The HDPE strips and StarBoard-covered bunks made moving the boat off and back on the trailer much easier than the bare plywood deck and carpet-padded bunks did.
I have four boat trailers, and on all of them the boats drag over bare wood and come to rest on the bunks padded with carpet. Rollers seemed to be the only alternative, and may work for all the motorboats that I see throttling up to power onto their trailers, but they weren’t well suited to any of my boats. I have bearing buddies installed, but I prefer to keep them—and the taillights—out of the water whenever I can, so I like a trailer with a plywood platform that I can safely walk on for pushing a boat out to launch and pulling a bow up out of the water to retrieve a boat. The plywood trailer decks and the carpet-covered bunks create a lot of drag; even when I’m launching the boat and have the slope in my favor, it takes a hard shove.
Carpet gets less boat-friendly with use and age. My boats come out of the water pretty clean, but when I vacuumed the carpet I was going to replace with HDPE, I extracted a lot of grit, which appeared, under magnification, quite fine compared with beach sand,. I suspect it was picked up from roads while driving. And the pile of the carpet padding I’d put on one trailer 10 years ago has become quite stiff and is now more of an abrasive than a cushion. I don’t mind the painted hulls getting a bit scuffed—they’re meant for the rigors of cruising—but I don’t want my Whitehall’s varnished Port Orford planks to prematurely lose their shine.
High-density polyethylene is as easy to work as softwood. This 1″ Forstner bit cut right through the 1/2″-thick panel.
A few years ago, I had added some small pieces of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) across the centerline of one of the trailers plywood decks to reduce the friction of bare wood. I was pleased with how much easier it made launching and retrieving my 14′ Whitehall, so when I modified that trailer with a longer tongue for my 19’ Caledonia yawl, I decided to replace the carpet-padding on the bunks with StarBoard by King Plastics, a slippery marine-grade HDPE. I bought 3/8″ StarBoard for the two bunks, stiff enough to keep its shape and thick enough to accommodate countersinks for screws. The material is easily worked with common shop tools. I quickly rounded the corners with a router and drilled holes with Fuller bits and Forstner bits. I used galvanized screws to secure the StarBoard to the 2×6 bunks. The HDPE was more than solid enough to keep the screw heads from pushing past the countersinks.
The difference the HDPE makes at the ramp is dramatic. When the yawl was resting on carpet and plywood, I had to put my shoulder into the bow to push the boat into the water, and that was with the slope of the ramp in my favor. Now even standing upright with just my hands on the boat I can push it back, even when the trailer is on level ground. The reduced friction means I have to be prepared for the boat to pick up its own momentum when it’s being launched at the ramp. When it’s steep, I can loop the painter around the winch post to check the boat’s speed. Bringing the boat back aboard the trailer takes much less work than before. The winch no longer takes two hands on the crank to bring the boat up the last several feet.
With the reduced friction, having the boat well secured on the trailer is all the more important. An extra tie-down strap or two can keep the boat in place, and a preventer chain made to the bow eye is a worthwhile backup to the winch connection.
Where I’ve installed HDPE, and the especially slippery StarBoard in particular, I’ve greatly decreased the strain on the boat, the winch, and my back when I’m at the launch ramp. I have two boats that are too big and heavy to take off their trailers while they’re at home, but installing HDPE is simple enough that I can cut, router, and drill the pieces at home and then install them at the ramp while my son motors to one of the waterside restaurants to pick up lunch for the two of us.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The author is grateful for the recommendation to try StarBoard, which came through Kent and Audrey Lewis from Steve Baum, who had made the same switch on his trailer.
Starboard is available from a number of retailers. Search online for “Starboard HDPE.” For the bunks shown here. I bought two 3/8″ x 5″ x 60″ pieces for $50 at the Seattle TAPS Plastics store.
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Years ago the wooden mast in our Drascombe Lugger was getting wear marks where it contacted the wooden partner/thwart. The manufacturer didn’t put leathers on the masts to protect them and the partners didn’t have room for adding leathers, so I needed another solution. At about the same time, Audrey brought a roll of tape home from a theater event; it was gaffer tape, used to secure cables to equipment and stages. On that day we welcomed Pro Gaff Gaffer Tape to our small-boat rigging kit.
Duct tape is a staple in the kit for shops, camps, and boats, but for many jobs, there’s a better product: gaffer tape. It’s made of heavy cotton fabric and, unlike duct tape, does not have a slick polyethylene coating. It adheres with a synthetic rubber adhesive (SRA) that does not leave residue behind, as duct tape’s adhesive does, when it is removed. The tape has a nice look and feel, and does not become oily and sticky like some other types of multi-purpose tape. Gaffer tape has excellent adhesion and sticks well to the wooden, metal, and fiberglass surfaces on our fleet of boats, and it conforms to many different shapes.
SBM
Pro-Gaff’s gaffer tape comes in white, black, and 18 other colors.
The tape’s tensile strength is rated up to 50 pounds per inch of width, the equal of the best duct tapes. Gaffer tape protects a variety of components, it is easy to remove without damaging the surfaces, and it resists abrasion itself. The tape is easy to tear by hand, no scissors required, both off the roll or along its length to get a piece at just the right width. Gaffer tape has a matte finish, so it does not reflect light, and it is also tolerant of UV light.
Kent and Audrey Lewis
The tape was used instead of leather to protect a mast where it bears against the partner.
After we taped the lugger’s mast to protect it from abrasion by the partner/thwart, we were pleased by how well it stayed in place and survived the wear. We then used the tape to wrap a sprit where it rubs on our Penobscot 14’s mast.
Kent and Audrey Lewis
A spiral wrap of black gaffer tape reduces the chafing between a sprit and a mast.
Another bit of tape reduces wear and abrasion where the tiller bolt on our wooden Sunfish rubs the deck; we also taped the tiller extension, which gave it a good grip and a nice soft feel. We have used the tape as a spacer between dissimilar metals of the bronze gooseneck and aluminum boom on our Sunfish. Gaffer tape works great to wrap clevis pins and keeper rings to keep them from abrading the sails; we wrapped the bottom of the turnbuckles on our Day Sailer with gaffer tape to keep them upright while the mast is stepped and to prevent snagging the jib sheets under sail.
One of our most frequent uses has been to tape the last 1/2″ of a line, an “Electrician’s Whip,” before we applied a thread whipping.
There are many brands of gaffer tape, and we have been very happy with Pro Gaff’s offerings. Their regular gaffer tape is water resistant, and there is also a waterproof version. It comes in 20 colors—among them a glow-in-the-dark tape that could have interesting applications, and a camouflage tape. Pro Gaff Gaffer Tape is not as ubiquitous or as inexpensive as duct tape, but it is well worth adding to your kit.
Audrey and Kent seek prizes on the shoal waters of Northwest Florida when not taping things with gaffer tape. Their mess-about log can be found at their blog.
Gaffer tape works very well as a stand-in for first-aid tape, and wraps on tender fingers can ward off blisters at the beginning of a cruise that requires a lot of rowing.
SBM
The matte, textured surface of the tape takes pen and pencil marks well. The white tape is especially good for making clear, sharp marks. The tape on the table saw has a mark for stopping the cut at the right place on the bottom side of the wood; the gaffer tape on the side of the measuring tape provides a handy, transferrable place for recording dimensions.
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 Vintage 3-Strand has a soft feel and doesn’t tend to kink while coiling.
The Penobscot 14, with its glued-lapstrake hull and small sprit rig, resembles a traditional workboat, so when we rigged ST. JACQUES we wanted rope that matched the vintage look and had a soft feel with the strength and performance of the newest technology. We tested several samples of P.O.S.H., Hempex, Vintage Sta-Set, and Vintage 3-Strand in different diameters acquired from R&W Ropes.
The product we chose for ST. JACQUES was New England Ropes’ Vintage 3-Strand. It is a 100% polyester blend of spun and filament yarn that is UV stable. The spun yarn is made of softer, shorter lengths that are blended with the longer and stronger filament yarns. Vintage 3-Strand is available in nine different diameters ranging from 5/32″ up to 1″. Tensile strength of the line runs from 730 lbs for 5/32″ line up to 20,200 lbs for 1″, well in excess of the performance required by our small sprit rig. The line has low stretch properties, which make it acceptable for use in both running and standing rigging. The two colors available are Natural, a convincing hemp lookalike, and Noir, which looks like tarred line.
The Vintage 3-Strand here is being used for the snotter, the mast lacing, and the slender brail line.
The look of the 3-Strand is exactly what we want on our small sailing dinghy. It has a nice feel and is easy on the hands, being neither stiff nor scratchy. All of the other samples were stiffer; the 3-Strand is very flexible, running easily through the snotter and sheet blocks, and it coils nicely without any tendency to kink. It has a secure grip when wet and it dries quickly.
The ends of the line are easy to cut and whip—the line can be unlaid and twisted back together without excessive fraying. New England Ropes has excellent splicing instructions for 3-Strand on their website.
We have been using the line for two years now in a saltwater environment, and it has retained its clean new look, with no mildew or mold in outdoor storage. There have been no indications of wear, and the line has not abraded any of the paint or varnish on our boat.
We liked the 3-Strand so much that we also used it on our gaff-rigged Drascombe Dabber for the painter, halyards, downhaul, and sheets. We have been very happy with Vintage 3-Strand for its look and feel and its performance.
Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about in the shoal waters of Northwest Florida in their armada of vintage small boats.
I once saw LA BELLE OIE sailing away from the Puget Sound launch ramp as I was on my way back, and as always, I altered course to intercept her.
