The current vessel is 10 years old and gets the power for its electric motors from one set of overhead cables that span the river, and is held against the current by another.
Just 100 yards downriver from the ferry, Wells Island stretched on for the better part of a mile. It had no visible campsites. A mile and a half farther we reached Whiteman Bar, a wooded island on the left bank with a choked-out channel between it and the mainland. Next to it was a mid-river rocky bar. There were two open channels either side: a short channel between it and the island and a longer one between the bar and a sweeping bluff, river right. The current pulled us to the short channel where several dead trees rested with roots reaching from the water like claws. Water rippling against rocks and branches broke the tranquility of the quiet river. I untied H2ONUS from CLARABELLE, and we shot single file through the gap between the fallen trees.
In the slower-moving water downstream from the channel, we pulled ashore to make camp on the bar. Baseball-sized rocks lining its shore made walking a challenge; the high ground was covered with sparsely leafed scrub. I scoured the 300-yard-long islet for driftwood for a campfire while Jon and Hart fired up the grill and cooked the steak Hart had bought. We ate it on a mound of rice and vegetables, finishing dinner at sunset. Long after we went to bed, a train woke me. Although the tracks were 1/2 mile away beyond the right bank, it sounded like it would roll right over us. After it passed, only the cries of an eagle reached across the river.
Hart Williams
On the second morning, Jon cooked breakfast while I took a hatchet to his oars to shorten them to a length appropriate for his little boat, H2ONUS.
On Sunday morning, I woke in my bivy bag to fog, again. Before I was fully awake, a canoe with two men waved a good morning as they paddled past in the silvery mist. Jon fired up the grill, and coffee and breakfast sandwiches soon followed. I double-checked that Jon would let me shorten his oars. He gave the okay, so I lopped off 6″ with an axe, then carved new handles.
It didn’t take too many tools to shorten Jon’s 9’ oars. A saw would have helped. After I tried the oars I thought I could have taken off at least 3″ more.
Independence was 6-1/2 miles away. Hart rowed CLARABELLE while I sat in the stern. A few beavers passed us with tiny wakes fanning out from their heads. A few miles in I asked Jon how he liked the oars. He wasn’t sure, but I was confident he’d grow to like their shortened length. A doe peered out from the brush on Judson Island, an eagle watched us from atop a telephone pole. The fog lifted to a low overcast.
Hart Williams
Our trip began in summer, and two mornings later ended with autumn. We pulled up to Independence in a light rain and bit of a chill.
After skirting the mile-long curve around Murphy Bar, the river swept to the right to run north to the town of Independence. A lone bridge with pale-green girders set on concrete piers made open with pointed Gothic arches spanned the river and a wide bar extended from the left bank. A few minutes after rowing under the bridge we passed a riverside park and pulled ashore at our haulout, a wide sandbar extending from the trees lining the riverbank. A light rain began to fall, leaving dark speckles on the sand. We had caught the last warm sigh of summer; the Willamette would flow without us into autumn.
Jordan Hanssen is the author of Rowing into the Son, his story about setting a Guinness World Record while winning a rowing race across the North Atlantic. Adventures by boat have taken him up and down the West Coast, down the Mississippi and Rio Grande, and to Alaska, Hawaii, and Panama. On one adventure he was briefly lost at sea. With his rowboat, CLARABELLE, he leads history and birdwatching tours on Seattle’s Lake Union. His pursuits are noted on his website.
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Creating a model of a boat before building it is a common procedure, and one I find very useful. For a 23′ boat, I chose to build a 1:4 scale model; this worked great since the 7′ 8″ model was big enough to use as a tender. For a nesting kayak that I designed, I started by building a full-sized model (also known as a mock-up) out of cardboard, to test for accuracy before cutting expensive plywood. The cardboard parts would be used for patterns.
Photographs by the author
The plywood panels for the V-berth could be built into the mock-up, fitting only straight edges and right angles. The curves of the perimeter can then be traced precisely with a batten bent fair around the frames.
My latest project is a 17′ pocket cruiser. The design challenge was to create accommodations for two with an acceptable level of comfort. Working with drawings and scale models was not going to definitively prove the success of the design or the many small construction details that would need to be considered when building the finished boat. My solution was to build a mock-up strong enough to climb aboard.
The transom was framed in wood yet has a cardboard face. The cutaways for the outboard could be easily made in the cardboard.
The twin rudders, hung from the pintles and gudgeons that will serve the finished boat, have an interesting mechanism that can get its first trials on the mock-up. Note the printed cardboard used for panels that just need to define space. The aft end of the port cockpit coaming has a convex shape while there is a concave treatment to starboard; changing features comes with a minimal investment in time and materials.
I made drawings and a half-hull model and then drew the frames full-scale. To begin the construction of the model, I gathered a supply of cardboard and scrap wood. As when building most boats, the keel and stem of my model were constructed first and then the frames set up on the keel. At this point, the mock-up departed from the traditional boatbuilding sequence. Instead of planking the hull, I constructed all of the interior components. The advantage was that none of the interior components had to be measured or scribed to fit the inside shape of the hull; they could be left to extend outside the hull between the frames and then marked for trimming using battens sprung around the frames.
All of the weight-bearing surfaces in the mockup were made of plywood so Tom and crew could not only check the accommodations for fit and comfort but also enjoy spending time in the mockup.
Rather than look for galley equipment to fit the cabinetry, Tom built the galley around the the things he already intended to use aboard the boat.
The mock-up made it possible to sit in the cockpit and cabin as well as work out the building sequence and many small construction details. The many changes and improvements I devised in the process made the mock-up well worth the effort. The original design had a flat bottom intended for navigating very shallow water. The final design was changed to a V bottom to provide better performance in choppy seas and move the ballast closer to the centerline.
Patterns for the planks were made only on the starboard side. They’d serve for the port side as well.
I purchased a trailer to fit the model, ensuring that there would be no surprises when the finished boat was loaded. Placing the model on the trailer revealed that there would not be enough clearance under the garage door to rig a hinged mast. The cabin roof was lowered as a result without much sacrifice in cabin headroom.
With the mockup, the trailer could be set up to a precise fit for the boat when it is ready to launch.
As the building progressed, the stem went through more changes than any other part of the mock-up. Seeing it full size, attached to the boat, and in three dimensions was a distinct advantage over drawings. I added a bowsprit to create more sail area forward and provide the more traditional look of a gaff-rigged sloop.
The three patterns for the planking, here at the bottom of a garage wall, were made on the starboard side only. They will serve as the patterns for the port side, too, when the boat is built.
The transom and other mock-up pieces cover the garage’s opposite wall, ready to speed the construction of the cruiser.
With most design and construction details worked out, I disassembled the mockup and set the parts aside to be used as patterns, which included truss-like patterns for the planks. The building of the actual boat is under way. The benefits of building a mock-up have provided invaluable experience. I’ve been able to proceed with confidence this second time around knowing that FREEDOM, as the boat will be christened, will meet all expectations. Only her sailing performance remains to be discovered.
Tom Hepp has spent most of his life around boats and water. He is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine and has worked professionally as a boatbuilder for over 10 years. He spends summers on the coast of Maine and winters near the St Johns River in North East Florida. He designed, made cardboard mockups of, and built two take-apart pirogue-style boats (see “Nesting Boats”) to take in his van during summer vacations.
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Small boats often require a variety of sails, covers, ditty bags, straps, and other fabric accessories that have grommets—metal rings that protect holes in the material and whatever cordage runs through them. Plain metal grommets were introduced around 1830 to replace sewn eyelets, and in 1883 William Wilcox developed a new type, the spur grommet, which quickly became the standard for maritime use.
Spur grommets can be put under loads that would tear out plain grommets and can be set in sailcloth, canvas, leather, webbing, and many other materials. They have two parts: the grommet itself, which has the barrel that is inserted through the material, and the washer. Spur grommets are made of thicker metal than plain ones, and the barrel is longer to accommodate thicker material. The washers have small triangular teeth that puncture the material when the grommets are installed, and the grommet perimeter has a rolled rim that captures the washer spur tips as they are bent outward.
Photographs by the authors
Spur grommets are made of thicker metal than plain grommets and have rolled rims. The spurs of the washer, right, curl into the hollow of the rime of the grommet, left.
Plain grommets and spur grommets both come in numbered sizes, but for any given size, they have different shapes and dimensions so each type requires a dedicated die set. While plain grommets are designed for light-duty use on thin fabrics, spur grommets require a minimum thickness of material to take a tight set. The Sailrite website lists both the minimum and maximum capacities, expressed in decimal inches as well as layers of Sunbrella fabric required. In applications such as reefpoints, where there aren’t multiple layers of sailcloth, reinforcing panels should be added, both to strengthen the area and provide the three layers the grommet needs for a tight fit. Common spur-grommet sizes are #0 (1/4″), #1 (5/16″), #2 (3/8″), #3 (7/16″), and #4 (1/2″). The dimensions given in fractions of an inch are the inside diameters of the grommets before installation. That diameter is slightly larger after installation. For our small boats we use #0 for sail lacing rings on our Sunfish, #1 for reefpoints, and #4 for sail head, tack, and clew grommets as well as tie-down points for boat covers.
The tools for installing spur grommets are a hole punch, mallet or hammer, and a setting tool and its anvil.
We punch holes for our spur grommets with a hole cutter, set on a rubber cutting mat. We use our 3-lb Barry King nylon mallet to drive the setting tool of the die set and have, with practice, developed a feel for the force and number of strikes to set the grommet tight without overdoing it and making the outer ring cut the fabric. If you foresee a lot of grommet setting in your future, you might consider splurging for the W-1 C. S. Osborne hand press.
There are many applications for grommets in the gear used for boating, from sails to covers and gear bags. Spur grommets—and the dies to set them— cost more than plain grommets but are far more secure than plain grommets and just as easy to install.
Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about with their small boats in the shoal waters of Northwest Florida. Their boating adventures are logged at Small Boat Restoration.
Spur grommets and the tools needed to install them are available from Sailrite, C. S. Osborne, Stimson, and other suppliers
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The best gear for small boats is compact and serves more than one purpose. My galley box, for example, stores my cooking supplies and shields my stove from the wind, serves as a slip thwart for rowing, and is part of the platform for sleeping. The Multi-Fuel Stove from nCamp is compact and has just one purpose, cooking, but does so using many different fuels, whether solid, liquid, or pressurized gas. Its versatility is a welcome addition to my outdoor adventure kit.
Photographs by the author
With the combustion chamber collapsed and the legs folded, the stove is quite compact.
The stove is made of aluminum and stainless steel, weighs 30.4 oz, and is well designed and sturdily built. Its top measures 9″ x 6-1/2″, it is 6-5/8″ tall when in use, and just 2″ tall folded. The aluminum legs provide a steady base that’s not prone to tipping over. A telescoping combustion chamber, made of six concentric stainless-steel rings, works like an upside-down version of the plastic drinking cup I had for backpacking when I was a kid. The bottom of the chamber is a circle of stainless steel, perforated for airflow. In its center is a 1/2″ hole to accept the burner head of an adapter to fuel the stove with a gas canister.” hole to accept the burner head of an adapter to fuel the stove with a gas canister.
The valve and hose have a fitting designed to fit propane/isobutane canisters.
The adapter has a 12″ stainless-steel-clad hose that connects the burner head to a canister fitting, which is equipped with a valve. The threaded fitting is compatible with propane/isobutane canisters. That type of canister isn’t one that I have used with my other stoves or torches, and I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of adding to the ever-growing collection of canisters I have for cookware and metalwork. Fortunately, there is a wide array of adapters that make it possible to connect almost any kind of gas stove to any kind of canister. I bought one for the propane cylinders I use for torches and stoves, and another for the butane cartridges that fuel my other camp stoves.
The butane adapter has a bracket to hold the cylinder in the correct position.
A 1-lb propane canister provides a lot of gas quickly and will boil water faster than any other fuel.
I did boil tests with the nCamp adapter’s valve wide open and timed how long it took to bring 16 oz of water to a rolling boil. The propane/isobutane cartridge that the stove is designed for took 3:30 (minutes:seconds), the butane was slower at 5:20, and the propane was faster at 2:45. The propane was notably louder and, I suspect, being delivered at a significantly higher pressure.
An alcohol burner made from a standard 12-oz aluminum can and shown here wedged in the opening, just fits into the top of the combustion chamber. The second stove is made of a tall 12-oz can.
The combustion chamber, with the burner head removed, will burn almost anything that will fit through the 2-5/8″ opening at the top of the stove. A DIY ultralight alcohol stove made from a standard 12-oz soda can will fit with just enough room to spare. I primed one of mine outside of the nCamp stove, blew it out, and set it in the stove while raising the bottom of the combustion chamber to receive it. The boiling time was a quick 2:40. (It was my first DIY alcohol stove and I had drilled burner holes much larger than the standard size, which are poked in with push pins.) The bottom of the chamber didn’t get hot, so it can be pushed up by hand for the flame to be blown out.
Wood burns cleanly with little smoke once the fire gets going and makes a small but pleasant contained “campfire” after dark.
Wood burns cleanly with little smoke once the fire gets going and makes a small but pleasant contained “campfire” after dark. With twigs and Port Orford cedar kindling fueling the stove, 16 oz of water boiled in 7:30. The combustion chamber goes through wood quickly and I fed the fire a couple of times as the water was heating up.
Putting a pot on for cooking slows the draft and the fire produces more smoke. The bottom of the pot here is streaked with bar soap to make it easier to clean the soot off.
The stovetop has six molded-in supports that elevate the cooking pot 3/8″ to give the fire room to breathe. With some of the fires I made in the stove, that didn’t seem to be quite enough and the fire went from burning cleanly without a pot in place, to producing a lot of smoke with the pot over the hole. And the pot bottom would get a coating of tarry soot, a sign of incomplete combustion. Rubbing bar soap over the bottom of the pot before use made any soot deposited easier to clean.
Unlike canister gas and alcohol, wood creates a lot of heat at the bottom of the stove, enough that the stainless-steel rings of the combustion chamber begin to glow a dark red. A good measure of that heat is radiated downward and will scorch whatever surface the stove is set on unless the legs are elevated or something heat-resistant is set under the combustion chamber.
While I was cooking breakfast—an omelet with mushrooms, leeks, and sugar snap pea pods—the opening of the combustion chamber created a hot spot on this thin stainless steel pot lid I used for a cooking pan. By moving it every so often I was able to avoid scorching the omelet.
The nCamp stove doesn’t have a built-in igniter, so you’ll need a sparker, matches, or a lighter to use it. But if you have a lighter with you, you can leave the fuel canisters and adapters in the boat or in camp, tuck the folded stove in a day pack, and have a hot meal and hot drinks anywhere there are dry twigs—and enjoy a small enclosed hand-warming fire when the stove isn’t being used for cooking.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The Multi-Fuel Stove, with adapter, is available from nCamp for $69. It is also carried by online retailers.
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John Carswell retired to Jekyll Island, a 7-1/2-mile-long barrier island on the coast of Georgia. With gentle slopes of white sand on its Atlantic coast and creek-laced salt marshes on its western side, Jekyll is surrounded by shallow water. When John and his wife Dorothy relocated there, they brought a boat with them, a Princess built in 1932 by the Thompson Brothers Boat Manufacturing Company of Peshtigo, Wisconsin.
Photographs by John and Dorothy Carswell
John began by carving a half model made of 38 vertical transverse lifts. The method is uncommon but is a direct route to a section drawing. The sections, somewhat loosely arranged here, are set on a separate horizontal piece for the box keel. He put each piece on a scanner and a print shop scaled the images up and printed them full size.
John had been rowing an aluminum johnboat for five years when he bought the aging Princess in 1985. It was far prettier than the johnboat even though the long-neglected cedar-on-oak hull had been sheathed outside with fiberglass, which was peeling away from the strip planking, taking the green paint with it. The interior varnish was cloudy and the oak frames were black along the punky keelson. John rowed GREEN HERON, as he named the boat, for five years on the lakes of central Florida and later, after a move to Washington, D.C., another 10 years on the Potomac River and its tributary, Piscataway Creek. John estimates he rowed GREEN HERON between 3,000 and 4,000 miles.
John cut the paper patterns out, traced the outlines onto ¼″ plywood, and cut them out to make molds. The time and money he saved on the flimsy plywood cost him many hours in the long run. It was a struggle to keep the molds from shifting as he built the hull’s framework over them. “I kept trying to make it work when I should have started over,” he commented. “The day I finally lifted the frame off the form and cut the 1/4″ plywood into little pieces was a day of relief and revenge.”
The boat was already hogged and leaking when he brought it to Jekyll Island and, in the five years he rowed her there, the hull deteriorated to the point where it required bailing four times for every mile traveled. After 80 years of service, GREEN HERON was beyond saving. In 2012, John armed himself with a saw but he couldn’t bring himself to put his old friend in the dumpster; it’s still under the eaves at the back of his house.
The structure of steam-bent oak frames was lifted from the molds and readied for planking. The tunnel for the propeller called for some frames bent to very unusual shapes that required a second steaming for the one half of the frame after the other side was secured in place. The box keel and the deadwood for the prop shaft were put in place after the frames were bent.
John wasn’t about to give up on rowing. For decades it had provided the conditioning he needed for a troublesome lower back. He decided that he would build his next boat. He had a shop and tools, but beyond working for a while framing houses, he had no real woodworking experience: “I just fixed old things,” he says, “I did not build new things. I was most definitely unprepared; I didn’t know how to sharpen a chisel.” And though he had fixed at least a dozen old boats, he was at a loss as to where a new one begins. He bought books, among them Building Classic Small Craft by John Gardner and started reading WoodenBoat. The study in itself was in some ways as therapeutic as rowing: “After a couple of years of retirement, my brain needed adventure as much as my body needed a rowboat.”
The 5/16″ sapele strip planks were glued only to each other and not attached to the frames. John applied only two strakes each day—the first in the morning, and the second in the evening after the epoxy had cured enough to hold the first in place.
He was drawn to the Whitehall type, imagining it as easily driven under oars as GREEN HERON, and likewise easily equipped with a sliding seat, but larger, capable of taking his son fishing. His recalled that his son suggested he should consider having a motor “because eventually I would get too old to row home.”
The hull’s strip-built shell and its framework were built as separate pieces. After removing the framework, John applied fiberglass to the inside of the shell.
Browsing through back issues of WoodenBoat, John was intrigued by Robb White’s 2006 article, “Rescue Minor: A shallow-draft motorboat.” White lived in south Georgia and, like John, needed a boat well suited to those shoal waters that extend south from Jekyll Island and into northern Florida. Photographs in the article show his 20′ adaptation of the original William Atkin design speeding along just a boat length from a sandbar in water so thin that the bottom is clearly visible. Another photo shows the boat with its box keel resting flat on the intertidal flats, with one blade of its propeller just visible above the sand, the other blades hidden by a hollow in the hull.
With the hull elevated with a hydraulic engine hoist, the protection the box keel and the tunnel provide for the propeller and rudder is clearly visible.
Atkin had designed the Rescue Minor for plywood construction and a hard-chined hull; White strip-built his version with complex curves instead, and incorporated a distinctive tumblehome stern. The plywood version would have been much easier to build, but John was taken by White’s curvaceous interpretation: “I did not worry much about the fact that Robb White had built dozens of boats and I had built zero.”
SKIMMER is quite at home in her thin south Georgia waters and rests between tides on her flat box keel. In the distance, over her stem, is the Sydney Lanier Bridge, which connects Jekyll Island to the mainland.
Rather than working from plans—they were available for the Atkin design, but not for the White—John started with a half model he carved, not with waterline lifts but with a horizontal stack of bread-slice sections.
The sliding seat is a shop stool. Its base, made of rock maple and hidden beneath the floorboards, rolls on 4″ wheels.
SKIMMER, being a lot of boat for a solo rower, isn’t fast under oars, but John rows to keep in shape, not to get from place to place.
The generous accommodations provide plenty of room for guests.
SKIMMER has two transoms: an inner one that gives the hull its watertight integrity, and an outer one built as a grating that drops down like a landing craft’s bow ramp. John used to slip over the side of GREEN HERON to go swimming on the Potomac, then clamber back aboard over the transom. That was 30 years ago; John opted to build SKIMMER with this easier way to get back aboard. Like GREEN HERON, SKIMMER was outfitted with a sliding seat—rolling, actually, on 4″ wheels—and oarlocks and 10′ ash oars salvaged from GREEN HERON.
After serving for two years as a rowing vessel, SKIMMER got her auxiliary power, a 13.5-hp diesel, neatly fit into a box that serves as the skipper’s seat.
John rowed SKIMMER for two years while he saved money for her inboard motor. When the time came, he bought a marinized Kubota 13-1/2 hp diesel and installed it under an engine cover that also serves as the driver’s seat. The instrument panel is neatly tucked away in the keel, and the starboard side of the engine box is equipped with a removable whipstaff for steering.
It was John’s son who thought that the boat John was going to build should have power as a backup to rowing. Skimming briskly along, John couldn’t help but be pleased with the suggestion.
John usually launches SKIMMER in the Jekyll River on the west side of the island and motors upwind or up current for a few miles and then rows back with the elements in his favor. SKIMMER isn’t fast; John can row about 2 miles per hour at 12 strokes per minute, but he’s out for exercise and the pleasures of the inland waters and the marsh. And while White’s Rescue Minor could do 22 knots, SKIMMER, heavier and with less power, will do just 10 knots, but as with his rowing, John is in no rush to get anywhere.
The drop-down grating transom is an elegant means of stepping aboard with dry feet.
The grating also provides a safe and easy way to climb back aboard after a swim. It easily supports John’s weight without pulling SKIMMER well out of trim.
John did very well for a first boat, especially for building one from scratch, and SKIMMER naturally draws compliments like “beautiful” and “a work of art.” But John isn’t inclined to let even the well-deserved praise go to his head: “It’s nice to hear, but I think it is mostly the varnish they see. It takes some education to appreciate the beauty of wooden boats, at least it did for me. The pleasure is in the fair curves, the scarf joints, the handles on the swim platform, that stout ipe post.” Building his first boat was neither easy nor quick. “I paid for my ignorance with a lot of hours,” John recalls. “I’ll have to live a long time to row SKIMMER for as many hours as I spent building it, but that’s okay.”
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The Boothbay Harbor One-Design is a particularly handsome boat that has proven itself in the choppy waters off Boothbay and Pemaquid, Maine. It’s an easy boat to sail, while being both maneuverable and fast, and its design is the product of some of the best boat minds of the 1930s.
Shortly after the J-boat RAINBOW successfully defended the AMERICA’s Cup in 1934, her designer, W. Starling Burgess, moved to mid-coast Maine and hired Geerd Hendel as his chief draftsman. Their primary work, funded by Alcoa and loosely overseen by Bath Iron Works, involved designing high-speed military craft made of aluminum. For recreation, both men focused on the emerging fleet of Boothbay Harbor daysailers, with which Hendel was already deeply involved. Starting with lightly built, plumb-ended centerboarders much like those that raced on lakes back in his native Germany, Hendel was in the process of converting four of them to keel boats when Burgess arrived. (As centerboarders, they had proven not to be up to salt water’s more boisterous conditions.) Hendel’s experimentation led to SANDERLING, built by Norman Hodgdon for the summer of 1936. She was the Boothbay Harbor One-Design precursor—and the first sizable boat Norman Hodgdon built.
Photo by Maynard Bray
The Geerd Hendel–designed Boothbay Harbor One-Design is a sporty and seaworthy short-ended daysailer-racer. It was designed in the mid-1930s, when limited overhangs and long waterlines were that region’s rage. Several designs of these basic proportions came out around the same time.
The mid-1930s were the bleak Depression years when small boats rather than big ones were receiving attention—quality attention—from Boothbay region designers, builders, and sailors. Boats with long waterlines and short overhangs began dominating the Boothbay racing fleet in those days, and top-echelon designers took notice. A long waterline means a faster boat; boats of these proportions came not only from Hendel and Burgess, but also from Charles Hodgdon of East Boothbay’s Hodgdon Bros. Yard, and from L. Francis Herreshoff.
Hendel introduced a boat called LOON late in the 1937 season, and was then asked to work with the Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club, and particularly with its selection committee, in refining LOON’s plans to become a one-design class that would be cheap to build and fast to sail, and whose plans would be available to any builder—as these sailors intended to shop for the best price. The parameters echoed the fleet average of 21′ overall, about 19′ on the waterline, and carrying 200 sq ft of sail. After testing and massaging LOON, they agreed on what became known as the Boothbay Harbor One-Design (BHOD). It was an immediate hit, growing to 15 boats by its second season, 20 by the start of World War II, and 37 boats when wooden construction ended in 1966. (The final count came to 53, including the two subsequent batches of fiberglass boats.)
Geerd Hendel’s wooden BHODs were built upside down, then turned over and set atop their outside-ballasted fin keels—an efficient way to build any wooden boat whose design allows it. The BHODs’ flat transoms, as well, were an economy measure. The initial cost of these boats was in the neighborhood of $850.
The original planked construction of the BHODs has not held up especially well, as the boats have rather small frames and deep keels. However, the cost-cutting virtues of the original boats also make the BHOD an ideal candidate for the more robust and lower maintenance cold-molded construction. This technique involves the gluing together of multiple layers of diagonally laid veneer-like planking. It was this realization as well as a lifelong fondness for the BHODs that brought a kind of ad-hoc group together at Brooklin (Maine) Boat Yard, a long-standing leader in cold-molding. Besides designing and building new boats with cold-molded hulls, the yard had rejuvenated two aging BHODs belonging to Ted and Sandra Leonard—one of them nearly 20 years ago. Ted’s BLUE WITCH was detached from her fin and ballast, turned upside down, her hull sanded and faired to good wood, given a two-layer sheathing of 1⁄8″ diagonally laid veneers set in epoxy, faired and painted, then set upright again atop her original fin keel. Despite many seasons of sailing, her hull remains flawless and tight. Not surprisingly, Sandra’s boat, INDIA, received the same treatment a few years later.
Photo by Maynard Bray
The original plank-on-frame construction of the Boothbay Harbor One-Design did not stand the test of time. Two of these boats, BLUE WITCH and INDIA, owned by Ted and Sandra Leonard, received cold-molded overlays. Their hulls are much smoother than the dew-soaked topsides seen here suggest.
