Here’s a flat-bottomed sharpie ketch that we can build in the backyard. This shoal-draft boat will sail on the morning dew, right itself after a knockdown, and leave most deep-keel cruisers in its wake.
Photo by NIS Boats
The sheet-plywood Norwalk Islands Sharpie (above and opposite) can easily be built in the backyard, yet it outperforms more expensive yachts. Its simple cat-ketch rig needs no standing rigging (wire shrouds and stays that support the masts). The outboard-motor lifts into its own house when idle—no ugly mounting bracket, no hydrodynamic drag.
More than two decades back down the road, I visited with designer Bruce Kirby at his Rowayton, Connecticut, office. A crackerjack sailor, he was best known for his design work for the Canadian AMERICA’s Cup challenger and for having created the Laser, a sophisticated 14′ singlehander that revolutionized sailboat marketing in the 1970s.
I found the talented designer of high-tech sailboats hunched over the drawings for a simple sharpie that was to become the Norwalk Islands 26. He was excited about the design—with, history now suggests, ample justification. The easily built ketch sails fast on all points, offers reasonable cruising accommodations, and can handle rough water.
Photo by NIS Boats
Sailing wing-’n-wing off the wind—no need for a spinnaker here.
Kirby drew a handy cat-ketch rig to power the NIS 26—no labor-intensive overlapping headsails or tiny, impotent mainsails here. Full-length battens support considerable roach, that is, curve to the leech (trailing edge) of each sail. This allows more sail to be carried on spars of a given length, and it provides a more efficient sail shape. As an additional benefit, these sails are quiet. They don’t flog wildly when luffing. But we need to pay attention, as fully battened sails won’t telegraph word of improper trim in the immediate manner of unsupported sailcloth.
This is a controllable rig. We can fuss with the tension and taper of the battens to alter sail shape. We can back the mizzen to stop the boat or put it into a slip. A word of caution: unless we actively control fully battened sails, they tend to keep sailing. Simply releasing the sheets won’t quickly stop the boat. We should remember this as we approach the dock, lest we come to rest in the parking lot.
The original NIS 26 rig measured 302 sq ft. After sailing the prototype, the designer increased the area to 340 sq ft. He also has changed from aluminum masts to sticks made from carbon fiber. The greater heeling effect of the larger sails seems to be offset by the lighter weight and greater flexibility in the upper portions of the tapered, thin-wall masts. In strong winds the masts bend, thus relieving tension on the upper leeches.
Photo by NIS Boats
With a draft of only 10″, the Norwalk Islands 26 can sail through marshes.
Robert Ayliffe, who sails and sells Norwalk Islands Sharpies from his base in Australia, recently devised a nifty tabernacle that makes raising and lowering the sharpie’s masts a casual singlehanded operation. The boats now will get underway quickly from their trailers, and we’ll have ready access to bridge-blocked water. Given a 10″-deep stream no wider than your driveway, we can sneak our NIS 26 into it…to hide from a hurricane or simply to get away from the crowd. Plans for the NIS 26 describe both a two-berth interior and a “sleeps-four” production-boat layout that carries a double V-berth forward and two quarter berths in the main cabin. The centerboard trunk is tall, which allows it to house the required board. (A sharpie will not go well to windward without a centerboard of substantial area.) Much of this trunk resides innocuously below the sole of the self-bailing cockpit. The aftermost berths in both accommodation plans offer sumptuous seating in the main cabin, and we’ll make good use of the exposed portion of the trunk by hanging a dropleaf table from it.
Both plans show “enclosed” heads, but you should understand that we won’t find anything resembling true privacy aboard a 26′ sailboat.
Photo by NIS Boats
Bring the boat right up to almost any shore.
The outboard motor, which provides auxiliary power, resides out of sight in its own house way aft. When not in use, the engine lifts vertically. We’ll not need to worry about dragging the propeller around the bay while we’re sailing, and we’ll have fewer concerns about corrosion of expensive machinery when we’re at the mooring.
All of this seems fine…but how, you might ask, can a sailboat that has no deep keel and that floats in only 10″ of water right itself? Here are some design rules to follow if you want a shoal-draft sharpie to pop up reliably from knockdowns and inversions: Draw the combined hull-house structure rather tall (say, at least 4′ for a 26′ boat). Keep the width on deck to an acceptable minimum so that the boat won’t become stable in an upside-down position. For the same reason, a strongly crowned housetop and/or deck will help (acting as a “round bottom” when the boat is inverted and providing plenty of volume where it’s needed). Concentrate structural weight low— make the bottom brutally heavy, as it will provide secure ballast as well as protection during hard groundings. To keep the center of gravity low, spread well-secured inside ballast in the bilge (do not pile it up against the centerboard trunk). Build the cockpit small, and be certain that it is self-bailing. Locate hatches near, or on, the boat’s centerline. Make the rig low and light. Last, be certain that everything is strong and tight. Yes, extremely shoaldraft boats really can right themselves without violating any laws of physics.
Photo by NIS Boats
The brilliant performance of EXIT 12, designer Bruce Kirby’s prototype NIS 26 (right), surprised Long Island Sound sailors during the 1980s.
Not all sailors will like the appearance of a boat designed to the above parameters, but Kirby has a good eye. On the NIS 26, a strong sheerline and dark hull sides lessen the visual impact of substantial freeboard. Low house sides and extreme crown (athwartships curvature) to its top reduce the apparent height of the house. In all, this ketch has a seamanlike look about it.
So, there you have it, a fast and easy-to-build cruiser that will take us to shallow coves that lie just out back of nowhere.
Bruce Kirby’s drawings reflect the startling simplicity of the NIS 26, but this flat-bottomed sharpie has been well proven in tough conditions around the globe.
My kayaking trip to Croatia in 2005 got off to a rough start. During the first day, crossing swell on the Adriatic made for seas so steep and confused that seasickness slowed me to a crawl, and that night a storm brought lightning ground strikes and winds of 40 knots, flattening my guide’s tent and forcing us to retreat from the open ground where we’d camped to find shelter. It made for a good story, the kind I was used to writing about: facing challenges. The trip ended well, and in a way that I grew to appreciate the more I traveled in small boats: chance meetings with remarkable strangers.
Radovan and I arrived at Kozarica on the morning of our last day of a kayak tour of the Elafiti Islands near Dubrovnik and Mjlet Island. We stopped in Kozarica to stretch our legs.
My guide Radovan and I were on our final day, paddling along the north coast of Mljet, a slender 19-mile-long island, 4 miles off the Croatian coast and 15 miles northwest of the city of Dubrovnik. We stopped at Kozarica, a village of only a dozen buildings nestled between its harbor and the steep wooded slope of the ridge that runs the length of the island. We landed on a gravelly beach tucked in the inner corner of the harbor and pulled the kayaks ashore between the handful of open fishing boats hauled out there.
It seemed that everything on the coast was made of stone: buildings, roadways, and fences. The Croatian limestone is easily worked and yet water resistant, so it’s not as prone to dissolve as other types of limestone. The White House’s columns are made of it.
The village was quiet, and Radovan and I were alone for several minutes, before a man wearing a blue coat and a yellow baseball cap emerged from a passageway between the harborside buildings. He walked up to us; I said Dobar dan—good afternoon—one of the few bits of Croatian I’d picked up. He nodded. Radovan spoke with him in Croatian and translated for me. His name was Pero, but he was called Brko, the mustached guy. He had a weather-creased face, deep-set brown eyes, and a short black beard showing the first signs of turning gray. Beneath his coat, showing below his throat, he had on a white sweatshirt, a green plaid shirt, and a T-shirt.
The residents of Kozarica didn’t build their village to accommodate cars, so there were more passages like this than roads. Brko’s kitchen and bedroom were in separate buildings, so these public walkways were also the hallways of his home.
It was early in the morning and Brko invited us for breakfast, so we followed him to a 4′-wide alley that led to his kitchen, a single room with just the one door from the outside—he slept in a room in another building. The kitchen’s two windows were darkened by shutters and the room was lit by a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, casting sharp-edged shadows on the walls. The floor was a foot deep with juniper boughs. Brko motioned for me to sit at the table in the seat where he had been eating breakfast. I sat down to a white enamel bowl and the jaw of a pig, leathery brown with a row of teeth facing me and half of a lip curled back over a bed of dark boiled greens. Brko, talking to Radovan, pointed to a picture on the wall. It was of Croatia’s president on a visit to Kozarica and behind him stood a beaming Brko. Taped to the opposite wall was a year-old poster-sized calendar with a photograph of a woman leaning against shelves of wine bottles and wearing tight white shorts and a pair of silver stars. Hung from a cupboard knob by a piece of blue plastic twine was a leg of ham, which Brko had been slicing away at.
He set a frying pan on the stove, poured in 1/2″ of green olive oil, and picked two eggs out of a box on the floor—one white, the other brown, its shell as lumpy as alligator skin. While the eggs were bubbling in the hot oil, Pero pulled a block of cheese out of a bucket, scraped off a gummy gray outer layer and sliced thin shavings onto our plates. He served the eggs, sunny side up, glistening with a sheen of oil.
The traps that Brko and others made were scattered around the perimeter of the harbor. This type of trap, called a vrša, is made with split juniper withies and wire.
I asked Brko about the boughs lying on the floor. They were for making lobster traps. I had seen several of the traps at the edge of the harbor. They were about 5′ long and the diameter of a basketball hoop. Split boughs were woven in a tight pattern of triangles on the cylinder walls and in opposing spirals at the ends, like the pattern of a sunflower’s seed head.
The vrša has its origins in antiquity, and while it remains effective for catching lobster and fish, it is also popular with tourists as a decorative item.
Brko said it took him two days to make a trap. As intricate as they were, I would have thought they would take much longer. They were as much works of art as utilitarian objects. The outer shell came to a domed end and two funnels of woven withies inside the cylinder would lead the lobsters in and keep them in. The layers of juniper withies, bent in spirals and circles and bound with thin galvanized wire, created mesmerizing patterns in an elegant form that I would be happy to have in my living room.
Hanging on the wall by the kitchen door was a hooked tool for harvesting the boughs. Next to it was an adze, a small and simple tool with a blackened steel blade. If there had been a hardware store in town that carried them, I would have bought one. I asked Radovan if it would be inappropriate to ask Brko if I could buy his. Radovan translated for me and Brko, answered, “No, I need that. It’s a good one that I bought on a market day in Dubrovnik on the Day of Saint Blaise, the town’s patron saint.” It was just the kind of answer I’d give to anyone who might ask to buy any of my tools. A tool that’s useful, feels good in the hand, and has history can’t be replaced at any price.
Brko was popular with the cats in Kozarica. This one-eye black cat was just one of the cats that sought out his company while we were there.
As Radovan and I ate, a black cat, its right eye swollen closed, came into the kitchen and leaned up against Brko’s leg. He stooped down and cupped his hand over its head and spoke to it in a high, sweet voice.
Brko’s boat was built by his brother. The two of them, each in their own boat, row from the harbor to set lobster traps and fish the waters around Kozarica.
After breakfast, Brko took us back to the harbor to check on one of the traps he’d set there. His boat, built by his brother, had a white hull and a light blue sheerstrake and deck. He pointed to a boat just like it, resting on the beach by our kayaks, built by his brother for his own use. The trap Brko pulled up had been sitting right under his boat where it was tied to the dock. It had a dozen lobsters in it—it was clearly as effective as it was beautiful. Brko had wrapped it in green fish net when he’d returned to the harbor to keep the day’s catch securely stored.
Brko had kept a day’s catch of lobsters alive overnight by keeping them in one of his traps, hung over the side of his boat. The netting prevented any from escaping.
Radovan and I had to get underway again to meet our rendezvous at the west end of Mljet. As Brko walked us back to our kayaks, a little girl with short blonde hair and dark sullen eyes ran up to Pero and wrapped her arms around his knees. He put his hand on her shoulder and spoke to her in the same sweet voice he’d spoken to the cat. I said goodbye—Dovidenja—and shook his hand. His grip was gentle and his hands surprisingly soft for all the work he does with them. Brko said goodbye to us, and bowed his head toward the girl as the two held hands and walked away along the stone-paved street, deep in conversation.
As Radovan and I were saying goodbye to Brko, this little girl came up to him and wrapped her arms around his legs. He was an unassuming man who left a deep impression on me for his craftsmanship, generosity, kindness, and warmth.
About 20 years ago, Long Island, New York, boatbuilder and designer Paul Gartside was commissioned by Steve Doherty, a publisher of marine books, to design a boat he could build in his retirement. Steve lived on Shelter Island on Long Island Sound and, Paul told me, “was a bit of an Anglophile and loved the British workboat types, so the resulting design is just a typical small beach boat of the type that was common throughout the British Isles, especially in the West Country, 100 years ago.” Typically, those boats carried mizzen sails, mostly to help them tack, and didn’t have centerboards. “It did concern me,” Paul noted, “that without a board, it would be slow to windward and there would be too much reliance on oars.” So, the addition of the board was the only significant difference in Paul’s design. As it turned out, Steve never got around to building his boat, and it is only recently that the first one built to this design has been completed.
Photographs by the author
The square hole in the transom is for the mizzen’s boomkin, which extends 4′ from the transom. The forward thwart is designed as a rowing station, though oarlocks are not installed here. The line at the aft end of the centerboard trunk is the tail end of a gun tackle on the port side of the trunk, which provides the mechanical advantage needed to raise the galvanized steel-plate centerboard.
When Kate Abernethy enrolled at the Boat Building Academy (BBA) in Lyme Regis, England, she arrived with an old Wayfarer dinghy that she hoped to restore as a course project. But when the Wayfarer was found to be beyond repair, she decided that she would build a new boat. Kate wanted something that would be trailerable and around the same size as the 16′ Wayfarer, and she liked the idea of a lugger. While searching online, the Gartside Centerboard Lugger, Design #124, caught her eye. “It just looked perfect,” she said. It would be well suited to learning about building boats as “it had all the boatbuilding joints you would want to know. It would be challenging with lots of problem solving.”
During the lofting process, there were concerns that there wouldn’t be room for the landings of the planks on the sternpost, and so its siding was increased from 2″ to 3″. Other than that, Gartside’s six sheets of clear and detailed plans were followed fairly closely. The centerline structure consists of a 4″ x 2 1/4″ fir keel (Kate used oak for hers and laminated it from three pieces for more economical use of the timber), an oak stem made up of three pieces scarfed together, and an oak sternpost, with a knee. Although Gartside prefers building the hull upside down—“because it is so much easier having gravity on your side”—Kate decided to do it the right way up “because I was inexperienced and it would be easier to ‘see’ the boat during the building process.” Once the 1-1/8″-thick oak transom and seven temporary molds were set up on the centerline, 11 ribbands were run around each side. Then 5/8″ x 1″ oak frames on 6″ centers were steamed and bent between the molds inside the ribbands. (If the boat is built upside down, the timbers would be steamed outside the ribbands, with a corresponding reduction in the dimensions of the molds.) Most of the frames run gunwale to gunwale, but three aft, four forward, and nine in way of the centerboard case are in two parts with their ends boxed into the centerline components.
The carvel planked hull has steam-bent oak frames on 6″ centers. The 3-1/2″ wide brace across the top of the transom serves as a partner for the mizzen mast.
For the planking, Gartside specifies nine strakes of 1/2″ red cedar, laid carvel, with red-lead putty in the seams and with a yellow-cedar lapped sheerstrake. Kate planned to store her boat on a trailer rather than on a mooring, and she was concerned that it would dry out during any long periods between outings. To keep the seams from opening up, she decided to use Accoya for the planking, and to glue the planks to the ribs with epoxy as well as riveting them, and to glue the seams as well. Accoya is a material that originates as radiata pine in New Zealand but then has its structure modified by a process called acetylation. This process reduces the timber’s hygroscopic properties (the ability to take in and expel moisture) and increases its stability.
The planks in the lower part of the hull at the bow and stern are required to twist as they are bent in place, so it was necessary to steam some of the planking. However, it was found that Accoya wouldn’t steam as well as more conventional timbers, to the extent that for the aft third of two of the strakes, oak had to be used instead and was scarfed onto the aft part of the Accoya planks. Kate also used oak for the sheerstrake, as it was to be bright finished, and laid it carvel rather than the lapstrake specified. Once the planking was complete, the molds were removed, allowing the remaining ribs to be steamed and fitted.
The Lugger is a big boat for solo rowing. The plans call for a second set of oarlocks forward. Two at the oars would comfortably keep the boat moving.
The hull could then be turned upside down to allow easier fairing of the outside, and over the next few days the hull was flipped several times so that the outside could be painted in the evenings while the interior fit-out progressed during the days.
Ten 1-1/8″-thick sapele floors (oak in the plans) were fitted, all with level top surfaces to allow them to double up as bearers for the larch floorboards which are in four sections for easy removal. The 2″ x 5/8″ oak seat risers support the 7/8″ painted sapele thwarts and bright-finished larch sternsheets. The timber for the latter was left over from a larch-clad barn Kate had built, so she used it instead of the cedar called for. The 2 -1/4″ x 1-1/8″ oak gunwale, tapered slightly at the ends, had to be steamed along the outside of the sheerstrake before fitting it to the inside. Kate decided to install a 3/4″ x 1″ rubrail at the sheer “for aesthetics and practical reasons,” adding to the protection provided by the 3/4″ x 7/8″ oak rubrail at the bottom of the sheerstrake specified in the plans.
The centerboard is made of 5/16″ galvanized mild steel and weighs 99 lbs, and is controlled by an uphaul with a 3:1 pulley system. The rudder blade—not shaped in the elongated ovoid designed by Paul, but more of what Kate thinks is a “traditional lugger shape” with straight leading and bottom edges—is in yellow cedar sheathed in ’glass and epoxy, rather than the more traditional bronze-pinned oak in the plans. The cheeks and tiller are oak.
Each of the main’s reefs shorten it by about 2′. The mizzen mast is set about 9″ to port to keep well clear of the tiller.
Kate clearly loves her boat, but she now realizes that her expectation that she would be able to launch and recover it easily singlehanded may have been unrealistic. At around 770 lbs, it is not a light boat, but as long as she can back the trailer far enough down the launch ramp to float the boat off the trailer, and with a bit of patience, perhaps she will be able to meet the challenge. When I met up with her, she had three of her fellow former students with her and we had no problem at all with rigging, launching, and recovery. The solid spruce main and mizzen masts are both easily stepped singlehandedly. The mizzen mast is offset to port by 9″ to allow the tiller a full range of movement.
Unladen and with centerboard and rudder blade raised (the latter is then just clear of the level of the bottom of the keel), the boat’s draft is about 8″. With the wind directly onshore, we decided, as soon as we had launched, to row out to a nearby vacant mooring to hoist the sails. As you would expect with a boat of this weight, it took a bit of effort to get it going with the oars, but once it had some way on it became much easier. Kate didn’t install rowlocks for the forward thwart, and so it was difficult to get the right fore-and-aft balance with two people in the boat.
The powerful balanced lug mainsail has an area of 122 sq ft and an 18′4″ leach. The 20 sq ft mizzen provides balance and gives the boat good manners when luffed.
The 122-sq-ft lug mainsail and 20-sq-ft Bermuda mizzen sail were also made as part of the BBA course but, as the photos show, the mainsail needs some tweaking to lose the crease from the throat to the clew. With two of us aboard, we had a most enjoyable sail in a good Force-3 breeze with flat water in the sheltered waters of the River Torridge in North Devon, England. We had plenty of room: in fact, there were seven on board on launch day at the Academy and it didn’t seem at all crowded. The boat has a wonderfully lively performance and is easy and responsive on the helm. On a beam reach, it averaged about 5.5 knots, although when two others took over, the wind got up a bit and it looked as if it was going a little faster at times. It tacked through about 90 degrees and carried way very easily through the eye of the wind. After cleating the mizzen, it is easy to tend the mainsheet while steering and, with no headsail, there isn’t much for anyone else to do except enjoy the ride. Kate need have no fears about sailing the boat by herself.
Twenty years seems a long time from the publication of plans to the completion of the first boat, but it is nice to think that other examples of this great little boat might now follow.
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.
Wherries go back to the 15th century in Britain, where the designation has been applied to a variety of vessels from canal boats, water taxis, naval gigs, fishing dories, and even collegiate rowing vessels. Later, in colonial America, wherries built by immigrants plied the Maine coast, and rapidly became the preferred boat of the Atlantic salmon fishery. These wherries feature a plank keel, which makes it very easy to work the boats on and off the shore, since they stay upright and create a flat surface in the boat for the occupants to move around. Fine waterlines at the stern as well as at the bow provide efficient rowing and easier launching into waves. The sheer flares at the stern and ends in a wineglass transom. The resulting greater volume provides the buoyancy needed to retrieve the heavy anchors used to set fishing nets.
The Duck Trap Wherry was designed in 1980 by Walter J. Simmons of Lincolnville, Maine, as a 16′ pulling boat, traditionally built with white-cedar lapstrake planks over an oak backbone and steam-bent frames, all copper and bronze fastened. The completed boat was to weigh around 175 lbs.
Responding to demand for even lighter boats, Walt created 14′ and 15′ glued-lapstrake plywood versions that come in under a magic 100-lb mark. They were drawn with the amateur builder in mind and require about 300 hours of labor.
Photographs by Pepe Mélega
The rowing version of the wherry has widely spaced steam-bent frames to support the glued-lap plywood planking. The sailing version gets stouter sawn frames.
Walt, responding again to demand, added sailing capabilities: centerboard, rudder, and a beefed-up structure. The spritsail keeps the center of effort low to minimize the heeling moment imposed upon the boat’s 4′ beam and low freeboard. This new version was just what I was looking for: a trailerable sail-and-oar vessel that would be easy to build, perform well in light winds, and carry two for day trips on nearby reservoirs.
The sailing version of the wherry has more substantial sawn frames to stiffen the hull for the strain imposed between the mast pressed to leeward and the weight of the crew set to windward.
The plans I ordered from Duck Trap are comprehensive and very clear. They consist of a booklet on glued lapstrake construction and four 36″ x 26″ sheets that include lines, offsets, construction details, and a sail plan.
If you don’t want to loft the lines, full-sized loftings are available and printed on a long roll of paper. There is also an e-book for the Duck Trap Wherry available as a download or a CD. It is a detailed guide to the construction and includes instructions for building the wherry in any of the design lengths, 14′, 15′, or 16′, and is helpful to read before ordering the plans to see what you can expect in the building process.
With two at the oars, the wherry trims nicely.
I built a 16′, two-station pulling version to this design back in 2013 as my first glued-lapstrake construction. The plan featured the arrangements for setting the boat up for solo or tandem rowing. After years of happy rowing, I decided to build a sailing version from the same plans. It is important to note that, when ordering a set of plans, one gets the right to build one boat. Any subsequent boats built to the same plans require the payment of royalties to the designer—in this case, half of the plan’s purchase price.
On the first boat I built, I transferred the drawings of the stations to 3/4″ pine boards and used a bandsaw to cut them out. Yet on the sailing version, I used a different approach to gain precision and to become acquainted with CAD techniques. I electronically lofted the stations from the offsets and drew the major parts as CAD files and had them CNC routed. For the molds I used 3/4″ MDF. The keel and most of the solid Brazilian cedar parts that would be used throughout the construction of the boat, such as inner stem and transom as well as quarter, thwart, and transom knees, I also had shaped by CNC router.
The plank keel is an 18mm laminate consisting of two layers of 9mm okoume marine plywood (I used Brazilian cedar plywood). The plans call for 1-1/2″ oak stem and transom knees and 1” mahogany transom; I used Brazilian cedar lumber.
A passenger in the stern throws the trim off a bit when two are at the oars, but the wherry can support the weight of three adults.
The lighter rowing-only version uses steam-bent laminated oak ribs. To give the hull the necessary strength to withstand the stress imposed by the sailing rig, my sailing version has sawn, 1”-thick frames of Brazilian cedar, although one could use white cedar or red oak.
The planking, cut from 9mm Brazilian cedar marine plywood (okoume is specified), is scarfed together to get the lengths required. Since the interior was to be varnished, a detail I worked out was to hide the joints behind one of the frames. The result is well worth the effort, as there are no visible joints on the varnished interior. The sheer is strengthened by oak or mahogany inwales and outwales separated by wooden blocks evenly spaced between the frames.
The sailing version of the Duck Trap Wherry has two rowing thwarts, side benches, and a stern seat. The seat in the bow serves as the mast partner. I combined the stern seating elements in one piece of 9mm plywood and added 10mm teak planks to all of the seats, simulating a yacht’s deck.
Four teak floor gratings cover the flat keelson and keep the crew’s feet dry longer, should water come in over the topside. I prefer the gratings over the 3/8″ x 3″ oak floorboard slats specified in the drawings.
