A cruising sailboat in the 20′ to 22′ range resides at the high end of the spectrum that most amateur boatbuilders can realistically aspire to. Go bigger and you need time, money, space and skills that few of us have. But there’s a delectable spread of choices at the level just below the impossible dream—plans by at least a half dozen highly regarded designers. Of these, Sam Devlin’s Song Wren 21, was, in the end, the most compelling. I had already built two smaller stitch-and-glue designs from Devlin Designing Boat Builders, so I felt comfortable with the process.
The Song Wren can be built with a shallow slotted keel and a centerboard for sailing thinner water and easier trailering and launching. I was drawn to the fixed-keel version for its ballasted-keel stability and cabin space unobstructed by a centerboard trunk. Its profile exuded the refined dignity of a much larger craft, and the gaff-cutter configuration offered the complexity I crave in a sailing rig. I love to stay busy, tinkering and tuning sail trim.
Devlin had drawn the Song Wren in 2011 as a commission, but nobody had yet built one, so no one could report on how it would sail, and if there were bugs in the design. I had budgeted up to $36,000 for parts and materials, a figure Devlin confirmed to be in the ballpark. Committing this pile of money to a boat that has never before existed, to be executed by an amateur who just barely knows what he’s doing, would seem edgy by any objective standard. But anyone who’s ever loved a boat, or a drawing of a boat, understands.
Dennis Ryerson
The Song Wren is the first of Devlin’s smaller sailboats to use double-chine construction, and the upper chine provides an opportunity to mount a rub strip the full length of the hull. This makes the hull appear longer and lower, giving it a more serious, big-boat look.
Devlin can supply a kit of CNC-cut okoume plywood panels for the hull and bulkheads, so I went with that option. Not only does it relieve the builder of the dismal job of scarfing plywood, it also provides a fiberboard building jig with slots that hold and align the Song Wren’s five bulkheads. This ensures that the hull will take form accurately, and that an insubordinate builder will not tinker with the basic design. There’ll be no sneaking in an extra 6″ of overall length, nor robbing from the cockpit to make more cabin. Amateur builders are probably better off with such temptations foreclosed.
The hull is built upside down on the jig, and the two-chine design (two side panels and one bottom half per side) made the handling of the big pieces manageable—with the help of one dedicated and capable friend. Topsides, I made one significant structural and aesthetic change, with Devlin’s approval. His plan called for a mast tabernacle to sprout from the cabintop with a steel compression post to carry the load to the keel. I planted the tabernacle on the deck instead and moved the cabin trunk’s front 6″ aft to lock into the tabernacle and buttress it. I added a beefy laminated deckbeam underneath, 2″ thick and 6″ wide, and supported it with the relocated compression post. The result is a terrifically strong foundation for the mast (which also enjoys six stays!) and, I think, an elegantly integrated design detail. It was a lot of additional work, but a project as ambitious as building a boat like Song Wren does not argue for taking the expedient path.
Dennis Ryerson
The maximum headroom of 51” is more than adequate for seated tall people. The surface at right doubles as chart table and galley counter; a cooler slides underneath. A portable head resides in the closed compartment under the seat forward of the counter.
Though cabin headroom is only 51″, I wanted to outfit the living quarters as elegantly as possible. My plan is to park the boat at a marina in Port Townsend, Washington, or the San Juan Islands and use it as an occasional summer cabin as well as a daysailer. I installed a ceiling of 79 varnished sapele planks, concealed all electrical wiring behind sapele trim or structural bits, and built in a total of 16 drawers, shelves, bins, and cubbies to corral the clutter that loves to overwhelm small-boat cruising.
The build consumed 4,500 hours, and the cost of parts and materials came in about $1,000 below that $36,000 budget. It was challenging, but the 14-page plans set is extraordinarily detailed, including such things as a precise assembly sequence for the keel and several drawings of the cabin’s sliding hatch. Still, I wouldn’t recommend this as a first boat for any amateur builder.
With 302 sq ft of sail, the Song Wren seems generously canvased to make the best of Puget Sound’s notoriously skinflint summer wind. Devlin estimates the dry weight at 2,800 lbs, but I haven’t yet weighed this first real-world iteration. It glides eerily through air that’s barely stirring. Two knots (verified with an anemometer) gets us moving. In 5 knots of true wind we’re seriously sailing. On a close reach we enjoy 4+ knots of boat speed with 7 knots of apparent wind. In 10 knots apparent we are approaching our theoretical hull speed of 5.8 knots. A close reach seems to be this boat’s best point of sail. In the best conditions, the Song Wren will sail up to about 40 degrees off the apparent wind and tack through 95 degrees—decently pointy in the gaff-rig universe. The jib slips easily past the staysail stay for tacking, though in very light air it helps to furl it halfway when beginning the tack, then release the furling line to finish.
In this first season since the May 2019 launch, my wife Patty and I have tried all possible combinations of sail—always fun and interesting when you’re blessed with more than the usual main and jib—and learned what works and what doesn’t. The best balance and performance come with all three sails flying. The staysail doesn’t provide much power—it adds no more than 0.2 knot in most situations—but it does help us crowd the wind more tightly, and it looks way cool. I had hoped the first reefing step would be to simply furl the jib, but this doesn’t work well. The Song Wren develops an unpleasantly heavy weather helm with only staysail and full main, and if the wind continues to rise, it’s impossible to heave-to for further reefing unless we unfurl the jib. So, we reef the main first, then roll up the jib as the second reef. The boat balances beautifully on staysail and reefed main, which gives 63 percent of the working sail area. I may add a second row of reefpoints in the main, which could be more effective than dropping both foresails.
Dennis Ryerson
The Song Wren’s cockpit seats are 7’ long, providing plenty of space for daysailing with four adults. The seats are overlaid with a veneer of sapele planks with contrasting fir strips, and the battery, charger, and depth sounder reside under the watertight hatch on the starboard side.
The Song Wren’s sail controls all are accessible from the cockpit (there are 13 lines in all), so while there’s a lot that requires attention, it’s all in a safe place. I located cam-cleated lines on the cabin top for a preventer so it can be deployed in seconds for downwind runs.
Dennis Ryerson
The staysail is self-tending with a single sheet. Roller furling added to the jib makes it easily doused from the cockpit.
Some years back, I twice had to dock chartered boats under sail because of engine failures, so I always like to plan and test what I’ll do in case of that event. With the Song Wren, approaching a dock on staysail alone is a good idea since it provides a suitably poky pace and will drop instantly. It will not, however, claw upwind or tack, so a power-off docking still needs the jib’s aid until final approach.
Sam Devlin
The 302 square feet of sail take good advantage of light air.
For auxiliary power, I bought a new 8-hp Yamaha outboard. In all but one respect it was an excellent choice: reasonably quiet, smooth-running, powerful enough to push us to hull speed at half throttle, and incredibly economical—we’re averaging 12 nautical miles per gallon. The drawback is its weight. I tried to engineer an indented transom mount but failed, so I finally resorted to a commercial adjustable mount. Cantilevering 90 lbs out nearly 1’ behind the transom makes the engine hard to tilt up and causes the boat to squat low on its design waterline aft. The only mitigation at this point seems to be to plant more ballast forward. If I were starting over, I would consider sacrificing some cockpit locker space (there’s plenty) for an inboard motor well.
Sam Devlin
The sail controls all lead to the cockpit, so there’s no need to venture forward to tend to the jib and staysail.
Near the end of this first sailing season, the most remarkable thing about living with the Song Wren is its accommodations. For such a compact boat, both its cockpit and cabin seem incredibly spacious and comfortable. Four people easily daysail; three sleep inside as long as they’re close friends. The most rewarding thing is this boat’s jaw-dropping beauty—and Devlin deserves all the credit for it, not me. I have perhaps accentuated it by celebrating its woodiness with acres of brightwork (rub strips, toe rails, cabin sides, companionway doors, cockpit seats, and more), which I may regret when the time comes to sand and revarnish. Devlin implores builders to paint everything. But when you totally fall for a boat’s great looks, and its performance keeps you engaged and intrigued, you’re not afraid to look forward to a mountain of work in the relationship.
Lawrence W. Cheek is a journalist and serial boatbuilder (two kayaks and four sailboats to date) who writes frequently for WoodenBoat.
From all the refined creations of the designer Iain Oughtred presented in the intriguing biography A Life in Wooden Boats, written by Nic Compton, one particular boat, the 14′11″ Elf, caught my eye and imagination. Based on Norwegian faerings with roots in the Viking era, the small but intrepid-looking Elf is a fascinating adaptation of ancient design to modern construction. I had built a couple of glued lapstrake plywood canoes, so the Elf was a natural choice for me.
The original faerings were built by hand and eye, and had slowly evolved during hundreds of years to meet the local conditions and particular purposes. Iain carefully studied every design and photo he could find, realizing no two faerings were alike. He had a commission for a boat smaller than the original ones, and after absorbing all he could find on the subject, he began drafting his own interpretation of the faering, adapting the structure for glued-lapstrake plywood.
Mats Vuorenjuuri
The Elf has many traditional elements—broad strakes, rangs (angled frames in the ends), kabes (wooden row locks)—and only the daggerboard trunk and the absence of lap rivets betray its modern construction. For rowing, a plug for the daggerboard case will keep water from splashing into the hull.
Iain’s plans are famous for their elegance and detail, and Elf makes no exception to this. The package includes full-sized templates for the building molds, frames, and stems plus lines plan, construction plan, detail patterns, materials list, and construction notes. Add Iain’s own informative book Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual, and you should be good to go.
Iain recommends 9mm okoume or 7mm mahogany plywood for the hull and Douglas-fir, larch, or pitch pine for keel and frames. There are only two laminated frames in the center of the boat and smaller canted frames—rangs—aft and forward in the hull. The center and forward thwarts are installed aligned with the main frames further reinforcing the structure.
With basic woodworking skills, tools, and some practice in using epoxy, building Elf should not be too demanding. One critical step is to get fair and accurate lines on the three wide strakes of the hull. This can be achieved using plywood or bendy strips attached together to make patterns to transfer plank shapes from the molds.
In his book, Iain constantly uses various clamping methods to avoid the need for screws. Moving forward with the building process, I started to understand and appreciate this method more and more. The benefits of avoiding screws are less screw removal, fewer holes to be filled later, and perhaps a more elaborate structure. There are some stages where screws are necessary and unavoidable to get parts set correctly for gluing.
Sanna Virnes
Elf is a joy to row, it moves effortlessly and tracks exceptionally well. The hull is quite full forward, so, for rowing alone the forward thwart is a good choice, especially when traveling downwind. Some gear or ballast aft, will help put the keel level.
As the hull comes together, you really begin to admire the simple and functional structural design of the boat. Realizing the unadorned beauty of Elf, you will think very carefully before adding anything but the necessary fittings into the boat. It took a whole year before Iain dared to equip his own boat with sailing gear, and to that end, a slot for the daggerboard is cut to one side of the wooden, full-length keel and the daggerboard case is fitted forward of the center thwart. Iain has drawn a beautiful Norwegian-style rudder, and there are two options for rudder fittings. One has a long, curved rod held by two stem fittings that allows the rudder to be positioned high on the stem with the blade nearly clear of the water for rowing or beaching, or low with the blade fully submerged for sailing.
I chose a more conventional solution of common pintles and gudgeons and remove the rudder when I’m not sailing. With the 5′-long tiller, I can easily steer even while sitting in the middle of the boat.
The plans include drawings for oars and the traditional oarlocks called kabes. The oars are locked to kabes using rope loops. The loops need to be measured and spliced carefully for both a smooth rowing experience and to allow shipping the oars. The 9′ oars for the Elf have looms with flat backs and bottoms that fit the kabes and set the blades at the proper angle. The blades are long and narrow; their shape catches little wind while being effective.
The Elf weighs only 143 lbs and can easily be pulled up on a beach or onto a trailer singlehandedly, and two people can carry it. I bought a pair of inflatable beach rollers for effortless and harmless beaching; they fit under the thwarts when not in use and serve as flotation.
Once you get the Elf in the water, it will feel tender at first, but stable when you get settled on the thwart. Then the very first strokes will put a smile on your face. The hull resistance in slow speeds is remarkably low, and the boat is very easily driven. A peaceful pace for this boat is 3 knots, and by adding some effort, a knot more can be achieved. This seems to be the hull speed. The full-length wooden keel provides excellent tracking, and she turns smoothly. Because the Elf’s bow is much fuller than its stern, the forward thwart is the best choice for rowing alone; putting some gear or ballast in the stern will achieve proper fore-and-aft trim. For solo rowing, when the wind is abeam, rowing from the aft station will help prevent the hull from turning into the wind.
Mats Vuorenjuuri
With two rowers, Elf balances up nicely and maintains good speed with little effort. The 3′ spacing between the rowing stations is just enough for two well-synchronized rowers.
Because the span between the aft station’s kabes is 4″ less than the span at the forward station, you will lose some leverage rowing aft. For tandem rowing, the space between the two rowing positions is just enough.
The extreme lightness of the Elf has its virtues and drawbacks. It takes very little to move it, whether under oar power or sails. Lightly loaded, the hull sits high on water, and the upswept bow and stern add to windage. Although the hull can handle rough wave conditions, rowing against even a moderate breeze can be hard work. Waves also have an effect on the light hull, and its lack of momentum while tacking can lead to getting caught in irons. After you steer through the eye of the wind the Elf will start flying; off the wind it will accelerate quickly to surf down waves, occasionally exceeding hull speed.