The first time I saw this lovely melonseed skiff was while I was kayaking on Seattle’s Lake Union. It was a couple of hundred yards away, and at that distance, there’s not often much to distinguish one small boat from another, but I was struck by its plucky low profile, understated sheer, and classic gaff rig. I paddled well out of my way to get a closer look and met her builder, Noah Seixas.
Since that first meeting, I’ve seen Noah sailing his melonseed many times—convinced now that there is no boat on the lake that’s prettier—and I always chase him down.
Noah grew up on Long Island and learned to sail in the ’60s aboard his father’s boats on Gardiners Bay, at the island’s eastern extremity. His schooling, which lingered a dozen years beyond a BA to a PhD, and work (he’s a professor of occupational health and safety at the University of Washington and now on the verge of retirement) kept him from devoting his time to boating, but it didn’t erase his fond memories of being on the water.
In the early 1990s, his budding career brought him to Seattle, where Puget Sound rekindled his memories of sailing Gardiners Bay, memories he shared with his ’tween daughter, Isabel, too often, evidently. “Dad,” she said, “stop talking about boats and build one.”
Noah Seixas
Young Isabel and Gus pose with the hull with the garage door open. The foredeck’s longest deck beams are supported by the centerboard trunk.
Noah started looking at boats with an eye toward building one, and the Wooden Boat Festival at Port Townsend offered many possibilities to consider. The boat that caught his eye was a melonseed skiff. The type was developed in the 1880s for waterfowl hunting in the bays of New Jersey. It was an improvement over its predecessor, the sneakbox, and could extend the hunting grounds from the marshes and mud flats to open water where the vertical bow could slip through the chop without taking water over the foredeck as the spoon-bowed sneakbox did. The drier ride makes the melonseed well suited to sailing for pleasure.
courtesy of Noah Seixas
With the skiff in its finishing stages, Gus (left) and Noah set it in the alley, across from the garage shop.
Noah purchased plans from The WoodenBoat Store for Marc Barto’s 16′ adaptation of the 1888 New Jersey melonseed gunning skiff documented in Howard Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft. Chapelle notes that the melonseeds built for hunting were carvel-planked, believing that lapstrake hulls were too noisy for approaching skittish waterfowl. Barto’s glued-lap plywood construction suited Noah just fine. He remembered all too well the annual summer chore of having to caulk, soak, and bail the family’s old carvel boats before they were ready for the sailing season. His father ultimately switched to a 20′ leak-free, cold-molded mahogany daysailer. It was in that leak-free boat, THE GOOD TERN, that Noah was infused with an affection for the beauty of varnish and the lapping of waves against a wooden hull, a soothing sound when the water isn’t seeping into it.
The plans for the Barto melonseed include full-sized patterns, often an indication of a project suitable for a beginner, but the build is an intermediate to advanced challenge. Noah’s most ambitious project before the melonseed was a Bevin’s Skiff, built from a kit, and while his home shop was equipped with the tools he needed for simple woodworking, he had to borrow a bandsaw and a thickness planer to do all the tasks the melonseed required. Fitting the boatbuilding in between work and home life, he could work only a couple of hours at a time on evenings and weekends. While his progress was slow, it was steady and he found the work engaging. “I was always looking forward to the next step,” he recalls. “In fact, I often would lie awake at night thinking about the next step, what I needed to do to make it all go together.” The project stretched out over four years, and the care he put into the work is evident. The boat looks as good up close as it does from a distance.
Christopher Cunningham
Making good speed in light air with a grown-up Isabel and Noah aboard, the melonseed shows the profile that draws me in no matter how far away I am when I spot it.
He christened his melonseed LA BELLE OIE, French for “the pretty goose.” It doesn’t have any special significance in French, or even in English. It’s a family homophonic joke. His daughter, Isabel, “is-a-Belle,” and his son, Gus, is the sound-alike goose.
Almost every time I get in touch with Noah, I ask him if he has put oarlocks on LA BELLE OIE. The Barto plans didn’t include details for oarlocks, but Chapelle’s drawing showed tholepins. I think the melonseed would make a fine rowing boat. I built a sneakbox to follow the route Nathaniel Bishop followed from 1875 to 1876 and wrote about in his book, Four Months in a Sneak-Box. My sneakbox rowed well on the Ohio and Lower Mississippi rivers, but on the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico it made for some miserable pulls to windward with the bow slapping against the chop. I had many occasions to wish Bishop’s book was Four Months in a Melonseed. Later, I had even started building a Barto 16′ melonseed to make up for Bishop’s lapse in judgment. I got the molds set up but then stalled and abandoned the project. I’ve been hoping Noah would make LA BELLE OIE rowable so I could recover a bit of my discarded dream.
courtesy of Noah Seixas
Dwarfed by the brig LADY WASHINGTON, a replica of a Revolutionary War ship, LA BELLE OIE heads out on Puget Sound.
Noah too is an avid rower but said, “The addition of oarlocks, while it would seem useful, is pretty elusive given the lack of a thwart, and the presence of the boom and gaff. A loose-footed sail, or lug rig might better accommodate a rowing station.” Thwarts were not installed in the original hunting sneakboxes either, and seating was provided by a box that could be moved out of the way when the hunter needed to hide by lying down in the cockpit. I suspect the early melonseeds had a similar arrangement, with easily removed seating. As for the boom, a topping lift would get it out of the way for rowing while the rig is up.
courtesy of Noah Seixas
This is how I often find Noah and LA BELLE OIE, sailing solo on Lake Union. Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats is just above the melonseed’s bow.
Whatever the practical issues there are with rigging LA BELLE OIE for rowing, I suspect I know why Noah hasn’t gone to the trouble of installing oarlocks and making a set of oars. When I see him sailing his melonseed, he is the picture of contentment, even when there’s only a whisper of wind. There’s not a good word for what I see in him when he’s aboard LA BELLE OIE, but there’s an apt expression in German: wunschlos glücklich—wishlessly happy.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
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The final week on the Danube brought Finn and Teresa to a short-cut to the Black Sea. Small boats aren’t allowed on the 40-mile-long canal, so they hitched a ride aboard a cargo-carrying motor barge. Join them for their last miles as they relaunch JILL at the end of the canal and row on the Black Sea under sunny skies.
The Caledonia yawl in my back yard was covered with a heavy frost this morning and all of the varnished ash had been turned from amber to silvery white. In the afternoon, when the I draped a tarp over the boat to protect it, I was daydreaming about waking up to a heavy frost after spending the night at anchor.
It has taken me a while to appreciate the cold. Before I took to adventures in small boats, my focus was on backpacking. It started as a summer activity with my father and older sister when I was about 10 and became a solo pursuit when I was 18. I kept increasing the challenge of wilderness travel, first by stretching the distances and later by shifting, by degrees, from summer to winter. In 1997, my friend Mark and I snowshoed across the Cascade mountain range. I have a vivid, lasting memory of getting up in the middle of the night for a pee break and seeing the light from my headlamp being reflected as thousands of flickers of light, brighter than anything I’d seen reflected by snow. During the night ice crystals had grown up from the surface of the snow, each like a hexagonal golf tee of crystal, some over 2” tall, and their cupped tops reflected the light back to me. The crystalline pillars would fall over with the slightest touch—even a breath could send them knocking others over like dominoes.
Deep in the woods, Mark and I found a trail maintenance shed that made a comfortable camp. The shin-length cagoule and foam-insulated booties I’d made kept me toasty warm.
I ultimately graduated to winter solo hikes and carried a heavy pack to a frozen alpine lake where I spent the first night in my tent, and the rest of the time in an igloo I made the following day. My boating took a similar trajectory, starting with summer cruises and drifting toward winter.
It was slow going in the Okefenokee Swamp, where temperatures were in the teens the water trails were barricaded with ice.
Paddling the East Coast from north to south, starting in September 1983, was intended to stay in autumn and keep pace with the migration of the cold weather that would clear alligators, snakes, and biting insects from our path. That strategy worked well until we reached Florida, when a cold front caught up with us. The St. Marys River was fringed with ice and parts of the Okefenokee swamp were frozen over. My paddling partner’s kayak had a long, overhanging bow, so she got the icebreaking duties. She’d sprint at the ice and ride up over it until the ice collapsed under the weight. We were free of the ice by the time we reached the Suwannee River, but it was still bitterly cold. We’d learned about “fat lighter” wood from the locals, so we’d camp where there were pine logs and stumps that had rotted away, leaving the resin-saturated heartwood. Even sticks that I pulled out of the river water would light and burn. The wood bubbled black resin as it burned and made hot, long-lasting fires that would hold the cold back until we were in our sleeping bags.
This raft seemed like a good place to spend the night, but it was bitterly cold. I didn’t sleep at all and just waited for dawn when I could row to warm up.
Two years later, when I started a solo rowing trip on the Ohio river in November, the idea was to travel with the leading edge of winter. I had a few cold nights. I stopped at a small marina on the Ohio shore, asking permission to sleep on the dock, and the owner’s son brought me an electric blanket and an extension cord. On my last night on the Ohio River, I dragged my sneakbox into a flooded field and woke the next morning with the boat locked in ice.
The Ohio River lies just beyond the row of trees, and I had a quiet night in this flooded field. I had slept aboard the boat, protected from the wind and insulated from the cold by the cedar hull and deck. The green and blue cagoule is the one I’d made for snowshoe hiking.
The field (in the photo above) that I’d waded the boat across the evening before, made for a noisy passage in the morning as the layer of ice buckled under the sneak box.
At another camp I had left my cook pot full of water to soak before I washed it. A hard freeze overnight had entombed my spoon in a solid block of ice.
