Some sawhorses I’ve used were built bull-strong for house construction; others were so feebly put together that they quickly became kindling. The style I like most is based on a James Krenov type used for a mortise-and-tenon exercise 30 years ago at furniture-making school. Those horses were made of 4/4 hard maple with legs like an inverted-T and upper and lower crossbars that are through-tenoned, wedged, and glued. Variations on that style have become the mainstay in my shop.
Tom DeVries
This pair of sawhorses converts from crossbeam (right) to sling (left). The lower beams’ tenons are wedged to lock them permanently in the uprights’ mortises.
I wanted knock-down sawhorses for travel and storage, so I designed a set with cross bars attached with dowels and carriage bolts. I made these of spruce 2x4s and with upper cross pieces I can remove and replace with carpet-strip slings screwed to the uprights. For displaying a pair of lapstrake canoes, I made two pairs of “show horses.” I worked out a simple, break-down design with loose-wedged tusk-tenons for the lower cross piece and a sling made of soft, polyester three-strand rope attached through holes in the uprights with fancy stopper knots. These stands readily break down to two parts and lie flat for transportation or storage.
Tom DeVries
These take-apart sawhorse slings have tenoned crosspieces that are held in their mortises by removable wedges.
On occasion, I have more than one boat needing attention, so I recently put together a new set of work horses that have both upper cross bars and canvas slings. These were made from four 8′ 2x4s of the SPF variety (my chosen boards were likely fir). With a chop saw I got out four bases 23 3⁄4″ long, two 23 3⁄4″ lower cross pieces, four 31 1⁄2″ uprights, and two 30″ upper cross bars. I picked the heaviest 2×4 for the bases and the lightest for the top cross bars, then thickness-planed the top cross bars to 1 1⁄4″ and left the other parts as is. After cutting mortises in the uprights for the lower cross piece through-tenon and cutting the notches for the top cross bar bridle joints, I mated the bases and uprights with a half lap, glued, and screwed together, with the joint off center. (A great resource for all woodworking joinery is a book titled Woodwork Joints by Charles H. Hayward. In it you will find the half-lap, dowel, tusk-tenon, through-tenon, and bridle joints used in these sawhorses.)
Having longer feet pointing toward each other makes the horses less likely to rock when a boat is slung on them. Offset bases also require a little less floor space when these horses are stored shoved together. A slight arch cut on the bottoms of the bases keeps them from getting high-centered and rocking. The lower cross piece is attached to the uprights with wedged through-tenons. Before the glue-up I dry-fit everything, including the notched top cross bar. I checked for square and avoided racking while clamping for this glue up. The slings are made of a triple layer of No. 10 canvas that I sewed to a width of 1¼″. They are 44″ long and are glued and screwed to wooden blocks that fit the upright notches.
Whether glue-fastened tight or designed for easy disassembly, these show horses and work horses cost only a few dollars and a few hours’ work, and all earn their keep.
Tom DeVries studied fine woodworking with James Krenov in the early 1990s. He and wife Tina live in central Massachusetts surrounded by white-pine and red-oak trees. Tom drives north for his white cedar planking stock and wishes his lumberyard still carried spruce 2x6s.
Editor’s notes
When I first saw Tom’s Krenov-style sawhorses, I was a bit skeptical. All of the sawhorses I’d ever used a flat plank top and four splayed legs; I didn’t think an inverted T shape could be as solid. I built a sawhorse to Tom’s specifications, modeled on a bolt-fastened take-apart he’d made, and as soon as I had it assembled, I was sold on the design. I can take the one here apart in less than a minute and put it back together in about 75 seconds.
Years ago I’d bought some molded brackets that held 2×4 legs to a 2×6 top. They were annoying to assemble and constantly got loose and wobbly. I can get rid of them now and replace them with the Krenov-style.
The half lap is easily cut on the table saw. A shop-built sled is safer and more accurate than a miter gauge. If you don’t have a sled, this is a good excuse to make one. To make the sawhorse joints as strong as possible, cut the slots in the bases for a tight fit on the sides of the uprights.
After the upright and base have been cut and dry fit, the joints is assembled with carpenter’s glue and screws.
Screws are driven into the joint from the base side because the upright’s side of the joint has an open end that poses a risk of splitting.
Cutting 1⁄2″ from all but the ends of the base creates feet at the ends that will keep the sawhorse from rocking. An alternative is to glue 1⁄2″-thick blocks on the ends of the bases.
The cutout for the bolt end starts with a 1 1⁄2″ hole; a jigsaw is then used to cut a flat for the washer.
A long hex-head bolt holds the lower crosspiece in place. A bolt with a washer allows putting a lot of pressure on the connection, making it so solid that the tenon used in the classic construction isn’t necessary. The hex head makes for quick assembly and disassembly. A carriage bolt would mean turning the nut in the cutout, a slow and awkward process. And the head of the carriage bolt would eventually crush the wood and make the connection less solid.
To assure that the hole for the bolt hits its mark in the center of the cutout, use a guide block bored on the drill press.
Another aid to a straight hole is a straight edge clamped on the centerline. Eye the drill bit parallel from above and the side.
The crossbar is notched to keep the crosspiece from sliding out of the upright’s slot. Cut the slot 2 3⁄4″ deep and the notch 3⁄4″ deep, so the top surfaces of the uprights and crosspiece will be flush. You can plane or rip the crosspiece to a thickness of 1″ to make the sawhorse lighter; if you do, cut the upright slot to match.
A screw driven through each upright keeps the crosspiece in place when you use it to lift the sawhorse.
With the bolts turned up tight, the take-apart sawhorse is quite solid.
Taken apart, the sawhorse makes a compact bundle.
A pair of plywood shelves set on the bases provide a place to hold tools or weight (sandbags here) to steady the sawhorses. To keep the shelves in place, screws driven into the bases are set close to the shelf’s edges and left about 1⁄4″ proud so the screw heads dig into the edge of the plywood when it is pivoted in place, wedged against the uprights.
A sling of 1″ tubular or flat webbing can be a permanent part of the sawhorse. I drilled 3⁄4″ holes for some 1″ tubular webbing 1 1⁄2″ below the uprights’ slots.
Simply remove the crosspiece to use the sling. The idle crosspiece can rest on the bases, with its notches engaged to keep it from sliding around.
The 1″ webbing for the sling is inserted through the top of a 3⁄4″ hole, looped around a dowel, and passed again through the hole, on the bottom.
When the webbing is drawn tight, friction and downward pressure on its tail end keeps it from slipping.
The sling will keep round- and V-bottomed boats upright.
A 2×4 or 2×6 fastened on top provides a lip for clamping.
The 2×4 is held in place with a few screws driven into the crosspiece.
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The front of the Odyssey PFD has pockets on pockets, D-rings, and lash tabs to carry essential gear.
The PFDs that Audrey and I have been using for the past several years were starting to look a little weather-beaten. Their faded colors, bleached by the Florida sunshine, were our sign that the fabric was probably weakening and the aging flotation foam was losing buoyancy.
In search of replacements, we found our way to Northwest River Supplies (NRS), where we both bought the Odyssey. This Type-III PFD is available in XS/M, L/XL, and XL/XXL to fit chest sizes from 30″ to 56″. Because we prefer bright, easily seen colors, we chose the all-red version; the PFD is also available in black accented with lime green.
The Odyssey PFD has 16.5 lbs of foam flotation, a pound over the USCG requirement. The PFD weighs 1.9 lbs, and the fabric is 400-denier ripstop nylon. The two shoulder straps and the four waist straps can be adjusted for a snug and secure fit; a quick-release buckle below the zipper has an adjustable strap that’s cinched to keep the PFD from riding up when the wearer is in the water.
The flotation foam is divided into seven panels, four on the front and three on the back, so the Odyssey PFD can mold comfortably around differently body shapes. The Odyssey was designed for sea-kayak touring, so the arm openings are wide and low to provide an unrestricted range of motion, which works well for sailing and rowing. The full-length foam back has the NRS “Cool Flow System,” four mesh-covered “pillows” along the spine that hold the vest away from the body to increase ventilation.
Kent Lewis
The back of the Odyssey PFD has a lash tab, usually used to secure a rescue strobe.
The large front-entry plastic zipper will not corrode, and its tab is easy to grip with wet fingers. Two large zippered storage pockets can hold small essentials and rescue items or a cell phone in a waterproof bag. The left pocket has a plastic snaphook on a tether to attach car keys or safety gear. Attached to the large pockets are two vertical clamshell pockets, which are a good size for VHF radios; dual zippers allow many options for the antenna to pass through.
All of the pockets have grommets at their bottoms to drain water. There are two plastic D rings above the pockets and two below the smaller pockets. Two small flat pockets on the chest just below each shoulder strap provide a good spot for a whistle and an LED light. There are two lash tabs on the front of the Odyssey where a knife can be clipped, and one tab on the back that’s usually used for a rescue strobe. Six retroreflective straps are placed high on the chest, shoulder, and back, and could be used as attachment loops to secure gear, though we recommend not covering them with accessory items.
The cut of the vest allows a good range of motion, and we find that the back is very comfortable for use with the seat backs on our sit-on-top kayaks. The foam back is also appreciated in our small sailboats and runabout, and the low profile of the neck helps keep it from snagging the sheet during tacks on our Sunfish. In the water, it was easy to float on my back or float vertically with my legs tucked up in the Heat Escape Lessening Position (HELP). The waist strap prevented the Odyssey from riding up around my neck, and the arm openings kept it from interfering with swimming, using either a backstroke or crawl. I was also able to board our sit-on-top kayak from the water without interference from the front pockets and foam panels. In fact, I liked the cushioning provided by the foam.
Both Audrey and I have found that the Odyssey PFD provides a snug, secure fit. It is comfortable enough to wear for extended periods so we don’t have to suffer in the name of safety.
Audrey “Skipper” Lewis is a costume designer who has extensive experience designing garments and working with fabric. Kent Lewis is a retired Marine Corps Aviator with thousands of hours wearing integrated life-preserver units and survival vests, flying combat missions, and conducting search-and-rescue operations. The fleet at their Florida Panhandle home includes lateen, lug, sprit, sloop, and gaff-rigged sailboats, a canoe, two kayaks, and a 15’ lapstrake runabout; these boats range in length from 10’ to 19’. A diamond-bottom, cross-planked catboat is in the design phase.
The GasOne Mini has a body made of plated steel and enameled steel.
I’ve used a variety of backpacking stoves for camp-cruising, and for the past 15 years I’ve happily settled on portable gas stoves that use butane cartridges. When I discovered the much more compact GS-800P Mini Camp Stove from Gas One, which uses both butane and propane, I had to have one. I liked the idea of being able to use my favorite kind of stove with the propane cylinders I seem to accumulate for soldering torches. My son, who has taken to camp-cruising, also uses propane cylinders on his galley stove and grill for cooking meals onboard.
I’ve been using two standard butane stoves for years and they’ve been very reliable. The GasOne can do the same job without taking up as much space on the boat.
The Mini Camp Stove’s steel frame is coated with white enamel, which didn’t burn or blister when I held a lighter’s flame to it. The rest of the body is plated steel. Some retailers list the stove as having stainless-steel construction, but all of the body parts were strongly magnetic. Only the four pot supports and the burner parts proved non-ferrous.
The Mini can use propane fuel when fitted with its hose and adaptor.
The butane fuel canister fits into the compartment to the right of the Mini’s stovetop and is shielded from the heat by a hinged cover. A lever on the front engages the canister to allow the flow of fuel. A dial regulates the fuel and, turned fully counterclockwise, it clicks a piezo ignitor, creating a bright blue spark at the burner to ignite the gas. To use propane, first connect the Mini’s hose to the stove and then to the canister—the hose fittings don’t have a valve, so don’t connect the canister first.
The fuel receiver is threaded to accept the hose that connects to a propane canister.
The stove has a guard surrounding the burner head to prevent a gust wind from extinguishing the flame, but to get the best out of the stove, I bought a folding windscreen to surround the stove and the cookpot. The stove is supported by rubber and plastic feet that elevate the steel body ½”, and whatever I set the stove on got only warm to the touch.
I compared the Mini with the two types of camp stoves that I’ve been using: a standard butane stove (left), and a basic propane stove.
I did trials to see how the Mini compared to my familiar stoves. With the air temperature at 46 degrees Fahrenheit and the water from the tap at 52 degrees, I used my 7″ camping saucepan, uncovered, to bring 2 cups water (500 ml) to a rolling boil. The Mini brought the water to a boil in 3:35 (minutes:seconds) when fueled by butane and 5:20 by propane. The packaging gives the stove’s output as 7,172 BTU/hour for both fuels, but it seems the butane provides more heat. My old portable butane stove, rated 9,500 BTUs, boiled water in 3:40, so the Mini is almost as effective. My son’s propane bottle-top stove, rated at 10,000 BTUs, brought the water to a boil in 3:10; even judging by the sound, it delivers fuel at a higher rate than the Mini. The 6″ burner on my 220-volt range in my home kitchen boiled the 2 cups in 3:45 from a cold start, and in 2:30 when started on a hot burner.
My water-boiling trials demonstrated that the GasOne mini was just as effective as its full-sized butane-burning equivalent.
Butane canisters cool as they’re used, a function of expanding gas, and the pressure drops, so the Mini didn’t burn as hot with continuous use. Switching to a warmer canister brings the pressure back up. (Some of GasOne’s higher-end stoves have a thermal conductive plate to transfer heat from the burner to the canister to keep it warm and maintain pressure.)
A folding windscreen is a useful addition to the stove. The ring surrounding the burner head protects the flame, but a screen surrounding the stove keeps the heat around the cook pot.
Folded, the screen makes a compact bundle. It is an option from GasOne and sold by many other camping-equipment suppliers.
The Mini will simmer and cook at low heats beautifully. The burner has an inner and an outer ring of ports to create the flame, so the heat, even on a thin pan, is evenly distributed to the food being cooked. Just keep an eye on the flame when you dial it down. The flame will begin to flutter with the dial at its midpoint and extinguish itself at the one-third point, and yet fuel will continue to flow.
With the flame turned down, it’s easy to cook without scorching, as this eggy batch of French toast shows.
The Mini is bound to get more use than my other camp stoves. It’ll fit in with my galley box with room to spare and easily fit in a small daypack for picnicking.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The GS-800P Mini Camp Stove from Gas One is manufactured by Gas One and sells for $38.99. The GS-800, without the propane adapter, sells for $26.99. The stoves are also available from outdoor and hardware stores 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.
Martin Casey’s Caledonia yawl, AUDREY/JAMES, carries the names of his parents, assuring they will be remembered by future generations of the Casey family.
James Casey was a remarkable man. He was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1924, grew up in the Great Depression, attended Rhode Island School of Design, and, with the arrival of World War II, enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Italy. In January 1942, then Private Casey saw action in the Battle of Rapido River in an ill-fated effort to secure Rome. American losses were 2,100 troops either wounded, killed, or captured. In January 1944, in another attempt by American forces to reach Rome, Casey took part in the Battle of Monte Cassino, a victory for Allied forces that came at the cost of 55,000 casualties; Casey was among them, having been hit in his right foot by German rifle and machine-gun fire. Four months later, in the Battle of Anzio, he took a German machine-gun round in his left leg. By the end of the war in Europe, Casey had been raised to the rank of Sergeant, and for his service in Company F, 143rd Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division, he was awarded six Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for bravery. Following the war, he spent two peaceful years as a Trappist monk.
James Casey married Audrey Barton in the 1950s, and the couple raised a family of 10 children. He worked as a calligrapher and stone carver at the John Stevens Shop, a company in Newport that has been doing inscriptions in stone since 1705. Some of Casey’s carving is on the John F. Kennedy Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, at Rockefeller Center in New York and the Prudential Center in Boston.
In addition to being a master craftsman and artisan, he had a lifelong interest in boats. One of Casey’s four sons, Martin, took to boats too. He had been, by his own account, “a rebellious, tormenting teenager who challenged his father frequently,” an uncomfortable match for a father who was a strict disciplinarian. Even as he grew into adulthood, Martin found it difficult to connect with his father, but when he became a father himself he was able to leave the discomforts of the past behind and develop a greater appreciation for his father and compassion for the unseen scars he bore from his experience during the war.
Martin had taken to building wooden surfboards while his father was in his 80s and thought building another board would be a way to connect with him through their common interest in boats and woodworking. James replied to the offer with “No, I don’t know anything about it,” an answer Martin was prepared for. He made other overtures for experiences they could share, without success, until he suggested visiting Newport’s International Yacht Restoration School, where the 131’ schooner-yacht CORONET, built in 1885, was being restored. The day went well, and provided an opening between father and son. A few weeks later, the elder Casey accepted Martin’s offer to join in building a new surfboard. While his spirit was willing, his health was failing and he was hospitalized. He passed away in June 2017 at the age of 92.
This 16′ Old Town double-ended row boat was James Casey’s second love. He bought it in 1958 when his wife, Audrey, was delivering baby No. 5. The family affectionately called it “the green boat,” but its true name was KOWLOON GIRL in honor of Audrey, who was born in Kowloon. Note the oarlocks set on a small side deck, which is actually the top of a long sponson, an addition Old Town provided to add stability and safety. Standing by is Martin’s father, and aboard are his grandfather and two of his brothers. Martin is the boy in the stern looking down into the boat.
The Old Town double-ender KOWLOON GIRL carries four generations of Caseys. James steers with a paddle from the stern, Martin rows stroke, his son rows bow, and his grandson is perched in the bow.
Martin had been considering building a wooden boat for camp-cruising in his retirement and settled on Iain Oughtred’s Caledonia Yawl, a boat that appealed to him as both beautiful and practical, and a design of which his father, who loved small double-ended oar-and-sail boats, would have appreciated. James had purchased an Old Town double-ended rowing boat in 1958 and in the ’80s had built a cold-molded Wee Lassie canoe with Martin’s younger brother.
The weather was looking reasonable in mid-March 2019 when Martin set up the building jig for the Caledonia Yawl. Snow was still a possibility, but the winter had been mild, a trend he hoped would continue. Two 20’ composite construction joists from a local lumber yard formed a building frame that would remain true for the duration of the build.
In March 2018, eight months after Martin’s father died, Audrey became ill and was hospitalized for what was expected to be a short stay. During that time, Martin ordered the Caledonia plans and got his workshop ready for the build. He started with the small parts: thwarts, laminated stems, spars, centerboard and trunk. Audrey was pleased to know her son was happily occupied with a complex and engaging project, but sadly, she didn’t live to see the boat finished. Before the month’s end, she passed away, as had her husband, at the age of 92.
Martin chose to build Iain Oughtred’s second version of the Caledonia yawl, which had seven strakes instead of the original design’s four. While there are more planks to shape, they more easily take the curves and twists demanded of them.
Martin continued with the Caledonia Yawl, and as the work progressed, he gathered resources on boatbuilding to help him through his first experience with lapstrake construction. He discovered that Oughtred had written Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual and was poised to buy a copy.
It’s not a flagpole, but the Caledonia’s main mast, equipped with a tabernacle. Stepping the 18’ mast in an unsteady boat seemed a little daunting to Martin, and in May 2018, while he was recovering from back surgery, he decided to mount the mast on a tabernacle.
The finished tabernacle, installed in the boat, has worked well and saves Martin from straining his back.
While settling their parents’ estate, Martin and his brothers cleared out their father’s shop, sorting through tools and materials accumulated over six decades for working on his boat, carving wood and stone, doing calligraphy, making paper, and casting concrete. Among the books James had collected, Martin found a copy of Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual. It was confirmation that his father would have approved of the Caledonia Yawl.
The black walnut gracing the tiller came from Martin’s father’s workshop.
Martin added his father’s tools—planes, chisels, clamps, files, rasps, and handsaws—to his own in his small shop. He also inherited several sharpening stones and leather strops; his father always kept a keen edge on all of his edge tools. Whenever Martin used those tools he thought of his father and often felt he was fulfilling his father’s dream. Bits of wood from James’s shop were incorporated into the yawl: cherry for the mizzen thwart, black walnut for the tiller, and a salvaged maststep from the Old Town for the Caledonia’s mizzen maststep.
If AUDREY/JAMES follows the example set by KOWLOON GIRL, she’ll be around for a long time and be enjoyed by Martin’s large extended family for at least half a century.
On August 1, 2019, with most of his siblings and his two grandsons present, Martin launched his Caledonia Yawl and christened it AUDREY/JAMES in honor of his parents. She sails the waters of Newport as a link between generations.
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On January 23, I bought a box of 30 N-95 disposable dust masks at Home Depot for $21.47. They’ve been standard fare in my shop for decades, but a little more than a month later, with the spread of the coronavirus, a box of 20 was selling for $132.99 on Amazon, and wouldn’t be available for two weeks. I’ve been watching the coronavirus spread like an incoming tide, and it is already lapping at my doorstep. On February 29, a man in a care facility 8 miles from my home in Seattle died, the first person in the U.S. to succumb to COVID-19, the illness linked to the virus. The governor of Washington has declared a state of emergency.
I was once on a morning Seattle TV program along with an Iditarod-winning dogsled musher, the late Susan Butcher, and an aerial-acrobatics pilot, Patty Wagstaff, if I recall correctly. I was there because I’d covered a lot of miles in a small boat. We were all introduced as risk-takers, but all three of us had to explain that we were doing what we loved, had logged a lot of hours, and took great pains to avoid risk.
Risk takes on a different look when it’s not something you take on willingly but something imposed upon you. Dealing with what appears to be a pandemic seems scary to me, but health professionals all around the world are approaching it head on. They’ve learned to accept working with people carrying viruses and infections and can rely on their training to minimize risks to their own health to levels they can accept. For me, the threat of COVID-19, something unfamiliar and imposed, makes me anxious.
I read a lot of books before I built my first boat, took my first cruise, did my first solo hike, and climbed my first mountain. The more knowledge I accumulated, the more I knew the risks and how to avoid them. Heeding the advice of health professionals now, I trust, will do the same.
My first instinct was to stock up on supplies and stay home, but I realized I’d be just as safe out on the water and working in my shop where I have made peace with the inherent hazards to life and limb. So I’ll continue with my shop projects and my outings on the water. I know how to keep my fingers away from a spinning tablesaw blade and how to scan the horizon for any subtle signs of a change in the wind and the water. I can adapt those kinds of skills now and put them to good use now as I navigate a changing world.
Afterword, Tuesday, March 24
On Sunday, I called up my local hospital and offered to donate N-95 masks and safety glasses from my basement shop. They’ve set up a system for collecting much needed Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and I’m waiting for instructions on delivering what I can to the hospital. Your local healthcare providers may also welcome donations of PPE that we boatbuilders and woodworkers can spare. Please call them if you can help.
"Is that a PocketShip?” Even though it was the first time I had ever launched my PocketShip, it was not the first time a stranger had approached me to ask about it. This stranger turned out to be very familiar with the design, having followed it since Chesapeake Light Craft introduced it. What would prove to be the usual suite of questions followed: Did I build it myself? Plans or kit? How long did it take? How does it sail? He expressed his enthusiasm for the PocketShip and his dream to build one.
Jon Lee
The PocketShip was designed to be towed by a modest car with a four-cylinder engine. The full-sized sedan here is more than up to the task.