Once you step into the Elf you are more than doubling its displacement, making it sensitive to both longitudinal and transverse trim. This can be disconcerting to a novice, at least to begin with, but very useful to an expert sailor accustomed to trimming and ballasting a sailing dinghy. The magic of faerings is in a narrow waterline beam for fast rowing, and a ’midships flare for ample reserve buoyancy to resist heeling while under sail.
Pasi Ehrola
Elf is well mannered under sail. Once the ample flare in the midsection hits the water, the hull stiffens up considerably.
Elf sails quite well even without the daggerboard. Before I installed the daggerboard case, sitting on the floor in the center of the boat was a sweet spot when sailing alone. The push-pull tiller rests conveniently on the center thwart, and I had unobscured views under the sail. When the wind picks up, you get more leverage from body weight by sitting on the thwart, or by hiking out on the gunwale. Sailing with a family of three aboard was also comfortable—my daughter would sit in front of the mast on the floor, I steered while sitting between center and aft thwarts, and our third crew sat between the center and forward thwarts. Loaded this way, Elf is very forgiving and stable.
Adding the daggerboard resulted in faster tacks and better windward performance. If you have camp-cruising in mind, I would seriously consider dispensing with the daggerboard and case to get good use of the stowage space in the center of the boat.
Gene Williams
This Elf, built by Duane Mathes, carries the sprit rig that is detailed in Oughtred’s plans.
I deviated from the plans for the sailing rig. The plans call for a 53-sq-ft sprit sail, but I opted for a lugsail of similar size; lugsail is also a choice of preference by Oughtred for Elf’s big sister, the 16′ 6″ Elfyn. As designed, Elf’s mast is supported by an extra partner fastened at the sheer. I wanted to minimize the structures and have unobstructed access to the bow, so I used the forward thwart as the partner. With this arrangement, the mast bury is quite small, so I stayed the mast using the halyard as one stay, and a dedicated line as the other. Eventually, finding the right tweaks for the lug sail, balance was good. The area of the balanced lug sail that sets forward of the mast compensates for moving the mast location a little bit aft, so the center of the sail’s overall area is very nearly the same as that of the spritsail.
As Iain remarked about the Elf: “Getting such functional efficiency in such a simple shape is astonishing.” Build an Elf for rowing, sailing, or wandering solo with a light load of camping gear, you can hardly go wrong. Elf is packed with character. Give it time and opportunities, and it will eventually charm your eye and steal your heart.
Mats Vuorenjuuri is the father of three and an entrepreneur, making a living in graphic design, photography, and freelance writing. He is currently becoming a boatbuilder as well, offering boatbuilding and maintenance services through Nordic Craft. In recent years he has discovered the simplicity and joy of small boats after sailing various types including sail-training schooners. He wrote about cruising the Finnish coast in his Coquina in our May 2016 issue and about a Lakeland Row in January 2017.
Elf Particulars
[table]
Length/14′11″
Beam/4′4″
Sail area, lug/52.72 sq ft
Weight/143 lbs
[/table]
Plans for the Elf are available from the WoodenBoat Store for $204 USD (study plans are 99 cents) and from Oughtred Boats for $224.44 AUS.
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!
We descended the steep trail from the parking lot into the Barron River valley and came into a grove of pine trees with waist-thick trunks; their roots fanned out more than 20′ and intertwined above the shallow soil. At the river’s edge was a clearing carpeted in russet pine needles. The banks were lined with rounded barrel-sized boulders, and rocks just below the surface of the water had a copper-colored glow. Where the 50′-wide river was deepest it ran black.
Photographs by the author
After carrying the canoes down from the long, steep path from the Brigham Lake parking lot, Phil and Rob paused for a rest before launching onto the Barron River. Two paddlers who preceded us are just getting underway.
The sun was high overhead and the heat of the day was peaking. Sweat beaded on my brow, but waiting for us was a soothing breeze on the Barron River. I was headed, with Rob and Phil, my canoe buddies for many years, to a part of Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park known as Barron Canyon, where granite cliffs stretch 300’ above the river.
All of us, now in our 60s, preferred to use my lightweight solo canoes (30 lbs) that I call Wee Bonnies. Rob and I used the skin-on-frame versions, while Phil always has dibs on the one I strip-built using light blue insulation foam.
Launching into the shallow, gentle current of the Barron River, we slid slowly downstream in clear, cool water over black, white, and orange granite stones the size of golf balls.
As we headed downstream over a shallow stretch of the river, we had to be careful to watch for submerged log debris and rocks lurking just below the surface.
Phil took the lead, Rob followed, and I was at the end, making sure to avoid any sunken logs or boulders that were just under the surface of the shallow river here. The banks were high and thick with white and red pine, and as the land rose up around us, we paddled by sections of crumbled cliffs and boulders separated by stands of trees. Pickerelweed with its spikes of purple flowers was thick along both sides of the river, and log debris was everywhere.
The river widened abruptly at the entrance to a small lake, and the rippled sand beneath us dimmed as the water gradually deepened. Brigham Lake is 200 yards across and twice as long and surrounded with pine and fir. We paddled to the south side of the lake and carefully picked our way through barely submerged shoreside rocks to a clearing in the woods.
To prepare the canoes for portaging from Brigham Lake to Opalescence Lake we flipped the seats up so the yokes on the ends of the seats were ready for the carry. The trail was steep and rocky so we carried the canoes and packs in separate trips.
A campsite there had a stone-ring fire pit and log rounds for seats, but we were here not to stay but to portage to Opalescent Lake. The carry would be a challenge, as it rose about 150 feet over a distance of 800 yards. The path was well defined and easy to follow but strewn with ankle-twisting rocks and roots. It crossed steep-sided valleys and skirted steep rocky drop-offs, so we decided to carry our gear and canoes in two trips. If the portage was less rough, we would have chosen to do a single carry. We had plenty of time, so two trips it was.
The three of us picked up our packs and set off on the first crossing along the sun-dappled path, winding through the thick bush of pine. While I could see clearly ahead over 50’, I kept my focus downward, and stepped gingerly over rocks and roots, sometimes hidden by a thick layer of dried pine needles. We maneuvered down some rock steps, being careful not to lose our footing on the uneven ground and tumble down a rocky granite slope. We passed through a valley and crossed a small creek on a narrow bridge made of four long, springy 2x6s. In the lowlands around the creek, swarms of mosquitoes attacked us and we picked up our pace. As we got close to the end of the portage, we could see the sun sparkling on the water through the trees. It was a welcome sight because our packs, fully laden with gear and provisions for four days, were at their heaviest.
Roger Siebert
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I set my pack down at the end of the portage, scratched my legs and arms, and then reached into the front pouch of my pack to pull out a bottle of bug spray. I hadn’t applied enough repellent to deter the little blood-sucking pests; I’d be better protected for the return trip.
Phil and Rob had already headed back and I could hear them in the distance, cursing the mosquitoes. Well slathered with spray, I hurried back over the rocky trail to catch up. Back at the Brigham Lake clearing, Rob flipped his canoe onto his shoulders and took the lead, with Phil close behind him. I brought up the rear again, hoping the mosquitoes would have had their fill from them and leave me be.
The third walk on the trail was easier because the canoes were lighter than our packed gear, and the mosquitoes left me alone, but the trickles of sweat running down my face seemed to attract deerflies. There was no cooling breeze making its way through the thick bush of pine, spruce, and fir, and the back of my T-shirt was drenched and sticking to my skin.
We set up our base at the Opalescence Lake camp site where we would stay for the next two days and do day trips. There was still some unpacking to do but but a refreshing swim came first.
I rejoined Phil and Rob at the end of the portage, and gently swung my canoe down on a patch of the hard-packed ground cushioned with pine needles. A soft cool breeze skimming across Opalescent Lake provided some relief on that hot day in July. The irregular chain of rocks that had dotted the portage carried on into the lake, making it difficult to find enough space to launch our canoes. The clear water, its dark-blue surface dotted with bright green lily pads, was breathtakingly beautiful and indeed opalescent.
The narrow lake, running ¾ mile from east to west, was hemmed in by red and white pine, cedar and spruce, and scattered maples and birch. We walked out onto a low rock ledge at the edge of the lake and set our canoes in the still water. After loading the packs aboard, we eased into our seats and pushed off.
Just around a bend from the launch, we glided up to a granite ledge on a blunt point of land where pale, shin-high grass surrounded bald outcroppings of bedrock. Working together, the three of us quickly carried the canoes up past the ledge and set them on a tracery of roots covering the nearly flat ground. In 2013 we had camped here in the sun-drenched clearing, a dozen yards wide. Since then a tree that had provided shade had been snapped in half, perhaps in a heavy wind storm a few years ago.
Rob pointed out to me that his canoe’s seat had started to split, as the synthetic cane weaving had finally succumbed to the sunlight after four years of use. I would do some patching later.
Since we’d been here before, I knew just where to hang my hammock and Phil and Rob knew where to pitch their tent. The bedrock, of course, made it impossible to set tent pegs, so we weighted them down with rocks. My hammock was strung between two large pines where the bank started to slope down to the lake, so I’d have a good view of both the lake and sky.
With our camp set up, we could take advantage of the clear lake water just a few yards away. We dove off the rock ledge, swam out about a quarter of the way across the lake, and bobbed around, enjoying the refreshing feel of cool water below the warm surface layer.
As we climbed out of the water, Phil noticed blueberry bushes at the edge of the clearing. The berries were so sweet, it was hard to save some for breakfast.
Rob, Phil, and I have a tradition of having steak for dinner on our first night at camp. We had brought a frozen, precooked meal of steak, potatoes, and veggies. It had thawed during the day and all we had to do was to warm it up on our camp stove. For dessert, I’d brought a bar of dark chocolate.
With supper over, dishes done, we needed to pack all the food in a bag and hang it in a secure location outside our camp beyond the reach of mice, chipmunks, raccoons, and bears. We found a tall dead tree about 100’ to the east and Phil and I took turns trying to throw the rope, with a small rock tied to one end, up over the branch about 20′ up. I missed, but Phil did it on his second try. We hoisted the bag and headed back to camp. We made a small fire in the campsite’s fire pit, a ring of flat granite rocks piled in several tiers. Flickering flames spread easily across the dry dead branches Rob had gathered. Watching the flames was calming, and, tuckered out, we soon headed for our sleeping bags. Stargazing would have to wait. We were in bed by 10 o’clock, but I couldn’t fall asleep. Bullfrogs seemed intent on singing all night, and one was just 10′ from my hammock. Every 40 seconds he let out about four or five deep “ribbits.” I fell asleep at about 2 a.m., only to be awakened by two loons three hours later. Their haunting calls echoed off the far shore, making it sound like there were more of them.
After a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, I worked on the seat on Rob’s canoe. I always carry some 1/8″ nylon cord and it worked for reweaving the damaged half of the seat. With a foam cushion added, it would be almost as good as new, but feeling somewhat guilty that I hadn’t replaced that old cane in the spring, I let Rob use my green skin-on-frame canoe and I would take his.
A light morning breeze ruffled the lake just before we launched for our day trip to explore Cork Lake.
Our plan was to go for a day trip to Cork Lake, east of Opalescent Lake via a 750-yard portage. We paddled slowly down the far shore of Opalescent Lake, taking our time, paddling as close to shore as possible to peer into the woods and enjoy the scenery. We passed a campsite on a rocky point; some trees there had been toppled by a small tornado that had passed through in July 2013. Massive pines lay on their sides, root structures upright like a giant saucer on edge.
The portage to Cork Lake was as reasonable as a portage through the bush could be, and we were carrying only light daypacks with our canoes so we only had to walk it once. It didn’t take us long to reach the shore of the lake.
Cork Lake had only three campsites, and only one was occupied that morning. The water was crystal clear, but the decaying debris on the bottom made it look an inky black. We hugged the shore and saw a few loons. The shallows along the shore were cluttered with underwater logs and a lot of rock ledges, but the water was so clear they were easily seen and avoided. One ledge was a massive dome of bright, gold-colored granite that loomed just 6″ under the water.
We took our time, circled some boulders, and squeezed our canoes in behind others.
When we stopped for lunch on Cork Lake, I pulled into a shallow, very slippery rock cove and let the north wind hold my canoe in place while we ate.
Heading north along the eastern shore, we stopped about halfway for lunch at a flat, scrub-covered rock ledge protruding out from shore. Phil and Rob pulled their canoes out of the water to keep the northerly, now steady breeze from sweeping the canoes away. I circled around to a cove on the north side of the landing, where the wind would hold my canoe mostly afloat over a smooth shelf of rock. We sat in silence, taking in the warm sun and eating lunch. Rob and I dove into the cool, clear water, swam well out from shore, and just floated, taking relief from another hot and humid day.
Phil and Rob paddled close enough to touch the cliff that bordered the east shore of Cork Lake. The vertical rock face extended well under water.
We continued our loop of the lake and paddled up the east side to massive cliffs of multicolored granite that towered over it. Orange lichen made the cliffs look as if they were spray-painted.
We made the carry back to Opalescent Lake and just as I stepped into my canoe, I slipped and dropped right on the back rest, snapping it from the thwart. I couldn’t paddle with my back up against the thwart, so I used a water sandal as a cushion and paddled gently back to camp. I rummaged through my pack to see what odds and ends I could use for repairs. I had thrown in a couple of bicycle inner-tube strips as general-purpose bungee cords. It wasn’t a pretty repair, but it worked to hold the seat back on the thwart.