The centerboard, laminated with two layers of 9mm plywood, has a 17-lb lead insert to drop the board when the pendant is eased. The 16′-long, 3″-diameter tapered mast was laminated in two halves made from local freijó wood, which has properties similar to the eastern white spruce recommended by the designer. The 16′ sprit was carved from one single 2″ x 2″ piece of freijó.
Plans detail a kick-up rudder and a fixed version. I opted for the latter, which is more curvaceous and has a classic look. It’s made of laminated plywood and cedar cheeks. Special Duck Trap bronze fittings are an ingenious way to let the fixed rudder rise along a bronze rod if the blade touches the bottom.
The 100-sq-ft spritsail is ideal for our prevailing light winds. The plans call for one reef; I added a second to ensure that the sail won’t overpower the boat if the wind pipes up. In addition, after talking to Walt, I had the sail made with a full batten on the sail foot. This setup gives it a nicer shape, especially when sailing downwind.
I made the 8′ spoon-blade oars to Ducktrap Store plans. It is not a very difficult task to shape them, and they are quite efficient in the water.
The wherry is a fairly light boat—around 230 lbs for the fully rigged sailing version, with all my usual stuff in it—and is easily trailered with my mid-size sedan. At the ramp, it can be effortlessly launched and retrieved from the trailer with its front winch and a roller at the rear.
Boarding is pretty straightforward from the side, and moving around in both versions of the wherry is facilitated by the broad plank keel, which measures 15″ amidships, although the centerboard trunk in the sailing version is a bit in the way. Working wherries were designed to allow the hauling of heavy fishing nets over the side and, like them, the Duck Trap Wherry has excellent stability.
For solo rowing, using the stern station leaves the bow high, an advantage for holding a downwind course. The forward station is the choice for upwind work.
Rowing the wherries is a sheer pleasure. The fine ends create very little drag. It is almost like rowing a competition skiff. I never felt like I was hitting the limit when pulling hard. It takes little effort to make 5 knots, so at cruising it could cover a lot of ground at a satisfying pace. The heavier sailing version of the wherry, even carrying the weight of the sailing rig, performs really well under oars, too, almost as well as the rowing version.
The wherry turns well for course corrections and favors tracking over maneuverability in tight quarters. For tandem rowing, there is enough space between stations to keep out of each other’s way. The plans provide arrangements for tandem rowing for the 15′ and 16′ versions of the wherry.
The boomless spritsail offers uncomplicated sailing and quick furling when it’s time to strike the rig.
For the sailing version, putting the unstayed mast up is a cinch and the boat can be ready to sail in a few minutes. The wherry needs very little wind to be up and running and the spritsail points well to weather, tacking through a very commendable 84 degrees. With 5 knots of wind, it can do 3.5 knots to windward.
The hull was initially intended for rowing and has a low freeboard amidships, so keeping an eye on the leeward rail while under sail is always advisable in order to avoid accidentally taking on water.
On a beam or a broad reach, the wherry performs superbly, easily reaching its predicted hull speed of a little over 5 knots. I’ve even recorded 5 1/2 knots when riding out a puff.
The Duck Trap Wherry is a versatile boat that rows and sails with ease. It’s designed with the amateur builder in mind and requires about 120 man-hours for a standard build. It took me around 300 hours to build the sailing version of the wherry, with a considerable amount of that time spent finishing the boat to a high standard.
The wherry’s classic beauty always draws a lot of attention. Captain Pete Culler had a saying that, “If a boat looks good, it usually is good.” The Duck Trap Wherry is proof of that.
Oliver Ilg, 58, was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and moved to Brazil at the age of 4. He is a physicist with an MBA and worked for the automotive industry from 1985 to 2002, when he joined Sterling Yachts. His father always loved boats, so Oliver had early exposure to them—at the age of 3 he was already rowing a wooden boat. In 1989, Oliver was the project manager for the construction of a 53′ steel sailing vessel for his father. Ten years ago, Oliver started to build wooden boats for himself as a hobby and has kept building them ever since then.
I arrived at the top of the boat ramp at Riffe Lake around 6 p.m., on a cool evening in the second week of March. I had some daylight left, enough to get the boat in the water and row the mile and a quarter to the north side of the reservoir where I would drop anchor for the night. I piled gear, groceries, and water jugs into the cockpit without keeping track of what I put aboard or where it went. I only knew that there was nothing left in the car and whatever I’d brought was aboard. I’d sort it out later.
Riffe Lake is a reservoir a dozen miles long from Mossyrock Dam to the mouth of the Cowlitz River; 14 miles if measured on a map down its center, along the long sagging curve of its east end and across a jog at the west end that looks like a displaced fracture. The reservoir was down about 25′, and between the water and the forested hills surrounding it, there was a broad band of buckskin-brown dirt as far as I could see. Backing the trailer down the 150-yard-long ramp across that barren landscape was like descending into a flooded open-pit mine. Of the five hinged sections of floating dock at the bottom of the ramp, only the last one was afloat. I eased HESPERIA, my 16′ cruising garvey, off the trailer into the water and pulled the bow up on the beach.
After I parked the rig, I shoved off and moved bags out of the way so I could sit down to row. I could feel the weight of the gear as HESPERIA slowly gained momentum. The water, food, firewood, gas, motor, spars, and sails all had to be set in motion, but after a dozen strokes they helped carry HESPERIA forward. The air was still, the lake quiet, and the cockpit resonated with the sound of water purling around the hull.
Photographs by the author
Water levels on Riffe Lake vary seasonally with the winter snowpack feeding the reservoir. It was 25′ below capacity during my cruise.
Just 100 yards from the ramp, I had rowed from the shadow of the land into sunlight and the moisture-laden air blanketing the water glowed the color of straw. The dam, 1-1/2 miles to the northwest, was in shadow—just a dim sooty line at the water’s end—while the north shore was radiant in the brassy light of the evening sun.
Somewhere in the water below HESPERIA, 200′ down, was what remained of the town of Riffe: the concrete foundations of a general store, a post office, two Baptist churches, a gristmill, and the homes of 350 souls. The Port City of Tacoma, 50 miles to the north, needed electricity, and wanted it cheaper than the power purchased from a power plant on the Columbia River, so the city appropriated the valley around the Cowlitz River under eminent domain and began building the Mossyrock Dam in 1965. Surveyors plotted a contour line through the forests where the reservoir’s water level would be when the dam was put into operation. Everything below that line was logged or demolished.
Nearly 2,000 people were forced to leave before their homes were torn from their foundations.The dam rose 365′ above the riverbed when it was finished, and it took eight months for the reservoir to fill, swallowing up not just Riffe, but also Nesika, a town 6 miles upstream, and most of Kosmos at the east end of the reservoir.
Roger Siebert
.
Just as I drew near the north shore, the sun impaled itself on the tips of ridge-top trees, and split in three behind a picket of slender tree trunks. The light that had been spilling over the ridge angled upward, and the hills to the east grew wan in the pale purple penumbra.
I reached the mouth of the creek where I planned to spend the night, a deep nick in the shoreline, 200 yards long and 100 yards wide at its mouth. At the top of the band of bare ground around it were scattered tree stumps, sawn straight through at the top, with roots exposed when the reservoir’s high water washed away the soil.
Halfway into the creek, I lowered the anchor, paid out the chain and the soft braided rode, and when I came to its end, I was still holding the full weight of the anchor and chain. I had not given the stream its due—it had cut a ravine that was beyond the 100’ reach of my rode.
Sitting on the foredeck with my heels skimming the water, I paddled farther into the inlet and tried again. I felt the rode go slack with 50′ of rode in the water. I let HESPERIA drift downstream, nudged by a chilling north wind. Like a fisherman sensing a fish nibble at his lure, I felt the anchor flukes tripping over rocks. When they caught and held, the rode pulled tight.
I started working through the clutter onboard to prepare for the night. Before I could raise the roof on the pop-top cabin, I had to get the weight of the spars and sails off. I stepped the main and mizzen masts and set the bag holding the rest of the spars across the cockpit. Inside the cabin, I put the floorboards on the side-bench ledges, laid on my back, and, with my feet centered on the cabin roof overhead, pressed the roof up.
The wood stove didn’t require much time or wood to warm and illuminate the cabin. The portable loo is stowed in a locker in the cockpit, but it was too cold outside to use it there.
With the stovepipe connected to the woodstove and chimney cap on, I was ready to make a fire and warm the cabin. The wind made a low whistle and created enough draft to pull my lighter’s flame into the firebox to ignite the crumpled newsprint and kindling. With the fire going and the flames glowing bright orange in the mica window, I set a pot of soup on the stovetop. I was feeling a bit grubby after the long haul of getting to the lake, so I set the water jug on the roof of the cabin and connected it to the fitting that feeds the cabin’s plumbing, including the heat exchanger next to the stove. While the soup was heating, I filled the sink with warm water, shaved, and washed my hands and face.
After dinner I stepped out into the cockpit. The night sky was full of stars. I set the cockpit floorboards on the cabin roof to make a platform where I could lie down and wrap myself in a wool army blanket to look up at the patch of sky above the creek. Cassiopeia’s W, the Big and Little Dipper, and Orion with his three-star belt were all out. I counted six of the seven Pleiades; Jupiter was bright enough to paint a thin line of its reflection on the lake. A satellite drifted across the Big Dipper and blinked out.
I made the bed with the cabin floorboards filling in the space between the side benches, and cushions covering the queen-size platform. With clean sheets, my pillow from home, and two sleeping bags spread out as comforters, I settled in to sleep, but the wind strengthened and even in the lee of the woods surrounding the creek mouth, it was strong enough to stir the water. The constant slapping of wavelets against the hull was keeping me awake. Out on the lake, in the 2-mile fetch from the dam, a northwesterly was kicking up waves large enough to wrap around the corner and work their way up the creek. They rocked the boat and the mainmast was knocking against its partner.
Getting up in the middle of a cold night to move the boat farther inland was a bit of a nuisance, but it was worth getting a look at the lake by moonlight.
It was no use trying to sleep, so I got dressed and stepped outside into the cockpit. I unstepped the mainmast and set it on the cabin roof, then lay belly-down on the foredeck to pull the anchor up. I piled the dripping rode to the side so the water would run off the deck away from me. When the anchor broke free, the bow fell away quickly, so I promptly hauled the rode and chain in, grabbed the paddle, and pulled the bow back into the wind. As I paddled HESPERIA farther into the creek, the light of the newly gibbous moon lit the way ahead. I made slow but steady progress and the water remained deep beneath the hull even as the banks, clearly visible but colorless in the moonlight, closed in on HESPERIA. The bank to starboard was steep; to port was a gentler slope of short grass and tall crumpled reeds. I stepped ashore, taking the anchor with me and pushed the flukes into the firm mud. I pressed a stick into the mud at the water’s edge to see if the water level would change during the night, a habit I developed from cruising tidal coastal waters and from rivers where rain and dam releases can quickly change the water.
Back aboard, I paid out the rode and let the wind draw HESPERIA into deeper water. Now in quiet water, I settled back into bed, and tucked my hands and feet in close to warm up. The cabin was cold but HESPERIA was quiet, and I was soon asleep.
At dawn, the starboard cabin windows framed a lacework of leafless trees against a pale sky. I sat up in bed and pulled a handful of kindling from the locker beneath the stove. The Western red and Alaska yellow cedar start a fire quickly and impart their fragrance to my bedding, which I stow in the same compartment a bit farther aft. As the fire took hold and the stove radiated light and heat, I lay down in bed again and drew the covers over myself. In about ten minutes I raised a bare arm and felt the hot air pooled against the ceiling. I sat up into the heat and waved a hat around to stir the air and spread the warmth throughout the cabin. Up and dressed, I breakfasted: a fluffy smoked-salmon omelet, egg whites whisked stiff, yolks and crumbled salmon folded in, and cooked in a pan on the woodstove. I then let the fire die down, and put my shoes and coat on for a walk.
Downstream from HESPERIA, the trees at the creek’s mouth surrounded the view of lake with a tattered fringe of overlapping bare branches. One tree was suspended nearly horizontally above the bank, and others leaned over it as if pushed by the crowd of trees behind them. Whitecaps were skimming across the lake, but the wind in the creek’s slender ria was reduced to a sigh.
In the morning, I took a short walk into the woods around the unnamed creek.
I stepped ashore near the stick that I’d put at the water’s edge during the night. It was now 12″ from the water, so the level of the lake had dropped just a couple of inches. It was no cause for concern and likely just a wind-driven seiche dragging the water to the far end of the lake. There were deer tracks in the mud, one of them pressed into a bootprint I’d made during the night.
I stepped over the creek and climbed the slope on the east side of the ravine. High up on the bank, a pair of fluted stumps tilted downslope, their bare roots fanned out, touching lightly on the soil. One stump bore two notches, each a handspan wide, cut by the logger who had felled the tree. With steel-tipped springboards jabbed into the notches, he could stand higher and cut the tree where the trunk is narrower down above the flare to the roots. Even then, the stump was a good 7′ across where it had been sawn through.
I’d brought my axe and with two swings, cut a flake of wood from the side of the stump. Beneath the dull gray surface, the wood was a rich brown color and its sweet fragrance was clearly that of Western red cedar. The other stump had two deep saw cuts on the water side of the stump, just below the cut that had brought the tree down. Such wasted effort would only have been tolerable for loggers working with chainsaws instead of handsaws.
The pale fuzz on a stinging nettle is made up of hollow glass-like needles that break at the touch and inject formic acid and other compounds into your skin. Heat makes the needles harmless and breaks down the acid. Cooked young nettles are delicious.
In the woods at the top of the rise, there was level ground covered with moss and arched over by saplings that I had to step over and stoop under. I picked my way inland a few dozen yards and saw a patch of black no bigger than a bathmat. It was asphalt, the only indication that under the carpet of moss and scrub there was a paved road. If it continued on its line south, it would have dropped into the lake. The asphalt was also concealed by a patch of shin-high stinging nettles. I didn’t have any gloves with me to pick them so I returned to the boat and collected some of the plastic bags my groceries were in and returned to the nettles to harvest them with the bags on my hands.
In the morning, I lowered the cabin top and raised the sails, expecting to spend the day sailing.
Back at the boat, I put my dry suit on, stepped the mainmast, lowered the cabin roof, and rowed out toward the lake. A brisk easterly, funneled by the chain of hills to the north and a 1,000′ high ridge to the south, was churning a few whitecaps in the middle of the lake.
I began sailing from the cockpit, steering with the line running through the cabin and the perimeter of the inwales and attached to the tiller. Even with the heaviest cargo in the cabin keeping the bow high, the biggest waves slapped the bow and sent spray into the cockpit. I crawled over the cabin roof, removed the hatch at the back, and dropped in to stand on the cabin floorboards. I was out of the spray, and with the hatch coaming at my waist, I was only half exposed to the wind.
I came about as I neared Riffe Lake’s south shore and, as HESPERIA settled in on the starboard tack, it was clear I wasn’t going to get far beating into the chop. I bore away and sailed back toward the cove I’d anchored in. When I reached the lee of the creek mouth, I crawled forward to strike the whole rig, main first, then mizzen.
I had set out without the motor in place. It was stowed in HESPERIA’s tiny aft cockpit, the 20″ space between the transom and the cabin. I got the motor clamped in the notch in the transom, fired it up with two pulls of the starter cord, and motored along the north edge of the lake, skirting the shore to take advantage of the small lees there.
The stumps along the shore haven’t moved an inch from where the loggers left them a half century ago, but I couldn’t help but see them as living things in flight. Many, like this one, anchored to a rocky slope with its profusion of limbs, reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
Stumps were scattered everywhere on the slope between the lake and the forest, some elevated by their roots above the rust-colored soil, others clinging to steep-faced rock outcroppings, all leaning toward the water, an odd migration of spindly-legged creatures down the slope of the shore. It was hard not to think of them as once-mobile creatures, caught on the wrong side of the surveyors’ line during the antediluvian slaughter of the forest. It looked as if the stumps, decapitated and stripped bare, had risen in a blind downhill rush on thready amoebic limbs, only to be stopped dead a few strides into their descent of the valley.
Just a short distance and two turns from the lake, Swigert Creek’s inlet made a nice stop for lunch, but the two waterfalls (one here at the bottom, hidden by driftwood, and the other around to the right) would have been too noisy for an overnight stay.
On its way to the lake, Swigert Creek spills over boulders and under and around stumps and branches.
The wind eased as I approached a bay with a steep-sided rocky opening in its northwest corner. I killed the motor with the line tied to the motor’s deadman switch, crawled aft from the cockpit, and kicked the outboard up. I rowed the dogleg into the passage and, about 175 yards in, it ended in twin creeks cascading over boulders cradled in steep-sided ravines. A toppled tree trunk, 60′ long, spanned the mouth of one of the creeks and served as my dock. Its bare wood was silvery and smooth to the touch. I tied the painter to the blunt broken end of one of its roots and, in the still air of the gully, settled in the cockpit to make lunch.
Stewed just until they are soft, stinging nettles are delicious.
With the butane stove fired up in the cockpit, I cooked the nettles in a pot with a cup of water. The leaves, like fresh spinach, wilted and turned a darker green, and as soon as they were soft I could eat them without getting stung. They had a mild bite of pepper and a rich buttery flavor like artichoke hearts. When I finished them, I sipped the emerald green broth they’d cooked in; it was as flavorful as the nettles. I finished lunch with some vegetable soup from my favorite deli. It was not nearly as good as the nettles.
Separated from the lake by two sharp bends and sheltered from the wind in any direction by the forest, Shelton Creek’s ravine was as quiet an anchorage as I’ve ever had.
I motored another 2 miles east along the shore and turned north into a broad, 150-yard opening and then a blind corner 400 yards in. Steep, bare rock walls rose on the west side; to the east the shore was sloped and sandy, inhabited by stumps. The inlet veered to the right then immediately made a sharp turn to the left. Another third of a mile in, the passage came to an end. There, a creek had cut its way down through the forest floor, leaving moss and ferns hanging over the lip of eroded soil 20′ up, and the water wandering around logs and boulders in its bed.
When I reached the end of the inlet, I considered anchoring, but worried that there might be anchor-snagging driftwood on the bottom. Shelton Creek enters the inlet at the snag sticking out of the water at the left.
The banks of the inlet were too steep for exploring the woods, so I didn’t try going ashore. Rather than drop the anchor, I tied a line across the inlet, from one stump at the waterline on one side to another on the opposite bank. It took the anchor rode, the mainsheet, and another length of line to span the water. I snugged the line tight with a trucker’s hitch on one end, then tied HESPERIA’s painter to the middle.
To keep HESPERIA from wandering around during the night, I stretched a long line across the inlet and tied her bow and stern to it. I could sleep soundly without having to get up to see if that boat was still in a safe place.
With the cabin readied for the evening, I made French fries (russet potatoes, pan-fried in butter) as an appetizer and then cooked a dinner of sautéed broccoli and yellow bell pepper, with quinoa and chicken breast on a bed of tortilla chips topped with salsa.
It was still early in the evening, so after dinner I readied a bath. I took the rugs out—they needed a shake anyway—and snapped the tub in. I made it from the same tough coated material I used for the hull of FAERIE, HESPERIA’s folding coracle tender. The tub’s corners have snaps to hold them up to the ledges of the cabin benches. During dinner, I’d had a pot of water warming on the stove and it was quite hot, so I mixed it with cold water to cool it down to about 110 degrees. I poured the water into a gallon plastic jug with a knife slit in the lid for a shower head. After my bath, I folded the tub, with the water in it, and emptied it over the side of the cockpit. I air-dried sitting next to the stove in the cabin’s sauna-like heat.
High clouds had slipped in from the south during the evening, and in the dark it began to rain. I got the sleeping platform arranged and stepped into the cockpit for one last look-around. The anchorage was very well protected, and the only wind was the flow of cold air from the hilltops following the creek, just enough to tilt the column of gray smoke rising from the chimney into a starless ebony sky.
When I laid down to sleep, the inlet was so still that HESPERIA could have been aground. With the lights out, the cabin was lit by the agate glow from the last embers of the fire. The rain intensified and then stopped, leaving only the hushed voice of the creek slipping around its bed of boulders.
In the morning I sat up, filled the stove with kindling and scraps from my shop—bits of wood that I recognized from several of my projects. I lay back down, covered up, and waited for the cabin to warm and for the condensation on the windows and ceiling to evaporate. As I got dressed, the rain was so light that I could no longer hear it on the cabin roof, but I could see its scintillas in the dark reflection of the woods’ shoreline shadows.
To occupy the cockpit without getting wet I needed to get the canopy up. I set up the frame, which looks like a boom gallows but set in the wrong end of the boat, and snapped the canopy to the cabin roof and the gallows. I made a comfortable seat with the throw cushion, did a little morning reading, then put FAERIE together and slipped her, tethered, over the side. I set the cockpit table for breakfast; soup warmed on the butane stove, crackers, and blueberries.
Most of the shoreline was too steep to climb, so I paddled FAERIE, my folding coracle tender, for my morning constitutional.
I stepped aboard FAERIE and paddled around the inlet, first to the creek, where the bottom was littered with waterlogged driftwood, and then out to the bend in the inlet where gray-barked deciduous trees perched on the banks were flocked a bright electric green with lichen. I happened to have my GPS in my PFD pocket, so I turned it on and checked FAERIE’s top speed: 2.1 knots. She couldn’t even keep ahead of her own wake.
It had stopped raining by the time I returned to HESPERIA. I made ready to get underway, gathered up the shore lines, topped up the outboard’s fuel tank, and motored slowly out of the inlet.
All around the lake was a band of ground that was bare except for the stumps of trees logged in advance of the reservoir’s filling.
This knoll was once an island, but the low water has tied it to the mainland. There is a clearing in the middle of the knot of trees that would have made a nice place to camp but for all the branches strewn over it. During a strong wind, it would be a dangerous place to be.
The bridge over Landers Creek is cut off from the roadway it once served. The concrete-paved bridge deck, even though it is isolated from the land, has begun to sprout grass and saplings.
On the south side of the lake I could make out a pale-green stripe, which turned out to be a bridge when I took a look with the binoculars. As I got closer, it was clear that the bridge wasn’t connected to a road on either side. The lone disconnected span was held up by two concrete hammerhead piers and straddled a creek, looking like a giant dinner table.
Landers Creek has created a sandy delta that is one of the few level beaches on the lake.
With HESPERIA pulled up on the sand at the creek’s mouth, I scrambled up a bank of loose rocks to the east end of the bridge where the road leading to it had sloughed away, leaving a 20’ gap. The road bed was covered with grass, making it a pleasant, if narrow, meadow, and 100 yards to the east it was blocked by a wall of brush. I didn’t try crossing the creek to see the road on the other side. When it was passable, it must have taken traffic 3 miles to the west to Nesika, now at the bottom of the lake.
The roadway to the east of the bridge has turned into a meadow that is slowly becoming part of the forest again.
A breeze out of the west promised good downwind sailing to the far end of the lake, so I stepped the mainmast, broke out the square sail, and readied the halyard, haul-down, and sheets. I motored away from shore, killed the outboard and cocked it up, then lowered the centerboard, and raised the square sail. Spread by its upper and lower yards, it filled instantly and HESPERIA surged forward. I’d led the sheets through a block on the forward end of the cabin roof, so I scrambled through the cabin, a tight fit with the roof down, and stood up in the hatchway to take the helm.
The square sail means bringing two more spars and the sail but it’s my preferred rig for runs with a bit of a broad reaching. My 14′ push pole doubles as a selfie stick.
With one hand on the tiller and the other holding both sheets like the reins of a horse, I set a course northeast, across the lake and across the wind. With the board down, and the sail angled to face the wind, HESPERIA did well on a broad reach, making 3.5 knots. Water boiled up from under the transom; the lower yard was bent by the pull of the clews on its ends. In the middle of the lake where the wind was stronger, the GPS showed a steady 4 knots and flickered as high as 4.7 knots.
With the square sail pulling well, HESPERIA leaves a gurgling wake the equal of that created by the outboard.
As the end of the lake drew near, I peered forward by bending down to look across the cabin roof and through the space between the foot of the sail and the lower yard. Ahead, at the edge of a low brushy plain that had once been part of Kosmos, there was an inlet leading to two winding creeks.
This brush-covered flat plain just above the lake level is a small part of the Kosmos townsite. The rest of it is underwater.
Steffen Creek, the one to the north, would allow me to continue sailing downwind, although through a few twists and turns. The other, Rainey Creek, took a sharp 90-degree turn across the wind, and the square sail, not well suited to a close reach, would have to come down. My plan was to sail the northern creek until I was far enough inland to be out of the wind’s reach.
From upwind, this concrete “deadhead” was practically invisible, just a small whitecap that occurred more than once in the same place. The slightly brighter diagonal in the water is the glow of a horizontal piece of a demolished bridge.