Based partly on this track record and partly on the yard’s expertise, Ted Leonard (who raced BHODs as a lad, as did his father) chose to sponsor a new BHOD of cold-molded construction. With input from Steve White (the yard’s owner), Bob Stephens (BBY ’s chief designer), and a little from Ted and me, the details were worked out and depicted on a new construction drawing by Bob. Instead of 1⁄2″ cedar planking, caulked, the new skin will consist of three layers glued together—the inner being 1⁄4″ thick running fore-and-aft over steam-bent frames, followed by two diagonally laid 1⁄8″ veneers running at right angles to each other.
As of this writing, finished drawings have been worked up and approved by the BHOD Association. The building jig has been completed, and over the winter the new hull will take shape. Ted’s goal is to share the information so that anyone can build one of these fine little daysailers using a method that has been proven. Finished boats will have strong and dimensionally stable skins, so you can store these BHODs in your garage or under a tarp with assurance that they’ll keep well and not leak when launched. The hulls will hold paint well because there’s no swelling and shrinking with changes in humidity—no seams to open, shed their paint, and ultimately leak. Fiberglass boats have some of these same advantages, but because that material isn’t self-fairing between supports the way wood is, fully faired and waxed female molds are necessary.
Since this boat weighs under 2,000 lbs, you’ll be able to tow it from place to place over the road behind the family sedan, expanding your sailing venue without damaging your boat. If the boat is equipped with a mast that swings in a tabernacle, stepping and unstepping should be a do-it-yourself operation.
Photo by Maynard Bray
Ted Leonard at the helm of BLUE WITCH. The success of this boat’s cold-molded overlay (it strengthened the hull enormously) has inspired the construction of a new BHOD, to be launched next summer. The new boat will have conventional steambent frames, like the originals, but will have a cold-molded, rather than planked, hull.
It’s a thrill to sail a BHOD, either singlehanded or with a friend or two. You tuck a cushion under your fanny and sprawl on the floorboards, where you’re out of the wind and much of the flying spray, yet you can see all around since your line of sight is under the boom and not obstructed by it or the mainsail. In tacking, the mainsail takes care of itself. Although the jib has to be let go and resheeted when changing tacks, it’s a small sail that blows across to the new lee side and sheets in easily once there—hardly needing the winch except in strong winds. With half her total weight at the bottom of her keel, the BHOD can be driven harder than a centerboarder of equal size. A reef is seldom needed and capsizing almost unheard of. Nevertheless, flotation chambers in the bow and stern will keep the boat from sinking should a catastrophic knockdown and swamping occur.
The resurgent interest in BHODs comes largely from a fleet roster developed by Association secretary Alden Reed—a listing that accounts for all 53 BHODs. Alden’s roots run as deep as his research in tracking down the boats. His grandfather Alden sponsored some of the early boats to get the class on its feet, and his father, Edgar, while a youngster, often crewed for Starling Burgess during the late 1930s.
If you do not plan to race, and are not constrained by the one-design parameters, the design invites such modifications as a reduced keel and separated rudder, curved transom, small cabin or boom tent, and tabernacle mast. The boats are small enough to store in the garage, yet big enough to give one the thrill of sailing fast—a perfect balance between manageability and performance.
There’s a newly chartered Boothbay Harbor One-Design Association, open to anyone interested in the boats. It organizes the racing, and publishes a comprehensive quarterly newsletter that covers restorations as well as recent race results. Ordering details for the new Boothbay Harbor One-Design Plans were being developed at the time of publication.
For a displacement hull, top speed is a function of waterline length. That’s the beauty of a Boothbay Harbor One-Design: The waterline length is nearly equal to the boat’s overall length. The short ends also reduce the boat’s tendency to pitch.
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.
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The Christmas Wherry possesses two characteristics that should be critically important to anyone looking for a small boat to use in open waters. It displays classic beauty and, as the boat’s designer, Walt Simmons of Lincolnville, Maine, says, “It will take you out, and bring you back home.”
The wherry can trace its origins perhaps as far back as the 15th century. Superb pulling boats, wherries could be found fishing or carrying passengers on rivers and harbors throughout much of England. These working boats were often equipped with sailing rigs. The fast, all-purpose boats came to the New World during the earliest part of the Colonial era.
The Christmas Wherry can trace its design almost as far back in history. The boat is based on the salmon wherries developed on the shores of Penobscot Bay in the 19th century, a time when the fishery for wild Atlantic salmon flourished in Maine bays and rivers. Some 35 miles long and more than 20 miles wide, the bay lies at the mouth of the Penobscot River and is studded with granite ledges and islands. For decades, into the early years of the 20th century, the Penobscot was among the most productive salmon rivers in North America. As might be expected of boats relied on by fishermen working on the rugged Maine coast, the ability to go to sea in all weather, and to come back laden with salmon in all but the worst of it, was critical.
Corurtesy of Walter Simmons
Walter Simmons rows standing up when he takes out his Christmas Wherry, a shapely lapstrake rowing and sailing skiff.
Today, the salmon and the fishery are gone, but the value of a small boat that can carry a good load in tough conditions hasn’t changed. The difference is that the boats will be used for recreation, and that poses some design issues.
In developing the Christmas Wherry, Simmons was working within some very specific parameters. His customers wanted a shoal-draft boat in the 15′ length range that they could sail as well as row, with a rig that could be stored entirely inside the boat. The boat had to be heavy enough not to be “corky” in the water but light enough for one person to load on and off a trailer without assistance.
“That’s a taller order than you might think,” Simmons says, but the Christmas Wherry fills the bill.
At 15′ in length between perpendiculars, with a molded beam of 5′ and depth amidships of 1’6″, the Christmas Wherry can carry two or three people with ease, “and four in a pinch,” Simmons says. She’s long enough to sail well under her 102-sq-ft lug rig and beamy enough to stand up to a good breeze under a press of sail. A plank keel makes the boat maneuverable enough for the rower to skid sideways if necessary, but her planked-down hull aft means she’ll track well, too.
The Christmas Wherry shares the excellent seakeeping abilities of other boats of the type. The owner of a Simmons–designed 19′ Newfoundland Trap Skiff, a boat very much like the Christmas Wherry, sailed his boat from Massachusetts up the coast to Penobscot Bay, a trip that at times exposed the boat to the full sweep of the Atlantic. With her broad beam (her length-to-beam ratio is almost 3:1) and her flat ’midship sections, the Christmas Wherry isn’t at all tender. Simmons says the boat can support his 230 lbs standing on the rail. Under sail, with her nicely canted stem and full sections forward, the bow stays up even when the wind is blowing hard, and there’s enough flare in the planking to keep things dry.
The Christmas Wherry is planked up from 9-mm okoume plywood using glued-lap construction, with eight planks to a side. It can also be built with cedar planking and traditional boatbuilding techniques, but Simmons likes the way fastenings hold in okoume, which he also used for the wide plank keel and the centerboard. Simmons uses Honduras mahogany for the thwarts and oak for the wherry’s inwales and rubrails. He doesn’t use the traditional oak keel because it’s too difficult nowadays to find wide oak planks that won’t cup.
Courtesy of Walter Simmons
A plank keel allows the wherry to stand upright on the beach.
The boat has six pair of sawn frames rather than the seven pair traditionally found in wherries. Each frame is laminated from two layers of cedar. The joints are “broken,” as they would have been historically in a large vessel. Just as in double-sawn frame construction, which were bolted up of individual members called futtocks, Simmons staggers the frame’s butt joints in adjacent layers as widely as possible for strength. Using multiple pieces, Simmons says, all but eliminates any cross-grain. The Christmas Wherry’s frames are composed of two 5⁄8″-thick layers of cedar epoxied together to make the 11⁄4″ sided frame. That might mean three pieces on the forward side and two on the after side, for example, so that the butts are widely separated and each is fully supported.
Historically, wherries built in the area where Simmons has his shop used natural-crook cedar frames from trees cut along the banks of Duck Trap Stream. With today’s conservation ethic, that practice is no longer possible, but Simmons says that he utilizes modern technology to duplicate what cedar trees used to do all by themselves.
Simmons says that in a wherry built using glued-lap construction, the hull is so strong that frames wouldn’t even be necessary except for the wracking strain imposed by the sailing rig.
Although fitting sawn frames in a lapstrake boat is what Simmons calls “an interesting proposition,” he says they’re preferable to steamed frames, which have a tendency to exert a lot of pressure on the center of wide planks. Fitting the frames square to the planking makes the job easier, although there’s still plenty of beveling to be done.
The Christmas Wherry is not the boat for a novice builder. It has the shapely, extremely tucked-up stern sections characteristic of the salmon wherry and a fair amount of tumblehome. Springing the garboard into place requires a lot of pressure, Simmons says, and constructing a centerboard trunk adds to the complexity of the project.
The centerboard itself is built from 18-mm okoume, and carries 15 lbs of lead at the bottom to make sure the board stays down. For those occasions when the board doesn’t stay either down or up but gets stuck somewhere in between, the centerboard trunk has a removable cap. Plans for the Christmas Wherry show a kick-up rudder, but the latest version built by Simmons has a traditional fixed rudder.
Courtesy of Walter Simmons
The Christmas Wherry moves well under sail, and for a boat like this an appropriately sized and uncomplicated spritsail is one possible traditional rig.
Building and repairing wherries for more than 30 years, Simmons says, “I learned the hard way.” Getting the lofting right goes a long way toward simplifying the construction. To that end, Simmons offers complete loftings as well as plans and detailed building instructions either in printed form or on a CD. He’ll also build a finished boat to order.
Any boat designed for rowing is only as good as the oars used to propel it. Simmons prefers to stand to row the Christmas Wherry and uses a pair of 8’6″ curved-blade oars made to his own pattern. The boat is fitted with bronze horned rowlocks that Simmons designed especially for rowing in the standing position. A 10′ oar is recommended for sculling. The shorter oars can be gotten out of a 28 plank without any laminating. For the Christmas Wherry builder, Simmons offers plans and a full-sized lofting of the oars.
Moving the Christmas Wherry to and from the water should be an easy task, even for the singlehander. Even with her full rig and gear aboard, the boat shouldn’t weigh more than 300 lbs. She can be easily launched and recovered with a small trailer that has been modified to fit a round-bottomed wooden boat by adding a cradle to support the boat’s ’midship section and a substantial roller aft.
The Christmas Wherry may not be everyone’s cup of tea. She’s not a quick and easy building project, and even an order to Simmons’s one-man shop won’t produce a finished boat by return mail.
Still, seeing a Christmas Wherry on the beach or, even better, in the water makes it clear that she fulfills the aesthetic imperative of small-boat design. And she will take you out, and bring you home, in style and safety.
The Christmas Wherry packs a lot of enjoyment into a hull only 15′ long. In one of his rigging plans, designer Walter Simmons presents a standing lug rig, which permits better sheeting angles than the loose-fitted spritsail shown in the photograph opposite and also has the advantage of being easy to reef or douse. Two people can row when the wind fails.
Full sets of plans, completed boats, and Simmons’s boatbuilding instruction books are available through Duck Trap Woodworking.
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President John F. Kennedy made a speech in Houston, Texas, at Rice University on September 12, 1962. I was only nine years old at the time, but one part of that speech eventually reached me and stayed with me, as it has for most Americans:
“We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
The president’s declaration led to Neil Armstrong, less than seven years later, making the first footprint on the lunar surface. And getting to that point was hard, even for a nation with almost unlimited resources. As individuals, we set goals for ourselves that are more modest than going to the moon, but those that are the hardest for us to achieve, no less “measure the best of our energies and skills.”
In this issue, Isabelle Heker tells us of the daunting task she took on of building a Greenland kayak in spite of her lack of skills, tools, and materials and in spite of the doubts cast by those closest to her. Dave Gibson, also in this issue, built a plywood kayak and confessed that after looking at the instructions, “I had not even started,” he said, “and I was buffaloed.”
I was also intimidated by the steep front face of the learning curve I had chosen to scale when I first started building boats. I read lots of books, gathered up the tools I thought I’d need, and made a start. I got as far as stetting the frames on the bottom of the dory skiff that was my first real boatbuilding project. A batten sprung around them showed the frames weren’t all making contact along that batten’s fair curve. I spent a week, maybe two, checking offsets, studying the lofting, measuring the frame, searching for the numbers that were causing the problem. I couldn’t find them, gave up on that approach, and decided that the only solution was to take my direction from the batten and build the boat.
Building that 14′ skiff was the most difficult thing I had done to that point. In spite of the challenges, the mistakes, and the disappointments, I often stepped back from the work, nestled in the pile of redolent oak and cedar shavings I’d swept into the corner of my makeshift shop, and gazed at the boat in wonder. The feeling of “I did that” wouldn’t have been as rewarding if the project had been quick, easy, and without suffering.
I thought the repairs I had to make to the kayak I had allowed to fly off my roof racks would have been easy. I’d made repairs before, after it had arrived seriously damaged after being air-freighted from Denmark. The new fix the aft deck required was easy, a repeat of the repair to the foredeck I’d done years earlier. But addressing the damage to the skeg and the crack in the aft half of the hull had me a bit “buffaloed” and took a lot of thinking before I could continue the work.
I had to create some new tools and new ways of using existing tools as well as invent methods for working on damage I could access from just one side. I complained to Rachel that I was having to find solutions to problems I’d never encounter again. That missed the point. The value of the exercise was not in a solution I’d never need again, but in being determined to solve a problem I’d never encountered before.
If I had taken up woodworking because I had wanted it to be easy, I would have stuck to projects that involved only straight lines and right angles. I wouldn’t have started building boats with the struggles posed by their curves and compound bevels. With each boat I built after the dory skiff, I took on more complex builds that would pose new problems to solve, knowing full well that they would at times frustrate and even annoy me, but knowing just as well that the level of satisfaction would rise with each elevation of the difficulty. To put it Kennedy’s way, the challenges would serve to organize and measure the best of my energies and skills.
In that 1962 speech, President Kennedy also said this: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained.” It’s no surprise that his metaphor was about boats.
Update:
I greatly appreciated all of the comments sent by readers who could empathize with my story about forgetting to tying my Struer kayak to the roof racks and the damage it suffered falling onto the pavement. I finished the repairs recently and, after a two-month hiatus, got it back on the water. Here is a review of the damage:
The rudder blade was bent almost 90 degrees by the impact.
The forward end of the hull had lots of scratches.
The skeg was punched into the hull and a break along the centerline extended about 5′ forward from the hole.
These cracks aft of the cockpit were the worst of the damage to the deck.
And here is what it took to make the kayak seaworthy again:
The fractured area of the deck would be epoxied to this piece of 1/8″ birch plywood. Two pieces of 3/4″ plywood, cut to the same shape and drilled through with holes to match those on the deck, would pull the interior patch tight to the underside of the deck.
Two carriage bolts pulled the sandwich together and assured that the flaps of torn plywood would all come to a smooth, fair plane.
Torn plywood edges don’t just snap back together like a puzzle pieces. The frayed fibers have to be scraped away to get the edges to align. A small pen-knife blade did the job for all of the cracks except the one here on the port side of the skeg. That fracture, right at the edge of the skeg, was at a shallow angle pointing at it, blocking access. I made a tool from 1/4″ mild-steel rod with one straight edge and one hooked. I heated each end with a torch to hammer and bend them to the rough shapes required, then filed and belt-sanded the scraping edges.
I couldn’t get the skeg to line up with both sides of the hole in the hull at the same time so I glued the starboard side first. A long stick parallel to the skeg pushed the edge of the hull flat and fair. Three short sticks, weighted with small sandbags and their ends tucked under blocks hot-glued to the skeg, applied pressure. The straps, wedges, and blocks push down on two parts of the tear that needed more force to lie fair.
For the second step, gluing the port side of the skeg, I used a variation of the same cantilever pressure system. One block of wood with holes drilled in it was clamped to the starboard side of the skeg. Another block of wood, pushed down by the sandbagged dowels, applied pressure on the hull side of the break.
And here are the results, with a fresh coat of varnish:
The damage to the bow’s underbody was mostly superficial and remedied with sanding and new varnish.
The skeg is back where it belongs, with very little mahogany missing along the breaks, and the rudder has its proper posture back.
I didn’t bother to disguise the bolt holes, filling them with white thickened epoxy instead. I’m OK with the visible reminder to tie the kayak to the roof racks.
Two months after dropping the Struer from my car, it is back on the roof racks. This time I tied it down.
Out for the first time this winter, the kayak felt and looked almost as good as new. There were few other boats out on this chilly January day. A sailboat on the south end of Seattle’s Lake Union was one of them and the only one I passed by within earshot. The skipper took a long look my way, then called out: “Nice looking kayak!”
With one of us at the stern, the other at the bow, we lift our Savo 650D off the boat trailer, step to the water, and swing the bow until the boat is perpendicular to the shore. When we set it down, it balances on the smooth surface of the water like a leaf that has just landed with a whisper, light as a feather. We’ve set it in the water hundreds of times, yet the sense of the boat’s spirit always comes alive at that moment when its hull alights on the water.
We often imbue certain inanimate objects with human qualities. We have bonded strongly with our boat, and think of it as an individual with its own personality. It sounds a bit crazy, but perhaps it has something to do with the strong emotions, both good and bad, that we have experienced while rowing it. Slipping across a perfect glassy mirror of salt water at sunset, awash in pinks and blues, gold and silver. Bashing across the chaos of Petit Manan bar off the Maine coast, in an opposing wind and tide, our every fiber focused on not tipping over, and looking up to see a jellyfish in the crest of a wave above our heads. Riding the long lazy swells of a perfect summer morning on the ocean, and wishing we could keep rowing to the horizon and beyond. Maybe it is a strong sense of gratitude that creates a deep connection with, and subsequently a persona for, an object. NORPPA, as our Savo 650D is named, is eager and spirited, somewhat sassy, and a bit wayward. She detests rocks, especially large ones that are barely awash and sneak up on her from nowhere. She loves attention and pampering.
Photographs by Murray Carpenter
Weighing 101 lbs with the rowing rig installed, the Savo 650D is a manageable carry for two. Dowels set across the ends serve as handholds.
The Savo 650D’s predecessors were traditional rowboats built and used in Savonia, a Finnish province crisscrossed with a network of navigable freshwater lakes and rivers. The rowboats were a fixture of everyday life, used for exploring, fishing, transport, and visiting. Children were borne by rowboat to their baptismal ceremonies, and family members rowed their deceased to their final destinations. After a lifetime of dependable service, Savonian rowing boats were traditionally burned at the midsummer bonfires.
The Savo 650D from Puuvenepiste in Finland features a hull of glued-lap planks of 6mm marine-grade plywood over three laminated frames. The plans offer a three-strake version designed for a combined crew weight of 350 lbs or more and a four-strake version for crews weighing less. Together, the two of us weigh close to 350 lbs, and we have the tendency to load a lot of gear for camping trips, so the three-strake version might have been the better choice, but the four-strake version came to us serendipitously, and it has worked well for us.
Designed to be light, the Savo 650D’s keelson, gunwales, and frames are made of pine or spruce. The fully equipped boat weighs in at just over 100 lbs. The length is 21′ 4″, with a nearly plumb bow and stern so its waterline is virtually the same as its overall length. The hull flares wide at the gunwales and tapers to a V-bottom that is shallowly curved amidships, and narrows sharply at bow and stern. Its interior is simple and clean, with only three frames and the sliding seat system, so there’s lots of room for stowing gear.
With the boat bare for racing, it draws only 4″. Loaded for a multi-week camping trip, it sits a bit lower, but handles even better. Though we didn’t build the boat ourselves, a kit version is available and comes with detailed instructions and diagrams.
The two tubular rails support two Poseidon rowing stations. They can be adjusted to position a single rower for proper fore-and-aft trim. The sliding seats are not in place here.
The Savo 650D is designed for two rowers, though it is simple to outfit the boat with a third set of oarlocks to row as a single as well (though there’s also a version of the boat—the Savo 575—that is designed as a single). The 650D is equipped with two Poseidon sliding seats, which have concave wheels that rest on round stainless-steel rails. This setup is a huge improvement over most sliding-seat systems, which have convex wheels that fit down into concave rails that collect all manner of grit and debris making for lots of friction and extra maintenance. Any debris that falls on the Poseidon rails just drops off. The foot stretchers are clamped onto the sliding seat rails, and can be easily loosened to slide the foot stretcher to any position to accommodate taller or shorter rowers, or to set the boat up to row as a single.
There are no storage or flotation compartments—the Savo’s original purpose is to be a racing boat. If you’re considering taking the Savo out for an extended open water expedition that may land you in rough water, you’ll want to consider lashing some sort of flotation into the boat.
We transport our Savo on a lightweight aluminum trailer, but in Finland, where these boats are common, they are often cartopped. At 100 lbs, the boat can be lifted on and off the trailer or car top by two fairly sturdy people with relative ease.
Compared to a racing shell, this boat is quite stable. Compared to many traditional wooden rowing boats, it feels a bit tender. It is somewhere between the two in terms of stability, but closer to a traditional rowboat. With its V-bottom and wide flare at the gunwales, it lacks a little in primary stability, but makes up for it in secondary stability. In rough water you’ll be in for a bit of a wild ride, but it won’t go over. We once did a test to see what it would take to flip the boat and found that it took both of us getting off our seats to lean all of our weight out over the gunwale. That being said, when loading the boat with gear it’s important to take care to distribute the weight evenly. It is sensitive to small differences in port/starboard loading. Also, with its relatively light weight and large freeboard, wind on the beam can heel the boat. It is minor yet noticeable; sometimes it helps to have some ballast available to counterbalance a wind-induced heel.
The standard oarlocks for Finnish rowing are pins through the looms preventing the oars from being feathered, an advantage on long hauls. The oars here are not the standard Savo oars but the ones we used on our expedition Savo, with blades about 10 percent larger.
Finnish racing rules don’t permit oarlocks that allow the oar blades to feather, so the Savo is equipped with Sarana oarlocks, hinged pins that pass through bushings in the center of the oar looms. These non-feathering oars were a revelation to us. The pin system is ingeniously simple, and makes great sense for long-distance rowing. Though not being able to feather may at first seem a limitation, it is in fact a great bonus. The blade is always at the perfect position at the catch and no energy is wasted on feathering. And the traditional Finnish blades are slender enough that only the strongest headwinds have caused us to momentarily wish we could feather. The other 95 percent of the time, we dearly appreciate not having to think about blade angle at every catch, and our forearms are happy to forgo feathering, especially on the long-distance rows that we enjoy so much.
The Savo’s oar shafts are laminated spruce or pine, with hatchet blades made of marine plywood. Overall length of the oars is 8′ 4″, with blades approximately 17″ long by 5″ wide. Despite the relatively small size of the blades, we have found that they keep the boat clipping along nicely. One thing that may take some getting used to for American rowers is the amount of cross-over of the oar handles, which is much greater than that in most rowing or sculling boats in the U.S. That cross-over provides the right amount of leverage for oars that are mounted on the gunwales with no outriggers, but it does feel a bit different at first. While learning to row in rough water, the cross-over can be a contributing factor to bruises and scrapes on your hands and arms. But this is not an issue on flat water, and is overcome with practice in rougher sea states.
We have rowed our two Savos—one standard, the other equipped with decks, bulkheads, and a kayak rudder for the Race to Alaska—hundreds of times, in all conditions, and for very long stretches across open water off the coasts of Maine and British Columbia, and have found joy in all of it. These boats have carried us safely across rip tides and whirlpools, over ocean swells, and through the worst chop that our home waters of Penobscot Bay can whip up. On calm water, the Savo is a dream to row; it skims along with long glides between strokes and you almost feel like you are flying. It seems to barely notice a slight chop; it’s not uncommon for us to be out in 1′ to 2′ chop and stay dry. In rougher water, it can be quite fun, once you acquire the skills to stay on your seat and keep time with your partner. Any minor downsides to rowing the Savo that we have noticed are probably only due to our continued insistence on taking the boat out into water and conditions that are not usually encountered on the lakes of Finland.
Due to its relatively light weight, moderately high freeboard, and shallow draft you’ll need to row with quite a crab angle to make up for the effect of a strong wind on your course over ground.
The Savo 650D’s long waterline makes for slow turning, so trailing the oars on the inside of a turn to serve as rudders can help bring it around more quickly.
The Savo’s long waterline and V-bottom give it good speed and tracking along a straight-line course. The trade-off is a reluctance to turn sharply. We routinely drag an oar (sometimes two) to act as a rudder to assist a course correction or a larger turn. The original Savo does not have a rudder, or any kind of skeg or fin. It tracks fairly well upwind, but can be a bit squirrely in a downwind swell, suddenly taking 30- to 60-degree turns out of the blue when its stern gets caught by a wave (not an unusual trait for small boats). We have become adept at quickly dragging an oar on the fly to correct these sudden departures from our intended course. To be sure, steering issues are much less of an issue on flat, inland water, and in any case can be overcome with experience and practice.
The Puuvenepiste website states that the 650D can attain speeds of up to 9 knots (for a short period with exceptional rowers), and cruising speeds of 4.5 to 5.5 knots. We have briefly achieved speeds in excess of 8 knots, and have consistently achieved cruising speeds right in line with the designer’s range. In 2018, the Savo 650D was our boat of choice to row the entire Maine coast, 260 miles from Kittery to Lubec. We chose the Savo because of its capacity to hold all our camping gear with ease while maintaining a great cruising speed. Even with our increased payload on the trip we averaged 29 miles a day, and when we got to the end we wished we could keep going.
Over the past three years of rowing the Savo, we have gradually built our skills and learned to trust the boat in rougher and rougher water. We do all of our rowing on salt water, mostly on the coast of Maine. At first, it was nerve-wracking to be out in 2′ chop. Now, we have rowed across long stretches of open water in steep, choppy, 5′ waves, and have been in swells of up to 8′. Although the Savo was designed for flat-water racing on the lakes of Finland, we have found it to be quite seaworthy. In very rough, steep seas from 4′ to 7′, we have had to regularly stop and bail, but in sea states that are more typical for rowing, the boat stays dry inside. The greater barrier to rowing in rough water has not been the boat, but our own level of confidence and skill with the oars. It takes time and patience to learn how to row well, and stay in sync, when the boat is pitching all over the place.