Back at the Opalescent Lake camp after a day of paddling, Phil, at left, gazed at the small fire in the fire pit. Rob, center, and I relaxed with a cool drink.
As the evening dimmed the perfectly clear sky, Venus appeared, followed by the brightest stars one by one. Soon the sky was filled with constellations and streaked by shooting stars traced by satellites. When we hit the hay, it was nearly midnight with so many bullfrogs croaking that it sounded like white noise. Loons again woke me up early.
The morning was hot and humid even as we were getting our daypacks ready; we launched and set out to explore Barron Canyon. Three shadow-dappled portages through the woods, a 350-yard paddle across tiny Brigham Lake, and we were back at the Barron River 650 yards downstream from where we’d first launched two days before and very close to the canyon’s west upstream end. We launched the canoes into the clear shallow water where the river was running fast over a bed of tumbled granite stones. We slowly traveled downstream—sometimes lightly paddling, sometimes just drifting—and as the embankments flanking the river rose over us, the water deepened and the current slowed. Hemmed in by rough boulders, the river flowed past the stands of white pine, then towering cliffs where trees had taken root in small crevices in the rock and grown tall with their backs up against the vertical sides of the canyon walls. The cliffs rose over 300’ high and were streaked chalky white and sooty black with minerals leached by rainwater, and the rest of the rock was stained cinnamon brown or draped with moss; only a few places showed the rock’s real color. We paddled beneath outcroppings of granite that were cantilevered over the river.
Phil got ready to step into his Wee Bonnie for the final leg into the Barron Canyon. The water was so clear it made the canoe look as if it were floating in air.
About a mile or two downriver—I’d lost track of how far we had come—we found what seemed to be the only accessible spot to pull up our canoes and have a bit of lunch. We climbed up into a secluded grove of widely spaced slender red pines, then sat and looked out at the slightly rippled narrow river and at the pine-covered steep rocky embankments. A few other canoeists paddled by.
Rob gazed up at one of the massive multi-colored granite cliffs that stretch up over 300’ high. Hikers could peer back down from a trail at the top.
It was time to start the long trip back, so we launched and headed slowly upstream the mile or so back to the portage we had come through a couple of hours ago. A great blue heron flew ahead of us, landed a short distance away, only to fly ahead again at our approach. A beaver swam across the river in front of us; the heron landed once again and finally just waited for us to get by.
As the water grew shallow approaching the portage, we got out of our canoes and walked over the pebbled bottom, with the cool water lightly flowing over our feet. We pulled the boats upstream 60′ or so. A couple of hikers were moseying along the river bed in the ankle-deep water as if they were strolling in the park.
Phil and Rob shared the carry of one of the canoes as they hiked up the steep, rocky portage trail as we headed back toward Brigham Lake
The portage was short and would now be a little easier with our lightened packs, though rough with lots of roots and rocks to carefully step over. We carried up the initial steep slope of the portage one canoe at a time. Once at the top the path was now level but high up from the river bed. I chose to carry my own canoe with my lunch bag strapped to the thwart. Phil and Rob chose to carry both their canoes parallel to each other, holding their daypacks, with one person at the front and one at the back. We stepped along a steep and narrow path with the Barron River to our left and barely visible through the trees. Halfway along the portage, we took a short break at the narrow falls and rapids known as the Brigham Chute. The water there crashed down over a small waterfall and swirled around in side-streams to get through all the rocks.
Stopping for a break at the Brigham Chute, Rob decided to climb down and sit out in the center of the stream. Phil and I thought the climb down to be too precarious and remained up on the embankment.
From the Chute it was only a short walk to the river, where we launched, paddled a short distance, then made the100-yard portage back to Brigham Lake. Then the longer 800-yard portage uphill put us back into Opalescent Lake, and a paddle around the corner put us back in camp.
That night we were beat and all in bed before 9:30. The evening was hot and humid, and I had the fly of my hammock flipped back to catch whatever breeze there might be. I gazed up through the bug netting at the evening sky. I could clearly see the stars and even the glowing band of the Milky Way, and soon slipped into a deep sleep.
Heading back up stream on the Barron River, we approached our launching point from a few days prior. The solo canoes could easily maneuver in and around any debris we encountered.
We were up the final morning shortly after 6 a.m. We had our breakfast, took a quick swim, and then broke camp and retraced the route we had come three days earlier via a short paddle, again the 800-yard portage into Brigham Lake, and back into the Barron River, but this time heading northwest upstream 3/4 mile, with a final carry up the hill to the parking lot. It took us a couple of hours to get back to the cars and packed up for home.
Gazing down from a dizzying height on top of the Barron Canyon trail we watched canoes coming down stream through the canyon.
It was still early in the day, so we drove the short distance to the Barron Canyon Trail, parked, and hiked up the steep, well-worn trail leading to the top of the canyon. I looked down over the edge at the meandering river. In the distance, three canoes, almost invisibly small, traveled downstream and vanished around a wooded bend.
Phil Boyer retired in 2017 after working 38 years in R&D in the telecommunications industry. He now keeps busy teaching karate at two local clubs and building boats. He has been around boats his whole life, starting with paddling as a kid. At age 11 he built a sailing pram with a bit of help from his father. In 2006 he began building solo canoes and now has four of them, featured in the August 2019 issue. Phil’s interest turned to building SOL CANADA, his solar-electric boat, in 2015. His next build will be a solar-electric version of the Power Cat he read about in the March 2016 issue of Small Boats Magazine.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
"Never cleat the main” is often taught to beginning small-boat sailors. A cleated main can turn you over. A friend of mine, Barry Thomas, solved this when he built a Seabright skiff for his young son, David. There were no blocks in the mainsheet and no cleats on it, so Barry let his son sail whenever he wanted. David wasn’t strong enough to hang onto the mainsheet if the wind was strong enough to capsize the boat, so he couldn’t help but spill wind from the main.
But sometimes there are not enough hands to hold the main, steer the boat, and do something else; sometimes you just get tired and it’s a relief to have a cleat to hold the sheet. Dinghy racers are well familiar with this, and for many years have used various forms of quick-release jam and cam cleats. But sailors who haven’t grown up with them may not be fast enough to free the sheet, and so sometimes wind up taking a swim.
Ben Fuller
With a turn around a short pin protruding from the underside of the thwart, a slipped hitch holds the main sheet.
A traditional way to secure a sheet is with a slipped hitch on a half pin. The Ashley Book of Knots describes the Slippery Hitch, #1619: “…in small boats, especially boats that are easily capsizable, the hitch is indispensable. A whaleboat’s halyards as well as sheets are always secured with them, since a Slipped Knot admits of casting off without first removing the load.”
The slippery hitch is anchored by a pin that extends below a thwart, a rail, or some other part of the boat; a line under tension is looped around the pin, and a bight in the tail end is tucked behind the working end, using the tension in the line to pinch it into place. My faering has two pins protruding beneath the thwart just ahead of the helm, one for the halyard and one for the foot downhaul. The sail is pulled up, and the working end of the halyard is looped behind the half pin, turned into a bight, and the halyard pinches it against the thwart. A yank on the free end drops the sail.
On my Harrier, RAN TAN, I also have a pin on the center thwart, which is just a bit of 1/2″ oak dowel glued into a hole in the underside of the thwart near its aft edge. I added a bit of brass half-round to the thwart edge to minimize chafing. I use the pin and the slippery hitch to make my mainsheet fast, but also easy to release with a yank. If the sheet goes slack it will release itself, a disadvantage of this system.
When I rigged my Good Little Skiff for the hitch, the thwart had to be drilled from the top, so I turned a 1/2″ pin with a 1″ cap and drilled a countersunk hole for it in the thwart. It isn’t quite flush but is just a bump sitting on it.
SBM photograph
The cam-cleat arrangement is a good fit for this 14′ New York Whitehall, especially as the breeze picks up.
I have the pins for the slippery hitches close to the boat’s centerline, and while that’s fine for light breezes, it’s not handy when I need to have my weight to windward. For RAN TAN I added a quick-release mainsheet cleat that I could reach sitting on the rail or a side bench. I took advantage of the oarlock sockets by using a 1/2″ stainless-steel carriage bolt (which fits the socket) and a piece of Delrin to hold a cam cleat.
Ben Fuller
The author’s arrangement uses a Delrin block to connect the 1/2″ bolt to the cam cleat.
SBM photograph
The editor’s disassembled cleat on the left shows the countersink for the head of the 1/2″ bolt; his assembled cleat on the right shows the countersinks for the cleat-jaw bolts. The jaws of the cleat are angled down toward one another, so using the cleat as a guide for drilling the holes for the bolts made sure they fit. Pairs of copper rivets across the oak blocks are guards against the wood splitting under strain.
If you don’t have Delrin, you could use anything that won’t split under a load on the cleat. Cut it to match the base of the cam cleat, and drill holes and countersinks for the cleat’s bolts and the 1/2″ bolt. To make the cleat easily removable for rowing, I drilled a small hole in the Delrin for a lanyard.
SBM photograph
A tether keeps the cam cleat from going astray when it’s removed to free the oarlock for rowing.
These cleats go into the oarlock sockets when it’s breezing up. I then can place the sheet into the cleat with a little tug and an upward pull instantly releases it.
Both of these systems can easily be retrofitted into most small boats and make sailing much easier by holding the sheet to free up a hand, with the ability to let it run with a single pull.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International canoe to a faering.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
After it was set up for this 10″ blade, the sharpener got through all 60 carbide teeth in less than 3 minutes. I was impressed until I took a very close look at the results.
Not long after I bought Harbor Freight’s 1 x 30 belt sander, I returned to the store for their circular saw blade sharpener. The belt sander needed a little bit of work to make it run smoothly, but it has become one of my most frequently used tool, so I had high hopes for the sharpener—a little bit of fussing to get it tuned up and then it might do a respectable job.
The reviews on the Harbor Freight web site for the sander and the sharpener were about the same, 4-1/4 stars for the former and 4 for the latter. Several noted that setting up a blade for sharpening was time consuming, so I wasn’t surprised that it took a half hour to set the spring-loaded pawl in the right position on the blade. I eventually was satisfied that the 4″ diamond-abrasive wheel would just kiss each carbide-tooth face and shave it down to a new clean surface with a sharp cutting edge. Making fine adjustments to the pawl’s support was quite difficult because when the bolt holding it to the base was loosened, the post tended to move much more than I wanted it to. A screw adjustment device would have made a world of difference. The kit included a 10 mm wrench for turning the bolt head, and it worked for a while, but soon started slipping. The bolt’s hex corners were a bit rounded from the get-go and even before I had made adjustments for the first saw blade, the wrench no longer worked. Fortunately, a 3/8″ box-end wrench was a tight, functional fit. I was okay with that and decided I’d replace the bolt with a thumb screw that wouldn’t require a wrench.
The spring-loaded pawl at the top of this post sets the teeth at the right position for the diamond-coated blade, just visible at top center with the yellow label. Setting the pawl is done by loosening the hex bolt in the slot of the posts’s base. It’s difficult to adjust, but not the fatal flaw.
The motor and wheel ride on an adjustable carriage that tilts 25 degrees either direction from square. The indicator was set at 0 degrees, but the wheel was hitting just one side of the first tooth. A few small adjustments got the wheel to make full contact. A screw adjustment device would be an improvement here too, but all of the carbide-tipped blades have teeth square to the blade, so this initial adjustment might be the only one I’d need to make.
With the adjustments made for a 60-tooth blade, I sharpened all of the teeth in under 3 minutes. The pawl did not set the teeth precisely. There was some play in the sharpener and I could apply a bit of pressure on the blade to get a consistent sound as the diamond abrasive worked on the carbide.
This carbide tooth wound up with a ragged cutting edge and a chipped corner. Before the “sharpening,” the edge was smooth and straight, and only just a bit softened.
And this tooth took a real beating in the sharpener and lost a quarter of its edge to the diamond wheel.
When I was finished, all of the tooth faces had a new shiny surface, which I took as an indication that the cutting edges would be sharp. It wasn’t until I took a powerful magnifier to the teeth that I saw what the sharpener had done. The diamonds left tracks across the carbide; under magnification it looked like the work of a garden rake. That was bad enough, but the worst damage was at the edges and corners of the teeth. Carbide had been chipped away on very tooth. I didn’t bother putting the blade back on the table saw. It was ruined.
I went to the Harbor Freight web site and closely read all 37 of the one-star reviews, the ones I’d dismissed as being in the minority. Among them were two that matched my results:
Everything posted about how hard this is to setup it true. However, with a little patience, this tool can be used to sharpen circular saw blades. However, the real problem is with the available grinding wheels. The diamond wheel is just too coarse.
When finished, I looked at the top cutting edge of each tooth. Every one had carbide grains chipped out instead of a sharp edge.
If Harbor Freight would offer wheels with finer grit, there’d be hope for the sharpener, but the 180-grit wheels that are supplied with the machine and available as replacements are brutal on carbide saw teeth. I have two diamond sharpeners from EZE-Lap Diamond Products with four grades of diamonds on aluminum handles about the size of tongue depressors. The grits are rated from 250 to 1200, and the 250 grit is designated as “coarse.” That puts the 180-grit wheel on Harbor Freight’s circular saw sharpener into the proper perspective—coarser than coarse.
Harbor Freight has a 90-day return policy. Unfortunately, that opportunity for a return went by 4 months ago. I’m reminded of a billboard I used to drive by back in the 1960s: “Only the rich can afford poor quality.”