Right at the entrance to the north creek I saw a small section of a wave trip over a deadhead that was just below the surface. As I sailed past with it on the port side, I got a better look at it. It was concrete, a tilted post rising above a jumble of pale pieces barely visible in the ruffled water. To starboard, a larger structure of concrete rose a few feet above the creek’s surface at an awkward angle, and on the shore beyond it was a section of a paved road with a faded white dashed centerline that started at the gravel at the water’s edge and ended in a stand of grass 50 yards away. I had passed over the ruins of a bridge, one of the remnants of Kosmos.
This short section of road used to carry cars and trucks to a concrete bridge spanning Steffen Creek. In 1968, the Army Corps of Engineers used the bridge as a training exercise, first testing a variety of explosives to see what damage they could do, then blowing up the whole bridge and leaving the rubble behind. A few of the remains rise above the creek’s waters.
The initial plan for the Mossyrock Dam would have spared Kosmos and left it safely above the reservoir, but a year before construction began, a proposal to make the dam 20’ higher was approved. That doomed Kosmos, and as at Riffe and Nesika, all of its buildings were torn from their foundations. A checkerboard of concrete slabs, a handful of roads that go nowhere, and the ruins of five bridges on a plain a few feet above the lake remain visible; the rest of the townsite is under water. A quarter mile and three bends farther up the stream, the trestles of a railroad bridge face each other from opposite banks, with nothing spanning the 100′ gap between them.
The railroad that led to Kosmos is gone, its rails pulled up and sold for scrap. The trestles on the banks of Steffen Creek are the most notable of its few remnants.
I hadn’t anticipated that the wind would blow unabated well into the creek. I brought the square sail’s starboard leech into the wind to slow HESPERIA’s rush into the narrowing creek.
The wind hadn’t let up as I had thought it would, and HESPERIA made quick progress over the next 200 yards toward a bend that I couldn’t see around. I started my turn, clipping the grass at the apex of what turned out to be a U-turn, and realized that the only thing I could do was aim for the grass on the other side of the bend to bring the boat to a stop. I almost made it, but a bit of wind caught the top of the square sail and nudged the bow to port, and the last of the momentum carried HESPERIA into a 6′-tall vertical bank that was a conglomerate of hardened dirt and bowling-ball-size rocks. The whole boat shuddered when the port corner of the bow made contact. I rushed forward, grabbed the paddle, and pulled the boat into the grass where I could park and drop the sail. The damage wasn’t bad. I could fix it when I got home.
I had to give up sailing the creek when I wasn’t able to round this bend, and instead of bringing HESPERIA to rest in the grass at the right, I hammered the bow into a stone-filled earthen wall.
I carried on under power, but I was able to motor only another 200 yards farther around a broad bend to find the shoaling creek bed was blocked with brush. There wasn’t enough room to turn around, so I cut the engine, turned to starboard, and plowed to a stop in the grass. After I paddled the stern around, I started the engine and headed back out to the lake.
Steffen Creek’s “navigable” section came to an end in grassy shallows a little over 1/2 mile in.
Leaving Steffen Creek, I headed back out into the lake to make my way to the launch ramp. The cloud ceiling had lowered over the ridge looming over the south shore.
Once I was back on open water, it was time to head home. To make the long run to the launch ramp, I dropped the rig and raised the cabin top so I could motor west in comfort. With the hatch cover in place and the doors closed, I was warm enough just being out of the wind. Seated comfortably on cushions in the warmth of the cabin, I could steer with just a light touch on the tiller line. The top of the ridge above the lake’s southern shore was lost in a low, gauzy layer of clouds. The miles of shoreline slipped by, and at some point, without knowing exactly where, I passed over Nesika. The town took its name from Chinook jargon, the trade language spoken in the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century. Nesika is the word for us.
Concerns about the ability of the Mossyrock Dam to survive an earthquake intact have led to keeping the water level well below its designed capacity, so the waters of Lake Riffe will never rise again to meet the edge of the living forest. But there are already areas of the shoreline where grasses, brush, and saplings have taken root and the green of the hillsides will eventually reach down to the blue of the water. The ancient stumps will be embraced by a new forest, all of the old abandoned roads will be covered by moss, and no trace of Riffe, Kosmos, and Nesika—us—will remain.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine. This story includes photographs and descriptions from a subsequent day trip to the lake. A previous adventure with HESPERIA and FAERIE, along with videos and more information about the boats appears in “A San Juan Islands Solo” in the June 2015 issue.
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.
You might not think of some of the most important tools in your workshop as tools. They’re your shop lights—important for safety, accuracy, and unblemished finishwork. The old lights I had in my garage shop were a mish-mash of 4′ fluorescent tubes including the old T12s and some T8s (T stands for tubular and the numbers are the tube diameters in eighths of an inch). The bulbs were getting pretty tired and didn’t provide good quality light or enough of it. I know something about the technical side of lighting because energy efficiency retrofits, which included lighting upgrades, were something I did in my day job before I retired. However, like the cobbler whose children went without shoes, I had never upgraded my own shop. When the ballast in one of the fixtures needed replacing, I decided it was time to upgrade to LED fixtures.
Alex Zimmerman
The author’s new light fixtures look like fluorescents, but the LEDs in the tube provide more light, better light, and last much longer.
LEDs—light-emitting diodes—have gotten dramatically better in the last few years, and the tubular lights made with LED strips are significantly better than the best fluorescents. They don’t flicker or hum, have good color rendition, turn on instantly even in freezing temperatures, and have a very long life. It’s unlikely I’ll have to replace them in my lifetime, but if they do need to be disposed of, they don’t contain the mercury that fluorescents do. The cost of LEDs has come down to a point where they are competitive with, or even cheaper than, any of the lighting alternatives.
If you go shopping for lights, you’ll come across some technical terms such as color temperature, CRI, lumens, and luminous efficacy.
Color temperature is the apparent color of the light source. Color temperature is literally the temperature of a “black body,” a theoretical object that reflects no light, heated to make it emit light like metal heated with a torch. Its temperature and the light it produces are both expressed in degrees Kelvin. The old incandescent bulbs, which we all had in our houses at one time, are at the low end of the temperature range (about 2,700 K) and appear to our eye to be quite warm, yellow in color. Skin tones look good under this source. Full daylight is toward the higher end of the temperature range at about 5,780 K and, by comparison, appears very cool, bluish in color. Thirty years ago, most commercial 4′ fluorescents—the 1-1/2″-diameter T12s—were 4,100 K, appeared quite cool and, in fact, were called cool white. T8 and T5 fluorescents now are commonly available in 3,000 K, 3,500 K, and 4,100 K. The 3,500 K lamps are a pretty good compromise and most people like how things look under them. LED light fixtures are generally available in 3,000 K, 4,100 K, and 5,000 K.
The CRI—color rendering index—is a measure of how well the colors of objects under a light source are rendered compared to an ideal source such as sunlight or an incandescent lamp. The ideal “black-body” light has a score of 100 and all other light sources are scored relative to that. Old-style fluorescents could be in the low 60s, and modern tri-phosphor fluorescents such as T8 or T5 tubes are somewhere between 80 and 85, which is pretty good. Most LEDs now available are slightly better, in the range of 80 to 90. High-CRI lights are important when you are trying to judge colors of paint. Paint that looks right under poor-CRI lights will look very different when you move your boat outside in the sunlight.
Luminance, sometimes also called brightness, is the total light output of a fixture expressed in lumens. The labeling of most new bulbs or fixtures will indicate the number of lumens. An old-style T-12 40-Watt fluorescent tube (stamped F40T12 on the end of the tube) actually draws about 50 Watts and puts out about 3,050 lumens, and an LED version built to replace it puts out 1,800 lumens while drawing just 16 Watts at a cost of about $7. By dividing a light’s lumens by its Watts you get its luminous efficacy, the light you get for the electricity. Incandescents and halogens range from about 8 lumens per Watt (lm/W) to about 20, depending on bulb size, and both convert most of the electrical energy into heat. The newest 4′ T8 and T5 fluorescent tubes produce up to 96 lm/W. Most commonly available LED shop lights are better than 90 lm/W, and one I found at Home Depot is 128 lm/W (for $44.97).
For general lighting of workshops, the Illuminating Engineering Society recommends illuminance levels—the amount of light falling on the work surface— in the range of 300 to 750 lux (that’s 30 to 75 foot-candles). Older eyes, like mine, will need a level at the higher end. Illumination engineers can determine which lighting fixtures will deliver that illuminance with this formula:
I = Ll x Cu x LLF / Al, where I is the illuminance in lux, Ll is the luminance in lumens, Cu is the coefficient of utilization for the inefficiency of the fixture), LLF is a light-loss factor to account for age and dirt, and Al is the illuminated area in square meters.
Calculating the ideal fixture is one thing, but what’s available in your local home improvement store will determine what you purchase. So, what type of fixtures and how many of them do you need to provide your shop with that optimal illuminance of about 750 lux? The area in my workshop where I build my boats measures about 8′ x 18′ and has an 8′ ceiling, so this is where I want to have good general light.
Small Boats Magazine
Inside the tubes of an LED shop light is a long strip of LEDs. The 30-1/2″ tube of this 3′ fixture has 168 LEDs and cost $16.
My local hardware store, Canadian Tire, had some fixtures on sale (regularly $59.99) : 4′, 50W LED double strip lights, with 4,500 lumens output from each fixture. By plugging 750 lux into the formula for a third of my shop area (8′ x 6′), I find that area requires 4,647 lumens. That’s 4,647/4,500 = 1.03 fixtures, but since fixtures don’t come in fractional units, a single 4,500-lumen fixture is close enough.
Small Boats Magazine
Each of the yellow rectangles is a 1/8″ x 3/32″ LED that puts out a light so bright that it’s best not viewed directly.
If you don’t want to do the calculations, a single 4,500-lumen fixture for an 8′ x 6′ area in a shop with an 8′ ceiling is a pretty good rule of thumb. The fixture doesn’t have to be 4′ long, either. If you can find a 3′ fixture with the same output, that would also do. I wouldn’t, however, install spotlights with that output for general area lighting, as it would result in lighting that is too bright underneath them and too dim between.
My lights have a 5,000 K color temperature, not too far off daylight, which is good for painting and finishing. Their efficacy, at 90 lm/W, is a little lower than the best available, but hey, a deal is a deal and, at the electricity rates I pay, we’re talking a difference in operating cost of just 50 cents a month between that and the most efficient LED light. None of the fixtures I was going to replace were built into the ceiling, so I could just replace the whole fixture rather than retrofit a built-in recessed fixture that is best left in place. If you need to keep the existing fixture, there are LED replacement kits for fluorescent fixtures, with efficacy of up to 115 lm/W, that include new drivers and LED strips to replace T12 or T8 tubes.
Alex Zimmerman
This portable work light has a single LED that puts out 3,500 lumens.
The workbench is where a lot of close-up work gets done, usually with your back to the overhead area lights. The bench is closer to a ceiling-mounted light, and with my 27″ x 9′ bench, it needs 2,000 lumens to provide 750 lux at the work surface. The fixture I got (again on sale) is a 28 W, 4′ single strip, with a pull-chain switch that puts out 2,500 lumens—a little more light than required but, for detailed work, more is better. For jobs that aren’t illuminated by the ceiling fixtures (think working under upturned hulls) I have a 3,500 lumen, 43-Watt, LED spot work light that cost $39.98.
Upgrading my shop lighting from fluorescent to LED has made it much easier to work in the shop, with less eyestrain at the end of a long day. I am pleased with the result.
Alex Zimmerman is a semi-retired mechanical technologist and former executive. His first boat was an abandoned Chestnut canoe that he fixed up as a teenager and paddled on the waterways of eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. He started his professional career as a maritime engineer in the Canadian Navy, and that triggered his interest in sailing. He didn’t get back into boatbuilding until he moved back to Vancouver Island in the ’90s, where he built a number of sea kayaks that he used to explore the coast. He built his first sail-and-oar boat in the early 2000s and completed his most recent one in 2016. He says he can stop building boats anytime. He is the author of the recently published book, Becoming Coastal.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
When we head out for our small-boat day trips we always bring snacks, water, towels, a wallet, and some dry clothes. It was challenging to keep those items dry from bilgewater and spray from the bay, so we began looking for dry bags that would keep those items accessible and protected. Recently we tried one of SealLine’s Discovery View dry bags, and it has been more than up to the task.
Photographs by the authors
The translucent material provides a view inside the bag, so there’s no having to guess what’s in it, an advantage when you have your gear in several dry bags.
The SealLine Discovery View dry bags have sides made of translucent 12-oz polyurethane; the bottoms are opaque 18-oz polyurethane-coated polyester. The translucent material has a frosty appearance, but colors and shapes are easily discerned through it. The opaque bottoms are offered in four colors to help distinguish one bag from another. Our 5-liter bag is big enough to hold a towel, a couple of shirts, and a few oranges with room to spare. The bottom is oval, creating flat sides to keep the bag from rolling off a dock or traveling around the cockpit. The D-ring attached to the closure provides a way to secure the bag and keep it safely tethered in the boat to avoid loss or getting underfoot. All Discovery View bags are equipped with PurgeAir valves. Once the top is sealed, the bag can be pressed down, making it even flatter and roll-resistant, and the enclosed air vents through the one-way valve. Just be sure not to cover the inside face of the valve with anything that won’t allow the air to pass through.
The Discovery View material feels tough and promises to be resistant to tears and punctures. The seams are radio-frequency (RF) welded, which results in a longer lasting seam that offers more resistance to water intrusion. The 1″-wide seam on the back of the bag is almost fully transparent and provides a strip with an even clearer view of the contents. The 5L bag weighs 4.8 ounces and, full of gear with the top rolled down, measures roughly 4″ x 7″ x 10″ and has 305 cubic inches of space.
The PurgeAir one-way valve vents excess air but keeps water out. The bag, with its top rolled down in three crease-free folds, keeps its contents dry.
Discovery View bags carrying cruising gear float if dropped in the water and are rated by SealLine as “waterproof, withstand quick submersions.” We have left our bag floating in the bay for as long as 45 minutes, and submerged it several times yet the contents stayed dry. In one trial, we noticed five to six drops of water finding their way past the black sealing strips and into the bag because we had rolled the top closure down only twice instead of three times. SealLine notes, “water resistance depends on the user carefully and properly sealing the closure. This means a minimum of three tight, wrinkle-free rolls.” The buckle halves are joined on the side opposite the folds. SealLine also advises against storing electronic or photographic equipment in any dry bag as they are not designed to provide gear submersion protection.
SealLine has been making bags to protect and carry adventure gear since 1986. The light weight and performance of the Discovery View dry bags make them well suited for use on our fleet of small boats.
Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about with their small fleet of 16 boats in the shoal waters of Northwest Florida and document their boating adventures and restoration on their blog.
Discovery View Dry Bags are available directly from SealLine and from numerous retail and online sources. They are available in four sizes: 5L, 10L, 20L, and 30L. Prices range from $29.95 to 49.95.
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.
Humble but hyper-handy, hook scrapers have been part of virtually every boat project I’ve done over the last 45 years. Unfortunately, this essential tool has been given a bad rap thanks to junky knock-off paint scrapers that can’t hold an edge properly or feel comfortable in the hand.
Ken Textor
The author’s collection, which includes some garage-sale finds and very old scrapers, has made itself useful through 45 years of building boats.
Good scrapers will last a lifetime and more. I have yard-sale scrapers from the 1940s and ’50s that are still serviceable—although replacement blades are tough to find. Fortunately, Red Devil and Hyde still make reliable and durable hook scrapers. The 1″ version from either brand has a blade with a single edge. Hyde’s 1-1/2″ scraper also has a single-edge blade, while Red Devil’s 1-1/2″ has two blades, back to back, so both can be used just by flipping the tool over.
Small Boats Magazine
Three scrapers with good high-carbon-steel blades (from top): the Hyde 10540 2-1/2″ four-edge scraper, the Red Devil 3040 1-1/2″ double-edge scraper, and the Red Devil 3010 1″ single-edge scraper
Four-edge scrapers using wider blades are heftier, two-handed tools for more aggressive work. Many, like Hyde’s, have a knob over the blade end for applying pressure with one hand while pulling with the other. The blades have two edges for fine work and two for rough work. The former are 2-1/2″ long and have a gentle curve; the latter are 2-1/8″ long and have a deeper curve, focusing the pressure on a smaller part of the edge.
Small Boats Magazine
Four-edge scrapers have blades for coarse and fine work. The double-edge scraper has twin blades that fit back-to-back in the handle. Single blades for the 1″ scraper simply slide sideways in and out. Replacement blades for all of these models cost only a few dollars.
While you’ll usually find these hook scrapers among others in the paint departments of home-improvement stores, they are also good woodworking tools, especially when jobs call for removing minute amounts of wood without marring nearby surfaces. With a little practice, you can trim countersink plugs flush with the surrounding wood, remove planer tears in wood with twisted grain, or radius sharp corners to better accept and hold paint or varnish.
Ken Textor
With a freshly filed edge, this old 1″ scraper with a wooden handle can smooth a softwood screw plug flush faster than sanding and without the chipping often caused by chisels.
Paint and varnish removal, however, is the primary job for hook scrapers and, for that, the 1″ or 1-1/2″ size is a good place to start your collection. These are among the smallest scrapers, but a wider blade doesn’t always mean quicker results. A 3″ blade requires two hands to create enough pressure for effective scraping. That means you can’t use a heat gun simultaneously to help remove the paint, so a 1” blade in one hand, leaving the other free for the heat gun, might actually work more quickly than a 3″ blade.
A sharp blade is essential for quick and satisfactory paint removal and woodworking. I usually hold the blade in a vise while I make a few passes along the length of the scraper edge with a high-quality mill bastard file, maintaining the roughly 45-degree angle of the scraper’s cutting-edge bevel. It doesn’t take much filing to put a fine edge on the high-carbon steel in good scraper blades.
A sharp hook scraper is a ticket to professional results when finishing wood and other semi-hard materials, like gelcoat, epoxy, and other fillers. Along with hammers and screwdrivers, they’re versatile tools you should never be without.
Ken Textor has been writing about, working on, restoring, building, and living on boats since 1977. He lives in Arrowsic, Maine.
Hook scrapers are available from a wide range of hardware stores and online resources.
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.
Frank Turner and his family—wife Rena and sons Daniel and John—live in Savannah, Georgia, where he is a petroleum dispensing systems technician (he keeps gas pumps in working order) and an avid and prolific woodworker. Over the years, he had built a lot of furniture, but, he says, “there are only so many coffee tables and bookshelves you can stuff into one house.” He had grown tired of furniture making, all straight lines and right angles, and thought making a canoe would provide new and engaging challenges and produce something his whole family could enjoy.
In May 2014, Frank began work on a 16′ Prospector from Bear Mountain Boats. He bought the plans rather than a kit, eager to try his hand at milling the strips, and picked up cedar from the lumber yard. Building the canoe from boards to boat took 18 months, working in the garage shop on and off; it was christened THE BEAST.
Photographs courtesy of the Turner family
John, Daniel, and Frank (left to right) pose proudly with THE BEAST, the first of Frank’s canoes. A skull over crossed paddles adorns the bow of an otherwise undecorated hull. Each subsequent canoe would get fancier.
Frank and THE BEAST joined Daniel and John, both Boy Scouts, for paddling outings with their Scout troop. After paddling stretches of the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers, Daniel and John took quite an interest in canoeing. Paddling down a river was much easier than lugging a backpack up a mountain.
Rena’s canoe, a Rob Roy, was built with a decorative stripe composed of hardwoods that were given to her by one of her patients, a British WW II merchant mariner.
In 2017, Frank and Rena bought plans for Bear Mountain’s 13′ Rob Roy Solo canoe. The smaller canoe, with two sharing the work and Frank having one canoe’s worth of experience to his credit, was a much less daunting project, so they decided to up the ante and take a stab at some decorative inlay. They were given some interesting woods to work with by Harold Dove, one of Rena’s pulmonary rehab patients. During World War II, Harold had served with the British Merchant Navy and in his retirement was building models of all the ships he had served on. As he got older, he found it more difficult to do the fine work and worried about being able to use power tools safely. During one of his sessions with Rena, after she mentioned her sons were Boy Scouts and enjoying canoeing, he suggested his treasure trove of hardwoods and fine plywood could be put to good use by the Turners’ growing fleet of canoes.
John, looking very dapper in his fedora, opted for a pair of eagles to set his canoe apart.
The third canoe, for John, was another Bear Mountain design: a 15-footer, Bob’s Special. It also got a decorative treatment, a fearsome-looking eagle with outstretched wings, and eyes made of sections of a pencil, with the lead as pupils. John christened it SKIPPER.
During the summer of 2019, the Turners joined the Scout troop and took their three canoes to the Suwanee River in Florida for a week-long, 50-mile cruise from the confluence with the Santa Fe River to Manatee Springs. The fleet consisted of 14 canoes and 26 paddlers.
Daniel’s canoe got the deluxe treatment, with a dramatic Viking theme: a dragon’s head and tail and an inlaid stripe with scores of battle shields patterned after Hot Wheels car wheels.
The launch of SKIPPER left Daniel as the only one in the family without a canoe of his own. Frank set out to take care of that in October 2019. At that time, Daniel was an Eagle Scout (as his younger brother would be, too) and he had rebuilt his school’s educational garden as his Eagle project. Daniel wasn’t especially enthusiastic about canoeing and, being on the autistic spectrum, required something extra to get him excited about the build. Hot Wheels cars and the movie series How to Train Your Dragon are his two favorite things, so Frank came up with a way to combine both in a modified Bob’s Special. It would be a Viking longboat with Viking shields. All 64 shields, inlaid below the sheer, were made, at Daniel’s suggestion, to look like the wheels of Hot Wheels cars. The ends of the canoe had a dragon’s head and tail modeled after Toothless, the leading dragon in the movie. They were mounted on the canoe decks with powerful magnets, simplifying hauling and storage, as well as making it possible to swap them end-for-end when switching between solo and tandem paddling.
During the building of his canoe, Daniel didn’t like the noise created by the power tools in the shop, so he stayed away when his father was working, but visited every evening to check on the progress. He was quite excited to see the dragon head and tail take shape.
Six years in the making, the Turner fleet has a canoe to suit every member of the family.
In May, when Daniel’s canoe was finished, the Turner fleet was complete: with four canoes loaded on the scout-troop trailer, the family launched on Lake Rutledge, set in the woods 175 miles northwest of Savannah. The sun was out and the four canoes, lined up on the water’s edge, drew a lot of attention. Daniel was more than happy to talk about his dragon to anyone who took an interest in it. And that was everyone who saw it.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
I have a shelf in the corner of my shop where I pile my collection of tape measures. They frequently fall off the shelf, and this past week I finally got tired enough of picking them up off the floor that I put them in order. In the process, I noticed a drawer in a small parts organizer that the tapes had been hiding. The drawer was marked “Knives.” The handwriting, in black Sharpie, was mine, but I didn’t remember putting any knives in that organizer. When I pulled the drawer out I immediately recognized one of the knives in it. “Oh, there you are,” I said out loud as one does when finding a member of the family in an unusual place in the house. It was my marlinespike knife, which had been missing for over ten years. The last time I’d seen it, I had taken it apart to replace the pins holding it together—they had loosened considerably with age. The knife had once belonged to my grandfather, Francis Cunningham, Sr.
My grandfather, Francis Cunningham, Sr., dressed for sailing in an outfit that was at once natty and ratty.
My father, Francis Jr., was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. Every two or three years we spent our summers in Massachusetts, splitting our time between my grandparents’ home in Lowell and a rented summer house in Marblehead, a harbor town just down the coast from Boston. On one of our stays back east we took a trip to New York City. I think it was in 1960; I was just seven years old then, so my memories of the trip are quite dim. I remember going shopping with my father for a birthday present for my grandfather, Papa, as my sisters and I called him. We went to Abercrombie and Fitch. It wasn’t at all like it is now, a source of trendy, upscale fashions for those who can afford to show a bit of midriff. It was the store for adventurers outfitting safaris and expeditions. I recall a high-ceilinged showroom with dark, wood-paneled walls covered with the mounted heads of African wildlife. Dad bought a folding marlinespike knife for Papa. We then visited FAO Schwarz, and Dad picked out a toy sailboat with a bright royal blue hull and a sloop rig. I liked it, and in my young mind I saw no reason that my 71-year-old grandfather wouldn’t like it too, as one of his birthday presents. As we were leaving, Dad asked me which gift Papa would like most; I could have the other one. I picked the knife for Papa and the sailboat was mine.
My grandfather’s boat, MOLLY MAY, was a 31′ auxiliary cutter designed by Wilder B. Harris in 1931. On hot summer days with light wind, Papa would trail a line from the stern so I could jump in the water and get towed behind the boat.
Papa would have used the knife for working on MOLLY MAY, the 31′ cutter he kept in Marblehead Harbor. After my grandfather died in 1965, Dad brought the knife home with him and used it working on his 27′ Tumlare sloop. In the ’60s, when I took an interest in maritime skills, Dad gave the marlinespike knife to me. Its blade held a good edge and was the best I’d ever used for cutting rope.