The Savo 650D lies somewhere on the spectrum between the ultra-slim, lightweight racing shell and the heavier, more stable traditional rowboat; all in all, we find it to be the best of both worlds. It is fast, yet dry in most sea states. It is light, yet sports beautiful, traditional lines. If you’re a sliding-seat rower who wants to enjoy that amazing, weightless feeling of skimming along across a mirror-like surface, you can do that, and probably win some open-water races while you’re at it. If you’re a busy person trying to spend time in the outdoors while also getting in a good workout, you won’t have to bend and warp your life schedule around finding perfect flat-water conditions; you can go out in a bit of wind and chop. If you live for adventure and you want a boat that you can load with camping gear and shove off for multiple weeks away from modern life, you can do that, too. The Savo is also a great training boat for beginners. With its wider beam and freedom from feathering, newcomers to sliding-seat rowing find the Savo to be a much more forgiving, less frustrating boat than a typical shell. Yet, experienced rowers will find much to love as well; if you’re like us, you’ll find that the boat’s extreme seaworthiness will have you continually testing yourself in more and more rugged conditions.
Leigh Dorsey and Dameon Colbry are rowing addicts lucky enough to be living on the coast of Maine. They have found no more enjoyable way to experience the sea than in a small boat, and no more rewarding journey than one completed under their own power. They feel a strong connection to the generations of humans who explored their world by oar and paddle.
Savo 650D Particulars
[table]
Weight, equipped/101 lbs
Length /21.3′
Beam /4.2′
Depth/24.6″
Displacement/441 lbs
Waterline length/21′
Waterline beam/29.4″
Draft/4.5″
Freeboard/12.6″
[/table]
Finished boats and kits for the Savo 650D are available from Puuvenepiste in Finland. Old Wharf Dory is the authorized builder in the U.S. Kits in the the U.S. are available from Hewes & Company in Blue Hill, Maine.
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The catboat is a beamy, monohulled sailboat descended from a line of working watercraft. No one is sure of the origin of the name “catboat.” Some said the boat was as fleet as a cat. Or, the name might have been inspired by dock cats that greeted returning fishermen. Catboats fished, hauled freight, and ferried passengers along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard as early as 1850. Their spiritual home is Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where generations of the Crosby family built catboats, determining their shapes with hand-carved models.
The beam of a catboat is typically half its length. Such generous beam afforded room for a fisherman to work. A single mast, stepped far forward, has a forestay but generally no shrouds. The rig is a single sail, often a gaffer. Fishermen made headroom by furling the rig then hiking it high overhead with one of the halyards. Because catboats worked in shallow waters, most have shoal draft and a centerboard. Catboats have a characteristic barn-door rudder, hung proud of the stern and steered with a tiller.
Working watermen eventually adopted steam and gasoline. But a new kind of sailor, the pleasure boater, adopted the catboat, which retains a loyal following to this day.
Naval architect Charles W. Wittholz of Silver Spring, Maryland, designed boats ranging from 11’ dinghies to 85′ replica ships. In his career, Wittholz designed several catboats, but it was the 17-footer that he himself sailed on the Potomac River. Built in 1967, he named his boat GOOD OMEN and sailed her for more than 20 years.
Monte Copeland
The keel version of the Wittholz 17 catboat has its greatest draft 13-1/2′ back from the stem, so it can be brought fairly close to shore. The bundled boom and gaff have been hiked up by the peak halyard to provide more headroom in the cockpit.
The plans for the 17′ 1″ plywood catboat include 11 sheets with good construction detail: materials, dimensions, fastening schedules, notes, and comments. Several alternatives are included: self-bailer instead of deep cockpit, lead-ballasted full keel instead of a centerboard, open cockpit instead of a cabin, gaff or marconi sailing rig, optional anchor-handling bowsprit, and an optional inboard engine. The plans date to the early 1960s, so some of the suppliers mentioned have long been out of business.
The Wittholz 17 requires lofting from the plan’s offsets. Drawing the body plan (the end-on view) requires a 6′ x 10′ drawing surface and is critical to loft accurately as it provides the full-sized patterns for the frames. The 6′ x 6′ side-view lofting of the stem provides patterns for the stem/forefoot assembly. The lofting for this catboat is not complicated; Greg Rössel’s book, Building Small Boats, covers lofting nicely.
Hull construction is straightforward: assemble the oak stem, the 1/2″ plywood transom, and the nine frames of mahogany or oak with 1/2″ plywood gussets. Set those elements on a level building jig, upside down, with the frames 22″ apart. Fit the mahogany or fir sheer stringers and chines, and the mahogany keelson to the frames.
The hull sides and bottom are 3/8″ plywood. The plans suggest a layer of fiberglass cloth on the ply for extra durability. I know from personal experience that if you get the catboat sideways to the wind and ram the dock, you can crack some plywood along the sides. The most vulnerable areas are between the frames forward of amidships, aft of the forward bulkhead. I suggest adding oak blocking between frames about 12″ above the waterline and heavy-duty fiberglass-epoxy on the inside of the plywood in these areas.
In my experience, fir and Aquatek plywoods check and crack if painted only, so they must be covered on both sides with fiberglass cloth set in epoxy. If you do cover plywood in fiberglass, do it after cutting pieces to shape, before installation, while they are still flat. This is so much easier than fiberglassing an assembled boat. High-quality okoume plywood is nice stuff: no voids, many plies. Okoume, when used for parts of the boat other than the hull, benefits from a barrier coat of unthickened epoxy on both sides, but it does not require fiberglass cloth.
This boat will always have a little water in the deepest part of the bilge. Seal this area with several coats of epoxy resin.
Get the sides from 5′ x 20′ panels (two sheets 5′ x 10′ scarfed). Attach the sides first. Get the bottoms from 4′ x 20′ panels (4′ x 8′ sheets scarfed). The bottom panels overlap the side panels most of the way then transition to a butt seam forward. Fit the keel to the keelson before turning the hull over.
The sail plans include both marconi and gaff rigs. The gaff-rig mast I built is solid spruce: 5-1/4″ in diameter, 25′ long. The gaffer requires a single forestay but no shrouds. The hardware called out in the plans is all from Merriman Yacht Specialties, a company no longer in business. Most parts have readily available equivalents, but if gooseneck hardware is hard to find, try wooden jaws. See William Garden’s article, “The Right Jaws for your Gaff and Boom,” in WoodenBoat No.59.
The gaff rig’s solid mast is too heavy and awkward to step handling it solely from the foredeck. Lacking a crane, it requires a person on a low bridge or atop a neighboring houseboat to steady the mast while a crew of two lifts/lowers on deck. Spare halyards from two neighboring sloops would also work to step this mast.
Those wanting a trailer-sailer will look to the marconi rig then make modifications for folding. The builder will have to design the modifications, because the plans say nothing about folding. The marconi mast is a 5-1/4″ x 4-1/4″ hollow rectangle, 32′ 3″ long. This mast requires a forestay and two shrouds that belay aft of the mast partner.
The gaff rig peaks up higher than is usual for a center of effort similar to the marconi. Build either sail with two sets of reefpoints as shown on the plans. The second reefpoint has a calming effect in 40-knot winds.
The optional bowsprit is not for a jib, as a jib of any kind would unbalance the boat. The bowsprit is for anchor handling, equipped with a chock to guide the chain and rode.
The Wittholz catboat has a centerboard, as catboats commonly do. Draft with centerboard up is 21″, down 4′ 3″. The centerboard case is 6′ long, most of it in the cabin, with 19″ extending aft into the cockpit. The centerboard itself is 3/8″ galvanized steel. There are 500 lbs of movable ballast in the form of lead pigs under the cabin and cockpit floorboards.
Monte Copeland
The trailer for this keelboat version of the catboat is fitted with screw pads to steady the hull while the weight of the boat is supported beneath the keel. The centerboard version could slide onto a trailer equipped with bunks.
The plans include an option for a full ballast keel, as seen in the catboat pictured here. The draft of the full-keel version is 28″. The builder must make a mold to pour 600 lbs of lead shaped to fair with the deadwood in the keel. The mold requires lofting, too; refer to the Bud McIntosh book, How to Build a Wooden Boat, for a simple explanation.
Either model weighs about 2,200 lbs, including the ballast. The trailer for it could be a bunkboard arrangement, but a trailer with boat stands is better. When trailering, the boat must rest on its keel, not its garboards.
Monte Copeland
With the tiller swung to port, there’s room for the stove when the cockpit is pressed into service as the galley. The plans call for an engine box, which would occupy the center of the cockpit. A transom-mounted outboard motor frees up that space for the crew.
The cockpit is seriously spacious. Sloop sailors often walk by and exclaim, “Look at all that room!” The cockpit can easily accommodate six people. The seats have a comfortable slope, and the coamings are tilted as backrests should be. The footwell is deep but not self-bailing. Water will sump to the deepest part of the bilge where a reliable pump awaits. For a self-bailing cockpit, see the plans; there is a sheet for that. The high sheer up forward keeps the cockpit dry in most conditions.
At anchor, it is a fine thing to hike up the sailing rig for standing headroom in the cockpit. On the gaffer, do this by furling the sail, lashing boom to gaff, and hauling on the peak halyard. For the marconi rig, modify the wire topping lift. Its upper end is fixed to the top of the mast, so modify the bottom end with 1/4″ rope, blocks, and a cleat on the boom to adjust it.
Monte Copeland
The plans for the cabin include two berths and cabinets aft of them, one equipped with a sink, the other a two-burner stove. The keelboat version, seen here, leaves the space between the berths unobstructed by a centerboard trunk.
In the cabin, there is sitting headroom on berths port and starboard. The two lockers amidships are sure to be customized by the builder. At anchor, a Coleman stove works well in the cockpit aft, so the two-burner alcohol stove in the cabin shown in the plans may not be required. The drawings show a head up forward, but it flushes straight into the sea. Better find a place for a porta-potty, either forward or perhaps amidships port or starboard. When it comes to building the cabin, How to Build a Wooden Boat is again a good companion to the plans.
The plans show where to fit a small inboard engine, but a 5-hp, four-stroke, long-shaft outboard motor serves well as an auxiliary. The plans also show an option for stowing an outboard under a hatch set in the cockpit floor. On smooth water, the outboard will push the boat at 6 knots. Mount the outboard to a bracket on the transom, but keep it clear of the big rudder. Add framing in the transom for attaching the bracket to the boat. The bracket should be adjustable up and down to keep the propeller in the right amount of water, no matter where the passengers are. Most 5-hp outboards come with a propeller suitable for light craft or inflatable dinghies. For a boat of this size and weight, select a propeller with less pitch so that engine rpms are high enough to avoid lugging the engine.
Sheila Harnett
The 220-sq-ft sail here is held to the mast by hoops and lashed to the gaff and boom. The plans not using sail track along the boom.
In good conditions, expect this boat to sail to windward at 45 degrees off the wind. A sloop, with its two sails and narrower beam, might sail closer, but the catboat sailor specializes in his one mainsail and strives to get the most from it. The peak and throat halyards of the gaff rig provide control over sail shape. A three-part boom outhaul for either rig is useful to control the belly of the sail. The position of the crew greatly affects overall trim. Move crew aft or to windward to reduce weather helm, something catboats have in abundance. On this boat in particular, moving crew leeward can help push the hard chine underwater, so the side acts like a leeboard.
It is best not to oversheet a catboat. When hauled hard, the boom should be over the stern quarter of the boat. Hauled any harder, the boat slows down and crabs to leeward. Best to let out the sheet, find the wind, then adjust by looking for the sweet spot. On gusty days, do not cleat off the sheet; instead, wrap just enough turns around so it will slip when hit by a strong gust. On a reach, 15 knots of wind will move this boat at 6 knots. In stronger winds, reef the sail to match, preferably sooner than later.
At the helm, keep the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other. One can sense immediately how the combination affects boat speed and trim.
This boat is built for comfort, not speed. What appeals most to me is how the Wittholz catboat provides so much space for its 17′ length. It’s a sailboat with berths for overnighting, and yet is buildable in a 20′-deep two-car garage. Over the years, I have come to appreciate its comfort, safety, good looks, and ease of sailing singlehanded. If I could add one thing to the plans? Fishing rod holders just aft of those stern cleats.
Monte Copeland grew up in a lumberyard along the Ohio River, but never connected wood with water until after moving to Austin, Texas. Now retired from computer programming, Monte and his wife Sheila sail on Lake Travis. In his shop is an old Shellback dinghy getting ready for new paint.
"Don’t you think such a project is a little too big for you?” That’s what my father said when I told him I was thinking about building a kayak. He used to do little craft projects with me when I was younger, and I remember when we made a small wooden figurine for Grandma to put in her garden. He did the sawing out and let little me do the painting. While he had in mind teaching me to use some tools and different materials, in the end, he always did the building and all the work with the tools, while I watched and cleaned up afterward. When I was old enough, I stopped taking part in these projects and turned to some simpler craft projects I could do on my own, such as sewing, braiding, and working with leather.
“A little too big” came back to me as I stood in a lumberyard collecting the first of the materials for building a Greenland skin-on-frame kayak, but the echoes of my father’s words faded as I breathed in the wonderful fragrance of the wood surrounding me. Thomas Bruns came out of his storehouse carrying a very long packet of lumber. He is the father of an old friend of mine, and I’d recently found out, just by chance, that he’s a lumber wholesaler. I could not really believe my luck, because for weeks I had searched the Internet for a source of wood of 16′ or more in length, knot-free and straight grained. Thomas had been very friendly when I emailed him, offering me wood for my project and not wanting any money for it—the amount of wood I needed for my kayak was not a quantity they think twice about giving away. For two big boards of pine and four beautiful, knot-free 20′ boards of hemlock I paid one homemade chocolate cake.
As I strapped the boards to the roof rack of my parents’ car, I still could not believe I was doing this. These boards were longer than any kayak I had ever handled, and “too big for you” was suddenly something I could see and struggle with as I loaded them.
The idea for this building project came up when I was practicing Greenland rolling in pool sessions during the winter months with my fiberglass Greenland-style sea kayak, christened NAAJA. In the Greenland tradition there are rolling techniques for every eventuality. In the Greenland National Kayaking Championship there are 33 different rolling techniques, from the Standard Greenland Roll with a paddle, to the Straitjacket Roll without a paddle, arms held tightly across the chest. I love my kayak, but it is just not perfect for rolling. I needed another kayak, one meant for rolling.
There are only a few manufactured models available that would fit for me, as I am not very big—5′ 7″, around 130 lbs—and a boat for rolling should be very low in volume. Suitable boats turn up only rarely in Germany as used boats, and shipping a new one is too expensive for some playing around in pool sessions. My boyfriend Martin said “just build one for yourself. It can’t be that difficult.” He was not really being serious, but still, the idea stuck with me. Then I started reading everything I could get from the Internet, and finally ordered the book Building the Greenland Kayak by Christopher Cunningham. I read through the whole book in a few days.
With every page I read, I tried to imagine if I could do each step, if I had or could borrow the tools I needed, and so on. As I got more and more interested in the idea of building, my thoughts drifted to it no matter where I was or what I was doing; I even had a dream about it. As I read and planned, it slowly became clear to me that the process of building the kayak was not that difficult. I became more and more determined to take the project on.
My parents did not take me very seriously at first, and I tried not to bother them as they had already been complaining “you only ever talk about kayaks,” even before this project got stuck in my head. I was used to this. For the last 15 years before I took up paddling they complained I “only ever talked about horses.”
I discussed everything with my boyfriend, but even he grew tired of the topic at some point, even though he was the one who got me to take up kayaking three years before. He is still making fun of me that I took it up a bit too well, laughing at my ever-growing collection of kayaks and gear and list of places I want to paddle. He also taught me paddling and rolling in the first place, and my first kayak was given to me by his grandpa.
I plotted where I could get my materials and find some space for building. When to do it was clear: I was to finish my master’s thesis in microbiology/biochemistry by the end of March 2019, and would start a PhD program on the first of June. I looked forward to building with my own hands something I could actually use. It would be just the break needed from lab work and sitting in front of computers trying to make sense of weird measurements of microscopic bacteria.
I needed a place to build the kayak. I was living with my parents in a flat on the third floor, and our cellar was so small that there wasn’t even room for my bike. I would have moved out earlier, but I wanted to wait until my boyfriend and I both had jobs and knew we would not have to move farther away within the next few years.
As I earned a lot of skeptical looks from family and friends alike for my project, I got more and more determined to do it. I did not expect it to come out perfectly, but I wanted to prove, not just to them but to myself, that I could do it and do it on my own. The biggest projects I’d done were a leather book bag and two leather guitar straps—nothing like building a whole boat from scratch. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that proving what I was capable of was driving me more than any need for another kayak, but I would never admit that to anyone.
Photographs by and courtesy of the author
Ralf-Peter’s workshop is amazing, but not a place to visit if you are claustrophobic. It is filled to the ceiling with boats, wood, and other materials, as well as all kinds of machines. To get from one end of the shop to the other is an exercise in acrobatics because you have to climb over and duck under boats and stacks of wood, and there is scarcely any bare floor.
Even before I set up a workplace to build the kayak, I needed to get my stack of boards sawn to the dimensions required. This necessitated a tablesaw, a machine I had never used before, and was the only step I was willing to accept help with. My friend Ralf-Peter Stumme has a prehistoric tablesaw with no safety features at all; I am always amazed that after using that thing for years he still has five fingers on both hands. He would not let me use it anyway, but he would do the rip sawing for me.
I rounded the corner into the yard of the rowing club in my hometown of Mülheim, Germany, where Ralf-Peter has his workshop, and heard a radio blasting some audiobook from the station he is always listening to, and I saw him in his customary red-and-white striped shirt working on a century-old four-oared racing skiff. The red and white stripes are the “official outfit” of the Classic Boat Club he founded in 2004, and about the only color of clothing Ralf-Peter owns.
As we unloaded the boards from the car roof rack, we chatted a little about my project. I was really happy to finally talk to someone who actually knows something about boatbuilding and who was interested in my plans.
Ralf-Peter put my boards through the tablesaw and I, at a safe distance from the blade, supported the boards as they came off the saw. We milled two gunwales, two chines, and a keelson for my kayak. After we loaded the milled pieces back on the car, I paid Ralf-Peter with a chocolate cake.
During the previous weeks of planning, I had figured out the perfect, secluded place to build my boat: my grandma’s garage. It is not very big, but if I kept the door that connects the garage to her garden shed open, there would be just enough space for an 18’ kayak and some tools. I had tidied up and moved out old flower pots, garden furniture nobody needed, and bits left over from projects my grandpa had done decades ago.
The space was small, but I’d have it mostly to myself and be free to make every mistake on my own. I trusted my grandma would not get involved too much, unlike my father or some people from our paddling club. I had a very good connection to my grandma ever since I was a small child. Her name is Ingrid, but I always called her Lieblings Oma— “Favorite Grandma” in German— when I was little, and only when I grew a little older did I learn that this was not very nice for the other grandma, so I just called her Ingrid or Oma. I would spend a lot of time in my late granddad’s little workshop as a child and was allowed to use some of the tools that he had left in the cellar. As I grew up, Ingrid would be the only person to witness my budding skills and trust me enough to let me do useful things, like install a ceiling lamp in her living room and doing minor repairs around the house.
Working at my grandma’s place had another great advantage: every day around noon, that good soul appeared in the dusty doorway to my wooden cave and called for lunch. A few hours later, there was cake. Or ice cream. Or both.
As lovely as this was most of the time, it became a kind of stress factor over the time I worked there. One day, while I was painting the frame, with my hands full of sticky boat oil, she could not accept that I did not, and could not, eat anything right then. She ended up standing directly next to me and shoving bites of ice cream into my mouth while I kept working. I accepted this to keep her happy, even though it really got on my nerves. Except from these minor occasions where I was stressed because of varnish needing my attention or steamed wood ready to be bent, we got along very well and I think she enjoyed having me there.
The first jig I made for the kayak project was a drill guide for drilling rib mortises into the gunwales. I nailed it together from some scrap wood I found in my granddad’s cellar. I didn’t focus on the aesthetics very much, but it still worked well. Over the course of the project, the contrast between this early piece and later parts became ever more apparent as my woodworking improved.
I quickly got into a routine of reading the book in the evening on the couch at home to memorize the next step I wanted to work on the next day. Then I converted all imperial measurements into meters and centimeters, looked up a few specific terms I didn’t know (English is not my first language), and put down some notes in German to use while working. This prevented a lot of time from being wasted while working in the shop.
As I shaped the gunwales, I built a few jigs to help with marking all necessary mortises and drilling holes in the correct angle and make it more efficient and precise. After about a week, they were ready to put on the building forms that would hold them in their proper angle and shape. This sounds easier than it was. As soon as one end of both gunwales was put into a form, the other end sprung apart, adding to the chaos in the crowded garage. After a few attempts I asked Grandma to help me and hold one end while I worked on the other. Together we finally managed to put the forms on. With just the gunwales sprung around them, what I had made already was looking like a kayak.
I’d been struggling with putting the building forms on the gunwales, but when Grandma happened to come by to see what I was doing, she lent a hand and held the ends of the gunwales in place.
Oma is way over 80, with age-worn bones and joints that barely allow her to walk properly, but she would never refuse an opportunity to help me with minor things on the kayak. She would look very content to be part of the project and was at least as proud of the boat as I was, but never trusted it would be seaworthy. She had been afraid of the water her whole life, and never learned to swim, so she expected the river would swallow me and the boat the first time I slipped into the cockpit. I tried to convince her it would stay afloat, or at least sink slowly enough for me to get out, but I don’t think she ever believed me.
The trunnels that keep the gunwale ends together have kerfs flared by wedges, so they cannot be pulled out when the kayak frame flexes. They’ll be sawn flush with the gunwales. At first, I struggled with the wedges because I made them too small and they broke off when I tried to hammer them into the kerfs, but when I made them from ash instead of pine and with a thicker tip, they held up very well. I was amazed by the fastening. It is cheap and elegant, requires very few tools, is super easy to do, and yet it is a very strong connection.
The weeks followed the same routine: I’d have breakfast with my parents before they left for work, drive to my little boatshop, work on the kayak for a few hours, have lunch with Grandma, work some more, have some cake or dessert, and then go home to do some paddling, horseback riding, or play my saxophone.
Every morning, I arrived to find my kayak lying there, waiting for me. The garage was fragrant with wood, reminding me of when my dad took me shopping for wood when I was little. Even the shop floor, littered with shavings and wood dust, had its own bouquet.
Each stem piece is fastened to the ends of the gunwales by lashings. They start with the turns of artificial sinew making a V shape between three holes. Turns around the two arms of the V to pinch it into a Y shape greatly increase the tension. The lashing is angled across the joint to pull the stem tight to the gunwale ends. The keelson, at top, will get pegged to the stem with the pegs set at different angles to lock the keelson in place.
When I opened the door to the garage, sunlight gave it a nice golden glow and the warm spring air and the songs of birds filled the space. As the weather grew warmer, the garden behind the garage came alive. It was full of flowers of every kind and color, but especially roses, which my grandma loves most. Some of them are much older than I am—they were planted by Ingrid’s mother. She is a good gardener and spends almost every day in her garden. Nearly every week, there are new flowers blooming somewhere. Among the flower beds there are herbs for cooking and a little grassy lawn to just lie upon and watch clouds drifting across a blue sky.
As spring warmed toward summer and I worked with the garage door open, I became entertainment for the neighbors. Little Emilia, who lived next door, was at first afraid of me and my electric sander because it is so loud, but when I switched it off, she was too curious to stay outside any longer. Sitting in the half-finished frame and using a little broom as a paddle, she laughed so loud that her older brothers came over to see what all the fun was about.
My grandma also did her part spreading the rumors about the girl building a boat in a garage, giving tours of the shop and showing the kayak to everybody who came to visit, but only after I went home for the day, because she knew I did not want the attention while I was working. She even showed it to a handyman who had come to the house to repair a broken window blind. After he saw the kayak and admired the work I’d done he said, “And this was really built by a woman?” Grandma was still very angry about that comment when she told me about it the next day.
When the deck part of the frame was finished, I put it to a test by resting it on the work stands and sitting on the deckbeam just aft of the cockpit, the one that will later be the backrest while paddling. I was amazed by how sturdy the structure was already—it did not bend or flex when I set my full weight on it.
The nine straight deckbeams and the two arched deckbeams forward of the cockpit were attached with pegs angled through the gunwales; the ends of the gunwales were joined with trunnels and lashings. As someone who has never worked with wood before, I was amazed how strong and stable the delicate-looking framework was at this point, even if it was just the deck and the whole hull was still missing. Resting on two work stands, it could support my full weight without any significant flex.
The hull consists of ribs made from ash and steam-bent to achieve the shape of the hull. Before bending, the ribs needed to soak in water for a while. After a lot of looking around, the only fitting container I found was the old bathtub in the cellar, dating back from when the house was still divided into two separate flats and my great-granddad had his bathroom in the cellar.
Steaming and making the bends was the step I was most afraid of and thought was most likely to go wrong. Just in case, I ordered more wood than necessary to have some backup. I made the steambox out of Styrofoam and attached a steam generator meant for removing wallpaper. When it was fired up, the workshop smelled and felt like a sauna: hot, wet, and fragrant from the heated wood.
Looking from the foredeck area toward the stern, I checked the ribs for symmetry. The deckbeam in the foreground is the one that will serve as the foot brace.
Steaming the ribs for the first time was a stressful task. The ribs are in danger of breaking, and I could scald my fingers. This was not the time for me to answer questions or have someone getting in the way. Oma—always interested in what I was doing and eager to hear that the next steps of the construction would be—stood between the kayak and my steambox, asking way too many questions while I was intensely focused on bending the wood. As I was doing it for the first time, I was not sure how important it was to stick to the steaming time exactly, and I did not want to take any chances. As soon as the wood is out of the steambox, it starts to cool and dry and becomes inflexible, so it needs to be bent without delay. This was the only time I ever had to throw Oma out of her own garage. I could tell she was a bit offended, so I explained the problem to her later and showed her all the parts I’d bent. That reconciled the two of us (well, mostly). I had to eat an excessive amount of ice cream afterward to finish making amends. After the ribs were all in their mortises in the gunwales and secured with lashings to keep them in place, I lashed the chines and keelson to them. I was amazed by the simplicity and the ingenuity of traditional Inuit boat building: pieces hand-hewn from driftwood, all held together with pegs and lashings. A few simple hand tools and materials gathered from the land produced seaworthy boats with such beautiful lines.