John Harris, the proprietor of and chief designer for Chesapeake Light Craft, designed the PocketShip as his personal boat. “I’d owned a production fiberglass pocket cruiser, which sailed well but was hellish uncomfortable,” he explained. “I had a hunch that I could design a sailboat with a 15′ length-on-deck that not only sailed extremely well, but was ergonomic for someone of my 6′ 1″ height.” The boat had to be light enough to tow to Florida behind his four-cylinder car, fast and seaworthy enough to sail overnight to the Bahamas, and commodious enough for a week’s cruising once there. He drew a centerboard gaff sloop with a doughty profile. The waterline length is 13′ 8″, and the boat weighs around 1,200 lbs when rigged, ballasted, and loaded with provisions. John packed a lot of boat into a small, well-balanced package.
Jon Lee
The boom gallows catches the boom and gaff when the main is lowered.
The PocketShip struck a chord with amateur boatbuilders, and a flurry of interest from potential customers led John to add the design to the CLC offerings. The promise of big-boat cruising adventure in a petite, built-it-yourself, trailerable package proved irresistible to many, and at last update more than 300 kits and plans have shipped to locations around the world.
The PocketShip is a do-it-yourself project with a scope and complexity that a handy amateur can readily contemplate. It is available as a kit with CNC-cut plywood parts, epoxy, epoxy thickeners, fiberglass, drawings, and manual. Hardware, timber, and sails are available as optional packages. I built from CLC’s plans, huge rolls of paper with full-sized patterns for nearly all parts. The 280-page manual is a masterpiece, with minutely detailed instructions, readable prose, and clear photographs and illustrations. While PocketShip is best for the intermediate-level amateur, the quality of the manual has enabled complete novices to build fine PocketShips.
I built my PocketShip in a one-car garage over the course of two years. When I decided to order plans instead of a kit, I felt that I had to cut out all the wood myself in order to claim I had built my own boat. If I were to do it over again, I would build from a kit; it would get the build started faster, produce more precise work, and still require enough labor to provide a legitimate claim to a self-built boat.
Jon Lee
The 2.5 hp four-stroke outboard is the maximum recommended auxiliary power. A larger outboard would add an unnecessary burden to the transom.
The PocketShip is constructed using the stitch-and-glue plywood method. Having built two kayaks before the PocketShip, the basic techniques were familiar to me, and the hull went together much like a giant, complex kayak. I picked up some new skills such as scarfing plywood (the kit uses CNC-cut puzzle joints), melting lead for the keel, and rigging the sheets, halyards, and stays. The manual always kept things from getting intimidating; it breaks down the building into a series of small, achievable tasks, most of which can be completed in weeknight sessions. Some things, such as the big fiberglass jobs, are best reserved for weekends.
courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
For the performance-minded sailor, the optional spinnaker adds power for sailing off the wind.
Construction begins with the keel assembly, which includes the centerboard trunk and has two compartments, one at each end of the trunk, that are filled with 108 lbs of lead, melted and poured in. (Another 150 to 200 lbs of ballast—bags of lead-shot—will later get set in the bilges of the completed boat.) The finished keel assembly is dropped into a building cradle made of two female molds. The hull bottom and sides are then dropped in and wired together with temporary 18-gauge-steel wire stitches. Next, an array of plywood bulkheads and floors are stitched in place. The joints are then permanently bonded with big epoxy fillets and the entire interior is sheathed in fiberglass. The decks and topsides are also stitched, glued, and ’glassed. There are a few fiddly bits of carpentry along the way, where timber needs to be cut at a complex angle, but these tasks tend to be welcome breaks from the epoxy work.
The mast is a tapered hollow box, built up from four 16′ spruce staves. The bowsprit, boom, and gaff are all solid timber with rectangular sections, milled down to attractive tapers. While traditional in appearance, the rig is fairly modern in the details, including a roller-furling jib and sail track for the main. Rigging requires a wide variety of blocks, cleats, and eyestraps, and careful routing of the running rigging.
Getting the PocketShip to the launch site and out sailing is a breeze. For easy trailering, the mast is stepped in a tabernacle and folds down onto the boom gallows. On reaching the launching ramp, you start by casting off the tie down that secures the mast to the boom gallows. The bobstay also must be shackled to the bow eye, unless the geometry of your trailer permits it to remain attached. Standing in the cockpit, you thrust the mast upward toward vertical and haul in on the jib halyard, which does double duty as a forestay, pivoting the mast into place. Once the boat is in the water, drop the centerboard and slide the mainsail onto its track. When this process is well-rehearsed, it is possible to be underway within 10 minutes of arriving at the ramp.
The boat is designed with singlehanding in mind, with all lines, including the jib’s roller-furler line, led to the cockpit. For a relatively heavy displacement boat with a 13′ 8″ waterline and 6′ 3″ beam, the PocketShip has surprisingly inspired sailing qualities. John Harris likes his PocketShip to sail fast, and worked hard to get as much speed as he could out of this little vessel. The hull lines are fairly refined and carry a good dose of racing dinghy in them. The boat has a single hard chine, a V bottom, and a surprisingly fine entrance. If it were not for the 268-lbs of ballast required to keep her on her feet, it could probably be induced to plane quite readily. The ample sail area adds to performance; with a 109-sq-ft main and a 39-sq-ft jib, the boat has no shortage of power.
courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
The prudent reefing and PocketShip’s ballast, over 250 lbs divided between the keel and bilge, lets the skipper sail while safely seated in the cockpit.
For a gaff-rigged boat, the PocketShip is close-winded, able to sail to within right around 50 degrees of the wind. A beam reach is where it really shines. The boat almost effortlessly plunges forth at a sprightly 5-ish knots and settles into a groove that yields delightful sailing. At speed, the PocketShip will plow jauntily through chop, and is stable and confident in rough conditions. Full sail can be carried up until the wind hits 10 to 12 knots; above that, a single reef will calm the boat down substantially without sacrificing any speed.
With its large sail area, a PocketShip will propel itself in even the lightest of airs. If currents are a fact of life in your home waters, however, a 2- to 2.5-hp outboard motor, hung on a mount fixed to the transom, is essential. The boat is easily driven and zips along under power. The manual notes that a pair of oars and a yuloh are auxiliary power options, good for a couple of knots, and though accommodations for them are not included, they would be easy enough for the builder to add.
Jon Lee
The cockpit foot well is kept to a minimal but functional size to make more room in the cabin for storage and sleeping.
The cockpit is roomy enough to accommodate three or four adults. It is an expansive and comfortable space, almost as well suited to lounging about as a living-room couch. The narrow, shallow footwell is a compromise with the sleeping accommodations below it, but the PocketShip’s cockpit is perfectly functional.
Jon Lee
The cabin provides sleeping quarters with the extensions, to left, under the cockpit seats.
The cabin has an open layout; you sit or sleep directly on the floorboards, with legs extended aft under the cockpit. At the forward end of the cabin there is a large storage area, and additional space aft, below the cockpit decks. There are comfortable sleeping accommodations for two full-grown adults. Though the cabin is small, it is possible to spend time below without discomfort, as I discovered during one very rainy weekend.
Jon Lee
The PocketShip performs well in light air, and when the winds fail, it is light enough to be propelled by sculling or rowing if the builder choses to rig the boat for oars.
There is a degree of celebrity that comes with sailing a PocketShip. A PocketShip owner gets used to being photographed out on the water, complimented at the dock, and peppered with questions at boat ramps. On a recent trip to Friday Harbor in Washington’s San Juan Islands, my PocketShip looked Lilliputian moored next to the long rows of enormous, glittering, white production cruisers. Yet, the tourists walking the docks were inevitably drawn to my little red boat. I had to abandon my plan to lie about and read, and instead respond to the stream of questions and compliments that the boat drew. While the monster yachts that surrounded me had galleys, settees, even televisions, one little boy stood wide-eyed, marveling that such a little boat could have windows!
The PocketShip has indeed gained a following. With stout and shippy good looks, delightful sailing performance, and micro-cruising comforts all rolled into one built-it-yourself package, it is a following that is well-earned.
Jon Lee of Everett, Washington, is a full-time engineer, sometime amateur boat builder, not-enough-time sailor. He built his first boat, a self-designed rowboat, during grad school. In the years since, more boats followed, while Jon swore he could quit anytime he wants. His greatest claim to fame is successfully leading his boatbuilding team to two successive last-place finishes in the Edensaw Boatbuilding Challenge at the Wooden Boat Festival, and loving it.
The Weekender is a plywood gaff-sloop pocket yacht designed by Peter Stevenson and first presented to the public in a two-page article in the March 1981 issue of Popular Science magazine. In the decades that have followed, it has been a very popular design. I was drawn to its classic look and simple construction. Eager to learn how to sail—and to find out if my wife would enjoy sailing too—I was excited about the journey of the build and encouraged by the many helpful examples of other builders who are linked to the Stevenson website.
SBM photographs
The Weekender draws 3′ with the rudder deployed; with its blade retracted, the hull draws 1′.
I bought the set of plans and the two companion DVDs. The combination of the 44 printed pages and three-and-a-half hours of video were helpful, entertaining, and, above all, encouraging. The plans are well illustrated with some photos and many nice drawings. There are no full-sized patterns, so each part is drawn right onto the materials. Step-by-step instructions keep the process going in the correct order. As a shipbuilder, I found the instructions clear and straightforward. My granddaughter, who was three years old when we started and nearly seven when we finished, was as eager to build the boat as I was, and we watched the video instructions several times together. Even at her young age, she could recognize the steps we had completed and the ones we had yet to accomplish, a good indication of how easy the plans were to follow. For me, the video clarified the few places in the plans that I was having difficulty understanding. Mike Stevenson, Peter’s son, who took over the business, has assured me that the most recent revision has eliminated some of those sticking points.
The Weekender has a very unusual construction: it is built right-side up with the stem and keel serving as the strongback. The deep keel and its integral stem are made of three laminates of 4/4 pine, fir, or mahogany. The keel, 10″ at its deepest, is rigid enough to support the build. I built a cradle to hold it upright throughout the build. Plywood is joined with butt plates to get the necessary length and width for the bottom panel; the bottom is attached to keel with screws and epoxy. The deck is added and secured at the stem and then temporarily propped up until the transom and three bulkheads are installed. The side panels go on next and they’ll extend above the deck to become part of a toerail. The construction then follows a more common sequence, with the assembly of the cockpit and the cabin. The hull, deck, cockpit, and cabin are sheathed with 6-oz fiberglass and epoxy.
The plans indicate a solid mast, and I built mine as per the instructions; however, a lighter hollow version would be much easier to raise. Details to build the wheel, trailboards, towing bitt, and bowsprit are included. There is also an option included to add a taffrail.
The forward hatch provides access to the storage space in the bow. The block to the right, held upright by a spring, is for the single sheet that controls the jib boom.
My PT Cruiser has enough power to pull our Weekender. The boat has a somewhat deep keel for a flat-bottomed boat, so bunks are required under chines to support the hull. At the ramp, it’s easiest to float the boat off the trailer; at shallow ramps it can be a bit of a struggle sliding it off, in part because the two batteries I use for the trolling-motor auxiliary power add significantly to the Weekender’s weight. However, the boat can be winched up onto a trailer that’s not fully submerged. It takes as little as 30 minutes after arrival at the ramp to get the rigging in place and have it in the water; the most time-consuming part of launching and loading the boat is almost always the attention it attracts from people watching. When people gather around, the time at the ramp stretches out to a bit more than an hour.
The mast tabernacle is created with two strap hinges—one aft to act as the pivot, and one forward with a loose pin to lock the mast upright—and it works well. The two pairs of shrouds have turnbuckles that are adjusted each time the mast is raised; they remain connected, and only the forestay is removed for lowering the mast.
The 5’ bowsprit is fixed and anchors the forestay at its tip and the jib’s 60″ clubfoot at its middle. The club foot pivots about halfway out on the sprit, and the jib clears the mast when tacking and requires only a single sheet. I have added a downhaul to the jib so that I can both raise and lower the jib going no farther forward than the companionway. I also led the main’s throat and peak halyards to cockpit so I didn’t have to go forward to the mast to drop the sails.
To help keep the mainsail from overwhelming the cockpit when it’s lowered, I added lazyjacks. The plans specify eyebolts and a bit of pipe and metal strapping to make the gooseneck; I instead made an aluminum gooseneck with an extension that allows me to pivot the boom fully vertical and scandalize the mainsail. When coming into harbor, it’s a quick way to douse the mainsail and clear the cockpit for docking. This has proven most helpful especially when sailing alone. I also fabricated an aluminum masthead fitting to help with the rigging and give me a base for an anchor light and a wind-sock vane.
The rudder is in a rudder box that is an integral part of the tiller arm that is connected by lines and pulleys to facilitate a wheel. The rudder must be pivoted and locked up for transport. The wheel keeps the cockpit free of a long tiller that would most certainly use up the limited space. I find it quite handy.
The Weekender carries a total of 120 sq ft of sail. The jib, with its boom and single sheet, is self tending, so tacking is uncomplicated.
Under sail, the Weekender is like a sports car and very snappy in response on most points of sail. It can sail remarkably close to the wind for a gaff rig, and the self-tending jib makes tacking a snap. Its club foot is an excellent touch to the rigging, making singlehanding very simple. The Weekender can ghost along with hardly any discernible wind, although in light air it can be a bit hard to tack if the boat doesn’t have quite enough way on; the long keel requires some momentum to overcome its resistance to sweeping sideways when tacking. I have found that moving my weight to the downwind side forces the boat to heel, and it will gain speed and increase its ability to turn.
The Weekender is a pretty stable little boat, and ours is made a bit more so by the weight of the batteries for the trolling motor. It is stable when one is standing on the foredeck; however, it is a small boat, so if you step off-center it will move accordingly. But I have never felt that it was going to come out from under me.
The Weekender was initially designed with a centerboard, but the full keel provided good performance to windward and the board and trunk were eliminated from the design, freeing up cabin space.
The hull can take waves better than one might guess for being so close to the water. The flat bottom can slap a bit depending on the angle of approach to the waves, but that same flat bottom can also surf down waves quite well, getting some help from the broach-countering directional stability of the full-length keel. I have found the cockpit to be generally dry with only occasional spray from hitting a larger wave. I prefer fair-weather sailing with our boat. When running dead downwind, wing-on-wing, the boat performs well; it’s a comfortable point of sail for the crew, with the hull sitting pretty much bolt upright.
For auxiliary power, we have a 55-lb-thrust electric trolling motor. While the plans call for a mount made of a 2″ x 10″ chunk of wood through-bolted to the transom, I designed and welded an aluminum bracket. The motor pushes the boat at just the right speed for harbor maneuvers, and provides an occasional boost to make a tack in light air. I have the two batteries on separate switches, but they can be combined for back-up power. I have run out of power only when I forgot to charge one of the batteries.
The cockpit benches include dry storage compartment aft and extensions of the cabin space forward.
The cockpit is not large, but it has enough room for the me and my wife to be comfortable, even when we’re sailing with our granddaughter and our small dog. The cockpit footwell is not self-draining and we have been caught several times in squalls that filled half of the cockpit, so I added a bilge pump under the hinged step at the forward end of the cockpit. The cockpit seats have hatches, and aft sections serve as storage. The curved coaming, shaped from a stack of 4/4 stock, makes a comfortable backrest and keeps water out when the toerail is in the water under sail. I cold-molded my coaming out of 1/8″ x 2″ sapele.
The wheel is more than an affectation. It doesn’t crowd the cockpit as a tiller would.
I added running lights to our Weekender as well as a small LED to illuminate the cockpit for the times when we are out later than expected or after dark at anchor. My wife and I have slept aboard comfortably on several occasions. We rig a boom tent for privacy and rain protection so we can keep the companionway open through a warm night; to clear the berths, we move most of the gear that usually resides in the cabin into the cockpit. The bottom serves as the berth and is flat, save for one transverse butt block, but with foam mattresses it’s not noticeable. The space works best sleeping with heads forward and our feet aft to take advantage of the space under the cockpit benches. Shelves with rails on their sides are a nice feature and are in fact part of the rigid framing.
The bulkhead at the forward end of the cabin allows access to the storage compartment in the bow. Rails on the shelves port and starboard keep gear in place while under sail.
The designed cabin has sitting headroom if you are of average height—I made our cabin a couple of inches higher than the design, for even more sitting headroom. There is no cabin footwell, so sitting is with legs outstretched on the bottom. There is access through the forward bulkhead to storage space under the foredeck, but it is easiest to use the foredeck hatch for larger items. The storage bin/seat at the companionway has proven to be a great addition for holding safety equipment, and it has also been a good speaker box for our CD player.
The aft end of the cabin provides a place to stow a portable toilet when it’s not in use. At right, one of the spaces under the cockpit benches is visible.
We have enjoyed our Weekender immensely. It was a most satisfying build, and the whole family agrees that it has been a wonderful boat to sail. My wife and I have trailered it to many lakes, both large and small, as well as portions of Puget Sound, and always have come home with a new story to add. The Weekender can provide an affordable and convenient way for getting armchair sailors out of their armchairs and into real sailing.
Ken Hauenstein lives in Burlington, Washington, just a few miles from Puget Sound, and is a general contractor who does all manner of work including interior boat remodels. He dreamed of working with boats from an early age and had his first real exposure working in a boat factory building interiors for cabin cruisers. He later worked in various shipyards and ran his own cabinet shop. His last shipyard job ended in 2017 as he made plans to retire. He started HUMMINGBIRD while working there. Since then he has built two dinghies, one wood and one aluminum. He is currently building a large aluminum ketch. He hasn’t set a launch date, and won’t because he finds the work therapeutic and likes to give the details all the attention they deserve.
Weekender Particulars
[table]
LOA/19′ 6″
LOD/16′
Beam/6′
Draft/3′ (1′’ with the rudder up)
Hull weight/550 lbs
Sail area/120 sq ft
Crew capacity/Daysailing, up to four; Overnight, two cozily, one easily
Auxiliary Power/up to 5 hp outboard or 45-lb thrust electric
In September 2014, Tim, Alex, James, and I launched from Alder Bay, near Port McNeil, at the north end of Vancouver Island. Each of the four of us brought our own open wooden boat, built with our own hands: Tim with BIG FOOD, a John Gardner-designed peapod; James with ROWAN, mostly an Iain Oughtred-designed Sooty Tern; Alex with HORNPIPE, a modified Don Kurylko-designed Alaska; and me with BANDWAGON, a Hvalsoe 16 of my own design. All of the boats were designed for oars and sail and rigged as lug yawls. We were headed for the Broughten Archipelago, on the southern rim of Queen Charlotte Strait, positioned between Vancouver Island and the remote, mountainous British Columbia mainland.
We were having an easy sail along Hanson Island on the north side of Johnstone Straight when an orca crossed through our fleet and swam between Tim in BIG FOOD, left, and Alex in HORNPIPE, right.
We began with a 2-nautical-mile crossing to the wooded, low-lying Pearse Islands, and headed east by southeast. Immense whirlpools and gyres boiled up near Weynten Passage at the north end of Johnstone Strait. Our course described long, lazy arcs through and around the edges of broad upwellings, spinning around one way, then another. A pleasant breeze filled in as we skirted the south shore of Hanson Island. Several orcas passed close by, heading northwest.
From left, HORNPIPE, BIG FOOD, and ROWAN approached the south end of Hansen Island. ROWAN has the longest waterline of the bunch and tended to sail at the head of the pack depending on James’s whim. My BANDWAGON’s boom is run well out to port.
We slipped through Blackney Passage and crossed the bottom of Blackfish Sound. Alex led the way to our first overnight stop at Mound Island. In woods behind the well-hidden beach I found a cozy tent site where moss padded the earth and lichen hung from cedars and hemlocks.
Shoehorning four sail-and-oar boats with clotheslines moorings off the beach at Mound Island was pushing our luck. ROWAN came up with the short end of the stick. The anchorage appeared snug but adequate with the high tide at day’s end—not so much. In the early morning after the 15′ tidal swing that left ROWAN high and dry on a foul bottom.
In the morning the falling tide had shrunk our anchorage to the size of a swimming pool. James, who had been sleeping aboard, was roused when ROWAN’s stern hung up on a drying rock. He was rattled by his precarious predicament, but ROWAN suffered no significant damage and he quickly recovered his senses and good humor.
A gentle sail of 4 nautical miles along Indian Channel brought us to the old Mamalillicula town site on Village Island. We glided into the inner harbor, where a narrow beach of brilliant white shells fronted the brush-covered embankment. A well-beaten path just above the bank carved its way through brambles and grasses. Two huge silvery, adze-textured cedar posts, rising up above the thick undergrowth, held overhead a great beam, the remains of a native longhouse. Nearby, a two-story building of weathered clapboards was framed by vines and creepers. Farther along the path an aged totem pole lay on the ground, the carved features barely discernible; moss and delicate fern flourished over its gentle folds. Silent, dense green forest edged the clearing.
Roger Siebert
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We rowed west to Owl Island and pulled into a small kelp-armored nook. The beach was soon cluttered with our lines and pulleys as we jostled clothesline moorings to keep the boats afloat and clear of each other on the overnight low tide. With the chaos sorted out and our boats secure, we explored the island. A path led overland under towering spruce and cedar trees, through salal and understory growth, bathed in infinite shades of cool green light. On the seaward side, stunted pines and fir clung to the foreshore above jumbled driftwood and tidepools.
The next morning, we weighed anchor and moved out along Cedar Island. My attempt to sail against wind and tide in the narrow channel left me lagging far behind the others. I took to the oars and pulled hard to catch up. Just as I spotted Tim, James, and Alex again, they seemed to vanish into a solid wall of rock. I followed, through a narrow passageway just wide enough for our boats to pass through one at a time. This yards-long slot near the north end of Cedar Island led to the open water of Queen Charlotte Strait with a strong westerly blowing along its 40-mile fetch.
Waves deflecting off the shoreline piled upon each other and rocked the boats like bucking horses. We tucked in multiple reefs, raised sail, and surged northeast across the swells toward Retreat Passage, the wind on the port quarter. Regrouping among the Fox Group, a cluster of islets sprinkling the far end of the Passage, we sheeted the mizzens in to point with our bows into the wind and dropped the mainsails. The high eminences of Gilford and Baker islands loomed to the west and north.
After a lunch break, we raised sail again and continued eastward through Cramer Passage. The wind strengthened as it funneled between the two islands. BANDWAGON felt on the verge of a knockdown. Once again I sheeted the mizzen, threw the helm back, and dropped the main as the bow swung into the wind. Even after tying in another reef, my hands were full as the rig started drawing again. I managed to careen along the last bit of the passage and into the opening of Echo Bay.
With BIG FOOD and ROWAN tied up to the wharf at Echo Bay, the steep ramp and barnacled pilings indicate a low tide. The ramp leads to a spacious meadow and a path continues to the right to other parts of the settlement. BIG FOOD’s stern shows her kick-up rudder, boomkin, and push-stick steering arrangement.
We eased up to the sturdy, though somewhat neglected, government wharf at the head of the bay. Its pontoons floated lazily at odd angles and grass grew in the gaps of the decking. On the north side of the bay, docks and a few modest floating cabins with bright red, green, and blue metal roofs backed up against a 100′-high cliff of fissured grey rock. The half-dozen finger piers of the marina opposite were nearly empty. Operations were largely shut down for the season: only a handful of other vessels lay scattered about, and the cabins were quiet.
A ramp led from the dock to shore and a spacious meadow with scattered cedars and firs. The place was just right for camping. A short walk from the meadow sat a modest single-story building, used as a schoolhouse in earlier times, when small thriving communities supported by logging and fishing dotted the British Columbia coast.