Eventually the knife got a bit loose and the marlinespike wouldn’t snap open and stay steady, so I took the knife apart, intending to fix it. I was at a loss for how to go about the repair and I put the knife away, in pieces. As it often is with important things put away carefully so they won’t get lost, I forgot where I put it. Having the knife once again in my hand, I straightaway set to putting it back in working order, using common nails to make new pins and replace the missing bail.
I sharpened the blade and, just as I remembered, it cut through rope with ease. I haven’t seen Papa for more than 55 years, but when I look at the knife, I imagine it held in the hand of my grandfather and think, “Oh, there you are.”
Putting the knife back together
The pins holding the wood covers to the liners hadn’t loosened so I had left those parts together. My goal was to make the knife functional again, not make it look like new. The knife had never rusted, so the steel had no pits and I could keep the patina of age.
I used two sizes of nails to make new pins for the knife. They were oversize, so I chucked them in a cordless drill and spun them against a fine sanding belt to get them to fit the holes in the liners.
The nail marked with the arrow presses against the two-ended spring to tension it. I couldn’t reassemble the knife with it in place, so I set it aside while I joined the liner and cover with the other pins.
With the pieces assembled, the pin that tensions the spring is driven in. It’s already seated here, marked by the arrow, with its point in a hole in the piece of wood under the knife. An extra tensioning pin, at left, shows the point beveled on one side. It functions a bit like a drawbore pin in a mortise-and-tenon joint, creating tension between the pieces being joined as it’s tapped in.
The beveled end of the tensioning pin is visible below the knife. With all of the pins in place, they can be trimmed and peened.
I kept the heads on the finishing nails I used for the new pins. That saved me from having to flare both ends of each pin. The belt sander took the extra metal off both ends of the pin. I left enough metal on the cut ends to flare them when peened.
The reason the knife loosened up in the first place was that the peened ends of the pin were pressing against wood, not metal (except for the blade’s pivot, run through metal bolsters on either side). I flared the pins wider than the originals had been to have a longer-lasting hold on the wood. My anvil is, I believe, a train car’s roller bearing, which I found by railroad tracks.
I used another nail to make a new bail. The original had been lost quite some time ago. The nail’s steel was soft enough to hammer cold to make the ends flat and wide.
After years of sharpening, the tip of the blade was no longer buried in the handle.
The projection on the blade’s tang is called the kick. It keeps the sharp edge of the blade from making contact with metal inside the handle. Trimming the kick on the belt sander will allow the blade to sit a bit deeper.
With the kick shortened, the blade is fully buried in the handle.
Peening the pin ends flared them, but they were shaped like the bells of trumpets and had sharp, proud edges. To roll the edges down and create mushroom-shaped ends, I used a diamond Dremel bit to shape a concave end on a pin punch.
A few taps of the modified pin punch rounded the rivet heads.
Back in good working order after serving the family for 60 years, my marlinespike knife is ready for future generations.
In his classic The Dory Book, John Gardner wrote, “The handsomest of all pulling dories is unquestionably the long, slim, but richly curving double-ender that originally came out of the Orne Street boat shop of William Henry Chamberlain of Marblehead.” Designed to take one or two hunters, or a hunter and his dog, to the offshore islands and marshes along the New England coast, the gunning dory had to be reasonably fast under oars, and capable of handling the sort of blustery fall weather that a duck hunter might encounter.
Photographs by Matthew Norman
The parallel sides of the deck opening allow the slip thwarts to be placed wherever they’re needed for rowing.
My home waters of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, are halfway up the west coast of Lake Michigan. Within minutes of launching, you’re outside of the Sheboygan breakwaters, and out in the waves and winds fetching up from the shores of Chicago, 150 miles to the south. It can really rock out there; the sailors love it. I wanted a boat capable of being rowed by one or two, offshore, in any sort of reasonable weather. Having grown up on the shores of Lake Superior in Duluth, and having worked in the Merchant Marine on the Great Lakes as a young man, I’m very aware of the power of the water. Seaworthiness was at the top of my list of requirements. And, well, the boat had to be beautiful.
My search for a boat led me to Crawford Boat Building, in Marshfield, Massachusetts. I had read of the well-known Crawford Melonseed, and I discovered that Roger Crawford also offers a Gunning Dory. The 15′ double-ender met my specifications: fiberglass, with enough wood trim to highlight the lovely lines of the hull, and the heritage of an open-water dory. Roger responded enthusiastically to my email query and, in autumn of 2019, he agreed to build me a Gunning Dory.
A solo rower uses brackets on the inside edge of the deck to brace the feet.
Roger builds his boats one at a time. The Gunning Dory is hand-laid fiberglass starting with rolled-on gelcoat. The layup for the bottom includes biaxial fiberglass cloth, a 1/2″ foam core, and two layers of 1.5 oz ’glass mat. The sides get 10-oz ’glass cloth, biaxial cloth, and a layer of 1.5-oz mat. Reinforcement is added at the ends where wear is likely and polyester resin is used throughout. The hull is molded with a lapstrake appearance, and the five faux strakes accentuate the hull’s curves and make the layup stronger and stiffer. Foam-filled buoyancy chambers in the bow and stern add to the flotation provided by the foam core in the bottom and foam panels under the deck. The dory’s interior fiberglass has a long racetrack-oval opening; the parallel sides allow the two slip thwarts to rest anywhere along the sides’ length. The construction gives the hull incredible stiffness; nothing flexes as you row. All trim and the seats are solid teak.
There are only a few options available for the dory. I upgraded from the oil to a Cetol finish on the teak after talking with Roger, who convinced me that the Cetol would look better in the long run, and be easier to keep up if I tended to it properly. I also ordered two brass fittings that each allow you to lock a pair of oars to the seats to keep them from being stolen.
The double-ended hull tracks well without the addition of a skeg.
The boat has three rowing stations, and the two teak seats can be set up for solo rowing, double rowing, or rowing with one to two passengers. The boat comes with three sets of rowlock sockets, and two sets of bronze oarlocks. Changing the seat positions to move between rowing stations is quick, using brass thumb-screws. When rowing double, the forward rower can brace his feet against the forward edge of the aft seat, where Roger places a brass half-oval for your feet to brace against without marring the finish in the wood. Footrests for a solo rower amidships, or the aft rower of a crew of two, consist of fiberglass L-brackets secured with brass thumb-screws to the inner face of the cockpit opening. They can easily be moved fore and aft to accommodate different leg lengths. I prefer having my feet closer together; a bar spanning the brackets would achieve that.
I purchased a light Load Rite trailer from the Crawford shop, and Roger set it up for the boat. Because the boat and trailer are so light, the rig can be pulled by almost any vehicle. The light weight makes launching the 160-lb boat easy. I can move the dory on and off the trailer even when the trailer is stopped with its hubs and bearings above the water level.
The sole of the cockpit is level, and offers good footing as you step aboard. The flat bottom allows the boat to sit upright when beached. Despite the narrow flat bottom, the gunning dory is close to being round-bottomed. Stepping aboard, it’s important to keep your weight centered. Once you’re seated, the boat feels solid underneath you. A pair of 7-1/2′ oars is a good fit for the middle or forward stations; the aft station, with a narrower span between the locks, takes 7′ oars.
The stroke uses 7′ oars; the bow rower, with a greater span between the locks, uses 7-1/2′ oars.
Rowing the Gunning Dory is a pleasure. The boat has neither skeg nor skids, but it tracks very well, even with a cross breeze or in waves. It tracks dead straight in calmer water and requires minimal correction when the wind is blowing or the waves are hitting at an angle. For a boat that tracks so well, the dory spins easily when one oar is pulled and the other backed. It floats up and over larger waves without hesitation, and rowing into a headwind is a smooth roller coaster ride as you bob up and over the oncoming waves. I have yet to see a drop of spray come aboard.
The Gunning Dory is responsive to even slight corrections with the oars and, despite being light for its size, it carries well between strokes. Rowing the Gunning Dory is so effortless that it is easy to get lost in the rhythm of my rowing. My rowing so far has been local. Down the last mile of the Sheboygan River, then out the breakwaters, and upwind along the shore for an hour. Then, a break: oars stowed, water bottle and snack at hand, I just sit and feel the waves under the boat while watching the shore and the birds. The boat feels stable and I can imagine using it used for hunting, with a dog or two being lifted in or out after retrieving a duck.
The Gunning Dory responds well to two rowers and carries its speed between strokes.
The Crawford Gunning Dory is a gorgeous boat. The beauty of the wood gunwales, breasthook, and seats is mesmerizing. The workmanship is flawless; everything looks Bristol. Roger’s take on this traditional type meets my criteria for seaworthiness and beauty and is a well-engineered, well-built vessel that is a pleasure to row.
Dan Knoedler works as a Community Mental Health Service psychiatrist in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife, Suzanne. He has spent most of his life living in the Great Lakes Basin, on the shores of either Lake Superior or Lake Michigan. His fleet of boats over the years has ranged from a used, homemade 12′ Bolger Old Shoe sailboat, which tried to sink to the bottom the first time he took it out, to a 28′ Bolger-designed Edey & Duff Shearwater Yawl. His children have set their sails to Chicago, Austin, Palo Alto, and Auckland, New Zealand, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his passions. He anticipates rowing, sailing, paddling, and otherwise involved with boats to be the great theme of his free time as he eases into retirement.
As a child growing up in south Florida with a canal in my backyard, I always wanted to build a boat. I had drawn several designs as a young boy, but I never fulfilled my dream of building one. I recently moved to South Carolina and, living near a wonderful lake now, I needed a boat. It had to be sturdy, have an open floor plan for fishing, and be stable enough for two adults moving about. To build the boat, it had to fit in my garage and still leave room for my truck. After looking at hundreds of boats online and in person I came across Spira International’s 15′ Hudson skiff. Designer Jeff Spira specializes in boats that can be built by amateur builders with basic woodworking skills and limited budgets. I ordered the print version of the Hudson plans: four 24″ x 18″ sheets and a well-written 50-page workbook with detailed instructions, drawings, and color photographs that are easy for the first-time builder to follow.
The plans call for inexpensive common dimensional lumber and plywood. While the frames are intended to be cut from 2x3s, the quality of the 2x3s that were available were not to my liking, so I bought 2x4s and cut them down to size. Surfacing the lumber with my jointer and thickness planer provided flat and true surfaces, making construction easier. The six frames are each made of three pieces, lap-joined at the corners and secured with 2″ #8 stainless-steel deck screws and PL Premium construction adhesive, as per the designer’s recommendations. The manual also specifies epoxy as a suitable adhesive. The bottoms of the frames have notches to set the keelson flush, with extra width to provide limbers on either side.
The transom is framed with 2x4s, which I also surfaced, reducing their size just a bit, but not significantly diminishing their strength. The manual indicates these frame members can be butted together and held by adhesive. The joints will get the strength they need when the transom’s plywood face and gusset are applied. I half-lapped the transom frame members, which took a bit more time but provided some extra strength. The stem is a straight 38-3/8″ length of 1×6, which gets beveled after the chine logs and sheer clamps are installed.
Photos by and courtesy of the author
The framework for the skiff is assembled over a 2×6 strongback. The half-lapped joints in the transom framing are this builder’s option.
The frames are supported over a 2×6 strongback by scrap-wood pillars at specified heights and spacing for each frame. The locations provided are precise and assure fair curves on the sides and bottom. The transom is set at 15 degrees and the stem at 36 degrees by matching bevels on the ends of the strongback and temporarily held in place with sheetrock screws.
The plans specify a 1×6 for the keelson, and 1x2s for the chine logs and sheer clamps. To get the length needed for the logs and clamps, I scarfed two pieces together for each of the longitudinals. Following the designer’s recommendations, I secured the keelson to the frames using PL Premium and four 2″ #8 deck screws. A framing square assured the frames were square to the keelson.
The chine logs and sheer clamps are set in notches in the frames, transom frame, and stem. The manual suggests a backsaw for cutting the notches, but I used a multi-tool. Fine-tuning can be done with a rasp or file. I installed the chine logs and sheer clamps, fastening them to each frame with 2″ #8 screws. The chines and sheer clamps are let into the stem, establishing the bevel for the forward edge. With the skeleton of the hull complete, the frames, stem, transom, chine logs, and sheer clamps are all planed fair to meet the plywood sides and bottom.
Spira designs typically leave the interior arrangements up to the builder. The decks and bench meet this builder’s needs. Floorboards will be added later to separate the occupants from water in the bilge and address the possibility of tripping on the frames.
The manual recommends using marine plywood if the hull is not going to be sheathed with fiberglass and epoxy, and ABX plywood if it is. I wanted to have a bright-finished interior, so after contacting Jeff and discussing different types of plywood, I went with marine-grade plywood with meranti faces.
The plans call for two 4×8 sheets of 1/4″ plywood for the sides and two sheets of 3/8″ plywood for the bottom. The transom gets 1/2″ plywood on the outside and a 3/8″ plywood gusset in the inside. The shapes for the plywood aren’t provided in the plans, avoiding any problems created by variations in individual boats, but taken directly from the assembled framework. To fit the plywood to the transom, sides, and bottom, I first dry-fit each sheet of plywood, clamping it in place, pre-drilling all the screw holes, and tracing the framework edges on the plywood. I then removed the plywood and rough-cut it to size using a jigsaw. Before installing the plywood permanently, I sealed the inside faces of the plywood, and any framing members that contact the plywood, with two coats of epoxy. I applied Thixo thickened epoxy to the frames just prior to assembly, to assure a better bond between frame and plywood. I used a lot of clamps to hold the plywood in place, then drove 1-1/4″ #6 deck screws every 2″.
Steven Paci
The builder added the foredeck to provide a covered storage space and side decks to support fishing-rod holders. The trolling motor is his preferred choice of power for the lake he frequents.
To cover the hull’s full length, the 8′ sheets of plywood are butted together in place on the frame and the seams are backed by plywood butt blocks, screwed and glued. After the plywood is all attached and the epoxy has cured, the proud edges of the plywood are planed flush with the chine logs and sheer clamps.
The plans do not call out a keel or skids on the bottom, but through my research I found that it was common practice for protecting the bottom and improving tracking and steering, so I followed suit.
The broad stern can support the weight of a small outboard and its operator.
To finish the exterior, I applied two coats of epoxy, four coats of a two-part epoxy primer to the bottom and two coats to the sides, then two coats of bottom paint and two coats of topsides paint. After the outside of the boat was complete, it was time to flip the hull over. It wasn’t heavy, so three friends and I easily lifted the hull off the strongback and righted it.
At this point, typical of the Spira plans, the arrangement of the interior is left up to the builder. I added a short foredeck to make a small storage space in the bow and installed inwales and railcaps for mounting cleats and rod holders. For seating, I made a fore-and-aft bench/storage box that allows easy access to the motor and still gives me easy access to the space of the open boat. I have not added any floorboards but intend to do so in the future. Although this boat can be rowed, I did not make any provisions for oars, since my mode of power will be an outboard and trolling motor.
The designer recommends a 7.5 hp outboard for the skiff. The motor here is a 3.5 hp.
I have a full-sized pickup truck, so trailering the lightweight skiff is not at all difficult. Launching at the ramp is similarly not a problem; Hudson floated right off the trailer. Once in the water, it was perfectly balanced. The flat bottom makes the boat very stable, easy to move about in, and provides a comfortable platform for standing and casting. To be expected of a small boat, it will list whenever you move to the side, but only slightly. The plans recommend a 7.5-hp outboard for the Hudson, and set the maximum outboard size at 15 hp. I live on a lake that does not have rough seas or pounding surf, so I use a Minn Kota 30-lb thrust trolling motor for the skiff. A 9.9-hp outboard would likely get the boat on plane, but such a motor would cost twice what I spent on building the boat. I go out on the lake for enjoyment and relaxation so the trolling motor is easy to manage, quiet, and serves my needs. It has enough power to move the boat with three adults aboard even against a 15-mph headwind. With a 3.5-hp outboard, the boat clips along at a fair pace, though not on plane. With just me aboard, sitting well aft at the helm, a bit of the bow is out of the water and the waves could slap against the flat bottom. The skids I added seem to provide good directional stability for the boat; it tracks true. With the outboard’s tiller hard over, the Hudson turns on a dime.
I am so pleased that the Hudson skiff gave me exactly what I wanted. It was a straightforward, frustration-free boatbuilding project, and in the water it’s an easy-to-handle, lightweight boat that makes a perfect fishing platform.
Steven Paci’s career spans many different fields—cabinet making, construction, machine design—but his bread and butter has always been industrial machine maintenance. He grew up near the water in Florida and later on the Great South Bay in Long Island, New York. He cared for an 18’ Thompson wooden boat and made a lot of furniture, so building a boat seemed the next thing to tackle. He now lives in South Carolina across the street from Lake Cunningham and was moved to fulfill his childhood dream of building a boat. He’ll use the skiff, christened BARBARA JANE, for fishing and spending days on the lake with his grandchildren.
Hudson Skiff Particulars
[table]
Length/15′ 8.9″
Beam/4′ 10″
Hull weight/140 lbs
Maximum Displacement/1,220 lbs
Recommended power/7.5 hp
Maximum power/15 hp
[/table]
Update: Jeff Spira passed away unexpectedly in the spring of 2022. His website is no longer operating and it is presumed that his boat plans are no longer available.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Magazine readers would enjoy? Please email us!
I stood on the old planked dock gazing out from the Kingston, Ontario, shore onto the Cataraqui River. The sky was clear and blue but for a few cumulus clouds, the late morning was a comfortable temperature for late August, and the light breeze made a few ripples on the river’s dark blue surface. The far shore seemed quite distant but was in fact less than a half-mile away. I could plainly see the trees lining the shore with the few apartment buildings peeking out. Not wall-to-wall buildings as you would expect in a city, but very rural with a wooded shoreline. To my right, downstream, I could see under the Kingston-LaSalle Causeway to the city harbor and beyond it out into Lake Ontario. I was at the south end of the Rideau Canal system, a 125-mile-long series of interconnecting lakes, rivers, locks, and hand-dug canals that has connected Lake Ontario to the capital city of Ottawa since 1832.
Photographs by the author
It was getting late in the morning but SOL CANADA, the 18 1/2′ solar-powered cruiser I built, was finally ready to depart from the Kingston Marina’s dock, beginning my journey up the Rideau Canal system. I’d rely on the solar panels on the canopy to supply the only power I’d use to cover the 125 miles to Ottawa.
With SOL CANADA, my 18 1/2′ wooden, hand-built, solar-electric boat tied to the dock and now loaded with my supplies, I aimed to make it to Ottawa and back using only solar electric power. This has never been done before; at least that is the conclusion I arrived at from my research.
I shoved off at 11:30, made my way carefully out to the channel, passed by a few moored sailboats, and steered away from prop-fouling weed beds.
I made it into the channel and headed north. The current flowing against me slowed the boat to 3.7 miles per hour, a pace slower than I had planned for. The distance to the first lock was just under 5 miles upstream at Kingston Mills, and I could expect to arrive there in about an hour and a half. Within minutes of traveling up the channel, the city skyline vanished behind the riverside marshlands, acres of cattails, and grasses that are home to turtles, ducks, cormorants, Canada geese, mute swans, and seagulls. SOL CANADA was the only boat heading upstream. I soon passed under a busy overpass where thundering traffic disrupted the stillness. The banks grew higher and the river was soon flanked with high rocky shores covered with dense brush of pine and cedar. The river narrowed as if cutting through a gorge and stirred up algae, turning the water an emerald green. I followed a bend to the right and suddenly, over the bow, loomed the towering stone structure of the Kingston Mills Lock, like a medieval castle with round turrets of stone blocks flanking the lock gates. The flight of four locks would raise SOL CANADA 45′ in about an hour.
The Kingston Mills Lock on the downstream side is typical of all the locks on the Rideau with huge stone-block columns and wooden gates. This is how they were made in the 1830s and they’re still working almost two centuries later.
I did not have to wait very long before the lock gates opened to let a few downstream boats exit. A lock tender waved me in to take the left side of the lock. I motored slowly forward and looped the painter around one of the vertical mooring cables. The grayed walls were chipped in some places and covered in slippery algae in others, and in the mortared seams between the blocks grew tufts of weeds and moss. As I waited in shade of the walls, the aroma of the lock reminded me of an old damp, musty basement.
Ascending in the locks was often a turbulent ride as water poured in from upstream. When I passed the apex of the Rideau and entered the descending locks, the water would be quite still as it drained.
The lock tenders cranked open the sluice valve and water rushed in, bouncing my small boat around. I used my boathook to push away from the walls to keep the canopy and the solar panels that covered it from being damaged. I slipped into the sunshine as the water level rose and soon the gates slowly opened as the tenders cranked the large winch handles by hand. SOL CANADA was the only boat in the lock, so I proceeded alone into the second chamber to repeat the process and then moved to the third chamber. I crossed a 75-yard-wide mill pond before entering the fourth lock.
After I motored out of the final lock, I stopped at the wood-planked mooring dock to get out and stretch my legs. The sky was still mostly clear but the clouds were starting to creep in from the horizon and would eventually affect the output of the solar panels.
The river widened into Colonel By Lake, which stretched 3 miles north where it again narrowed through a dog-leg channel into the River Styx, another wide stretch of water where the shores were lined by marshes and dotted with widely scattered farm buildings. After covering 5 miles at cruising speed, I steered SOL CANADA into a 50-yard-wide riverway that gently weaves through farmland and marsh for more than a mile leading to the Lower Brewers Lock. On the right bank, a great blue heron waded along the shore on stilt-like legs, intent on the water, and ready to strike at any small fish with its long-pointed beak. How catching a fish could be possible was beyond me as the water here was a very murky bright green and nothing below the surface was visible.
Between Lower Brewers Lock and Upper Brewers Locks the canal enters and meanders through peaceful wetlands where only the wildlife broke the stillness. The water here was bright green.
On both sides of the stream, maple and willow trees arched their branches over the banks. There were no other boats at Lower Brewers when I arrived, and the lock gates opened almost as if by magic. Ten minutes later, SOL CANADA had gained another 13′ of elevation.
It was 4 p.m. I had planned to make it to Jones Falls by day’s end, more than 12 miles away upstream, but first I would have a half hour’s journey of 1-3/4 miles to Upper Brewers Locks, which has two chambers to pass through. I could have stayed the night at Upper Brewers, but that would have put me behind on my schedule. My average speed seemed to have settled on about 4.5 miles per hour, very good for SOL CANADA. The sun had stayed out most of the time, and the solar panels had held the charge on my battery bank at 95 percent; I was in good shape to continue.
Upon reaching Upper Brewers Locks, the gates again were open for me and I was able to pass right in without stopping. The Parks Canada staffers always monitor the traffic and ask you how far you will be going so they can notify the next lock about boats in transit.
SOL CANADA had been performing fairly well, but about once an hour the motor would just stop. I could get it going again by putting the throttle neutral for a few seconds and then I could put it back in gear. This was happening more frequently, and by the time I left the lock, it was occurring about every 10 to 15 minutes. The 11-mile run to Jones Falls should take two hours and 20 minutes, but the delays caused by the motor would add to that. I decided to push on. After 4 p.m. in late August, the solar production diminishes quickly, so I’d have to rely on the batteries as the day wore on.
The route took me through three lakes—Cranberry, Little Cranberry, and Whitefish—and the meandering channels between them. The landscape was marked with bare granite outcroppings and dense forests of cedar and pine. Cottages took the place of farmhouses, and the water was clear—a deep, dark blue.
The intermittent motor outages continued until I reached Jones Falls at 7 p.m., 40 minutes behind schedule and too late to be let into the locks.
To keep wind, rain, and prying eyes out I enclose the cockpit with tarps. During the day, they’re rolled up and secured to the canopy.
I moored the boat at the downstream wharf and got my boat into camping mode. I rolled canvas panels down from the perimeter of the canopy and fastened them to the gunwale. I folded the seats down to make the sleeping platform and set my inflated air mattress and sleeping bag on it. For dinner, I heated up some spaghetti for a quick bite to eat.
Before turning in, I walked through the locks to see what the Rideau Canal had in store for me in the morning. Jones Falls is a four-lock flight secluded from any towns but it has a resort a hundred yards down from the lock. I could have walked across the boardwalk and enjoyed a nice meal, but I was thinking about the motor, concerned that I could not continue the trip if it continued to cut out. I phoned my son-in-law to see if he would be available to drive my trailer to me if I decided to terminate the trip. While talking with him, I thought perhaps it was a thermal issue and that I would try traveling the following day with the hatch open to allow for better cooling. We decided that I would at least continue for one more day after I had a good night’s sleep.
Early in the morning of the second day, I waited for the Jones Falls lock tenders to begin their day’s work. Beyond the upper gate is a mill pond I’d cross to get to the final lock in the flight of four.