In baseball, blistering line drives and long hard throws from the outfield are called “frozen ropes.” A wet painter, left taut overnight, is the literal version.
The cold caught up with me in earnest on the Mississippi River south of Memphis, Tennessee. A moonless night fell across the river before I was able to find a place to pull ashore. In the dark, carried fast by the current, it was even harder to spot a place to stop. A wind blowing upriver created a chop that splashed over the bow, coating the deck, the dodger, and my jacket with ice. I was aware of the numbness creeping from my hands and feet up my arms and legs. I’d had a run-in with hypothermia once before, and knew I’d be in trouble when the cold hit my core.
The beam of my flashlight picked up a bright patch of sand flanked by stands of dead reeds. I rowed for the sand but the reeds, frozen and coated with ice brought me up short. I had to back up and ram the reeds again to break through. I was racing against time to get a fire started. As I gathered dead wood the cold seeped into my core and I was doubled over and wracked by spasms. It took intense concentration to get the fire lit.
I got through the night, warmed by the fire, hot food, tent and sleeping bag. In the morning I woke up just as the sunlight set my tent aglow. Outside there was a single leafless tree surrounded by fist-sized cobbles. Its shadow, as intricate as a cathedral’s rose window, was white with frost, luminous against the wet black rock.
In the morning after that cold night south of Memphis, my boat was coated with ice and frost.
That night on the Mississippi taught me to better respect and prepare for cold, and the morning showed me another beautiful creation of winter, one that can easily go unnoticed.
I am much better equipped now to go boating in winter and can be quite comfortable when the weather turns cold. The frost on the boat in my backyard this morning doesn’t make me happy to be home. It makes me wonder what I’m missing by not being out on the water.
Joined by a schoolmate for the lower Danube River through Bulgaria and Romania, Finn and Tereza, draw near the Black Sea. One last barrier stands in their way—a canal that doesn’t welcome small boats. Watch as a Ukrainian merchantman comes to the rescue.
Still descending the Danube, Finn and Tereza found the going slow on a stretch of the river between Serbia and Romania. Rather than struggle for meager miles against a headwind, they did what any resourceful wayfarer would do: stick out a thumb and hitch a ride. Every wonder what it’s like to be towed alongside a barge doing 7 knots? Check out their latest video.
Lukas Schwimann’s home is in the village of St. Gilgen, Austria, at the top end of Lake Wolfgang—Wolfgangsee in German. A friend who lives near him owns a 16′5″ rowing skiff that has been in his family for about 100 years. The boat is not in great condition, but it is still serviceable. Over the years it has been patched up with chopped-strand mat and polyester resin. Lukas has had several opportunities to use it and has found it to be an enjoyable boat to row. He already has three sailboats, and his wife, Irmfried, insisted that if he were going to attend the Boat Building Academy at Lyme Regis and build a boat there, it would have to be a rowing boat. Lukas decided he would build a replica of the skiff.
Lukas Schwimann
New and old: the reproduction, here rowed tandem, has the same flat sheer as the original skiff behind it.
Lukas’s starting point was to take the lines off the old boat, although this proved particularly difficult as its shape had distorted somewhat over the years. “It was kind of hogged and sagged all at the same time,” said course tutor Mike Broome. When Lukas arrived at the Academy, he gave Mike the information he had. “It was a bit like a fairground ride,” said Mike, “but I breathed on it a bit with CAD and produced a table of offsets.” From this, Lukas and his fellow students lofted the boat full size and then “tweaked it here and there.”
Despite the distortion in the original boat, Lukas recognized that it had a fairly straight sheer and that was one characteristic that he was keen to retain. Although it is thought that it was originally used as a leisure boat, Lukas thinks it is a “workboat type and doesn’t have any fancy features” and he was also keen to replicate that. When he measured the skiff’s scantlings he kept coming across the figure of 44mm (1-3/4″) or neat divisions of it and used that as a guide through the lofting details.
Nigel Sharp
The cleats below the oarlocks have a hole to brace the bottom ends of the oarlocks and to slow the wear on the sockets. The feature was built into the original boat. Removable, adjustable heel braces anchor the rowers.
The boat was built upright, and before construction could begin, a strongback was set up with its top about 2′ off the workshop floor, and directly below an overhead beam. These were put in place with great care and accuracy—partly with the aid of a laser—to ensure the centerline components would be exactly in line. Assembly of the boat’s sapele backbone components could then proceed, beginning with the perfectly straight keel (1-3/4″ thick at its maximum) and hog (3 1/2″ x 7/8″). The stem was composed of a grown outer part in two sections scarfed together and with the lower section scarfed to the keel and hog; and an inner part, or apron, which was laminated from 11 layers to give a thickness of 1-3/4″ and which overlapped the top of the hog over a length of 16″. The 7/8″-thick sapele transom was supported by a 1-3/4″-thick sapele stern knee. All of the centerline components were glued together with epoxy and fastened with bronze screws.
The seven plywood molds produced from the lofting were temporarily fastened to the hog and braced with cross spalls and struts going up to the overhead beam. Battens secured to the stem head and cross-spalls held the molds in their vertical positions.
Lining off the eight strakes was done with a 13/16″ x 1/4″ batten, the same width as the planking laps. The rabbets for the planking had been cut into the keel, hog, and stem as part of the lofting process and had now been faired, so with the laps marked on the stem, molds, and transom, now everything was ready to fit the 3/8″-thick khaya planking. The garboards were dry-fitted, checked for accuracy, and then permanently installed with silicon bronze screws and butyl rubber mastic as a sealant.
The rest of the planks followed, riveted together at the lapse with copper rivets spaced at 2-5/8″ intervals, skipping where the steam-bent frames would be installed later and fastened with longer rivets. All of the planks needed some steaming to cope with the twist at both ends of the boat. Lukas found the mastic “messy to work with and I am not sure if it was necessary apart from with the garboards and the hood ends. The garboards are obviously a critical element and as they were the first planks we fitted, we were learning fast then, so I am glad to have mastic there.”
Lukas Schwimann
The solo rower can choose between the two rowing stations, aft for downwind work, forward for rowing to windward.
The molds and their supporting struts were removed, leaving struts from the transom and stem to the roof beam, and adding two new temporary braces across the boat and notched over the sheerstrake.
Oak frames, milled to 7/8″ x 7/16″ and tapered to 5/16″ at the ends, were steamed into place at 8″ spacings and riveted to the planking. They were continuous from one side of the boat to the other, except for the forwardmost three, which were taken down to the outer faces of the apron, and the aftermost two, which were taken down to the top of the hog where the garboards are nearly vertical. The framing started amidships and worked toward the ends. A few of the amidships frames broke as they were being fitted, and a piece of that was used to make a shorter rib at one end of the boat.
After the frames were installed, their ends were cut a little below the sheer. The sapele inwale was notched to fit over the frame heads, then steam-bent into place. Mastic sealed the frames’ end-grain. The sapele outwale was not steamed but left overlength initially to help with the bending. The finished gunwale, perhaps not surprisingly, has an overall gunwale thickness of the “magic” 1 3/4″.
Ten 7/8″-thick sapele floor timbers were fastened with bronze screws through the planking. The 1/2″ khaya floorboards bear on the structural floors; both rowing positions have adjustable stretchers. The khaya thwarts had individual end supports rather than full-length risers. The sapele breasthook, transom quarter knees, and thwart knees were each made from two pieces with a half-lap joint between them.
Part of the course at the Academy involves making spars and oars, and Lukas managed to persuade three other students to make oars in the same size and style as the one he’d made in spruce with a sapele inlay, giving him a matching set of four oars.
Lukas Schwimann
With two rowing, the bow trims well when the rowers lean aft at the catch. When their weight moves forward at the release, the bow dips a bit.
A long time ago, I spent several years sculling and rowing competitively in everything from single sculls to eights on various English rivers, and I have always enjoyed rowing my own yacht tender. With Lukas happily leaning against the transom keeping watch forward, I took the bow rowing seat in his newly launched Wolfgangsee skiff. A fellow student, Will Mackie, set the pace from the stern station. The boat felt like the best of all compromises. It was more stable than a river-racing boat, of course, but at the same time considerably faster and easier to row than the average yacht tender; it really was a joy.
There was practically no wind, so we were lucky enough to enjoy flat water, but even the wash of a passing speedboat did little to concern us. The new boat has a beam of 4’ and the oars are 8’ long, proportions that felt just right, as did the relative heights and fore-and-aft positions of the seats and rowlocks.
Nigel Sharp
With the builder rowing in the stroke position, the skiff carries a passenger without sousing the stern.
On its home waters in Austria, Lukas was able to report further on its performance. “Interestingly enough there is not much difference in the speed with one or two rowers,” he said. “The maximum speed is somewhere between 6.3 and 6.8 knots, and it depends more on the wind and waves. When crossing the lake with some side wind you feel the boat going off to one side, as is to be expected, but it can easily be compensated when pulling a few strokes stronger on one side. To turn the boat, by pulling with one oar and pushing with the other, it takes about four strokes to turn around. It is also interesting how the boat sits in the water: it is best with either one rower or with two rowers and a passenger. With two at the oars and no passenger, the bow dips a little bit with the rowers’ layback at the finish of the stroke.”
Irmfried is particularly keen to use the boat to row across Wolfgangsee to their favorite restaurant. Lukas plans to set up as a boatbuilder and he is very much hoping that the original boat’s owners, when they see his reproduction of it, will be eager to have him build a new one for them.
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.