Christoper Cunningham is editor of Small Boats Magazine.
Afterword
When the Harbor Freight sharpener failed to live up to its promise, I kept looking for ways and devices to sharpen carbide-toothed saw blades. In the comments following one DIY sharpening video, someone mentioned that carbide dust created by sharpening is a health hazard. I did a bit of research and found the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries confirmed the risk in a 1995 article titled “Carbide tips create heath problems”:
Workers who file saw blades or those who machine tools with tungsten carbide (or other “hard metal”) tips may be exposed to toxic levels of cadmium, a cancer-causing agent, and cobalt, a suspected cancer-causing agent.
A lot of the jobs I do in my shop create dust, some more evident than others, so a dust mask is always warranted, but, for me, the health risks of creating carbide dust outweigh the benefits of sharpening my circular saw blades myself.
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 Zhike Gravity Hook, left, and the Lixada 4-Claw Hook work in different ways and both performed well.
The grappling hook (also known as a grappling iron or grapnel) that I made a while back from some stainless-steel rod and a few cable ties worked well enough, but it was an awkward and dangerous thing to keep in a small boat. It rested with one claw always pointing straight up, like a caltrop, an ancient and wicked device of war that wounded anyone unlucky enough to step on it. Modern grappling hooks aren’t so hazardous. I found two different types, both welcome to stay aboard waiting for the opportunity to retrieve something underwater.
Lixada 4-Claw Hook
Opened up, the Lixada’s claws span 8-1/2″.
The Lixada 4-Claw Hook is 9″ long, has a span of 8-1/2″ between the tips of opposing claws, and weighs 26.3 oz. The central shaft is stainless steel and the claws, my magnet tells me, are some sort of steel alloy. The claws spin around the shaft on an internal threaded rod that pushes the round cap at the bottom out so the claws can pivot outward or fold against the shaft. Spinning the claws in the opposite direction locks them either in or out. The folding design makes the 4-Claw Hook quite compact and prevents the claws from digging into woodwork or the bottoms of my feet when stowed. The device is rated to 860 lbs, more than I could imagine ever subjecting it to, and the serrated claws keep whatever has been hooked from slipping away. It’s an elegant design with an aggressive grip.
The large round disk at left moves in and out on a threaded rod. Here it keeps the claw tips safely up next to the shaft.
The Lixada was quick to snag this 60-lb ride-share bike and held on to it during the lift to the dock.
Zhike Gravity Hook
On contact with something, the Gravity Hook’s jaws open up. The single plate on the jaw at left will slip about 1/4″ into the space between the double plates on the right, preventing slender items from slipping out.
The Zhike Gravity Hook is 5-3/8″ long, 3-1/2″ wide, and weighs 8.9 oz. The device is made of stainless steel except for the nuts and bolts—the magnet says they’re steel. The four pivot points allow the jaws at the bottom to open upon contact with something, then close when the Gravity Hook is pulled upward. For use as a grappling hook, a separate cross piece is set between the articulated jaws and two O-rings are rolled into a pair of notches to keep the device from opening and dropping the cross piece. The hook is rated to 772 lbs, more than enough for retrieving anything from a small boat.
When the cross-plate is installed, two O-rings roll down into a pair of notches and keep it securely held in place.
In its grappling hook configuration, you can cast about and drag for lost items, and it will snag line and chain, the wire basket and tubing of a shopping cart, but not anything with a diameter over 1-1/2″. For retrieving small objects like glasses and key rings, the Gravity Hook’s ability to grasp things make it better suited than an ordinary grappling hook. Using the opening jaws is best done when you can see what you’re fishing for. If you don’t have clear, undisturbed water, a face mask or a bathyscope will be helpful. The jaws have to be set directly upon whatever you’re after, so you need to be directly above it; and they have to be crossing the object, not parallel to it, so you have to be able to see what you’re doing. That said, we were able to grab a lost bright orange cinch cord on the first try.
The Gravity Hook got a hold on this sunken cinch cord on the first try. The milfoil came up on one of the hooks.
With both devices, it’s possible to get hooked on some immoveable object and join the ranks of items stuck on the bottom. Neither has an attachment point for a retrieval line, the kind used to retrieve a snagged anchor, but you could tie one on if you decide to go fishing blindly, or dive for it if the conditions and your ability allow.
The promotional copy for both devices suggests you can use them for climbing, just as Batman did with his grappling hook in the 1960s TV series. But if you’re going to throw the hook up to the top of a building or over a tree branch, you may not be able to get the grappling hook back if you can’t climb up to it. The Lixada and Zhike devices both supported my 220 lbs, but climbing is risky business, especially if what’s holding you up can get dislodged.
Both of these devices have the ability to save the day if something valuable is lost overboard in shallow water; they also can provide great entertainment fishing for the treasures that accumulate around the docks at marinas and launch ramps.
Christopher Cunningham is editor of Small Boats Magazine.
When we first heard from Richard Nissen, in June 2017, he shared one of the boats he had built and added to his small fleet at his home west of London on the River Thames. It was a s’ciopon, a Venetian boat rowed standing up and facing forward. With his newest boat, he’s still facing forward, but he’s taken a seat. It’s a skin-on-frame kayak, built to the plans and instructions in George Putz’s 1990 book, Wood and Canvas Kayak Building. Putz took his inspiration from a how-to article by about the Walrus kayak by Norman Skene in the June 1923 issue of the now defunct magazine, The Rudder. And Skene took his inspiration from a Southwest Greenland kayak he measured in 1921 in the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Howard Chapelle drew the lines for that kayak and included it in his chapter of Bark Canoes andSkin Boats of North America.
Richard Nissen
The frame’s many elements are screwed and glued together. When it was finished, Richard had to decide what to skin it with.
The kayak has undergone quite a few changes from its origin as a sealskin-covered driftwood frame to Skene’s adaptation. To simplify construction for readers of The Rudder, Skene did away with steam-bent frames and lashings and switched to a frame made of sawn pieces, glued and screwed together. He felt at liberty to assume that his readers had tools and woodworking experience; his article occupied two-and-a-half pages of the magazine. Putz, publishing in 1990, took 124 pages to coach readers through the build.
For lumber, Richard had some old planks on hand, nearly free of knots, but not long enough to make the longitudinals in one piece, so he had to cut and glue a lot of scarf joints to make the keel, stringers, chines, and gunwales. He repurposed a discarded Windsor chair back for the deck beam at the aft end of the cockpit—a more comfortable piece to lean against—and cut the curved stems from a similarly curved driftwood branch he found in the river.
Richard Nissen
The heavy-duty, fiber reinforced polyethylene tarp made a lovely skin, allowing the intricate frame to show through.
The construction of the frame was straightforward and didn’t bog Richard down, but deciding what material to use for the fabric covering did. He was set on keeping the expenses to a minimum and steered away from canvas, even if it were easy to come by. Back in 1990, Putz himself acknowledged that a suitable piece of 10-oz canvas would be pricey—about $130. Richard settled on a fiber-reinforced polyethylene tarp as the source of his covering material. “It looks magnificent,” he notes, but admits in hindsight “that this choice was a bad one as it is not as strong as it should be.” It stretched over the frame easily enough and with bright-finished sheer guards covering the material’s edges and the staples anchoring them, the semi-transparent skin looks quite hi-tech.
Richard Nissen
At the Thames riverside, the kayak, ready to launch, rests in the company of two of Richard’s other boats.
The keel strip, which is to guard the skin from wear, was itself the cause of damaging it. When the kayak went out for its first trials, where each screw holding the guard passed through the skin there was a pathway for water to get aboard. “This made the first paddle extremely exciting as the kayak effectively leaked like a sieve. So, it was a dash for home not to sink completely.” The solution was clear silicone caulking, dabbed over each screw head and run along the junction of the skin and the keel guard.
Richard and his son report that, leaks nearly eliminated, the kayak performs well and “is a joy to use, so the design works.” Setting the kayak over strips of toilet paper helps locate leaks that have yet to be fixed, and chasing leaks remains an ongoing project. Richard isn’t willing to replace the skin. “It may be easier to start again from scratch to resolve the difficulties with a new solution for the skin. The frame is a very beautiful object in its own right and perhaps it will end up on display stripped of its skin.”
Juliet Nissen
Richard has the perfect place for “messing about in boats.” His stretch of the Thames winds through the countryside that Kenneth Grahame used as the setting for “Wind in the Willows.”
For now, he hopes to get all of the leaks stopped and enjoy paddling the Thames. “There are no rocks or other things in the river to rip or destroy the boat—the Thames is very sheltered and gentle environment.” Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows,” lived very close to where Richard has his houseboat, so he paddles were Ratty and Mole enjoyed picnic outings and messing about in boats. He has yet to cross paths with them.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
Finn and Teresa continue eastward on the Main-Donau Canal, taking lock aft lock the geographical high point of the voyage. While it was all “downhill” from there to the Danube, their video conveys a grand adventure.
At Würzberg, Finn and Tereza are joined by Lorenzo, a staffer from their alma mater, the Brockwood Park School. Watch this video to see how our adventurers solve a few problems on their way to the city of Bamberg and the entrance to the canal that will carry them to the Danube river.
Averaging about 17 miles a day, Finn and Tereza work their way up the Main River and reached Würzberg. They still have many more miles of the Main ahead of them before they reach the first canal along the route to Russia. Watch this video and see how our young travelers are getting into their groove.
Their destination, Sochi, Russia, was 1,500 miles away as the jet airliner flies, but Finn and Tereza are in no hurry and determined to travel in a manner that’s kind to the environment. They have been underway for a week now. Watch this video to see the beauty and adversity they discover in the first week of their journey, which lands them in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg, about 50 miles from their start at Mainz.
With no car, Finn and Tereza have to figure out how to get their boat to Mainz, Germany. With all their supplies (and a guitar) aboard JILL, their 16’ Matinicus double ender, their goal was to get her in the water and spend their first night under the open sky. Watch this video to see how they fared!
JILL, the boat Finn and Tereza have been building for their journey across Europe to Russia, is still not finished. Watch this video to see the challenges finishing JILL and the final stages of the pre-trip preparations.
Students at Brockwood Park School in Hampshire, UK, Finn Cameron-Turner and Tereza Deminova, both 17, built a 16’ Matinicus double-ender. They had some help from a mentor and other students during the construction at the international school located in England’s Hampshire countryside, but it will be up to the two of them to row and sail the boat over 1,500 miles from Mainz, Germany, to Sochi, Russia, Tereza’s home town.
They’ll cross Europe on inland waterways, the last of which, the Danube, will deliver them to the Black Sea for the final leg along an exposed coast. For Finn and Tereza, the voyage is more than a summer vacation. They’ll continue their education by learning about navigation, sailing, and different languages and cultures. The state of the global environment is of great concern to them and they hope to demonstrate that travel, even for Tereza to get from school to her home in Sochi, can be done with a minimum of ecological impact. We’ll follow along on the adventure with regular installments of videos from Finn and Tereza. Watch this video to get to know the two adventurers.
I recently parted with my Hooper Bay kayak, the only remaining relic of my first efforts as a boatbuilder 40 years ago. It was my second kayak, the first being one I designed after poring over my father’s copy of Adney and Chapelle’s The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. That kayak was an awkward platypus of elements I’d seen in the book and turned out to be a bland dilution of whatever qualities the original kayaks might have possessed.
That kayak got me afloat, but I gained a new appreciation for the traditional forms I’d appropriated for it when I met David Zimmerly in 1978 at Port Townsend’s Wooden Boat Festival. He gave a talk there on the Hooper Bay kayak, which I recognized as the same style as the Nunivak Island kayak included in Skin Boats.
Nunivak is about 75 miles due south of Hooper Bay, and both are inhabited by the Yupik people of Alaska’s west coast. I was taken in by David’s detailed description of the Hooper Bay and the work of Yupik master kayak builder Dick Bunyan. David kindled my interest by giving me a photocopy of his draft of his then yet-to-be-published book, Hooper Bay Kayak Construction.
The Hooper Bay design was thoroughly and beautifully documented in David Zimmerly’s book, “Hooper Bay Kayak Construction.” The book is out of print now, but there are some old copies available from online used-book outlets.
It included detailed drawings of every piece, photographs of every step of the process from collecting driftwood to paddling the finished kayak. All that fall after the festival, I gathered driftwood, something I’d been doing since I was a youngster, helping my dad collect red cedar for fencing our yard. The beaches near home also had a bit of Alaska yellow cedar—straight stock for steam-bent frames and the coaming hoops; crooks for deckbeams the curved lower stempiece.
I learned a lot building the Hooper Bay: cutting straight and hooked scarf joints, half-lap joints, and mortises and tenons on compound bevels; working with crooks, carving stempieces, and steam-bending frames and coamings. Aside from the practical experience, I gained a better understanding of the sophistication of traditional designs and the centuries of experience and knowledge that went into them.
The Hooper Bay was meant for hunting seals in the Arctic and occasionally for ferrying people short distances across protected water, with as many as six aboard: two back-to-back in the cockpit, one on each deck, and one inside each end. It was only 15’ long, quite short compared to a modern touring kayak, but with a beam of 30”, a depth of 18” and weighing over 70 lbs, it was a big vessel. As deep as it was, the coaming came up to my armpits. I made a single-blade paddle of the type used for the Hooper Bay and paddled it like a canoe, alternating sides. It made for a slow, meandering course, so I never traveled far.
When it still had its canvas skin and was seaworthy, the Hooper Bay was a restful place to lie in with its decks for a cathedral ceiling and its cockpit opening for a skylight.