There wasn’t enough space in the garage to work on the stems, so I put the kayak frame out on the driveway and set it on cardboard boxes. I clamped each rough-cut stem to the gunwales several times to check its shape, and then did some adjustments until I liked the lines. Ingrid often came outside to see what I was doing and, with the boat sitting outside the front door, she could perch comfortably on her steps and watch my progress.
The last parts of the hull to make were stems, which I cut out of the pine boards Thomas gave me. They were lashed to the gunwales and attached to the keel by pegs. The ends of the chines were beveled and then pinched to the stems by a lashing that allows them to give a bit to dissipate impacts and accommodate the flexing of the kayak in rough water.
When all of the ribs were in place, the hull started to show its shape, so I brought it outside to try it on for size.
I made some minor changes to the stem shapes described in the book, just to fit my personal taste and the kind of kayak I wanted to build. I worried a bit about changing the paddling characteristics, as I knew there are many complex connections between shape of the kayak and its speed, maneuverability, and seaworthiness. A rolling kayak should have a minimal volume—the lower it sits in the water, the easier it is to roll—and I did not want to compromise the paddling and rolling properties too much, so I made only small changes.
The deckbeam that I’d brace my legs against is called the masik in Greenlandic. It had to be high enough to allow me to slip in and out of the cockpit and low enough to provide for a solid connection to the kayak.
When I sat in the kayak to test the fit of the cardboard masik template, I would have preferred to sit in the garden with the boat, but on that day it was raining. I read a book to keep myself entertained while I made sure that I could sit in the kayak for a while without my legs hurting or going numb. I had left the garage door open and, when I heard people walking by, I turned around and was often met by curious stares.
To find out a perfect shape for my masik, I cut out a cardboard test pattern and clamped it to the gunwales to see if I could get in and out of the boat and sit in it comfortably as well. To test the long-term comfort, I sat in my boat, on the floor of the garage, and read a book for an hour. This attracted even more long stares from the people walking their dogs or on their way to the bus stop. Many of them I did not know—they probably lived a few streets away—and they passed without stopping, so I didn’t get to explain why I was sitting in my kayak with a book.
When I was fitting the masik, the aft deck ridges were already in place behind it. Here, the arched deckbeam forward of the masik is not yet in place. This will give the forward deck ridges a nice curve from the straight footrest deckbeam to the masik.
After adjusting the cardboard masik until I was happy with it, I traced its outline on a 2″-thick ash board and cut it out with a sabersaw. After I pegged it in place around the top inside corners of the gunwales, I attached the deck ridges just forward of the masik as well as the pair aft of the cockpit. The frame was finished. The weather was very nice and I gave my boat a little photo shoot in the garden before covering it with its skin, concealing the elegant structure for the next ten to twenty years.
There were so many flowers and shrubs in my grandma’s garden that there wasn’t room to photograph the finished frame without damaging the plants or having them in the way. Her neighbors are not as keen on flowers as she is, so I used their garden as a photo-shoot setting with more space.
With the frame finished, I decided it was time to give the kayak a name. I wanted a Greenlandic name, with a meaning that matches the boat. After some research and a lot of reading through various online dictionaries I finally settled for alleq, the Greenlandic word for the long-tailed duck—Clangula hyemalis—a species common in the Arctic and famous for being very vocal. That made it a good match for me—as a child I was often scolded for talking too much.
After steam-bending the cockpit coaming around its form, I set it out to cool and dry overnight. On the next day, the hoop held its shape very well and I would bend the coaming flange over it.
While the frame was complete, there was only one more wooden part to make, and that was one I was kind of afraid of: the cockpit coaming. It is a wooden steam-bent hoop and it would be attached only to the kayak’s skin. I’d had some splits develop when I was bending the ribs, so I made the stock for the cockpit hoop thinner. That worked quite well. I used thicker stock to make the coaming flange, which would hold the spray skirt. It failed when bending so I ended up making it in two separate pieces, joined with glued scarf joints. The end result had an acceptable shape and was pretty strong.
I gave the frame and the coaming three coats of boat oil, a mixture of boiled linseed oil, tung oil, and other natural oils. Its smell was not unpleasant but it carried a few hundred yards down the road, leaving the whole neighborhood smelling like a boatbuilder’s workshop. I often noticed people passing by with their noses up in the air, sniffing to figure out where the smell was coming from.
With all woodworking done, it was time to sew the skin on. ALLEQ’s skin is made from cotton duck, which would later be painted with oil-based boat varnish to make it strong and waterproof. To get the skin on without having wrinkles on the finished boat, I waited for a very hot and sunny day, because cotton canvas can’t be fully stretched when it has moisture in its fibers. It takes two working together to get the skin pulled really tight—one to pull the canvas tight and the other to staple it, temporarily, to the gunwales—so, for the first and only time during my build, I asked Martin to help me.
I was so nervous and excited when we arrived to do the work on my grandma’s terrace. I warned her that we wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of the process, so she brought her armchair and cup of coffee outside and settled in to watch us in silence. In the glaring sun, with the temperature climbing into the 80s, I felt a little sick when Martin and I started to work.
Getting the canvas skin on the frame pulled really tight requires two people and some strange contortions. To pull the longitudinal tension into the skin, Martin laid on his back with the stem on his chest, braced his feet against a deckbeam, and pulled the canvas while I stapled it to the stem. Here, he gathers his strength for the big pull.
Finding a good position to pull the skin tight on the frame of the kayak led to a few funny positions, but Martin is used to crazy jobs from working in Ralf-Peter’s workshop as a student and did not complain. Ingrid stayed in her armchair all day, sometimes smiling or grimacing as she watched us struggle, and wisely kept her thoughts to herself.
We managed to stretch the skin over the hull, holding the tension with a neat row of staples along the sheer, and sewed half the deck by evening. Sewing up the rest and removing the staples took me another two days, but I could easily do that alone. The cockpit coaming was attached to the skin by sewing as well, resting its forward end on the masik, and the aft end steadied by the two aft deck ridges.
Sewing the canvas skin under the hot summer sun was not very pleasant, but Ingrid thoughtfully lent us her little parasol to make the work a bit more tolerable. She also served up lots of ice cream and cold drinks, so it could have been a lot worse.
When all sewing was finished and ALLEQ already looked ready to go, the time-consuming process of coating the skin started. I wanted to do it with the natural oil-based varnish, to avoid any harsh chemicals and having to wear breathing protection while working. This meant having to put on several layers of varnish, each of which needed to dry for at least 12 hours before I could paint the next layer. As the boat always had contact with the stands I placed it on, I could only paint either the hull or the deck each day.
The whole building project had gone on much longer than I had planned: I had started working on my PhD project full-time in June, and the kayak’s progress was slowed down as I was only able to work on it on weekends and some afternoons.
Summer slowly faded into autumn, the days grew shorter, the weather got colder, and I slowly became tired of a routine of work–varnish–eat–repeat. In the end, I went to the garage every day to sand the varnished surface and then brush on another layer not because I enjoyed doing it, but because I wanted to get it over with. Grandma had started to worry about where she could put her garden furniture over the winter if my kayak was not finished—another reason to pull through and get it out of that garage.
The varnishing went on for three weeks and I finally finished it in time for our kayak club’s end-of-season paddle at the beginning of October, roughly five months after starting the project.
After taking the finished kayak to our club’s boathouse, I wanted to take the usual look-what-I-built photo. My friends laughed at me as I posed, but they obliged and took the picture for me.
From the beginning, I was looking forward to bringing ALLEQ to the club without any announcement beforehand, to enjoy the surprise on people’s faces. On the day of the tour, I took the car with the roof rack to my grandma’s house and loaded up the boat with a little help from Martin. Then we drove ALLEQ over to the club slightly early, placed the gleaming amber kayak on the grass in front of the boathouse, and waited. Two more friends arrived who knew what was going on, so there were four of us, standing in the doorway, giggling, and brimming with excitement.
My plan was fulfilled: people stopped, looked a little confused, and started searching around for whoever placed the kayak there. There were lots of questions and even more compliments. Some people did not even realize the boat was self-built and thought it was bought somewhere. I was really happy to answer all questions and…I enjoyed the attention. I had kept quiet about the project all along, to make this moment even more fun and special. Now I enjoyed it as best as I could.
When everybody was ready to go, we finally took ALLEQ down to the river Ruhr. Getting aboard was a little bit tricky as expected, but worked out fine and I stayed upright and dry. Finally paddling my boat, I could not get my huge grin off my face: ALLEQ paddles very nicely, is very maneuverable, and is faster than I had imagined. Unfortunately, Ingrid could not be there on the day, as it would be too far for her to walk from the parking area to the water to see us depart, but I took lots of pictures for her and promised I would find a place where she can watch me paddling ALLEQ without having to walk far.
ALLEQ looks good on the water, very sleek and elegant, and, when I’m aboard, rests perfectly in the water with just enough freeboard. Sitting on the bare wood slats is much more comfortable than I had anticipated. I had planned on putting in a seat cushion later, but that does not seem necessary. I did, however, add a piece of pool noodle around the coaming as a backrest.
When I took ALLEQ to the swimming pool for the first time, I was really happy about the rolling I could do. In this picture, I’m doing a balance brace, a way of floating on your side, halfway between capsized and upright. The paddle, held on an extended arm, provides extra flotation. Properly done, this position can be held with little effort and nearly endlessly (or at least until you get hungry).
The weekend following the launch, I took ALLEQ to a pool session for kayaks, and it again fulfilled my expectations. It rolls better than my sea kayak and its masik gives me a very good connection; I could easily complete some rolls that were difficult before. For the first part of the session I was so busy answering questions that I barely had the time for rolling. Everyone at the pool was surprised by the kayak from the moment it arrived. There was an endless stream of compliments.
Martin and his father both were eager to try the kayak, but it was built to fit me and was too small for them to slide into the cockpit even though they can easily fit and paddle all my other kayaks. Neither of them is that much bigger or heavier than I am, but their feet are at least two sizes bigger, and that is enough to form two bumps in the deck when they try to slip into the cockpit. My parents were not very interested in the kayak, and did not see it launched and paddled, but they happily listened to my report about the event the next day. I am pretty sure that they are secretly proud of my work and that I achieved it all alone, especially my dad, but he would never tell me.
For myself, I am very happy with the outcome of the project I had taken on and seen through. I had feared that there would be visible flaws on the finished boat and that the kayak would not paddle with the modifications I had made to improve its rolling ability. The project was a huge success, and gave me a lot of confidence in my abilities. I am a little worried about being overconfident, but I believe future projects, like making a Greenland paddle for ALLEQ, will work out if I just take the time and try.
Martin got a new job and we were able to move into a new home of our own. It needed some work and, when we began to remodel the kitchen, I was suddenly responsible for all the sawing, because Martin said I was the one with the skills required. He cannot have been entirely wrong, because all of the countertops fit quite well, and our new kitchen is working just fine.
Isabelle Heker lives in Essen in the Ruhr area of western Germany. She is currently working at the University Duisburg-Essen in the laboratory and writing her PhD thesis in microbiology/biochemistry. She was introduced to paddling by Martin about four years ago, and since then accumulated a collection of eight kayaks and two canoes. Paddling soon took up an increasing part of her life, with membership in a club, paddling holidays and tours, and organizing and instructing paddling courses for the university’s sports program. The Greenland-style kayak, ALLEQ, was her first attempt at boatbuilding. She had no previous experience in woodworking, but used to repair fiberglass boats with Martin sometimes when necessary. When she is not paddling or working, she is horseback riding or playing saxophone in a Big Band.
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.
For a fabric with its heyday in the distant past, waxed canvas is enjoying a remarkable resurgence. Your nearest hip boutique probably stocks a few bags and jackets made from the stuff. But how does it stand up to use on the boat and in the workshop? I purchased a few yards of DuraWax Heavy Waxed 12-oz duck from Sailrite and found it useful, attractive, and easy to work.
DuraWax comes in two grades: light, which is treated with paraffin wax, and heavy, treated with beeswax. Both have the same underlying 12-oz cotton-duck fabric and, in both, the added wax is an integral part of the product, not a superficial coating. According to Sailrite, the light grade is 50 percent paraffin by weight—there’s just as much as cotton. The heavy grade is 54 percent beeswax. Wax contributes water resistance, windproofing, stiffness, and shape memory to the fabric. Both grades are available in ten traditional-looking colors.
Photographs by the author
The sewing kit roll keeps a needle holder, a sewing palm, and a roll of whipping twine with an awl tucked inside. When the top flap is folded down, prior to rolling the kit, its top right corner needs to be angled inward to keep from covering the upper snap.
The Heavy Waxed duck arrives as a 57″-wide roll of remarkably stiff fabric with uniform color and texture. It’s a pleasure to work. Cut it with scissors or a rotary cutter; make marks with a scratch awl, which will leave a fine pale line in the waxy surface. The fabric will fold cleanly along these scored lines and will stay folded while you sew it down. My home-duty sewing machine stitches it beautifully with a size-18 denim needle and V-69 polyester thread. The machine punches comfortably through up to six layers of the fabric; anything thicker requires occasional hand cranking. Sewing a lot of waxed canvas will leave an accumulation of wax in the machine’s lower unit, requiring periodic cleaning. One source reported a minor clean-out was needed after making four backpacks. After a few medium-sized projects I haven’t noticed any wax in my machine.
The pockets for this set of nine combination wrenches and an adjustable wrench has its pockets sewn to keep them from slipping too deep into the pockets.
Waxed canvas is thick, tough, and feels durable. In use, it develops a patina—a faint spiderweb of whitened regions where it has been folded or crumpled; these marks are part of its appeal. When new, the waxed canvas has good water resistance, and rain and spray will bead up and run off. As use and time wear on the wax, the fabric becomes less waterproof but re-waxing is straightforward: simply rub wax on the fabric and apply gentle heat with a hair dryer. Sailrite sells bars of wax, as do other sources for the fabric, formulated for re-waxing canvas.
A strip of fabric, folded like binding tape and sewn, serves as a tie to keep the wrench roll closed.
I can’t imagine a better material for tool rolls than waxed canvas. Easily made in an evening, rolls like those pictured here offer a lifetime of organization and satisfaction. The thick fabric provides some protection for contents, and the memory of the material makes unfolding, unrolling, and then returning to the desired shape almost automatic. I learned to make these rolls from a Sailrite video. Once you’ve got the basic idea, they’re easily adapted to your needs. I’ve also enjoyed using waxed canvas to make covers, like the one I made to store my rowing machine outdoors. The canvas makes it stiff enough to stand up just fine even without the machine underneath it, leaving ample room for ventilation.
Try your hand at making something from it. Durable and easily worked, waxed canvas makes the maker and the user look good.
James Kealey lives and teaches in Richmond, California. When he’s not chasing his two young sons, he can usually be found banging away on some project in his garage workshop. In high school, he rowed in racing shells. He still gets away most summers for sail-camping trips on mountain lakes.
Editor’s Notes
Inspired by James’ article, I bought a yard of the same heavy Durawax canvas from Sailrite. For the journal cover I wanted to make, I drew a pattern on graph paper. The hems of the outside cover would enclose the cut edges of two of the pieces that would be sewn inside, one to hold the back cover of the journal, the other to have pockets for pens and pencils. The smallest piece, for business cards, would have a folded hem at the top and the cut edges tucked under on the sides and bottom.
I’ve made all of the double-fold hems 1/2″ wide. They start with “drawing” two lines 1/2″ apart using a ruler and an awl with the point rounded over and polished so it doesn’t cut the fabric. The tip turns the wax in the fabric white. The edge gets folded twice, then sewn.
[Update: For corners that have fewer layers of fabric and are easier to sew, see the mitered corners in “A Canvas Lounger.”]
A seam rubber is a useful tool for tightening the folds of the double-fold hems. I turned this seam rubber on the lathe from a scrap of hard, dense mahogany. A piece of hardwood with a slightly softened edge and polished wedge faces will work just as well. I pressed the corners especially tight so they’d stay in place for sewing.
The four pieces are arranged prior to sewing. The pen and pencil pocket has a double-fold at the top and a single-fold hem on the back of the right side. The business card holder has three single-fold hems.
The double-fold hems create a minimum of three layers of fabric where there are no pockets and eight layers in the corners with pockets. I sewed squares of stitches in the corners by hand cranking.
The finished cover keeps my writing tools in one place. The pen at the right has a built-in light for midnight note-taking.
I sewed a length of cord to the spine for a tie to keep the cover closed. Note how the pens and pencils create ridges on the outside of the cover. Pleated pockets would leave the outside smoother.
I also used the waxed canvas to replace my grandfather’s tattered 55-year-old sewing kit. I first laid out the pockets to be sewn. I lined up beeswax, a needle case, my marlinspike knife, whipping twine, a seam rubber, and a sewing palm. I later decided the beeswax could fit in with the sewing palm.
To make the pockets, I put the items I wanted them to hold in place, and curved the hemmed strip over them. Staples held things in place while I sewed along the lines I drew for the stitching.
The extra fabric gets folded into mirrored pleats and pressed flat with the seam rubber prior to sewing. The edge can be sewn before the binding tape goes on to keep things from shifting.
After the pockets are sewn in place the outer perimeter is ready to be finished with binding tape. The tape starts as a 2″-wide strip cut from the same waxed canvas and gets its edged folded in along lines scored 1/2″ apart, creating four layers of fabric. The roll will add one layer (left and top), two layers (right side of pockets), and four at the pocket pleats and hem. I got through the extra layers by hand cranking the sewing machine.
To get the binding tape neatly around the corner, I pinched the tape into two crests…
…and folded them flat in opposite directions.
Then I sewed around the corner by hand cranking the sewing machine to push the needle through 10 layers of fabric.
Where the two pieces of binding tape met, overlapping them with one folded back on itself created more layers of fabric than my machine could manage, so I butted them together and covered the seams with thin leather.
A length of binding tape sewn shut made the tie for my sewing kit. The binding tape is quite stiff so a loose square knot is all that’s needed.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
There was a time when we got to the boat ramp that we would remove our trailer lights before backing boat and trailer into the water. To prevent the lights from being dunked and their internal metal fittings from instantly corroding, we had mounted the fixtures with wing nuts on the bolts and installed separating connectors in wires. Then, a few years ago, we started switching our fleet of trailers over to LED lights and have been very happy with their longevity, even when dunked with every launching.
Kent and Audrey Lewis
Submersible LED lights are brighter, longer lasting, and quicker to illuminate than their incandescent predecessors.
LEDs, light-emitting diodes, provide bright lighting for trailers, much brighter than incandescent bulbs, making trailer lights more visible even during daytime towing. This is especially important with tail lights tucked under overhanging boats, making them harder to see. Research has shown that LED lights reach full brightness milliseconds faster, which translates to as much as 16′ more braking distance for vehicles following at 65 mph. And LEDs are less susceptible to failures caused by vibration while traveling down the road, and have a much longer life than incandescent bulbs, as much as 100,000 hours.
Kent and Audrey Lewis
Because LEDs draw far less power than incandescent bulbs, additional fixtures can be added without overloading the towing vehicle’s fuse box.
Our friend John built a beautiful Penobscot 14 and, worried that someone might drive into the back of the boat, added vertical and horizontal light strips to the back end of his trailer. We have also opted for supplemental lighting and attached LED lights to the top of our trailer’s guide posts. Our friend Eddie owns a boat-trailer business, and has sold many red LED light strips to folks who use them to make light bars that attach to a boat’s transom, providing additional lighting. He recommends adding a second plug to the vehicle’s wiring harness, and giving the light bar its own plug and wire so it can be easily disconnected and connected at the ramp. LED lights, because of their low amperage draw—one-tenth of incandescent equivalents—can be added to the trailer lighting without overloading the towing vehicle’s circuit and fuse. A four-way plug and wire to the light bar provides the ground.
SBM
This square submersible LED fixture is an equivalent replacement for common trailer lights. The square fixture’s LEDS are protected by permanently attached red lenses. Note the ground wire screwed to the trailer frame in the upper left.
SBM
This rectangular fitting has removable red lenses and a clear lens in the bottom to illuminate the license plate. The fixture doesn’t have watertight seals on the lenses as it doesn’t require them. Water drains through the bottom.
SBM
The LEDs inside are all protected by interior clear lenses, permanently sealed and watertight.
When shopping for LED trailer-light kits, look for fixtures with submersible, sonic-welded housings, even though most LED trailer lights have sealed diodes and electrical components that can stand a dunking at the ramp whether the housing is sealed or not. Housings can be permanently sealed because the LEDs have such long working lives and won’t require replacement. It is usually easiest to buy an entire kit that includes wire and plug, as these parts degrade with age. Make sure the wire is long enough for your trailer. If the wires are enclosed by the trailer frame parts, use the wires as you would an electrician’s fish tape to pull the new wires through.
SBM
This sealed amber clearance light is grounded to the trailer. This replacement required drilling a new set of holes for the screws that attach it to the trailer frame.
Some kits include amber clearance lights for trailers equipped with them; white LED back-up lights are also available for towing vehicles with connectors equipped with a wire to power them.
LED trailer lights have kept us free from unexpected interruptions to boating outings, will save us plenty of lost time troubleshooting inoperative trailer lights, and have cleared out a glove box once full of spare incandescent bulbs.
Kent and Audrey Lewis maintain a fleet of five trailers to haul around a small armada of mess-about boats. Their adventures are blogged at Small Boat Restoration.
Submersible LED boat trailer lights are available from many automotive, marine hardware, and online retailers. Kit prices range from $20 to $40.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
There’s no easier way to douse a jib than with roller furling, and Harken, with a line of small-boat furlers, has brought the ease and convenience normally employed by larger boats within reach of small-boat sailors. Unlike furlers on larger boats, which use a rigid foil that spins to furl the sail, Harken’s small-boat series uses stainless wire for the forestay, simplifying the setup and lowering the cost. These small furling drums are available in both conventional single line and the newer endless-line style.
Photographs by the author
This hoistable swivel, used here with the conventional furler drum, is installed over the forestay for a regular hanked-on sail to be hoisted and furled. In this picture, the peak of the sail is attached via a pendant—the gray Dyneema and red lashing line—to set the jib peak below the jumper stays, so they do not interfere with it. The sail will be hoisted with the blue halyard attached to the swivel.
With the conventional furler, pulling on a jibsheet unfurls the sail and pulling on the 4mm furler line furls it; the latter doesn’t spool line, so the line can be thicker and easier on the hands. While the conventional drums work perfectly fine, the endless-line type can handle a larger sail and provide finer control over the rotation of the tack, allowing one to fully unfurl the sail without relying on the sheet tension, and helping to overcome any curl that may be induced into a sail that has spent significant time tightly rolled on the furler.
This endless-line furler on a bowsprit will be attached to a straight-luffed code-zero spinnaker. The peak of the sail will be equipped with a swivel. This type of furler isn’t limited by the amount of line it can coil, making it more versatile for larger sails than the conventional furler.
The endless-line type can also be used to furl some of the more straight-luffed flying sails, such as code-zero spinnakers or gennakers common on beach cats and multihulls, and would be more suited toward jib setups under less tension, such as jibs used on traditional rigs with unstayed masts.
These Harken furlers employ the drum at the tack, a wire installed into the sail’s luff, and a swivel at the head of the sail. The luff wire becomes the forestay, and this combination is spun to furl the sail. This configuration is ideal for smaller trailerable sloops (where the mast is removed for trailering) and boats with traditional unstayed rigs, but makes it impossible to change or remove the sail without disconnecting the forestay on boats that rely on forestay tension to support the mast.
On these boats with tensioned standing rigging, a slightly more complicated setup can be used to enable sail changes without disconnecting the forestay. In this configuration, the furler is installed at the base of the forestay and a swivel is installed at the top. The forestay connects these, and a sliding hollow swivel is installed over the forestay. When installed in this manner, the tack of the sail is attached to a fitting at the furler drum, and the head is attached to the hollow, hoistable swivel. The sail is hanked onto the forestay as usual, and the hoistable swivel is hoisted by the jib halyard. While slightly more expensive and complicated, this setup enables sail changes and allows you to set the jib halyard tension independently of the forestay tension.
One important thing to note is that these furlers do not enable roller reefing as there is nothing to prevent the head and tack from furling and unfurling unequally and, therefore, sail shape cannot be maintained on a partially furled sail. Modifications may be necessary to your sail in the form of a different luff arrangement that incorporates a stainless-steel wire or high-tech Dyneema line to strengthen and stiffen the luff. If the sail will be left furled and hoisted for extended periods, UV protection to the sail’s foot and leech is a recommended addition.
I’m very happy with the performance of these furlers on my boat. Managing the headsails has become so easy that I rarely motor into or out of my mooring, opting to sail instead; singlehanding is also made much easier. I’ve also found that I am much more likely to grab a quick afternoon or evening sail now that the jib is stored on the furler with the hoistable furler setup and UV protection, as I spend more time on the water and less setting up and putting away.
Robert Hodge lives aboard a 42′ sailboat in Seattle, and cruises Puget Sound on his 1960s wooden Lightning that has been restored and extensively modified. He works seasonally in commercial ship repair in local shipyards and in the retail store at Fisheries Supply. He is a veteran of two first-leg Race to Alaska attempts and has plans to compete in the full R2AK in 2021.
Harken’s full range of small-boat furlers is available in individual pieces and in kits. A basic setup for a low-load application runs a little over $300, and the more heavy-duty ones come in at around $750.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
If you had the good fortune to grow up in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Sears catalog, not Amazon, was the source of everything you could ever want or need, you’d remember the Advent excitement of scanning page after page of pictures of toys, printed in muted colors on paper as thin as that used in Bibles. As a young Dave Gibson leafed through the Sears special year-end Christmas Book, he traced lopsided circles around everything that struck his fancy, which was more than half of the offerings for kids. Of course, he was far too young to order anything on his own, so he would count himself lucky if his parents checked the catalog and bought only one or two things as presents. But the dozens of things he circled were more than a wish list, they were the treasures for the imagination no matter what he got for Christmas.