Wolfgangsee Skiff Particulars
[table]
Length/16′5″
Beam 48.8″
Depth amidships/20.75″
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For more information about the Wolfgangsee skiff, email Mike Broome at the Boat Building Academy, or the builder, Lukas Schwimann.
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Two years ago, when I was considering building my next sailboat, I daydreamed about a compact, shoal-draft solo cruiser with a comfortable cabin that has no need of an engine. My sailing in recent years involved cruising and racing my trimaran, sometimes in very lively conditions. That boat was all about speed and distance. Perhaps I’m getting old and lazy and even a bit cranky, but no more jibs, no more winches, no more twangy-tight shrouds for me. I’d had enough of fooling with the noise and maintenance of engines and the careful timing and physical effort that sail rigs demand simply to change direction. I wanted to revisit the low-key end of the boating spectrum, gunkholing the shallow and protected places that few cruisers visit.
I had expected there would be a good list of production boats to fit the bill, and an even greater selection of plans and kits for the home builder. But no, my search was a frustrating one until I recalled seeing Chesapeake Light Craft’s Autumn Leaves in WoodenBoat No. 249. It was not just a boat that I could make work for what I had planned, but one that John Harris had drawn from scratch for exactly this purpose. Add to that the availability of a CNC-cut plywood kit and a timber package milled of quality stock, and my decision was all but made.
David Dawson
The Autumn Leaves has a towing weight of about 1500 lbs. and doesn’t require a large truck to pull it. The Volvo here has a towing capacity of 3,300 lbs.
At the time I had read Mike O’Brien’s comments about the design in WoodenBoat, no one had built an Autumn Leaves, but I was quite intrigued by Mike’s assessment of the drawings. While he noted the rig—a classic yawl with a jib— “will prove a joy to handle,” it seemed the three sails might be a bit fussy for me in an 18′6″ boat. A few years ago, I turned a 16’ skiff into a balanced lug yawl and found it most agreeable, and knew this rig was the right direction to take. I was downsizing from that larger and fairly complicated trimaran and wanted to simplify everything as much as possible. I wrote to John and asked if an Autumn Leaves could be built with a balanced lug main in a tabernacle. John agreed and drew the new sail plan and at the same time extended the cabin trunk to create a more agreeable interior. With that, I placed my order.
Putting the hull together was straightforward. Chesapeake Light Craft cut the kit for me without having put a prototype together—the first time they’d done this—but I was game to be the guinea pig. The plans were detailed, but a step-by-step construction manual had not yet been created. I received countless tips from John as I worked my way through the build. The precision of the CNC okoume parts was a marvel. I found just one very minor measurement error in the entire kit. I also purchased the Autumn Leaves timber- and spar-stock packages. The quality of the lumber was far beyond anything I could have sourced locally, and because the stock was milled to the finish width and thickness, I saved many hours of work sawing, resawing, and planing.
Caroline Dawson
The auxiliary power is provided by a pair of oars rowed while standing and facing forward.
The specs for Autumn Leaves create a very stout hull. The bottom is composed of two layers of 9mm plywood with a third strip of 18mm ply down the center, forming a wide, flat keel. Generous placement of cleats and stringers tie bulkheads and horizontal plywood members together to create a very rigid structure. In the ends of the boat, below the cockpit sole aft and berth flat forward, foam provides about 860 lbs of flotation. This plywood boat does not resonate like a drum, often a problem with the type. The exterior surfaces are sheathed in epoxy and fiberglass. I had the aluminum tabernacle for the free-standing main mast fabricated by a local shop.
The plans call for 14 ballast castings of approximately 38 lbs each, or 532 lbs total. The mainmast and tabernacle structure on the lug version is heavier than the deck-stepped, stayed mast on the original version. To compensate for this, John suggested that I add extra lead, bringing the total up to 620 lbs. Making the castings was the only process I’d never done before, and so was the biggest challenge of the build for me. Others may be intimidated by having to melt and pour lead, but those familiar with the process said it’s not really difficult. My view is that going with lead is preferable to the alternative. Building a water-ballasted boat adds another step to the launching and retrieval at the boat ramp.
courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
The box-section hull has a beam of just 5′, but lead ballast in excess of 600 lbs keeps the hull on its bottom while under sail.
Fifteen months after picking up the kit from CLC in Annapolis, Maryland, I had my Autumn Leaves in the water. The boat immediately surprised me with a surefootedness and ease of motion that I did not expect. The slab-sided hull has just 5′ of beam, but motion is tempered by of the lead ballast under the floorboards. It feels in every respect like a bigger boat than it is.
I’m more than pleased with the ease of raising the mainmast in its tabernacle without assistance, setup rigs, or tools of any kind. Both the main and mizzen sails remain laced to their spars. The mizzen bundle is light enough to lift and simply drop straight through its partner. The bilge boards are housed in cases that open to the side decks. They are not ballasted and pivot up and down with very little effort.
The Sitka-spruce mainmast, boom, and yard are of lightweight, hollow box-section construction, and the masts are unstayed so it takes little effort to rig the boat and raise sail. The mizzenmast and its sprit are solid, but are small enough to be easy to handle. The 180 sq ft of canvas the boat carries in the main and mizzen is plenty; even in the lightest airs, it ghosts willingly and easily. As the wind picks up, weather helm predictably builds, and feathering or even dousing the mizzen and trimming up the boards will reset the balance.
My first real outing in a strong wind had me concerned on this point. A tailwind of 25 knots and a steep, breaking Chesapeake Bay chop that reached 4′ high forced yawing beyond what the shoal-draft rudder could control, despite its generous endplate. But adjustments since then—setting the sail more forward on the mast and lifting the boards partway—have shown that in most conditions the boat is fine as drawn. For sailors who regularly have to navigate rougher conditions, John has sketched a rudder that encloses an aluminum drop plate to increase its depth and area when needed. I may make one, but rougher conditions are not what I have in mind.
Cie Stroud
The lug rig carries 150 s ft in the main and 30 sq ft in the mizzen for a total of 180 sq ft, just 7 sq ft less than the alternate rig with the same mizzen, a 114 sq ft Bermuda main and a 43 sq ft jib.
The suitability of the Autumn Leaves design to the dedicated gunkholer is obvious at a glance. It draws just 8” with the boards up and has no appendages to catch weed or pot warp. This was brought home to me on a very blustery day at a local lake. It was time for lunch and I wanted to get out of the wind and relax. I sailed deep into a tree-lined cove, close to the shoreline. The water was choked with weeds. No problem, I doused the sails and let the anchor go into the green mass. So close to shore, the wind was down to nothing and the October sun was quite warm. After I ate and rested, it was an easy drill to raise the anchor, set the sails, give one sweep of an oar to bring the bowsprit away from the overhanging branch it was nuzzling, and off we went. As soon as I cleared the weeds, I put the boards down. Catching the breeze beyond the shoreline’s wind shadow, the boat bounded down the lake.
When I first sailed the boat, I found it easy to greatly underestimate my speed until I consulted the GPS. The skinny hull does not toss the water around much, removing the noise and visual clues that usually suggest speed in a boat this size. And if the reefs are tucked in when due, the Autumn Leaves stays on its feet, giving the crew nestled in the deep cockpit a sense of solid security.
David Dawson
The cabin isn’t large, but it has a comfortable chair that folds down to create a broad sleeping platform for one.
Simplicity extends to life aboard the Autumn Leaves. When it’s time to settle down for the evening, John made sure the solo cruiser would have ample comfort. In the center of the cabin is a cushy easy chair, just right for reading. It’s folded and hidden under the end of the berth when not in use. Countertops are right at hand near the companionway, with camp stove to one side and navigation gear to the other. Everything is within arm’s reach. The cabin overhead is low, but the average person can sit on the forward end of the berth flat without butting up against the roof, and there is space enough to stow and use a portable toilet or bucket, as one prefers. One compromise I made in opting for the unstayed mast is an obstruction about a foot back from the forward end of the cabin—the tabernacle comes through the deck and the berth on its way to an anchoring cross-member on the hull. There is good headroom forward, thanks to the extended trunk, and to my surprise I found it wasn’t difficult to crawl out through the hatch at the forward end of the cabin roof. Storage in the cabin is generous, with lockers under both the berth flat and the cockpit sole.
courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
The designer recommends putting the first reef in when whitecaps appear.
Three can be comfortable in the cockpit for a day sail, but for overnighting, Autumn Leaves is a one-person cruiser. And the solo sailor does need a bit of determination to go without a motor. The boat has a good deal of windage and, loaded for a week’s cruise, it displaces over a ton. It rows easily in a calm—I can maintain 1.5 knots with minimal effort, 2 knots if I push hard—but once the wind is much over 5 knots, the boat needs to be sailed to make good way.
John told me he was aiming for an L. Francis Herreshoff Rozinante-type of boat that would be easy and affordable to build, a canoe yawl in the tradition of Albert Strange and friends, an engineless sailboat for cruising as it was once always done. I think he hit the mark. I christened my Autumn Leaves TERRAPIN, after a turtle once common up and down the East Coast of the U.S., and with her I’ll be gunkholing the shallow and protected places that few cruisers visit: the backwaters, creeks, rivers, and estuaries along the Mid-Atlantic coast.
David Dawson is a retired newspaperman who has been hooked on boats since he was a boy, when his dad built a plywood pram. He does most of his cruising on the Chesapeake Bay, but has taken a variety of trailerable boats elsewhere to explore waters from New England to Florida. Nearer to home in Pennsylvania, he enjoys kayaking the local rivers, lakes, and bays.