The night sky was starry but the air was very cold, and I woke several times shivering. With my jacket draped over the sleeping bag, I slept okay but was wide awake and up by about 6:30 a.m. The sky was clear and blue and a morning mist rolled across the 100-yard-wide bay at the base of the locks. The water was mirror-like, adding symmetry to the beautiful patterns of white and green made by the pale stone blocks powerhouse at the base of the dam and the wooded banks that surrounded them.
The previous day I had run the battery bank down at 80 percent, which concerned me as the boat’s lead-acid batteries shouldn’t ever carry less than half of a full charge. This was my first strictly solar-powered trip, and I was not sure if I was being too conservative or not. My goal was to have the battery bank back to near 100 percent at the end of each day to avoid depleting the batteries.
At the mooring dock just beyond the final Jones Falls lock, I decided to give the boat a couple of hours of sunshine and tilted the canopy to more quickly charge the batteries. I had depleted them to an 80-percent state of charge.
At 9 a.m. the lock staff arrived and opened the first chamber for me. I was once again the only boat going through, which made going through all four chambers of the first flight a quick process. I was through to the mooring dock in about 45 minutes. I moored at the upstream dock to boost the charge on the batteries. To maximize the charging, I angled the canopy on its adjustable posts to face the sun. While the boat was sitting there in the bright morning sun, I crossed the lock on the white painted walkway on top of the gates. Peering over the black painted steel railing and looking down into the lock basin made me a bit dizzy.
Up the hilly pathway was a small stone building approximately 30′ by 20′. The blocks that composed the walls were of assorted sizes and colors—mostly variations of beige and gray, others rusty red. Two windows, each composed of 24 small panes of glass, flanked the entry to this restored lockmaster’s home. Inside were heavy wooden shutters that could close off the windows and small rectangular slotted holes in the walls were gunports the first British lockmasters and staff could use to defend the house if Americans were to attack. The Rideau Canal was built by the British Navy after the War of 1812 as a military route to bypass the Saint Lawrence in case another conflict with the Americans occurred.
The footpath crossed a weir used to divert excess water to keep it from overwhelming the dam downstream. Water tumbled down in a thundering torrent of foam.
When I returned to the boat, I re-leveled the canopy and checked the state of charge. It was now at 90 percent. That was enough to allow me to continue cruising, though I’d have to travel at a reduced speed of 3 miles per hour to ease the draw on the batteries. The solar panels could then supply the power to the motor while trickle charging the battery bank.
Roger Siebert
.
Working my way through the curving waterways that connected pond-like lakes I had to round the bends cautiously, keeping watch for oncoming traffic in the very narrow channels. This went on for about 3/4 mile before opening up to a series of lakes, channels, and locks. During the afternoon, bright sunshine fell upon the solar cells, but a haze of overcast moved across the sky as I made my way through Davies, Chaffey’s, and Newboro locks. I kept the motor hatch half open to allow a good amount of airflow to the motorwell, and that helped keep the motor running. It shut down only twice.
The lakes had high granite shores and forests of large maple and white pine trees. The dark blue water was clean, deep, and cool. Cottages and docks were scattered along the shores and on the islands and there was considerably more boat traffic. At one point I was swarmed by fishing boats flying by flat out, racing back for a fishing derby weigh-in. Even at my decidedly slower pace I was making good progress along the circuitous 18 miles of the route to the Narrows Lock.
The Narrows joins Upper Rideau Lake with its much larger sister, Big Rideau Lake. Upper Rideau is the summit of the Rideau Canal system, so the lock would be the start of the 275′ descent to the Ottawa River. A causeway at the Narrows carries a backcountry highway to a swing bridge that crosses the locks. The bridge is low, so before boats can pass though the lock, a gate with flashing lights blocks traffic while the bridge is raised and the lock gates are opened.
By the time I passed through the lock after a drop of just 3′, it was getting close to 6 p.m., so I swung around to the back side of the long extended wooden pier and moored about 40′ behind a large yacht. In the protected cove between the pier and the causeway, I’d have good shelter from the wind. A picnic table on the pier right next to the boat was where I settled in for dinner.
As morning broke I climbed out onto the dock and found Big Rideau Lake perfectly still, with mist hanging in the air right next to the water. The trees were separated from their mirror images by an indistinct white boundary that looked like a smudged line of chalk.
I approached the bridge at Rideau Ferry, which separates Big Rideau Lake from Lower Rideau Lake. The name of the place recalls the ferryboat that crossed the channel before the bridge was built.
Big Rideau is the largest of the lakes on the canal system. It is 13 miles long and its perimeter is dotted with as many elegant homes as humble cottages. I got off to a late start and made my way up the lake, following a course just 100′ from the west shore in case the wind came up and I needed a lee. The lake stayed calm, barely rippled, except by the wakes of boats that appeared as the morning wore on. I reached the top of Big Rideau Lake where Rideau Ferry, a 150-yard-wide channel, divided Big Rideau from Lower Rideau Lake. The gap is spanned by a 26’-tall cement bridge, high enough to let boats pass beneath it.
Crossing under the bridge I checked my batteries’ charge. They were at 94 percent, so even with the skies becoming more overcast I was in a good position to cross Lower Rideau Lake to a narrow winding section of the Rideau River.
After passing through Lower Rideau Lake, I entered the Poonamalie Lock and was now headed downstream. The experience in the descending locks was quite different and much easier. Draining the lock and descending is no more turbulent than pulling the plug in a bath tub.
The low banks were dense with cedar and brush, the water was glass calm; the ride was so peaceful, unspoiled by the quiet running of my electric motor. After making my way along a channel that took me through the Poonamalie Lock, the waterway opened to wide marshlands. Around a third bend in the river I saw an old bascule railway bridge, abandoned and left in a permanent 45-degree angle. It marked the entrance to the locks at Smith Falls. The first lock lowered SOL CANADA into a large manicured basin in the middle of a park in the heart of the town. I passed through to the second lock and moored on the downriver side so I could leave at my own leisure in the morning rather than wait for the lock. I walked into town for a restaurant meal.
At the first lock at the town of Smith Falls, I had to wait for a few boats before we entered the lock. The lock tenders are always aware of what boats should be approaching and will wait until everyone is at the lock before opening it.
I left Smith Falls early the next morning. I had been traveling for three days and had passed the halfway point. I had my battery management down pat and knew how far I could travel given the amount of sunshine a day would provide. This waterway weaved through low terrain with large marshy bays thick with cattails. I was careful to remain in the channel as the river and bays were clogged with weeds.
The day was warm and sunny and I would have seven locks to go through to travel the 20 miles to Burritt’s Rapids. The current was in my favor and SOL CANADA made 5 mph over the bottom as my battery bank gained enough charge to reach and stay at 100 percent while underway. I covered the first 6 miles with ease and passed through Old Sly, Edmonds, and Kilmarnock locks. Rarely did I see another boat. There were no cottages; the unspoiled terrain was inhabited instead by turtles, ducks, and geese.
I arrived at a very narrow channel that led me into the first of three locks in the town of Merrickville. The bright sun made the buildings around the lock glisten. Just yards away stood the Merrickville United Church. Opened in 1890, it is built of rough-hewn blocks of limestone and has a square bell tower with narrow arch-capped windows. Beyond the church were three-story commercial buildings all made of radiant limestone.
The lock gates closed, we descended, and as the downstream gates opened a steel swing bridge in front of us slowly opened as all the cars driving to and from town waited. The group of boats proceeded to a second and third lock, both flanked by trees and well-manicured lawn. When the gate of the last lock opened, I put the power to the motor and jumped out in front of the pack of boats to get a bit of a lead on the way to the next lock, Clowes, 2 miles downstream. The lockmaster there would wait for all the boats to gather before closing the gates, and I did not want to be the straggler who kept everyone waiting. The other boats all soon overtook me and the wakes of a few, hitting the port quarter, tossed SOL CANADA around, forcing me to pull back on the throttle. Even so, I was not too late to enter the lock.
A short distance past Clowes was a half-mile of channel that was hand dug, mostly through limestone, over 187 years ago. The passageway was narrow—at places only 40′ across—and bordered on the west by a line of limestone blocks arranged to create a level walkway.
Three miles downstream, the river splits with two channels, creating a long, narrow island. The right channel led me pass the town of Burritts Rapids, which sits in the broad middle of the island. After passing through the lock at the tail end of the island, I secured SOL CANADA for the night to a long dock away from the main channel.
The following morning was looking to be a good day for keeping the batteries charged, but I had some concerns that wisps of clouds might cover the sun later in the day. I had to travel 25 miles to get to the next lock and SOL CANADA had never traveled that far in one day. If bad weather closed in, I could be in a bit of a pickle if I had to stop for the night short of the lock.
It was a beautiful morning at Black Rapids Lock as I got ready for a final push to reach downtown Ottawa. While this area is within the city limits of Ottawa, it is quite pastoral.
I motored through about 7 miles of the Rideau River hemmed in by farmlands; beyond them, the suburbs of Ottawa crowded the banks. I cruised under a couple of noisy, heavily trafficked bridges and passed several marinas before I reached Long Island’s flight of three locks. The weather had held and remained mostly sunny, so I was thrilled to see the batteries at 94 percent. It was still early enough in the day to push another 5 miles to Black Rapids. The river was lined with homes and cottages and busy with boat traffic.
I finished the fifth day at the downstream side of Black Rapids Lock. This is a popular spot for fishermen and I had to anticipate having company in the morning and be ready to cast off to get out of their way.
I passed through the Black Rapids Lock and tied up for the evening. I had traveled 30 miles in one day on solar-electric power, the farthest I have ever gone, and my battery bank was still at 94 percent.
I woke to a beautiful morning, excited to make my final push to Ottawa. The air was a bit cool, but there was neither a cloud in the sky nor a breeze on the water.
The dock in downtown Ottawa was my final destination of the trip. Through the dark passage under the Wellington Street bridge is the top lock of the flight of eight locks that descends to the Ottawa River. The intricate building looming above the bridge is the East Block, one of the three buildings of the Canadian Parliament.
I started downriver, passing a rock berm all along the shore for a few hundred feet and then a mix of trees and homes so well blended that it seemed more country than city. As I approached Hogs Back Lock I passed Mooney’s Bay, usually crowded with beachgoers, swimmers and rowers, but there was not a soul to be seen this chilly day. At the north end of the bay the river splits. To the left is the lock at the entrance to the canal to downtown Ottawa, and on the right the Rideau River parts company to tumble over the dam above Hogs Back Falls on its final descent to the Ottawa River. A mile downstream along the canal, beyond a row of mansions, I passed through Hartwells Lock adjacent to the modern blocky buildings of Carleton University.
The canal narrowed to about 150′—all along the banks it was well-kept park land, bike paths, and busy streets—then made an abrupt 90-degree left turn and narrowed to 90′. Down this straight 3/4-mile-long final stretch I could see the castle-like Chateau Laurier hotel and the limestone buildings of Parliament with their green-patinaed copper roofs. I came to my final moorage, a pier running along the canal beneath a row of large ornamental street lights. Just a short distance beyond were the final eight locks that drop 79′ to the Ottawa River. It could take at least 1-1/2 hours to travel the last 1,000′ of the Rideau Canal system, so I made my final destination the top of the locks and counted that as the first ever 100-percent solar-powered voyage from Kingston to Ottawa. I walked the short quarter mile to the Parliament building. It was lunch hour and the lawn there was full of people in a yoga class.
The descent to the Ottawa River, seen in the distance, traverses the eight locks of the Ottawa flight and can take hours, so I decided not to go down them.
After lunch I was back to my boat. I had a schedule to keep, and that was to start the journey back along the Rideau Canal to Kingston where I had started six days ago. The trip from Ottawa to Kingston by solar-electric boat had never been done either, and I intended to be the first.
Phil Boyer retired in 2017 after working 38 years in R&D in the telecommunications industry. He now keeps busy teaching karate at two local clubs and building boats. He has been around boats his whole life, starting with paddling as a kid. At age 11 he built a sailing pram with a bit of help from his father. In 2006 he began building solo canoes and now has four of them, featured in the August 2019 issue. Phil’s interest turned to building SOL CANADA, his solar-electric boat, in 2015. His next build will be a solar-electric version of the Power Cat he read about in the March 2016 issue of Small Boats Magazine.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
At the Small Reach Regatta in Maine, we host some 70 oar-and-sail boats, and have a number of support boats, all in an area well away from Coast Guard or other emergency support. So, we require everyone to carry a VHF. The boats range from 13′ to 20′, have a wide variety of sailing rigs, and don’t all get underway at the same time, so the fleet spreads out over many miles. It has been a challenge to communicate with everyone and to get a message from the front of the fleet to the rear.
VHF radios, like cell phones, are limited to line of sight. The Coast Guard sets its antennas up as high as possible, often in spots remote from their base, to cover a wide area. The range, or “radio horizon,” for a handheld VHF in a small boat could be as little as 2.5 miles if the user is seated, with the radio only about 4′ off the water. If you are trying to communicate with another handheld, 5 miles might be your outer limit.
A second limit is set by the way we use VHFs. In simple terms, your signal radiates out in a plane perpendicular to the antenna. If you angle your VHF, that signal plane tilts too, and may be over some recipients or fall short of others. It may be degraded further if your recipient’s plane is not aligned with yours. So, handheld VHFs work better held vertically.
Photographs by the author
This MITA work skiff, used as a regatta chase boat, is rigged with an antenna on a pole to better reach all of the boats in the event fleet.
Larger boats put antennas on top of deckhouses or masts to increase their VHF range: a height of 9’ would reach someone 7 miles away with a handheld VHF in a small boat; 16′ would reach them 9 miles away. As a sometimes driver of a Maine Island Trail Association (MITA) chase boat, I started thinking about how to connect a taller antenna to my handheld VHF. It was pretty simple. I had a handy 8′ pole, and bought a simple whip antenna which promised a 3Db gain, doubling my effective output power. A length of coaxial connects the antenna to the radio.
The handheld VHF, with its antenna removed, accepts an adapter to the coaxial cable that is connected to the elevated antenna.
Only some handheld VHFs will connect to coaxial cable. You can tell if yours can when you unscrew the antenna and find a small coaxial fitting. To connect the cable to the radio, you will need an adapter—one end to fit your VHF and the other to fit a PL-259 plug on the end of an RG-58 coaxial cable. I bought a cable long enough to run down the pole and allow me to operate the VHF while at the helm or pass it to a crew member.
The MITA skiff uses a pole secured to the console to raise the accessory antenna.
With the antenna up at 9′, I could be at the front or the rear of the widespread regatta fleet and everyone could hear me. Problem solved.
If you are in areas frequented by other boaters, the antenna on your handheld will be fine. Your communications will improve if you can stand and hold the unit upright. But if you are off the beaten path, a fixed antenna, elevated on a mast or a dedicated pole, could help.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
While it’s generally accepted that the right sails and sail trim will determine how close you can sail to the apparent wind, a sailboat’s progress to windward also depends on the lift and drag generated by the centerboard and rudder. How much difference does proper foil shape make over a simple rounded leading edge and tapered trailing edge, anyway? Foils operating in fluids, whether air or water, are a well-studied topic. C.A. Marchaj, in his book, Sailing Theory and Practice, discusses the theory and gives the results of actual tests of differences in foil planform (side view), cross-section shape, size, and aspect ratio (AR – length to width). Lacking other constraints, an ideal centerboard, daggerboard, or rudder blade should have a reasonably high AR (greater than 2) planform with a streamlined cross-section that has a parabolic leading edge and a thickness of somewhere near 10 percent of the chord width (the distance from leading edge to trailing edge). A thickness of 8 percent produces less drag but stalls sooner; 12 percent has a higher stall angle but produces more drag.
Exactly where the point of maximum thickness should be located is a matter of some debate. Marchaj suggests it should be at 50 percent of the chord width, halfway between the leading edge and trailing edge, but provides no data to back that up. Other sources suggest that the NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) symmetric foil sections, originally developed during aircraft research, are actually a good fit for boat foils operating at low speeds in water. A NACA 0010 foil, for example, has a maximum thickness of 10 percent of the width of the foil, located at 30 percent from the leading edge.
Of course, there are many practical reasons why not all keels, centerboards, and rudders have high AR planforms, but the cross section for a foil of any planform should be streamlined. My personal experience of doing it wrong on one boat, and getting it right on another boat, has convinced me that the NACA sections and guidelines above provide good performance.
HORNPIPE, my first sail-and-oar boat, was an 18’ Kurylko Alaska with a standing-lug ketch rig, and sailed well enough to windward in flat water, but lost 10 to 15 degrees of pointing ability as soon as the water got choppy. I knew it wasn’t poor sail trim. Eventually I got looking at the daggerboard and analyzed it. It was only about 2.5 percent of the sail area and its thickness was only about 6 percent of the chord width, neither big enough or thick enough in my view, and in rough water it lost laminar flow and lift. When I designed my 18′ lug-yawl cruiser, FIRE-DRAKE, I gave it a thicker centerboard with a greater fraction of the sail area, about 4 percent. I also gave it a straight quarter chord line (think of the shape of the wing of a Spitfire aircraft) and a moderately high aspect ratio of about 3:1 for the planform area. To get the daggerboard foil shaped accurately and quickly I opted to have it cut on a computer numerical control (CNC) machine. All that was left for me to do was sand, seal and paint, and make an epoxy-lined hole for the pivot pin.
The results have been what I had hoped for. FIRE-DRAKE sails quite well to windward and maintains its performance in rough water. I sailed in the company of a similar boat—with the same length and beam, the same weight, and the same sail plan—along the south half of the Inside Passage, and that boat’s centerboard was shaped by eye. When sailing to windward, FIRE-DRAKE would consistently point higher and walk away in speed. My centerboard even let me continue sailing to windward when my partner gave up and took to the oars.
Although I had the daggerboard shaped with a CNC router, it is possible to shape a high aspect ratio, fully streamlined foil in the home shop. I’ll walk you through my second project, a kick-up rudder blade that I made at home to replace the original one I built for FIRE-DRAKE. I settled on a planform that is one-quarter of an ellipse with an elliptical leading edge and a straight trailing edge. (The shape would move the center of lateral resistance of the boat aft a few inches, and is intended to lighten the weather helm I’d experienced with the original rubber blade.) I drew the new blade with an aspect ratio of 2.5:1, with a length of 30″ (762 mm) and a maximum chord width of 12″ (305 mm), which would increase the lift and reduce the tip vortex drag.
To draw the planform shape of the quarter ellipse you can use an online graphing tool such as Desmos for a full ellipse. If you center the ellipse at zero, you can drag the two axes out until you get the aspect ratio you want. Since the graph has a grid in the background, you can then print out a screen capture of a quarter of the resulting ellipse and scale up the printed image to the actual dimensions required. If you are comfortable with computers, you can download and run Freeship (available for Windows only) which has a “keel and rudder wizard” that accurately generates several different planforms.
The new rudder blade for FIRE-DRAKE has a quarter-ellipse planform. The plywood’s glue lines show the contours that help with shaping the foil.
Obtaining the cross-section profile of a chord of a given width is best left to a computer. For any of the NACA foils, like the 0010 foil I mentioned above, Competition Composites Inc. (CCI) has a very simple and handy calculator. You need enter only the chord width and the maximum thickness and it will generate a table of X-Y coordinates that you can copy and print out. They’ll be your offsets for drawing a pattern for the foil cross-section. If you intend to sheathe your foil with ’glass and epoxy, for example, you can also enter the skin thickness and it will calculate the coordinates for the plywood core.
Now, here’s the tricky bit. If you have a rectangular foil planform, you only have one chord width and therefore one section profile for the entire length of the foil. However, if you have any other planform (e.g., half-ellipse, quarter-ellipse, trapezoidal, straight-chord-quarter-line, etc.), the thickness, which will be one-tenth of the chord width, changes along the length of the foil because the chord width changes.
I used the CCI calculator to generate profile coordinates for three different points along the length of the rudder blade: at the root, at about two-thirds of the way along and at about 90 percent of the way to the end. I chose those points because the chord width for my quarter ellipse planform doesn’t change much for the first half of its length, but it changes more quickly toward the tip. The idea is to shape the foil to these profiles at these points and then taper the foil evenly between them. You can lay out your foil plan directly on to the ply or you can use something thin, like doorskin, to make and fine-tune a template, which is what I did.
I made a blank for my rudder by gluing layers of marine ply with epoxy to the required 1″ thickness. I have found that the plywood, in spite of its cross-grain plies, has sufficient strength for the size of small-boat foils that I have built (though the cross-grain would weaken a long thin foil). Plywood does not warp and has the added advantage over solid wood in that the plies create a kind of contour map that give you graphic visual feedback as to the evenness of your surface once you start shaping the foil. You can make a foil with solid wood or even foam plus a ’glass-and-epoxy skin, but without the plywood laminates as guides, you would have to make more section profile templates to ensure a smooth and accurate shape.
Clamping a 4′ level to the flat part of the rudder blade provides a reference line to gauge how much wood to remove to achieve the foil’s taper.
The next step is to taper the thickness of the laminated foil blank along its full length. Knowing the required thickness at your chosen points, you can draw a pattern for the curve of the taper and half the thickness of the blade stock and measure how much wood you have to remove at each point. I clamped my 4′ aluminum I-beam level to the flat part of the rudder blade above the shaped part, and used a ruler to measure the depth I had to cut to. To remove the wood for this part of the project, I used my #4 Stanley plane. While I have a power hand planer, I didn’t trust myself with it to not take too much off too quickly.
Photographs by the author
The female half-section template for a given chord for a foil gets its shape from the X-Y coordinates generated by a foil calculator.
I made three female half-section profile templates, one for each of the three points noted above, by plotting out the generated X-Y coordinates on pieces of doorskin and carefully cutting them out. One thing to note is that the CCI calculator generates a profile that has a trailing edge of zero thickness. Obviously, this is not practical to build in wood, and a knife edge is not that critical anyway. I adjusted the trailing edges so that the finished edge would end up about 1/3″ (4mm) thick.
Applying the template to the foil in the works shows the high and low spots as the shaping continues.
Next, I used the profile templates to shape the foil at my three chosen points. I shaped the plywood with a Shinto rasp, regular rasps, and coarse sandpaper. It’s a process of taking some wood off, placing the template, and repeating until you get the section of wood shaped to the templates. Once that is done, I could go to work taking down the wood between the sections, using the ply layers as a guide. I used my block plane, Shinto rasp, and sandpaper for this task. I eyeballed a smooth transition around the tip from the leading edge to the trailing edge.
I sealed the surface of the shaped foil with a couple of coats of epoxy to provide a smooth, hard surface to accept a finish coat of marine epoxy enamel.
I’ve finished the rudder blade, installed it, and have taken it out for its first sea trial. The new foil definitely seems more responsive. It doesn’t require as much tiller movement to turn the boat as the old blade did and tacking seemed quicker. The effort to make the rudder blade and daggerboard with proper NACA foils has paid off with improved performance under sail.
Alex Zimmerman is a semi-retired mechanical technologist and former executive. His first boat was an abandoned Chestnut canoe that he fixed up as a teenager and paddled on the waterways of eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. He started his professional career as a maritime engineer in the Canadian Navy, and that triggered his interest in sailing. He didn’t get back into boatbuilding until he moved back to Vancouver Island in the ’90s, where he built a number of sea kayaks that he used to explore the coast. He built his first sail-and-oar boat in the early 2000s and completed his most recent one in 2016. He says he can stop building boats anytime. He is the author of the recently published book, Becoming Coastal.
For further reading on the pros and cons of the variables in foil design, Competition Composites (CCI) has a good discussion. For those of you who want to go into the math, Paul Zander has a good presentation from nearly 20 years ago, and also, for those inclined that way, an updated discussion with a lot more math.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
Back in 2016, while we were restoring an 1880s Mississippi River skiff, we needed a second cordless drill/driver, so we could have one to drill pilot holes, and the other to drive screws. When I went to purchase the second drill/driver, I found a combo package from Kobalt that included a 24-volt impact driver. We were not sure exactly what it was used for, but when we found it could drive screws even better than the drill/driver, we were extremely pleased, and it has driven countless screws in the four years since then.
With the drill/driver we had been using to drive silicon-bronze screws into the skiff’s cypress, the driver bits tended to “cam out”—that is, strip out—and damage the soft bronze Frearson slots with disturbing regularity and at other times shear the screw’s shaft. We tried a variety of fixes, like waxing or greasing the screw, with poor results. Sometimes the drill drove screws right through a plank. Setting the clutch helped a bit, but variations in wood grain and density made for unpredictable results.
The impact driver spins the bit first; then when the resistance increases, a rotating weight inside the driver slips, stores energy in a spring, and then releases, creating an impact that rotates the driver bit and pushes it forward. The forward motion into the screw head greatly reduces the tendency of the bit to cam out of the screw slots. The mechanism gives the impact drive much more force, but doesn’t transfer any torque to the user, so it is easier to use for long periods of use. Impact drivers are loud when they switch to the impact mode, so be prepared for that and wear hearing protection.