After tidying up the boats and claiming tent sites, we followed a trail across a 100-yard-wide peninsula to Billy Proctor’s sprawling homestead at the foot of the adjacent bay. Set apart from his home, museum, and gift shop, an arched, shingled boathouse and shipway looked like nothing so much as an inverted boat hull. After perusing the gift shop, we made our way back along a steep trail to Echo Bay and Pierre’s marina where we found the restaurant closed and the store’s shelves nearly bare. We were able at least to bolster our supply of drinking water. Back at the government float, James and Tim hauled in their traps, which held a catch of Dungeness crab and not the more-common rock crab they’d expected. Boiled on James’s powerful white-gas stove, this signature northwest delicacy was served for dinner alongside our boats that evening.
Tim rowed in the glass calm typical of of our early morning departures. The westerly breeze would regularly come up in the afternoon. After our Broughton trips, Tim switched from BIG FOOF to HAVERCHUCK, an 18-footer he built to my design.
Departing Echo Bay in a light fog the next morning, we rowed north then west along Baker Island, its vertical walls of multi-hued conglomerate rock washed by the 15′ tidal range. Tim and I bore away to the southwest and pulled hard against a foul current through narrow, mile-long Old Passage. Around midday we met up again with James and Alex between Eden and Insect islands. We pulled up to a narrow strip of beach on Insect Island. A signboard on posts at the edge of the beach implored visitors to respect First Nations land and territory.
At high tide on Insect Island, we took a break next to a First Nation’s sign requesting “Respect Our Land,” which we endeavored to do. Access to Insect Island is now limited, but there is plenty of gunkholing, and other anchorages in Broughton Provincial Park. Among our group, beach chairs are mandatory and provide a welcome measure of comfort on the shell-midden beach. The wooden box is James’ cooking kit.
Treading lightly, I walked across the soft luxuriant forest floor, thick with needles and duff. Logging had left most of the island covered with second-growth forests but huge trees remained, crowding out sunlight from the interior. Fallen giants spanned broad ravines and hollows. The land above the beach was steep, providing wide-ranging views northward over the surrounding wooded islands and channels to Queen Charlotte Strait. In the afternoon I went for a sail in the fresh breeze, exploring Misty Passage. That night I put BANDWAGON on her mooring and slept ashore; I used every bit of my 400’ clothesline to keep her afloat beyond the shallow shelving beach.
I anchor BANDWAGON with the mizzen set as a riding sail. My clothesline mooring has a blue buoy attached to the anchor and a yellow floating retrieval line, which passes through a ring on the buoy and runs in a loop from the boat to shore.
The next morning, after a light breakfast and stowing anchors and clothesline gear, we rowed quietly north and west through narrow passages separating Fly and Eden islands. Already the air was warming and ruffles of wind tickled the water’s surface. Tim and James paused for a spell with their rods and lures.
As the four of us spread out over the wider waters of Fife Sound, two humpback whales cruised along the perimeter of the waterway. Rowing well out in the middle, I entered a broad area of tidal upwelling; the two whales began crossing from the west shore to the east, seeming to make a beeline for me. Their arched backs slid across the water’s surface, the immense tail flukes slowly following in a graceful and powerful arc.
The pair dove and resurfaced very close to BANDWAGON, at times within yards. They came from one direction, then another, sometimes each from opposite sides. Spinning around, I tried to identify a pattern of movement so as to steer clear, and eventually backed out of the upwelling. Only later, after the adrenaline subsided and my head cleared, did it occur to me that I had been sitting right atop the humpbacks’ dinner table. The upwellings were stirring up a rich stew for these giant filter feeders.
A large humpback trailed BANDWAGON in Fife Sound just off the logged slopes of Broughton Island. We heard or saw humpbacks nearly every day, but they never came so close to us as in Fife Sound.
In the late afternoon, after 5 or 6 miles of parched rowing and sucker wind holes, we reached Cullen Harbour. It was high tide and Alex had arrived first but found no feasible campsite or haulout around the perimeter of the bay. We would have to try the lagoon just out of sight to the northwest. With high slack water, Booker Passage, the 1/4-mile-long easternmost entry into the lagoon, was calm. I followed James as he entered the passage then took a sharp right turn into a narrow opening where the forest canopy closed over our heads. A strong current set against us, and in the dappled light oar blades kissed the tree-choked banks.
After a couple of minutes, the tunnel opened up and we coasted into Booker Lagoon. Two miles long east to west and more than a mile wide, the lagoon was expansive, and as still as a millpond. Dense foliage and sagging evergreen boughs hugged the water’s surface, giving the impression of an overfilled tub. To port was a flat-topped rock islet. Tim and Alex, having taken a slightly different route into the lagoon, came around the corner. We brought the boats gently to rest on stony ledges. The islet was not much to camp on, but a fine place to have dinner after a long day.
We arrived in Booker Lagoon with the high tide at the end of the day. As the lagoon drained with the ebb, we had to shuffle the boats around as the rock dried. The white shape in the distance is a motor yacht at anchor. It surely would have taken local knowledge to get a vessel that large safely in and out of the lagoon.
The late-afternoon ebb began to draw down the water in the lagoon. Between bites of food, we shuffled the boats around to keep them from going high and dry. Our rock platform grew and its sides began to fall away steeply. With dusk approaching, we clambered back down to the boats. Each of us stole away to drop the hook for the night. I carried more than 100’ of anchor and rode; all of it went overboard. Not a lick of wind ruffled the surface. As an orange glow faded from the western sky, I slung my tarp between main and mizzen masts and set the alarm for predawn to catch the next morning’s slack.
After being rousted by the morning alarm, I rose from my sleeping pad on the gently curving floorboards, slipped half out of my bag, and fired up the stove for a cup of oatmeal. As I stowed the tarp, the stars began to fade away and the eastern sky brightened. I coiled ground tackle into the forepeak and lowered the spars for the row out.
The four of us slipped toward the mouth of the lagoon. An unfamiliar noise began as a faint whisper. I rounded a corner and took a look at the outlet stream, so calm when we had entered the previous afternoon, and the whisper became a roar. We had extrapolated the tides for Cullen Harbour from the tables but we could only guess at when and how the water might flow out of Booker Lagoon and its two narrow outlets.
The channel was a whitewater tumult. Thinking it may only get worse, I took a deep breath and thrust into the maelstrom. With my legs braced and a firm grip on the oars, I ferried across the current in whitewater fashion, stern first, bow pointed against the flow. After a quick few hundred yards the rapid deposited BANDWAGON into the north end of Cullen Harbour, and I pulled into an eddy beside a large rock to watch the other boats sweep through.
The morning had barely begun. We rowed out to the mouth of the bay and gazed upon the open water of Queen Charlotte Strait. The sun warmed the chill air as we rafted together for morning coffee.
To seaward, the dark silhouettes of two humpbacks appeared, possibly the pair we had seen the previous day, one enormous with immense flukes as broad as my boat is long. Arcing in slow motion, the pair moved as if in a choreographed ballet. In the stillness of the crystalline morning, within a few hundred feet of our floating congregation, the large humpback leapt for the sky. After extending nearly its full length above the water, it fell back into the sea with a thunderous boom and eruption of spume and spray. We sat in dazed silence, coffee cups motionless in hand.
From Cullen Harbor, the four of us fanned out across Queen Charlotte Strait to rendezvous again 9 miles to the south at Crease Island. James skirted closely along the Broughton Archipelago. Tim, Alex, and I chose a more direct course toward Swanson Island, a little over 8 nautical miles distant, leading us out into open, glass-still water. In the midst of a sun-soaked rowing stupor, I became aware of a distant splashing sound. Nearby, Alex was already standing up and gazing across the water. I looked east and all around the water was dappled with splashes. We were in the midst of a massive school of Pacific white-sided dolphin, as far as the eye could see and traveling northwest. I sat for several minutes taking it all in, surrounded by the sounds of dolphin.
Tim and Alex pulled through Swanson Passage as we headed south, back to Vancouver Island, which towers in the distance. After this trip with HORNPIPE, Alex built a new sail and oar boat, FIREDRAKE, to his own design and has since cruised extensively with it.
Off the north end of Swanson Island several clusters of islets, rocks, and shoals turned the calm water into a confusing mix of rips, eddies, and upwellings. We made our way through the turbulence and continued south; a pleasant following breeze sprang up. Tim, Alex, and I had yet to spot James. We passed a cove on the north shore of Crease occupied by a motoryacht, and continued eastward along the edge of the island as the day waned. The three of us landed at a small beach with a rock-strewn approach, pulled the boats above the high tide line, and settled in for the night. I bivied among the driftwood on the beach and under the stars fell into a deep sleep.
It was an early-morning call the next day to get the boats off before being trapped by the falling tide and obstacle course of rocks. With mighty heaves we pushed the three boats down the rough beach and into the water, getting away just in time.
As we made our way back toward the anchorage passed by the previous afternoon, we found James and ROWAN standing off the point. It seems he had been in the anchorage all along, obscured from our view by the motoryacht. He had avoided our mad morning dash; we avoided the noise of his neighbor’s generator in the anchorage.
Continuing south around Crease Island, we pulled against the current through Swanson Passage. Mist clung to the verdant shores of Crease and Swanson islands. To starboard, larger vessels lay in fog-shrouded Farewell Harbour. The ebbing current exposed a rich intertidal zone that popped and hissed. Slowly the fog burned off, and as we rounded the bottom of Swanson, we pulled inside the bight of Flower Island. Thick kelp beds provided a handy mooring. It was now a waiting game to pick a time to negotiate Blackney Passage, one of a handful of constricted exits for the ebb-powered flow of Johnstone Strait.
Eventually we cast off and made our way a couple of miles to the north end of Parson Island. While the current still ran strongly northward through Blackney, we inched south, rowing along the steep shores of Parson, playing the back-eddies and fighting through the kelp beds. A raft of sea lions was as surprised to see the four of us as we were to see them. Wanting to leave them in peace and avoid any aggressive behavior, we gave them as wide a berth as possible, but quarters were tight. As the current showed signs of weakening, Tim judged the time right to make a dash west across to Hansen Island. We crossed without difficulty and continued into Johnstone Strait.
The gang spread out across the beach on the Blinkhorn Peninsula. The campfire was ready for cooking and James bent over a big ling cod to fillet it.
A steady northwesterly that afternoon gave us a glorious sail to windward and the Blinkhorn Peninsula, 5 nautical miles distant. For dinner, the 10-lb lingcod James pulled in that afternoon was filleted on a driftwood platform and cooked over the campfire, to be topped off by James’s Dutch-oven biscuits. That night Alex retired to his tent while Tim, James, and I slept soundly at anchor.
At dawn of the eighth day, we pulled home to Alder Bay.
In the morning we rowed west 5 miles in a dead calm along the forest-draped coast of Vancouver Island, back to our launch point at Alder Bay and one of the very few things we had missed: warm showers.
Eric Hvalsoe grew up in a boating family near Seattle, Washington, and got glimpses of the San Juan and Gulf Islands, and northern BC waters, at an early age. He later revisited some of these same destinations, including the Broughtens, in sea kayaks and most recently, traditional sail-and-oar craft. As Hvalsoe Boats, Eric has been designing, building, repairing, restoring, and maintaining wooden boats since 1980. His home and shop are located in Shoreline, Washington. Eric teaches traditional boatbuilding and lofting skills at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats. The Center’s collection includes some of Eric’s designs, the Hvalsoe 13, 15, and 16. This family of sail-and-oar designs has expanded to include the Hvalsoe 18. For a while longer yet, Eric hopes to continue exploring the Salish Sea in non-motorized craft.
Travel Notes
A portion of the Broughton group has been designated as the Broughton Archipelago Provincial Park. Find out more about the park and environs, including up-to-date bulletins, from BC Parks. Bring water, be bear-aware, and leave no trace. Campsites, with beach haulouts or anchorages for small boats, are relatively scarce. Weather is variable and can be fierce, so monitor marine-weather-radio forecasts. Be mindful of First Nations ancestral sites. For permission to go ashore at Mamalillicula, contact the Mamalillicula Band office at 250-287-2955. A fee of $20 is required for each person visiting the site. Insect Island, according to a kayak guide service operating in the area, was closed to visitors in 2016. Tidal Waters Sport Fishing License must be obtained from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Licenses can be obtained online or in person at recreation and sportfishing shops. E.H.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
I made my first full-length cagoule, left, in 1977 for a snowshoe hike and later used it for winter boat cruising. This year, I decided it was time for a new one, right.
In a journal entry dated January 4, 1977, I wrote: “I made a cagoule last week,” but I don’t now recall where I got the idea to make an oversized, full-length cagoule. A cagoule is a lightweight pullover rain jacket that’s usually only thigh length. There may have been something similar to my long version on the market 40 years ago, but I can’t find anything like it on the Internet now, which is unfortunate because it’s quite useful in cold and wet weather.
My cagoule proved its worth on the outing that began on that cold day in 1977. My friend Mark and I embarked then on a snowshoe hike across the Cascade Range from Western to Eastern Washington. Temperatures dipped to 20 degrees, and the cagoule was especially valuable in camp when we weren’t warmed by hiking. In the evenings I’d sit with the bottom of the cagoule drawn up under my feet, the hood tight around my face, and my arms drawn in from the sleeves into the warm bubble of still air inside.
I was so pleased with my new cagoule during that 1977 snowshoe hike that I made a sketch of it in my journal. It shows the sleeves hanging limp because my arms are tucked inside. One snowshoe is stuck in the snow and the cagoule is tucked around my feet.
For taking refuge from the weather, my cagoule worked very much like a bothy bag, which is an emergency shelter, usually for two or more people, that slips over the occupants with the bottom opening tucked underneath them. When you’re in a bothy bag, you can read, take notes, check the weather, anything you can do in a small tent, but for anything else you have to leave its protection. With a cagoule, you can pop your head into the hood, and put your hands and feet outside; you’re then able to move about and tend to chores and still be warm.
Photographs and drawings by the author
My cagoule’s width makes it easy to spread out while seated and its length covers the feet.
A full-length model eliminates breezes and helps keep feet warm, but for climbing stairs or steep terrain and stepping over thwarts, the hemline needs to be hiked up. The belt of a backpack or a PFD can hold extra fabric up, or you can tuck the excess fabric into the front of your pants. The cagoule has a generous width to make it easy to slip arms in and out of the sleeves and to keep it loose while sitting down—if it’s too narrow, it stretches tight across the knees, creating cold spots.
The first of my two recent cagoules, left, was cut full enough for walking, but was a bit tight for sitting. The second has plenty of width and is much more versatile.
I lost track of my original cagoule, so I recently re-created a pattern and sewed up two new cagoules. The first was a bit tight over my knees when I sat down with it on, so I added to the girth of a second cagoule; it measured up to the pleasant memories of the original. Sitting out in the weather, I can be quite comfortable. Wearing just a light pile pullover over a T-shirt —what I wear in the house—and a knit cap prevents cold spots where the shoulders and the hood make close contact with the cagoule. With the hood opening drawn tight around my face and my hands pulled in, it can be 20 to 30 degrees warmer inside the cagoule than outside. On one 37-degree night I measured 67 degrees inside the cagoule.
A little reading or journalling? Tuck inside.
Making a cagoule doesn’t cost much or take a lot of time. Four yards of 200-denier coated cloth cost $20, and I spent another $10 on thread, cord, toggles, and seam sealer. Working from a pattern I made of plastic sheeting, I progressed from raw fabric to a seam-sealer-ready cagoule in a single Saturday.
On a sunny day with a chilly northerly blowing, my new cagoule kept me quite warm. The generous circumference kept it slack around my knees and the length accommodated my feet.
When my son saw the finished cagoule, he said there would be a market for it at football and soccer games in open stadiums. The fans are unexpected kindred spirits to boaters and camp-cruisers, just other people who sit out in the weather and want to keep dry and warm.
Making a Cagoule
The tools I use for the job include a sewing machine, of course, and a seam ripper—I rarely get through a project without sewing something I have to undo. The plier stapler is much faster than pinning and the pinching type of staple remover is best for fabric. The Fiskars scissors with offset handles are well suited for making the cut of the folded body’s four layers at once without having them slip out of line.
This is a one-size-fits-all hood. I have a 7-3/4 to 7-5/8 hat size, on the border between XL and XXL, so the hood should have plenty of room for most. The opening at the bottom measures 16 -1/2″, with seam allowance, which will fit the 10″ circle you’ll cut into the cagoule body. The face opening is the same size, so you can push the hood back off your head. The right angles at the ends of the face opening will create a straight line between the hood halves when the hood is opened up for sewing the draw-cord sleeve on.
The fabric for the hood gets folded back 16-1/2″ and the chin of the pattern is set on the fold. After cutting the fabric, sew the hood from the back to the top of the face opening.
Here the back of the hood has been sewn and the staples can be removed. All of the seams are topstitched, leaving the edges exposed. The fabric’s coating will keep them from fraying. Open the hood, fold the seam allowances to one side, and topstitch them.
You can use this pattern using a few dimensions to size the cagoule to yourself. For the height, drape a light cord over your shoulder and note where it touches the floor in front and behind you. Half of that length of cord is the Height indicated on the drawing. The Width of the pattern is the Height x 0.35; making the full width 70 percent of the Height, which will make the finished cagoule quite roomy. The Span sets the lengths of the sleeves. Put your hands together in front of your chest, arms outstretched, palms together, and fingers pointing away from you. Measure from fingertip around your back to fingertip. The folds at the cuffs and the hem are 2″ wide, stitched with a 1/2″ seam allowances, and creating 1-1/2″ draw-cord sleeves.
For a custom fit, you can make adjustments to a plastic-sheet version, assembled with tape and staples, before cutting fabric. The 6mil sheeting I used was easy to work with.
You can use the pattern provided above or use your plastic-sheeting prototype, folded in quarters, as a pattern. Fold the fabric in quarters.
Weight the fabric so it won’t shift as you cut it. The excess length has been trimmed here.
Here’s where the scissors with the offset handles prove themselves. They won’t lift and shuffle the fabric as regular scissors will, so you can cut all four layers at once with accuracy. Note the curve in the armpit from sleeve to waist (I forgot that when I cut the green cagoule) and the marks at the upper right corner marking the midpoint of the cagoule.
Open the body to add the sleeve extensions and to draw and cut the hood opening.
The crossing straight lines are centered on the midpoint marked with the fabric was folded. The hole for the hood has a diameter of 10″. It is set toward the front with 1/3 of the opening on the back side of the shoulder fold and 2/3 on the front side. The center of the hole is 1-3/4″ away from the cross’s midpoint.
Cut 1/2″ inside the drawn line.
Stapling or pinning the hood opening to the hole with the fabric slack is nearly impossible. I made two sailmaker’s hooks with a couple of 16-penny steel sinker nails, tied some cord to them, and pulled the hood and body tight against each other. Then I could mate the edges and staple them together, uncoated faces pressed against each other.
The sleeve extensions are sewn on and trimmed to the pattern. You can see the inside surface of the topstitched seam here, with the seam allowance flaps folded flat and sewn.
The sleeves for the drawcords on the cuffs at the bottom of the cagoule and its arms get their edges folded back at an angle.
The draw-cord sleeves are then folded and sewn. The the drawcord opening at the bottom can be put at one of the side seams.
From here, the cagoule can be folded so the sides can be stapled together with coated sides out, sewn, and topstitched. Seal all of the seams. I used SeamGrip +WP. Let the sealer dry overnight.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Afterword:
A cagoule that’s cut very wide, like the green one here, works great for privacy when changing clothes or using a porta-potti. While the crescent-moon on the blue cagoule pictured above suggests the latter, it’s a design from my third great-grandfather’s private signal.
A couple or readers asked about condensation in the comments below. I mostly use the cagoule for relaxing in camp or as an extra wind-proof layer in very cold weather. I went out rowing on March 29 and was getting chilled by a brisk headwind. The air temperature was about 50 degrees F, not especially cold, but the wind was cutting through my fleece jacket. My cagoule was handy so I slipped it on. I was working hard for about a half mile against the headwind and worked up a sweat. I could feel the moisture in the sleeves of the jacket while I was rowing so when I reached a lee and dropped my anchor I took the cagoule off. The inside of its sleeves was somewhat wet. The jacket and the cagoule dried in a few minutes and I put the cagoule back on for relaxing in the boat. The waterproof/breathable jacket tucked away in the boat would have been a better choice for the rowing, saving the cagoule for the anchorage.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
The HX890 packs VHF, GPS, FM radio, distress beacon, and many other features in a waterproof unit that will fit in a PFD pocket.
Audrey and I wanted to buy a full-featured handheld VHF transceiver for communication, navigation, and emergency response; our research led us to the Standard Horizon HX890 with DSC and GPS.
The HX890 floats and is submersible down to 1-1/2 meters for 30 minutes, important features for boating kit. It functions as a standard VHF marine-band two-way radio and can transmit digital distress calls that include latitude and longitude provided by its 66-channel GPS receiver as well as a Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number, a unique nine-digit number that is assigned to Digital Selective Calling (DSC) transceivers. We obtained our number through BoatUS; it provides our names, address, emergency contacts, and information about our boat. The MMSI number is entered into the HX890 during its initial setup.
This DSC transceiver enables boaters to make digital calls to other boaters. It can send out a preprogrammed message to any listener on a selected frequency or transmit a private alert to initiate a voice call. DSC improves upon analog voice calls by reducing frequency congestion, transmitting preprogrammed digital messages out to a slightly longer range, and helping ensure that critical calls are received by rescue agencies. Up to 100 DSC contacts can be stored, and combined in up to 20 groups. The HX890 can receive a DSC distress alert and be directed by a directional compass to the aid of a boater in distress.
As a GPS unit, the HX890 can be used for navigation. It can store up to 250 waypoints and multiple routes. It can be used to navigate to a GPS position received from another DSC radio. A man-overboard (MOB) function records the position of a person who has fallen overboard and points the way back that spot. The HX890 can be set up to automatically turn on and activate an LED light when it senses water immersion if the user goes overboard.
Dropped into the water, the HX890 floats face up and activates its built-in light, the bright spot here in the middle of its right side.
Another feature of the HX890 is Group Monitoring (GM), where group members’ locations can be displayed. Ten groups of one to nine members can be stored. Individual locations will be displayed, calls to members can be transmitted and the transceiver can be used to navigate to them. Communications between other DSC users can be scrambled to be private. The HX890 can receive FM radio and get updated weather through the NOAA radio frequencies.
The HX890 transceiver comes with a manual, rechargeable lithium-ion battery that provides 11 hours of operating time, charging cradle, AC adapter, DC cable with 12-volt-lighter plug, a case for using five AAA alkaline batteries, belt clip, hand strap, and USB cable. The device is compact, measuring 2.60″ x 5.43″ x 1.50″ not including antenna, and lightweight, weighing just 10.94 oz. The backlit display screen measures 2.3″ diagonally and has adjustable brightness for day/night operations. The LED strobe light can be programmed to burn steady, flash at three different rates, or flash distress SOS. The strobe is at the upper right of the control buttons, so facing the operator, but it is not a powerful light. A lot of SAR agencies have night-vision devices so a little goes a long way. You can set the light to go on when the VHF is submerged; the radio turns face up when dropped in the water, so having the light go on will help you to locate it in the dark.
The controls are intuitive, with a dedicated Channel 16/Sub Frequency button and a soft-key-driven menu system—the soft keys are programmable to allow personal choices of 16 different functions, such as weather radio, transmit power, scan, compass, and position logging. The transceiver can be set up to scan multiple desired frequencies or to stand watch over two to three priority frequencies. The HX890 has a very powerful 6-watt transmitter, adjustable down to 2W or 1W, with a line-of-sight range of over 5 miles.
Should one purchase the HX890E for international use, it will also support the Automatic Transmitter Identification System (ATIS) used in inland waterways of Europe. Whether it be for the basic or advanced features, we consider the HX890 to be a great value.