Low gray clouds and fog hung in the hills above Port McNeil, an isolated town on the northeast side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and the jade-green water of Broughton Strait didn’t show a ripple. A curtain of dark conifers lined the shore and a bare, logged hillside hulked in the distance. Every inch of space of ROW BIRD, my 18’ Arctic Tern, was stuffed with gear, food, water, art supplies, and books. It was early August, and over the next six weeks, I would row and sail some 350 nautical miles through British Columbia’s Inside Passage back to the United States.
Photographs by the author except as noted
I wasn’t used to rowing with a heavy load—seven gallons of water and three weeks’ worth of food—and the going was slow, but the scenery near Near Port McNeil was so striking that I didn’t mind.
After I launched at a campground between town and the Nimpkish River, the clouds broke up and thin strips of blue sky appeared. ROW BIRD glided through the shallows, gliding over a meadow of eelgrass. The tips of my long green blades were just inches beneath the surface; rusty rock crabs and finger-sized fish darted at the approach of the boat’s shadow. Reaching deeper water, I rowed toward the jumble of buildings and boats that crowded Alert Bay, the village lining the edge of Cormorant Island, 1-1/2 miles away.
At the north end of the bay, a First Nation’s longhouse, as big as a barn, was covered with the black-and-white stylized painting of an eagle perched atop a skeletal fish. Several cedar totem poles with orca, wolves, and human figures painted in bold red, green, and black stood nearby. I spent the afternoon walking around the island, and that evening I anchored just offshore of the longhouse. I unrolled ROW BIRD’s cockpit cover and stretched it between the masts; I arranged my foam pad, sleeping bag, and mini pillow on the floorboards. Black turnstones—stocky, white-bellied shorebirds perched on splintery pilings—kept me company with their shrill chirps until dusk. Exhausted by a busy first day, I quickly fell asleep.
Edye Colello-Morton
The wind shifted from hour to hour, so I frequently changed from sailing to rowing. Fortunately, the balanced lug sail was easy to set or strike.
I awoke in the morning to a fog so thick I could barely see the shore 300’ away. I stowed my bedding, transformed the cockpit into a galley, and cooked a breakfast of oatmeal with dried apples. When I peered out under my cockpit tent, I saw nothing but a dingy white haze and heard only the deep bellow of ships’ horns farther offshore. I got under way and crept along close to the shore, but when one particularly loud horn inexplicably seemed to be getting closer and closer to the shallows, I tied up to a dock. A break in the fog revealed the source: a seven-story-tall cruise ship that was anchoring in deep water just a few hundred feet away.
When the fog lifted, I rowed east along the upper reaches of Johnstone Strait into the Broughton archipelago through the churning currents in Blackney and Whitebeach passages. In the fluky wind filtering between islands and along channels, I changed from sail to oar frequently as I navigated through a few dozen of the archipelago’s hundreds of forested islands, tree-capped islets, and bare rocks. I measured time now only by the tides and the amount of daylight available, and because I wouldn’t be returning to my starting point near Port McNeil, there was no need to think about when to head back, only where to go next.
At the north end of Vancouver Island, dense fog dominated the mornings. Here, just south of Mound Island, I waited for it to lift.
I explored the intricate shorelines of the Broughton Islands, poked around rock gardens, and slid into small coves. A few dozen yards off Mound Island, a 3/4-mile-long wooded island nestled in the south end of the archipelago, I used my Anchor Buddy to keep ROW BIRD off a stone outcropping almost as big as a baseball diamond. At its top was a shallow basin filled with salt-marsh plants and succulents like lime-green pickleweed with tiny salt crystals under its plump stems. Intricate horseshoe-shaped patterns of blue-gray lichen clung so closely to the rock that they appeared to be painted on.
I could have spent my whole trip wandering through the archipelago, but I had a loose itinerary that included 35 stops. I had allowed for a few relaxing zero days, as well as weather or tide delays, but felt I had to move whenever weather and currents were in my favor, meaning I was neither rushing nor lingering.
Roger Siebert
.
To travel eastward from the Broughtons, one option was to take on 50 miles of the notoriously windy and rough Johnstone Strait, a narrow passage so long and straight that its eastern extremity would be hidden not by islands but beneath the horizon. The passage provides limited shelter for a small boat, so I opted for a longer, more protected route through the meandering back channels along the mainland. On this calmer journey I would only need to navigate a brief 15-mile stretch of Johnstone Strait—but I’d have to contend with the fast-moving tidal currents in Chatham Channel, Whirlpool Rapids, Greene Point Rapids, Dent Rapids, Gillard Passage, and Yuculta Rapids.
I had rowed for several hours against a current in Johnstone Strait and was relieved and exhausted by the time I reached Sunderland Channel. When I found the tiniest breeze, I set sail, even if it meant moving at just one 1 knot.
A few mornings later, I was rowing in the 3/4-mile-wide channel between the Lady Islands and Turnour Island. Since dawn, the only sounds I’d heard were the gentle splashing of my oars and the occasional guttural cackling of a raven, but that calm was pierced by the loud “PFFFFT” exhalation of a humpback whale that had broken the glassy surface of the water just a few boat lengths to starboard. The whale was as long as a school bus and could have been quite frightening, but it just rolled on its side, extended a 12′ long pectoral fin upward, and promptly disappeared.
Many of beaches along the Inside Passage are composed of stone and pebbles. A white shell beach, like this one in the Mist Islets of Cracroft Island’s Port Harvey, is a good indication that the site was once a First Nations village.
The next day, leaving from the placid waters of Lagoon Cove on the north end of East Cracroft Island, I rowed through The Blow Hole, a 130-yard-wide channel between Cracroft and Minstral Island that’s known for strong winds that funnel through the gap. I encountered only a modest headwind that followed me as I turned south between the steep, forested hillsides that surround Chatham Channel, the first of six tidal rapids I’d need to traverse.
Near Port Harvey, on a rare clear morning, the reflections on the water changed from pink to a deep blue. It was 7:15 as I was getting ready to depart from a beach near Port Harvey after spending the night at anchor.
I tried sailing against the headwind, but found myself making ground on one tack and losing it on the other, making it to Chatham rapids later than I expected. I turned on my marine radio and looked around for other boats. Seeing none, I headed east in the narrows with almost 2 knots of current in my favor. About halfway through, I saw a flash of red through the trees. I saw it a second time, but I wasn’t sure what I’d spotted on the far side of the bend until the radio came alive.
“Tug heading west up Chatham Channel,” a voice said. “This is motor vessel ENCHANTED SEA. We’re heading east. What can we do to keep out of your way?”
“We’re triple wide,” the tug’s captain replied, indicating the he was in one of two tugs pushing four barges, “It would be appreciated if you could spin a few circles above the rapids until we pass.”
“Roger that.”
Under oars alone, it was a challenge for me to turn ROW BIRD around and buck just a couple of knots of current. As the tugs and barges came into view, I doubted there would be enough room for me to stay safe between their likely course and the jagged, barnacle-covered rocks in the shallows. I spied a tiny cove, barely twice the width of my boat, on the Cracroft shore, a few hundred feet downstream. I floated into that small refuge, just as the tugs and massive barges labored by leaving, to my relief, virtually no wake behind them.
When I spent the night at the Port Neville dock, my boat was, as usual, the smallest. The other mariners were curious about me and my travels, which often resulted in much-appreciated invitations to dinner.
Over the next few days, I covered about 30 sea miles almost entirely under oar power, and transited Johnstone Strait, Sunderland Channel, and Whirlpool Rapids in the middle of Wellbore Channel. The northwest winds that I’d read were typical in this area never materialized, despite daily weather forecasts issuing warnings for a strong northwest wind.
Edye Colello-Morton
Under calm conditions, ROW BIRD is easy to steer standing up. During long days in the boat, I took every opportunity to change positions.
As I rowed west along Cordero Channel and approached Greene Point Rapids on the northeast side of West Thurlow Island, I expected funneling winds to push me through the gorge-like passage. The rippling rivers of water pushed with the flood tide, waving kelp, and swirling back-eddies were the only signs of movement for the first few miles. Eventually, a westerly wind rose just enough for a sedate downwind sail through the end of the rapids; it petered out at the east end of East Thurlow Island, just before I reached the 600’ government pier at Shoal Bay. I cleaned the hull in the afternoon and then spent a sociable night at the dock there with cruisers who had arrived aboard several big motor yachts.
When I built ROW BIRD, I used topside paint on the interior and exterior. Worried that keeping topside paint submerged for weeks on end would damage it, I dried the boat periodically, as I did here at Shoal Bay, and scrubbed the bottom to rid the hull of growth that would damage it.
Underway again at dawn, the coal-black water reflected the low clouds overhead as I rowed toward the final trio of rapids—Dent, Gillard Passage, and Yuculta—strung one after another along a 3-½-mile stretch of Sonora Island’s east coast. I had planned to complete one rapid per day, slipping through each one as wind and current allowed, stopping for a night in between. I went through much faster. I arrived early enough that I rowed against the last of the opposing tide and passed through Dent Rapids as soon as slack started. Surprised to see that I’d made it to the Gillard Passage rapids just as the tide was turning in my favor, I forged on, taking Innes Passage, the 250′-wide channel tucked behind ½-mile-long Gillard Island.
Just 1/4 mile south of Gillard I entered Yuculta Rapids, where two hulking sea-lion bulls cavorted in the water. I rowed into an eddy and slowly pulled out my camera, thrilled as they came closer. Then, like a growing crowd of rowdy school boys, three more bulls joined them and I felt I was becoming the subject of their chasing game. Worried one might get the idea to leap aboard, I charged away into the heart of the rapids. It was just past slack, and a tongue of bubbly water down the center of the broad channel showed the safest and least obstructed route. ROW BIRD was jostled and turned here and there, but I drew on my experience with whitewater rafting to hold a steady course downstream.