While the impact driver has lots of power, more than enough to shear screws, the variable-speed trigger provides the operator with very good control for the depth of the screw. Our impact driver had the finesse to drive #6 and #8 marine stainless screws on 1/4″ (6mm) planks, where exact depth setting was critical. The impact driver also had the powerful yet controlled torque we needed when using long temporary screws with fender washers to pull plank sections together for scarfing or to set Dutchman patches tight for gluing.
Kent and Audrey Lewis
Both the 24-volt Kobalt and the 20-volt DeWalt impact drivers have efficient brushless motors.
Recently we bought the DeWalt’s DCF787 20V impact driver, which is lighter and smaller than the Kobalt. Both tools have brushless motors, which are more efficient and use less power than brush-equipped motors, so our batteries last almost twice as long. Skipper likes the smaller DeWalt which weighs in at 2.1 lbs; it has nice balance and weight and it will fit into small spaces. The LED light on the head of the driver is also handy in remote corners. The DeWalt driver has a no-load speed of up to 2,800 rpm and drives screws with up to 3,200 impacts per minute and a maximum torque of 1,500 inch-pounds. It is a “smart tool” that senses reduced loads on soft materials and decreases demand on the motor, and provides only the required power.
The Kobalt has a “finish” function that shuts down the driver after the impact mode has been activated (for one second in order to prevent overdriving the screw), but we found this reduces our control of the tool. The Kobalt has a no-load speed up to 2,700 rpm and can deliver 3,500 impacts per minute and 1,800 inch-pounds.
Impact drivers are useful additions to the tool kit for boatbuilding, woodworking, and household jobs. They offer power and control and, by stripping fewer screws, they’ll reduce the need to resort to salty language.
Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about with their fleet of small boats in the shoal waters of Northwest Florida. Their adventure log can be found at Small Boat Restoration.
Editor’s Notes
This Milwaukee 12-volt impact driver has a brushed motor.
I had never used an impact driver until I had edited this article and bought one. Actually I thought I’d bought one, but it was just a driver that looked like an impact driver but without the impact. It was a good complement to my drill driver, so I didn’t send it back. Paying a little more attention to my shopping, I did buy an impact driver, tool only, that used the 12-volt batteries and charger that I have for my Milwaukee drill/driver. The Milwaukee 12-volt impact driver won’t provide the power that the Lewises have with their brushless 20- and 24-volt impact drivers. They put the power to good use driving screws through 500 square feet of 2×6 decking along their waterfront bulkhead, but I’m content having a lighter-duty impact driver. A brushed-motor version is much less expensive, and while it isn’t said to be as efficient or as long lasting as a brushless motor, my first cordless tool, a Makita drill/driver, had a brushed motor and did all I asked of it and lasted around 20 years.
Even my less powerful Milwaukee makes a lot of noise and I won’t use it without hearing protection. The noise suggests that an impact driver is a brutal tool, but I was surprised by how much control it offered and impressed how well seated the driver bits stayed. My drill driver has cammed out of a lot of screws and ruined their slots in the process. The impact driver hasn’t done that yet, even when driving a 2″ brass #7 screw without a pilot hole. It won’t stop driving automatically because it doesn’t have a clutch, but I can watch the screw head come home and stop when it’s where it belongs. It’s going to be a very useful, often-used tool. Keeping up with the Lewises hasn’t disappointed me yet.
All of the impact drivers here are available from home-improvement centers and online retailers.
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.
David Parker isn’t one to sit idle. He’s a woodworker, a cook, a musician, a luthier, and a knife-maker, so when the pandemic kept him from going to his job at a musical-instrument wholesaler and confined him to quarters, he wasn’t going to let hours slip by binge-watching his DVD collection of Gilmore Girls. With more time to spend in his shop at home in Oratia, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, David made a paper canoe. Using an unconventional material wasn’t new to him. Last year he made a bicycle frame out of wood.
David Parker
The paper canoe was molded over a wood-strip canoe while it was still on the molds.
Laminating paper to make a boat isn’t a new idea. In the 1860s, Elisha Waters of Troy, New York, had a lucrative business making paper boxes, and then in 1867, his teenaged son, George, came to the factory to take advantage of the paper and paste there to make a mask for a masquerade party. At the time, George was also repairing a wooden racing shell, and the proximity of the two projects led him to try using paper and shellac as materials to repair the shell. That worked so well that he considered the possibility of making an entire racing shell that way.
George and Elisha molded paper over a racing shell and created a new hull that was seamless, leakproof, light, and strong. They made three more hulls and realized they were onto something, and patented the idea. The following year, Elisha got out of the box business and his factory became the home of E. Waters & Sons, Paper Boat Builders. The company produced racing shells, revolutionary monocoque hulls that dominated collegiate regattas.
David Parker
The canoe’s wooden elements—gunwales, decks and thwart—give the hull stiffness, just as they do in ordinary canoes.
The Waters company also made paper observatory domes and paper cruising boats, including the canoe made famous by Nathaniel Holmes Bishop in his book, Voyage of the Paper Canoe, published in 1878. The company continued in business until 1901, when George accidentally started a devastating fire in the factory while working with a blowtorch. He died the following year, followed by the death of Elisha in 1904. Their technology went with them and the exact combination of paper and adhesive they used remains unknown.
In recent times, many amateur boatbuilders have made paper canoes using available materials. I gave it a shot many years ago and tried kraft paper, brown paper towels, Handi-wipes, Weldwood glue, carpenter’s glue, polyester resin, and epoxy.
David’s path to building a paper canoe began in 2013 when he took an interest in woodworking. He borrowed tools from his brother to build a lap steel guitar. He enjoyed the woodworking, started to set up a shop in his garage, and built more guitars.
David Parker
If the scenery doesn’t capture David’s attention, he can brush up on strip-building from the pages of the book, Canoecraft, which make up the inner layer of the canoe.
Parks and Recreation was another of his favorite TV series, and he stumbled upon a YouTube video featuring one of the show’s stars, Nick Offerman. In the video, Offerman was building a Bear Mountain Boats strip-built canoe. David had no interest in paddling a canoe, let alone building one, but he liked the idea of building something larger than a guitar and was intrigued by the aesthetic possibilities offered by strip construction. He ordered a Prospector 16 kit from Bear Mountain Boats in Ontario and finished building it in 2017. Not long after he got it afloat, he discovered that he loved paddling.
This year he ordered plans for a Freedom 15 from Bear Mountain and bought his materials from local sources. He discovered that the fiberglass he had purchased was too narrow to cover the canoe, so he placed an order for the right size and used that to sheathe the hull. Rather than let the first order of fiberglass go to waste, he decided to use it in the building of another canoe. He had seen a paper canoe on Instagram and was intrigued by the construction, thinking that paper could serve as a core between layers of ’glass, just as cedar strips do.
Jane Parker
While David is waiting for bolts to hang a canoe seat from the gunwales, he paddles the canoe kneeling.
The lockdown in New Zealand began on March 23 and David stayed home to do his part in slowing the spread of COVID-19. He focused on his canoe projects and covered the Freedom 15 with plastic sheet to use the unfinished canoe, still on its building form, as a male mold for a paper canoe. The canoe he’d seen on Instagram was made of newspaper, and that’s what he decided to use for his canoe. The first layer to go on the mold would be the one visible in the interior of the finished canoe, so David decided he’d pay tribute to Ted Moores’ Canoecraft, the book that introduced him to canoeing. Using water-diluted white PVA glue to saturate and bond the paper, David followed the layer of pages cut from a copy of the book with a layer of white paper, eight layers of newspaper, and a final layer of white paper. The 6-oz fiberglass that led to the project, set in epoxy, completed the layup inside and out. David used Victorian ash from Australia for the gunwales and reclaimed New Zealand kauri pine for the decks and thwart.
David is waiting on bolts so he can install a seat, but he has been out for a few test paddles, paddling while kneeling. The hull is a bit rippled and not as fair as he would have liked, but there’s a lot of good reading inside.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
While I was working with John Leyde on this issue’s Reader Built Boat story about building a skiff with his grandsons, I was particularly struck by why he had come up with his plan for the skiff in the first place. As he put it in an email to me: “With winter coming on, I found I was projectless.” There’s no question that building a boat with his grandsons was an inspired idea that would strengthen the family bonds and give the boys something to remember for the rest of their lives. But what surprised me was the sense of anxiety suggested by facing the future projectless. When I write “projectless” on my computer, the word gets a jagged red underline from the spellchecker, and Google won’t turn up a definition for it, but it is, in fact, a word. When I searched for it on the web, I came across the full text of an impenetrable academic treatise on creativity, which had, squirreled away on page 137, this lovely phrase: “the precariousness of projectlessness.” That scholarly affirmation that the impulse to take up projects could be linked to anxiety made me wonder about my own history of filling my time with boatbuilding projects that often go on for months.
With the gunning dory, Dad and I did a lot more sailing than we did with his 27′ sloop. Here I’m sailing with my sisters: Ellyn by the main, Laurie by the mizzen.
I do recall that anxiety played a role in building a boat for my father. Not long after I’d built a dory skiff for myself, I convinced him to let me build a gunning dory for him. For several years he had owned and maintained a 27′ Tumlaren sloop, but he didn’t want to split his time between two boats, so he sold it for the sake of the gunning dory. The summer I started building it was the summer I had planned to row and sail the Inside Passage in the skiff I had built, but I was fearful about taking that ambitious voyage. It would be my first solo cruise ever, and I had never done anything but daysailing. Building the gunning dory was an ostensibly face-saving way of backing out of it. I could immerse myself in the gunning dory project and avoid spending an idle summer nagged by thoughts of what I had intended to be doing. (By the time I had finished the gunning dory the following spring, I’d spent enough time sailing my skiff to feel more confident in its abilities and mine and embarked on the Inside Passage adventure.)
I used poles to catamaran Nate’s kayak with one of mine. I also equipped his kayak with fenders as outriggers so he could paddle solo. Here, he’s offering to share his cookie with me.
When my kids were young, much younger than John’s grandsons, I built a small Greenland kayak for each of them, even though they certainly didn’t need kayaks and had never expressed any interest in either boatbuilding or paddling. In spite of that, I felt a strong urge to build the kayaks. I should mention that Nate was then just 3-1/2 years old and not to be trusted with edge tools, and Ali was just 9 months old and preoccupied with language acquisition. I had my hands full with working a full-time job and being a father, but I stole precious time to build a 7′ Greenland kayak for Nate and a 5′ kayak for Ali.
This is as close as Ali ever got to paddling the kayak I built for her. I made rockers for it so she could ride the waves at home.
It’s clear now that I built their kayaks as much, if not more, for myself than for them. I was new to child-rearing and a lot of it was difficult. Some was even scary. When Nate was an infant, he came down with croup and one evening struggled to breathe. I was terrified and raced him to the ER running red lights, tears streaming down my face. Worry and uncertainty just came with the parenting territory. I had been building boats on and off for 12 years then and always felt at ease and competent in the shop, even with the most challenging projects. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that building those two little kayaks for Nate and Ali was an avoidance strategy, in the way building the gunning dory had been, but I think it was a way of restoring my confidence and peace of mind. (By the way, my kids, now 26 and 29, turned out just fine.)
The rack I made in the back yard of my old house had four of my early Greenland kayaks. The one on the bottom was the first and very fast, especially in rough water and wind. The top kayak is a duplicate of it. The two middle kayaks are nearly identical except for the skeg on the lower one. I built the little skiff when Nate was not yet two years old. While I worked on it, I often had him in a carrier strapped to my chest where he could drool on my hands and tools. The boat is now his bookcase.
I currently have 15 boats that I’ve built scattered in and around the house. Many of them haven’t been used in years but I can remember why I built each of them. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I can remember the intentions I had for them.
My reproduction of a King Island kayak was a lovely boat, and one I intended to use for camp-cruising, but I never spent enough time with it to have confidence in it.
I built a King Island kayak thinking I’d cruise the San Juan Islands with it. I paddled it a few times and then put it on a rack under the eaves where it gathered dust and cedar pollen. I built a decked tandem lapstrake canoe to paddle down the Missouri River. I drove past the river’s headwaters without the canoe and collected a bottle of water as a reminder, but I never returned with the canoe to paddle the river. Even with many of the dreams I had for my boats unfulfilled, I have no regrets about building any of them and don’t the time spent on as time wasted.
I don’t consider myself an anxious person and I think having a steady stream of projects for my entire adult life has played part in that. The news has been especially troubling these past few months and it only seems to get worse. I don’t have a boat in the works but I’ve been able to take refuge from current events by making a spinnaker. While I’m under the soothing spell of thinking about it, cutting out the pieces, and sewing it together, I’m safe from the precariousness of projectlessness.
I have been a member of the RiversWest Small Craft Center, a small boatbuilding club in Portland, Oregon, and upon my retirement, I decided I would like to build myself a small boat to row and sail. I wanted to have a boat that would be easier to move about in because of my aging knees, one of them recently replaced.
One of the club members, a retired boatbuilder, suggested I check the designs in The Dory Book by John Gardner. Being a transplant from the Northeast, I decided on the Swampscott dory design. I had rowed an original at Mystic Seaport some years ago and liked the feel on the water. I didn’t have the confidence to build my first boat from the somewhat sparse information in the book, so I bought a plan set for Iain Oughtred’s John Dory. It included full-sized templates, so I could avoid the unappealing task of getting on my knees to loft from a series of offsets. For those who’d like to start with offsets, they’re provided on the plan and profile drawings.
The plans consist of six pages of drawings and include full-sized patterns for the frames, stem, and transom. While the drawings have a wealth of details, they are not a step-by-step guide to construction. Oughtred’s book Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual will provide instructions for those who need guidance.
My home has a basement with a rather large window that’s level with my front yard. After making a few scale drawings, I decided I had enough room for the building frame and a path to remove the boat upon completion. This indoor location afforded me pleasant and practical temperatures for building in both winter and summer.
Photographs by Russell and Sharyn Smith
The dory slips along easily with a solo rower. At the bow, four strakes are evident; the plans provide an option for three, with the garboard and first broad strake combined.
I decided after seeing a completed John Dory that I would use the two-plank garboard option that shows on the plan. I liked the look of having four strakes. I also decided to make all the planks of 9mm thick plywood instead of 6mm for the top two planks as called out on the plan.
I made the five permanent frames and stem out of Douglas-fir and the transom from 5/4 mahogany. The frames were cut in pieces and spliced together using 1/4″ plywood splines and thickened epoxy. The two temporary frames—one close to each end—can be made of inexpensive softwood. Once all the frames, inner stem, and transom were installed plumb and centered I used a block plane and a batten to bevel the flats of frames so they would make full contact with the planks.
The bottom was cut from 5/8″ (15mm) plywood slightly oversize, trimmed and beveled to match the angle at each frame for the garboard plank. Although the plans did not specify fastenings, I drove two #10 bronze screws through the bottom into each of the permanent frames in addition to thickened epoxy.
Next was the sheer clamp, a 5/8″-thick by 1-1/2″-wide piece of Douglas-fir that extends from stem to transom passing through notches in each of the frame tops. I found that because the frames were made of vertical-grained fir, the pressure of the sheer clamps caused cracks in the frame notches. I chalk this error up to inexperience; I should have used the hardwood specified in the plans. Adding 1/4″ x 6″ plywood gussets to the top of each frame with thickened epoxy allowed the sheer clamps to be installed without any further problems. I also made up two knees of mahogany, one at the stem and the other at the transom, just to reinforce the bottom connection to both of these junctions, although they’re not called out on the plan.
In order to avoid mistakes with the expensive 9mm marine plywood, I made plank templates out of 1/4″ underlayment. I made a spiling template out of the same material in articulated sections about 4’ long. Each section was connected to the other with a 10″-long connector with a pivot hole in each section. Once the template was positioned correctly, screws driven through the connector maintained the section alignment after removal from the frames. After spiling and cutting the patterns, I tested their fit on the frames. When they looked acceptable, I traced their outlines on the permanent plank stock.
Coming from Scottish lineage, I hate to waste expensive wood. Rather than scarf plywood panels into full-length sheets and cut planks from them, I cut my plywood into strips slightly larger than the pattern and cut the scarfs at an angle to match the curve of the pattern.
Upon completion of the planking, I sealed the outside of the hull with epoxy, and then applied epoxy and 6-oz fiberglass over the bottom and around the corners of the garboards. I then added the 32″ skeg noted in the plans.
The frames have knees rather than gussets or clips often used in dory construction. The floorboards have yet to be installed. Note the flotation compartment and its white access hatch in the stern.
The hull gets turned over for finishing, including installing the breasthook, gunwales, and outer stem. A thwart riser of 5/8″ x 2″ Douglas-fir was added inside the frames on both sides. These pieces had to be steamed and installed hot in order to get them to bend to meet the frames.
A combination seat/flotation compartment in the stern has a top made of 1/4″ plywood supported by a centerline kingplank and crowned deckbeams made of 5/16” plywood laminations. While the plans include details for a shop-built wooden hatch for access to the compartment, I installed a plastic screw-in hatch in the bulkhead. The plans also include drawings for a second watertight compartment in the bow, but I chose the open option from the plans and installed a simple mast-partner beam. Both options have gated partners to ease raising the 12′ 6″ lug-rig mast. The plans include an option for a gated partner located farther aft for builders who choose one of the two sloop rigs for the dory.
The centerboard trunk is sided with 9mm plywood and secured to the bottom where it divides two frames. The top of the case is braced by the forward and middle thwarts. I chose the simplified version of the centerboard and trunk, which is flush with the tops of the thwarts. The other option in the plans is a trunk that peaks between the thwarts and houses a centerboard with more surface area and lateral resistance when deployed. The dory has removable floorboards built in sections that drop in between the frames and alongside the centerboard trunk. I used western red cedar for the slats.
The kick-up version of the rudder will be equipped with lines to retract and deploy the pivoting blade. The plans include drawings for a traditional one-piece rudder.
The plans offer options for a fixed-blade rudder and a retractable one as well as a tiller and a yoke. I chose the kick-up style. It uses 1/2″ (12mm) plywood for the cheeks and 7/8″ plywood or hardwood for the rudder blade. The blade is raised and lowered with 1/8″ lines.
The plans offer six sail rigs: gunter, gunter sloop, balanced lug, sprit, small sprit, and spritsail sloop. Being a novice sailor, I decided to use the balanced lug. I repurposed an orphaned mast for the boat and made up a new yard and boom of Douglas-fir laminations, tapered according to the plans, and rounded with a spar gauge and spokeshave. The sail I purchased from a Portland area sailmaker was sewn to the dimensions called out in the plans.
All of the spars fit inside the boat for transport. I made two racks that clamp to the thwarts and hold the sail, yard, and boom bundled together as well as the mast, tiller, and oars, all retained with bungee cords. With a hull weight under 200 lbs, the dory isn’t a burden for trailering or for solo launching and retrieval at the ramp.
The glued-lap-plywood construction brings the dory’s weight in at about 200 lbs, half the weight of a traditionally built Swampscott, making it easier to accelerate.
For rowing, I have a pair of 9′ Alaska-yellow-cedar oars that I made several years before building the dory. The standard formula for oar length would suggests 8-1/2′ oars would be the best fit for the middle and forward rowing station and 7-1/2′ oars for the aft station. I’m finishing a set of 8-footers and will add those to the John Dory quiver.
Afloat, the John Dory feels tender while I’m getting aboard, but the more the hull tips, the more the secondary stability becomes evident and keeps the boat from feeling uncomfortably tippy. After I’ve taken my seat on the center thwart, the boat feels steady; I can slide my weight of 200 lbs over to the gunwale and look down into the water and still have one plank width above the water.
The boat is very easy to row solo. I used a temporary foot brace prior to making my floorboards last year and found it considerably helped applying power. The skeg assures the boat tracks very nicely. When I’ve taken a passenger along, seated on the stern flotation compartment deck, I rowed from the forward station. The dory was still easy to row and steer with company aboard. I didn’t take the rudder along on those outings, but I could have had the passenger take over the steering so I wouldn’t have to look over my shoulder to navigate. When the rudder is equipped with the tiller, the passenger would have to sit on the aft thwart to steer. A yoke, also detailed in the plans, would allow the passenger to steer from the stern bench, facing forward with a tiller line over each shoulder.
The plans include six drawings for different sailing rigs. This dory carries the balanced-lug rig. The author initially rigged the rudder with the Norwegian tiller seen here, but later opted to use the standard tiller with an extension, as shown in the plans. A yoke with tiller lines is also detailed in the plans.
The lug rig goes up quickly. With the sail already attached to the yard and boom, all there is to do is tie the halyard and downhaul on, rig the sheet, and you’re ready to raise the sail. I had initially rigged the rudder with a Norwegian push-pull tiller but, being a novice sailor, I had trouble making precise clean tacks in light air. I decided to switch to the straight tiller arm as shown in the plans and found it worked better for me. The boat does move well in the light air I’ve had for sailing thus far, but it can be challenging to make a clean tack. This may have more to do with my limited experience than the boat. In heavier winds, I expect the dory’s good secondary stability will give me confidence.
While waiting out the pandemic lockdown this year, I’ll scarf an additional 14″ to the mast so I can raise the rig a little higher for more clearance. I’m 6′ 2″ tall and had some problems getting the boom to clear my head. The plans have a provision for a motorwell, and I have been thinking about adding one in hopes that I may use the boat more often.
From the building to the rowing and sailing, the John Dory has been an enjoyable and educational experience. I am happy with the way it turned out and have had some very nice comments about it from many people who know boats. My interest in small wooden boats will always be with me. I am not sure if I will build another boat, but I will always take pride in my John Dory.
Russell Smith, 75, was born and raised in New Jersey. His first exposure to boats was in high school when he worked as a deckhand on party fishing boats on the Jersey shore. He was an Outside Machinist at Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he trained as diesel mechanic on amphibious vehicles and after his service worked as a diesel truck mechanic for various fleets for 28 years. More recently, he worked for the past 16 years doing field service for a company that sold thrusters and roll stabilizers for yachts. He has long been a member of RiversWest Small Craft Center, a community woodworking and boatbuilding shop in Portland, Oregon. Russ started building boats in 2003 with a sea kayak built from plans. He started work on the John Dory about 6 years ago.
John Dory Particulars
[table]
Length/18′ 3″
Beam/4′ 8.5″
Depth amidships/1′ 6.75″
Draft/6″
Hull weight/ around 200 lbs
[/table]
Plans for the John Dory are available from The WoodenBoat Store, printed plans only, for $183. Plans can also be purchased from Oughtred’s Boats.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Magazine readers would enjoy? Please email us!
The Bella 10, Sam Devlin’s jaunty 9′ 9″ rowing skiff, started out being called the 5×10 skiff because all of the plywood it required could be cut from a single 5′ x 10’ sheet. When Sam was teaching boatbuilding classes, the 5×10 sheets saved him the time it took to scarf 4×8 sheets together to get the length needed for a small yet able rowing boat. There are a number of boats designed for a single 4×8 sheet of plywood, and while they are interesting as design challenges, they don’t have the length to be pleasing to row or the freeboard to carry an adult safely in a bit of a chop. The Bella 10 has both.
Photographs by the author
The interior is simple and spare, keeping the weight down. The foot brace called for in the plans, absent here, is essential for rowing.
Designed for stitch-and-glue construction, the Bella 10 can be built from plans or a kit. The plans consist of four pages of drawings that include the cutting schedules for a 5′ x 10′ sheet of 1/4″ (6mm) BS1088 plywood as well as for two sheets of 4′ x 8′ plywood scarfed together end to end. One marine-plywood supplier sells the 5×10 sheet of five-ply okoume for about $133 and the two sheets of 4×8 that would be required for $146, so you’d save a bit of money as well as the time required to scarf the two sheets together.
Devlin Designing Boat Builders
.
The shapes for the side and bottom panels are determined by offsets measured from the edge of the plywood sheet, so the pieces all nest together and produce minimal waste. The transom gets two pieces cut, and they will be sandwiched together with epoxy at the start of construction. The drawings include a 24-step list of the building sequence, and an 80-page manual detailing stitch-and-glue processes is included with the plans. The book Sam wrote 25 years ago—Devlin’s Boat Building—is a good companion for those who like to study up before they build.
In the included manual, Sam details an alternative to the drilled holes and twisted wires in the stitches of stitch-and-glue: stapling the panel edges together. A pneumatic stapler with stainless-steel staples of the right length and gauge can speed the job of putting the panels together and have the added benefit of leaving virtually invisible holes after the seams are glued and the staples removed. Sam had students in one of his boatbuilding classes staple three Bella 10 hulls together; it took 25 minutes for the first, 20 minutes for the second, and 10-1/2 minutes for the third.