Kent and Audrey Lewis mess about in a small armada of boats in the waterways of northwest Florida. You can follow them on their adventure blog.
The HX890 is manufactured by Standard Horizon and available for around $199.99 from many marine supply stores 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.
The Wen 6307 weights a bit over 2 lbs and its grip is just 2″ in diameter. It’s easy to work with.
I was introduced band files when I was working at the Smithsonian, making the brass mounts that support museum artifacts on display. The mounts were often complex shapes that needed to be sculpted to blend in with the objects they supported. The band file could do the work quickly and with a light touch that wouldn’t damage delicate bits of brass.
The band file I’d grown to like was very expensive, so I never bought one. I did buy an inexpensive band-file attachment for an angle grinder, but it was a bad pairing. Angle grinders are too heavy, powerful, and loud—and spin too fast—for the work I do with a band file.
The Wen 1/2″ x 18″ belt sander, model 6307, was what I was hoping to find, and it came at a very affordable price. It has a motor about the size of a Dremel tool and weighs, with cord, just 2 lbs 6 oz. To install a belt on it, you press on the front roller to push the arm against its tensioning spring until it clicks; that shortens the arm about 3/8″ so a belt can be installed. A fresh belt can be a bit difficult to put on, even with the arm retracted, but it will eventually slip into place. Used belts that have stretched just a bit tend to go on more easily. The push of a button releases the arm, putting the belt in tension.
The arm pivots through 55 degrees.
The arm can be pivoted 25 degrees up or down from its straight position to accommodate jobs at odd angles. A fitting for dust collection clips onto the tool’s right side. It covers the belt tensioning button, so the fitting has to be removed when changing belts. With a vacuum attached, the dust collection is very effective; I don’t see any dust escaping.
The right side of the tool accepts a clip-on bracket that fits a 1-1/4″ dust-collection hose.
Just behind the front roller there are two base plates, one on top, one on the bottom, that make contact with the sanding belt and back it up for working a flat surface. The plates are slightly narrower than the sanding belts, so the belts can work into corners. Closer to the 6307’s body the belt is unsupported, so it will take a gentle curve for working convex contours and softening corners. The front roller has a diameter of 5/8” and can reach into concave surfaces, though it works like a gouge and can’t fair a curve.
This newly brazed brass fitting was easy to clean and shape with the Wen 6307. Note that the sanding belt extends slightly beyond the base plates below the front roller, making it possible to reach the inside corner and smooth the fillet of silver braze.
A dial at the back of the 6307 controls the speed, which ranges from 1,100 to 1,800 feet per minute. When turned on, the tool isn’t disagreeably loud at its lowest speed, but at half speed it starts to get loud and whine, and it’s certainly time for hearing protection. The vents for the motor’s cooling are at the forward end of the body, where I like to grip the tool for fine control, but when the air flowing from the vents gets hot, it’s time to back up. Farther back on the body, a rubber insert assures a non-slip grip.
As a test of sanding speed, I “sawed” through a 1″-square piece of spruce with a 60-grit belt running at top speed. It took less than 40 seconds. The dust collection attachment worked effectively; the sanding dust on the workbench is from earlier work.
As a test of sanding power, I put an 80-grit belt on the 6307, dialed the speed up to the maximum, and cut a 1/2″-wide “kerfs” all the way through a 1″ x 1″ piece of softwood. The 6307 could lop off the end of that stick in an average of 37 seconds. I had to let the belt do the work—if I applied a firm pressure, the drive wheel would slip and the belt would bog down or stop.
The portions of the sanding belt that are not backed by the base plates are well suited for working curved surfaces like the top of this wooden cleat.
The 6307 comes in handy for working the saddle-back shape between the horns of wooden cleats and the complex transition from blades to looms on oars and paddles. On metal, the 6307 knocks down sharp edges quickly and excels at working inside corners and cleaning up flux and oxidation left by brazing.
The belts with the finer grits can be used for quick sharpening of tools that don’t require precise edges. For this axe, I started with a 220-grit belt and finished with a 320 and the edge was ready for chopping.
The 1/2″ x 18″ sanding belts cost around $1 each and come in grits from 40- to 400-grit, so the 6307 can take on jobs from the rough shaping of wood to quick sharpening jobs on outdoor equipment such as hatchets and machetes.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The 6307 1/2″ x 18″ file sander is manufactured by Wen. Wen currently lists the tool as out of stock. It is available from other sources online. The one shown here was purchased from Amazon for $36.40. The current price is $44.37. The Grizzly T10745 appears to be identical, and is listed in the Grizzly catalog at $59.95
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.
Rebecca and Kimberly Yeung built this 15′ Prospector Ranger canoe from a Bear Mountain Boats kit. Widgeon Creek, here, is where the canoe made its first camping trip. The creek is 35 river miles inland, yet not above the reach of the tides.
"We’re just two sisters who love science.” That’s how Seattleites Rebecca and Kimberly Yeung describe themselves. In 2015 they decided to get a glimpse of the Earth from the edge of space and sent a weather balloon up from the flatlands of Eastern Washington to an altitude of 78,000′ (14.8 miles). Two GoPro cameras recorded the ascent to the point where the expanding balloon burst and the parachute controlled the descent back to Earth. The sisters gathered data along the way with temperature sensors to detect the point between the troposphere and the stratosphere where the temperature rises rather than drops with an increase in altitude. A flight computer with GPS tracked the flight and included a beacon so they could recover their craft and its instruments from its landing in a cow pasture 52 miles from the launch. The video of their flight has been viewed over 370,000 times on YouTube, and Rebecca and Kimberly were written up in Geekwire’s technology news website and the Washington Post. They have spoken at the Gates Foundation and were invited to the White House to present their work to President Barack Obama. At the time, Rebecca was 11 years old and Kimberly was 9.
Kimberly did not perform a Māori warrior’s haka before applying a coat of varnish, but she brought a fierce enthusiasm to every step of the canoe project.
In 2016 the Yeungs launched a second balloon carrying their usual instrumentation as well as a solar panel to test a hypothesis that the solar energy that could be captured increased as the density of molecules diminished with altitude. While that might be a commonsense conclusion, Kimberly warns, “You don’t want to speculate. You always want to rely on data.” Their instruments on this flight recorded a maximum altitude of 101,000′ (19.1 miles).
Their third launch required making precise calculations and predictions. They launched the balloon from eastern Wyoming as part of a NASA program to document the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 in the NASA-supported Eclipse Ballooning Project. They had a launch window of just two-and-a-half minutes to assure that their cameras would capture the shadow of the moon drifting across the face of the Earth before the balloon burst. They succeeded and got video from 80,000′ (15.2miles) before the cameras ceased operating in extreme cold of -81°F. The ascent reached 96,000′ (18.2 miles). On that last flight, the Yeungs collaborated with NASA Ames Research Center on a microbiology experiment. Their payload included microbes that would be exposed to the conditions of the stratosphere, which are similar to the atmosphere on Mars. The experiment was part of the ongoing research into the possibility of life on Mars. The Yeung’s mission was featured in a program by the BBC and PBS.
Rebecca and Kimberly have other interests. Kimberly enjoys archery and playing piano; Rebecca is into basketball and martial arts. On her way to her martial arts classes in Seattle’s International District, Kimberly often saw homeless people camped in the streets. She felt compelled to do something, and she and her sister set out, as they usually did, doing research. After a visit to Seattle’s Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), they decided to do something tangible and ordered a kit for a tiny house that could be incorporated in a LIHI village. During the summer of 2018, with a bit of help from neighbors, family and friends, they built the house in their driveway and finished it in just over a month. It was trucked to the village, and one homeless person had a safe, comfortable place to live.
The build started with CNC-cut molds purchased in addition to the kit.
That fall, Rebecca and Kimberly, now 14 and 12, began work on a Prospector Ranger 15 canoe kit from Bear Mountain Boats. Their father, Winston, helped with the project and their mother, Jennifer, gave the three free time by doing everyone’s household chores and feeding the troops. Canoecraft, the how-to book by Bear Mountain designer Ted Moores, was their guide through the build. “Every year,” says Winston, “we do big Lego sets and they just love going through the instruction books and following the guidelines, so they both liked that there was a book we could follow with really detailed instructions.”
Most boatbuilders eventually tire of sanding, but Kimberly enjoyed long stints working with the random-orbit sander.
While Winston describes himself as “handy,” neither he nor his daughters had much woodworking experience beyond the tiny house build. “Many stages were new to us. We’d never worked with cedar strips, never used a spokeshave, never bent wood, never used fiberglass, never did epoxy. This was all new.” Since a lot of time building a wooden boat is spent sanding, it was good that Kimberly was good at it and enjoyed working with the random-orbit sander.
Kimberly and Rebecca took the cherry decks to school where they used the laser cutter in the Maker Space to etch designs in the wood. They filled the maple-leaf etching with red epoxy to finish the tribute to the family’s Canadian roots. The aft deck’s engraving, to be filled with black epoxy, is the Chinese character for the Yeung family name.
The hull, with its exterior ‘glassed, came off the molds late in November, and construction continued through the winter with the canoe largely finished in January 2019. Brushing on the final finish coats waited until the warm, dry weather of May. On the first of June, Kimberly and Rebecca, with their parents, brought the canoe to Green Lake, in the heart of a popular Seattle park, for its launch and maiden voyage.
The family gathered around the canoe at the south end of Seattle’s Green Lake before putting it in the water for the first time.
Rebecca, bow, and Kimberly, stern, took the canoe out on its maiden outing.
In the summer the Yeung family took the canoe to Widgeon Creek, a meandering tidal stream cradled in the foothills northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, for a weekend camping trip. It was a first for Kimberly and Rebecca; Jennifer and Winston had done two outings there while dating 25 years earlier. The round trip at the creek is less than 4 miles, a cautious beginning for the family’s canoe cruising, but this summer they may work up to a 35-mile trip along the Powell Forest Canoe Route, a chain of eight lakes outside of the city of Powell River, British Columbia. Beyond that, the sisters might take to even more ambitious canoe trips, but rather than speculate on where their wide-ranging interests may take them, it’s safe to say that whatever Kimberly and Rebecca choose to do, their data proved that even the sky’s not the limit.
During the canoe trip, Kimberly and Rebecca—sisters, budding scientists, fellow boatbuilders, and paddling partners—shared a waterfall at Widgeon Falls in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia.
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I built my first kayak in 1978. It was my own design, a mongrel of elements I’d seen in the classic documentary book, Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard Chapelle. It had a stern profile from Alaska’s King Island, a midsection from Canada’s Southampton Island, and a bow from Greenland’s Disko Bay. I built it in fuselage-frame fashion as I’d seen my father do for his Hypalon-skinned interpretation of an umiak. I thought my kayak looked pretty good, and it served to get me on the water, but I clearly had learned nothing about traditional Arctic kayaks. When I paddled an old and rough reproduction of a Greenland kayak I got my first inkling of what I had missed.
The baidarka has 43 ribs, bent cold from saplings. They seem delicate, but they are all intact almost 30 years later. They were very easy to shape and the irregularities get smoothed out when the stringers are lashed to them. The “wings” connecting the stern block to the gunwales are curved toward the keel, not straight across as in Zimmerly’s reproduction, a detail that my friend John Heath pointed out.
In the years that followed I built reproductions of traditional Arctic kayaks to see what I could learn from them. In the early ‘80s I took an interest in Aleut baidarkas. John Heath, for years a leading authority on traditional kayak who later became a good friend of mine and a mentor to me, had taken the lines from an Aleut double and published them in Skin Boats. I built that kayak and was impressed by its speed and ability to rise over oncoming waves.
I stained the frame red with some artist’s oil paint mixed with linseed oil. The Lowie specimen was, according to Lantis, “painted with blood and a powdered red mineral mixture.”
The ribs dried quickly and held the shape of the hull quite well.
Ten years later I had my eye on a single-cockpit baidarka documented by David Zimmerly in the February/March and April/May, 1982 issues of the now extinct Small Boat Journal. I happened to be in Berkeley, California, and visited the Lowie (now Hearst) Museum of Anthropology and was permitted to see that very kayak, an exquisitely crafted frame collected by Margaret Lantis in 1934 from Atka Island in the middle of the Aleutian chain. The woodworking bore the marks of the builder’s simple tools that the builder used; the bow and stern pieces, which wouldn’t be seen once the skin covering on, were as carefully sculpted as works of art.
I carved the lower piece of the bow from a yellow cedar crook, so as in the original, it can be slender yet strong. The upper bow is in the shape of a T in cross section, and could easily be made from two boards joined together, but it is meant to be carved from a solid block.
Sewing the skin into the gap between the upper and lower bow pieces was difficult, but it was not merely for a decorative effect. The gap makes it possible to put increase the fore-and-aft tension on the skin so that it takes a convex curve from the sheer line to the keel. That flare, as in modern fiberglass powerboats, throws spray outward, and helps keep it from getting to one’s face.
Several years later, still captivated by the Lowie specimen, I began work on my reproduction of that baidarka. I had plenty of Alaska yellow cedar for the deck beams and end pieces, including a good crook for the curved lower bow, and clear straight-grained spruce and red cedar for the longitudinal elements. The ribs in the original were round in cross section and while Zimmerly milled his ribs from lumber, resawn, and rounded, but I decided to use saplings. I don’t now recall if saplings were used in the original; trees are scarce on the Aleutian islands. I harvested the saplings from a hillside overlooking Puget Sound. They grew in clumps, very straight and slender, and I found them very easy to bend and shape.
The hole in the stern piece was likely meant to save weight and perhaps to increase air flow to speed drying in the stern. The lashings holding that piece to the keel are extremely tight. They start with the lashing twine laced tight in a V shape between the 3 holes. Frapping turns pinch the V into a Y, greatly increasing the tension.
The unusual stern has the provides a lot of lift and forward drive in a following sea.
My baidarka was the first kayak I covered with nylon and two-part polyurethane instead of canvas and airplane dope. The dope was quite forgiving of application errors and was easy to work as long as I wore a respirator whenever I got near the vaporous stuff. The urethane was going to be a challenge for me, working alone, because it had to be put on continuously, coat after coat, and was very runny. I set up my drill press with a stirrer I made out of brass and while I was applying one batch it was mixing the next. That worked fine until the can at the drill press broke free and got spun by the mixer. In an instant the contents were flung from the can and splattered in a horizontal line across every wall in my shop and on any tool that happened to be stored at that height. I had my back to the drill press so I got a coating on the one part of me that wasn’t protected by my apron.
In spite of the trouble I had with the skin, I like that it is semi-transparent and lets the intricate framework show.
I eventually finished a serviceable if rather drippy coating on the baidarka skin. I’d been quite proud of the way the frame had turned out, but now it had a skin that bore a strong resemblance to a syrup-drenched stack of pancakes. To make matters worse, when I stored the finished baidarka in an unheated warehouse in the middle of winter, the nylon went slack with the cold and was as wrinkled as a raisin. During the summer the skin smoothed itself, but as soon as I put it in the water it cooled off and got all wavy again.
My baidarka,weighing just 42 lbs, sits lightly on the water. On this cold winter day the deck shows a bit of the waviness that plagued the skin for years.
I haven’t been kayaking since last summer, but I was able to get the baidarka up to 7 knots. I did speed trials with scores of sea kayaks while I was the editor of Sea Kayaker magazine and there were only a handful that were as fast. Here I’m using a carbon-fiber wing paddle. The Aleut paddle I made is in storage and I’m not as adept with it as I am with the wing.
I didn’t paddle the boat much at all until about three years after completing it. Fortunately, the skin got tighter with time and the color became darker and richer and concealed the drips. I began to take the baidarka out and bit by bit learned how the Aleut design performed. It was clearly fast, especially given its 16′ 8-1/2″ length. I didn’t have a good way to measure its speed, but when I got a GPS years later, I found I could hit 7.2 knots in a sprint. Zimmerly’s plans note the theoretical top speed is 4.9 knots. When I took the baidarka out for the photos here, I hadn’t been kayaking for months, but I still managed to record 7 knots on the GPS.
In wind, the fairly low profile keeps the baidarka from getting blown around and the long bow counters weathercocking. The slender lower bow cuts cleanly through smooth and rippled water, and the broad upper bow provides lift in oncoming waves. In a following sea, the buoyancy above the waterline created by the spread of the gunwales keeps the stern from being swallowed up by waves. It rises instead and you can feel the waves pushing the baidarka forward. It’s a great boost for starting a sprint to get surfing.
After I finished my baidarka I stumbled upon a hidden key to an Aleut baidarka’s speed. In 1805, Urey Lisiansky, a Russian sea captain traveled 300 miles in a baidarka and wrote: “At first I disliked these leathern canoes on account of their bending elasticity in the water, but when accustomed to them, I thought it rather pleasant than otherwise.” I doubt my baidarka is as flexible as the original Lowie specimen. The urethane soaked through the nylon and bonded it to the frame, so the whole structure is quite rigid. The skin of the original baidarka wouldn’t have restricted the frame’s movement and the flexing would have allowed the frame to conform slightly to the shape of the waves as well as soften the impacts of rough water. Kayakers who have both folding kayaks and rigid molded kayaks know that the folders have a speed advantage when the going gets rough.
There are two joints like this in the keel. They seem designed to let the ends of the baidarka curve down around a wave lifting the middle of the hull, yet support the paddler over a trough.
The keel of the Lowie baidarka is made up of three pieces and the joints between them are shaped like the moldings on drop-leave tables—a mating quarter-round with a small vertical butt joint at the top. The way the keel is constructed, the ends of the baidarka can move slightly to wrap around the crest of a wave, but resist sagging into a trough.
In this damaged museum specimen, the bone bearings hidden inside a keel joint are visible.
The joints in the Lowie baidarka may be concealing some interesting bone bearings called kostochki. Joe Lubischer, a Canadian graduate student in anthropology and a fellow kayaker, once mentioned to me that the literature on baidarkas suggested the existence of these bearings but none had been discovered in the museum specimens he knew of. A few months earlier I had just happened to see a bunch of kostochki at the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus. I had gone there to see what I might find in their collection related to baidarkas and was allowed to see a baidarka that had been collected in and shipped from Alaska quite a while ago. To get the unskinned frame to fit into a reasonably sized shipping crate, someone had sawn it into pieces. Unfortunate for the kayak, but lucky for me, and for Joe, that all of the bone bearings were accessible.
The kostochki in the keel joints were elliptical bone bearings cradled in matching recesses carved into bone rectangles which were set into mortices on either side of the curved part of the joint. The allowed a bit of longitudinal movement, but no lateral movement. There were also rectangular strips of bone let into the contact surfaces between the deck ridges and the deck beams. John Heath believed the principle function of all of the various kostochki was to prevent wood surfaces in contact with each other from wearing away over time. The bone could endure the abrasion and keep the joints from getting progressively looser inside of their lashings.
A few years later Joe and I, along with George Dyson, author of the book Baidarka, studied a baidarka on loan from a Russian museum. It was collected in Unalaska in 1826. With a veterinarian’s X-ray machine, we made images of the joints and the films revealed the kostochki inside of them. If I had known about the bone parts when I built my baidarka I would have made them, even if all that work would be hidden away, just to experience a little connection with long-forgotten baidarka builders.
I suspect that the kayak I designed for myself four decades ago will be the only kayak I will ever design. I suppose I’d take some pride and pleasure in coming up with something that performed well, but nothing I could do would fill me with a sense of wonder as the genius that lies waiting to be discovered in kayaks from the past.
Paul Gartside’s 16′ Gaff Sloop, his Design No. 218, has its roots in SJOGIN, a 22′ traditional double-ended Scandinavian workboat built in the late ’50s. Paul designed a modified version of it, his Koster Boat, Design No. 176, and later developed three smaller versions. The last of them, Design No. 218, is the Gaff Sloop, a 16-footer with a transom stern. When Jonathan Sheldon of Hereford, England, enrolled at the Boat Building Academy (BBA) in Lyme Regis, he decided that this design fulfilled all his criteria for a new boat. He wanted a trailerable, stable, traditional-looking boat that he could sail, row, or motor either singlehanded or with a sizable crew.
Photographs by the author
The removable floorboards are finished bright and bordered by fixed perimeter boards, here painted white.
Jonathan was keen for the boat to have a cutter rig with a bowsprit, a feature that was present in the Koster. Paul was more than happy to draw a new rig with a bowsprit but thought the boat was too small for two headsails, so the gaff-sloop rig was retained. The mainsail and topsail were adjusted slightly to keep the center of effort in the same place.
The lines were lofted, according to BBA tutor Matthew Law, “using Gartside’s own lofting process, which is to loft the body plan first using all the offsets, including the offsets for the diagonals. Some people only use the diagonals at the end of the lofting process.” The long, fore-and-aft lines were then drawn as a result of which only minimal adjustments were necessary on the body plan. “Gartside’s drawings tend to be very good,” said Matthew.
For two of his iterations of the design, Paul specifies a variety of construction methods such as glued lapstrake, strip-planking, cold-molding, and traditional lapstrake, but he has drawn No. 218 for traditional lapstrake only, built right-side-up so the sweep of the planks can be tuned by eye as work on the hull progresses.
The boat is easily rowed, though the builder plans to lower the oarlocks and their pads to bring the oar handles down to a more comfortable height.
The centerline structure consists of a 2″ x 5″ keel of three laminated pieces, and a 9/16″-thick hog (both in sapele and with a slot for the centerboard), and an oak stem laminated of 13 layers of about 3/8″ thickness each]. The stem was made in two parts: an outer stem and an apron to provide a rabbet for the planking, with enough width in the apron to provide a substantial landing for the plank ends. The laminations were steamed to get them into their basic shape and then left to dry for about three days before clamping on a form and gluing up with epoxy. These centerline components were set up on a base framework along with the 1-1/8″-thick oak transom and 2-1/2″-thick oak stern knee, all of which, along with six temporary molds, were stabilized with struts up to an overhead workshop beam.
The 12 strakes of 3/8″ thick khaya planks were then fitted starting from the centerline, with the forward ends of the lower five planks steamed to cope with the twist as they approach the stem. The wood for the top strakes, which would be finished bright, was carefully selected from two particularly straight-grained boards and set aside before planking began.
For ease of access, the centerboard case was fitted when the planking was partially complete and required making cutouts in two of the temporary molds. Each side of the case was made up of three pieces of 7/8″ sapele, biscuit-joined, and had a 3″-deep sapele log fixed to the bottom, to be bolted through the keel. This, Jonathan thought, was “more efficient and cheaper” than rabbeting the sides into the tops of the logs in the way that Paul had drawn.
With the planking complete, the molds were removed and replaced with three sheer-to-sheer cross spalls to maintain the shape of the hull during the framing. The 1″ x 5/8″ steam-bent oak frames were fitted on 6″ centers. The frames are installed in halves in the bow and stern where the garboards are nearly vertical and amidships where the centerboard is located; the rest are bent in place in one piece.
The transom doesn’t have a notch for an outboard, but if the motor’s shaft is long enough, one isn’t required. The transom is designed to be strong enough to support outboard power.
Next came the ten 1″ oak floors, each made with a limber adjacent to every plank lap, and the 7/8″ x 2-1/2″ oak inwales. The plans called for a cap over the top of the inwale and sheerstrake, but Jonathan left this out because he wanted an open gunwale with the frame tops visible and open spaces between them. To compensate for the loss of structure, he added sapele outwales shaped from 1-1/8″-square stock. The sheer is also strengthened by the rubrail that Paul drew to protect the lower edge of the sheer strake.