Once clear of the main current, I pulled into a small cove on the rocky east shore of Sonora Island. I landed on a patch of white shell beach where I found a cascading freshwater stream surrounded by logs and lush green sedges. I checked for bear scat and prints, and seeing none, stripped off my sweat-soaked clothes and stepped in for a chilly bath and laundry session. It was pure relief to be clean again, despite the long strands of algae that clung to my hair and clothes. From the safety of the cove-nestled stream, I watched logs and woody debris in the tail end of Yuculta churn beneath the flanks of the surrounding mountains.
During the two weeks I’d been out, I hadn’t encountered another self-propelled cruiser, but I was hoping I’d cross paths with my friend Dale, who was participating in the Barefoot Raid, an informal race for sail-and-oar craft. I studied the race itinerary I’d jotted down on a scrap of paper before I’d left home, and realized that with a small change from the route I had planned, I could intercept the fleet on the northwest side of Cortez Island.
With this hopeful and loosely planned rendezvous on the horizon, I rowed into the lazy backwaters of Háthayim Park and spent a zero day cleaning salt off the gunwales, mopping out the bilge, organizing my supplies, and relaxing.
A wide variety of production and custom-built boats made up the Barefoot Raid fleet. At night the racers gathered around the mother ship POOR MAN’S ROCK.
The next day, I ghosted south 2 miles to rock-fringed Carrington Bay, also on the northwest coast of Cortez Island. The fastest of the racers had already arrived and were at anchor. A few stragglers, Dale among them, tacked all the way in a dying breeze to join the rest of the fleet. I tagged along and soon all of the boats had surrounded POOR MAN’S ROCK, a two-story workboat that followed the racers and served as the Raid’s sweep, cookhouse, and party spot. It was large enough to hold several boats in its cargo bay and 20 Raid sailors on its deck.
In the morning I joined the raiders as they continued on their clockwise circumnavigation of Cortez Island. We made the 1/2-mile crossing to West Redonda Island, tensely waited out a gale warning in a cove, and then plowed south flanked by the steep, forested hills along Lewis Channel. On the third day, the group headed west around Cortez and I continued south, crossing to the mainland’s Malaspina Peninsula, and the town of Lund. It was the first time in weeks I’d seen cars on a road.
I spent a restful night in a tidal estuary near Powell River while a storm blew through Malaspina Strait. I anchored in shallow water so ROW BIRD would settle on mud during the night, allowing hours of peaceful sleep.
I followed the mainland coast for another 15 miles, resupplied in Powell River, and continued toward the Strait of Georgia, a vast body of water covering nearly 2,400 square miles. Each morning I listened to the marine forecast, trying to make a cautious plan to cross safely from the British Columbia mainland to Vancouver Island. The forecast covered such a wide area that it was hard to know what I’d encounter within the narrow band of the strait where I’d make the crossing.
Malaspina Strait was protected by Texada Island from some of the influence of the adjacent Strait of Georgia, but being over 2-½ miles wide, it was choked with chop and confused swells that splashed aboard ROW BIRD. The one saving grace was a northwesterly 15-knot wind that pushed me through the lumpy conditions to Pender Harbor, where I would start the first half of the 20-mile crossing to Vancouver Island.
Humpback whales were a common sighting. The white cloud in the center is the exhaled mist from the whale that had come up to breathe.
Leaving the crowded harbor the following morning, I was excited to get back to open water and the freedom to move without constantly looking out for faster-moving motorboats. From Pender to Lasqueti Island was about 11 miles. I put on my sun hat and slathered myself with sunscreen. To row at the quickest pace I could before the wind picked up, I dropped the masts into the boat. I had rowed barely an hour when the tide must have shifted, because the water became so thick with short chop that it felt as though I was rowing through syrup. My normal 3-knot rowing speed dropped by half.
Later in the day a tailwind filled in and I set sail; wind waves combined with the chop, creating a lumpy 2′ following sea. ROW BIRD seemed to push the water like a bulldozer instead of cutting through it. As the wind strengthened from a gentle breeze, little whitecaps began to appear in the distance. Normally, I’d reef my mainsail when the wind approached 12 knots, but I pressed ahead under full sail. ROW BIRD bounced along, taking spray over the bow, but with the ballast of 7 gallons of drinking water and all my gear on the floorboards, combined with the steadiness of the wind, the boat felt docile and the tiller was light in my hand.
Hours later, the 8-mile crossing of Malaspina Strait was behind me and I passed Texada Island. After another 3 miles, I reached the craggy south end of Lasqueti Island. Its black volcanic rock jutted out into the strait like the broken furrows of a giant plow. I had a 1:20,000-scale chart for the islands, so I knew where Squitty Bay was, my destination for the night, but I couldn’t see its narrow entrance. I dropped the sail and poked cautiously into crevices in the southern shore by oar, aware that an errant wake could bash me against the rocks. Finally, I saw masts sticking up above a steep stone outcropping, and found the crooked 30-yard-wide entrance. ROW BIRD glided through the sheltered water toward the government dock, where I found a spot just big enough among the 10 local boats occupying the rest of the space.
Sheltered by two long ridges of rock, the water around the dock was smooth enough to see a reflection. I fell into conversation with James, a local shipwright working on a wooden sailboat moored there. He’d been living in the islands and exploring them in craft large and small for most of his life. I told him about my journey, and he suggested a route across the western 8-mile crossing of the strait that would avoid a National-Defense torpedo test range southwest of Lasqueti and provide some protection from waves by threading through a series of house-sized rocks and small islands close to the mainland.
Squitty Bay was surrounded by a provincial nature park, and feral sheep grazing among the smooth-skinned madronas and rough-barked junipers kept the grass and shrubs under the trees so low that it looked like it had been mowed. I spent two days relaxing, sketching, and waiting for the right weather window. Early on the third morning, I climbed a 200’ hill that looked over the strait. Smooth water spread to the south of the island; to the west, where I was bound, dark ripples marked the open water separating Lasqueti from Vancouver Island.
At Squitty Bay, I slept comfortably aboard the boat, my accommodations for more than 30 nights during the cruise. The canopy, here opened on the starboard side, is a two-layer cockpit tent. Its outer layer is waterproof ripstop nylon, and the inner layer is breathable Sunbrella.
The forecast called for a 5- to 10-knot northwest wind, so I anticipated a fast and mellow crossing. I rowed out of Squitty Bay, negotiated around a tug towing a log raft the size of three football fields, then passed from the smooth water into the first of the ripples I’d noticed from the hilltop. In the distance, Vancouver Island was so far away it looked like a thin ribbon of green on the horizon, in spite of the 4,000′-high ridge running along its length. Once I was under sail, the water became lumpy, and a confused swell from the north slapped ROW BIRD on her starboard side. Every third or fourth wave sent spray over the bow that left a salty film on all my dry bags and lines.
Half an hour later, the hull hissed as ROW BIRD bounced through the chop, leaving a frothy wake astern. Seven miles into the crossing, I cleared the Ballenas Islands, two 1/2-mile-wide islets that sit 3 miles from Vancouver Island’s shore. The swell and wind had increased enough that I hove-to and put a reef in the lug mainsail. The wind turned gusty, and I had to luff the mainsail more often than I could haul it in; I hove-to again and put in a second reef. I was following the plan for the crossing that James had outlined, but the rising wind and worsening sea state was troubling. Nanoose Harbor, the nearest place on Vancouver Island to get off the water, was still about 3 miles to south, but with access limited by a military base along its shore, I was reluctant to pull in there unless I got desperate.
I scanned the chart for a sheltered landing site, but couldn’t figure out how to progress safely perpendicular to a following sea that had now built to nearly 4′. Putting the third and final reef into the sail, I tried to make my way toward a private marina I saw in a tiny cove but ultimately decided I couldn’t make it. To avoid taking on water, I had to steer away from crests breaking astern. Seawater sloshed in and out of the bilge and over my feet, but I didn’t dare stop and bail.
A strong gust made ROW BIRD round up and slam over the back of a steep wave into a deep trough. The sails hung limp for a moment, then rattled noisily. I decided to let ROW BIRD drift, hoping that conditions would moderate. I set the mizzen tight, and the bow pointed into the wind, but, unfortunately, the waves were coming from a different angle and hitting the starboard quarter. I drifted toward slowly southward toward the Ada Islands, little more than a cluster of bare rocks with reefs awash in whitewater. I clenched the tiller in my right hand, adjusting to each set of waves, wondering if the next might swamp me. I pulled my VHF radio out of my PFD pocket and switched it to channel 16. Would this be the day I called for a Coast Guard rescue?
The waves crested in crumbling white foam, lifted the boat, then slowly passed me by without breaking entirely from top to bottom. Twenty minutes later, I decided that I wouldn’t call for help as long as I could still sail, so between swells, I hauled the mainsail back up, loosened the mizzen sheet, and turned ROW BIRD downwind. She surfed, swerved, and ducked between waves, and as I approached Stephenson Point at the entrance to Departure Bay. In the lee, the wind and waves abated but I had to steer away from an approaching ferry, and in the bargain slid over a reef near Horswell Rock, scraping the centerboard. When I slipped behind Jesse Island, the sails suddenly went limp, and with the ordeal of the crossing over, I felt lightheaded and hot. I peeled off my damp drysuit and collapsed onto the thwart. When I regained my strength, I rowed into a marina in downtown Nanaimo, where the high-rises loomed over the shoreline. I went to check in at the front desk, and exhausted and ravenous, I asked where I could find some pizza. The harbormaster immediately produced a partially eaten pie from behind the desk. “Take as much as you want,” he said.