Photographs courtesy for Dave Gibson and Dave Elliott
Dave, not a loyal British subject, named his kayak after the Royal Highness of his kingdom.
His habit of circling the stuff of dreams didn’t abandon him when, a half-century later, at the age of 58, he leafed through a catalog from the Pygmy Boat Company of Port Townsend, Washington. Among the kayaks featured, there was just one that he circled: the Borealis XL. It was the “XL” that caught his attention. At 6′4″ and 230 lbs, with size 12 feet, he was a tight squeeze in most kayaks. The Borealis XL was designed for kayakers weighing 230 lbs and more, the cockpit was stretched to make it easy for long-legged paddlers to get aboard, and the high foredeck would accommodate feet up to size 15. Dave cut the page from the catalog and pinned it up at home, thinking, “One day I am going to build that boat.”
The cockpit of the Borealis XL is extra long and deep, big enough to fit a paddler as tall as Dave is.
Along with all of the excitement that the Sears Christmas catalog provided came lessons in patience—weeks could pass between drawing the circle and opening the gift-wrapped box—lessons that held Dave in good stead even in his 60s as he continued daydreaming about building a kayak and paddling something he had put together with his own hands. Dave couldn’t justify diverting funds from family and household to indulge himself in a Borealis kit, so the Pygmy catalog page stayed pinned to his wall for close to ten years.
Dave and his wife, Kathi, were living in Cypress, Texas. He was nearing the end of a 42-year-long career as a minister and looking forward to retirement, when in 2018 he was asked by a church in McKinney, a town north of Dallas, to fill in for a pastor taking a sabbatical. He eagerly accepted the invitation and spoke for them for the 13-week opening while still working his other ministry position.
At the end of Dave’s service to the McKinney church, the congregation wanted to present him with a gift of thanks. Being Texans, their first thought was a pair of cowboy boots, fancy ones with a price tag of $1,500. Perhaps unaware that a man who is 6′4″ doesn’t need to be elevated any higher on 2″ boot heels, they wisely consulted with Kathi before making the purchase. She told the church representatives, “I am sure he would be grateful for them, but what he really wants is a kayak kit.” Quite pleased to be giving Dave something he had wanted for years, the representatives purchased the kit (and saved the church $400 in the bargain).
For Dave, getting afloat in the kayak he built was a moment well worth the wait of over a decade.
After preaching one of his last evening services to the congregation, the leaders of the church asked Dave to join them for a meeting and then surprised him with the gift. It wasn’t a big gift-wrapped box; the kit in it had been shipped to his son, Grant, in Boise, Idaho, where he and Kathi would soon move upon leaving Dallas. What Dave received that evening was a picture of the Borealis XL. He was overjoyed with the parting gift.
Dave and Kathi moved to their new home in Boise but he continued serving in Dallas for another year, commuting back and forth every other week. The kit stayed in Grant’s garage for another year. Dave then retired and the house he and Kathi bought, a fixer-upper, kept them busy for another year. The kit, at least, was in the garage where it would be built. Someday.
Two years after being given the kit, Dave was ready to start and pulled the plywood pieces out of the box they’d been shipped in. The visions of his dream dimmed as the garage light fell upon the dozens of pieces of computer-cut plywood and every page of the lengthy instruction manual. Dave doesn’t consider himself a skilled craftsman; projects are an exercise in patience and determination, and often require help from a friend or online videos. While the kit pieces were so precisely cut that they fit exactly and the instructions were clear and comprehensive, the scope and complexity of the stitch-and-glue build was overwhelming. “I had not even started,” he said, “and I was buffaloed.”
Looking online at the Pygmy Borealis XL page, he noticed at the bottom, in small print: “To check out Dave Elliott’s photographic blog of building a Borealis, click here.” The link led him to Dave Elliott’s comments and photographs of the Borealis XL he had built. It wasn’t the first Pygmy kit he had put together; Dave had first built two for his nieces and nephews to use at a family retreat in Maine, then two more for a friend in Montana. All of them were a tight fit for his 6′2″, 235-lb frame, so he ordered a Borealis kit for himself. In the blog he made an offer to help other kit builders.
Rev. Dave (as we’ll call Dave Gibson now) connected to Dave (Elliott) through Pygmy and corresponded via email and phone. They hit it off right away, but despite all of the help, the project made only slow progress. “I wouldn’t say I begged Dave to come out,” Rev. Dave recalls, “but it was pretty close.” Dave drove to Boise—over 450 miles from his Montana home—and spent five days at the Gibson household. He had brought his own Borealis with him to give Rev. Dave an afternoon of paddling to energize him for the work ahead. Over the next four days, the two Daves spent long hours working together, and transformed the pile of plywood pieces into a kayak that needed only finishing touches that Rev. Dave could do on his own.
Rev. Dave had shared with his helper and new friend his decision to name the kayak HMS KATHI LENETTE to honor his wife. After Dave returned home, he had the name cut in vinyl and mailed the port and starboard copies to Rev. Dave. Kathi learned of the name her husband had chosen for the christening only when she saw it fixed to the bow of the newly varnished kayak. “One would think that a woman would be pleased to have a boat named after her,” Rev. Dave observed. “This woman was not. Maybe it related to my habit of doing things without asking her or maybe she had a little bigger vessel in mind for her namesake.”
Fast friends Dave Elliott, left, and Dave Gibson, right, were a fortunate meeting of an experienced kayak-kit builder and a kayak-kit builder just getting started.
Rev. Dave had spent about 150 hours on the build over the course of 10 months and planned a maiden outing for August 2020, on the lakes of Grand Teton National Park, in northwest Wyoming, the corner of the state bordered by Idaho and Montana. Among the group of friends who came with their own kayaks and a canoe to take part were Dave and his wife, Carol, having made the 200-mile drive to be there.
The Rev. Dave, left, and his friend Dave, got together with their twin Borealis XL kayaks in the Grand Teton National Park for the maiden voyage of the HMS KATHI LENETTE.
The fleet paddled String Lake, made a portage to Leigh Lake, and paddled across that lake to their first campsite. Rev. Dave found HMS KATHI LENETTE a joy to paddle. Accustomed to canoes that “felt like you were pushing the lake ahead of you,” he was impressed with his kayak’s speed, even though it was loaded with over 100 lbs of gear. The following day, the wind lumped up swells 4′ high, making the 3-mile paddle to the next campground challenging for the group, but Rev. Dave made good headway; “KATHI rode the swells like a cork.”
With Wyoming’s Mt. Moran towering above Leigh Lake to an elevation of 12,605’, Dave paddles HMS KATHI LENETTE toward a campsite in the lake’s northwest corner.
There’s no telling how many things Rev. Dave has circled in catalogs. Most of them were only his in daydreams. The kayak he lassoed with his pencil demanded a decade of patience, but ultimately it was the perfect present and well worth waiting for.
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Paul LaBrie is new to professional boatbuilding, but the design he chose for his first commercial project is one of the oldest in this publication. CARPENTER was drawn up by L. Francis Herreshoff in the summer of 1929—his Design No. 41—and featured in his book Sensible Cruising Designs.
In an era when small boats were less commonly created for their own sakes, Herreshoff devised CARPENTER as a tender for the 50′ auxiliary power cruiser WALRUS. (The names come from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter.”) He described CARPENTER as being a “sort of cross between a whaleboat and a dory, for she is whaleboat-shaped above the waterline, but has the narrow, flat bottom of the dory. The combination would make an admirable seaboat, whether loaded or light, yet a boat that would also take kindly to being beached.” He went on to explain that the “turtlebacks fore and aft provide dry stowage space and extra buoyancy,” and that “the rig is extremely versatile, for…there is an additional mast position at the forward end of the centerboard trunk, which would allow sailing her as a catboat with either the big sail or the small one.” In short, Herreshoff mused, “she would make an excellent secondary cruising boat for exploring small waters within range of the WALRUS’ anchorage.”
For Paul LaBrie it was love at first sight. About 10 years ago a friend gave him a copy of Sensible Cruising Designs and as soon as he saw the drawings for CARPENTER, he “just fell in love. I always thought, if nothing else, it would be a fun boat to have for myself. Then two years ago we moved to Maine—we have a log home in the woods with a barn and access to lakes, the Penobscot River, and the upper Penobscot Bay. Once I’d built the new shop it seemed that CARPENTER was ideal to be my first boat.” Paul had built boats before: an English punt for his son, two kayaks—one an Aleut baidarka, the other a “tortured-ply” Severn from a Chesapeake Light Craft kit—and a strip-planked canoe, but CARPENTER was the “first bigger boat” and the first to be built “on spec.”
Photo by Jenny Bennett
The characteristics that made the L. Francis Herreshoff–designed CARPENTER a fine companion to the power cruiser WALRUS for day treks also make her a fine daysailer and gunkholing boat.
I met up with Paul the day after his first sail in CARPENTER when, despite a few minor details that he felt needed attention, he was pleased with how things had turned out.
Just as he had surmised when first he saw CARPENTER’s lines, she is, indeed, a pretty boat. Double-ended with smoothly curving turtleback decks fore and aft, her sheer sweeps pleasingly from end to end and is picked up in each of her narrow lapstrakes. Her shape is reminiscent of the lifeboats seen on oceangoing ships of the early 20th century, but her construction is altogether lighter—with an overall length of 18′ and a beam of 4′ 6″, she has a total hull weight of just 400 lbs. Following the lapstrake building technique described in Tom Hill’s book Ultralight Boatbuilding, CARPENTER’s glued side planks are of 7mm BS1088 meranti plywood, while the single-piece bottom board is of 18mm meranti ply covered externally with Dynel fabric and epoxy mixed with graphite to give a strong abrasion-resistant finish in anticipation of the boat being beached. For the rest, Paul used native lumber: ash for the frames, seats, and gunwales, and white pine strip planks for the decks—these he built in situ before removing them to glass-sheathe them top and bottom. The decks have a pleasing smooth-radiused curve, which Paul thinks may not have been Herreshoff’s original intention: “I think he would have built them with a flat top and vertical board, but I think the curve is prettier.” Like the bottom board, both the centerboard and rudder are in 18mm meranti plywood finished with epoxy and graphite powder; the centerboard and lifting rudder blade are both weighted with lead pockets (the rudder follows the designed profile, but Paul made it lifting for beaching).
Photo by Jenny Bennett
Her flat bottom makes CARPENTER an excellent boat for beaching, yet she has an elegant lapstrake appearance above the chine.
It’s always a treat to go sailing in someone’s new pride and joy, and when its performance lives up to the sweetness of the appearance, it’s a true joy. Paul and I embarked from his father’s dock in the upper reaches of the Piscataqua River on a day of little wind, yet we slipped right along, the chuckling of water against the narrow strakes a cheerful accompaniment to our conversation. Despite the strengthening ebb current (always an issue on this river that marks the southern border between New Hampshire and Maine), CARPENTER made good headway, and, as was to be expected given her light weight, she responded quickly to even the smallest breath of air. Paul told me that he’d heard criticism that the design is undercanvased—with the mizzen measuring just 19 sq ft and the main about 50 sq ft, it is certainly a small sail area, but judging by her progress that day I would have no qualms about it. Indeed, the reverse of the argument is that in a blow she could keep sailing when, perhaps, others of her size and narrow beam would run for shelter. For our outing we had set both main and mizzen. Sadly the wind never filled in enough to see how she fares cat-rigged with the main or mizzen mast stepped through the forward thwart, but I would expect her to remain well balanced. Under her ketch rig she tacked and jibed with grace, held a steady course on all points, and with no headsail to push her off, lay head-to-wind calmly and steadily whenever required.
Photo by Jenny Bennett
Yoke steering is necessitated by the centerline mizzensheet lead and works very well in a long, fine hull.
Inevitably with a new boat and an early outing we had one or two teething problems but with a bit of experimenting ironed them out. As we set off I found that she had rather pronounced weather helm, and this didn’t help me familiarize myself with the push-pull tiller. First I tried slacking off the mizzen sheet a couple of inches, and that did help but only with some loss of performance. Next we sheeted in both main and mizzen and raised the centerboard just a few inches—success! The helm was immediately lighter and, even when heeled to a gust, no longer a problem. The tiller did take some getting used to. For anyone accustomed to a conventional helming system it will surely seem awkward at first, but after awhile I did find that it became—if not quite second nature— at least logical.
Photo by Jenny Bennett
With her rig struck, CARPENTER rows and maneuvers well, with either one oarsman or two.
After a happy couple of hours’ sailing we returned to a beach by the Dover Point public landing and ran CARPENTER up on the shingle beach—just as she is designed and built to do. Her flat bottom now came into its own—she sits perfectly upright so that you can lean in and de-rig without grinding the topside lands into the beach. The masts and spars all fit within the boat’s length (one end of the mainmast tucked into the forward storage locker) so that you can row unimpeded, and trailer the boat without the need for support crutches. Once we were all tidied away Paul rowed around to the ramp, and within minutes CARPENTER was on the trailer and hitched to the back of the car—the ideal scenario if all you have time for is a short morning’s outing, or you’re lucky enough to be returning from a long weekend of camp-cruising with a friend.
L. Francis Herreshoff described his CARPENTER design as a cross between a dory and a whaleboat, flat-bottomed with well-rounded sides. Her rig is simple and versatile, with an alternative maststep at the forward end of the centerboard trunk for sailing single-masted when the wind pipes up.
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.
I’ve been the subject of a helluva lot of flattery over the past three days—not to say that I don’t appreciate it,” said Jim Hulm, beaming, while working his fantail launch alongside a floating dock at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport. It was a Sunday in June, the third day of the 2007 WoodenBoat Show, and Hulm’s 26-footer, JOLENA III, had created a buzz among spectators. Its power plant, on the other hand, had created hardly any buzz at all.
Hulm, an Englishman living in New Hampshire, had built the boat a few years before to a modified design by Iain Oughtred—who had developed the plans for a client in England. The original was 30′ long, and had a cabin and head and other accoutrement. Hulm shortened the distance between the construction molds, creating a hull 4′ shorter than the original boat. “Iain was quite excited about that,” he said of the modification, “because it would give more spring to the sheer—which it does.” The shorter boat has no cabin. It’s an open day launch.
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
JOLENA III is an adaptation of an Iain Oughtred design. She is inspired by the steam powered Thames River launches that came into vogue in England in the 1860s, but her propulsion system and construction are thoroughly modern.
The builder changed the propulsion, too. The 30-footer was launched with “a big old gas engine about amidships”—though designer Oughtred reports that the original boat is now electric powered. Hulm’s 26-footer, on the other hand, has had an EVA Advanced Electric motor since its launching. “EVA [Electric Vehicles of America] is a small company that set out to provide vehicle conversions — for deliver y vans and the like.” Hulm chose a 36-volt motor, though it will withstand the 48 volts of his battery bank. The battery bank is composed of eight 6-volt golf-cart batteries. The motor is coupled to the propeller shaft by a timing belt running at a 5:1 reduction ratio and turning a 20 x 19 three-bladed bronze wheel. “Dave Gerr’s book, The Propeller Handbook, was my bible when I was putting this together,” said Hulm.
What does this machinery translate to? The motor puts out about 5 hp and the boat will travel 20 miles on a single charge. Hulm said that “people often ask, ‘What if you slow down? Do you get better mileage?’ The answer is no; it’s still 20 miles [on a single charge],” regardless of speed. “While it’s true that the power needed to move a displacement hull drops off dramatically at lower speeds,” he said, “the electrical efficiency of the motor also drops at lower RPM. Running at 5 mph for 4 hours puts the same demand on the batteries as 2 mph for 10 hours.”
This is the first boat Jim Hulm has built from scratch. His previous experience included the construction of a Glen-L 14 kit sailboat and the restoration of a Turnabout. He then restored an 1890s fantail launch. “I restored that and put it in a museum,” he said, “and then I got to this.”
Richard M. Mitchell, in his book The Steam Launch (International Marine, 1982), gives an excellent history of steam launches. He notes the year 1860 as “a convenient peg” after which steam power in small boats became possible. “They [the boats] grew lighter, trimmer, thriftier, and more numerous, and as their marketability increased, competent builders began to produce a few, at the same time making further refinements.”
One of the principal refinements of this era was the development of the elliptical, overhanging stern— the so-called “fantail.” This stern configuration allows a narrow, fine-lined shape like a steam yacht to swing a big, slow-turning propeller. The stern, Mitchell notes, is “only incidentally beautiful.” Some might say it is downright seductive, for that stern shape has outlived the power-plant technology that gave it life.
Steam launches developed on the Thames in response to the demand for livery boats. There is a long tradition in London of fluvial courtships, and thus a tradition of oar-powered pleasure boats. “Commercial steam launches,” writes Mitchell, “evolved out of rowed boats and small working steamers and were shaped not by custom but by determined efforts to make money with engines in boats.” Between 1868 and 1875, one builder, Yarrow, had built 350 launches “at first for gentlemen and their ladies along the Thames, later to be used as ship’s boats on oceangoing vessels.”
Photos by Matthew P. Murphy
Jim Hulm (at helm) installed in JOLENA III a motor devised for electric delivery vans. The timing-belt drive provides a reduction ratio of 5:1.
One of the beauties (depending on your bias) of power-boating on the Thames is its strict speed limit. It varies between 4 and 8 knots, so there is no pressure to develop faster, resource-guzzling boats. An outing under power remains, essentially, a motorboat excursion at rowing speeds. In fact, there is a unique craft there—a cousin to the early fantail launch—that appears fast in profile, with its sloping stern (almost a reverse counter) and rakish windshield. Its speed, however, is restricted to the low legal maximum.
JOLENA III, said Iain Oughtred, “is a fairly typical Thames River launch.” Her predecessor was designed “for a guy from Egypt who wanted an impressive-looking launch,” and was built of glued lapstrake plywood. In addition to tweaking the original’s dimensions and power plant in the creation of JOLENA III, Jim Hulm changed the construction. He built his boat of 3⁄8″ strip planks covered with two diagonally opposed layers of cedar veneer, creating a smooth-skinned hull more in keeping with the early carvel-planked launches. The hull is covered inside and out with 10-oz fiberglass cloth, with an additional layer of 4-oz Dynel cloth on the outside. Jim Hulm accomplished much of the modification on his own, in conversation with designer Oughtred. Strip planking, said Oughtred, “is just not a type of construction that interests me.” Oughtred is known mostly for his exquisite small sailing craft, and glued plywood is his construction method of choice.
People interested in owning a boat such as JOLENA III, but not interested in building, would do well to speak with the folks at Elco. They manufacture a line of fiberglass fantail launches, and also sell complete drive systems. Their power plants range from below 2 hp to 8 hp, and there’s a hybrid arrangement (think Prius), as well. These systems would be of interest to readers wanting to build a boat, but not wanting to engineer the mechanicals from scratch, as Jim Hulm did. Other fantail launch plans are available, too. Phil Bolger has drawn an exceptionally pretty one (a 23-footer whose plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store, ). JOLENA III has a varnished deck, seats, and console—and plenty of other brightwork, too. This will raise maintenance concerns for some readers. Here’s what Jim Hulm has to say about that: “I haven’t put a lick of varnish on it in five years.” The boat’s brightwork is in fine shape—a testament to the benefits of thoughtful storage. He keeps the boat under cover when it’s not in use. “People talk about the high cost of maintaining a wooden boat,” said Hulm, but he has demonstrated that the cost can be reasonable “if you keep it [the boat] in the right environment.”
At the helm of JOLENA III, Jim Hulm is a happy man. During our brief excursion on the Mystic River, he reduced the satisfaction of building his boat to these three things: “First,” he said, “it’s the satisfaction of building something with your hands; second, it’s the intellectual challenge of laying out the interior; and third, it’s the artistic challenge of creating something that just plain looks nice.” Uncounted builders worldwide owe a debt to Iain Oughtred for giving them a leg up on point number three.
JOLENA III was built to the modified lines of this 30-footer that Iain Oughtred designed for a customer in England. Jim Hulm reduced the station spacing for his boat, creating a 26-footer.
As of November 2022, Plans for the 30′ version of JOLENA III do not appear on Ian Oughtred’s website. The review appears here as archival material.
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!
Sam (S.S.) Crocker designed the 19′ 9″ pocket cruiser Sallee Rover as a yawl in 1953; later, in 1955, he drew the sloop-rigged version seen in the accompanying photographs. Making just a few changes to her for aesthetic purposes, Joel White built this sloop in 1967 for his father, E.B. White, and named her MARTHA.
E.B. White enjoyed sailing her for many years in the waters of Eggemoggin Reach and nearby bays. With the passage of time and E.B.’s eventual health problems, his use of the boat diminished, and MARTHA would sit at her mooring in Center Harbor for most of each sailing season, used only occasionally by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I was encouraged by Joel, along with a few others, to use her as often as I liked, and over the next few summers I grew comfortable, confident, and at home sailing E.B.’s little sloop.
I’ve had numerous visits of good fortune in the 24 years I’ve been working here at WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, and high on that list is getting to know and work alongside Joel White at Brooklin Boat Yard in the mid-1980s and, more important, becoming friends with him. I will treasure that friendship my entire life.
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
MARTHA is an example of S.S. Crocker’s Sallee Rover design built in 1967 by Joel White, for his father. Here, Keenan Hilsinger, age 11, shows considerable facility at the helm.
After managing the WoodenBoat School shops for seven years, I took over the Director’s helm in 1991. I had recently brought my father up to the area from Pennsylvania and was helping him adjust to life at the Island Nursing Home in nearby Deer Isle. He had suffered a stroke and was battling dementia, so between caring for my dad and my new responsibilities at work, my plate was full. At times, it felt overloaded. Joel happened to phone me at work one day during this chapter in my life and asked if he could come over to the office that afternoon. There was something he wanted to discuss. In those early days of WoodenBoat School, we were often at Brooklin Boat Yard asking to borrow this or that. As the time approached for Joel’s visit, I feared we had overstepped the boundaries and either requested the tap-and-die set once too often or damaged one of the yard’s tools. Within minutes of welcoming him into my office, I was relieved and quite surprised when he explained that his family had decided to sell MARTHA and were hoping I would be interested in becoming her new owner. He asked that I think it over and get back to him. If I wasn’t inter-ested, another individual in town was, and it was important to Joel and his family that the boat remain in Brooklin.
My initial thought was, “Why now? I’ll never find the time to use her with all I’ve got going on.” I resigned myself to the fact that it just wasn’t the right time to take on the commitment of owning such a boat. Later that evening I felt myself drawn over to the boatyard just to take a look at her. She was sitting in her cradle in one of the storage buildings, and as I approached her, it took all of a few seconds to realize that this special little boat was exactly what I needed to help cope with all the anxiety I was often feeling. Returning to the boatyard the following day, I asked Joel if he was certain the family wanted to let her go. After explaining that they wanted to see MARTHA used and appreciated, I accepted his proposal and we shook hands, which sealed the deal. I was profoundly touched that the White family would entrust me with this heirloom, and, as one might expect, MARTHA has brought me and my family countless days of joy under sail exploring the same waters E.B. loved and wrote about.
With her small house, low topsides, spacious cockpit, and simple deck plan, MARTHA is the quintessential pocket cruiser. Her round-fronted cabin trunk fits perfectly with the clipper-bow profile and strong sheerline. Whether sitting on her mooring or out under sail, she always draws admiring looks. Down below, the cabin is small and simple. Two settee bunks, one on each side of the centerboard trunk, suffice for overnight cruising for my 11-year-old son, Keenan, and me. Adequate storage exists under these bunks and forward of the mast. A cedar tabletop fits into the trunk for meals, or a game of cards. Cruising with the basics, we do just fine with an ice cooler, a small camp stove, and a cedar bucket. For the two of us, small is beautiful.
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
A self-tacking jib and uncluttered foredeck make MARTHA a delight for short afternoon excursions. Her painted surfaces are simple to maintain. MARTHA’s owner estimates he spends 8 to 10 hours per year readying her for the water.
The hull is of shallow draft and wide beam, sort of a cross between a catboat and a Muscongus Bay sloop. She is ruggedly built. The keel is 7″ 9″ white oak and her stem is sided 41⁄2″ and molded about 8″.These are big timbers for a boat only 20′ overall. This hull structure alone incorporates much of the ballast required, which simplifies the construction process. She is planked with 1″ Northern white cedar over 1 1⁄ 4″-square bent-oak frames on 9″ centers, and 1 1⁄ 2″-thick white oak floor timbers. Her deck is 1⁄2″ plywood covered with Dynel and epoxy fastened to oak beams. With both the designer’s and builder’s expertise, she is an extremely stiff and strong boat and is enjoying a long life. Approximately 700 lbs of lead ballast are stored under the floorboards on both sides of the centerboard trunk, and combined with the heavy backbone and 7′ 7″ beam, MARTHA holds her own in a breeze.
Sallee Rover is a project well suited for someone with prior boatbuilding and woodworking experience. In fact, she’s such a great example of classic carvel construction that her construction details were drawn by Sam Manning and published by WoodenBoat as a poster over two decades ago in the tenth anniversary issue (“ The Anatomy of a Wooden Boat,” WB No. 60). Individuals interested in building to the Sallee Rover design may purchase the six sheets of plans. They won’t be disappointed in the process, or in the results. Weighing 4,000 lbs, MARTHA is easily trailerable by car, pickup truck, or tractor.
Once rigged and in the water, she provides a steady platform with no unexpected motion. And she is stable. Complementing MARTHA’s reassuring initial stability is her deep, self-draining cockpit. Her marconi mainsail and self-tending jib total 218 sq ft, which allows the boat to sail well on most points in moderate and strong winds. The main is rigged with a single row of reefpoints, which come in handy if the wind blows over 15 knots. MARTHA performs best off the wind on a reach or a run. With both sails trimmed and pulling, she sails herself, and all I need to do is adjust the jibsheet from time to time. Sheisa relaxing boat and not sensitive to shifting weight. Her helm is pleasant, with a steady feel and just enough weather helm to keep one attentive. She answers her barn door rudder instantly—even to tiny corrections. The oak tiller is the only varnished piece you’ll find aboard.