The 1″ thwarts (pine in the plans, oak in Jonathan’s boat) rest on risers (the 2-1/4″ x 5/8″ pine in the plans proved difficult to edge-set at the stern so Jonathan used 1-1/2″ x 3/4″ oak) and have lodging knees connecting them to stiffen the hull. Each end of the thwarts also has a pair of vertical knees that extend 15″ inboard and taper down to a very low profile. Paul calls for 7/8″ grown knees, which can be hard to come by, so Jonathan made his with 1″ iroko, in two pieces, half-lapped to avoid weak cross-grain at the ends. Jonathan had been collecting timber from various flea markets, auctions, and odd sales, and he often used that stock in lieu of the lumber specified in the plans.
The floorboards rest on the floor timbers as loose panels for easy removal. They run fore and aft and are bounded by a fixed, curved perimeter floorboard port and starboard.
I had the opportunity to take a short sail on Jonathan’s Gaff Sloop on the Academy’s Launch Day in gentle Force 1 to 2 winds, which would have been good, forgiving conditions for a first sail, were it not for a disproportionally lollopy chop. There were four of us on board, but at no time did the boat feel crowded, even when we were tacking and each of us had to shift to a new place to sit. Jonathan has sailed with five aboard, including himself, and observed there was still plenty of space. The boat felt comfortingly stable at all times, not surprising given the generous 6′ 9″ beam, the stability provided by the hull form, and the 35-lb lead insert in the centerboard.
Adding the bowsprit to the original sail plan increased the length of the jib’s foot by 12″ and its area by a bit over 6-1/2 sq ft.
In the stronger winds of the day, the sloop was beautifully balanced and I was able to let go of the tiller for a couple of minutes at a time while the boat steered a straight course. When the breeze went lighter, however, I found that there was a lee helm and the boat wouldn’t tack. I put that down to the chop, which I felt was giving us a less-than-fair test, but afterward I contacted Paul about it. He was a little concerned because, he said, “I have the sail’s center of effort right over the spur (the intersection of board’s leading edge and the hull) and normally that guarantees a neutral helm until the boat heels, even on a beamy boat.” He suggested that perhaps crew distribution had put the boat out of trim or the centerboard wasn’t fully lowered. He was right; Jonathan acknowledged the centerboard control lines were not yet set up quite right, and the board was about 90-percent deployed.
At the time of launching it was only possible to row from the central thwart—Jonathan was experimenting with the location of the forward thwart and hadn’t yet installed locks for the forward rowing station. When rowing from the ’midship station, with two others aboard and pulling on the new 10′ oars, it took a bit of effort to get the boat going—it is, after all, big and beamy for a 16-footer–but it then carried its way well. Jonathan and I both agreed that we had to raise the oar handles a little too high when taking a stroke, but this should be easily resolved by lowering the height of the rowlock pads and by replacing the rather long-stemmed rowlocks Jonathan had available with lower ones. Longer oars would help too; a common oar-length formula indicates 12-1/2′ oars would be suitable for rowing, but anything over 10″ would be awkward to stow aboard.
The 28.5 sq ft topsail catches the faster-moving air aloft when the breeze is light. Here it’s set a bit high; it should overlap much of the main’s gaff to close the gap between the two sails.
It is to be expected that any new boat’s launching and first sea trial would have some teething problems, but in the case of Jonathan’s Gaff Sloop, christened DUNCAN R, the problems were all human error: the partially deployed centerboard, the choice of oars and oarlocks, and having the topsail set a bit high when the sails were set. But the boat itself, as designed, lived up to Jonathan’s expectations: it was comfortably stable and manageable under sail, singlehanded or with a crew of four or five aboard, and it had the classic look of a lapstrake sailboat. And, he and I agreed, she looked great with the bowsprit which Paul had added.
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boat building and repair industry, and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
I grew up with a peapod. It was 6″ long and my father had whittled it, probably before I was born. It was one of the many models he had made that taught me to appreciate the beauty of the forms of boats. I was especially fond of this delicate double-ender, but despite having built real boats for decades now, I never built a peapod. I very much liked the type, but I was unwilling to tackle the challenge of carvel planking. So, when I saw the John Harris–designed Lighthouse Tender Peapod from Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC), I was eager to row and sail this adaptation of the classic type, updated to easy-to-build plywood construction.
Christopher Cunningham
The plywood adaptation of the peapod has a combination of lapped planks on the upper strakes the edge-joined planks on the lower strakes. The smoother bottom is easier to cover with fiberglass and less vulnerable to abrasion.
John had taken his inspiration from a working peapod built in around 1886 in Washington County, Maine. It was the same peapod I had been drawn to in American Small Sailing Craft. Author Howard Chapelle notes that particular peapod was, when the lines were taken off in 1937, the last of its kind ever built Its type was used for lobstering near Jonesport up to about 1938. John’s Lighthouse Tender Peapod has a shape very similar to the original working boat; the chief differences in the new boat are a sternpost that is nearly vertical rather than raked, and the absence of a keel, which allows his boat to sit upright on the beach.
The boat, built from a kit, is 13′ 5″ long with a beam of 52″, and is a combination of CLC’s LapStitch construction and standard stitch-and-glue. The three upper strakes are LapStitch, with overlapping edges, which cast shadows that highlight the curves of the hull. The lower three strakes are edge-joined, making it easier to apply fiberglass to the bottom and avoid the vulnerability of proud plank laps. The combination of different seam types isn’t as visually jarring as it might sound. I didn’t notice it until I crawled under the boat while it was resting in slings.
Christopher Cunningham
The thwarts are joined by plywood side pieces that aren’t intended as benches, but rather as part of a system that stiffens the hull for sailing. A block of flotation foam, painted black, hides in the shadow under the bow seat.
The seating arrangement includes stern sheets, a center thwart, and a seat forward that incorporates a mast partner at both its aft and forward edges. The three seats are made contiguous by narrow extensions that are somewhere between side benches and lodging knees. The combined structure, bolted together, gives the hull the stiffness to resist the torsion created by sailing forces. The plywood pieces are not glued to the hull, so they can all be removed for refinishing when the time comes.
Fixed underneath the seats are blocks of foam for flotation. The foam is painted with a flexible coating that resists chipping and wear. The coating is black and surprisingly inconspicuous in the shadows cast by the seats. The floorboards are fastened to the frames with stainless-steel screws and finishing washers so they too can be removed for maintenance. Aft of the centerboard trunk is an opening in the floorboards for a bilge pump.
Christopher Cunningham
The lever that operates the centerboard has loops of bungees to hold it in position. Note the black flotation blocks under the thwart.
The centerboard is braced by the center thwart and extends forward from it with an open slot for the lever that raises and lowers the board. Bungee loops slip over the lever to hold the board in position with some give if it strikes an obstruction while the boat is under sail. The rudder has a kick-up blade with a bolt and a star knob that adjusts the friction that holds the blade down or up. The skeg extends about 6″ abaft of the after stem before it curves upward. It allows the gudgeons to line up vertically, so the rudder is easy to attach while the boat is afloat and is more effective for steering than a rudder that pivots on an angled axis. The rudderstock has a fixed arm extending to starboard for a Norwegian tiller that reaches around the mizzenmast. I’d prefer a removable arm to make the rudder more compact when stowed, though that arrangement is more complex to build and would have to be much heavier. A cord connects the tiller and the arm, providing a very simple, flexible joint, which is kept from getting sloppy by tensioning the cord in a clam cleat at the forward end of the tiller.
Christopher Cunningham
The rudder stock has a fixed arm for the attachment of a Norwegian tiller, which works around the mizzen.
The spars are all rectangular in section with rounded corners. They’re tapered to minimize weight and achieve a pleasing appearance. The mainmast is laminated with three pieces of fir, and the mizzen is a single piece of spruce. In the kit they arrive with precut scarfs ready to be glued together. The main is a balance lug sail, loose-footed, and has an area of 73 sq ft. The mizzen is also a balance lugsail with its foot laced to the boom and has an area of 22 sq ft. The Peapod has an optional rig, a cat-rigged balance lug with an area of 79 sq ft.
Christopher Cunningham
The Peapod is a nimble boat under oar power and a pleasure to take out for a quick, uncomplicated outing.
When I stepped aboard the Peapod while it was afloat just off a cobble beach, its stability was readily apparent. I could lunge over the side and move about with ease. Sitting on the end of the center thwart, I rested my shoulders on the gunwale to look over the rail and still had plenty of support and freeboard. It was easy to imagine pulling a crab trap up over the side. My first task to get ready for sail was to lower the rudder blade. Leaning over stern, wrapped around the mizzen to reach the blade, was a further test of the double-ender’s stability. In a boat with a transom there would be some beam at the stern to support my weight off center, so I was surprised the Peapod didn’t mind having its tail end twisted.
Chesapeake Light Craft
For rowing through the lulls, the sails are easily dropped out of the way and the rudder blade retracted to clear the water.
With a fluky wind blowing at 12 knots and gusting to 15, I set out with the full main and mizzen set, just right for the conditions. For stiffer breezes, the first reef is to remove the mizzen and move the main from its forward position aft about 15″to its other step. The second reef is made by pulling the main about 24″ down to the boom in a traditional slab reef, which is made easy by the reefing lines on the luff and leech and three reefpoints. On a reach, the Peapod made 4 3/4 knots in 1-1/2′ wind-driven waves and rolling freighter wakes. The Peapod was quite lively and bobbed like a cork. The bow rose quickly and I never saw any spray, let alone have any come aboard. And I didn’t see any water sloshing up out of the open top of the centerboard trunk.
Chesapeake Light Craft
The yawl sail plan offers a total sail area of 95 sq ft.
The bow rounded up smartly with the helm a-lee for tacking, and then slowly crept across the eye of the wind; it didn’t get caught in irons, but I took to backing the main to snap it across. The Peapod did well to windward and in gusts resisted heeling quickly, giving me plenty of time to react by easing the sheet or rounding up.
I only sailed the Peapod solo, and for the gusty conditions I was most comfortable kneeling in the bottom rather than sliding across the center thwart. There was plenty of room for two more people. The full ends would give the additional crew room to move athwartships and shift weight to windward.
Chesapeake Light Craft
There is an optional sail plan for a lone 79 sq ft mainsail. With no mizzen in the way, a common tiller can be used.
For rowing, with both sails and spars resting in the hull and the rudder blade cocked up, the Peapod performed well. The retracted rudder barely touched the water so it didn’t drag or interfere with tracking or turning. The skeg gave the boat good directional stability without hindering maneuvering. The boat scooted along at 3 knots with a lazy effort, held 4 knots at an aerobic exercise pace, and did 4-1/2 knots in a short sprint. The Peapod has two rowing stations, one for rowing solo or with two passengers, and the other, about 32″ farther forward, for rowing with a single passenger in the stern. With three men aboard, the hull still shows two-and-a-half strakes above the water. There is plenty of freeboard. Chesapeake light Craft set the capacity at 650 lbs.
Chesapeake Light Craft
With three men aboard, the Peapod sits nicely on its lines and has plenty of freeboard.
With the Lighthouse Tender Peapod, Chesapeake Light Craft has brought a modern construction that is easy, inexpensive, and light to a traditional form that isn’t within reach of a beginning boatbuilder or well suited for recreational pursuits. It has the pleasing shape of its predecessor and the simplicity and ease provided by modern construction.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Lighthouse Tender Peapod Particulars
[table]
Length/13′ 5″
Beam/52″
Hull weight/160 lbs
Draft, rowing/6″
Draft, sailing/30″
Sail area/95 sq ft
Maximum payload/650 lbs
[/table]
Kits for the Lighthouse Tender Peapod will be available from Chesapeake Light Craft sometime in February, 2020.
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It was already past noon when I loaded three days’ worth of camping gear aboard my Flint, ARR & ARR, still on its trailer in the unpaved lot near the launch ramp at Port O’Connor, Texas. The sky over the Gulf of Mexico was thickly overcast and gray; a chilly breeze cut through my shirt, but I expected to warm up once I started rowing.
I had postponed this winter trip twice because of poor weather, so the forecast for a fair weekend was a welcome change. There would be some rain in the evening and the nights would be chilly, but the three days were supposed to be mild.
I wanted to have camp set up by twilight, before the rain arrived. I just needed to get going and keep an eye on the time. Rowing ARR & ARR, I can sustain 3 knots, and with Matagorda Island only about 6 miles from the mainland, getting to my campsite at Sunday Beach before the rain wouldn’t be a problem. I’d have ample time to explore the oyster reef and mangrove marsh along the route.
I pulled on my muck boots, tied a slack line from gunwale to gunwale just forward of the stern sheets to serve as a rowing foot brace, and launched the boat. I rowed straight across the Intracoastal Waterway’s 150-yard-wide channel between Port O’Connor and slender Blackberry Island and entered Fisherman’s Cut, a passage just 200 yards long. The water in the sheltered channels was barely rumpled and just clear enough to see the oar blades on each stroke above its dark olive-green depths.
Photographs by the author
On Sunday, I set my boots, socks, and insoles out to dry at camp. The powerboat in the background belongs to a nice couple who came ashore for a while, stopped by for a chat, and then went fishing for sea trout.
I followed Fish Pond Trail, a route traced in red on the Port O’Connor Paddling Trail map that would lead me through the mangroves and into the shelter of Pelican Island. Hurricane Harvey had rearranged parts of this coast in the fall of 2017, which included cutting a pass through Sunday Beach that sheared Pelican Island off from the main 40 or so miles of Matagorda Island. There is now a 1,000′ gap where an isthmus had connected the two islands.
For a weekend, the waterways were surprisingly quiet, without a single fisherman in sight, and Port O’Connor resembled a ghost town, inhabited by only birds. Gulls hovered in the breeze; pelicans glided by in undulating single-file lines; and wading curlews dipped their long, slender beaks in the shallow water off a small beach at the edge of Barroom Bay. I crossed the bay along its eastern edge and entered Little Mary’s Cut. Four dolphins surfaced astern where I had been only a dozen strokes earlier, and a lone roseate spoonbill flew overhead, its deep pink feathers with splashes of crimson at its shoulders and tail striking against the gray sky.
Port O’Connor’s stilt-elevated houses shrank in the distance, soon leaving me surrounded by lowlands covered with thigh-high cordgrass and black mangroves thick with deep-green, thumb-sized leaves. I rowed by short beaches of pale-brown sand and low dunes fringed with sea oats.
Little Mary’s Cut was about twice as long as Fisherman’s but only about half as wide, with water deep enough for rowing right up next to the mangroves, where their upright pencil roots jutted out of the water like slender gray stalagmites.
Little Mary’s Cut emptied into Big Bayou, which was open on its east end to Matagorda Bay. Whitecaps dotted the bay and sent a light chop rolling into the bayou. I turned my stern to the chop and continued following the paddling trail, rowing a short dogleg west and turning south into calmer water at Chris’s Cut.
The cut was narrow and less than ¼-mile long, and I soon rowed over its south end where the water was so shallow that I could see the sandy bottom and seagrass laid flat by a slight current, the blades’ tips waving toward wide-open Espiritu Santo Bay. The current carried me onto a shoal with a gentle bump and dragged the hull hissing across the sand. With ARR & ARR aground, I stood and used an oar to push back into deeper water.
I rowed around the shallow spot, and the channel markers swung away from Bayucos Island out into the bay in a wide arc that didn’t turn back toward the island for another half mile. The small waves tumbling near the edge of the bay traced the edge of the massive half-moon shoal that reached out from the island. Sand and seagrass clearly visible beneath the ripples meant that it was too shallow for ARR & ARR, so I followed the markers instead of cutting across.
I followed Mitchell’s Cut through Bayucos. The cut, spanning 500′, was the widest yet, and yet so short, barely twice its width, that it seemed more like a natural gap between two islands than a manmade passage. As soon as I rowed out the other side and into Saluria Bayou, I met chop from Matagorda Bay again. This time I rowed east, into the waves.
ARR & ARR was safe in the cordgrass with just enough water beneath her astern so she could slip back out into the bay. During the night, when I pointed my flashlight in the boat’s direction, all I could see was cordgrass and a tiny bright spot of reflected light. In the morning I discovered it was my rowing mirror that I’d been seeing.
Saluria Bayou is the namesake of the town Saluria, a once-thriving port and ranching center that was nearly wiped out by a hurricane in 1875 and was abandoned in the early 1900s. Only the Coast Guard station remained, and it was closed in 1942. A bare concrete platform on pillars at the east end of the bayou is all that’s left. It was hard to believe that an entire town once stood where there was only a mangrove marshland.
About 500 yards west of Matagorda Bay, I turned south into First Cut, a fairly narrow channel, just 50 yards across, once used to access now long-closed oil wells, and rowed past marker No. 25 of the paddling trail.
The water in First Cut was calm, the rowing was easy, and I made good headway. About 600 yards in, I passed a side cut that ran out perpendicular to the east from First Cut toward Matagorda Bay. Another a short distance beyond that I passed a raised 10’ by 15’ metal platform sun-bleached to a dusty pink. The bottom 2’ of the four legs were rusted and thick with barnacles. Rising above the mangroves to the east stood a row of bare utility poles that had once run lines between the Coast Guard station and a now-abandoned WW II airfield on Matagorda Island.
Another abandoned platform, this one brown and topped with a rusting vertical cylindrical tank, stood at the trail’s No. 24 marker. The route followed a dogleg west for about 1,000’, turned back south, and emptied into an expanse of water about half the size of a football field. In every direction beyond was a watery labyrinth that wends through scattered clumps of mangroves.
White pelicans flew past the little spit where ARR & ARR was beached. Barely visible on the land on the other side of the pass are some of the utility poles in a line between the abandoned airfield on Matagorda Island and the old Coast Guard station at Saluria Bayou.
Just south of marker No. 23, a flats boat sat motionless with a boy poised on top of its tower with his rod and reel; a man wading in thigh-deep water fished next to the boat. I nodded to them and rowed into the widening water.
Although the map showed the trail continuing south and east for another 1-1/2 miles toward the sheltered water behind Pelican Island, my chart and navigation app put me at the end of water deep enough to row, with only marsh and mud flats between me and Pelican Island. Boating friends who knew the area had hinted that there were ways through the flats, which was what I wanted to explore to see if I could find my way through. I couldn’t see the No. 22 marker, and there was no obvious gap in the mangroves ahead that looked like a continuation of the trail, so I rowed due south, hoping to stay close enough to the trail to keep water beneath my keel and eventually spot the marker.
I hadn’t rowed more than 30 yards before my boat squealed to a stop on oyster shells. I stepped out into water only 6″ deep and the soles of my boots crunched the shells. The oysters on the bottom were a dark, mossy brown that made it difficult to gauge the depth. It was the short path of white slivers ARR & ARR had left astern that made it clear how little water there was over the shoal.
Holding the gunwale, I walked the boat along a meandering route between the shallower spots. When I reached water deep enough to threaten pouring in over the tops of my boots, I carefully kicked them in the water to remove clumps of thick black mud, stepped back aboard, and pushed off.
On the thwart is a rowing-seat pad made from two layers of a camping sleeping mat laminated together; strapped beneath the side benches are transparent homemade buoyancy bags. Shock cord pulled over a thumb cleat holds a plug down inside the daggerboard trunk to keep water from splashing out while I’m rowing. The line running from gunwale to gunwale and hanging slack between the side benches serves as my rowing foot brace.
Among the mangroves just in front of me was a flats boat with a boy fishing from the tower and a man fishing in the shallows next to it. Was it the same boat I just rowed past? Did they get ahead of me somehow? I checked my compass and it showed I was heading due north; I had turned myself 180 degrees without noticing it. The mangroves looked the same in every direction, and the sky, completely overcast with thick gray clouds, had blotted out the sun and offered no sense of direction.
I turned south again and ran aground after only a few strokes. I continued for a good 15 minutes, alternating between walking the boat and rowing before finally giving up the effort. I hadn’t made any appreciable headway toward where I thought the trail was, and I still had a mile or two of marsh and mud flats to negotiate if I were going to continue southward. Afternoon was turning into evening, and I didn’t have the time to walk the boat through miles of an oyster-ridden mangrove maze before the rain was supposed to start and the light would fade.
I cringed each time I heard the boat being grated by oysters and feared they would gouge through the thin layer of fiberglass and into ARR & ARR’s plywood hull. I dragged the boat back toward the trail that had brought me into the labyrinth. It baffled me that this could be part of a mapped paddling trail and have so little water. It was true that I was trying to wend my way along the trails just after low tide, but it was a low that was only 2″ shallower than the day’s high. What I didn’t know was that tides along the Texas coast have not only daily and monthly patterns, but also a seasonal one. If I had tried to navigate through the marsh and mud flats three months earlier or later, I could have had up to another 1-1/2′ of water, all the difference for a boat that draws only 8″ fully laden.
In an attempt to record the size of the beach I had camped on, I took this picture from the end of the little spit. Judging from pictures taken almost a year later, the little beach has grown at least sixfold.
Once I was past the flats boat, I rowed back down the dogleg and First Cut. A flats boat with three men in it came speeding around the bend behind me and slowed to an idle while still 100 yards away. I expected the boat to stop to fish or come ahead and squeeze between me and the mangroves, but it maintained its course at idle speed and at the same distance off my stern. They trailed me that way for a minute or so, and the distance between us didn’t seem to be shrinking. It occurred to me that the skipper might be trying to pass without making a wake, so I stopped rowing and rested the oar handles in my lap, the blades hanging in the air. ARR & ARR drifted to a stop and the flats boat drew even.
Its skipper and I nodded to each other, and he called out above the sound of his engine, “You were moving faster than I thought.”
I smiled and replied, “Thank you for slowing down.”
After he was a dozen yards past, he throttled up and sped on down the cut.
I had rowed north about half of the way along First Cut, approaching what my charts showed as a side cut, branching out to the east and stopping just shy of Matagorda Bay, but if it actually connected with the bay, or at least ended in mangroves sparse enough to allow me to drag my boat through, it would cut the distance I’d have to row in the bay in half, so it seemed worth a try.
The side cut was quite still, barely rippled, even after I’d rowed half its length. I should have encountered waves from the bay by then if the side cut connected to it. I rowed to the end and found what I’d feared: a thick mass of mangroves growing out of a ragged oyster bank. I had to turn around and row back to First Cut.
The green object, which that looks like a large lima bean sitting in the wrack line, is a black mangrove seed. The 1”-wide seeds drop from the plant’s branches and are carried by tides and currents and can travel far from the parent plant before washing ashore and putting down roots.
I was nervous about rowing in Matagorda Bay. The bay had shifting shallows all the way from Saluria Bayou to Pelican Island. To get to the still water in the lee of the J-Hook, the island’s northern peninsula, I would have to row about a mile across the shallows, taking waves on the beam. If I found the bay was too rough, I could just turn around and row with the wind and waves back into the bayou, though without a place to spend the night I’d have to return to my car. It’d be better than capsizing in winter.
Under a gray sky, I rowed into the bay and past the massive somber concrete platform of the old Coast Guard station. The waves in the bay weren’t as daunting as I had expected, especially rowing dead upwind to gain sea room before turning toward Sunday Beach. The boat pitched in the waves, occasionally shuddering violently, but nothing more than spray came aboard, and the boat’s fine forefoot cut into the waves well enough to allow me to maintain decent headway.
After I turned southwest to parallel the shoreline, ARR & ARR took the waves on the beam. They weren’t breaking but the boat rolled in the steep chop. No water came aboard, and I found myself enjoying the rolling ride. As sets of taller waves rose ahead, I didn’t fight them. I’d stop rowing and let them pass. It made for slow progress, but I enjoyed the challenge.