After the panels are stitched or stapled together, the hull is opened up to its proper shape with three spreaders while the seams are epoxy-tacked, have the stitches removed, and then get filleted and ’glassed. The exterior gets a layer of 6-oz fiberglass and epoxy to protect and strengthen the plywood. The remaining work is with 3/4″ hardwood lumber: 1-1/4″ inwales and outwales to stiffen the sheer, knees and a breasthook in the corners, an 8″-wide thwart and cleats to support it, and a low, glued-in foot brace. Flotation is provided by closed-cell foam blocks, easily obtained and cut from a throwable boat cushion, then screwed to the bottom of the thwart.
The Bella 10 I used for my trials was built by Devlin Designing Boat Builders as a showroom boat and impeccably finished. The foot brace and foam flotation were absent, and the sheer had the addition of a canvas-covered padded guard. At 52 lbs, the boat was light enough for me to carry it as I would portage a canoe. I rolled it over on the lawn, lifted the bow, and backed in to rest the thwart on my shoulders. Pulling the bow down raised the transom off the ground, and I could then easily walk with the boat. For transporting the boat with its oars and other gear aboard, my cart was a better option.
Hauling the skiff with a compact pickup truck is a simple affair, with no trailer to fuss with and no lifting to a roof rack.
The Bella 10 fit nicely stern-first into the bed of my half-ton pickup truck. The hull slipped between the wheel wells with a bit of room to spare, even with the bed-liner insert taking up some space. Not having to fuss with a trailer or lift the boat up to a set of roof racks was a welcome change.
The 52-lb Bella isn’t too heavy to cartop. Loading the boat is best done lifting one end at a time.
I could lift the boat to the racks on my Chevy Blazer, but it was an awkward lift approaching the racks from the side. The thwart is just above the boat’s center of gravity, so it makes a good handle for lifting and controlling the boat, but the boat’s beam makes it awkward when you’re on your own. It would have been easier to approach the back end of the car with the boat in canoe-portage mode, rest the bow on the back rack and the transom on the pavement, then lift the stern and slide the boat forward. I didn’t give that a try because I didn’t want to rasp the transom on the pavement or grate the canvas gunwale guard across my wooden roof-rack cross bars.
When I had the boat afloat, I first climbed aboard over the transom and later found it easier to step in and out over the side. About 8″ of water was enough to keep the boat from touching bottom when embarking.
With a beam of 3′ 8-3/4″, the boat was a bit nervous while I moved about, but settled down to be very steady once I got seated. I could slide on the thwart to about 6” from the side of the boat and look straight down into the water. That put the gunwale guard right at the water, as far as I could safely push the secondary stability.
A pair of 7′ oars is the perfect match for the Bella 10. They have just the right gearing and keep the stroke low.
For rowing, the thwart is in a good position relative to the oarlocks. I could sit well forward and keep my tailbone from pressing uncomfortably against the wood. With the foot brace omitted from this boat, I cobbled one together with a stick of wood, some rope, and a strap so I could row the boat properly and with full power. Once underway, I really liked the boat’s rowing geometry and the fit of the 7′ spoon-bladed oars. The handles had a 2″ overlap, right on target. On the drive, I could pull them straight at my solar plexus and have enough clearance over my legs on the recovery to avoid clipping wave crests. It was a nice compact and powerful stroke, far from the windmilling that small rowboats often seem to encourage.
Even though the Bella is just shy of 10′ long, it has a good turn of speed and is well suited to rowing for exercise.
The Bella 10 carried its way very well between strokes, easing the load at the catches, and it took very little effort to make 3 knots. At an aerobic-exercise pace I could sustain close to 4 knots and an all-out effort in a short sprint peaked just shy of 4-3/4 knots. I could row stern-first at 3 knots; and the transom didn’t seem to be bulldozing a big wave ahead of it.
The skeg does a good job keeping the Bella 10 on track without restricting maneuverability. The boat spins like a top and can do a 360-degree spin in just six push-pull strokes. In 1’ wind-driven waves taken on the quarter, the bow will occasionally veer, but the instant response to a corrective stroke sets the boat back on course. Rowing hard into an 8’-knot wind and waves just beginning to curdle before whitecapping, the forward end slapped some of the smaller waves, sending spray to the sides, but not causing the hull to shudder or slow down.
The Bella isn’t designed for use with an outboard—aside from the lack of buoyancy compartments that would be required, I suspect that my 2-1/2 hp four-stroke would be too much weight for the stern to support—but Sam and I agreed that an electric motor would be worth a try.
While the Bella 10 isn’t designed for power, the compact and lightweight EP Carry provided a satisfying push without overwhelming the boat with weight or excess power.
I borrowed an EP Carry from PropEle Electric Boat Motors, which I thought would be a very good match for the Bella 10 because it weighs just 21 lbs, including the battery. With the motor running at full throttle, the speed reading on the GPS wavered between 3-1/2 and 3-3/4 knots. Because I had to keep my hand on the motor’s tiller, I couldn’t get as far forward as I should have been to get the boat at its best trim, but I wasn’t doing the work, so it didn’t matter much.
I put my weight as far forward as I could and still reach the tiller. An extension would help get the bow down.
A tiller extension (built to accommodate the EP Carry’s atypical tiller) would have allowed me to sit comfortably on the thwart. Getting the bow down into the water would also help with steering. With it slightly airborne, the wind would hamper upwind turns. The boat has a Coast Guard plate on the transom noting that the boat has a maximum capacity of “2 persons or 300 lbs,” so having a passenger in the bow would allow a helmsman to be comfortably seated on the bottom aft of the thwart.
The Bella 10 is a splendid little boat that is inexpensive (it’s Devlin Designing Boat Builders’ most affordable kit), easy to build and transport, and an able boat on the water. It would serve well as a tender, a family boat for training young rowers, or an easily portable vessel for exploration and exercise.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Bella 10 Particulars
Length/9′ 8.5″
Beam/3′ 8.75″
Draft/6.1″
Displacement/305 lbs
Hull dry weight/52 lbs
The plans for the Bella 10 are available from Devlin Designing Boat Builders for $27.50, downloaded, and $63.75, printed. The basic kit sells for $499 [6/25/20 on sale for 15% off, $424.15].
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!
"Are you going all the way?” asked the voice from above. “I’m going to try,” I replied, looking up at the sole of a work boot at the lip of the concrete and above that a bearded face hanging over the railing. The immense tub of the lock engulfed me as I held onto a line dangling from 20’ above. The gray concrete walls stretched 1,200’ alongside my 17’ dory LITTLE JOY, and had long, heavy scrapes down their length, the scars left by the barges that pass through this lock around the clock. Sealed in on each end by battleship-gray steel gates, the water drained, dropping me another 11’. The Mel Price lock and dam, just downstream from Alton, Illinois, is the newest, busiest, and longest lock on the Mississippi River. More importantly to me, it is the last lock on the river.
The blast of an air horn made me jump as it echoed down the chamber–the all-clear signal. I rowed past the downriver gates and out into the churning river just below the dam and spillway. After a quick survey to get my bearings and check for river traffic, I pointed LITTLE JOY south. I was now free, like the river, to make my way to the Gulf of Mexico.
I had put LITTLE JOY in the river just a mile and a half above the lock and dam at the Alton marina, the very same place where I had taken out one year before when I rowed LITTLE JOY 650 miles from Minneapolis down to Alton (see “Downriver, Part 1” ).
Even though I was free of the last lock on the Mississippi, I still had a big first day ahead of me. I crossed the river from east to west and within 5 miles I reached the confluence with the Missouri River. Its muddy milk-chocolate-colored water, laden with sediment, violently shoves its way into the clearer blue-green waters of the Mississippi; whirlpools 25′ across appear quickly and then just as suddenly disappear. Water pushed up from below rose in big bubbles that splashed loud enough to make me look. I drifted through the confluence, once allowing a whirlpool to spin me completely around. After a half mile I was through the worst and prepared for the Chain of Rocks, 5 miles downriver, the last remaining natural obstacle to navigation on the Mississippi River.
The Chain of Rocks is a series of limestone ledges that stretch for 7 miles above St. Louis. The Army Corps of Engineers built an 8-mile-long canal that commercial vessels must use to bypass the ledges. In normal water levels small boats can pass through the 7 miles on the river. There is just a small set of rapids and a low dam to cross.
Three hundred yards upstream from the first ledge, I passed under the rusted steel trusses of the Old Chain of Rocks bridge and aimed for a stone tower standing alone in the river. The tower, the size of a small house but built like a castle with stone-arch windows and a round turret with a conical powder-green copper roof, was an old water intake for the city of St. Louis. The river parted and rushed around the stacked gray and white stone blocks of the tower base. It stood 40’ above me with water stains halfway up showing previous flood levels. Riding the current, I passed close enough to the base to brush it with an oar.
The boat was pulled by the current over a ledge, a foot or two high, and then carried through a couple of hundred feet of choppy whitecapping waves, and then it was over. The Chain of Rocks had been one of my big concerns of the trip and, thanks to the above-average water level and a river-worthy boat, I passed through easily and unharmed.
Photographs by David and Xiaole Hudson
After I passed by the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis I had 179 miles to go to get to the confluence with the Ohio River, and 950 miles beyond that to the finish of my voyage at the Mississippi River delta.
Ahead lay the first of St. Louis’s seven bridges; beyond them, on the west bank, I saw the unmistakable silhouette of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch. I passed under the Stan Musial Bridge, a slender roadway supported by scores of white-painted cables fanning out from twin towers, then under the 146-year-old Eads Bridge, three arches of black steel latticework resting on sturdy granite piers.
I passed by the riverfront without stopping, trying to get past St. Louis by end of the day. The Gateway Arch, the iconic symbol of St. Louis, towered above the right riverbank, its stainless-steel cladding shining in the afternoon sun. I passed close by a paddle-wheel boat at a landing with tourists at its rail, waiting to debark. A woman yelled down to me, “Where are you going?” “New Orleans,” I replied. “Oh my!” she exclaimed, then I heard the husband say, “See, I told you.” I sat a little straighter and hoped I didn’t run into anything with an audience watching.
During the first days of the trip I was fortunate to find small protected beaches where I could camp for the night without hauling the boat completely out of the water. I’d set my tent close by on high ground where I could keep an eye on the boat and have a view of the river.
And there were things to run into. Downstream from the city riverfront, both sides of the river were lined with barges and industrial docks for as far as I could see. Towboats, the river tugs designed to push the barges, bolted around, moving, adjusting the barges along the banks. Rafts of barges three across and five long made their way up and down the main channel. I weaved my way down the west bank for 10 miles, stopping and scooting past the working boats.
As the industrial landscape slowly gave way to a more wooded one, I found a tiny beach protected by a small point. I set up camp, cooked up some rice and eggs, and watched the sunset over the river. I had covered 34 miles for the first day—1,230 miles to go to the Gulf.
At Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, I had a quiet night camped in a protective cove. As the sun rose over the levee, the calm remained over the water.
I was back on the river at sunrise and made it to the small town of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, late in the day. Like many of the towns along the Mississippi, it is set back from the river, so there’s little evidence of it from my low vantage point. Adjacent to it, a limestone quarry was a dusty white scar that stretched for three-quarters of a mile along the right bank
Flood walls like this one at Cape Girardeau also protect other river towns like Caruthersville, Missouri, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. Murals painted along the length of this flood wall depict the history of Cape Girardeau. The trompe-l’oeil stone work is part of the painting on the town’s side of the concrete barrier. Marks on the end post show the high-water mark of the many floods. At the top are the years 2016 and 1993.
The next day, I stopped for a hot meal in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a city that hides behind a 20′-high, 6,000′-long concrete flood wall. I camped not far downstream, on a bend in the river surrounded by woods. The following morning, I stopped at Chester, Illinois, a town that took the high ground, a mile inland, and left the waterfront views to the inmates in the long rows of buildings of a state penitentiary.
About 110 miles downstream, I worked my way along the west bank as the Mississippi approached the confluence with the Ohio River. I pulled ashore on a sandy point at the end of the Illinois peninsula that separates the two rivers. With two empty gallon jugs in hand, I walked up the hill to Fort Defiance Park looking for water. Wearing a sun-bleached, wide soft-brimmed hat, a neck buff, and long-sleeved shirt and pants to protect myself from the sun in the 95-degree heat, I was sweat soaked. I was also wearing the dirt and smell of the past four days it took me to get there from St Louis. I took refuge under the shade of a broad-limbed oak tree. Two young women, better dressed for the day in shorts and sleeveless tops, came over to me, apparently undisturbed by my clothing choice of head-to-toe coverage. “Do you know which one is the Mississippi?” one asked. I explained to them that the Upper Mississippi was the river on our right and the larger, busy river on our left was the Ohio, which was coming down from Pittsburgh. Directly in front of us was the confluence, and beyond that the combined rivers are referred to as the Lower Mississippi. “Thanks for the geography lesson,” they said sincerely but with a laugh. They walked back to their car and I was tempted to ask them if I could sit in their air conditioning for just a couple of minutes.
For the Lower Mississippi, I switched to a new set of maps, which are produced by the Army Corps of Engineers and used by commercial traffic for navigation. They show detail of the entire river, mile by mile. Where I stood was 953 river miles to the Gulf of Mexico.
Hundreds of steel buoys mark the 9’-deep navigation channel that runs from St. Paul, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico. For a little excitement, I sometimes tried to see how close I could get to one as it raced by.
I returned to LITTLE JOY and rowed on a course directly straight down the middle where the two rivers became one, and quickly realized that I’d made a mistake. The confluence is over a mile wide and for 2 miles beyond Fort Defiance, the water was choppy and swift. The shipping channels of the Upper Mississippi and the Ohio, marked by red and green steel buoys, converged right ahead of me and I was headed right down the middle of the main channel of the Lower Mississippi. Tows, consisting of a single towboat pushing a raft of 15 or 20 steel barges tied together and covering an area larger than one-and-a-half football fields, had been regularly passing in every direction, and I had to stay well clear of them. I headed west to the Missouri shore and out of the main channel, but still stayed alert for traffic.
It was a different river now, more than three-quarters of a mile wide, half again as wide as the Upper Mississippi that I’d just left. It seemed swifter too, and although I had no way of measuring its speed, I made about 4-1/2 mph the rest of the day.
I had set up camp on a large, barren sandbar about 10 miles below the confluence along the Kentucky shore. The water lapped at the sand as I stretched out and took deep breaths. Across the river, the setting sun, glowing a flaming orange, lit the cloudless sky with yellow, red, and purple streaks. On the eastern horizon, a brilliant white full moon rose big and bold.
On many evenings, I took time to get much-needed rest time before setting up camp. Here I am studying the Corps of Engineers river navigational maps to see what’s ahead in the coming days.
I set my tent on the sandbar’s high ground, which was just 2′ above the water’s level, enough, I hoped, to accommodate an overnight rise. My kitchen was a poly tarp spread on the hard sand and anchored with dry bags and food containers on it. For dinner, I cooked up a pot of rice with two foil packs of tuna stirred in. It was a simple meal, but comforting as I dined propped against a dry bag and looking out over the river. In what was left of the fading evening light I studied the river maps to get a sense of what was in store for me tomorrow. When the sun set and the air grew still, the mosquitoes came out and chased me into the tent. The clear sky promised no chance of rain, so I left the rain fly off and lay on top of my sleeping bag, watching the rising full moon through the tent’s screen roof until I drifted off to sleep.
The alarm on my phone went off at 5 a.m. In the still-dark tent, I went through a routine of lower back stretches. My trip down the Mississippi last year was cut short at St. Louis by severe lower back pain. I was determined to not have that happen on this one.
The moon, now setting on the western horizon, illuminated the dark waters of the river as I finished packing the boat and shoving off. I stayed away from the main channel and worked my way close to shore. The heavily wooded banks were cast in a long soot-black silhouette as a faint yellow light appeared in the eastern sky behind them.
My simple camp on a sandbar was usually my tent, an area to eat and rest, and the boat with the anchor line far on shore just in case.
With the sun finally rising over the tree line, I pulled in the oars and let the current carry me. With the sun came the heat, and I slathered sunblock as thick as house paint on my face, hands, and bare feet. As the morning burned on I rowed hard enough to keep moving with the current but never have to pull with all my might. I made almost 5 mph. I chugged water, hot and tasting of plastic, straight from a one-gallon jug.
The Mississippi piles up debris on the upriver points of mid-river islands. Among the tree trunks deposited by the great flood of the spring of 2019 you can see, at the left of the pile, a green channel buoy, a full 8’ in length, carried here by the current. It is just one of many buoys that get moved out of position or tossed ashore with each flood.
After making my way around a hairpin turn in the river, I found myself with the morning sun on my left shoulder, an unsettling feeling because I was heading north. I had just entered the 20-mile-long New Madrid Bend, the only place on the Mississippi where it turns completely back on itself. I continued downriver, north, for 10 miles and approached the town of New Madrid at the top of the horseshoe.
A black bassboat with an oversized outboard approached me slowly and carefully. I stopped rowing. “What y’all doin’?” one of the two burly, bearded men asked in a thick drawl. “Rowing the Mississippi. What are you guys doing?” I asked. “Catfishin’,” they told me, and then asked if I needed anything. I thanked them and told them I was going into town for supplies.
The riverfront of New Madrid, Missouri, has an uninviting mile-and-a-half-long levee of boulders, stones, and gravel 30′ high with a stone-block flood wall 10′ high on top of that. A sign on the concrete wall says “Welcome to New Madrid.” The only access to town is a long boat ramp leading to an opening in the wall at its downstream end. I approached the ramp quickly, ready to tie off to a small steel floating dock. I would have one chance. There was no going back upriver against the swift current.
Just behind the levee at the upstream end of the flood wall was a small brick building with twin glass doors, the New Madrid Historical Museum. I walked in and a cold blast of an air conditioner washed over my sweat-soaked shirt. I was soon shivering. “Are you one of my paddlers?” asked a lean man with wire-rim glasses. I told him I was in a rowboat, not in a canoe. “Oh, that’s why you’re not as dirty as the other guys.” He pointed out the restroom and mentioned a hose out front to fill water jugs, and told me I could hang out as long as I wanted. “New Madrid is known for two things,” he told me, “the battle, and of course, earthquakes.” Earthquakes?
I was the only one in the museum. I strolled through looking at iron, lead, and steel artifacts from the Battle of Island Number Ten, a 40-day-long Civil War battle fought here in 1862, and scientific instruments, charts, and maps of earthquakes that occurred here in 1811 and 1812. A poster-sized engraving depicted the three-week bombardment by Union gunboats of the fortified Confederate island, and I try to imagine what that must have been like, occurring just outside these doors on the river. The curator told me about the three massive earthquakes that shook New Madrid. They were felt across the central and eastern U.S., and the shaking caused church bells to ring as far away as Philadelphia and Boston. During one of the first tremors the earth under the Mississippi rose and made the river briefly flow backward.
I walked a half mile out to the highway for a café meal, stopped at a store for bread, tuna, and ice tea, picked up a couple of sandwiches, and had a warm walk back to the boat, a walk that I repeated when I realized I had left my phone charger at the café.
Eighteen miles downriver from New Madrid, I camped on a sandbar in mid-river. Memphis, Tennessee, was only 135 miles away and I decided if I put in some extra effort, I could be there in two-and-a-half days. In the next two days I stayed on the river for 10 hours each day and covered 100 miles.
I was often on the river and rowing at dawn. I experienced a sunrise like this for four days in a row, but it never lost its effect on me.
At my camp 35 miles upstream from Memphis, I woke after daybreak with light suffusing my tent. With only 35 miles left to reach Memphis, I took some extra time in the morning to rest—the heat of the past nine days had been taking a toll. I packed up and got on the river.
As I got closer to the city, a 300′-tall glass-sided pyramid loomed over the trees lining the riverbank and dominated the other buildings in the Memphis skyline. With the city now crowding the banks next to me, I passed under the pale-green twin arches of the Hernando de Soto Bridge and rowed three-quarters of a mile to the downstream end of Mud Island and rowed into Wolf River Harbor.
The marina there was full of activity. Two cruisers, heading to the Gulf, were taking on hundreds of dollars of fuel. Other boats were heading out to the river to fish. In the marina office I was told all the slips were full because there was a catfish contest going on. A man in a wrinkled button-down fishing shirt and cargo shorts came over, pointed to a black steel dock, and said I could tie up there. When I asked what I owed him, he said, “We don’t charge you guys anything. Only I can’t let you camp here. The city will chase you off.” No problem. I had been planning on getting a hotel for two nights to rest.
In the shade of an awning, it was an oppressive 99 degrees. I walked into the city, checked into a hotel and, in my room high above the city, I turned the air conditioner as low as it went and lay down in a cool, clean bed. On my two days off, I took meandering walks around Memphis.
The view from high ground helps illustrate the size of the tows that ply the Lower Mississippi. This one has just 11 barges; imagine a tow with 30.
Well rested, I set out on the river again and, after rowing for three days, I beached LITTLE JOY on a bend in the river 121 miles from Memphis. The current was racing by, so I kept a hand on the bow line to keep the boat from being pulled off the shore and swept downstream. There was a tow a quarter mile away downriver. Tows on the Lower Mississippi are not restricted in size by locks, and I saw a few with more than 30 barges, covering an area greater than three-and-a-half football fields. I couldn’t tell if this tow was moving, but I didn’t want to take the risk of having my boat ashore if it passed by, leaving me to contend with its wake. I decided not to wait, and shoved off and let the current take me.
Whenever I pulled LITTLE JOY ashore near the navigation channel, I had to keep an eye out for vessel traffic. This tow was churning upriver and dragging a large wake, so I’d have to tend to my boat before the wake reached shore. Only when I pulled her on the beach or found a protected place to leave her could I turn my back on LITTLE JOY.
Another tow of six barges appeared farther downstream, churning toward me. It was too late for me to stop. The first tow I’d seen was parked with the tug’s props turning, pushing a lead barge into the bank to hold the tow fast; I waved my hat, hoping the pilot would see me and would stay put as I rowed by. The tow bound upriver was drawing near. I just kept LITTLE JOY’s bow pointed downriver and hugged close to the parked tow and flew by in the narrow channel, buffeted by the passing tow’s wake.
In the next 2 miles, on a long, straight stretch of the river, I counted 13 tows parked at an angle as if on an old-fashioned Main Street, their bows pushed into the banks of both sides. I didn’t know what to make of it and, unsure what to do, I went right down the middle of the river.
Two long blasts of a horn made me turn to look over the bow. A small tow was coming upriver and, even though I was out of the channel, I guessed he was letting me know he was coming. It was an Army Corps of Engineers barge loaded with a crane and construction equipment. A second one soon followed. It was the last moving towboat I saw for the rest of the day. I don’t know what happened to cause the commercial traffic to halt, but I took advantage of it and rowed until sunset, covering 60 miles in 12-1/2 hours on the river.
Several cruise ships passed me on the river, some more than once. This stern-wheeler, AMERICAN QUEEN, launched in 1995 with a length of 418’, may be the longest river steamboat ever built. She came in the night up the Yazoo River to stop at Vicksburg.
When I arrived at Vicksburg, Mississippi, I had to row one-and-a-half miles upstream along a tributary, the Yazoo River, to get to town. Vicksburg used to be on the Mississippi, but on April 26, 1876, the river cut across a peninsula on the Louisiana side, and left Vicksburg high and dry. It was land-bound for 27 years; in 1903 a diversion canal rerouted the Yazoo River to run by the city’s landing and reestablished Vicksburg as a Mississippi River port.
I spent two nights in Vicksburg and had no place safe to leave the boat, so I pulled LITTLE JOY out of the water and left her at this very busy boat ramp on the Yazoo River. In the morning I was surprised to find AMERICAN QUEEN, with its 222 staterooms, dropping off passengers for tours of the town.
My row from Memphis to Vicksburg covered 300 miles and took seven days, seven gallons of drinking water, two gallons of iced tea, and was without a single town visit. I stayed two nights at a hotel next to the boat ramp to take a break, do laundry, buy supplies, and pay a visit to the Civil War battlefield park.
These bridges at Vicksburg are two of the 130 bridges, both auto and railroad, that span the Mississippi. The view here is upstream as I’m leaving town. Beneath the central spans, at right, is a sprawling casino/hotel complex. The town of Vicksburg is in the distance at left. Bridges were fewer and farther apart the farther south I traveled.
Back underway, I dunked my hat and neck buff in the river and put them back on. The cold water soaked my shoulders and back. Even though it was October, the weather was sweltering. I had been on the river 23 days and had not seen a drop of rain nor a day when the temperature did not reach 90 degrees.
A 2″-long dragonfly landed on the thwart in front of me. Its multifaceted iridescent eyes and electric blue and green body glowed on the muted earth tones of the wood. Its wings, all but invisible save for their black veins, blurred suddenly and the dragonfly took off. Moments later another took its place.