On summer days I would paddle a mile offshore, stow the paddle inside, and slide into the kayak and let the afternoon’s land breeze carry me back to the beach. Sometimes I’d take a book and read. Twice I took a cassette recorder and made spoken letters for my great aunt in Boston. She was in her 90s and nearly blind, and the sound of the water gurgling against the canvas hull took her back to her childhood, canoeing at summer camp. Most of the time I’d lie on my back looking up through the cockpit at the circle of sky rimmed by the coaming, listening to that same sound. When a cool northwesterly was blowing, the air inside the Hooper Bay was still and warm, and redolent with cedar and linseed oil. The rocking of the hull would hold me cradled between wakefulness and sleep.
Over the following decades, I continued to build reproductions of Arctic kayaks. I was drawn to the sleeker and faster Greenland types, learned how to roll them a dozen different ways, and enjoyed paddling them in storms with water washing thick across the decks the deafening roar of the wind in my ears. The Hooper Bay sat under the eaves of my parents’ house for years, dusted green with the pollen of the cedar trees. When I had a house of my own, I kept the Hooper Bay alongside the garage. The canvas covering grew speckled with mildew, and the paint cracked. Eventually I removed the skin, leaving the lashed latticework frame bare.
An artist friend liked the frame and offered to keep it in her studio. The cedar had weathered and turned gray, so before taking it to her I brushed it with linseed oil mixed with vermilion pigment.
The frame stayed suspended above a belt sander and an electric kiln for quite a long time—through a dark decade of divorce, from a time when I kissed my young children goodnight to times when they were grown and I’d go to bed in an empty house; through the death of my mother and chill sea of long-forgotten deadlines and appointments.
I brought the Hooper Bay home when my friend moved out of town, and it lay hidden alongside the house under a black tarp. With the coming of each spring, bracken ferns pierced between its ribs and morning glory spiraled around its chines. I often thought about giving the Hooper Bay a new skin, to paddle away from shore, lie down in the cocoon of wood and canvas, and let the waves rock me into that peaceful half sleep of 40 years ago.
Two summers ago, I took some pictures of the frame set in front of an ivy-covered fence—the vermilion was vibrant against the dark green shingled leaves. I had planned to post the photos with a for-sale ad on Craigslist, but I let month after month slip by. I let the kayak’s color fade. I posted the ad a couple of weeks ago and I got just one response. A few days later the Craigslist buyer arrived and we strapped the Hooper Bay on his roof rack. The frame is gone now, but the best of that kayak remains with me.
It all started during the summer of 2015 when I decided that it was time to part ways with MAGIC, my 1962 Alberg 35′ glass sloop. I had spent four years and countless hours restoring MAGIC to her former glory, but two years after re-launching I needed a change. While she was not a big boat by today’s standards, the amount of time and money spent just keeping the boat in the water and in good condition was exhausting. The fact that I lived in central New Hampshire and kept the boat 150 miles away in southeastern Massachusetts only made things worse.
I found myself spending more and more time on a beat-up old O’Day Daysailer that had been following me around since college. My family and I romped around the local lakes and estuaries, sailing hard and often. The only money I spent on her was gas for the car and beer for the cooler. At some point that summer, I realized that I was having as much fun on the O’Day as I was on MAGIC, but with none of the stress. Sure, MAGIC was a comfortable boat that could take somebody sailing for weeks at a time, but I was mostly going out for day sails with an occasional overnighter. I could be doing the same thing on a much smaller boat.
At about the same time, I heard about the Small Reach Regatta, organized by the Downeast Chapter of the Traditional Small Craft Association in Maine. It’s not a race, but a gathering of small, traditional sailing and rowing craft. I have always been drawn to the look of classic boats and when I saw the boat lineup on the Small Reach Regatta website, I knew I had to check it out.
I showed up on the first morning of the event and was able to sail on Mike Duncan’s FRISKY LADY (a Chamberlin 15′ 6″ gaff sloop) and on Geoff Kerr’s NED LUDD, an Oughtred 19′ 6″ Caledonia yawl. I fell in love with the Caledonia but it was a bigger boat than I needed. However, the seed had been planted, and I spent the rest of the summer researching the perfect small boat in the range of 15′ to 18′.
The boat had to be pretty and, while I prefer the look of lapstrake, there is a lot of additional setup and framing required that takes a fair amount of time, so I was looking for a stitch-and-glue design that didn’t require a strongback and associated framing. I also like the classic look of a balanced lug-rigged yawl; and with unstayed spars, balanced lug rigs are really easy to set up for launching. The mizzen makes for easy handling. In spite of the appeal of classic boats, I wanted a fast boat, and a planing hull makes this possible.
The Apple 16, a five-strake stitch-and-glue balanced lug yawl designed by Thomas Dunderdale of Campion Sail and Design, came closest to being everything I wanted. The classic lines and balanced lug yawl were just what I was looking for and the somewhat flat aft section of the hull allows the boat to get up on a plane. I’m a sucker for a plumb bow, so as soon as I saw pictures of the Apple 16, I knew it was for me.
Photographs by Jacob Bowser
The plans detail several interior layouts, and provide the option for decked ends . The author designed his own interior with flotation tanks and a removable center thwart.
After several conversations with the designer, I purchased plans and began the build. Thomas was very helpful, answering all of my questions via email or phone.
I didn’t want to wait for a shipment of full-sized printed plans mailed from England; I opted for digital files and took them to a local copy shop and had them enlarged for about $30. I was really happy with the amount of thought and detail that went into the plans; they came with a general construction narrative, a detailed 30-page keyed construction index and at least a dozen schematics for the boat, parts, and interior layout options. For a first-time boat builder, everything provided should be easy to follow.
The included materials list calls for four sheets of 6mm marine plywood scarfed lengthwise for the hull, two sheets of 6mm for bulkheads and interior framing, and one sheet of 9mm for the rudder and additional components.
With a solo skipper aboard, the Apple 16 can, in spite of its traditional appearance and rig, get on plane in a moderate breeze.
While Campion does not currently offer files for a CNC mill, someone savvy with a CAD system should be able to digitize the planking measurements and send them off for cutting to save time. I don’t have easy access to a CNC mill, so I opted to plot the strakes on the scarfed panels and cut them out myself. The plans package provides both a table of offsets and a visual diagram for plank measurements that is very intuitive.
Probably the best thing about building a stitch-and-glue boat is how fast you can make visible progress. Once you cut the strakes from the scarfed plywood panels, assembling the hull is a simple matter of drilling out holes for wire or zip ties (I opted for zip ties) and stitching the panels together. In a single, albeit long, afternoon you can go from a pile of flat plywood pieces to a structure that resembles a boat.
The author could comfortably row the Apple 16 at around 3 knots. His sectional oars, with carbon-fiber ferrules, stow neatly out of the way while sailing.
Of course, it’s not all a piece of cake. Until you get the bulkheads tied in, the entire structure is a bit of a wobbly mess. I cut cradles to steady and align it while I tied everything together. This helps immensely when one is working alone.
The job of taping the inside and outside seams, followed by a layer of 6-oz ’glass on the outside of the hull is rather monotonous. If you’re careful, cleanup should be a relatively minor job and once complete, you can move on to fitting out the interior.
The plans provide layouts for several interiors ranging from a spartan setup of three thwarts, with two doing double duty as mast partners, to a more extravagant layout with decks fore and aft. I deviated from the plans and designed my own interior with built-in flotation compartments and a center thwart that’s removable for camp-cruising.
The boat is quite light, and a solo sailor could add some ballast to stiffen the hull against the press of the sails. The designer recommends adding between 110 to 275 lbs if ballast is needed.
The plans call for a long, open daggerboard trunk to accommodate multiple mizzen sail plans (the larger plan changes the center of effort and requires the daggerboard to be located further aft). Since I was only building the version with the smaller sail plan, I shortened the daggerboard trunk after consulting with Campion.
I also increased the thickness of the daggerboard from 25mm to 33mm so I could build a NACA 0012 foil. I’ve had several opportunities to test performance against other similar designs with balanced lugs and I believe that the foil helps with upwind performance.
All told, the build took me about eight months of working 10–15 hours per week, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. A single rower with 9.5’ oars can propel the boat at 3 knots when rowing at a comfortable pace, and her sailing ability has exceeded my expectations. Trailering with my four-cylinder Rav 4 is easy.
I’ve had the boat out for dozens of times in a variety of wind conditions, and the boat is really amazing to sail. Having no prior experience with balanced lug rigs, I spent a lot of time researching balanced lug sail tuning and after a bit of trial and error, I opted to go with 6:1 downhaul and 4:1 mainsheet tackle. I used Dyneema line for the downhaul and main halyard to maximize luff tensioning ability.
The Norwegian tiller may take a bit of getting used to if you haven’t used one before, but it is the simplest arrangement for getting around a mizzen mast and has a number of advantages over a conventional tiller.
With the rigging configuration sorted out and making sure the downhaul tension is drum tight, I found that the pointing ability was quite good. Combined with the foil daggerboard, which should theoretically increase lift, the Apple 16 is not far off the pointing angles that a similarly sized Bermuda-rigged boat can achieve. When soloing, I regularly get up on a plane on a reach and hit 8.5 to 9 knots in less than 15 knots wind. Over 15 knots and I put in a single reef, and have sailed in conditions up to 23 knots without being terrified.
We have had four adults out for a sail, and while it is manageable, two of the crew need to sit in the well on either side of the daggerboard trunk forward of the thwart. The 250-lb boat is really best suited for one or two, and each additional crew member reduces the boat’s ability to plane. I have yet to be able to get the boat on a plane with more than two crew on board; I suspect that it would have to be pretty windy to do so. With that said, the boat sails well even with four on board.
The boat is as well-mannered as a light boat can be and is reasonably dry in most conditions. Beating close-hauled into chop over 2’, predictably, tends to be the wettest point of sail. The yawl rig contributes to a very balanced helm on all points with just enough weather helm on the Norwegian push-pull tiller to take any of the play out of the system and allow you to make subtle course corrections.
The Campion Apple is a well-thought-out small boat that is lively to sail and will turn heads in any harbor. It’s a good choice for a first-time boatbuilder with woodworking skills who doesn’t want to spend years building a boat that looks and sails great.
Matt Bowser, a software engineer living in Canterbury, New Hampshire, can’t remember a time when he wasn’t obsessed with boats. He grew up sailing the coast of New England from Rhode Island to Maine and is enamored with the simplicity, ease, and low maintenance of small boats. When he isn’t sailing, building, or fiddling with various boat bits, he’s mountain biking in the forests of New Hampshire and Vermont or trying to get his teenage children to hang out with him.
Apple 16 Particulars
[table]
Length/15′ 10″
Waterline length/14′ 4-1/2″
Beam/5′ 3″
Draft, board down/3′ 9″
Sail Area/123 sq ft
Ballast, if used/110 lbs to 275 lbs
[/table]
Plans for the Apple 16 are available from Campion Sail and Design, based in the UK. Prices are in Pounds Sterling: £65 (approx. $79 USD) for PDF, and £120 (approx. $146 USD).
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Magazine readers would enjoy? Please email us!
The Auk is an Iain Oughtred design that dates back to 1984. He was “just looking at traditional boats and trying to produce an ideal version of an 8′ tender.” It was a smaller version of the Puffin, a 10′ tender he had previously designed; he gave the Auk a generous beam for its length and a particularly pronounced sheer. “I tend to agree with Uffa Fox that you should have a good strong sheer because it is stylish and it helps keep the water out,” he said. After selling about 250 sets of Auk plans, he redesigned it about 10 years ago to be “a refined version of the same thing with a couple of inches more beam,” and has sold a further 116 sets of plans since then. It is designed primarily as a tender with carrying capacity of three or four people “in sensible conditions,” but he gave it a balanced lug rig for sailing.
When Sam Manners enrolled at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis, England, he decided he would like to build an Auk, but was keen for his to be a bit longer. Iain offers two lengths for the Auk with a little stretching by spacing the five molds, transom, and stem 2″ farther apart to increase the length of the Auk from 7′11″ to 8′11″, but Sam wanted to go a bit longer. He decided to space them 2-1/2″ farther apart than designed, which would give him an overall length of 9′2″.
Sam Manners
The interior is functional, uncluttered, and easy to clean and maintain.
Printed plans include 12 pages consisting of an introduction, four pages giving basic knowledge regarding traditional and glued clinker construction, the table of offsets, and templates for the full-scale half molds. The plans are not available digitally.
“However good the plans and templates are, we always advocate lofting,” said course tutor Mike Broome, “as it allows any errors on the designer’s part to become apparent. Also, if you are stretching the boat, it’s the only way to get it all faired up. It also means you can lift patterns and templates for any elements of the fit-out, etc.”
After lofting the lines full-size, he and fellow students set to work by setting up five 1/2″ plywood temporary molds and the 7/8″-thick khaya transom upside down on a low workbench to give a comfortable working height. The centerline structure was then added. This consisted of the sapele hog 3/4″ thick and 3-1/4″ wide to allow for the daggerboard slot, although for the rowing-only version noted in the plans it would only be 2-3/4″ wide. The aft end of the hog had to be steamed to cope with the rocker. The curved inner stem (or apron) was laminated from nine layers of 1/8″-thick sapele.