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
Although she’s only 20′ long and displaces about two tons, MARTHA feels like a big boat and will accommodate two for a weekend excursion. At the end of the season, you can haul her home with a small truck.
Of course, a builder can choose a highly polished finish if desired, but MARTHA’s painted surfaces look right on this workboat-inspired hull, and yearly maintenance is minimal. I do all of this work on MARTHA myself. During the winter months, she lives in WoodenBoat School’s lumber barn, which has a dirt floor, the ideal storage environment for a wooden hull.
Drawing only 2′ with the centerboard up, MARTHA can take us into shallow waters most bigger boats avoid. An 8-hp, single-cylinder Palmer Baby Husky gasoline engine is installed under a big hatch in the cockpit floor. I very rarely use this anymore and, for a variety of reasons, am planning on switching over to a small, solar-powered electric motor in the near future.
These days, Keenan is handling MARTHA quite ably on his own, and it’s fun listening to him dream about additions he would like to make down below, changes to the rig, and which distant ports he’d like to visit when he calls the boat his own. We share a lot of good times on the water and I savor every one of them. Over the years I’ve found MARTHA to be extremely gratifying to sail— exhilarating really, when conditions are right—and I’m certain my son will experience similar sensations in the many sailing seasons to come.
S.S. Crocker drew this boat as a yawl in 1953; the sloop rig came along two years later.
Boat plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store, P.O. Box 78, Brooklin, ME 04616; 800–273–7447.
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!
This boat is a pint-sized version of a well-known and respected type that worked Lake Michigan from the late 19th century until the beginning of World War I. It’s called a Mackinaw boat—though historically that name applied to a range of boats that have only tenuous family connections.
The plans for this 18-footer, designed by Nelson Zimmer, appeared in WoodenBoat magazine in July 1978. The first example was built as an exhibition in the lobby of a bank. Subsequent accounts of that project suggest that it remained on display there, never to be launched.
The WoodenBoat design review stated that “The spars and gear are simple, inexpensive, and not particularly finicky. An unusual detail is the main and mizzen halyards’ arrangement, combining peak and throat into one line for each sail.” A single halyard for a gaff-rigged boat cuts the volume of spaghetti in half.
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
A Mackinaw in Maine. The 18’ Nelson Zimmer–designed Mackinaw boat, with her ample sail plan, takes full advantage of a dying southwesterly. Although the plans specify a single halyard for each gaff sail, the boat shown here has both throat and peak halyards.
The boat we sailed for this review was launched by Doug Hylan, a designer-builder and frequent WoodenBoat contributor, in 1982. (In a way, the boat launched his career.) Hylan did not use the single halyard specified, instead opting for separate throat and peak halyards. Twenty-five years later, he says he’d revert to Zimmer’s rigging plan, jokingly calling the boat the “world champion for number of feet of line per foot of boat.” There are other complications, too, though they are easily remedied. “I think the rig made sense,” said Hylan, “when the boats were 26′ long.”
Why?
“Because they had half the complications per pound of displacement.”
Hylan’s boat is now in the fleet at WoodenBoat School. I’ve long been fascinated with the type, and finally sailed WoodenBoat’s in August, trading the helm back and forth with my colleague Aaron Porter, an editor with Professional BoatBuilder magazine and a veteran schoonerman. The boat went like a freight train in a 7–10-knot breeze. She was also a handful, which I’ll describe in the form of a short digression into nomenclature and sheet leads. First, this boat is a ketch, though it looks like a schooner. The masts are of equal height, but there’s a few square feet of difference between the mainsail and the mizzen. The mizzen is set on a boom, and its sheet leads to the helmsman’s hand—sort of like a mainsheet would, except it’s a mizzen sheet. There is no cleat for it, though there’s archaeological evidence of one, in the form of four screw holes in the sole. Hylan’s boat sat for several years before coming to WoodenBoat, and the fate of the cleat (a swivel-based cam cleat, Hylan said) is lost in the mists of time. Its presence seems to be a linchpin to good solo sailing: you need a place to belay the mizzen while tacking the boat.
Back to nomenclature: The mainsail, then, is the forward gaff-rigged sail, and it is boomless. It has two sheets, as would a jib, and these lead to jam cleats near the helmsman, and are meant to be controlled by the crew. The reach to them is awkward for a solo sailor. A turning block and an ergonomic lead across the boat—and a means of easily belaying (and casting off)—would ease the job of tacking.
The jibsheets lead to jam cleats on the side decks, and need no further comment—except to say that the reach to them would be awkward, but manageable, for a solo sailor. This boat is set up for two or more.
I’ve gone on a bit about the shortcomings of the running rigging of our example boat. None of this is meant as a criticism of Hylan, whose catalog of designs and list of new builds and restorations speaks for itself. This boat sat for several years after Hylan had been using her regularly (and singlehanding with ease, he recalls), and a critical cleat has gone missing. As a school boat, she usually has ample crew, and so-staffed, the sheet leads as-rigged are not an issue. But for the solo sailor, they matter. I’m glad in a way that I experienced her like this; the absence of these things clearly defined the need. Once tacked and settled down, the Mackinaw sailed beautifully. Did I mention that she goes like a freight train?
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
The Mackinaw has a boatload of sheets to tend. But, rigged efficiently, the design can be singlehanded. Note that the mizzen halyards are belayed on the mast. If they led to the thwart instead, they’d add some security to the rig.
This paragraph from the old WoodenBoat review sums up the 18′ Mackinaw boat’s niche: “Anyone looking for a roomy, shoal-draft boat which would give a good account of herself in a broad range of wind and sea conditions, and with a variety of loads, would do well to consider this boat. She would be great fun for several people to sail or row, and she could also be a good friend to one seeking solitude. With her shoal draft she could sneak into some pretty tight places, or ground out at her mooring at low water without trouble. She wouldn’t be too big to haul up the beach when winter comes, either.”
Doug Hylan, however, questions the boat’s utility as a camp-cruiser. “She’s too heavy,” he said. “You get tide-nipped, you’re there.” He’s right about that, of course. There are many boats on the market that have this kind of volume—or even more—and yet are lighter. A sailor shouldn’t be completely swayed against camping in this boat, however. A properly rigged outhaul anchor will get it to deep water for the night.
Twenty-five years of hindsight have helped Hylan form another opinion about the boat: He thinks it should be a sloop, rather than a ketch. He’s had more experience with the boat than most people around here—indeed, he nearly dumped her in a sudden squall. I must say, however, that I’m rather taken with the rig (sheet leads aside) as configured—and not just because it looks right. The colossal sail plan would be a delight (is a delight) in evening zephyrs, and shortening options are numerous. Here they are, gathered during a conversation with builder Hylan: For the first reef, you reduce the mizzen. For the second reef, you douse the mizzen entirely, and proceed under full main and jib. For the third reef, you douse the jib, sailing under mainsail alone. A quick study of the sail plan suggests that the boat will remain balanced. Finally, you can reduce and then dump the mainsail, proceeding under bare poles.
Those masts, by the way, are unstayed, and this simplicity of standing rigging provides a great counterbalance to the relative complexity of the running rigging. But, sailor beware: WoodenBoat’s waterfront director reports that the mizzen has jumped its step in the past, on the mooring in a lumpy blow. The remedy for this behavior is simple: cleat the halyard on the partners (the after thwart) rather than on the mast, as it’s done now. The tension of the halyard will keep the mast put.
Photo by Matthew P. Murphy
This 18’ Mackinaw will sail in a range of conditions, though the first reef must be taken early. The reef nettles seen flying here are on the mainsail; they’re the last of four options, before dousing everything and proceeding under bare poles.
Here’s another quote from the 1978 design review, addressing the matter of construction: “She would be a moderately easy boat for the experienced amateur to build, with no particularly complex structures to deal with, and no need to be very concerned about saving weight.”
Which brings us to ballast. My colleague, after being surprised at the boat’s short “carry” when shooting the mooring on his first attempt, reckoned our example could use several hundred pounds more ballast. Hylan concurs; years ago, when he still owned the boat, he removed a portion of her inside ballast and melted it into a shoe that he bolted to the keel, freeing room inside for more lead pigs.
Doug Hylan reckons the boat would take a professional builder 1,200 to 1,500 hours, and thus cost about $40,000 to $50,000 to have one built. As great as this design is, that price has some stiff competition in the marketplace. A professional builder is not likely to make a career building Mackinaw boats. But this should be an inspiration, and not a deterrent, to would-be amateur builders. This figure supports John Gardner’s notion that the survival of traditional small craft like the Mackinaw boat rests in the hands of amateurs. (Gardner was a boatbuilder, a teacher, and the Curator of Small Craft at Mystic Seaport Museum. His writing and teaching inspired many builders to the profession—and many more amateurs to the avocation.) Boatbuilding is fun and rewarding, and to re-create a Mackinaw boat in one’s garage would be a wonderful way to spend 1,500 hours—far more wonderful than two or three years’ worth of sitcoms, in my opinion.
I’m reminded of a story I was told once of a woman who’d built a boat, and was asked how long the project took. The questioner expressed surprise at the hours, and at her dedication. Her simple retort: “It would have taken that long not to build it, too.”
With the after sail a few square feet smaller than the forward one, the Mackinaw is labeled a ketch. The plumb ends and deep forefoot are hallmarks of the type, as is the straight keel with no drag (or slope).
It rarely gets cold enough here in Seattle to keep me from getting out on the water, so I’ve been getting year-round exercise and recreation paddling my Struer K-1 trainer on the canal that connects Puget Sound to Lake Union. The launch ramp is only 1-1/2 miles from my home and I’ve made this outing hundreds of times, so often that it has become an efficient routine that takes well under two hours from the time I decide to take a break from work to being back at my desk, rejuvenated and clear-headed.
This dock, at the ramp just 1-1/2 miles from home, is where I’ve launched the Struer kayak many hundreds of times to go paddling on Seattle’s inland waterways.
When there was a break in the wind and rain on the last Sunday of last November, I changed into my paddling wet suit, loaded the kayak on the roof racks, and headed for the ramp. The news being what it was in 2020, I usually didn’t listen to the radio, and instead put the seven-minute drive to good use, often doing memory exercises. On this particular Sunday, I was trying to remember cast members from the movie Young Frankenstein. Gene Wilder was easy and I could picture Peter Boyle, both as the monster and as himself; his name wasn’t long in coming to mind. I knew that the name of the actress who played the ingénue laboratory assistant was one I’d be able to recall, but I got stuck on the similar-sounding name of Vikki Carr and it took me a while to come up with Teri Garr. Later in the drive, out of the blue, the face of a neighbor I hadn’t seen in over a decade came to mind, and his first name dawned on me in a few seconds: Craig. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to come up with his last name, but a half minute later, after I’d given up trying, it too popped into my head.
Within a couple of hundred yards from the ramp and feeling pretty good that my memory wasn’t too far gone for a 67-year-old, I heard a thump on the car roof and caught a glimpse in the driver-door rear-view mirror of a brown diagonal shape crossing the field of view. The kayak had flown off the racks.
I pulled off the street and walked back to the delicate, 30-lb Struer. It had flipped over and come to rest upside down on a diagonal across the edge of the roadway, half on concrete, half on the dirt and gravel of the median. The car coming up from behind had plenty of distance to stop and the driver rolled down his window and asked if I needed help. I replied “No, thank you. I’ve got it.”
I picked up the kayak, got it out of his way, and carried it back to my car to inspect the damage. Aft of the cockpit there was a T-shaped crack in the deck. It was as big as my hand and had a gumball-sized rock wedged between the jagged edges of one of the tears. The rudder blade was bent from vertical to nearly horizontal and there was a 1′-long hole in the bottom, just ahead of the rudder. I looked up and down both sides of the road looking for a missing piece but didn’t see any stray bits of the hull. I didn’t realize until I got home that the skeg, which guards the rudder, had been punched into the hull and stayed there.
I suppose I could have been angry, but I was numb with disbelief, not by why my kayak could have flown off the car, but by how I could have missed something I had never failed to do in nearly a half century of driving boats to the water: tying one down on the roof rack.
In the instant I saw the kayak in the rear-view mirror, I knew what had happened: I had made one small change in my routine. I have been loading the Struer the same way for years: I open the twin doors to the garage, slide the kayak off the carpeted eye-level shelf it shares with my lapstrake canoe and my son’s two paddleboards, and carry it to the car where I set it on the foam cradles and tie it down. On this Sunday, right after I’d put the kayak on its cradles, I glanced at the garage. The doors were open, as they always are at that point in the routine; I don’t close them until after I tie the kayak down. But one time last year I’d forgotten to close and lock the doors, and I was surprised to see them open when I came back from paddling. Not wanting to forget this, I walked away from the car and closed the doors. By the time I had returned to the car, I had slipped into the rest of the routine—the steps I do without thinking— got in and drove off.
If the bow of the kayak were visible from the driver’s seat, I would have noticed it bouncing and swaying; if I were heading to a distant put-in, I would have, as a backup to memory, rolled the window down, reached up and checked the tension on the rope.
The kayak stayed put for five turns, four stops, a 1/4-mile of arterial westbound at 25 mph, and 3/4 mile of boulevard southbound at 20 mph. It might have been a bump in the pavement that lifted the bow enough for the kayak to take its short flight.
The fall of the Struer from my car’s roof racks left the rudder’s stainless-steel shaft bent nearly 90 degrees.
The skeg, which keeps weeds from getting caught on the rudder, got punched into the hull. I couldn’t find any missing pieces on the road and was lucky that the skeg didn’t fall out through the hole on the drive home.
When I first picked the kayak off the road, the longitudinal part of the crack in the aft deck was tightly holding a piece of gravel; I couldn’t tell what had hit the deck here.
While the stern sustained the most damage, the bow took a hit, too, probably on a bounce as the kayak turned upside down.
As bad as the damage was, I had fixed the kayak once before and already knew how to approach the repairs. It had been air-freighted, brand new, from the Struer factory in Denmark, protected only by a soft, translucent cocoon of bubble wrap and a “Top Load Only” label. The label had evidently been ignored and the kayak made the flight to Seattle under a pile of other cargo. The deck and hull had pancaked, splitting the seam between them and breaking deckbeams free of the gunwales. The corner of a box or a crate had pushed through the bubble wrap into the foredeck, tearing through the plies of hot-molded mahogany. I’d put the kayak in slings and left it hanging from the ceiling in my basement for about two years as I mulled over how I’d put it back in working order.
Repairing the damage done to the Struer in transit from Denmark was rather complicated. Bringing the collapsed deckbeams back into position would restore the boat’s shape; planking clamps could work on the deckbeam forward of the cockpit and the rest required bicycle spokes inserted through the hull—their flared hub ends hooked under the beam ends—and drawn up with blocks of wood and slotted wedges.
The seam between the deck and hull had split in several places. Masking tape limited the spread of epoxy and packing tape drew the edges back together. Blocks of wood under the packing tape pushed the edge of the hull back in line with the deck’s edge.
The cracks made by a box during shipping required gluing a piece of 1/8″ mahogany plywood to the interior side of the deck. A piece of 3/4″ plywood inside temporarily backed the mahogany. Clear plastic food wrap and Plexiglas provided a surface to pull the damaged area flat and provided a view as drywall screws squeezed everything together.
The finished repair of the shipping damage was as smooth as it had been new. I didn’t bother tinting the epoxy to match the mahogany and hide the boat’s history.
Afloat for the first time, the repaired Struer proved a great pleasure to paddle and provided great exercise. It became my most frequently used boat, taken out well over 150 times each year. This time, it won’t take two years to make the new round of repairs. I’m eager to have the kayak available again for the outings I’ve come to rely upon for physical and mental wellbeing. I trust the Struer’s new scars will make an equally indelible mark on my memory, a prompt to tie the kayak tightly to the roof racks.
Harold “Dynamite” Payson, famed small-boat builder, wanted a boat he could row out to the islands of coastal Maine in the morning calm and sail home in the afternoon breeze. He wanted to be able to row standing up, facing forward, as he had done earlier in his life when tending lobster pots off Metinic Island. He was thinking of a sturdy Maine peapod, but wanted something lighter, like a light dory, only more stable. He asked Phil Bolger to design the boat for him and together they brainstormed ideas until both were satisfied. The result was the Sweet Pea.
It’s a cross between a peapod and a surf dory, primarily a rowing craft, 15′ in length, 4′ 4″ of beam, and 150 pounds or so when fitted with the spritsail sailing rig, slipping keel, and inboard rudder. For rowing, the sailing rig can be left behind altogether, the slipping keel and rudder removed from their wells, reducing the weight to just 125 pounds.
Ingrid Code
There is no centerboard or daggerboard trunk taking up precious space in the cockpit. On the deck at each end of the foot well, note the green protruding tongues with fids holding the slipping-keel in place. The tiller is folded back to rest in its notch on the sternpost. All spars and oars will stow inside the cockpit. This Sweet Pea is tender to the schooner NINA and hangs in the davits when cruising; a stainless-steel eyebolt with heavy backing plate at the mast partner (mirrored aft) serves as the attachment point for the lifting tackle.
In our case, we were looking for a tender to NINA, our 45′ Pete Culler-designed scow schooner. We were cruising full time and needed a rugged tender capable of carrying a heavy load of supplies or ferrying guests out to the schooner at anchor. We didn’t want a rubber dinghy with an outboard, but something that fit the aesthetics of the schooner—beautiful, in other words. It had to be a good rowing boat, but we thought it would be a lot of fun if we could sail it, too. Dayton Trubee, NINA’s captain, called Dynamite about a new rowing dory that could have a sailing rig also. Dynamite suggested the Sweet Pea design as the perfect boat for our needs. Dennis Hansen of Spruce Head, Maine, built it for us over the winter of 2002–2003, and delivered a work of art as beautiful as it is functional.
Sweet Pea has a multi-chined plywood hull designed for tack-and-tape construction and the resulting rather open seams are filled and shaped with putty before the hull is fiberglassed. Foam flotation beneath the side decks and the buoyancy compartments at either end of the boat will keep it afloat even if swamped. The bulkheads for these compartments, along with the ’midship frame, give support to the hull and help form its shape as the sheer panels are put in place. The bilge panels go on last, completing the hull.
Ingrid Code
The full-length slipping keel rests against the 1/2″ bottom and is secured only by the two fids fit through the ends of the tongues, which slide into the two wells at each end of the boat. The inboard rudder extends only to the end of the bottom. Sweet Pea’s straightforward, hard-chine construction is evident here.
The two wells for the full-length, 3″-deep slipping keel need to be included in the build only if the boat will be sailed. The slipping keel is an interesting way to go, and eliminates having a centerboard or daggerboard trunk crowding the middle of a small boat. As Phil Bolger describes, the slipping keel is based on those of England’s Norfolk Wherries, 50′- to 60′-long cargo vessels whose keels could be slipped off, while still afloat, before navigating shallow waters, and replaced upon return to deep water. The Sweet Pea’s shallow, full-length keel has two vertical tongues, one at either end, that slip up into small wells that are braced by the bulkheads and decks of the buoyancy chambers. A fid slipped into a hole at the top of each of these two protruding tongues holds them in place above the deck and the keel snug against the bottom.
The round rudderstock has its own deck opening aft of the slipping-keel well; the rudderstock pivots between the coved aft end of the slipping keel and the rounded aft end of the well. The rudder is kept from swinging free when rowing by the wonderfully efficient method of folding the tiller back all the way—180º—to set its end in a notch on the sternpost.
The rowing seats are built in five parts over a jig and are moveable to any part of the boat interior, resting on the parallel ledges that support the cockpit’s side decks. The plans call for two seats, but we’ve found that an extra seat aft (making one deep seat) adds considerably to the comfort of the passenger and doubles as a foot brace for the long-legged rower in the primary rowing position. It works for us because the two seats are butted up against the aft bulkhead. Heel cleats are indicated in the plans, but they’re absent in our boat. When using the forward rowing station, the ’midship frame works well as a foot brace. A savvy builder or owner could add foot braces to fit.
According to Payson, a skilled boatbuilder could complete a Sweet Pea in three weeks to a month working full time. Dynamite Payson’s meticulous instructions on building Sweet Pea in his book, Instant Boat Building with Dynamite Payson, give a detailed account of each step in the process, with a few modifications from Bolger’s suggestions in the plans. All in all, these directions are straightforward and clear, accompanied by photographs at each stage in the process. It would be well-worth studying these 21 pages with care before diving into the project.
Dennis built our Sweet Pea without the stacked foam panels filling the buoyancy chambers as indicated in Payson’s instructions. He left them empty and provided access to the enclosed space with watertight access ports in the bulkheads, two at each end. We’ve found these compartments most useful as places to store a dinghy anchor, a set of stand-up oarlocks, or our lead-weighted sounding line.
Paula Gillikin
Rowed solo from the primary rowing station, the boat is considerably lighter and easy to maneuver. The slipping keel and rudder are still attached in this photo, but can be removed.
There are two conventional rowing stations as well as the stand-up rowing station amidships. The two rowing stations are too close together to allow for tandem rowing but can be used to row solo from whichever rowing station achieves the best boat trim. The Sweet Pea rows well even when carrying a heavy load. We’ve had four adults aboard at one time or two adults with schooner provisions.
Paula Gillikin
An unusual feature of the Sweet Pea is its stand-up rowing station amidships. The rower faces forward “to see the rocks before hitting them,” as Dynamite Payson would say. The boat is surprisingly stable when standing. Stand-up oarlocks are essential for this practice.
The amidships station is used for stand-up rowing with tall stand-up oarlocks. One stands aft of center facing forward, propelling the boat by pushing on the oar handles. The motion feels different physically as one rows by pushing forward—and facing forward—rather than pulling the blades backward through the water, looking over one’s shoulder. It’s quite fun! The perspective is different, reminding me of stand-up-paddle-boarding, and approaching shoals are visible well before feeling the surprise of hitting bottom with an oar blade. And the boat is so stable there is no difficulty in being able to stand up and keep your balance. Only a powerboat wake caught beam on will prove momentarily challenging.
We usually row without removing the slipping keel, hoping that we might get in an afternoon sail. It’s easy enough to remove the keel for rowing only, though Payson suggests a skeg be made to fit the aft well to help the boat track straight. Without it, it’ll happily spin in its own length, as I’ve found, and curve off in one direction or the other if I’m momentarily resting on the oars. With the keel in place, coming alongside the schooner or a dock is easily done and the shallow keel will hold the boat in place, keeping it from sliding sideways at the wrong moment. Only a strong side-current or an unusually strong wind will make things difficult, though I suspect that would be the case with any small boat.
Paula Gillikin
When rowing with a passenger, the boat is well balanced using the forward rowing station and bracing one’s feet on the midship frame.
We’ve beached our Sweet Pea many times while out exploring. The breasthooks at each end do make it easier to haul the boat up the beach. It’s doable with one person, but easier with two. We make sure to lift the rudder clear of the sand when beach launching to avoid grit or mud getting up between the rudder and slipping keel, to prevent it jamming the rudder and making it hard to turn. Since we leave the slipping keel in place, even for beaching, we slide a cushion or small fender under the chine to keep the boat upright. We’ve found removing or replacing the keel on the beach requires two people, one to hold the boat up on one side, the other to handle the keel and rudder. It could be done solo if there were a post or tree nearby to lean the boat up against. The operation can be slightly finicky. Because the rudder is braced against the aft end of the slipping keel, we’ve always found we needed to remove the rudder also when removing the keel, and that means removing the tiller with its associated acorn nuts and washers, which have a tendency to slip out of your fingers and vanish down the well. Early on, we removed the rudder and slipping keel much more often—and contemplated having a skeg made for rowing only that would utilize the aft well and lighten the boat. In the end, we’ve found it suits us to leave the keel in place, have the option of sailing more frequently, and accept whatever drag it creates as an improvement in the exercise we get while rowing.
We keep the spars and sail inside the boat most of the time, even if just back from running an errand onshore, in case a breeze pipes up for a little sail. Payson talks about chocks on the fore and aft bulkheads to hold the spars off the ’midship frame and bottom panel, but without chocks in our boat and all spars and sail rolled snugly in one long canvas bag that fits inside the cockpit, the rig is secured with a single lanyard amidships and tucked up half under the side deck and out of the way. When not in use, the 7′ 6″ oars get stowed in their own protective bag on the opposite side, beneath the seats and under the other side deck. It doesn’t take long, 10 minutes at the most, to pull the canvas bag off and set up the little sprit rig. We move the seats into a neat, nested stack forward or aft and sit on the bottom of the boat to sail in light air. There’s more room that way and, with the center of gravity lower, the boat feels more stable. We ended up adding a visibility panel in the sail because it was hard to see under the sail at times.
Paula Gillikin
In the right conditions, the Sweet Pea will move along at a nice clip under sail with her spritsail rig, especially bearing in mind her shallow keel and primary purpose as a rowing craft. On the day this photo was taken, the Sweet Pea took off in a rising wind and favorable current, leaving the photographer in the chase boat calling out, “Slow down!”
With the Sweet Pea rigged to sail, the slipping keel shows that it works well in a little sailboat that’s more concerned with rowing and carrying gear than high-performance sailing. The boat doesn’t really like to go to windward, but then that was never the point of the design. Sailing with a nice breeze on or aft of the beam, it goes along smartly and is a lot of fun. For a while we sailed it without the boom—one less thing to carry aboard—but for close-hauled work or running the boat does better with it. We run the sheet through a block attached to a small cleat in the sternpost and it feels more controlled that way, lighter in the hand. In light airs we’ve occasionally “motor-sailed” (rowing while the sail is up), though we’re more likely to take the sail down and just row.
A year or so after we’d got our Sweet Pea, we corresponded with the designer, Phil Bolger, about the boat. His own Sweet Pea was built for rowing only and he was curious as to the performance under sail. He wrote:
“I’ve been wondering if another inch and a half on that keel would gain more in sailing ability than it would cost in rowing effort. This is prompted by an anecdote of a big, three-masted schooner, wall-sided and deep-loaded, which showed an allegedly dramatic improvement in windward performance by a quite small (proportionately!) addition to her salient keel. (She had no centerboard.)”
A home boatbuilder with time to experiment may want to make up a second, deeper slipping keel to see if Bolger’s musings on this improve her sailing performance any without too-great a detriment to rowing.