Herons and cormorants gathered on the beaches and in the trees. A flock of cranes flew high above me, their long necks extended ahead and their legs trailing behind with toes pointed. As I approached a wooded, mid-river island with a sandy beach, I jumped in my seat when an Asian carp, easily 2’ long, jumped over my port oar, bounced off the top of it, and came down with a splash. The Asian carp, an invasive species, always jumped at my approach in the shallows.
Standing on the bank of the island, I bathed with a jug of cold river water. While it was not muddy and appeared clean, I used it carefully. I knew from my pre-trip research that the Mississippi is the second most polluted river in the United States. The cooling effect of the bath didn’t last long. After I set up my tent I was once again dripping with sweat, and lay down to sleep, waiting for the sun to set and the barely perceptible cool of the damp river air.
In Baton Rouge, I pulled LITTLE JOY on this beach where she was just a speck behind the USS KIDD, a 376’ destroyer. I only stayed a couple of hours before heading out for the most dangerous part of the trip—Baton Rouge to New Orleans—where I’d have to make my way through heavy commercial vessel traffic.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, lay only a half mile away, but I could not get there. I was on the wrong side of the river and as I waited to cross, tow after tow churned up and down the main channel of the river. I stopped 75 yards upriver of a string of anchored barges and waited for my chance. The black steel bows loomed over me and I thought it would be scary if they started moving. A deckhand came walking down the length of barges. “Hey,” he said casually, “could you move out of the way?” Without replying I scooted quickly off to the side where I could see smoke and the ripples of heat rising from the towboat behind the barges. “Attention in the rowboat,” said a voice over a PA speaker. “Are you alone?” I looked up and nodded my head but I could not see anything behind the reflective glass on the bridge. “I thought I saw two of you,” the booming voice said. This time I stood up and raised one arm over my head to indicate I was indeed alone. The Captain must have understood because the engines revved to a high whine and the tow moved out into the channel. I crossed right behind and stopped in Baton Rouge for a couple of hours.
There were several ship anchorages like this one below Baton Rouge. I would look at the ships for an anchor chain or exhaust from the stack. I could pass by anchored ships in relative safety, sometimes even close enough to touch them, but I stayed well clear of ships with their engines running, whether they were underway or not.
The 105-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is one continuous deepwater port and one of the busiest in the world. The barge captains call this stretch Suicide Alley because of the amount of traffic.
For the 11 hours and 47 miles that followed leaving Baton Rouge, I was puckered up tight, dodging barges, shuttle boats, tugboats, piers, and docks. The ship anchorage was something new to me: large ocean-going cargo ships were anchored in line out in the river. I passed by them peacefully, but I stayed alert for the many fast shuttle boats bringing supplies or crews back and forth.
I took this self-portrait to commemorate a 60-mile day. I wasted no time setting up my camp on the sandbar so I could crawl into my tent to rest.
As I rowed downriver I spotted a large pipe stretched halfway across the river to a three-story-tall barge. It was a dredging operation. As I approached, a horn made three long blasts. My pucker got tighter. Was that for me? A fast boat from the Army Corps came out and instructed me to pass by near the bank and then took off in a blur.
I camped behind a barge anchorage with towboats shuttling barges back and forth all night to a noisy, dusty loading pier right next to me. I didn’t care. It was safe and I hadn’t seen a better place to camp all day.
I repeated the same scenario the next day but found a nicer beach for camping on the west bank at the end of a barge anchorage just above the city of New Orleans.
I enjoyed camping on the many sandbars on the Lower Mississippi. I made this camp far from the shore on what little high ground there was. I was unsure if the river would rise during the night and cover the sandbar.
I was up before daybreak and ready to go. Barges passed by as they had all night. I waited and ate Pop-Tarts until sunrise, when I’d have a better chance to see and be seen.
The sun was up as I passed under the Hale Boggs Bridge, a cable-stayed span over the half-mile width of the river. There would be no stopping; I wanted to get past New Orleans by the end of the day.
I reached the Huey Long Bridge, the first New Orleans landmark, at 11 a.m. I crossed the river there from right to left, holding my breath as I rowed as hard as I could, slipping in between the tows going up and down the river. At noon I reached Butterfly Riverview Park on the east side of the city. People walking the footpath along the river were enjoying their Saturday, looking out over the river and at me. I waved. Two long blasts of a horn deafened me. A barge, which I thought was anchored, was now moving along the bank. It honked at me even though I was all the way over near the shore. It passed me just as I was right in front of a group of 10 people, now gathered by the sound of the horn, to watch me get run over. I gave them a friendly wave.
Five miles downriver from the park, with the Crescent City Connection bridges right in front of me and downtown New Orleans crowds on the left bank, I had to wait under the bridges for a few minutes as the stern-wheel steamboat NATCHEZ made a U-turn right in front of me. I was next to the river cruise ship AMERICAN HARMONY and saw a uniformed officer out on a balcony. “You guys passed me four times in the past two weeks!” I said to him. “Yep,” was his only reply.
I made my way slowly past the New Orleans downtown riverfront. Most of it is set on pilings 15′ above the river, and I couldn’t see anything except the high-rise hotels and people leaning on the rail above. I rowed close to the pilings, and some people looking down at me waved, some took pics, and some just ignored me. I passed by the NATCHEZ, now tied up to the pier, as its steam-whistle calliope was playing “New York, New York.” After I rowed around Algiers Point on the right bank, the wind picked up and I put New Orleans behind me. I pushed on another 13 miles and made camp on a sandy, willow-covered bank right next to the 81-mile river marker.
It rained on and off for the last two days of the voyage. I stopped here at a small hidden public boat ramp for a brief rest and to reunite with my wife. Over the last 60 miles of the river’s course to the Gulf of Mexico the banks were either stone levees or marsh or mud with few protected places to stop.
The first rain of the trip arrived the next morning along with strong winds and I only made 31 miles before I stopped and camped in a small grove of trees on a muddy bank.
It was pitch black as I stared out at the river in the wee hours of the morning, debating whether to go or not. My wife, Xiaole, had flown in to New Orleans the night before and would meet me in Venice, just 40 miles downriver and the last community on the river accessible by road. I had to finish today. I pushed LITTLE JOY off the mud and got aboard. As I rowed close to the bank, I looked over my shoulder much more than usual since I couldn’t see obstacles in the river any farther than 100 yards ahead. Shortly after my start, at Pointe à la Hache, a rural riverside neighborhood, I stopped just upstream of the ferry dock and waited for a ferry, loaded with a half-dozen cars, to leave for its half-mile crossing of the river. It was 5:30 a.m. when I scooted by.
With 15 miles to go to the finish I set out between storms. I was exhausted by this point and made the last few miles only on the adrenaline generated by the excitement of finishing.
The blue-gray wall of a storm was coming at me from the east, and flashes of lightning pushed back the dark. I stayed right next to the left bank and took refuge from the driving rain and the frequent lightning under some small trees.
When the rain eased, I crossed the river to shave off some distance as I approached a blind bend in the river. I only needed 15 minutes to cross, but I could not see up or down the river far enough to see oceangoing cruise ships and giant container ships. They were passing about every half hour and moving fast so I kept a close watch on the river. I crossed the river several times that day without incident.
Later that morning, a second storm rolled over me bringing thunder, lightning, and high winds. On the river, the thunder seemed much louder than on land and it was so close that I could feel it in my chest.
The rain continued on and off through the afternoon as I approached the take-out in the town of Venice. “David!” I heard Xiaole’s voice over the wind. She was standing by the edge of the river at a small, nearly hidden boat ramp. It was the first time I’d seen her in a month and in her orange raincoat she was looking as beautiful as ever. I rowed ashore and got out and kissed her briefly. I was exhausted from the wind and the rain and the waves and, with 13 miles still left to row and unsure if I could reach Venice, I’d save a long hug for the finish.
The rain stopped and I set back out, but immediately the wind picked up and the waves battered the boat as a third storm from the east rolled in, the fiercest yet. I found a protective cove behind a jetty and held on tight to a willow bush. I turned my back to the rain and waited.
With just a few more miles left to row, I was exultant at seeing Xiaole on the riverbank.
As the storm passed, patches of blue sky shone through. It was only 3 o’clock as I set out for the last 12 miles. Channel markers counted down the remaining miles. The wind eased and came around from the northeast, helping me along. There were still 5 miles to go. My hands ached, but I rowed hard, without stopping. Now 3 miles. I saw a couple of fishing boats coming upriver from the Gulf heading into the channel that would take them up to Venice. I rowed even harder and stopped only when I reached that channel. Hunched over to catch my breath I heard yelling from the shore. Xiaole was jumping up and down on top of the levee. I stood in the boat, facing her, and raised my arms.
I still had 2 miles to row down the channel to reach the Venice Marina. I rowed at an easy pace as 40′ sport-fishing boats with four outboards passed by, some slowing, some not. I really didn’t care.
At the marina, the manager said, “We never ask you guys for anything.” He gave me a small, out-of-the way slip where I could leave the boat for a few days as I got ready to take LITTLE JOY home. Xiaole found me on the dock, and this time I hugged her tight and held on.
David Hudson is a happy corporate refugee. As a teenager, he spent countless summer days rowing a 10′ aluminum pram around a small New Jersey lake. Later he cruised the Atlantic and Mediterranean atop the deck of a U.S. Naval helicopter carrier. Downsizing since the Navy, he has spent time exploring the rivers and lakes of New Jersey, New York, and Ontario in a canoe. Putting his woodworking skills to a test, he built his 17′ dory, LITTLE JOY, and can be found, along with his wife Xiaole, rowing it up and down the Schuylkill River outside of Philadelphia.
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.
A few months ago, an iceboat followed me home. At 75 lbs, it’s too heavy to carry, so to get it from the roof rack or trailer to the ice, I needed to make a cart. Iceboaters typically make light, sturdy carts with wheels big enough to take the hard pushing and pulling required to get over the high icy ridges that form on the shore. I thought I could also use the cart to roll my sea kayak down a root-rutted trail to my usual launch.
I started with shopping for wheels. Inflatable tires don’t perform well when it is very cold, so I bought two 14″ plastic wheels, each rated at 50 lbs, with solid tires and roller bearings that would fit a 1/2″ axle. I had some steel tubing that I could use for an axle. It would go under a wood plank, a 24″ by 3 1/2″ piece of 4/4 ash that I had on hand. The cart could be made wider to take larger boats as long as the weight on the wheels is within their load rating.
Photographs by the author
The first arrangement for carrying kayaks used commercial roof-rack cradles. Disassembled, all of the cart parts fit through the kayak hatch seen here.
I used pad-eyes to fasten the axle to the wood—they would be stronger than the other option, eye straps. The pad-eyes were through-bolted to the plank, as I was concerned that wood screws could work loose. I needed spacers on the axle to bear against the pad-eyes and keep the axle centered. I tried using 1/2″ PVC pipe, which was slightly too tight, but 1/2″ copper pipe was just right.
An allowance is needed for washers on the inboard side, between the wheel and the tubing spacers, and on the outboard side, where easily removable spring clips hold the wheels on.
With a foam saddle for a kayak taped to the axle side of the wooden beam, the weight of the wood assures the saddle is always facing up, ready for the kayak.
To accommodate the kayak, I first bolted on a cradle that is part of my roof-rack system. These are a little expensive and I often need mine on the roof rack, so I replaced it with foam V block, taped in place. The cart is easy to take apart, and all of the pieces even fit through the large oval hatch in the stern of my kayak. Padding slipped over the axle ends keeps them from doing any damage.
I use a webbing strap to hold the kayak on the cart. That works fine on its own for pushing the cart; for pulling, an additional light piece of line hooked over the rear hatch coaming keeps the cart from slipping off.
The rigid wheels may not be as good in soft sand as some of the wide inflatable wheels, but their 14” diameter makes it easy to run over the rough terrain I built it for. For about $50, I had a cart that is the equal of any of the expensive commercial ones and much sturdier than the various do-it-yourself PVC-pipe ones I’ve seen.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
Editor’s notes
For quite some time, I’ve needed a good cart for my canoe. The first one I made had small wheels that couldn’t manage sand. The second one had a large frame with bicycle wheels and wouldn’t fit in the canoe. The third used a boat fender as a roller and worked great until the pressure of the axle tore a hole in it. When I saw Ben’s cart, I gave it a try and it has worked well.
I made a general-purpose cradle for my cart. The carpet pads are just wrapped around the cradle board and can easily be removed. With the axle located underneath the wooden deck and cradle, the cart needs a kickstand to keep the cradle upright.
The kickstand is a flat piece of 1/8″ aluminum secured by a screw to the beveled underside of the crossbeam.
The kickstand pivots out of the way and a partially driven screw serves as a stop in case the pivot screw doesn’t provide enough friction.
While the cart is wide enough to be placed in the middle of a kayak and take all of its weight, it could fit only the bow of this skiff (the Bella 10 reviewed in this issue) and take about half of the load.
The 14″ wheels don’t get entirely bogged down by dry sand, but they do get slowed down.
On damp hard sand, the wheels roll as easily as on pavement.
.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
During our build of our Penobscot 14, ST. JACQUES, and the restoration of the 1880s Mississippi River skiff, BARBASHELA, we drilled a lot of pilot and countersink holes for stainless-steel and silicon-bronze wood screws. White oak, southern yellow pine, okoume, and cypress were the targets. These holes can be drilled separately with drill bits and a countersink, but we purchased a set of Fuller bits that combine countersinks with tapered drill bits, and it has saved us many hours of switching bits. There were drill bit shapes for different wood screws, so we set up to compare the Fuller set with pilot bits from Carbide & Diamond and Bosch.
Photographs by the authors
The three pilot bits tested include, from top to bottom, the Carbide & Diamond, the Fuller, and the Bosch.
The Fuller set has bits for #6, #8, #10, and #12 screws. The bit is adjusted to match the length of the screw, and a stop collar can be added to set the countersink’s depth. Matching plug cutters for 3/8″ and 1/2″ countersinks are included. Our set had drill bits with round shanks; other available sets have quick-change hex shanks, which we would highly recommend.
The Carbide & Diamond pilot bits are sold individually and come with hex shanks, countersink depth-adjustment collars, and tapered drill bits. The Bosch pilot bits, sold in a set of four bits for #6, #8, #10, and #12 screws, have hex shanks and the drill bits are not tapered, which may work better for some screws. The drill bit depth is adjustable on the Bosch bit, but there is no collar for depth adjustment for the countersink.
We tested the bits by drilling holes for #6, #8, and #10 silicon-bronze screws with Frearson heads. We simulated planking stock with 1/4” okoume plywood with the screws driven, heads flush, into samples of ash, Douglas-fir, red oak, and locust for one test and, for the other, 1/2” pine with the screw head countersunk 1/4″. We also drove some stainless-steel wood screws and deck screws into samples of pine and oak plywood.
These screws show the grip they had on pilot holes drilled in ash. From left, the Bosch pilot bit has a straight drill and the screw threads fully engage with the wood for a very secure grip but harder driving. The C&D hole is oversized and engaged only the threads at the screw’s tip. The tapered Fuller drill bit engages about half of the threads—the wood screw itself is not tapered.
The Bosch and C&D bits were easy to swap out of the drill with the hex shanks, and the bits stayed secure. The Bosch bits had the smallest holes and, with their straight sides, they had the tightest fit and were the hardest to drive screws into. A few screws sheared mid-shank when I tried to remove them from the red oak and locust. The C&D bit holes were very big, and only one or two of the screw threads cut into the wood at the bottom of the pilot hole. It seemed that the bits were labeled off by at least one screw size. I drilled a hole with a #6 bit and got a good fit for a #8 screw.
The Fuller bits had shallow thread cuts in half of the pilot hole and the rest was shaft clearance, and there was still a tight fit for the screw. The Fuller bits could spin in the drill chuck, and the countersinks could spin on the drill bit periodically if I did not fully tighten the drill chuck and the set screw.
The C&D and Fuller bits both had adjustable counterbore collars that were easy to set, and they made consistent countersink holes with minimum tearout. The Bosch bits had no countersink stop collar, so countersink depth was a guess.
For the most secure fit, I’d use Bosch. The Bosch bits were not as sharp as the others and tended to burn the harder locust and red oak. The C&D bits had hex shanks and nice sharp bits, but the hole diameters were too big for the stated screw sizes. The Fuller boxed set is our all-around favorite; we have put in hundreds, if not thousands, of screws with them. The Fuller bits have the best balance of thread cut and shaft clearance for wood screws that do not have fully threaded shanks.
Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about in the tidal waters of Northwest Florida in their fleet of small boats, and are serial restorers of nautical craft. Their adventures are chronicled at their blog, Small Boat Restoration.
Almost every boatbuilder has had to contend with a broken screw that must be removed. This recently happened to me when my #6 self-drilling Torx screws had set firm while temporarily securing a 6mm panel to a thin Douglas-fir seam batten while the epoxy cured. Fueled by coffee and enthusiasm, I broke seven screw heads off. I should have stopped after the first one and used my soldering iron to heat the screws to loosen the rest, but that moment had passed. The screws were not stainless and their points protruded through the seam batten on the interior of the boat. They had to go.
Photographs by the author
The Unscrew-Um has started work on this screw that has lost its head. Guided by the screw shaft, the Unscrew-Um removes only a minimum of wood to extract the screw.
The conical left-hand-threaded screw-extractors that you might find in a hardware store are designed to bore into the head of a screw that has been damaged by a driver bit and then back it out. These tools can also work on a bolt or a screw with a substantial shank, but not on the thin shank of the #6 screw. For extracting broken screws, as well as those with stripped heads, there’s a tool called the Unscrew-Um.
In the 1980s, Tom Jannke, the Unscrew-Um’s inventor, was a boatbuilder helping to refurbish MAH JONG, an elegant Sparkman & Stephens yawl. The project manager had soberly lectured Tom to “make no mistakes” and set him to removing a teak ceiling. Unfortunately, the screw heads were breaking off and Tom was not allowed to split the teak, remove the screws, and make new strips. Out of necessity, he experimented with bored-out drill rods and split pins, and then inserted them around the screw. They would grip the outside of the screw and he could turn them out. Finding success with these homemade devices, Tom set about perfecting his invention and established his company, T & L Tools.
The Unscrew-Um has a saw-toothed tip to cut into wood and untempered metal and a slotted shaft to pinch and twist the screw.
An Unscrew-Um is a hardened-steel tube with an expansion slot on one side and cutting teeth on the end. Used with a power drill run in reverse, it descends over the broken screw, grips it, and backs it out. The key to success is to use the correct Unscrew-Um for the screw. A sizing chart provides a guide to the 11 different Unscrew-Ums and screw sizes from #2 to #20. The chart indicates how to select the right tool for a screw with a stripped slot, a head broken off, or a shank separated from the threaded end of the screw. The Unscrew-Um’s slot allows it to expand slightly as it descends around the remnants of the screw, locks onto it, and backs it out on its threads. There is little damage to the surrounding wood.
Many cheap multi-material screws now offered in hardware stores are hardened, as I unwittingly found my Torx screws to be. The threads are rolled onto the shank, not cut from it, so they can be equal to or greater than the shank diameter. The sizing chart notes that the Unscrew-Um to use on these screws is two sizes bigger than what is needed for a standard screw. The Unscrew-Um must cut outside of the screw, avoiding contact with the hardened metal, which will dull the tool’s teeth. The Unscrew-Um will slightly expand over the threads until the friction overcomes the grip of the threads, and the screw backs out.
For hardened screws seized in place with epoxy, which was my issue, use an Unscrew-Um large enough to pass completely around the threads of the hardened screw and core it out of the wood, leaving a small clean hole. Using the 1/4″ Unscrew-Um on the #6 Torx screws, I removed the remaining screws in a matter of minutes. The teeth bit right through the wood while the screw shank guided the Unscrew-Um down its length. A small pick pushed the plug from the Unscrew-Um. The ease of removing these screws in this fashion was impressive. A small, clean hole remained, which I filled with thickened epoxy. I was relieved that I did not have to resort to more complicated surgery.
Small boats often require a lot of small screws, whether expensive stainless-steel and bronze permanent fasteners or cheap temporary screws to hold epoxied connections, and sometimes screws strip or break. That’s when the Unscrew-Ums are good partners to have close at hand.
Christophe Matson lives in New Hampshire. At a very young age he disobeyed his father and rowed the neighbor’s Dyer Dhow across the Connecticut River to the strange new lands on the other side. Ever since he has been hooked on the idea that a small boat offers the most freedom.
Unscrew-Ums are available individually, at $8, and in sets, starting at $40, directly from the manufacturer, T & L Tools.
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.
John Leyde built his home on the hillside just above a small lake in Arlington, Washington, so he can’t be faulted for thinking about boats. If you were to visit him, you’d be thinking about boats too, because his long, tree-shadowed driveway will take you past his bow-roof shop and a boat or two before you even get to his front door. And if you were to come by boat, you’d find two rowing skiffs on one side of his dock and an electric launch in a shed on the other side.
Photos by and courtesy of Pat and John Leyde
As work begins, Valor zooms in with a magnifying lens, while River seems a bit less interested and gives in to a yawn, even though it’s almost noon according to the clock on the back wall.
John has been building boats for decades, among them the steam launch E. SCOTT HAMMOND, which he shared with us in 2018. Of course, he already has more boats than he needs, so has to rely on his friends and his family to provide the “necessity” to build another one. A few years ago, John’s friend Gary let slip that he wanted to build a boat, an Adirondack guideboat, and in no time at all John cleared a space in his shop. Then every Tuesday for 16 months, the two got together to build ATNA.
With the wood stove softening winter’s chill, Grampy (in red hat at rear) and grandsons start marking the panel shapes on an extended sheet of 1/4″ plywood.
Last fall, John was getting anxious about winter coming on. He had put his steamboat to bed for the winter and was without a project to carry him through the cold months that he likes to spend puttering in his woodstove-heated shop. His grandsons, 11-year-old River and 9-year-old Valor, came to mind. How could two young boys not want to have a boat of their own? Getting the okay from their parents was easy. They recognized the educational value of the project and the value of spending time with Grampy. The boys just wanted the boat to be able to accommodate their golden doodle, Winston. John’s patient wife, Pat, drove the hardest bargain: If another boat was going to be built on the property, one of the others had to go. Exit one plywood sailing pram.
The assembly of the hull starts with the two bottom panels getting stitched together.
The boys lived less than a half mile across the lake and John envisioned them rowing over to visit, so he looked around for designs for small, easy-to-build rowing boats. Sam Devlin’s Bella 12, the bigger sister of the Bella 10, fit the bill, and John ordered the plans. The boat is available as a kit, but he rightly decided that building from scratch would teach his grandsons more and give them a greater sense of accomplishment, turning a pile of plywood and lumber into a working vessel. He was proven right on the first count as soon as the project got started in late December. Marking the shapes for the bottom, side, and transom pieces on the plywood required working with fractions, a topic they were studying in school.
Unfolding the bottom was a milestone worth celebrating. It’s unclear what Valor’s club hammer and River’s splitting maul have to do with the job at hand.
River and Valor were only available on Saturdays, once their weekends had been freed up by the close of the soccer season, so during the rest of the week John did much of the power-tool work, like cutting out the plywood shapes, for safety’s sake as much as to keep himself happily occupied in his shop.
With spreaders holding the partially stitched hull open, the boys get their first glimpse of something that is beginning to look like a boat.
The trio stitched the pieces together with plastic cable ties instead of wire, assuring the edge tools would stay sharp if segments of stitches remained hiding in the joints. The boys were introduced to working with epoxy when “spot welds” were applied between the cable ties, and again after the ties were removed and the seams were taped with fiberglass.
River, left, and Valor are all smiles as John gets them started on painting, the final stage and their favorite.
The string of Saturdays stretched from December and finished in the middle of April. The boys told John that the best part of building the boat was the painting, probably because it didn’t involve fractions or sanding hardened epoxy, and that the best part of the whole project was spending time with Grampy—music to a grandfather’s ears.
On a sunny April day, the Bella 12 and crew emerge from John’s workshop.
The boat was launched on the lake and christened FORTNITE, not because a time span of two weeks had any significance, but because it is the name of a video game that River and Valor enjoy. Neither of the boys had done any rowing to speak of, but they quickly took to it. John can see that given a summer with the boat, they’ll be on their way to becoming adept watermen.
When Valor and River both take to the oars, they can get FORTNITE scooting along.
River and Valor are still occupied with school, continuing their education through the pandemic with a distance-learning program. While they’re doing homework, their father, Michael (John’s son), slips from shore aboard FORTNITE to do a bit of fishing. John also “borrows” his grandsons’ boat to go rowing.
SBM
John and Pat can invoke grandparental privilege and take the skiff out on the lake.
Come next winter, John may have to decide which boat currently in his fleet will have to go. River and Valor, taking after their grandfather, have decided they want to build another boat.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
Subscribe For Full Access
Flipbooks are available to paid subscribers only. Subscribe now or log in for access.
Photo by NIS Boats
Photo by NIS Boats
Photo by NIS Boats
Photo by NIS Boats
Photo by NIS Boats