The planks are 1/4″ BS1088 sapele plywood. The garboards were laid over the hog, meeting each other in the middle and glued with epoxy. The rest of the planking was epoxied along the 3/4″-wide laps using shop-made planking clamps known as “gripes,” and temporary screws at the hood ends to hold everything in place while the glue set.
Nigel Sharp
The standard arrangement for sailing is a balanced lug sail with a daggerboard. The plans offer another option: a standing lug with a leeboard.
The plans called for eight strakes, and that is what Sam and his fellow students fitted, but they had trouble fitting the planks around the turn of the bilge. There were two planks on each side that had get around nearly 90 degrees. “It took many attempts, and we probably got through a full sheet of plywood just trying to get that curve,” Sam said, “but we managed to get it eventually with the aid of double the number of gripes. If I built another one I think I would fit three planks round that curve.”
Once the planking was completed, a 1″-thick sapele skeg and keel were fitted as well as a pair of 2′ x 3/4″-square bilge runners, followed by the outer stem (made up from three pieces of sapele scarfed together) which sealed the end grain of the plywood planks at the bow. The daggerboard slot was cut through the centerline. An epoxy sealant followed by epoxy primer were then applied to the outside of the hull.
When the hull was flipped upright and the temporary molds were removed, it “wobbled like jelly,” but before any stiffening structure was fitted, the excess epoxy was scraped away and the inside of the hull was sanded. Once that somewhat laborious process was completed, four 3/4″-thick sapele floors were fitted.
The daggerboard case is made of ¼” plywood stiffened by a 2″ x ¾″ khaya framework and braced with the 7/8″-thick khaya center thwart. Rather than having continuous risers, the forward and central thwarts bear on short supports, while the stern seat—made up of seven fore-and-aft boards laid out in an attractive fantail pattern—are supported by a 1-1/2″ x 3/4″ athwartships bearer and a pair of cleats on the transom.
The boat’s outwale is made up of three pieces: first a rabbeted section of khaya that covered the end-grain of the top edge of the top plank, then a 1/8″ piece of yellow cedar for aesthetics, and finally another piece of generously rounded khaya, giving a total gunwale thickness of 1″.
Nigel Sharp
The volume created by the broad transom helps support a passenger seated in the stern.
Fitted along the bottom edge of the sheer plank, as much for style as for a guard, was another piece of 1/2″ x 3/8″ khaya tapered at the ends.
After khaya spacers to support the inwales for the open gunwale were then fitted, the interior received the same base coats as had already been applied to the exterior, and then three coats of polyurethane paint. The khaya got five coats of varnish. The inwales were installed, and the hull was then turned over for paint and brass keel bands on the centerline, alongside the daggerboard case, and on the bilge runners.
Various ancillary parts were made up: the 1/2″-thick khaya sole boards which bear on the floors, the rudder and daggerboard in 7/8″ khaya, and spars and oars of Sitka spruce. “The instructions and plans were nicely detailed and if ever there was any small confusion, we were able to figure it out,” said Sam. “We didn’t need to refer to Oughtred’s Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual.”
The boat was launched on a gray, at first windless, day in June. Sam and the two students who had most helped him with the build, Sam Ferguson and Amaya Hernández, climbed aboard and rowed out of the Lyme Regis harbor; the tanbark lug sail that Sam had made hung limply. After a while I replaced Sam Ferguson and a gentle breeze soon came off the land. We then enjoyed a brief sail as the boat slipped along nicely in the flat water.
It didn’t seem too crowded with three of us on board until we tacked. That would have been much easier with two, but maybe with a little practice three people could negotiate a better procedure. Starboard tack was the favored one for the balanced lug rig, but any loss in performance on port tack when the sail was pressed against the mast was imperceptible.
Nigel Sharp
The Auk’s full bilges make a burdensome hull with good capacity. The stretched version here has room and freeboard enough for three; the 7’10” unstretched version will carry two comfortably.
At one point, a speedboat came close by at about 20 knots, and Sam and I watched the approaching wash with some trepidation. When it arrived, however, we were boat pleasantly surprised with how easily the Auk coped with it, giving us no cause for alarm. The boat was much more stable than we expected.
We needed to get back into the harbor before the tide went out, so we dropped the sail and I rowed us back in. The three of us we were able to keep the boat on an even keel with Sam one side of the tiller in the stern and Amaya on the opposite side in the bow. At first, I was worried that there might not be room for my fairly long legs, but I soon found I could use the stern seat as a stretcher. Although the 8′ oars felt too long for me, and the leathers were too thick and prevented feathering, I could tell that the Auk will be a nice, easy boat to row. Sam’s Auk will be used mainly as a tender for his parents’ 32′ sloop. He plans to fit a rope fender around the Auk, using some old heavy-duty hemp, while her sailing rig will stow in a bag strapped to the front of the mothership’s mast. She will certainly be suitable for her role as a tender, and the option of also using her for exploring rivers, bays, and coves under oar or sail will be a welcome addition.
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.
Auk Particulars
[table]
Length/7′10″ or stretched to 8′10″ (as built here, 9′2″)
Beam/4′
Depth/19″
Weight/60 lbs
[/table]
Plans for the Auk are available from Oughtred Boats. Listed prices are in Australian dollars: $134.66 AUD (approx. $90.58 USD) for plans, $1235 AUD ($830.75 USD) for kits.
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 2018, I left my home dock on the Napanee River in southeast Ontario and headed for the Trent-Severn Waterway, a 240-mile chain of rivers, lakes, locks, and canals leading all the way to Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. My challenge would be to do this trip solo in SOL CANADA, a small wooden boat I’d built to be 100 percent solar-electric powered.
I knew of only one solar-electric boat that had traveled the full distance from Lock 1 in Trenton to Lock 45 in Port Severn, so they were the first. I’d be the first Canadian using only the sun to charge my batteries.
Photographs by the author
SOL CANADA’s canopy would not only keep me out of the sun and rain (mostly), but the four solar panels it carries would also generate all of the power I’d need for the trip.
SOL CANADA’s hull was based on the Greavette Dispro, manufactured by the Disappearing Propeller Boat Company from 1915 to 1958. An enclosed motorwell holds a Torqeedo Cruise 2.0 electric outboard, and in a compartment under the seats are four 6-volt batteries wired in series to provide 24 volts with a capacity of 221 amp-hours. I expected the boat to be capable of an average speed of 5.4 mph. The batteries are charged by four flexible solar panels on the canopy. They have a rated output of 860 watts.
At 7:30 a.m. on the morning of August 19, I motored away on what was supposed to be a sunny day with a light following breeze from the east. I headed down the 6-mile stretch to the mouth of the river, then along the Bay of Quinte to the city of Trenton—a distance of 31 miles.
There was a haze in the sky that cut the solar production by half, but on the bay, the easterly breeze was now a 12-mph tailwind and SOL, doing a bit of surfing, made good headway to the mouth of the Trent-Severn waterway at Trenton.
Two miles north upriver, the only boat heading upstream, I arrived at Lock 1 and went through immediately. The lockkeeper notified the next lock, just 3/4 miles away, that I was coming and its gate opened for me as I approached. There are three more locks in the first 6 miles of the Trent Canal, and all of them were expecting me with the gates open.
By the end of the first day of my trip, I had traveled 42 miles and had made it all the way to the top of Lock 5. With my home-made fabric walls rolled down into camping mode, SOL CANADA was ready for peaceful night’s sleep.
At 6 p.m. I motored out of Lock 5, well ahead of schedule. My total distance that day was 42 miles and my battery bank was at a 77 percent charge, good enough to carry me the next day if the conditions were poor. I was the only boat stopping for the night in a still-water cove above the lock. The lock master gave me a key to the staff washroom, kitchen, and the shower. Back at SOL, I prepared for the night by folding the seats down to make my bed and rolling down poly-tarp from the perimeter of the canopy. My enclosed sleeping quarters would get some peculiar looks, but they proved to be very comfortable.
On the morning of the second day, just north of Trenton at Lock 5, my good friends Ed and Sandy arrived by canoe to bring me a hot coffee and a homemade muffin. They just live 1/4 mile up river and frequently paddle this stretch of the Trent River.
The morning sky was clear, and the sun quickly warmed SOL’s enclosure. Ed and Sandy, old friends who live close by the lock, arrived by canoe bringing coffee and a muffin. After saying goodbye and packing my things, I rolled the curtains up and SOL was ready to go. It was such a sunny day, I figured I could maintain a good pace without drawing the batteries down. I got to Lock 6 at Frankford before the morning got busy with boat traffic.
All along the river, weeds choked the shallows, and islands of free-floating weeds ripped up by boats clumped together on the surface. I can see the power gauge jump when weeds get pulled in between the prop and the housing. Although I’d made a prop guard, weeds were still a problem, but I could throw the motor into reverse and almost always shed them. Sometimes I’d have to stop and tear them out.
When I emerged from Lock 6 at Frankford under a bright clear sky, the lock opened on water foul with weeds. Just 1/2 mile ahead they’d bring me to a stop.
Just past the Frankford lock, in a narrow quiet channel with cedar trees hanging over the bank, I felt the motor vibrate with weeds tangled in the prop. Shifting into reverse did not get rid of them, so I put the controller into neutral. As I removed the weeds, I did not notice that the breeze had pushed me close to shore. When I realized what was happening, I quickly twisted myself back into my seat to take control, and in my haste my elbow hit the throttle. The boat lurched forward into overhanging branches, and the 100-lb canopy came crashing down beside me. My shouts echoed across the channel. I should have pulled the magnetic kill switch before working on the prop.
I thought the trip was over. I made my way back to Lock 6 where two lockkeepers and a boater lifted the canopy up while I reinserted the front posts and drove screws back into the holes they’d been torn out of. One solar cable at the back had been pulled apart, and I had to splice it back together. After two-and-a-half hours, the boat was a bit battered but operational. I could keep going forward.
My packs containing my supper provisions and gas stove were on the picnic table as my boat was moored for the night at the top side of Lock 8, Percy Reach. After eating, I finished the repairs to the canopy supports.
I finished the day at Lock 8, a quiet site with campsites. I removed the screws that had been torn out, added glue to the holes, and reinserted the screws. I cooked up some spaghetti on my camp stove and was in bed by 9 p.m.
Morning came with heavily overcast skies; the forecast called for rain later in the day. So much for getting ahead of schedule.
I reached Lock 9 before its keepers arrived at 9 a.m. While I waited, I walked around the grounds. Set between farmlands to the east and a wooded island to the west, it would have been a very peaceful place to spend a night. Like many of the locks on the lower part of the Trent, this one was isolated from towns, their bridges, and their traffic. When the staff arrived, I spoke with the lock master; he mentioned he had a friend named Peter who was an editor and interested in stories for an online newspaper. I provided my phone number in case he wanted to do a story on my boat.
Just 1-1/2 miles upstream from Lock 9, I passed through Lock 10. Locks 11 and 12 were piggybacked one on top of the other for a combined lift of 48’. After about two hours on the water, with the rain pouring down and driving in from the starboard side, I got a call from the editor, Peter Fisher, and arranged to meet him the following morning. After seven locks and 12 miles in the rain, I arrived at the top of the two-lock flight of Locks 16 and 17. Lock 17 was not the nicest place to stay. The washroom was on the grubby side and the weather put me in a bad mood.
In the morning ,I had time to kill before meeting with Peter at 11 a.m. When he arrived, I invited him aboard for a ride on the boat as he interviewed me. I was back on my way at about 1 p.m., headed for Lock 18, 15 miles upstream.
Roger Siebert
.
The sky was overcast and the solar panels would not be generating much power. I’d have enough charge to get to Lock 18, in the town of Hastings, more than 14 miles upstream; but the following day, to cover 37 miles to Lock 19 at the outskirts of the city of Peterborough, I’d need to start out with fully charged batteries and have sun along the way.
As I was approaching Lock 18, a motoryacht, NEPENTHE, passed by and entered the lock ahead of me. After exiting, we both docked at the concrete wall on the north side of the river. NEPENTHE’s owners, Paul and Jill, and their passenger Tom, are “Loopers,” traveling the 6,000-mile-long Great Loop, a chain of waterways passing through the U.S. and Canada via the Mississippi River and the Intracoastal Waterway. Dale and Ann aboard UTOPIA, another yacht stopped for the night, were also Loopers. For dinner, the six of us walked to a nearby eatery . The yachters asked if I had seen a kayaker named Steve who was paddling the Great Loop. I hadn’t, but said I’d keep my eyes peeled for him.
When morning broke, the day promised to be mostly sunny, just what I needed to get to the Peterborough lock. I left just past 8:30 and headed 5 miles west to Rice Lake, a 20-mile-long shallow lake that can be very rough when a stiff westerly blows, exactly what I faced that morning. SOL crashed over the waves, and the wind howled and made the canopy sway. The quiet electric motor made noise of the elements seem so much louder.
After 17 miles on the lake, I turned north into the Otonabee River where I found shelter from the wind, even though I was traveling against a strong current of about 2 mph. At the Bensfort Bridge, 7 miles upstream, I met with another reporter, Jason Bain, of the Peterborough Examiner. The riverbank where he was standing was rocky, so I anchored 30′ from shore for the interview. We talked for a while, and as I was getting ready to leave, I tried to pull the anchor up, but it wouldn’t budge. I had to cut the rode. Jason felt bad that I had to lose the anchor and promised to replace it.