Two days later, I left Nanaimo and continued southward. Using a pair of range markers, I slipped between Vancouver and Gabriola islands via False Narrows. This signaled the entry to the Gulf Islands and cruising in civilization where there were ample calm anchorages, marinas, and sand beaches. The days that followed were like a vacation rather than a wilderness expedition. I rowed and sailed in protected waters where a multitude of islands prevented much fetch from building, and stopped frequently in small towns for luxuries such as ice cream and fresh baked pastries. No longer did I think about my stores or the presence of bears; I simply enjoyed long ambles in provincial and national parks.
The afternoons were set ablaze when the sun set, turning the sky and water fiery reds and oranges, and, as September rolled in, there were fewer boats on the water. Rainstorms indicated that the season was coming to a close. Forty miles to the southeast of Nanaimo I stopped at Saturna, a 7-mile-long island pushing into a notch in the border between Canada and the U.S. Black clouds skated across the mountains to the west and blocked the sun. As I stood on a dock at Winter Cove, rain fell in dreary streaks from gray clouds.
On the days that followed, I made my way at an easy pace through the Gulf Islands, and then crossed Haro Strait into the San Juan Islands of Washington.
Under clear skies, a chilly westerly wind drove me across the San Juan archipelago to Orcas Island, where I left ROW BIRD at a marina for a few days off the water. I spent two nights at a friend’s house, grateful for the shelter as thunderstorms or low clouds rolled in each evening. Being indoors was starting to feel appealing.
My friend Andy had brought my car and trailer from home, parked them on the mainland, and came by ferry to Orcas to join me for the last leg of my cruise. After being alone on my boat for over a month, it felt good to have some company as we wound through the remaining islands.
We spent a damp night camping on Lopez Island’s Spencer Spit, a popular marine park, and got underway in the morning, headed east for Thatcher Pass, a ½-mile-wide gap between islands on the thoroughfare to and from the mainland. A hide-and-seek fog covered navigation marks, waterways, and entire islands. Foghorn in hand, we crept around Decatur Island to the safety of the cove on the west side of James Island.
I lingered on the edge of James Island in the San Juan archipelago. Even in the still air, the fog banks formed and dissipated quickly.
We tied ROW BIRD to the public dock there and climbed the wooded trail to a ridge where we hoped to see east across Rosario Strait to Anacortes, 3 miles distant, but it was lost in the fog’s dull-white void. The strait is a dangerous crossing, with strong currents, long fetches, and a north–south shipping lane crossed by a busy east–west ferry route. I’d never attempt it in fog, and even if it were to lift, we’d have to wait for the turn of the tide to slow the currents in the strait. We were stuck, at least for the night, on James. Andy got busy with his phone, making arrangements for the unanticipated absence from home and work. But for me, the fog provided the chance for another zero day and a welcome excuse to savor a final day of cruising, my 37th away from home.
Late the next morning, the fog had cleared, and with Andy navigating in the stern, I rowed, somewhat reluctantly, the last few uneventful miles across water that shimmered like rippled satin.
Bruce Bateau, a regular contributor to Small Boats Monthly, sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his web site, Terrapin Tales.
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.
One of the first things that my father-in-law taught me was how to make the end of a line shipshape by applying a whipping. The method that he taught me is known as the “common whipping,” multiple turns of whipping twine with its ends pulled underneath the turns. The common whipping is quick and easy but prone to slipping off the end of the line and will come completely apart if any part of it is cut or chafed. Two other options—the Admiralty whipping and the West Country whipping—are more secure, nearly as easy to execute, and don’t require a needle.
SBM
The Admiralty whipping looks like a sailmaker’s whipping, but it is applied without a needle.
The Admiralty whipping is described inThe Ashley Book of Knots and the British Admiralty Manual of Seamanship as a good way to finish three-strand line and looks very much like the sailmaker’s whipping, also known as the palm-and-needle whipping, but it doesn’t require the palm or needle. Start the Admiralty whipping by tying the end of the line with a short length of whipping twine to keep the strand ends from untwisting and fraying while you work. Waxed polyester twine holds knots and stays in place best.
Normally a whipping covers a length of line that’s one-and-a-half times the line’s diameter. A 3′ length of twine is enough to whip a line up to a 1/2″ diameter. Spread the strands apart about 1-1/2” back from the line end by inserting a marlinespike or twisting the line against the lay; pull 6″ of whipping twine under a strand to become the standing end. The working end of the twine is taken over and back under the next strand up from the first strand, forming a small loop on either side of the first strand. This twine loop must be about 2” in length, which is long enough to slide over the end of the strand it crosses. At this point the working end is wrapped tightly around all three rope strands, starting at the base of the loop and working toward the end of the line. Once the turns are complete, the short length of twine holding the ends of the strands can be untied and discarded. The loop of twine, made at the start of the whipping, is pulled across the turns and put over the end of the strand that it straddles, then the standing end of the twine is pulled to tighten the loop around its strand. The standing end of the twine is then run alongside its strand, across the turns, and it is tied off to the working end of the twine with a square knot. The square knot is buried between the strands at the end of the line, and the end can be trimmed neatly with a knife.
SBM
The West Country whipping can be applied on laid or braided line. The gaff tape wrap underneath it is optional.
The West Country whipping is easy to tie and is both functional and decorative. It can be tied without a needle and palm, and its multiple knots prevent a quick unraveling. The knots can be retied if they come loose. The West Country can also be tied with cord to wrap tillers and handholds to provide a secure grip.
When we tie the West Country whipping, we tape the last inch of the line with two wraps of cloth gaff tape. The Ashley Book of Knots, incidentally, identifies this taping on the end of a line as a “linesman’s whipping” and notes that it starts with the end of the tape getting tucked in between strands of a laid rope. For whipping a 3/8″ line, I measure out about 3′ of waxed twine. The whipping can be started at the end of the line or worked out to the end from about an inch back. For laid line we work from the end. We draw the middle of the twine around the line and start tying half knots, the beginning of a square knot, first on one side, then on the opposite side, going back and forth for about 3/4″ of the line. The whipping is finished with a square knot; excess line is trimmed and the knot can be buried in the strands.
When we put whippings on synthetic line, we’ll often pass the freshly cut end by a flame to fuse the strands’ fibers. We do this with a light touch to avoid melting the material. A liquefied blob of synthetic material hardens with a sharp edge at its perimeter, which can cut skin if it slips through your hands.
Nicely whipped lines make our boats shipshape, and we find doing the whippings is very relaxing. Pull up a chair and try your hand at it.
Grayl has created a water-treatment system that is two reservoirs and pump all in one compact unit.
Unless you’re willing to risk a most unpleasant bout of giardiasis or worse on your backcountry ventures, some kind of water-treatment system is a necessity. I much prefer filters to chemical treatments or boiling, so I was immediately intrigued by Grayl’s Geopress, which offers an interesting alternative to the hand-pump type filter I’ve been using.
Unlike pump-operated filters, the Grayl Geopress combines a filter and water bottle in one unit. An inner bottle, with a replaceable filter attached, fits snugly inside an outer shell with a gasket providing a watertight seal between them. There are no moving parts likely to fail in the field, and very little opportunity for the kinds of accidental contamination that’s possible in pump-type filters, such as dropping an output hose into untreated water. Simply pull out the Geopress inner bottle and set it aside, then dip the outer shell in untreated water to fill it. Set it upright on a flat surface, reinsert the inner bottle, and open the pour spout’s threaded cap a half turn for venting air. Press the bottle down slowly and firmly into the outer shell. This forces the untreated water through the filter at the bottom of the inner bottle. It took me about 40 seconds to filter 24 ounces of water, much faster than pump-type filters I’ve used.
The filter at the bottom of the inner cylinder incorporates the gasket that forces the water through the filter. The replacement filters come with a new gasket to assure the watertight seal between the two cylinders.
The filter uses a combination of ceramic fibers for particulate removal, positively charged ions to bind pathogens, and activated carbon to adsorb chemicals and impurities. The manufacturer claims that the Grayl filter removes 99.9999% of bacteria, 99.99% of viruses, and 99.9% of protozoa, claims that have I found verified by independent laboratory tests for the similar Grayl Ultralight model. Replacement filters are available, and recommended after filtering 65 gallons of water (350 cycles), or when the time needed to press the inner bottle into the outer shell nears 25 seconds. The filters include the gasket, so that critical part is regularly replaced.
The Geopress is made of durable, BPA-free plastic throughout. The design is just right for easy drinking or spill-proof pouring. An arrow on the drinking cap clearly indicates open and closed positions, and the raised “Max Fill” line on the bottle is a useful feature as well, though a contrasting color would make it easier to see. A rigid plastic loop on the cap accommodates a carabiner for secure carrying.
The Geopress turned the murky stream water at left to the clear water at right. It’s best to filter the clearest water you have access to. The silt-laden water here was used to highlight a before and after difference. Many of the contaminants removed by the filter are invisible.
There are just a few things to consider. Those with small hands might find it difficult to pull the inner bottle from the outer shell—that’s an operation requiring a firm grip and a steady pull-and-twist. My wife, whose hand can comfortably span an octave on a piano keyboard, had some difficulty here. When drawing water from water too shallow to dip the outer shell, you’ll need a cup to fill it. The Geopress filters only 24 oz of water at a time, so while purifying a single bottle of water goes quickly, filtering larger amounts requires emptying the inner sleeve into a separate container and repeating the operation several times.