When I’m out for a row just for the fun of it, maybe to get some exercise, or to explore some new harbor, the Sweet Pea rows along smoothly at a decent pace, steady as can be. In a steep chop, the bow will stomp or slap a little. If the stern is weighted down (usually with me, while Captain Trubee is at the oars), some spray will make its way aft when pulling into a headwind. I’ve never noticed much spray, if any, coming aboard when rowing solo. Payson said the same of the boat. Bolger gives the Sweet Pea a hull speed around 3½ knots, 4 knots if rowing hard. It’s not a race boat and there are some craft she just won’t compete with that way. Recently I rowed with a friend in an Adirondack guideboat fitted with a sliding seat. His paper-light boat flew along, gliding across the water with great ease and speed. But, on quick reflection, I considered how tender his boat is, how limited the conditions are for safely taking it out, the loads it can’t carry, its lack of a sail, and my momentary envy yielded to a solid appreciation for Bolger’s sweet design.
We once had our Sweet Pea out in a bad squall, trying to row back to the schooner out at anchor; the wind gusted across the tops of the waves, rain poured down, and lightning was all too close. Our success that night was partly due to the skill of the rower, but also to the boat itself with its seaworthy design and solid construction. We never felt at risk of being swamped and knew even if we were, the boat would stay afloat.
After more than 17 years of continuous service, very little about her has needed attention, besides cosmetically. The one area that should not be neglected is the insides of the slipping keel wells and the tongues on the slipping keel. We had left the keel in place a little too long and it was only on removing it for maintenance that we discovered some wood hidden up in one of the wells (and along the corresponding slipping keel tongue) that needed the attention of a shipwright. Take care that these areas are well sealed in the building process and then remove the slipping keel and rudder periodically to inspect. Otherwise, our Sweet Pea was remarkably solid after considerable, hard usage as tender to the schooner.
The Sweet Pea is the perfect little hybrid vessel that fits our needs perfectly. It’s a handsome boat with pleasing lines and, despite the modern construction, has a heritage in its workboat ancestors. It’s an able, sturdy, rowing/sailing, weight-carrying double-ender with a graceful sheer and a penchant for exploring beautiful harbors and creeks in myriad anchorages, sailing along the sedge, taking us for picnics on deserted islands, and carrying loads of provisions out to the schooner. It tows well behind the schooner when the need arises and is light enough to be carried on the davits with ease. We’ve cruised NINA from Bar Harbor, Maine, to the Dry Tortugas and all points between, and our Sweet Pea has been an indispensable part of that—a great joy to row and sail.
Ingrid Code is a sailor, freelance writer, and musician who sails aboard the Joel White-built scow schooner NINA. Currently sailing south for the winter, she has spent the last twenty years exploring the rivers, creeks, bays, sounds, and byways of the US East Coast.
The Droleen, a 12′ lapstrake catboat, was designed in 1896 by W. Ogilvy of Bray, a town on the east coast of Ireland. It was intended to be launched off a stony beach and to be sailed “in any weather, plenty of wind and sea—not infrequently encountered off the coast of Bray,” according to H.C. Folkard’s 1906 book, Sailing Boats from Around the World.
Eight boats were built—some, if not at all, by Mr. Foley of Ringsend, Dublin—but it is thought that the development of the class was hampered when some of the original owners, who were in the British Army, were called away to fight in the Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa. There was, however, some class racing up until the First World War, after which the boats gradually disappeared. None survive today.
Photographs by the author
The trailing edge of the 3/16″ galvanized steel centerplate is fully exposed when retracted in the open-topped trunk.
The plans survived somehow and in 1996 they were redrafted by the renowned naval architect and small-boat designer, George O’Brien Kennedy. This allowed the Bray Droleen Heritage Association—founded in 2013 and led by the late Frank de Groot—to build two new boats, the first of which was launched at an Old Gaffers Association event on Dublin’s River Liffey in 2014. When Irishman Michael Weed enrolled at the Boat Building Academy (BBA) in Lyme Regis, U.K., he was keen to build one. He managed to get hold of a set of drawings from Jim Horgan, who runs the Galway School of Boat Building on the west coast of Ireland.
Before the lofting process began, BBA course tutor Mike Broome decided that there should be five molds instead of the three shown in the plans. This, and other anomalies in the plans, meant that the lofting process was more problematic than it might have been, but it allowed Mike to then produce a significantly more accurate lines plan and table of offsets.
The boat was built the right way up, and the construction process began with the dead-straight 1-1/2″ x 1-3/4″ sapele keel being laid on top of a temporary strongback. The triangular oak deadwood was fitted aft, and then the 1/2″ x 3-1/2″ sapele hog was laid on top of it and the keel, all glued with epoxy. The keel and the hog already had the centerboard slot cut into them. The 3/4″ oak transom was fitted along with its 1″-thick oak knee, while the laminated oak stem and apron—each 1-1/2″ thick and together forming the rabbet for the forward ends of the planks—were scarfed-in forward. The five temporary molds were then put in place.
The Droleen has 11 strakes of 5/16″ planking. The 6′ beam in the 12′ boat gives the hull a notably full shape.
The planking starts with the garboards. The plans called for 11 or 12 strakes, and it was considered that 11 would be enough, despite the extreme beam. Two strakes have full-length planks, but all the others have scarfed joints, some of them two. To cope with the bend and the twist, about 3′ of the forward ends of the bottom three planks had to be steamed. The planks are 5/16″-thick larch with 3/4″ laps between them. Once all the planks were fitted and fastened to each other with rivets, three struts were taken up from each sheer to the roof beams to allow the molds to be removed without the hull losing its shape. The inside of the hull was then primed.
Most of the steam-bent 9/16″ x 1/2″ oak ribs are continuous from sheer to sheer, but the two most forward are divided by the maststep, eight amidships by the centerboard case, and the aft two by the stern knee. After the ribs were bent in place, they were allowed to cool, then removed to be primed before they were riveted into place.
The internal fit-out began with the 13/16″ sapele floors, which also serve as sole bearers. The plans called for just four, all of them aft of the centerboard case, but it was decided to fit seven in all, partly for extra strength, but also to allow later fitting of sole boards over a greater area. Next came the 1-1/8″ x 3/4″ oak seat risers. It was initially thought that these would need steaming, but it was just possible to fit them without. The centerboard case—made of 5/8″ sapele with varnished oak trim—had previously been dry-fitted, and this was now fixed into place. The centerplate —3/16″ galvanized steel—was “originally a quadrant shape, meaning a large portion of it stuck up into the boat when raised,” said course tutor Mike. “I just tweaked the shape to a more conventional parallel-sided one to avoid this.”
Next came the 7/8″ x 1-5/8″ inwales, the 3/8″-thick caps, and the 3/4″ x 1-1/8″ rubbing strake, all in oak. The latter had to be steamed. The three 7/8″ oak thwarts were then fitted. The 8″-wide forward and middle thwarts gain some support from the centerboard case (the latter also with a knee fixed to the aft end of the case) and each of them also has two knees per side, while the 10″- wide aft thwart has a 5/8″ support, 3″ deep amidships tapering to 1-1/2″. The quarter knees are 1″ oak, while the breasthook, which doubles up as the mast gate, is 1-5/8″ thick. This is brought 17″ aft along the inside of the inwales—not as far as shown in the plans, but it was thought that they would become too thin to contribute any strength if they were brought farther aft. On top of the breasthook between the mast and the apron is a custom bronze fitting through which bronze pins are fitted to allow the mast to be lashed firmly into its gate.
The 7/8″-thick sapele blade pivots within a 2-7/8″-thick oak rudderstock. The tiller is also oak. The spruce spars are of hollow bird’s-mouth construction with oak cappings to seal the end-grain. The predominant feature of the unstayed cat-rigged sail plan is the length of the boom which, at 14′ 6″, is 2′ 6″ longer than the boat. It is thought that this was originally to allow a seaworthy low-aspect rig.
The aft end of the breasthook has a notch that serves as the mast partners. The mast is lashed in place with turns anchored by a pair of bronze belaying pins forward.
Stepping the mast is a simple enough job for one person by placing the heel into the maststep, pivoting it forward into the breasthook, and then lashing it there. The sail plan also shows a second sail which is referred to as a “jib/spinnaker,” but in truth it seems to be not really either. It is set with its tack on the end of a conventional spinnaker pole but is too small to be an effective spinnaker. Michael plans to make such a sail and pole at some time in the future, but for now the boat just has the single sail.
Although the Droleen in only 12′ long, it has plenty of room for a crew of four. The 112 sq ft sail has a boom that’s 14-1/2′ long, keeping the center of that sail area low.
I had the chance of a sail the Droleen on the BBA’s Launch Day when I climbed aboard from a RIB, swapping places with a couple of students. It was blowing a Force 3, with occasional Force 4 gusts; by the time the transfer was complete, the Droleen was in irons. Wishing she had a jib to back to turn the bow away from the wind, I put the tiller over the “wrong way” as we began to go backwards. I fully expected that when I then pulled the mainsheet in to fill the sail, she would just luff up again, but it immediately started sailing very easily. It then proved itself to be a very enjoyable and easy boat to sail on all points of sail, at all times well balanced and responsive. I had been a bit intimidated by the length of the boom and wondered how it would be to jibe. But I did so a couple of times with no issues at all, each time partly pulling the sheet in beforehand to give some control over the boom.
At one point the Droleen touched 5 knots in a gust on a close reach while the centerplate hummed satisfyingly. The massive beam gives the boat not only a great deal of internal space but also great stability. There were three of us on board—and there would have been plenty of room for two more—and while I steered from the stern seat to windward, my two shipmates sat each side of the centerboard case, sometimes on the center thwart, and sometimes on the sole where they were well clear of the boom. At one point when sailing to windward we had a bit of a gust and the leeward crewman instinctively began to move to windward. Before he could do so, however, the boat’s angle of heel stopped at about 10 degrees and he realized there was no need for him to move.
A pair of 9′ oars proved to be a good fit for the 70″ span between the oarlocks.
The Droleen also makes a nice rowing boat. Michael was concerned that the beam of the boat would make it difficult to row from the center thwart where the rowlocks are spaced 70″ apart and that it would be easier to use the forward thwart where they are 65″ apart, although he would need to make a raised seat to cover the centerboard’s handle, which lies across the thwart with the board up. As it happens, there was no difficulty rowing from the center thwart with the 9′ oars.
The Droleen is a versatile, well-behaved boat whose extreme beam gives plenty of space and stability, and it is great to see that the class is experiencing something of a revival after all these years.
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boatbuilding and repair industry, and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
Droleen Particulars
[table]
Length/12′
Beam/6′
Draft, board up/6″
Draft, board down/32″
[/table]
The Droleen lines and offsets, drawn by BBA instructor Mike Broome, are provided here. For more information, email Mike at the Boat Building Academy.
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On a warm midday in November, I cast ARR & ARR’s lines off from the dock at Goose Island State Park and rowed into the fickle breeze coming down the double row of low pilings marking the channel to Aransas Bay on the south-central Texas coast. The channel was only 100′ wide, too narrow to beat to weather in the light air with a balanced lug—at least for me—especially with fishermen or hunters speeding back to the park’s ramp in their high-powered skiffs and airboats. Instead, I rowed across the shallows between the channel and the park’s 800′ fishing pier.
Photographs by the author
After a 3-hour drive from my home in Austin, I left my car and trailer at a campsite at Goose Island State Park while I explored the bays. The landscape of the Texas Coastal Bend is flat with sand and shell beaches, brackish marshes, and bay depths of only 10′ to 15′. While mild conditions are the norm in early November, northers can blow through and drop temperatures 20 or 30 degrees in only minutes and build up a steep chop. I was fortunate to have five straight days ahead with afternoon highs near 80, overnight lows in the 60s, mostly clear skies, and winds rarely over 15 knots.
Near the steps that lead down from the pier into the water, two anglers in waders cast lines in long arcs. A kayak fisherman floating just past the end of the pier reeled in a slack line little by little. He paid no attention to me as I rowed past him on the side of his kayak opposite his fishing line, but a man and a boy standing on the end of the pier waved to me. I returned a wave and rowed another 1/4 mile into Aransas Bay. The bay was crinkled by wavelets in the light air. I had only 5 miles to go that afternoon, so I took my time stowing the oars, fenders, and dock lines before raising the sail.
I would rendezvous with another seven or eight boats across the bay at Paul’s Mott, a point of scrub and shell jutting about 1/4 mile into the bay from San José Island, for our first of two nights camping together. Most of them had set sail from Rockport an hour or two earlier. I would have launched from there as well, but I planned to spend an extra two days and nights exploring Aransas Bay by myself after they all headed home, so I left my car and trailer in the Goose Island campground where the gates are locked at night, giving me peace of mind and allowing me to relax completely.
Roger Siebert
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Oyster reefs run out into the bay in a broken line from Paul’s Mott. In the light air, waves wouldn’t break over the reefs, and with the murky water, I doubted I’d be able to see them. The Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) crosses the bay left and right about two thirds of the way to Paul’s Mott. Crossing the navigational channel at its marker 15 would keep ARR & ARR well away from the reefs, so I sailed closehauled south-southeast, as close to the marker’s bearing as I could while still maintaining 2 or 3 knots.
Within half an hour, the wind freshened to the 5 to 10 knots that had been forecast. It was easy sailing under a clear sunny sky, exactly the stuff I had wanted after months of being cooped up with a computer in what had become my office at home.
Tugboats pushing barges paired end-to-end crossed in the distance from left and right. I studied their courses through my monocular and made out the ICW’s numbered markers, green square and red triangular signs set on piles driven either side of the route. Two tacks put me back on track toward marker 15 and put more distance between ARR & ARR and the reefs, and I crossed the ICW during a lull in the barge traffic. By then, the wind had picked up another few knots, so I was able to point higher and made Paul’s Mott after only another hour on a single tack of easy sailing.
While I was still 200 yards from the point, where the chart shows a dip in the reef to a depth of 2′ to 3′, I raised the daggerboard and crossed the reef on a reach. Once on the other side of the reef and back in 5′ to 10′ of water, I put the board back down and closehauled back toward shore, where two boats were beached near a large portable canopy with a peaked fabric top.
Oddly, neither boat had a mast. I tried to recall if any of the group I planned to meet were to arrive in powerboats. I’d figure out what was what after I beached ARR & ARR. To cross the last 100 or so shallow yards to the beach, I dropped sail, unfastened the sheet’s lower block from its anchor point on the main thwart and moved it to a quarter cleat, swapped the daggerboard for the slot’s rowing plug, and set to rowing.
I heard “ARR & ARR, ARR & ARR, this is MYSTERY MACHINE, over” from the handheld VHF clipped on the front of my PFD. Matt, the sailor who had organized the trip, informed me that our group was not at Paul’s Mott—that the spot had been occupied when they had arrived—but about a mile southwest instead. I noticed a cluster of five masts then, well down the coast.
I decided to row instead of raising sail again and bent to the oars. I hadn’t rowed regularly in months, and it felt good to work my back and arms again. ARR & ARR slipped past the coast of waist-high cordgrass dotted with tiny oyster shell beaches, chest-high mangrove clumps, and narrow gaps where sloughs led into the island’s interior.
At our first night’s camp on San José Island, Matt, Ziggy, Dave, and I pitched our tents on the higher ground near the vegetation line. The island beaches in Aransas Bay are mostly oyster shell, and the water from the bay, at left, seeps through the sieve of piled-up shell to and from saltwater pools, at right, making them rise and fall with the tides.
MYSTERY MACHINE, Matt’s modified Bolger Featherwind, and MARILYN J, Glenn’s Mayfly 16, were already pulled up on the shell beach; Bobby and his wife Pam, with PILGRIM, a custom Princess 22 cat ketch, floated about 20′ off the beach on a bow anchor and a stern line run ashore; and CHICKEN PARTS, a MacGregor 26, swung on anchor about 100 yards out. I rowed ashore between MARILYN J and PILGRIM, stepped out, and pulled ARR & ARR’s bow as high as I could onto the beach.
The beach was mainly broken oyster shell piled into ridges paralleling the water and varied from as narrow as 10′ where I had beached ARR & ARR to as wide as 40′ interrupted with a saltwater pool so wide that cat’s-paws scurried across its surface.
Behind the beach, where soil mixed with the shell, thick vegetation transitioned through narrow, distinct bands. Closest to the shell beach and spreading onto parts of it were ankle-high saltwort, salt-tolerant succulents with pink runners and thick, light-green, inch-long leaves. Behind that was a dense, soft, shin-high layer of saltgrass, its narrow dark-green leaves in herringbone patterns that reminded me of the softer evergreens. Interspersed with the saltgrass were patches of prickly pear and knee-high sea oxeye daisy, some with dark, dried flower discs long gone to seed. The ground behind dipped back down into swampy swales and sloughs lined with cordgrass. Twisted limbs of scrub oak reached skyward above bushy, dark green mangroves.
As I unloaded ARR & ARR to make my camp, two WindRider 17 trimarans arrived, one skippered by Ziggy and the other by Dave, whom I had met the year before on a similar excursion. The three of us set up our tents at the edge of camp, on the flatter, higher ridge of shell running along the back edge of the beach’s wider stretch, next to the vegetation and separated from the shoreline by that pond-sized saltwater pool.
The tide would rise only 6″ or so overnight, and the wind was forecast to lighten and continue blowing across the island and out into the bay, so Ziggy, Dave, Matt, and I—those of us with tents—left our boats pulled up on the beach with anchors set on shore. Glenn planned to sleep aboard MARILYN J, so he repositioned her just off the beach with a stern anchor and a bow line running to shore.
Dave and I caught up over our dinners, he on his chair next to his tent and me, maintaining safe social distancing, on my two-gallon bucket next to mine.
Michael sailed in on RED TOP, a highly modified Lehman 12, and anchored about 15′ off of San José Island. The barge in the background stayed in place overnight and was on its way early the next morning before we got underway.
While we ate and chatted, a tiny red and green boat sailed in from the direction of Rockport and dropped anchor just 15’ from shore. It was RED TOP, a highly modified Lehman 12, now with a lugsail, leeboards, and a cuddy cabin. After stowing the sail, Michael, its skipper, came ashore and joined in the still-scattered reunions and conversation.
Most of us had brought firewood along—driftwood being rare on these bay beaches—and soon after dark, Matt had a fire going. An inflatable tender motored in from CHICKEN PARTS and Nick and his young son Mason disembarked. We gathered in ones and twos around the fire until the whole group of nine or ten was present. The air was pleasantly warm, so we didn’t sit in a circle around the fire but sat in a rough line stretched along the narrow beach facing the bay instead. I sat on my bucket at one end of the line, vigilant about keeping the recommended 6′ from anyone else whenever in company for more than a few seconds, but with the wind blowing across our line and out into the bay instead of along the line, even that was probably unnecessary.
I mostly listened, taking in the others’ stories and plans as much as I did the breeze and the deepening black sky. Mars shone bright and orange high in the southern sky, and Jupiter and Saturn stood poised above the horizon where the sun had set.
After daylight the next morning, we took our time breaking camp. I made a cup of coffee and sat on my bucket outside my tent. An airboat hummed in the distance and a bird trilled from somewhere in the cordgrass or mangroves, then went silent at the dull thud, thud of hunters’ distant gunfire. Ducks flew in wavy lines over the island.
The air was only slightly cool. I hadn’t even pulled my sleeping bag from its dry bag the night before, but had instead slept directly on my sleeping mat, comfortable just wearing jeans and a fleece shirt.
I walked down to the boats with the last of my coffee. The wind blew across the island from the east, so the waves were small but fell obliquely against the shore and had pushed ARR & ARR beam-to the shell beach. With her V-shaped hull, she rolled with the waves and ground against the shells. I knew it had probably done a number on the paint job during the night but hoped the double layer of fiberglass I had laid over her keel when I built her had provided adequate protection. I couldn’t see any damage, and I wouldn’t know for sure until I had her out of the water at the trip’s end, but this was exactly the type of camp-cruising wear and tear I had built her for.
I changed from my camp clothes back into the previous day’s quick-drying hiking wear and neoprene booties, broke camp, loaded the boat, and started to rig her for sailing. I had left the rowing plug in the daggerboard slot overnight, and now it was jammed in place by bits of shell that had worked their way into the slot.
I pushed the boat a few feet into the water, rocked her to work the water in the slot, and tried to wiggle the plug loose, but it didn’t budge. Using my push pole’s unattached duck foot, I pried the top of the plug away from the top of the slot, and the plug finally came out, the bits of shell grinding and squealing between the plug and the inside of the slot. I scooped water into the slot with my bailer to rinse away any remaining shell.
We planned to camp that night on 3-1/2-mile-long Mud Island, only 7 or 8 miles southwest, at most a couple hours’ sail, so most of our group were sailing back to Rockport to have lunch at a dockside bar and grill. I had been avoiding public places, and even though Aransas County had reported only one or two confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the previous week, I joined the others to head straight to Mud Island to see if the 2020 hurricane season, particularly Hurricane Hanna, had left either of two naturally fluctuating passes through the island suitable for our boats and tents. I also wanted to explore Blind Pass, the 60-yard-wide gap between Mud and 19-mile-long San José Island, for possible future overnight trips. Satellite images I’d studied showed what looked like promising beaches flanking the pass.
I shoved off and joined MYSTERY MACHINE, MARILYN J, and RED TOP on a broad reach under full sail south along the protected west coast of San José Island. Except for a few puffy white clouds just above the horizon, the sky was an unbroken expanse of blue. The wind grew from gentle to moderate, and soon we were sailing at 4 or 5 knots through only wavelets in the lee of the island. Dolphins converged on our boats and swam along for 15 or 20 minutes, moving mostly as a group from one boat to the next.
Dolphins are common in Texas bays, and the pod that accompanied ARR & ARR in Corpus Christi Bay seemed especially engaging, sometimes swimming so close that their puffy exhalations misted my face. On the low line of land on the horizon sit Point of Mustang and, tiny at the right, Port Aransas, marked by the towers of three deepwater drill rigs.
When we reached Mud Island, we sailed west along its northern side looking for the two cuts and beached our boats in what we thought was the smaller, easternmost one. A 15-yard-wide channel flowed north to south through the island between oyster shell beaches. The western beach was too short and steep to pitch tents on, but the eastern beach was a good 100′ by 50′ and curled around in a short hook at its southern tip, creating a sheltered cove that had deep water right up to shore along most of its length. The surface of the water flowing through the cut churned in eddies and swirls in a 4- to 5-knot current. Dolphins surfaced in tight arcs in the cut, likely after fish.
Like the beach we had camped on at San José Island, this beach consisted primarily of oyster shells piled in ridges, with a few wide depressions in the beach’s middle, some with shallow pools.
We relaunched and continued west looking for the larger cut. After a mile or so of sailing by nothing but narrow, steep shell beaches backed by unbroken mangrove thickets, we realized that we had landed in what had been the larger cut and that the smaller cut must have closed up, so we returned to where we had originally landed, beached our boats in the hooked cove, and scouted out tent sites.
The predominant plant on that part of Mud Island is black mangrove, growing too thickly to easily walk through and ranging from knee- to chest-high, with stiff, dark-green oval leaves only an inch or two long and seeds the color and shape of large lima beans. Sea ox-eye was thick there too, along the edge of the mangroves, and salt-tolerant succulents grew here and there. Sea purslane sprawled across low stretches of bare shell in the depressions, the purslane’s pink runners and 1″ leaves looking like saltwort at first, but with flat leaves instead of the bulbous succulent ones and with five-pointed, purplish pink flowers the size of a pinky fingernail.
Having found several good patches of flat ground, we returned to the boats. We had the entire afternoon remaining, so Matt and I decided to circumnavigate the eastern part of the island. We walked our boats from the sheltered cove, around the hook, and against the current along our side of the cut and launched from the cut’s entrance. We both set sail, and Matt pulled well away from me in only five or ten minutes. MYSTERY MACHINE bettered ARR & ARR in both pointing and footing.
Not wanting to admit that Matt was simply the better sailor, I decided that ARR & ARR was undercanvased, so I set a new jib I had been eager to experiment with. To accommodate the addition of the jib, I moved the main aft by setting the balanced lug as a standing lug. I moved the boom vang to the tack to serve as a downhaul, and let the downhaul move aft to become the vang. I set the little jib flying, and with the new sail plan’s center of effort properly set, ARR & ARR, now a sloop, took off.
I had not yet installed cam cleats for the jib sheets, so I had to hold both sheets, jib and main, in one hand while managing the tiller with the other. The boom still stuck a bit forward of the mast, and on each tack, the jib sheet caught on it. But the boat did make good speed and pointed higher.
I found Matt waiting for me at Blind Pass, and we sailed together through it. MYSTERY MACHINE drew less than ARR & ARR and my daggerboard hit the bottom several times. Although I quickly released both sheets, spilling most of the air from the sails, ARR & ARR pivoted on the grounded board and turned her beam to the wind. I pulled the daggerboard up and sheeted the jib to turn the bow downwind to get moving again.
We sailed on a broad reach up the southern side of Mud Island. This side of the island didn’t have beaches but was more of a wetland, with mangrove islets of all sizes scattered among inlets and flats. Although the water was opaque with mud and the chart showed less than a foot there, I didn’t run aground again.
At our second camp, on Mud Island, the little cove on the south side of the cut was deep enough right up to the beach that even PILGRIM and CHICKEN PARTS were able to nuzzle up to shore still fully afloat.
We beached back in the cut’s little cove, and before long we were joined by the four boats that had gone to Rockport for lunch. The cove was deep enough for even PILGRIM and CHICKEN PARTS to nuzzle up to the shell beach while fully afloat, and set anchors ashore on dry land.
RED TOP left by early evening, and two other boats joined us, CHEESE CUTTER II, a Hobie trimaran with skipper Chris aboard, and a Westsail 32. The Westsail came in under full sail and anchored a good 1/4 mile off Mud Island’s northern shore, and its crew—Chris, Cathy, and dog, Gus—sailed into camp on its lug-rigged tender with a tanbark sail.