It took me about 4 hours to make my way to Lock 19 into Peterborough and the lockkeeper there presented me with a new anchor and rode left for me, courtesy of the Peterborough Examiner. Jason called; I thanked him and told him the story of the anchor. In 1964, my father was working on a hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls. A coffer dam constructed above the falls exposed the riverbed, and among the artifacts lodged in the rocks were two anchors. My dad brought them home and the one I’d lost was one of them. Jason felt even worse that the anchor was a family heirloom, but month later, when I was back at home, Jason called again. Two SCUBA divers had heard about the missing anchor, found it snagged, and sent it to me.
Just 3/4 miles up from Lock 19, I stopped for the night at Lock 20 in the middle of Peterborough. My cousins Carl and Melba took me out to dinner.
With my cousin Carl aboard, we motored into the Peterborough lift lock, Lock 21. This is the largest of its type in the world, and lifts boats 65′ in a just a couple of minutes. At the top there is a panoramic view of the city of Peterborough.
In the morning, Carl joined me to ride up 65′ at Lock 21, the Peterborough Lift Lock, the largest hydraulic lift lock in the world. The locks are a side-by-side pair of 140′ by 33′ tubs called caissons, each sitting on top of a cylindrical ram, 7-1/2′ in diameter. When a caisson reaches the top, it stops a few inches below the water level of the upper canal and takes on water when the gates are opened. The additional water makes it the heavier of the two, and as it descends, water in its ram flows to the other ram to drive the lower caisson upward.
After the lift, I left Carl at the docking wall and chased after the other boats leaving the lock to join them in the 4-1/2-mile-long succession of five locks. If I fell behind I’d have to wait for the next opening, so I zipped along at 5 1/2 mph, figuring I could spare the extra batteries power.
About 14 miles from Peterborough, Lock 27 was the end of the Otonabee River and the entry to the Kawartha Lakes, a chain of a dozen lakes traversed by the waterway. The lock is in a park-like setting with a 200-yard-long island separating it from the rapids and dam where the Otonabee River rushes by.
After another good night I arose to yet another overcast day. I set out northbound on Clear Lake turned west at Stony Lake and passed through two of Lower Buckhorn Lake’s locks, finishing up at Lock 31.
By now, the interview with Jason had been published and I was hailed by boaters and people on shore. People in cars honked and waved at me.
At the west end of Lower Buckthorn, I arrived at the downstream side of Lock 31 and secured the last spot on the wall. It was a Saturday and there was a festival around the lock with live music. I made the rounds until the rain started and I retreated to SOL for the night.
On Sunday morning I headed south along Buckhorn Lake, a 1/2-mile-wide wooded corridor dotted with summer homes and bristling with finger piers. The water is utterly clear but looks black where it is deep. The land around the lake is blanketed with tall pine trees and dotted with granite outcroppings. The waterway turned west through a cluster of undeveloped islands and then north along Pigeon Lake. By midafternoon I reached Lock 32 at Bobcaygeon, a little town in the middle of cottage country. I’d only traveled 17-1/2 miles, but the next lock was another 18 miles away, more than I wanted to take on.
Bobcaygeon was a beautiful spot to stop for the night. There were lots of people around while I tied up the boat, many of whom had read about my adventure in the paper and asked about SOL. I took a walk around town and when I returned I saw a lone kayaker in the lock, his decks loaded with gear. I yelled down, “Are you Steve?”
“Yes,” he answered. I had found the kayaker paddling the Great Loop. After he left the lock, I gave him a hand unloading his gear and helped him set up camp. Steve Chard, 60 at the time, is from England, and had served in the ’70s on British nuclear submarines. We went out for supper and he told me about spending the Cold War years aboard a sub.
On Monday morning, Steve got a 30-minute head start on me, and it took me a couple of hours to catch up and pass him. We were both planning to go to Lock 35, in the rural community of Rosedale, for the night. I arrived at the lock well before he did and as I waited for the green light to enter, I heard the lockkeeper on the loudspeaker call out, “Come ahead, Phil.” Word of my journey had spread and I was now getting personal service.
I set up for the evening above the lock, which is far from any town and hemmed in by old trees, but not necessarily primitive: it had showers and free wi-fi. Steve arrived, set up camp, and we cooked supper together—a spicy Uncle Ben’s rice dish beefed up with a package of partly dehydrated steak chunks. Our meal was interrupted by our cell phones sounding a weather alert: there would be a tornado watch for the next few hours. When the rain started coming down, Steve and I took shelter. We soon had plenty of company. The all-clear notice came at midnight; Steve headed back to his tent and I got aboard SOL.
In the morning, I headed out onto Balsam Lake for a 5-mile crossing. The wind was blowing from the southwest at about 18 mph. The marked channel was exposed , so I veered north to take shelter in the lee of Grand Island, a mile-long, sparsely inhabited island in the middle of the lake. That was fine for half of the crossing, but west of the island, beyond the lee, whitecaps splashed over the bow. I slowed down to limit the spray. At the end of the crossing, with only 1/4″ of water in the bottom of the boat, I entered a quiet, 30-yard-wide canal.
After crossing the very rough water of Balsam Lake on my 10th day underway, I entered into a very long stretch of hand-dug canal where some of the original tailings still remain piled high on the banks. I was relieved to be out of the strong west wind that plagued me on the lake and have this peaceful canal all to myself.
Two long stretches of canal here—separated by the 1-1/2-mile crossing of Mitchell Lake—were dug by hand, straight as an arrow, just wide enough for two boats to pass. Mounds of stone piled by laborers along the banks well over a century ago are still there. I savored the solitude and silence. The only sound SOL makes is the murmur of her bow waves.
Lock 36 is the Kirkfield Lift Lock, slightly smaller than the one in Peterborough, and SOL, the only boat locking through, was dwarfed by the 140′-long caisson. After the gate closed, we dropped 49′, the first descent after gaining about 600’ in elevation since leaving Trenton. The rest of my journey would be downstream.
After I exited the Kirkfield lift lock, the caisson on the left took on two boats and had its gate closed behind them, ready to be raised.
UTOPIA was moored for the night at the downside wall, so I pulled in astern. Dale and Ann invited me aboard, and while we were swapping stories, Steve emerged from the lock and paddled over to join us for barbecued bratwurst.
Steve was in the lead as we approached the Gamebridge Lock 41, the last lock before heading out onto the sometimes treacherous Lake Simcoe.
Steve and I set out from Kirkfield and descended five locks over 11 miles of canal, stopping at Lock 41, which lies just 1-1/2 miles from Lake Simcoe. A sign at the lock warns boaters to be wary and check weather conditions prior setting out on the 14-mile crossing of the lake. Its shallow depth and broad fetch can make it extremely hazardous, with waves that can reach 6′. Steve and I planned to be on the lake by 7 a.m., before any wind came up. I’d follow the channel right out to the center of the lake; Steve would paddle along the shore, which would take considerably more time.
I entered the lake under a dark, overcast sky with a northeast wind already starting to blow. With SOL running at 4-1/3 knots it would take 3-1/2 hours to reach shelter in the waterway through the city of Orillia. As I made my way farther into the lake, the waves grew, probably only about 2′ high, but they pitched SOL back and forth. The canopy was swaying, and to stabilize it I braced with my legs and held on to it with my left hand, like a guy driving down the highway, holding a mattress on the roof of his car. I slowed down to about 3-3/4 mph to keep breakers from crashing over the foredeck. By the time I got to Orillia, my legs were like rubber, but SOL hadn’t taken on too much water.
Beyond Orillia, I navigated a narrow gap into Lake Couchiching, a 10-mile passage, but in that narrow lake the water was merely choppy. In just over two hours I was across and headed up 1-3/4 miles of canal to Lock 42, nestled in a dense forest of white pine, beautiful and quiet. The wind blowing through the trees rustled of the needles and imparted a fragrance to the air. Steve sent me a text saying his trip around Lake Simcoe had been slow and he would spend the night in Orillia.
After I passed through Lock 43 at Swift Rapids, I could see the magnificent structure of the lock and the hydroelectric dam adjacent to it.
Just 32 miles separated me from Lock 45 at Port Severn, the gateway to Georgian Bay. Going downstream now, SOL was at times making 6-1/4 mph. Only two locks remained. The towering Lock 43 at Swift Rapids lowered me 46′, and Lock 44 at Big Chute is not really a lock but a marine railroad. A huge flatbed car on train tracks rolled down a slope into the water, and I drove SOL over it, stopping over a pair of slings that cradled the hull. The car carried SOL and a handful of other boats 185 yards over a rocky hill to the other side and back into the water. The ride was a bit bumpy and not as fast as a lock.
The so-called Lock 44 at Big Chute is actually an overland marine railroad, the only one on the Trent-Severn waterway. The adjustable straps can securely hold almost any hull shape, but even so it is a bit of a bumpy ride. (This picture is from is my second visit, on the return part of the trip.)
I cruised the final 8 miles through a chain of irregular lakes to Port Severn, where I tied up for the night at one of the docks near the entry to the lock.
On a beautiful Saturday morning I lined up for the lock before 9 a.m., bound for Honey Harbor. After passing through, I entered the channel, threading between countless islets and rocky shoals on the fringe of Georgian Bay. A dozen miles north, I arrived at Honey Harbor, and after a stop for a lunch of a burger and fries, headed back to Port Severn. There I tied up near a harborfront restaurant for the evening. Thunderstorms were predicted, and while I was in the restaurant the storm hit. Forked lighting struck all around, one flash and thunderclap after another.
I waited until the storm passed before returning to SOL for the night.
My plan for the next day was to start my journey back home along the way I’d come. I was now about three days behind schedule, with unstable weather predicted for the next four days.
I headed out in the morning under an overcast sky and a destination of getting to Lock 43, Swift Rapids. The sky cleared and by the time I got there it was a sunny, hot day. I moored at the top side of the lock and set up camp. The weather forecast for the coming days was not encouraging, and I’d surely have trouble on Lake Simcoe on my return crossing. I decided I would go only as far as Washago at the north end of Lake Couchiching and have my son-in-law pick me up there at the Washago town dock.
SOL had navigated 337 miles in 16 days, and I had reached my goal of traveling solo up the entire Trent Severn Waterway from Lock 1 to Lock 45 using 100 percent solar energy—a first as a Canadian and a first for a solo skipper. I’m happily satisfied with that.
Phil Boyer retired in 2017 after working 38 years in R&D in the telecommunications industry. He now keeps busy teaching karate at two local clubs and building boats. He has been around boats his whole life, starting with paddling as a kid. At age 11 he built a sailing pram with a bit of help from his father. In 2006 he began building solo canoes and now has four of them, featured in the August 2019 issue. Phil’s interest turned to building SOL CANADA, his solar-electric boat, in 2015. His next build will be a solar-electric version of the Power Cat he read about in the March 2016 issue of Small Boats Magazine.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
My planer’s first set of wheels was a set of chair casters inserted in holes in the 2x2s attached to the base. Here one of the 2x2s is clamped to a dolly. The 2×4 being planed is pushing against the door at the back of the shop as the feed rollers drive the planer forward.
When I built my 19′ decked lapstrake canoe, my shop was in a cellar not quite 30′ long, so working with 20′ lumber for the keel and gunwales was a bit awkward. I could rip planks on my table saw by making a partial cut, stopping the saw, and flipping the plank around to finish the cut from the opposite end. A thickness planer can’t easily accommodate stopping, removing the lumber, and starting again, so I put mine on wheels. I’d start it up on the far end of the basement, feed the lumber in, and when the stock hit the wall, the planer would propel itself across the shop floor. It left a trail of chips behind it, but that was before I had a dust collection system so I had to sweep up anyway.
Coiling Tie-Down Straps
A figure-8 coil keeps tie-down straps in a compact, twist-free package.
Tie-down straps with cam buckles are very tidy devices for holding kayaks and canoes securely on roof racks, as well as a host of other applications, but they’re not so tidy when they’re piled in the back of the car waiting to be used. The 1″ webbing common to most straps doesn’t take as well to a loose coil as rope does, and winding them in a tight coil around the buckle requires something to keep them from coming undone. A better way to coil straps comes from the days when computers stored data on punched paper tape. Russ, a former Army intelligence officer turned kayaker, coiled tie-down straps the same way he had coiled paper tape by wrapping it in figure-8 turns around his extended thumb and pinky finger. The figure-8s have the advantage of alternating twists, so when the coil is undone, the webbing isn’t tangled up on itself.
Start by letting the buckle hang down about 3” from the inside of the pinky of your left hand. Feed the strap with your right hand and let the left hand do most of the work. Rotate your left hand, pulling the webbing around the outside of the pinky then keep rotating until you can dip your thumb under the webbing. Reverse the rotation, pulling webbing from your right hand until you can dip your left pinky under the webbing. That’s one figure-8. Repeat until you have all but about 18″ of webbing remaining. Remove the coil from your thumb and pinky and press the buckle into the hollow where your thumb was. Pinch the center of the figure-8s in the middle, fold the tail end at a right angle and take two or three tight wraps around the coil. Tuck the tail end under the last wrap and cinch it tight. That’s it.
Here’s a step-by-step look:
Hang the buckle from your pinky.
Pull the webbing around your pinky and lead it over your thumb.
Bring the webbing over the pinky, finishing the first figure-8.
Continue making figure-8s, always keeping the webbing flat and without twists.
Pull your thumb out and press the buckle into the recess.
Wrap the remainder of the webbing around the middle of the figure-8s.
Tuck the tail under the last wrap.
Cinch tight.
When you need to use the strap, pull the tail end free, undo the wraps, hold the buckle, and drop the figure-8s. The strap is ready to use.