Though the water droplets spattered across the wide-angle mirror mounted on my stern-light post, I spotted the reflection of something low and dark blocking the path ahead. It was the skeleton of a tree trunk lying on its side with limbs jutting out in all directions, so long and thick that they held the trunk high out of the water. I headed farther out into the bay and around the trunk and the shoal it rested on.
The two plastic buckets I carried aboard the boat served as camp seats, bailers, and garbage cans. If I need extra ballast for my return trip after going through firewood, food, and drinking water, I can fill one or both buckets, snap on the lids, and lash the weight wherever it’s needed in the boat.
I passed the J-Hook and rowed into flatter water in the channel that would take me to the pass at Sunday Beach. To the southeast, beyond the island, a thick, dark band of clouds out over the gulf was hanging lower than the rest. Slate-gray sheets of rain falling beneath the dark band blurred the horizon. I picked up the pace, hoping to avoid a drenching.
Ten minutes later, though, the clouds seemed to be no closer and the horizon appeared sharper through thinning veils of rain. Beaches the color of weathered manila rope lay on both sides of Sunday Pass. Two powerboats were beached on the south end of Pelican Island, with anchors dug in above the wrack line. Boats were beached on the Matagorda Island side of the pass as well, on a much larger expanse of sand. The deep water in the middle of the pass was full of breakers. I closed in on the little beach on Pelican, aiming for the 15-yard space of beach between the two boats already there.
After another five minutes of rowing, ARR & ARR nudged into the sand and came to a stop. I stepped over the side, lost my footing, and tumbled into the water—I was more tired than I had thought. With water squishing out of the tops of my boots on each step, I pulled the bow farther up on the beach. I was soaked and began to shiver, but I needed to tend to the boat and tent before I changed into dry clothes.
Dunes 10′ tall separated the beach from the gulf side, and while I would have liked to make camp on that high ground, a 30-yard-wide swath thick with grasses and mangroves surrounded it. The beach on my side of the barrier had only a slight slope, and I picked out what seemed the highest spot for my tent. With a tide expected to rise only inches during the night, I figured the site would do.
With the sun shining brightly, I pulled ARR & ARR ashore in the niche behind the little spit. A foldable solar panel draped across the foredeck charges the 15-amp-hour battery strapped down inside the forward buoyancy compartment. In the distance on the other side of Sunday Pass is Matagorda Island.
The waves edging ashore pushed my boat around until it was beam-to the little waves, getting rolled and bucked against the shore. I tried pulling the boat higher onto the beach, but the waves still hit the stern and pushed it around again. The waves had also turned one of the powerboats, but it was large and heavy enough that the little waves couldn’t bat it about—it would be fine until its crew returned. The other powerboat, closer to the pass, was nestled into a niche behind a tiny spit, clearly the sweet spot for a boat on this beach.
Inside the pass, the beach ended and gave way to a marshy shore thick with cordgrass and dotted with black mangroves. Curled into the grass was an inlet just large enough for my boat. I relaunched, paddled ARR &ARR around to the inlet, and dragged it in across a shallow at its mouth. In the still water there, the boat floated motionless. I set its anchor in the sand just beyond the cordgrass and tied a second line from the foredeck cleat to a short length of chain I wrapped around the exposed roots of a mangrove farther inland.
I pitched my tent, changed into dry jeans and sweatshirt, and pulled on dry socks and sneakers. I stored my boots in the tent’s vestibule, pulled out their spongy insoles, wrung them out, and draped them across the tops of the boots. I hung my damp rowing clothes on a cord tied inside the top of my tent.
The dark band of clouds broke apart, and it didn’t rain that evening. As the light waned, the crews of the two boats returned from the gulf side of the island, shoved off, and headed back to the mainland. I spent a comfortable evening sitting on one of my 2-gallon buckets next to a campfire, enjoying my dinner snug in warm, dry clothes. I stayed up for over an hour enjoying the breeze and the shushing of the waves rolling ashore before finally putting out the fire and crawling into my bedroll in the tent.
After the rain stopped on Sunday morning, the beach was left textured by tiny pits, a fresh surface for footprints. As the clouds began to break up I refilled my drinking bottles from the water can.
I woke to a dull-gray morning with rain pattering on the tent’s fly and leaving pockmarks in the sand beyond the fly’s perimeter. I crawled out of the bedroll and pulled on my sweater. For breakfast, I put a cup of coffee on the stove and ate a baggie of granola mixed with milk. Gunshots echoed in the distance—hunters out early on this drizzly Sunday morning. A boat roared somewhere out in the mangrove marsh.
After the rain stopped, I crawled out of the tent. The air was cool and still. Patches of clear sky showed between the remnants of the clouds. Pelicans, cormorants, avocets, willets, and gulls squawked and peeped while feeding in the shallow waters around the pass. I sat watching and listening on a blackened driftwood beam close to the water.
A dolphin darted and rolled in the water just 15 yards off the little spit. Farther out, jumping fish flashed silver in the morning light. White pelicans and brown pelicans circled over the pass. The brown pelicans dove and plunged into the water, resurfacing with skyward thrusts of their beaks, swallowing whatever they had caught. The white pelicans settled on the water surface, usually in teams, flapping their wings as they swam toward each other to box in fish before scooping them up.
Despite the noise of the birds, the dolphin, and fish—or maybe because of it—my morning of sitting on a driftwood beam beneath the waning cloud cover was the most peaceful I’d had in months. Port O’Connor was a faint blur of white buildings beneath a single water tower tiny on the northern horizon.
I thought about moving my camp for my second night, but I was tired and wanted to let my wet clothes dry, so I left my camp set up and struck out for a short outing. I rowed north into the little bay on Pelican Island’s west side as a cool but very light breeze came up, which was refreshing for the row beneath the mostly sunny sky.
By midmorning, powerboats were showing up at the pass. I didn’t want to stray too far from camp, so I rowed back to my beach and landed in that sweet spot behind the little spit of sand that that powerboat had occupied the day before. I set the anchor high on the beach, pulled out my solar charger, unfolded the panels across the foredeck, and hooked up the regulator to a through-deck connector wired to the boat’s battery, which is strapped down inside the forward compartment.
I noticed a snail with a gray shell about the size of a pistachio on ARR & ARR’s topsides, most likely a marsh periwinkle from the boat’s night in the cordgrass. Then I started to see dozens. I walked around the boat plucking the snails off and tossing them into the water for the crabs.
I went back to my driftwood bench and watched slender-beaked willets working the swash, plucking coquina clams from the glistening wet sand. I sat very still and the willets passed right in front of me, just 4′ away.
While I made a sandwich in my tent for lunch, the roar of an engine drew so close that it seemed right on top of me. The engine’s pitch dropped to an idle, and I heard a mix of voices. I peeked out of the tent; eight teens were packed inside a 16′ open boat nudging its bow onto the beach 10 yards from ARR & ARR. I waved and ducked back inside the tent to finish making my sandwich. The engine revved for a few seconds, and after dropping back to an idle for half a minute, its pitch rose to a constant roar again while its volume steadily dropped. By the time I reemerged from the tent with my sandwich and an apple, the little boat was already halfway across the pass, heading toward the beach on the opposite side. I must have looked a little less civilized than I’d thought.
Sunday Beach is a popular spot on weekends in the summer, and by early afternoon, even this midwinter Sunday was mild enough to lure a dozen boats to the pass. I took a short stroll around the southern end of the island to the gulf side, but I didn’t feel comfortable out of sight of camp, given the number of boats coming and going and not being able to lock up ARR & ARR’s gear. I cut my walk short and returned to camp.
A great egret, brilliant white with a school-bus-yellow stiletto beak, stood poised at the edge of an inland brackish pool, and a great blue heron waded with deliberate, punctuated steps just off the marshy shore on the island’s bay side. The washed-up wrack was a tangle of brown grass, weed, and palm fibers; broken clam, cockle, and moon snail shells; a sprinkling of drift twigs worn as smooth as creek-bottom pebbles; dark green mangrove sprouts; and bristle-worm tubes encrusted with the tiniest bits of shell. I turned over a mass of brown weed, and little gray sand fleas skittered away.
The sky had completely cleared by 5:30, and with the sun low in the sky and the air turning chilly, the dozen or so boats that had landed nearby for the day were gone. The wind swept across the beach toward the bay and the distant marsh. Sand drifted around the firewood I’d stacked for the evening. I squatted upwind of the pile to prevent the lighter from blowing out and got the fire going. After the fatwood was burning well, its amber resin liquid and bubbling, and had started the larger pieces, I sat on my bucket off to one side.
With the clear sky, the temperature plummeted after sunset, so I swapped out the hoodie for a thick sweater and got the fire going. Later I wore both the sweater and the hoodie. Matagorda Island State Park regulations allow Sunday Pass visitors to bring firewood from home, a luxury that makes starting a campfire easy.
The fire roared in the wind; flames whipped outward, sending sparks across the sand toward the bay. I moved my 3-gallon drinking water can and my other bucket to the fire’s windward side to block some of the wind and used a driftwood poker to rearrange the pieces of burning wood so that the fire was more compact. The only clouds in the sky, lying low and wide just above the horizon, pleated the fan of the sun’s copper and gold light where it spread across a purple sky. After the sun slipped beneath the horizon, the thin band of Matagorda Island’s dunes and mangroves across the pass dimmed to an empty black. The water in the pass glistened with the colors of the sky. Both sky and water dimmed around the silhouette of Matagorda Island and then disappeared entirely. Stars winked on by ones and twos and then by the dozens, and Mars glowed steady, orange, and bright. I stepped away from the fire to escape its scrim of amber light, and the Milky Way spread across a moonless sky.
Eventually I got cold and returned to the fire, and an hour or two after that, the last of my firewood burned down to only a red-orange pulsing glow deep within black-edged coals. It was 9:00 and high tide. The boat sat unmoving, its rode slack. I poured half a bucket of seawater over the coals, stirred the sludge with my driftwood poker until the last trace of the fire’s light was gone, and poured the rest of bucket of water on top.
As the sun set beyond Sunday Pass, it was hard to believe that the expanse of water between this little sand spit and Matagorda Island in the background was once Sunday Beach; the land was entirely swept away by the 130-mph winds of Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
The morning was quiet. It was Monday, and for most, the weekend was over. The birds and I had the world to ourselves.
I sat on my driftwood beam with my coffee and cereal and enjoyed the morning. With the sky so clear and the air so still, the just-risen sun could take the chill out of the air. I was looking forward to a casual row back to the mainland on such a day, but I couldn’t dillydally. A front, forecast to come through in the evening, would stir the air soon enough and pick up steam over the course of the day. Although most of my row back to Port O’Connor would be downwind, I would be exposed to waves crossing Espiritu Santo and Barroom bays, so after breakfast and a short stroll down the beach, I broke camp and loaded the boat.
It was a pleasant row back to Port O’Connor. I had suspected I might be saddened by leaving such a special place, knowing it would be a while before I could make such a trip again, but I felt surprisingly content. The place I had found was now as much within me as it was on my chart.
Roger Siebert is an editor in Austin, Texas. He rows and sails his Flint on local lakes, and has trailered it to a few of his favorite places on the Florida coast.
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In order to ease the construction of my 18′ pocket cruiser, I built a pair gantry cranes. I dismantled them at the job’s conclusion, so I built models to illustrate them here. While the size and materials may be adjusted to the builder’s needs, my full-sized gantries had 12′ 2×8 horizontal beams, 10′ 2×6 vertical supports, 8-1/2′ 2×4 angled upright braces, 18″ 2×6 top spacer blocks, 8″ 2×6 top beam supports, and 4′ 2×6 bases. The handles for winding the winches are inserted here.
When I built my Glen-L Bo Jest, an 18′ x 8′ pocket cruiser, there came a time when I had to get the hull from upside down—the way it was built—to right-side up to finish construction. To do the job I made a pair of gantry cranes; I’ve long since dismantled them, as they were of no use after I trailered the boat away from the shop.
This exploded detail shows the arrangement of the corners of the frame. Omitted for clarity is the diagonal brace running from the ends of the beam down 4’ or 5’ to the vertical support to prevent side sway.
I made the frames of the full-sized gantries with dimensional lumberyard stock assembled with Torx self-tapping screws, along with 1/2″ bolts and fender washers where extra strength is needed. The lifting was done with the four truck winches and two 4”-wide, 5,500-lb-rated tie-down belts. Each winch was drilled with 3/8″ holes and mounted to the frames’ horizontal beams with long bolts. Steel plates, 8″ x 8″ x 1/4″, distributed the weight on the softwood gantry frame and kept the winches stable.
Rolling a hull of this size is usually an operation that requires a small army of helpers. Working with the gantry cranes doesn’t require so many people; it goes fastest with four winch operators, each on a safely secured ladder, and a couple of additional helpers on the ground to assist when needed. The cranes rotate the hull in place, keeping it from rolling and traveling across the floor—a benefit for working in a small space.
A modified tie-down winch is shown here with the webbing rolled up and its end loop threaded through the winch drum and a metal retaining pin inserted. The ratchet gear is painted white; the ratchet pawl is blue and the added handle is yellow. The weld joining the ratchet pawl and the handle is painted red. The weight of the handle pushes the pawl against the gear. When this type of winch is used on a truck, the pawl is on top of the ratchet gear pivots under its own weight to engage the ratchet. When the winch is mounted in this orientation, the added handle provides the gravity operation and allows the operator easy and safe release of the ratchet gear, as needed.
To use the cranes, lead the belts under the hull and load the ends on the winches. Tension the belts and lift the hull slightly to allow the building jig to be released and removed. Block the hull up and take the tension off the belts to reposition them on the winches, rolling most of the belts onto the winches on the same side of both gantries and leaving just enough on the winches opposite to begin rotating the hull. This method provides the most length for lifting. The loops sewn into the ends of the webbing must be threaded through the slotted drum of each winch and have a steel rod inserted to prevent the web from slipping out of the winch. A heavy load may unwind webbing that relies on additional wraps to keep them in place.
Winch the hull up a few inches and begin rolling the hull, keeping it parallel to the floor. Wind each belt from the full winch to the nearly empty one. The helpers operating the empty winches pull and reset the winch handles as needed, and the ratchets will lock themselves automatically with their own weight. The helpers on the other side paying out the belts will have to pull back on their bars slightly, lift the ratchet dog handle, let a few inches of webbing out, and let the ratchet relock.
Twins of Harley Quinn and Robin have winch duty. As they wind the webbing from Robin’s side (right) to Harley’s (left), the hull rolls over.
The hull rolls as the process is repeated. The operation will progress smoothly if the teams coordinate their efforts between the winches paying out and the winches pulling in. Continue until the hull has rolled 90 degrees or slightly more. If the hull hasn’t reached the tipping point and the winches taking up the belts are now full, use some rope or a pole to get the hull to shift its weight across in a controlled manner. Once the tipping point has been passed, the hull should slide upright on its own, or with just a little coaxing, within the confines of the now static belts.
After the hull is upright it can be raised and then lowered onto a cradle or positioned on blocks. The 4′ bases on my gantries made them free-standing and allowed me to push them out of the way while the remainder of the construction continues. At the end of the build, the gantries lifted the finished 2,350-lb boat onto its trailer.
With the webbing shifted to the left sides, the hull is upright, ready to be lowered onto a cradle for the construction of the interior. The gantry cranes will be put aside and returned when the finished boat is ready to be lifted onto its trailer.
If your work space has strong, accessible ceiling joists or other overhead structures that can support the hull, you may be able to use truck winches without having to build gantries. The ratchet dog handles will work by gravity in the orientation shown; if they are used upside down, then a spring mechanism or a counterbalance opposite to the ratchet handle will be needed.
Earl Boissonou, 81, lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and is a retired elementary-school teacher. He is a passionate artist who draws, paints, and sculpts. He began sailing in 1968 and built his first boat, an Adirondack guideboat, in 2009 to keep busy while recovering from a major operation. The Glen-L Bo-Jest that required the gantry cranes was his most recent build. He wishes to credit to his friend John Fruetel for coming up with the idea of the gravity-operated ratchet dog—a necessary component. At age 91, John still as an active and inventive mind.
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The Marlinspike Knife from Colonial Knife Company is built to a U.S. Navy design and comes with the lanyard shown here, and the Department of Defense National Stock Number (NSN) etched onto the blade.
Before I had a rigger’s knife I used various pocket knives, X-actos, and scissors for cutting line. I kept a lookout for a good rigger’s knife, but most seemed too big for the smaller jobs that I took care of on our fleet of boats. That all changed when I found the Marlinspike Knife from the Colonial Knife Company. A 4-1/2″-long folder, it’s a nice size to fit in a pocket.
The Marlinspike Knife has a hardened 440A stainless-steel 3″ blade with a deep fingernail groove for easy opening. The blade does not lock when open. The frame and pins in the knife are also stainless steel. The blade’s 2-5/8″ cutting edge is straight for its entire length, a very useful feature for cutting line. You can make a long draw cut without having to pivot the knife to keep the whole length of the edge on the rope. The sheepsfoot blade’s flat spine curves down to meet the cutting edge to make a point that reduces the chance of piercing injuries and the blade’s satin finish helps hide fingerprints. The blade needed minimal attention straight out of the box, just a few strokes on the stone to finish the edge. The blade stays sharp through an afternoon of small-line cutting and will cut through 3/8″ polyester line, both braided and three-strand, with one stroke.
The spike locks when in use. Its release latch also serves as a shackle key.
The folding marlinespike is 316 stainless steel and locks in the open position, which keeps the spike from folding on your fingers when prying jammed knots open. The push-down lock release also serves as a shackle key and as a lanyard attachment point—a rope lanyard is included. The marlinespike is an excellent size for working the cordage that we use with small boats, whether loosening tight knots, splicing line, or laying open strands line for whipping.
The durable Zytel handle has scalloped areas that ensure a firm grip. It is impact and abrasion resistant. Zytel can be sterilized in boiling water, which is one of the reasons that the U.S. Navy chose the material; it conforms to requirements for use by medical personnel.
The heavy-duty design has been around the U.S. Navy since the First World War, so the design is battle tested and the construction of this knife is well executed by Colonial. I have enjoyed the knife so much that I bought a second one; one knife is dedicated to our rigger’s kit, and the other floats around the shop and the fleet.
Kent and Audrey Lewis mess about in an armada of small boats on the inland waters of Northwest Florida. They log their nautical adventures at www.smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com.
The Marlinspike Knife is sold by The WoodenBoat Store for $54.95 and directly by the Colonial Knife Company for $79.99. The knives come with the Department of Defense National Stock Number (NSN) 5110-00-530-1757 etched onto the blade, and each knife has a serial number. They come with a lifetime warranty registration card, as well as care and maintenance instructions. Colonial also offers the knife with a half-serrated, half-straight blade.
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.
The left side of the Explorer 160 has a 12-volt outlet used with the included adapter and socket. I bought a 12-volt-to-USB plug, which is shown here charging a headlamp and a flashlight. The right side has three USB outlets. The two USB-A ports are in use here charging camera batteries; the USB-C port is idle. As the unit charges these lights and batteries, the LCD screen is showing an output of 7 watts.
It has been a while since I could venture into the wilderness with all the electricity I needed supplied by a single battery for my headlamp. Now on my overnight boating trips I need to power cameras, a cell phone, a GPS, a VHF, running lights, weather radio, and often a small laptop. Some devices, such as my handheld depth sounder, get by with a single battery for the duration of a cruise, but devices used more frequently—running lights, smart phone, or cameras—require either backup batteries or recharging.
The right side has a 110-volt AC outlet, used here to charge a VHF radio. The onboard inverter, its cooling fan, and the transformer for the radio all consume a a lot of of electricity. I plan to find a plug and cord to connect the radio’s charging base to the 12-volt outlet on the front of the unit, thus bypassing the electrically demanding inverter.
In recent years I’ve carried a 12-volt deep-cycle battery wired to a cigarette-lighter socket. It worked well for recharging devices that had car chargers, but it weighed a cumbersome 50 lbs and was so often in the way that I made a foam-and-canvas cover for it to blunt the impact of my toes. When I stumbled across Jackery’s portable power stations, I quickly turned my back on my deep-cycle and bought the Jackery Explorer 160, the company’s smallest unit. Its bank of lithium-ion cells is rated to supply 167 watt hours, which is, if my calculations are correct, a 30 percent improvement over my deep-cycle battery. The Explorer 160 delivers that capacity in a 7.5″ x 4.75″ x 6.9″ package that weighs just under 4 lbs. The face of the unit has two ports for 12-volt power, one for charging the Explorer 160 with the included AC adapter or an optional solar panel, the other to supply power to electronic devices using the included cigarette-lighter socket and cord.
The built-in flashlight is useful on a boat or around camp. It can flash a programmed-in SOS signal in an emergency.
There are three USB ports, one USB-C and two USB-A. A backlit LCD screen in the middle shows input and output in watts, a graphic of a battery showing the level of charge, and the percent charge remaining. With each device being charged, the display screen shows how many watts are being drawn. When multiple devices are being charged, the display shows the total output. There’s an AC outlet at one end of the Explorer 160 and a built-in flashlight at the other. The outlets, display screen, and flashlight all have switches. The flashlight’s switch, if pressed and held, will make the light a flashing Morse SOS signal.
The Jackery power station isn’t waterproof, so it would need to be protected by a dry bag if carried in an open boat. It’s not meant to survive being dropped, so treat it as you would the electronics you charge with it.
Jackery includes a 12-volt socket for the charging of devices (top), a 12-volt plug for charging the Explorer 160 in a vehicle, and a transformer for charging the unit at home. The included pouch provides a place to store all the cables and adapters.
For my first trial with the Explorer 160 I charged my electronics for a weekend outing. Starting with 100 percent capacity, it charged a fully dead laptop battery, a dead VHF radio, four GoPro batteries (three 1,050 mAh, one 3,400 mAh), two DSLR batteries, a Bluetooth keyboard, a flashlight/power bank, a trailer back-up camera, and my phone, and still had 22 percent of its capacity remaining. The instructions advise recharging the Explorer 160 when it reaches 20 percent. If I head out with everything topped off, the Explorer 160 can keep me going for a three-day cruise, taking a lot of photos and video and spending evenings writing on the laptop.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The Explorer 160 is available from Jackery for $159.99. I bought mine on Amazon using a $40-off coupon that appeared on the listing there. Jackery offers two larger power stations, Explorers 240 and 500, as well as two sizes of solar panels for recharging.
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.
Detlef Arthur Duecker, and his wife, Elisabeth, make a unique sight rowing his Dias-designed Harrier, FALCONE de PALÙ, on Lake Klopein, in the Austrian province of Carinthia. Detlef equipped the boat with Venetian oars and oarlocks made by an Italian master builder.
When Antonio Dias drew the Harrier for Ben Fuller of Cushing, Maine—a frequent contributor to Small Boats—his mission was to design a double-ender that Ben could use for camp-cruising and day use under sail and oars. Ben’s boat, christened RAN TAN, has a small outrigger set just forward and to port of the stern; it supports an oarlock that Ben uses for sculling, in lieu of a notch that a transomed boat makes possible. There’s something to be said for propelling a boat while standing up and facing forward. The view’s better, being higher above the water than while sitting, and there’s no twisting around to see where the boat’s headed. Detlef Arthur Duecker of Austria took that approach a step further when he built his Harrier.
Elisabeth Duecker
The Harrier was designed for lapstrake construction, but Detlef chose to strip-build his. He’d become familiar with the latter method while building the canoe seen here, suspended directly above him.