At dusk, we collected the rest of the firewood we’d brought and gathered around in the warmth and light of the fire as Jupiter and Saturn set and Orion rose high in the darkened sky. I mentioned wanting to spend the next day sailing 15 to 20 miles north to explore Cedar Bayou, the 3-mile-long natural cut that separates San José and Matagorda islands and sometimes connects Mesquite Bay with the gulf. Matt suggested that, given the north wind forecast for the next day and the south wind for the day after that, I should go with the wind instead of against it to some beaches he had seen on Mustang Island’s Corpus Christi Bay side on a previous trip. Sailing with the wind abaft the beam both days was appealing, so that became my plan.
Glenn, Dave, and Matt (left to right) enjoyed fishing, coffee, and chatting on the second morning, at the cut through Mud Island, while maintaining safe social distancing.
The next morning was calm. On the south side of camp, the still water in the cove reflected the boats’ hulls and masts and the wetlands’ little islands of cordgrass in a perfect mirror of the sky’s growing gray-orange light. A haze on the eastern horizon separated the mile-long stretch of Mud Island’s mangroves from a line of palm trees on San José Island beyond. To the north, toward Rockport, the water rippled in the distance but had only dull crinkles next to shore. Dull thuds of duck hunters’ gunshots and the distant thrumming of engines carried through the still air but, with the air so heavy with moisture, I couldn’t tell which direction the sounds came from.
The saltwater pools in our beach’s wide depressions had risen overnight. The water in one had even reached the foot of Matt’s tent. It surprised me, because the night had been calm and dry, except for the heavy dew. Matt and Glenn surmised that the rising tide must have seeped through the coarse shell ground as through a sieve, which would explain why the depressions at our camps had water in them, despite no visible inlets and no recent rain.
In the early orange light, Rockport’s lone spheroid water tower and row of two-story buildings were strung along the northern horizon, like a string of pastel-colored beads. A haze over the rippled bay thickened until the entire horizon dulled and then disappeared.
The haze moved toward us in a thick bank. Fog. On the Coastal Bend. It is rare and was a first for me.
To the southwest, where I had decided to go, the water and horizon were clear. Even three deepwater drill rigs in Port Aransas were visible though low, tiny, and washed-out from the 6 or 7 miles’ distance. A moderate southwesterly breeze was forecast, and an encouraging hint of that breeze touched the back of my neck.
I was eager to get going, before the fog could reach Mud Island, so I said my goodbyes to the other sailors and raised ARR & ARR’s sail, leaving the jib stowed this time. I set the downhaul snug but not tight, so the sail could stay out perpendicular in the light air and catch what little there was. Chris, CHEESE CUTTER II’s skipper, gave ARR & ARR a good push to set me on my way, and I drifted from Mud Island at a turtle’s pace. The water had gentle dull ripples, like wavy window glass in a century-old home.
Sailing at a lazy pace, ARR & ARR didn’t need my full attention, so I gazed over the stern and watched the others leave the campsite for Rockport. One by one, they set sail and vanished into the fog. Whenever one hailed another on the VHF, I switched with them from 16 to the working channel and eavesdropped. I wanted to learn what sort of coordinating they were doing in the fog, and it made my departure feel less abrupt. Eventually, even their radio calls were out of reach.
ARR & ARR drifted past one of the lima-bean-looking black mangrove seeds floating on the bay, then another. I counted the seconds it took one seed to travel the 15′ from bow to stern—five or six seconds, which meant I was moving at only about 1-1/2 knots. I settled in on the sternsheets on the starboard side of the tiller, resting back against a dry bag, and enjoyed the easygoing morning.
A couple of hours passed before the breeze picked up, but by noon I was sailing up the channel to Port Aransas on a reach past the Lydia Ann Lighthouse, a 68′-tall tapered octagonal tower of red brick with four low, weathered wooden buildings tucked about 200 yards back into the surrounding mangrove marsh. Just past the lighthouse, on its south side, a bayou led from the channel into the marsh and next to the lighthouse.
In the nearly two centuries since the lighthouse was built, Aransas Pass—the channel separating Mustang and San José islands and connecting Corpus Christi Bay with the gulf—has shifted a mile south, so it wasn’t until the lighthouse was well astern that I rounded the point and sailed down Corpus Christi Channel.
ARR & ARR, sailing on a run down Corpus Christi Channel on the third day, passed three deepwater drill rigs under construction or repair in Port Aransas. The oarlock sockets on ARR & ARR’s transom allow me to use an oar as an emergency rudder if the need arises.
I was especially glad to have the wind driving ARR & ARR along the channel, while I watched for ship and barge traffic. About 1/2 mile down the channel, the ferries shuttling between Harbor and Mustang islands timed their 1/4-mile crossings to avoid me, and I was glad I didn’t have to hold them up too long.
On my approach to Sting Ray Hole, a 1/2-mile-wide pass between the sand-spit ends of Pelican Island and Point of Mustang, two white pelicans flew overhead, their black wingtips stark against their bright white plumage. Once through the pass and into the easternmost part of Corpus Christi Bay, I skirted the East Flats, a 2-mile stretch of shallows and low, mangrove-covered islets, and sailed closehauled toward the shoreline just south of the flats. The closer I got to the low stretch of undeveloped greenery, the more patches of white I saw between it and the water. I pulled the daggerboard up 8″ or 10″ to reduce draft without sacrificing too much pointing ability and aimed for the windward side of one of the larger white patches.
I pulled ARR & ARR ashore to camp on Mustang Island. The beaches in Corpus Christi Bay are white sand with clamshells instead of the piles of oyster shells that make up Aransas Bay’s beaches. Visible at left on the horizon are the storage tanks of an oil-export terminal at Ingleside.
I approached three beaches, the first two about the size of a modest kitchen, and settled on the third one, which was larger and higher than the others. Instead of mounds of oyster shells, these beaches were white sand just peppered with clamshells.
Beyond the mangrove wetlands, Port Aransas was still visible on the horizon from the three deepwater drill rigs—small and hazy in the northeast—to the low dark, angular spread of downtown buildings and the sprawl of two- and three-story homes to the east. Across Corpus Christi Bay, an oil export terminal’s spread of wide, squat, cylindrical storage tanks glowed with a bright splash of white sunlight.
All around me, silent except for the shush of wavelets on the sand and the occasional quack of a duck, was the wide, nearly motionless lapis and teal bay. Vast spreads of navel-high mangroves were interwoven with brackish bayous and sloughs. A quarter mile toward the thick spread of homes to the east, a man in waders fished 20 yards from a boat half hidden by mangroves. A skein of ducks flew overhead, all black except for flashes of white with the upward movement of their wings. This part of Mustang Island was an island of its own, an oasis of wild in the midst of human development.
I ate dinner cold: chowder straight from its can, the last bits sopped up with flatbread. It was simple and surprisingly good.
Although my mostly screen tent would have been comfortable with the light air and the pleasant temperature, the heavy dew that sets in overnight warrants setting the fly. After pitching the tent, I could change into dry camp clothes and hang up the day’s damp clothes to dry on paracord run between the tent’s inside webbing anchor points.
It was nice to be camping by myself. While I was sitting on the bucket watching the sun set, my shoulders and back relaxed and I felt as if my body’s weight had settled into my hips from its perch on tense shoulders. I had thoroughly enjoyed my time with the other sailors and was eager to see them again on future trips, but I prefer to do the social thing only in bits.
As darkness fell on Corpus Christi Bay, the oil export terminal at Ingleside lit up the horizon. The bright orange light, the fire on top of the flare stack, was clearly visible from the previous night’s camp at Mud Island, 14 miles away, and even discernible from Paul’s Mott, at 22 miles.
The last of the sunlight faded. The lights of Corpus Cristi and Port Aransas filled the horizon and spilled their glow into the night sky, masking all but the brightest stars.
I heard a puffy exhalation coming from out in the bay. I didn’t see a disturbance on the water’s surface. If it had been a dolphin, it could have covered a lot of distance before surfacing again. I didn’t hear it again.
I put my bread-mopped chowder can in with the rest of my double-bagged garbage, sealed the bags inside the bucket, and set the bucket on a clear spot of sand and shell 30’ from my tent. I crawled into the tent and fell asleep within minutes.
I woke up cold in the middle of the night. The half moon had risen and my tent was glowing in its light. I crawled out of the tent, pulled my sweatshirt out of its dry bag, and put it on over the fleece shirt I had been sleeping in. The bay was like glass, without the slightest of undulations. The light breeze, coming from over the land, didn’t stir the water’s surface for as far as I could see. The tide had come in, and ARR & ARR floated, motionless, 1’ from the beach with her stern pointed straight out into the bay. Having warmed up, I stayed up for a while and took in the stillness.
I turned in and when I woke again in the early morning light, the gentle breeze was still blowing across the land and into the bay. Low, thin puffs of gray clouds drifted north. ARR & ARR still floated free of the beach, but tugged gently at her anchor line.
I ate a breakfast of granola with boxed milk, broke camp, and set off to return to Aransas Bay. The breeze pushed ARR & ARR at only a knot or two; the sail’s sheet drooped toward the water between the boom and the gunwale. A lone brown pelican swooped down and glided across the bay, so close that its shadowy reflection almost merged with its breast.
Four or five dolphins swam in close and surfaced in ones and twos. Some surfaced gently, as if half asleep; others, quickly and tightly arced, as if diving after fish. They’d swim off 100′ or so and then return. Once, while they were farther from the boat, one leapt completely out of the water. Each time they approached the boat, one would swim right up to my quarter, turn on its side still beneath the surface, and watch me watching it, and a couple of times, when they surfaced on my windward side, their exhalations misted my face.
The wind steadily grew, and just after noon I was sailing a good 4 knots in Aransas Bay back toward Mud Island. A sea turtle with mottled skin on its fist-sized head surfaced soporifically just off my starboard bow and then ducked back beneath the water with a plop.
I was all alone at a midday break at the cut through Mud Island, where our entire group had camped two nights before. These cuts and beaches are in constant flux. The spattering of olive green near the shoreline are hundreds of black mangrove seeds that have washed ashore. Given enough time between hurricanes or other storms, some will set down roots and make this spit of shell more permanent.
At the cut through Mud Island, I spilled the air from my sail and coasted to a stop as the bow growled into the shell beach. I pulled the boat higher on the shore, had an apple and an energy bar for lunch, and refilled my water bottles from my 3-gallon jerry can.
I thought I might be able to make it back to Goose Island State Park before dark, but I wasn’t sure. I knew, however, that I could make Paul’s Mott. I decided I’d rather be camping alone on an island than in the park in the middle of a row of RVs on the mainland. Opting for the park would also mean driving the boat through the waves on the leeward side of the bay, and crossing the ICW, and navigating through the oyster reefs, all possibly at the same time, and all likely after dark.
I walked the boat through the cut and set sail to close the distance with San José Island. In its lee, the waves were small, and I sailed on a reach with full sail in the freshening breeze. The wind thrummed the sail’s leech, and water gushed away from the hull in foamy surges. It was an absolutely thrilling sail.
On my final night of camping, at Paul’s Mott, Aransas Bay was calm. Jutting partially from beneath the tent, just below the door, is a 2′ piece of an old foam camping sleeping mat that I pull out and rest my knees on while working at the tent’s door, to protect my knees from the jagged oyster shells. I tuck the mat between the tent and the ground tarp when not in use to prevent the wind from carrying it away.
When I arrived in the waning evening light, Paul’s Mott was deserted, save for a few shore birds alternately skittering toward and away from the swoosh of wavelets on the beach, and a mockingbird singing from the highest limb of the point’s thicket of scrub oak, tanglewood, prickly pear, and other undergrowth. An undulating line of brown pelicans flying low over the bay crossed over the island and disappeared.
The shells that make up the point’s beach were so coarsely piled that when I tried to set the anchor ashore, even a light pull would drag it plowing through the shells and clanking down the beach. I finally set it in a bit of scrub, where the roots bound the shells together and held the flukes tight. For good measure, I pulled the boat as high onto the beach as I could and set a second line with a bit of chain at its end around the trunk of one of the little oaks.
The next morning, I woke before first light. A fat crescent moon high in the sky cast the tops of the clouds in a silvery light and left their bottoms a deep catfish blue. Between the moon and the clouds, Venus and Mercury flanked Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. The water’s horizon was a sprinkling of lights. Wavelets plashed occasionally against the shell shore, and the mockingbird chirped from within the thicket. The air was still but not stale, and a heavy dew soaked the tent’s fly. I had my coffee and oatmeal while daylight crept into the sky.
I casually broke camp and, as I loaded the boat, a powerboat of about 25′ motored leisurely to the reef just off the tip of the point. Two more soon followed. My first thought was that they were fishing charters, but they soon set to work dredging for oysters. The closest had a 6′-wide panel running from its port gunwale down into the water. Chains and machinery clanked and banged, and a dredge ground its way down the panel and splashed into the water, was dragged grumbling across the bottom, and then was pulled clanking and banging back up the panel, over and over. The boat’s engine clattered at just above an idle, and boom-box music with thrumming guitars, an accordion, and Spanish lyrics carried through the air. I was glad I hadn’t been trying to sleep when the boats had arrived.
After I had ARR & ARR ready to go, I still couldn’t feel any wind or see any cat’s-paws on the water. The forecast was for light wind and then calm in the afternoon, but I raised sail anyway. I pushed the boat into the water and, wading knee deep, walked it around the tip of the point so I could launch on the same side of the reef as the state park and wouldn’t drift near the oyster boats.
I pushed away from shore with one foot and clambered aboard. ARR & ARR moved 20 yards, slowed, and coasted to a stop. There wasn’t a whisper of wind. I put the oars in the locks and rowed away from the land.
After about a half hour of rowing, with Deadman Island nearly abreast and the ICW markers in sight, having already covered nearly a third of the distance to the state park and still with no sign of even the slightest breeze, I lowered the sail and set in to row the entire distance. I didn’t mind, really. Moving under oars is where ARR & ARR comes into her own—the Flint was designed primarily as a rowboat.
The row to the park turned into a hot one, with the sunlight glaring off the water as well as from the sky, and I paused often to wipe the sweat from my eyes. But I didn’t mind at all. I’d had everything from arduous rowing workouts to drifting lazily along like a mangrove seed to flying at hull speed on nearly flat water. I had enjoyed the company of friends, made new friends, and recharged in silent solitude. For such a disruptive year, the trip had been a perfect relief.
Roger Siebert is an editor in Austin, Texas. He rows and sails his Flint on local lakes, and has trailered it to a few of his favorite places on the Florida coast.
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.
When sailing masters aboard tall ships needed to call out commands to the crew, they used speaking-trumpets, a type of megaphone, to aim and amplify their voices so they could be heard the full length of the ship and up to the topmasts. On a small boat, it’s not likely you’ll have trouble making yourself heard by anyone on board, but your voice may not carry well to people on shore, lockmasters, or other boaters in the area, especially if the wind and waves are making a lot of noise.
Cupping your hands around your mouth is instinctive and will help a bit, but megaphones are much more effective. For short distances, they can be small, like the pre-electronic type coxswains wore strapped to their heads to reach all members of the rowing crew; for more range they can be larger, like the traffic-cone-sized megaphones coaches once used to communicate between their launches and their crews.
Photographs by the author
Megaphones come in many shapes and sizes. In general, the longer and larger the better, but the more compact ones are easier to keep aboard a small boat.
As you’d guess, megaphones work by focusing sound in a particular direction, but there’s another factor at work that accounts for the perceived amplification of sound: acoustic impedance. The sound energy produced in the small space of your vocal tract can’t effectively make the transition to the wide-open space around you. I have to admit I don’t fully understand how this works, but I think of it this way: If you poke your finger into still water, it won’t make much of a splash or generate anything more than a small ripple. If you hit the water at the same speed with the flat of your hand you’ll make a splash and a wave. The megaphone effects the transition from a small area of impact at one end to a larger area at the other, setting more air in the open space in motion. A writer on one web site put it more accurately: a megaphone “acts as an impedance-matching acoustic transformer to efficiently couple the sound from your mouth to the open space.” And the effect isn’t restricted by the direction of the megaphone. I’ve noticed that rowing coaches using non-electronic megaphones are very easy to hear even when their megaphones aren’t aimed at me.
The most familiar acoustic megaphones have conical shapes (properly called frustums, as they are cones with their pointed peaks lopped off). Bullhorns and electronic megaphones flare like the horn of a trumpet. A conical megaphone may not be as efficient, but it is much easier to make, and I’ve made a several from plywood, aluminum, leather, and PVC drainpipe.
Staved plywood
This eight-staved plywood megaphone is 22″ long and 9″ across at the wide end. It greatly amplifies the sound of a voice.
My largest megaphone, and the loudest, is made of 1/8″ mahogany plywood. I cut eight staves 22″ long and 4-3/4″ wide at the bottom, 7/8″ at the top. It’s a bit much for my smaller boats.
I have a simple sled for cutting tapers on the table saw. It’s a piece of plywood with a strip on the bottom, which rides in the slot. Scraps of plywood tacked to the top orient the megaphone staves. The staves are stacked at right, The thicker piece of wood on the sled was made to hold the staves flat while being cut.
I had intended to join the staves with copper wire, stitch-and-glue fashion, but getting them to line up edge-to-edge wasn’t working. I went back to the table-saw sled that I set up to cut the staves and beveled the edges at 22.5 degrees.
Rather than wire the newly beveled staves together, I taped them together, flipped the bunch over, and brushed the edges and inside faces with epoxy.
After brushing the interior surfaces and seams with epoxy, I folded the bunch of staves to bring the last two edges together and close all of the joints tight. I taped the last seam and slipped hose clamps loosely over the megaphone to set its shape. A lightly applied bar clamp fine-tuned it.
After the epoxy cured, I sanded the exterior smooth, supported the megaphone on a horizontal stick, and gave it a layer of 2-oz fiberglass and epoxy. A coating of epoxy to fill the weave was followed by varnish. A brass window-sash handle finished the job.
Sheet Pattern
Many common megaphones have been made from sheet material. To make one in that manner, you need to create a frustum pattern.
Draw a side view of the megaphone you want to make and extend its centerline. For the small end of the megaphone, I use a diameter of 1-3/4″. The length and the diameter of the large opening of my sheet-material megaphones were somewhat determined by what I had available to work with. The pattern here has a length of 10″ and a large opening of 8″.
Extend one of the sides to intersect with the centerline. The is the center point of the arcs that follow.
With a compass or a trammel bar, swing arcs from the top and bottom of the side of the megaphone profile.
The circumference of the 1-3/4″ circular opening plus 1/2″ for the overlap at the edges comes to 6″. With a compass set to 1″, walk off 3″ on each side of the centerline.
Draw lines from the center point through each 3″ mark on the top arc.
Cut out the pattern and trace it on whatever sheet material you’ll be using
Sheet metal
All of the megaphones here were made from scraps I had around the shop. I wanted to make one from brass, but I didn’t have any suitable material, so I worked with aluminum.
This commercially made brass megaphone is the one my father used for coaching crews. It is 8″ long and 4-3/8″ in diameter at the large end.
Aluminum is easily worked and makes an effective and durable megaphone. A piece of vinyl tubing, slit along its length and glued over the mouthpiece with vinyl cement, covers the edge of the aluminum. The opening is contoured to fit around my mouth. A handle bent from 3/4″ x 1/8″ flat bar, is riveted over the seam.
I had some aluminum which had been liners for bear-proof food containers. It was 1/64″ (0.5 mm) thick, quite stiff, and big enough for a megaphone 10″ long and 7-1/2″ at its widest.
The aluminum, cut to the pattern, is ready to be curved into a frustum. The piece still had the curve of the bear-proof container, but it didn’t resist taking the new shape for the megaphone.
Hose clamps squeeze the aluminum to shape. I drew a line for the 1/2″ overlap in red Sharpie. Alcohol will remove the line later.
A 2×2 clamped to the workbench provides a support for drilling holes along the seam. I used 1/2″ aluminum tacks as rivets.
To form the rivets in the small end, I clamped a steel pipe in a vise and hammered clipped tacks in the holes from the outside. This didn’t flare the trimmed ends of the tacks, but folded them over, which was good enough.
Leather
I thought leather was an unlikely material to use for a megaphone, but it was commonly used prior to the development of plastics. A handle is useful for a megaphone that is too large to hold with one hand. A leather strap works here. The small end, contoured to fit around the user’s mouth, adds to the effectiveness of the megaphone.
Stiff leather was once used to make megaphones, typically those used by cheerleaders. Metal rings were usually fit to the ends, but they aren’t necessary if the leather is stiff. A scrap of leather I had—2.5mm vegetable tanned full-grained cowhide—was just big enough for the pattern I made for the aluminum megaphone.
To cut the 1/8″ leather, I drew the pattern on it and marked the intersection of extensions of the edges. With a stick with one hole pivoting around an awl at that intersection, I pushed a knife point into holes drilled to cut the two arcs. Cutting freehand works too.
Some of the old leather megaphones had a metal strip along the seam to stiffen them. I predrilled a length of 1/8″ x 1/4″ brass, set brass canoe tacks in the holes, and tapped them through the leather (without pilot holes) to clench inside against a piece of pipe.
PVC Plastic
My first PVC megaphones had their overlapping edges held by pop rivets and were painted with silver hammered-finish spray paint.
PVC is a versatile and remarkably tough material that can be coaxed into new shapes by heating it in a kitchen oven to 170 degrees F. I’ve used some 4″ drainpipe—with walls about 1/16″ thick (Standard ASTM D 2729)—for other projects and it’s well suited to making megaphones.
Starting with a 16″ length of pipe, I drew a centerline and measured 3-3/8″ from either side of the line on one end. The section of pipe removed between these two marks will take the small end to a diameter of 1-7/8″ (with a 3/4″ overlap). Draw a line from each mark to the centerline on the opposite end. A file folder makes a flexible straightedge.
Saw along both lines. A fine-toothed Japanese saw cuts PVC quickly though almost any handsaw will work. Sand or plane the edges to smooth them.
Draw a line 3/4″ along one edge and curl the other edge toward it. Hose clamps hold the overlap of the edges against the resistance of the PVC. Sticks on the outer edge hold it flat for the next step. Heat the whole set-up in a 170-degree oven for 8 minutes. This will relax the PVC and allow it to hold its new shape.
After the PVC has cooled, the hose clamps can be removed and the edges will remain overlapped. Drill a 1/16″ hole near each end, 1/4″ from the edge, and tap a 5/16″ copper tack in each, clenching them with the megaphone slipped over a steel-pipe bucking iron. Drill the rest of the holes 1″ apart and clench copper tacks in them. (On other PVC megaphones, I’ve also used pop-rivets to fasten the laps instead of copper tacks. I prefer the tacks.)
The ends of the megaphone will need to be flattened either by sawing or sanding them. On the disk sander, because of the megaphone’s taper, the small end needs to be elevated on a V-block.
The mouthpiece end is sculpted on a 2″ drum sander to create a contour to fit the face. PVC takes spray paint well (when the surface is scuffed), so a sanding with 150-grit paper follows.
I made two PVC megaphones as gifts for my son and daughter and spray-painted them with a pattern derived from the Cunningham coat of arms and house flag.
Curved Megaphone
This wooden megaphone with a flared shape was surprisingly effective.
While the conical megaphones work well enough, I wanted to see if a more sophisticated shape would make a difference. Exponential curves shape the horns for hi-fi speakers and P.A. systems. I couldn’t make sense of the exponential formulas I found online, so I just copied a section of a graph that I found.
I copied a section of a more complete exponential curve from a graph I found on the web. To my eye, it is close enough to other megaphones of the type.
The paper pattern, here folded in half, was used to shape pieces of 1/8″ three-ply birch plywood. I drilled holes every 1″ for stitching the pieces together, but only needed a few copper-wire stitches to get the piece bent to shape—a good thing since my hands didn’t fit very far into the opening to insert wires. I brushed epoxy along the seams and filleted the joints. After the epoxy cured, I removed the wires, heating them to release them from the epoxy.
With everything sanded smooth, I sheathed the exterior with epoxy and 2-oz fiberglass. I shaped the small opening for a good fit at the mouth. Although I don’t have a similarly-sized megaphone with straight sides as a comparison, this curved megaphone did seem to project my voice louder than I had expected.
ADDENDUM
Reader John Bishop, in the comments below, thought that a megaphone would be useful, but rightly guessed it would be bulky aboard a small boat. He wondered about making a leather megaphone that could be stowed flat or rolled up to take up less space in a small boat. A century ago, several inventors filed patents for easily stowed megaphones. Here are a few:
Zellers’ 1905 patent, the last of the four above was for “a foldable trumpet or megaphone consisting wholly of a sheet or blank of flexible material, like heavy paper or cardboard….” It could work for the leather megaphone John had in mind. I didn’t have any more scraps of leather large enough to make the Zellers megaphone, so I bought a $9 flexible plastic roll-up snow sled. It wasn’t as thick as I thought it would be, but rigid enough to hold a cone shape.
I drew the frustum pattern on the sled with a 1-3/4″mouthpiece (with 1/2″ overlap) and an 8″ diameter. The length of 15″ , fits within the 17″ width of the sled.
After the drawn shape is cut out, the snaps are located while the plastic is curved into the megaphone shape. The handle, at right, slips into two slits in the triangle on that side of the megaphone.
The Zellers-style megaphone rolls up to an easily stowed cylinder.
The handle makes it easier to grip the slippery plastic. The megaphone produces good voice volume when in use.
I came up with my own pattern for a square folding megaphone that could be stowed flat. I had in mind to make it with corrugated plastic (Coroplast) and the only piece I had was a neighborhood sign I’d put in my front yard to remind passing cars to go slow. I painted it gray.
I made a stiff paper pattern and traced it five times on the twin-wall plastic panel. The fifth tracing was modified to create a tab to insert in a slot that I’d later cut in the first traced panel. I cut the shape out with a ruler and a sharp utility knife.
To make the folds, I clamped a ruler on the panel and creased the plastic along the fold lines with a pizza cutter. (The cutter doesn’t have an edge sharp enough to cut the plastic.) After rolling the crease, I folded the outside panel up to make the bend against the ruler.
The tab, inserted into the slot cut for a tight fit, holds the folded megaphone together.
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.
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Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
Steve Siegert
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
Courtesy of Crawford Boat Building
Bruce Gordon
Roger Rodibaugh