Flag-Folding Tarps
The flag-folded tarp stays wrapped tight by tucking its end into a pocket in the folded triangle.
The method for folding a national flag into a triangle works quite well for camping and workshop tarps and ground-cloths too. The last step tucks the tail end away and the package will hold itself together. Two people can make quick work of folding a tarp, but if there’s no one else around, a spring clamp comes in quite handy. Fold one of the short sides of the tarp in half and clamp the corners to a fixed object. Move to the other end, pull the tarp tight and make the same fold, and then fold it in half again. Return to the clamped end and put a second and a third fold in, making the tarp 1/8th of its full width. Walk the unclamped end out, to tension the tarp again and put the third fold in that end.
Fold one corner in to form a triangle and then “roll” the triangle along the quartered tarp, drawing the fabric tight around the triangle. Stop when you have a leg of triangle (not the hypotenuse) crossing the fabric with at least a leg’s length of fabric remaining. If you have less, back up; if you then have more, fold the remainder to make it about as long as a leg of the triangle. Fold the remainder diagonally to make a mirror-image triangle and then tuck that triangle tight into the pocket formed by the wraps.
Here’s how that looks:
If you’re folding a tarp on your own, have a spring clamp lend a hand.
Start with the tarp folded in half and have the clamp hold the two corners, then fold the other end to halve the tarp.
A second fold quarters the tarp’s width.
The third fold decreases the width eightfold.
Fold one corner on a diagonal to form a triangle.
Flip the triangle along the length of the tarp.
Keep rolling the triangle until you’re close to the end and you have the triangle’s edge square to the tarp. Here there’s not enough tarp left to get to the next squared edge, so the remaining tarp will be folded toward the triangle.
Fold the tail end to make a mirror-image triangle.
Tuck the tail end into the pocket of the triangle.
Throw the flag-folded tarp in the boat if you like—it won’t come undone.
IKEA Slats for a Sleeping Platform
Resting on ledges on either side of the cabin passageway, the slats form a platform for a mattress. White polyester straps fastened to the bottom of the slats keep them together and evenly spaced.
One of our readers, Mike B., asked if I’d ever used IKEA bed slats to create a sleeping platform for overnight cruises. I hadn’t, but just happened to have a spare roll of 27-1/2″ (70 cm) slats for a double bed (Luröy), picked up free off a want ad, and a little canal boat that needed an upgrade for the bulky 3/4″ plywood panels we’d been using to create a sleeping platform in the cabin. The slats are slightly arched and made of 17 layers of hardwood veneer. The space for the slats is 24″ wide, so I had to trim them to fit. They’re joined by a pair of polyester ribbons, so I clamped the slats together and used a chop saw to take a bit off each end.
Stacked together, the slats take up very little room. The ledges for the slats are evident on the seats, on a beam spanning the gap under the table, and on the table itself when it’s lowered to create a queen-sized sleeping platform.
At night, the slats rest on ledges to either side of the passageway between the cabin’s side benches. Stops hold the slat at each end so the whole set is kept in place, just as they are on an IKEA bed, when a mattress is laid on top.
The slats are springy for comfort and are able to support a mattress and a sleeping crew member, just as they would in a bed frame. They’re easily stacked for storage, and take up much less space and weigh a lot less than plywood panels.
Christopher Cunningham is editor of Small Boats Magazine.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
For years, decades really, I’ve struggled moving boat trailers around by hand. They always seem to be on grass or dirt; somehow I’ve never had the luxury of paving. My jack wheels can create a lot of serious drag in grass, and they’ll dig holes in dirt when I straighten them out.
A thread on the WoodenBoat Forum, an immensely valuable resource for me, addressed this problem. “Thorne,” the forum member who started the thread, discovered Croft Trailer Supply in Kansas City, Missouri, not a place I’d think of for boating gear. Croft makes a pneumatic-wheel kit with dual 10″ wheels. The plated-steel hubs have grease fittings to lubricate the axle and bushings. Between the wheels is a plated-steel caster plate with a 2″ socket.
Photographs by the author
The two 10″ pneumatic tires provide lots of support on soft ground. The rope coiled around the winch post is what the author uses to pull the trailer; the jack-stand wheels follow on their own. The grease fitting for the far wheel is visible on the inside of the hub.
Several forum users bought the Croft wheel kit. One was especially interested in using the wheels with a light aluminum trailer that he pushes by hand across sand. At $90, the kit seemed pricey, but the other option I’d considered, a two-wheeled hand dolly, costs about the same. I often need to move the trailer when I’m away from home, and a hand dolly isn’t easy to carry along. So, I went ahead and got the kit.
To fit it to my existing jack stand, I had to cut off the welded-on caster wheel. It could have been done with a hacksaw, but it was much faster to use a grinder with a cut-off wheel, while wearing, of course, gloves, a full face shield, and ear protectors against the sparks and noise.
The caster plate is bolted to the jack-stand’s extending tube, which must be able to rotate for the wheels to pivot. The author’s plastic-pipe adapter, with a small gap where it it split, is visible here.
The Croft caster plate is built to fit a rotating 2″ jack tube. Mine was only 1-1/2″ in diameter, so it needed a bushing to fit snugly. One of the forum users found a bronze pipe of the right size, and there is mild steel tubing with a 2″ outer diameter and a 1-1/2″ inner diameter, but I happened to have a piece of 1-1/2″ PVC pipe. I cut a short length of it, then sawed a slot in it so I could open it up to fit around the tube. The pipe was a bit too thick, so I used my angle grinder with an 80-grit disc to thin it down for a snug fit in the caster-plate socket.
The caster plate’s socket is fitted with a 1/2″ bolt, so I needed to drill a matching hole through the tube and PVC. My 1/2″ drill bit was not up to the task, so I invested in a hardened metal bit at about twice the cost. Chucked into my 20-volt battery-powered drill, it did the job just fine. You need to be careful when drilling through metal: When the bit breaks through the back side, the tip of the bit can catch and set a piece of metal spinning or, if the metal is well anchored, wrench the drill out of your hand.
Even with the two oversize wheels, the jack will still fold away. With the wheels down, I can now push and pull the trailer easily over grass and dirt. Gone is the struggle. I like my new “four-wheel trailer” so much that if I were to get another trailer, I’d move my upgraded jack to it.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International canoe to a faering.
The pneumatic wheel kit is available from Croft for $182.95 plus shipping. Price current as of June 2024.
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.
We do a lot of sanding for our small-boat restorations and builds, and have relied upon a shop vacuum to collect dust. It does the job but leaves us with bags to empty and filters to clean or replace, which is messy and costly. That changed when we bought an Oneida Dust Deputy cyclone separator to collect the dust on its way to the Shop-Vac. The device uses the centrifugal force of a cyclonic airflow to separate dust and heavier particles, drops the debris into a collection bucket, and sends cleaned air to the vacuum. The collection bucket is easy to empty, and we can use the Shop-Vac without the HEPA bags and even without them, the filter rarely needs to be cleaned.
Photograph by the authors
The kit for the Dust Deputy includes a pair of 5-gallon buckets: one to gather dust or even water, and another nested below it that has casters and an attachment to the Shop Vac so the whole system can move as one unit.
We bought an Oneida “deluxe kit” that includes the cyclonic separator, a 3′ hose with two elbow adapters, and two 5-gallon buckets, one to collect dust, the other, equipped with casters, to be connected to the Shop-Vac as a “sidecar” to carry the other bucket. The cyclonic separator can also be purchased separately for attachment to different collection buckets and or to fit to larger collection bins. After attaching the sidecar with the hardware provided, we used our ShopVac hose to connect the Dust Deputy to our various sanders, thickness planer, crevice tool, bristle brush, and floor brush.
The Dust Deputy easily handled sanding two coats of epoxy paint off a Sunfish, and when we were finished we had filled about one-quarter of the 5-gallon bucket with dust and had very little material inside the Shop-Vac. For another job, we ran some cypress through a thickness planer, and without the Dust Deputy, the Shop-Vac would have filled a disposable bag almost immediately; with the Dust Deputy we easily collected and emptied the 5-gallon bucket of shavings.
We continue to use the HEPA filter in our Shop-Vac without the HEPA bags to keep the air as clean as possible and have noticed a visible reduction in dust around our shop. Since the filter doesn’t get caked with dust, the vacuum always pulls with full power. We get excellent performance cleaning up the sawdust, wood chips, and other debris that collects on the floor. Any debris that can pass through the 2″ hose, things like pine needles and small leaves and the occasional wood screw, can get through the cyclone. There are no moving parts to reduce airflow or to damage, and the parts are easy to rinse off.
The small Dust Deputy kit, attached to the Shop-Vac, is mobile, and we move it all around our shop and outdoors. It took a few minutes to get used to the extra bucket following the Shop-Vac around, but the superior air quality and cleaner work environment are well worth it. Many folks build a cart and stack the Dust Deputy over their vacuum for a smaller footprint, and to keep all the attachments together.
The Shop-Vac bags are no longer needed, the filter will very rarely have to be replaced, and the Dust Deputy will pay for itself with the savings. We are having fun using it and appreciate the better dust removal, freedom from cleaning the filter, and higher-capacity debris collection.
Kent and Audrey Lewis mess about in small boats on the Emerald Coast of Florida. Their blog can be found at smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com.
Glenn Joyner, after 43 years as an educator, decided to retire and delivered his notice of retirement to the administrators of John Paul II Catholic High School (known as JPII) in Greenville, North Carolina. Glenn had served as the school’s first principal when it opened in 2010, and a few years later he took on a position as an English teacher. The school community was reluctant to let him go, and at the annual spring banquet one of the school’s benefactors asked Glenn what it would take to get him to stay. Glenn said, half joking, “Build me a boatshop on campus and let me teach boatbuilding instead of English.” The school took the deal, built a campus boatshop, and Glenn stayed on.
Photographs by or courtesy of Glenn Joyner
Rolling the hull upright was an occasion that merited a class photo.
His idea wasn’t completely out of the blue. For the previous four years, he had conducted boatbuilding night classes for JPII students in his backyard boatshop. Each year, between January and May, the students who gathered in Glenn’s barn built and launched a new outboard skiff, starting with a the 15′ Diablo designed by Phil Bolger and Harold “Dynamite” Payson, the 14′6″ Little Moby by Charles Wittholz, the 16′ Shoestring by Karl Stambaugh, and finally the 16′ San Juan Dory by David Roberts. The students were enthusiastic and undaunted when they finished a boat only to discover it was too wide to get it out of the shop. They just took the door off its hinges and cut out a bit of the wall.
The school’s new shop has the luxury of two garage doors, each big enough to move boats in and out without cutting into the walls. The 7’6″-wide Kingfisher has a few inches of clearance on either side.
Glenn’s class at JPII is now among the most popular electives, and he has twice as many students as he had at home. That’s 10 students, a healthy percentage of the school’s 120-student population. They come from a broad spectrum of backgrounds; some have never used power tools or been aboard a boat and very few have even seen a wooden boat.
Trailered up, the Kingfisher is ready for the water. Along the wall are two other student-built boats: a Rubens Nymph and a Payson’s Pirogue.
As the boatshop got up and running, students built a Rubens Nymph, a 7′9″ pram designed by Bolger and a 13′ Payson’s Pirogue designed by “Dynamite” Payson. The Kingfisher 18, built to plans from Glen-L, is the first big boat to emerge from the shop. To power the deep-V plywood hull the school acquired a rebuilt 90-hp Johnson outboard. The fuel tank went out of the way under the floorboards to add to the boat’s stability.
With the project nearing completion, the student builders gather for the finishing touches.
Launch day for each new boat is a big day at JPII, and with the Kingfisher’s 7′6″ beam it helped that the new boatshop has two garage doors. There was no delay getting the boat out and on its way to the water. Once it was afloat, the boat moseyed from the launch out to open water where the throttle could be opened wide. It took off with exhilarating speed, and the V bottom provided a smooth ride. None of the students who were along for the ride had ever gone so fast in a boat.
Teacher Glenn Joyner backs the Kingfisher away from the ramp as class boatbuilders enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Soon after the boat was launched, it was purchased by the parents of two JPII students, but there will be more boats and more students, and it may be a long time before Glenn submits another notice of resignation.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
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I Look forward to seeing you on the boat.
Editor: Chris Cunningham
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Unlimited access to our searchable archive (since 2014)
Critical reviews of great small boats
In-depth tests of gear and techniques
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Small Boats Magazine is a monthly web-based magazine dedicated to owners and users of boats that can be stored and maintained by the boat enthusiast.
From boats propelled by a paddle (like the one pictured above) to boats designed to be powered by oar, sail, or motor, Small Boats Magazine has monthly content to help you explore your passion for boating.
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We share your passion for boats and we’d like you to be a part of our community. As a member, you’ll be notified of our new content each month, have access to the entire archive of searchable articles (since our launch in 2014), our popular classifieds, and some great new features we’ll be rolling out later this year. Plus, you can cancel at any time.
I Look forward to seeing you on the boat.
Editor: Chris Cunningham
Join the Small Boats community and you’ll receive:
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Critical reviews of great small boats
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Small Boats Magazine is a monthly web-based magazine dedicated to owners and users of boats that can be stored and maintained by the boat enthusiast.
From sail boats (like the one pictured above) to boats designed to be powered by oar, paddle, or motor, Small Boats Magazine has monthly content to help you explore your passion for boating.
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Dennis Ryerson
Dennis Ryerson
Dennis Ryerson
Dennis Ryerson
Sam Devlin
Sam Devlin