Detlef Arthur grew up in southern Austria and while he did a lot of boating on lakes and rivers, Italy’s coast was not far away and he occasionally traveled with his canoe to Venice, paddling the lagoons and canals the city is known for. The Venetian style of rowing made a lasting impression on him. The gondolas that frequent the canals of the island city are well known and perhaps the most elaborate of the rowed boats, but there is a wide range of simpler boats. To negotiate the narrow canals, the gondolas are rowed with a single oar to take up less room, but in the wide-open lagoons, workboats and racing boats are rowed with oars sticking out on either side, with one person per oar, or with a rower with two oars. The oars cross in front of the rower with the handle of the port oar going to the forward-facing rower’s right hand, and the starboard oar going to the left. The crossing of the oar handles forms a shallow V, like a valley or vale, and gives that manner of rowing its name, a la valesàna.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
With both fórcole set aft, a solo rower can row with the oar handles crossed, a la valesàna.
Detlef Arthur saw a review of the Harrier, Ben’s RAN TAN in particular, in our print annual, Small Boats 2009 , and was impressed by the design. He liked the double-ender’s promise of ease in a following sea, the power of the tall, fully battened lug mainsail, and the control offered by the mizzen. Detlef Arthur had previously built a Cosine wherry, a boat designed for strip construction, and had some clear tight-grained cedar planks left over from that build. After consulting with Antonio, he set up molds and prepared to strip-plank the hull.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
The boat is shown rigged for rowing by two, with the two fórcole offset in the Venetian style. The removable thwart, which is used for conventional rowing, is in place here.
When the hull was finished and ready for the interior appointments, he studied the layout of RAN TAN. She has the thwarts, stern sheets, and side benches typical of a sail-and-oar beach cruiser. Detlef Arthur had a different vision for his Harrier, a vision of Venice. The thwarts would have to go; they weren’t going to be needed for rowing in the Venetian style, and without them he’d have a clear path to move about between the helm to the mast. To keep intrusions to a minimum he switched from the long centerboard trunk that spanned the thwarts in RAN TAN to a short, self-supported daggerboard trunk. The daggerboard isn’t likely to jam after beaching or running aground, a virtue in the shallow Venetian lagoons.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
Saverio Pastor’s shop was full of fórcole of many various types in the works.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
The oar, shown here in the aft fórcola, the fórcola da poppa, has no leather to protect it from wear. Both of Detlef’s fórcole are branded with the name of their maker, Saverio Pastor.
He kept the side benches, but instead of giving them solid wooden tops, he made them like canoe seats, with frames filled with a weave of black polyester cord—miles of the stuff—making them dry, comfortable perches for sailing.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
Laced side benches offer comfortable seating, and the removable rowing thwart stows alongside the port bench.
For rowing standing up, a boat needs to offer a place to stand. For rowing a la valesàna, the rower stands in the center. With a pair of rowers, each holds a single oar, standing off-center for better span and more power: the forward rower, the provièr, to the right of center with the oar to port, and the stern rower, the popièr, to left with oar to starboard. The floorboards need to span a greater width than in a conventionally rowed boat. To get the width, Detlef Arthur had to raise the floorboards 4″ from the bottom. To provide good footing, the red-cedar floor boards are oiled rather than varnished or painted to preserve the grippy texture of the wood.
Detlef Duecker
By doing away with the thwarts, Detef created a clear path from the tiller to the main mast. The daggerboard trunk occupies much less space than a centerboard trunk would.
Rowing in the Venetian style requires special oars, remi, with long looms and slender, slightly offset blades, and sculpted wooden oarlocks, fórcole. They can be quite simple, even crude. A remo can be made of a sapling’s trunk with a flat board nailed on as a blade, and a fórcola can be made with from a board with a couple of half-moon notches cut out. But these pieces have achieved a degree of sophistication and beauty that can humble not only simple wooden tholepins but even polished bronze oarlocks.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
For camp cruising, FALCONE de PALÙ has flexible battens and a cover to provide a cozy space at anchor. The broad span of the sole, required for the Venetian rowing arrangement, makes plenty of room for sleeping.
When he traveled to Venice, Detlef Arthur often visited Saverio Pastor, Venice’s master remèr, and commissioned him make two remi and two fórcole. Pastor’s work is featured in Gilberto Penzo’s book, Forcole, Remi e Voga alla Veneta where his fórcole were photographed against a black background, removed from the context of a boatshop. It would be easy to open the book to those pages and assume you were seeing abstract sculptures in beautifully finished wood. And like works of art, the walnut fórcola made for Detlef Arthur bears the maker’s signature. The fórcola for the popièr, because it is used for most of the steering, is more complex than the fórcola in the bow. It has two notches—mòrsi, literally “bites”—in the aft edge for variations on the forward stroke, and a wide notch on the forward edge for stopping and backing. The fórcola for the provièr is a simpler device with a single mòrso, though still elegant in its form and functional. For solo rowing a la valesàna, this fórcola can be inserted in a set of sockets in the stern.
Tony Peressin
The sailing rig has a high-aspect-ratio, fully battened standing lug mainsail and a small sprit-boomed leg-o’-mutton mizzen.
The remi are 11-1/2′ long and have blades that at first glance are like elongated versions of those of beavertail canoe paddles, but in fact much more complex. Here’s how they’re described in Penzo’s book: “Venetian oars are not really so simple: the oar is not straight, nor symmetrical on any axis, and its construction requires careful observation. It can be a question of the difference of a few millimeters on an object that is four meters long.” The oars used to be made out of a single piece of beech, split out of a tree trunk to assure the shape of the oar followed the run of the grain. White ash was also used. Deltef Athur’s Pastor-built oars are made of ramin, an Indonesian hardwood, with laminates of beech in the blades.
Detlef Arthur Duecker
For outboard auxiliary power, Detlef made a bracket that spans the stern.
Detlef Arthur did make accommodations for conventional rowing, which is better suited to take on rough conditions along the coast. He mounted oarlocks amidships, made a removable footrest and a thwart with a laced-cord seat, and built a pair of 10′ spruce oars following Pete Culler’s pattern.
Dr.Marie Duecker
Elisabeth and Detlef dress the part for rowing alla Veneta, wearing the striped shirts that are commonly worn by Venetian gondoliers.
With his Harrier, christened FALCONE de PALÙ, Italian for the marsh-harrier, a bird of prey. Detlef Arthur and his wife, Elisabeth, have traveled to Venice to sail the lagoon there. Detlef Arthur has also entered the boat in numerous raids, in Venice, Piran, Izola (Slovenia), and the Barcolana Classica in Trieste, Italy. FALCONE de PALÙ may seem an unlikely mix of elements from its modernized version of a lugsail looming over seats for a canoe to the classic fórcole fixed to its strip-built hull, but in the waters around Venice, the boat never fails to draw compliments from the locals who, for centuries, have had a culture that fosters a highly refined sense of aesthetics.
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When I first saw the Jimmy Skiff II (above) that I reviewed for this issue, I was pleased to see its interior equipped with an offset daggerboard trunk. In “Getting Out of Line,” I had mentioned my fondness for off-center trunks, and Bud McIntosh expressed a similar sentiment in How to Build a Wooden Boat: “The centerboard and its trunk take up room in the best part of the boat, and create an antisocial barrier in an otherwise friendly cabin.” I think he’d also agree that thwarts, as their very name suggests, create a barrier to an otherwise friendly cockpit. The Jimmy II’s removable slip thwarts, and the side benches that support them, are features I’ve found very well suited to rowing, sailing, and sleeping aboard.
Laurie Cunningham
The gunning dory is a lovely boat to row and sail as long as I sit down and stay put. Making any sudden moves is perilous. Six-yard hurdles anyone?
My path to considering slip thwarts and side benches began with the Chamberlain gunning dory I built in 1980. In its 19′ length it has five thwarts, and three of them intersect the centerboard trunk and the mizzen partners, so getting from one end to the other at any speed rocks the boat and begs for barked shins.
I’ve spent just one night at anchor aboard that boat—long, uncomfortable, and sleepless hours waiting for daylight—plenty of time to let it sink in that the boat wasn’t at all suitable for cruising. While that boat pointed out the problems of a cluttered and unalterable interior, the 13′6″ sneakbox I built in 1985 provided some solutions. The seat for rowing was not a fixed thwart but a box that could be tucked under the deck at night to open up the cockpit for sleeping. Its daggerboard trunk was set 12″ to starboard and part of the coaming, leaving the center of the boat free.
With the pad removed, the box that was my rowing seat served as a lunch kitchen. The daggerboard trunk, out of the way to the right of the sandwich makings, has a cap over its opening to block the splash. During this break on the Ohio River, the wind was blowing upstream, so I took a tow from tree trunk that was drifting down river.
In 2005, when I built a Caledonia yawl for camp-cruising with my two kids, I kept the hull and sailing rig as designed but started from scratch for the interior arrangements. Applying the sneakbox’s lessons of asymmetry and adaptability, I moved the centerboard trunk 14″ to starboard. (Keeping its top at seat level and raising it bottom up the slope of the garboard diminished the depth of the trunk, so I made it longer to give the board the same area.)
The slip thwarts can be positioned anywhere on the ledges. A dowel inserted into the holes in the thwarts connects to two and holds them upright to support a table.
The trunk led to wide side benches with parallel inboard edges, and those invited a modular system where slip thwarts and floorboards could rest anywhere on ledges to fill the gap between the benches.
Todd Waffner
When my Caledonia yawl is heeling, the inboard edge of its leeward bench is in the Goldilocks zone for bracing my feet: a centerboard trunk would be too close and a traditional side bench too far.
The resulting width of the side benches brought some benefits I hadn’t anticipated. Standard benches are usually fairly narrow, and their curves parallel the contour of the hull. A 9”-wide side bench, like that in my 14’ Whitehall, is not much of a seat while at anchor, let alone when a boat is under sail. When the boat heels, the weather inwale angles into the small of your back and pries you off the bench. With a wide side bench you can lean against the inwale and still be well planted on the seat. In light air, the wide bench also allows you to shift your weight inboard in response to lulls in the wind. The inboard edge of a leeward wide bench, which is closer to the centerline than that of a narrow bench, can make a foot brace that’s better positioned to keep your weight on the high side.
Side benches also provide voluminous, out-of-the-way storage areas. The Jimmy II has watertight flotation or storage compartments; those in my Caledonia just have slatted tops and canvas-panel fronts, but they protect the dry bags and keep the hull’s sloped sides from funneling them into the middle of the boat, right where I need to put my feet.
The side benches provide a cockpit and a footwell that’s the equal of a much larger sailboat. The central transverse bench is the only obstacle between the bow and stern areas. The off-centerboard trunk supports the forward end of the starboard bench.
With the floorboards set on the ledges, the cockpit becomes a queen-sized sleeping area.
My yawl has a bit of deadrise, so it needs floorboards to provide a flat surface to stand on. I made the floorboards as wide as the slip thwarts are long so they can also be set on the bench ledges to create a large sleeping platform. Some argue for sleeping in the bottom of the boat to get the best stability, but I’ve never had any issues with sleeping at bench or thwart level in any of my boats.
The galley box, flipped upside down, rests its oak-plank base on the ledges. It takes the place of a slip thwart for rowing. Here the aft floorboards are also resting on the ledges to add to the seating area.
Flipped, the galley box holds two stoves, ready to cook. When everything is stacked for storage, the contents of the box don’t shift much and stay in place when the box is upside down. The box cover has been put aside; the black straps hold in place. The slip thwart gives the cook a place to sit, surrounded with lots of side-bench kitchen-counter space.
Other extensions of this “modular” approach made possible by galley-box benches supported by the ledges—right side up to cook, upside down and closed to be used as a thwart while under way—and a dining table created by setting a floorboard on a pair of slip thwarts set on edge.
With the slip thwarts set on edge on ledges and held upright by a length of dowel, they’re ready to support the floorboards as a table top.
For those who are put off by eating off floorboards, I carry a table cloth. There’s no pulling chairs back to get seated, but once at the table, the diners are all comfortable.
When I decided to build a boat with accommodations for cruising in the off season (see “A San Juan Islands Solo“), I incorporated the the side-bench/slip-thwart concept in the cockpit and the cabin.
I made a narrow floorboard that serves as the rowing seat, making a dedicated slip thwart unnecessary.
I extended the benches and ledges of the cockpit into the cabin of my little cruiser, HESPERIA. The floorboards spend much of their time on the cabin floor, though I have small rugs underneath them for comfort when the floorboards are used as a catwalk on the cabin roof.
Come bedtime, the floorboards rest on the bench ledges to make a broad sleeping platform.
The backrest cushions cover the floorboards, making a queen-sized bed.
In 1927, the architect Le Corbusier wrote: “Une maison est une machine-à-habiter”—A house is a machine for living in. We inhabit our cruising boats, and they too should be machines designed for our living aboard them. A good measure of their performance is the ease with which we can use them. Your boat should adapt to you, not the other way around.
Chesapeake Light Craft’s Jimmy Skiff was inspired by flat-bottomed utility boats used under sail and oar for work and transportation on the bay. The design was named not after a guy named James, but after the blue crabs of Chesapeake Bay—the females are called sooks and the males are called jimmies. The original CLC version was developed two decades ago and for almost half of that time designer John Harris has been working on an update to the popular design. The 13′2″ Jimmy Skiff II has the same length as its predecessor, but its beam is up from 50″ to 52″ and the transom has been reconfigured—broader and with less rake—to accommodate a small outboard motor.
Christopher Cunningham
The space from the transom to the forward bulkhead is 9′ 6″ long. With hatches to provide access to the enclosed space under the benches and slats to bridge the space between them to make a sleeping platform, the Jimmy II could do some overnight cruises.
The Jimmy II can be built from a kit or from plans. The instruction manual provided for both options is 179 pages long and richly illustrated with drawings and color photographs; there’s no shortage of hand-holding to lead first-time boatbuilders through the process. The last 13 pages of the manual provide instructions for the builders who opt to build from the plans, including details on scarfing plywood and timber to get the full-length pieces required.
Eight plywood panels make up the kit’s hull; its bottom and sides are all composed of two pieces joined together with puzzle joints and the transom is built up of two layers. The CNC-cut parts assure the accuracy of the construction. With the shell of the hull put together, the construction of the Jimmy Skiff II departs from the original design. It has three bulkheads: the forward bulkhead will be part of a flotation compartment in the bow and the other bulkheads will provide support for the side benches/flotation compartments, the new design’s most notable features. The ‘midship and aft bulkheads each have center sections that hold the boat’s shape during construction but are later removed to open up the space down the middle of the boat.
Christopher Cunningham
The mast partner is incorporated in the aft extension of the foredeck. The white plastic shims in the mast step are not standard equipment but here was an adaptation in one of the first Jimmy Skiffs built. The step in the production model is cut to fit the mast.
While the original Jimmy had a foredeck enclosing the bow’s flotation compartment, the Jimmy II has that triangular panel set below the sheer. Access to the compartment in the original was through a round port in the bulkhead, which was blocked when the mast was in place. The recessed panel accommodates the hatch nicely and provides a place for where gear can be set when conditions are calm. It also makes a perch that’s more comfortable than the arched foredeck with a small coaming along its aft edge.
The side benches extend from the transom to the forward bulkhead and enclose a generous volume of flotation. The instructions note: “If you plan on using an outboard on your Jimmy Skiff II, you must add foam flotation inside the seat tanks. The U.S. Coast Guard requires it.” The rigid sheet foam insulation shown in the manual assures the flotation compartments keep the boat afloat even in they take on water. If you choose to cruise without a motor, the bench seats, equipped with hatches, offer a lot of protected storage.
Christopher Cunningham
The daggerboard is built inside the starboard bench. Builders who initially build the Jimmy II for rowing only can build the trunk into the bench compartment and open the slots later, when the sailing rig option is added. The instruction manual includes measurements for locating the two places to drill pilot holes.
For sailing, the benches provide broad seating surfaces that make shifting weight fore-and-aft easy. Between the benches the boat has a 20″-wide passage that’s 9-1/2′ long. Ledges along the benches’ inside faces support slip thwarts that drop into place for rowing. The daggerboard trunk is set inconspicuously in the edge of the starboard bench, eliminating the obstacle created by a trunk set on the centerline. (Read a few of the editor’s thoughts on off-center daggerboard and centerboard trunks in “Getting Out of Line.”)
Chesapeake Light Craft
Rowed at speed, the Jimmy Skiff II keeps its proper trim.
The Jimmy II has very good stability, and I was at ease whether I was rowing, motoring, or sailing. I found the open interior plan quite inviting. And familiar. I had designed the interior of two of my boats with side benches, an offset board, and an unobstructed middle; no rocking the boat stepping around a centered trunk, no barking shins on fixed thwarts. For rowing, the slip thwart is easily adjusted to get a comfortable distance from the oarlocks. The skiff wasn’t equipped with foot braces and I always miss having to row without them. In one of my slip-thwart boats I have a footboard supported by a dowel stretcher that sits in fittings secured beneath the thwart-support ledge. A similar arrangement could easily be added to the Jimmy II. Even without foot bracing, the boat, being so light, is easily driven under oars. The optional textured sheet foam in the bottom is a good addition, and provides a bit of friction to push against.
Christopher Cunningham
With two aboard, the skiff trims well with a rower at the forward station and a passenger in the stern.
The boat was quick to accelerate and tracked well. I could maintain 3.3 knots at a relaxed pace, sustain 4.25 knots at an exercise pace, and topped out at 4.5 knots. With a passenger along, I took a seat in the bow and, rowing at the forward station at a relaxed pace, hit about the same speed; exercise pace was 3.9 knots and top speed was 4.3 knots. Solo again, sitting in the center of the boat facing the bow and pushing the oars in the forward locks, I could hit 3.5 knots.
Chesapeake Light Craft
The weight of the outboard and the helmsman in the stern forces the bow to ride high. A tiller extension would improve trim and likely add speed when motoring solo.
I brought my 2.5-hp, four-stroke outboard along for my Jimmy II sea trials. It’s mount, fortunately, straddled the upper rudder gudgeon and could be securely clamped to the transom. The outboard weighs 37 lbs, just shy of the listed maximum of 40 lbs. I should have had a tiller extension so I could get my weight farther forward to relieve some of the burden on the stern. The slip thwart allowed me to get as far forward as I could and still have a grip on the tiller; the trim wasn’t ideal but the skiff behaved itself, and I hit 5 knots at full throttle. With the motor kicked up, the boat was in good trim when I rowed from the forward station. I brought a passenger aboard to sit in the bow and get it back into the water for motoring and that brought the speed up to 5.3 knots.
Chesapeake Light Craft
The 19′ 2″ unstayed mast supports a 68-sq-ft leg-o’-mutton sail. The high sprit boom is vanged by the sail and isn’t likely to clobber anyone when coming about.
The Jimmy II carries a 68-sq-ft leg-o’-mutton sail that’s set with a sprit boom. The forward end of the boom is set well above the tack, so the sail is self-vanging. The snotter is led down to the base of the mast, rather than tied off on the sprit, so it’s easy to adjust the boom while safely seated. For my trials, the wind was blowing offshore and very fluky, switching suddenly from holes that let the sail droop to gusts I’d guess were pushing 15 knots. Fortunately, the side benches made it easy to shift my weight in any direction and I could respond quickly. I placed the slip thwart close to amidships so I could sit there to keep the boat on an even keel in the lulls and use it to slide across from one bench to the other when tacking. With that arrangement I had none of the awkward crawling around in the bottom of the boat that can dampen some of the enthusiasm I have for sailing a small boat. In the gusts, the hull had enough stability to absorb the blows, and I had time to react by easing the sheet and rounding up. When a gust sustained itself, the skiff accelerated quickly and took off. It was a thrilling ride. The boat, as light and as quick as it was, kept me on my toes, but stayed under control.
Christopher Cunningham
The slip thwart rests on ledges on the side benches and is tethered to prevent loss. The thwart not only provides a seat for rowing, but also serves as a bridge between the benches for sliding across the cockpit during a tack while sailing. Filling the gap between the benches with more thwarts or bed slats could create a roomy sleeping platform for a solo cruiser.
In the manual, there is the suggestion that Jimmy II can be used for cruising, with the slip thwarts removed to clear the center for sleeping. Designer John Harris wrote, “That would fit my narrow shoulders, but if you were wider you could have a bundle of ‘bunkboards’ to fill in the space between the side seats to create a big berth flat.” That 20″ space would be too tight a squeeze for me, even if I could sleep on my back, taking up the space with my shoulders. I sleep on my side and need to have enough room to draw my knees up, so I’d opt for bunkboards. If you were to make eight more slip thwarts, in addition to two included in the kit, you could cover 7′ of the space between the benches. That makes for a sizable block of lumber when it needs to be stowed, but if you have a thick sleeping pad you can get by with spaced slats, connected by webbing to keep them evenly spaced. (See the IKEA bed-slat tip.) Though a 13′ skiff might seem like a small boat to cruise, in protected waters it can be up to the task if you pack light and pick your weather.
The Jimmy Skiff II is small and simple, yet since its side benches and clear path down the middle of the boat make it easy to move around, it feels much bigger. Its versatility is among its many virtues, and in sheltered waters like some of those in Chesapeake Bay it would prove quite useful.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Jimmy Skiff II Particulars
[table]
Length/13′ 2″
Beam/52″
All-up weight/120 lbs
Rowing draft/4″
Sailing draft, board down/24″
Sail area/68 sq ft
[/table]
Full-size plans ($125) and kits (base kit, $1520) for the Jimmy Skiff II are available from Chesapeake Light Craft. A sailing kit ($1420) is available separately.
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The plans for Yankee Tender first appeared in 1979 in WoodenBoat Nos. 30–32 as part of a how-to-build series. When you get the six generously detailed sheets of plans from The WoodenBoat Store for this 12′4″ flat-bottomed rowing skiff, you also get reprints of those magazine articles with their numbered photos and written instructions. What a deal! If you have some heavy paper and a clean-swept floor you can get right to work on laying out the molds, as no lofting is necessary. Study the plans carefully, and you’ll learn a great deal about building a flat-bottomed lapstrake boat with wood in the traditional manner. I sure did.
Johanna DeVries
The Yankee Tender’s profile shows the strong curves of the sheer and rocker.
The tender is an elaboration on a boat designed and built by Asa Thompson in New Bedford, Massachusetts, more than 90 years ago. He started a one-man boatshop specializing in canoes during the late 1800s, and over the ensuing years adapted his methods to changes in boaters’ tastes. In 1927, he built a flat-bottomed yacht tender with canoe-like scantlings. This tender-skiff is in the Mystic Seaport Museum collection and is occasionally on public display—I got to see it two years ago at The WoodenBoat Show. For some time, I’d been contemplating building a lightweight, trailerable, traditional, flat-bottomed rowing boat with a saltwater pedigree. Three things that make this boat a standout: its lightness, both in weight and looks; its double-planked bottom; and its fish-well center seat. Seeing Asa Thompson’s skiff led me to The WoodenBoat Store’s plans.
The plans call for either white pine or northern white cedar for the transom, planking, and bottom—I built with cedar—and the remainder of the structure is white oak. The 3/8″-thick side planks are beveled at both sides of the lap to reveal a delicate edge. The sawn-oak frames are sided 5/8” and given a graceful curve; the inwale and guardrail are as fine as a canoe’s, helping bring the boat’s weight down. My boat weighs 130 lbs.
The bottom is cross-planked with two overlapping layers of 3/8″ cedar with a sheet of canvas slathered in bedding compound sandwiched in between. This construction prevents the gaps and subsequent leaks that occur when boats with single-plank bottoms dry out.
Johanna DeVries
The cross-planked bottom doesn’t require framing, so it provides a clean, unobstructed surface.
The cross-planking requires no framing on the bottom and provides an uncluttered interior. The fish-well structure of the center seat makes it sturdy and stiffens up the light hull, and gives great dry storage (or live bait) options.
The Yankee Tender is much more than an excellent introduction to traditional boatbuilding. The materials and fastenings lists are detailed and complete. There are even drawings for help in setting up the simply designed strongback. You’ll learn how to bevel the laps, cut gains, scribe frames, and get a sweet, fair sweep of the sheer. And when you’re done, you’ll have an elegant skiff.
I didn’t make the A-framed building platform as shown in the plans, but set the molds up on a ladder frame I’d made for a previous boat. The transom is of 7/8″ cedar, edge-glued with splines. The inner stem is sawn from 8/4 white oak. The transom and stem bevels are shown on the plans and can be gotten out on a tablesaw. With the molds squared and plumbed and the stem and transom in place, a temporary 1×4 backbone batten is secured to stem and transom and to notches in the centers of the molds to complete the setup.
I ripped the chines’ bevels on the tablesaw. It’s recommended that the chine logs be steamed to ease twisting and bending into place. My steambox is only 6′ long, so I steamed the aft ends and clamped them into place until cool. Later in the day I steamed the forward ends and clamped them overnight before fastening.
The cedar I had for the planking was 1″ thick and live-edged. I picked through the boards looking for knotty and narrow planks that would work better for the bottom planking, saving cleaner material for the sides. After sawing straight, parallel edges and resawing to a thickness of 3/8″, I laid out the random-width boards to dry-fit the planks for the inner bottom, hand-planing edges for a good fit. As per the plans, I laid a strand of cotton wicking along the chine as each bottom board was nailed home tight.
The garboards have a width of 10-1/2″ at the stem. My bandsaw can only resaw planks up to 8-1/2″ wide, so I needed to narrow the stock before resawing it, and then edge-glue two pieces with epoxy to achieve the required width. Next, I trimmed the ends of the inner bottom boards to match the chine bevel. The plans call for a strand of cotton as caulking between garboard and stem, chines, and transom cleats, but here I applied a healthy bead of polysulfide before fastening the plank.
After trimming the garboard flush with the bottom and sanding the inner bottom planking, I dry-fit the outer bottom planks, overlapping the garboard edges and covering the seams of the inner bottom planks, noting where nails lay, then pre-drilled and temporarily screwed-in the planks. With an oscillating tool and a flush-cutting blade, I trimmed the bottom planks flush with the outer surface of the garboards. I numbered the planks, removed the screws, and stacked the planks in order.
Then came the fun part! I had purchased No. 10 cotton duck and laid it out on the smooth inner bottom, cutting it to overhang a few inches. Before starting the bedding process, I lavishly brushed the bottom planks with boiled linseed oil, allowing them to soak it in overnight. Then I thinned Interlux Boatyard Bedding Compound to a peanut-butter consistency with boiled linseed oil, spread it evenly across the inner bottom, then laid out and rolled the canvas, squeezing the bedding compound into the fabric. Next, I trowled more of the goo onto the canvas. I then replaced the pre-drilled outer bottom planks, the setting and driving the screws home. I drew the double bottom tight along the plank seams with 7/8” copper clout nails, hammered in and clenched every 5″ to 6″. All told, I used 2-1/2 quarts of bedding compound and 1 quart of linseed oil.
After the remaining three planks were hung, I flipped the hull and fitted and attached the outer stem, breasthook, quarter knees, frames, and rails. I then flipped hull back upside-down to fit and fasten the skeg and keel. Finally, right-side up again, the fish well and thwarts were installed and oarlock pads were riveted to the rails.
Tom DeVries
The generously rockered bottom keeps the transom well clear of the water when the boat has a solo rower aboard.
Two hours from where we live are places like Mystic, Connecticut; Bristol, Rhode Island; and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Cape Cod isn’t too much farther. The Yankee Tender is easy to transport on a lightweight trailer. Its skeg, keel, and stem settle readily onto my trailer’s rollers and, by modifying the bunk boards just a bit, the hull rests its flat bottom for secure strapping. Two spry people can lift the light hull. For cartopping, roof racks that span 5′ are necessary to accommodate the boat’s 52” beam.
My first go at rowing Yankee Tender was on a quiet lake. It took some getting used to the angle of the 8-½′ oars I had made. The center seat height of 9-3/4″ is very comfortable, but my hand position seemed to be higher toward my chest than I’m accustomed to. The boats I’m more familiar with have a lower freeboard. It felt a bit like driving a Ford after years in a Toyota—the controls weren’t all in the same place. The Yankee Tender’s plans offer no recommendation for oar length, but the plan for Asa Thompson’s original 11′3″ skiff suggests 6′6″ oars. I felt these were too stubby. With practice, I found a quicker cadence, 8′ oars, and a shorter stroke worked well, especially with any headwind.
The boat is as zippy as a sports car in its maneuverability. With one occupant, it rides high on the water, with no drag at the transom. The skeg keeps you on course, yet the wicked rocker allows quick spins. The tender’s width and flared topsides allow you to scooch over on the center seat to a rail so you can open one of the hinged fish-well covers without making the hull unsteady. The boat moves along with ease; it’s not a flier but it offers a safe, dry, seaworthy ride.
Tom DeVries
The tender has two rowing stations, but it is not intended for tandem rowing. The forward station is used for rowing with a passenger.
With two adults on board, the rower occupies the forward thwart and the passenger sits in the stern with the angled transom as a comfortable backrest. Proper weight distribution is important to keep an even keel. The tender carries its load well with its fullness forward and ample beam. Settled into the water with the weight of two aboard, the boat has added stability, and is still lively and quick on a turn. The tucked-up transom makes it easy to back into shore and disembark dry-footed.
I had two goals in mind when building the Yankee Tender. First, I wanted to gain some more knowledge of traditional wooden boat building. If you’re like me and relish the smells of sawn oak and cedar accompanied by a heady waft of linseed oil or the fishy smell of bedding compound in your shop, building this 40-year-old design might be for you. Second, I wanted to have a light boat for safe seaside exploration. This is not a bull of a skiff, but a jaunty craft that will serve well in our saltwater adventures. Asa Thompson’s original tender has been around for more than 90 years, and there should be many more generations enjoying this salty skiff.
Tom DeVries studied fine woodworking with James Krenov in the early 1990s. He and wife Tina live in central Massachusetts surrounded by white-pine and red-oak trees. Tom drives north for his white cedar planking stock and wishes his lumberyard still carried spruce 2x6s.
Yankee Tender Particulars
[table]
Length/12′4″
Beam/4′4″
Depth amidships/15.25″
[/table]
Plans for the Yankee Tender are available from The Wooden Boat Store, printed or downloaded PDF (digital), for $50.
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!
In this final video of their series, Finn and Teresa are at their journey’s end: Constanta, a Romanian port on the west coast of the Black Sea. With their boat covered and strapped on a trailer and ready for the return trip to England, the young adventurers reflect on the three months they spent crossing Europe by river and canal.
The weather forecast for December 9, 2018, promised clear blue skies, light winds, and a calm sea, perfect for my start of rowing from El Hierro, a rocky island 240 miles off the African coast and the smallest of the Canary Islands. Family and friends had come to see me off on my first solo adventure, rowing singlehanded, without stopovers and without assistance from the Canaries to the Caribbean island of Martinique, a distance of some 5,400 kilometers. December was the recommended month for rowing the Atlantic, the end of the hurricane period, and the start of the tradewinds, a time, I was told, for “more secure and safer rowing.”
I am a retired military parachutist, now 51 years old, and in January 2013 I had lost three very close friends, soldiers killed in the same military combat. Losing them had left a lasting mark deep inside me; the sadness of their families was heartbreaking to witness. I wanted to honor them and all soldiers who had died in combat. I felt compelled to raise money for military widows and orphans, and so to do that, I decided to find sponsors and donors who would put their support behind a great personal challenge.
I gave myself 18 months for training, planning, and preparations, while exploring all the available avenues. Fundraising was my first priority, for both the crossing and the cause. I had to prepare myself physically and mentally for the challenge I’d set, and equally important, it was essential to have the support of a robust and reliable team behind me. Sailing was something I enjoyed, but rowing was new territory—I had only been on a few small kayak outings during my military career.
I acquired a boat, and it was a bonus that it had already proved itself seaworthy. Made of plywood and covered with epoxy and fiberglass, the boat had made four crossings from Dakar in Africa to Martinique, the first in 2006 and the last in 2014. The basic features were perfect. It was light, 1,000 lbs empty, 26′ long, and 5′ 3″ wide. I was delighted when the owner handed it over—a loan, he said, but “it does need a lot of work.”
Photographs courtesy of Christophe Papillon
Veronique, here applying the first coat of white paint on the handrails, painted all of the wooden elements on RKKD. We were lucky that the local town council allowed us to refurbish the boat in a spacious shed not far from home.
He was right, the basics were there, but the boat needed a complete overhaul. It had to be entirely stripped before any replacements could be made or rebuilding could take place. Renovation took place at my home in Toulouse, in southwestern France, with four of us working a total of 2,000 hours in our spare time. Doing the repairs ourselves meant more funds for the cause, and besides, it allowed me to better know my future oceanic home.
The first thing we did was to remove the entire interior, then thoroughly repaired all the cracks and holes of the hull. We continued with extensive work on the rudder and deck before tacking the electrical system installation.
We installed two batteries for storing the electricity from the solar panel; the desalinator, one of my most precious resources on the boat, would run off the batteries. I decided against an autopilot; it would have consumed too much electricity.
I named the boat RKKD after Denis, one of my deceased friends. A small chap with a great sense of humor, his nickname was Ree Kee, and “RKKDenis” was how he signed his name.
As we were loading the five plastic containers filled with water, it was essential to stow them correctly to get the right boat trim.
On embarkation day, my support team carried out their tasks rigorously, making last-minute preparations, checking equipment, and loading food supplies. Aware that the smallest technical problem could have enormous consequences, we made sure that all the electrical and safety systems and their backups were ready. RKKD was ready.
My singlehanded shakedown run in the unpredictable stretch of Mediterranean Sea between Monaco and Corsica had allowed me to make the final adjustments and improvements. My router, Eric Dupuy, understandably, wanted to check our satellite telephone system and back it up yet again. He would be my eyes, my ears, my only link at sea monitoring my progress and providing weather reports and routing advice at least once a day. Food supplies were the last to be loaded aboard: 40 days’ supply of military commando rations (balanced freeze-dried meals; just add water), 60 days of canned foods, some oranges, and onions. Although I had a desalinator, I also included 10 gallons of drinking water and three pairs of oars for security. Fully loaded, RKKD weighed 2,650 lbs.
In the last few minutes before departure, I had verified my checklist and did some last-minute tweaking to have my load balanced and evenly distributed. Everyone appeared super calm, but I could hear my heart beating.
It was a very emotional goodbye to my partner Veronique; strong and loyal, she never once distracted me from what I’d set out to do. I heard my father, full of life and stoic as ever, say to a reporter, “I wish him good luck and pray to all the gods that he arrives safely.” The tow line was released, the tug headed back to the harbor, and I began my first day alone at sea.
With my adrenalin running alongside inevitable apprehension, I picked up my oars and faced the deep, mysterious Atlantic. I told myself, “All I have to do now is to get RKKD to the other side.” I was determined to make it, and in the process do as much as I could for the military families who had been left behind.
Roger Siebert
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I couldn’t have asked for better weather for the first 10 days; it gave me time to adjust to the constant sounds of the waves, and to get used to the effect they had on the boat. I rowed on average around seven hours a day with wind speeds around 10 to 12 knots, with waves 6′ to 10′. My body adjusted to the physical demands on the third day, thanks to my daily rowing practice before setting off. I could now row four hours nonstop, have a break for 10 minutes, then do another four hours.
All in all, I was pleased; I was right where I wanted to be with the tradewinds and their currents in my favor.
I would sometimes have about 40 mahi-mahi following me. During the day, they were multicolored and silvery, but at night they became almost white, and looked like ghosts.
However, I got caught up in plastic pollution that first week, which was disappointing. A piece of plastic had got caught up in the rudder. As if to make up for this human negligence, I had a surprise visit, one that I had been anticipating, yet it came as a surprise. Dolphins! They appeared first astern, and then in a flash they were both port and starboard, popping up from nowhere, leaping close enough to see their unwavering, impish smiles. They cheered me up so much that I had to stop rowing to watch. In seventh heaven for a good 10 minutes, I watched fascinated as at least 20 of these fabulous creatures leaped and danced.
My sleeping quarters were a bit like a large tube with little headroom. The yellow foam pads kept me from hurting my head too much. I am glad that I’m not claustrophobic.
I’m fortunate in that I’ve never needed a lot of sleep, and aboard RKKD I could get by with just three to four hours. I was now sleeping mostly in a fetal position, with my back and knees leaning against the hull. Five minutes after waking up, I’d pick up the oars and row almost nonstop, allowing 10 minutes for meals. It was simple: if I didn’t row the boat, it would drift—and usually not in the direction I wanted to go. Living quarters were small and tight, so I had to be highly organized, putting things back where they belonged so they would be easy to find in an emergency.
Listening to music on my iPod became a regular pastime at any time of the day, from rock to pop, jazz, and even a bit of classical music. Hearing words of encouragement, prerecorded messages from friends, mixed in with the songs gave me that boost I needed. As a special treat, Veronique had included a few packets of my favorite biscuits and sweets, little things I didn’t consider bringing. These little luxuries had a massive effect on my morale, not only as I was eating them but long after. Being reminded of her pulled me out of the dull grind of my daily routine.
Eight days out, on December 17, I reported to Eric by satellite phone that I was 340 nautical miles from El Hierro. “Good going,” he said. I agreed. As I would soon learn, however, I couldn’t always rely on the trades.
Thankful and relieved after my first brush with bad weather, I wished everyone a Happy Christmas. Little did I know there was more foul weather to come.
My first episode of lousy weather started on Christmas Eve, and it slowed me down for two days. I was caught in a storm and pushed backward by an adverse current. It took me two days of rowing to make up the lost ground.
I recuperated for two days, then got hit again by another bout of bad weather, which lasted four miserable days. Eric had warned me that I was in for a rough time with winds of 20 to 25 knots, so I was prepared for it. I rowed harder than usual, fighting not to get pushed backward too much. I wasn’t particularly perturbed at first, just a little peeved. I told myself if this were the only way I’d be tested, then it would be okay. By the end of the day, however, weather conditions had noticeably deteriorated with more swells and a menacing horizon.
The following morning, things got a bit more stressful. Eric called on the satellite phone, announcing more bad weather: “A depression for the next couple of days will slow you down considerably.” It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Waves hit the boat, rocking me from port to starboard and back to port [as I rowed], and drenching me. I summoned all my courage and gripped the oars as if my life depended on it. Without a second oarsman or an autopilot to control the rudder, it was up to me to keep the bow straight and maintain the right course.
Eric had forwarded a message saying I looked like Robinson Crusoe. This selfie proved him right, but shaving was the last thing on my mind.
Navigating 12 to 14 hours a day took a toll on my body. I was suffering from tendinitis, and the anti-inflammatory pills I took for muscle soreness and fatigue didn’t seem to be working. The scene was surreal; waves were roaring with anger and hitting my face while I did my best to keep myself and my boat upright. God, I was having a bad time.
I decided to use the sea anchor to help stabilize the movement of RKKD and to prevent us from going backward. The time I’d spent learning about and testing this invaluable piece of equipment before the trip was definitely a good investment; set beneath the heaving sea, it worked well to keep the lost miles to a minimum.
Dejected, heavy-hearted, and alone under the gray skies and menacing seas, I had to admit I was lonely. I was begging for a change in the weather conditions. I thought of my father, who has always taught me the true meaning of commitment, excellence, and self-sacrifice. I thought of my deceased military friends, their wives and children now without them and who needed comforting. Wiping the sweat off my face, I raised both arms, imploring the skies, and hollered, “I’ve had enough! Stop blowing so hard! I have a mission!”
A rain storm that occurred while I was rowing allowed me to have a fresh rain-water shower. With tropical storms, I got a good salt-free soaking for an hour or so, then dried off in bright sunshine.
On the third day, realizing I had little choice but to stay calm, I stopped yelling. My only option was to continue fighting. I was alone, prey to strong winds, losing mileage every day, and doomed to drift.
I thought of Tom Hanks in Castaway, one of my favorite movies, where he was stranded on an inhabited island, and somehow, I found my courage again. But four days of constant bad weather had left me weary. Checking my position on the GPS didn’t help. On December 31, I was 100 nautical miles off the coast of Mauritania in West Africa. I had gone backward, and I had added 100 nm to the distance I had to row. My sore shoulders, glutes, and quads were stiff from exertion; I was physically exhausted and mentally drained.
On the last day of the year, waves of nostalgia washed over me and added to my bleak mood. I should have been holding hands and drinking champagne with Veronique on New Year’s Eve, but here I was, under gray skies, more alone than I had ever been. I had clocked 1,825 miles, but I still had 1,720 more to go. I tried to be rational, and told myself things could have been worse—the boat could have capsized. I had learned how to recover RKKD just in case, but RKKD had remained upright so far. I had painted her bright fluorescent orange—and the sponsor decals added to the hull were deliberately small so the boat would be visible to any rescue air mission.
There wasn’t much to see inside the boat when I looked out from my cramped sleeping quarters. There was no lighting inside RKKD.
Missing Veronique and the comforts of home hurt like hell that night. I looked at the white-paint print of her hand on the orange cabin wall: I had pressed her hand there as we were painting, knowing it would help in moments like this. Remembering how she laughed and put her hand on my heart that day gave me the courage to wish a Happy New Year to all my friends, family, sponsors, and donors on my satellite phone call to Eric.
Just as quickly as the bad weather had started, the wind change I longed for and prayed for finally arrived. The sea, now released from the cycle of turbulence, seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. And so did I.
The wind, coming over the stern, was now in my face and pushing RKKD forward instead of holding her back. It had an immense effect on my morale and energy level. I rowed with renewed strength, and my stroke rate rose as the worry of nature’s adversities lifted. I started to see the benefits of increased miles and my morale continued to climb. The lesson I learned those last few days is that in a wild ocean, unlike in the army, we do not fight, but instead must adapt to the elements with patience.
My good luck continued a few days with a most unexpectedly unusual encounter. On my AIS (Automatic Identification System) screen, I picked up a vessel some distance away. I wasn’t sure its crew seen me. I was, after all, only a low-lying rowing boat that might not have registered on the ship’s radar. I certainly wanted to avoid a collision, so I radioed the captain. It was apparent he wanted to chat, probably intrigued at the sight of a lone, disheveled figure rowing in the middle of the Atlantic. As the ship approached, the captain talked to me from his observation platform inquiring after my health, my morale, and finally asking why I was doing what I was doing.
Then, to my great surprise, he asked if I’d like to have some fruit. I happily accepted his offer. As the Panamanian-flagged vessel NORDKAPP drew within hearing range, I shouted, “I am very happy to see somebody; it’s been 48 days since I’ve seen anyone.” My voice sounded raspy and rusty.
The vessel NORDKAP approached RKKD as the captain and I talked over the radio. His kindness and generosity during this contact after my hazardous spell of lousy weather brought me immense relief and comfort. The handprint on the cabin wall is Veronique’s.
I wondered how I would manage to receive the delivery of a package. Thank goodness they didn’t leave it to me; I stayed where I was and watched their brilliant ship-handling. NORDKAPP first came toward my starboard side, sailed beyond RKKD, then lined up on her port side. Maneuvering to get close enough was tricky and took a good 15 minutes. At a distance of about 50 yards, crew members then lowered a blue canister wrapped in plastic on the end of a long line and set it in the water. It slowly came closer and I picked it out of the water. The crew retrieved the line, and job done, the NORDKAPP didn’t hang around—a quick honk on the horn and off she went.
I opened the canister and I found several containers. When I opened the first, I was overwhelmed by a savory aroma, which turned out to be a freshly cooked omelet. In a jam jar was some saucisse rougail of creole sausages, tomatoes, and fresh herbs to have with my omelet.
I hadn’t heard the captain clearly and had mistakenly heard “fruit” when he had actually said “food.” I radioed my thanks, my mouth already watering over this unexpected banquet. Hot and tasty food! I wolfed it down in no time. There were chocolates too—a box containing 15 Ferrero Rocher chocolates, those special ones that only appear at Christmas. I decided I would ration these and reward myself with one chocolate for every 25 miles made good toward Martinique.
Weather conditions had now stabilized, thank goodness, and I wasn’t preoccupied with safety and navigation and had time to reflect. In a world where we are continually being bombarded with outside interference, we don’t often get the chance to be completely alone in the natural world. I was lucky to enjoy beautiful marine life: to have dolphins jumping around me on several occasions, to have seen five or six whales…one had even come close up to the boat, staying for a good five to ten minutes.
Keen for RKKD to have a clean bottom for efficient gliding through the water, I scraped the hull every 10 days, and it was during such maintenance that I discovered why the dolphin fish (also called mahi mahi) almost always accompanied me. These colorful fish fed off the microscopic organisms and barnacles attached to the bottom of the boat. I was going slowly, so gave them shade and provided food. There were smaller things as well. Night rowing gave me the chance to marvel at noctiluca, those tiny microorganisms that light up at night. They accompanied me, shedding a lovely pale blue light as I swept my oar blades through the warm waters. Equally magic were those starry nights in an utterly clear, dark sky, the luminous streak of the Milky Way stretched out across it, and the warm, vibrant colors of sunsets and sunrise. These were my landmarks on the expanse of the ocean.
This is the first photo taken from the first boat that came out to greet me. Muscles sore, I still had another four hours of rowing to officially finish the crossing.
My arrival in Le Robert, a harbor town on the east coast of the Caribbean island of Martinique, on February 10, was phenomenal. Throngs of people crowded at the jetty waved and cheered; it seemed the whole town was there to greet me. It had taken me 64 days to row across the magnificent Atlantic; I had rowed a total of 2,900 nautical miles.
I had a moment of panic when I first saw land as I realized that my legs felt weak. Would I be able to walk straight? Sweating, aching all over, my pulse racing, but bursting with joy, I finally spotted Veronique and next to her my father. Holding Veronique in a warm embrace and sitting down for a real meal with friends and family who cared was all that mattered now.
As I finally arrived at my landfall I felt liberated. The sea was tranquil and a beautiful blue; a fair bit of wind made my landing somewhat tricky but its rush in my ears was sweet music to me. I was safe.
I’m sometimes asked what lesson I learned from this achievement. I can genuinely say that I learned a lot about myself. But the most obvious is that this crossing alone shows that we can unite people around us if the cause is beautiful. A solo trip is, in fact, a tremendous collective adventure. I had accomplished my mission to raise funds for the wives and widows who had lost their husbands and fathers. But I couldn’t have done it alone. Through donations and sponsors, we were able to give over $91,000 to a very worthy cause, much more than I’d hoped for.
Christophe Papillon spent his childhood on the island of Corsica and in Saint Mandrier on the south coast of France. He discovered his love of the sea through his father and his dream of adventure developed while watching the explorer Jacques Cousteau and his ship CALYPSO. He spent 21 years in the army as a parachutist and a parachutist commando. Losing military friends killed in action moved him to honor their memories and help their families. He has traveled extensively, to more than 90 countries. To continue raising money to support military families, he is preparing an unassisted solo crossing of Antarctica on foot.
Freelance writer Alice Alech writes from her home in the south of France.
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.
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Tom DeVries
Tom DeVries