For best results, follow the instructions and position the Grayl on a low, stable surface so that you can slowly lean the full weight of your upper body on the top of the bottle, with your arms straight and locked, to force water through the filter. Kneeling on the ground with the Grayl between my knees worked best; in that position, it took me about 8 seconds to filter a full bottle of water. It’s also possible to operate the Grayl while standing by putting it not far above knee height and keeping arms straight to let body weight do the work. The Grayl is easy to operate ashore where there’s no shortage of solid ground, but because space is limited aboard my sail-and-oar beach cruiser, I found it a bit awkward to use onboard. Standing up and pressing down on the Grayl while it’s on the thwart can be a bit dicey in a round-bottomed boat with a beam of just 4′6″. If you have room aboard to kneel, though, it’ll be easy to filter water while afloat.
If what you need is a method of very quickly treating drinking water one bottle at a time, the Geopress shines; it does everything it’s designed to do, and does it very well. Pricing for the Geopress is comparable to popular pump-type filters, and I was impressed with its quality, simplicity, and ease of use.
Tom Pamperin is a freelance writer who lives in northwestern Wisconsin. He spends his summers cruising small boats throughout Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, and along farther afield. He is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly and WoodenBoat.
The dolly has made it much easier for me to move over a half ton of boat and trailer.
If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have to man-haul my boat trailers to get them to the car to hitch them up. The caster on a trailer jack works okay on pavement, and only marginally in my backyard in the summer when the lawn is dry and hard, but on gravel and damp sod it’s a struggle to get it to roll or pivot.
I recently sprang for the MaxxHaul trailer dolly and wish I’d bought one sooner. It took about 20 minutes to assemble; metric sockets would have been much quicker than the crescent wrenches I had to resort to. The dolly weighs 31.7 lbs and feels quite solid. It comes with a 1-7/8″ ball, which fits the couplers on my two small trailers. The 12″ x 4″ pneumatic tires are like those used on wheelbarrows and roll easily on pavement, grass, and gravel. The dolly has a stable 24″ wheelbase and the wheels spin on bearings slipped over a 0.9″ steel tubing axle. A sturdy 1/4″-thick steel bracket supports the hitch ball and is connected by a brace to the 4′ long handle.
To roll a trailer-jack wheel across this soft lumpy ground, I had to lay down a path of boards. The dolly isn’t bogged down by it.
The first time I used the dolly—on the trailer I don’t have outfitted with a jack—I was impressed with how easily it can lift the trailer’s tongue from the ground. Raising the handle lowers the hitch ball, and after the ball is steered under the socket of the trailer’s coupler, lowering the handle lifts the tongue. The long handle not only provides a lot of mechanical advantage—4.4 to 1—but also entirely eliminates the back strain of lifting the tongue up by hand. I just have to put my weight on the handle to push it down. The tongue weight on the trailer I’ve been using the dolly on is 137 lbs and the weight of the trailer and the Caledonia yawl it carries is between about 1200 lbs. MaxxHaul sets the dolly’s capacity at 600 lbs, so even though I’m doubling the working weight, the dolly hasn’t shown any sign that it’s suffering under the load.
The handle comes to a convenient height for pulling; it just lines up with my arms and there’s no fighting its angle. Pushing is almost as easy, I can set the handle in the crease of my hips if I need extra power. Steering with the dolly is a breeze—it easily spins around the hitch. Lowering the handle moves the hitch ball a bit past directly over the axle and presses the handle down on the stand that’s bolted to its backside.
My backyard has a bit of a slope down to the sidewalk next to it, and while it’s neither long nor steep, it’s too much for me to push a half ton of trailer and boat up it. Although I can’t simply pull or push the dolly to get the boat up the slope, I can use the dolly to take advantage of the leverage provided by the long boat-trailer tongue. The 13′6″ trailer tongue gives me a nearly 3:1 mechanical advantage over the 4′8″ wheelbase. Chocking one wheel and pushing the tongue to that side will roll the other wheel forward.
The wheel chock I use for hauling the trailer uphill is tied to the trailer and follows close behind both wheels, allowing one to roll forward, while the other is prevented from moving back.
To make leverage work in a single-handed operation, I made chocks to follow the wheels. I added 1″-thick slabs of scrap wood to both ends and both sides of a 2×4 that spans from one wheel to the other. Cords, tied between the 2×4 and brackets forward of the wheels, pull this device forward, so all I have to do is push the tongue back and forth sideways and the chock lets the wheels roll forward but not backward. The dolly makes it very easy to move the tongue from side to side and ratchet the trailer uphill.
The fewer impediments that I have to getting a boat to the water, the more likely I’ll be able to get on the water more often. The MaxxHaul trailer dolly will get most of the heavy lifting out of the way.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
If you’d prefer to upgrade your trailer jack with dual 10″ pneumatic tires, see Ben Fuller’s review of the Croft wheel kit.
The MaxxHaul 70225 trailer dolly is available from online retailers. I purchased mine through Amazon for $50.80.
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.
When Frank Ward of Port Townsend, Washington, retired after his career as a healthcare cybersecurity consultant, he had a plan for putting his free time to good use and carried it out with enthusiasm. He joined a learn-to-row class at the local rowing club; soon afterward he served on the club’s board. He enrolled in the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding. He did so well as a student there that he was named as one of two teaching assistants for the following year.
Photographs courtesy of Frank and Cathy Ward
The strongback extended its plywood top across the workbench.
His new loves of rowing and boatbuilding set him on a search for a design that he and his wife Linda could safely row on the somewhat exposed waters around Port Townsend. His research led him to the Annapolis Tandem Wherry from Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC). He liked the look of the boat, and it clearly would meet his criteria for rowing, but the plywood kit offered by CLC wasn’t his cup of tea—he wanted the challenges, pleasures, and satisfaction of building a boat from lumber.
The first arrangement for positioning the transom was short-lived. It didn’t survive closing the door at the end of its first day.
Two of Frank’s friends had recently finished building a cedar-strip canoe, and he thought “it was gorgeous.” He resumed his search for a design, hoping to find a strip-built wherry, but kept coming back to the Annapolis wherry. He decided to call CLC and ask about a cedar-strip version of the Annapolis tandem, and the person who picked up the phone was John Harris, the company’s owner and designer. John, it turned out, had already drawn a version of the wherry for strip construction, and he told Frank to visit the CLC website the following day, and the plans would be there. That day, Frank placed his order for the plans and cedar strips.
The support for the transom here is the replacement for the one that the garage door tore off. There were moments in the shop when Frank enjoyed the boatbuilding in spite of the mishaps and cramped quarters.
The wherry is 20′ long and Frank’s single-car garage, at 23′, was barely long enough for the project. The sports car that he was sheltering there could store outside, but the woodworking bench had to stay. There wasn’t enough room for the bench and the strongback for the wherry, so the strongback was built as an extension of the bench.
Frank matched cedar strips to give the hull a symmetrical pattern.
After Frank had the molds set up square and plumb, he placed the transom on the jig to hold it in the right position and the precise angle. That would have been the end of the day’s work, but when Frank closed up the shop, he pressed the button to lower the garage door. It came down like a guillotine and clipped the jig. It went flying one way and the transom took off in the opposite direction. After that mishap he came up with a new jig, which provided the clearance required, a meager 1/2″, but enough for the safe operation of the garage door.
With planking complete, the hull seemed to take up even more room in the narrow garage when turned right-side up.
Before he could begin planking, Frank had to scarf the 8’-long, bead-and-cove strips together, so he made a special jig to speed the process and make stronger joints by cutting the bevel at an angle. He usually worked with the garage door open as an invitation for curious neighbors to keep tabs on his progress. When the molds went up, there was a quick, dramatic display of progress, and the conversations were welcome and encouraging, but the strip planking went slowly, and there wasn’t much to show for a day’s work. When the thrill was gone, the work didn’t go as well and mistakes happened. His workspace was small and there was always something in the way. Linda, on more than one occasion, heard a crash coming from the garage, followed by some strong language, and rushed to Frank, fully expecting to find him gravely injured. She was relieved to discover he’d only lost his temper, not any blood or body parts.
The finished boat was equipped with and sliding seats he built to fit the wherry and Colin-Angus designed outriggers.
After two months of work on the boat, Frank fit the last of the planks and could step back and admire the shape of the finished hull. After planing, scraping, and sanding the planks fair, he draped the hull with fiberglass, and as he filled the fabric with epoxy, the color of the cedar came out for the first time, radiantly.
The neighbors who were checking on the progress were impressed by the beautiful cedar but dismayed that Frank said he intended to paint the hull white. Only the exterior would be painted, he reassured them, and there would be more than enough bright-finished cedar on the inside.
Prepping the interior for varnish was an arduous task. Frank sealed all of the wood with epoxy, and sanding it smooth took a toll on his fingers and wrists. They’d ache for days afterward. For the varnishing, the shop was vacuumed clean, and the garage door came down to keep the dust and the cold out. There was no going around the stern, and Frank had to crawl under the boat to switch sides.
Friends and neighbors joined Cathy (left) and Frank (right) in carrying the wherry to the water on launch day.
Frank launched the wherry with a group of friends and neighbors and christened it FESTINA LENTE, a Latin saying that goes back to ancient Rome and Greece. It means “make haste slowly.” Frank and Linda took the wherry for the first row.
Frank and Cathy took the first strokes aboard FESTINA LENTE.
Not long after the launching, Frank took FESTINA LENTE to the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend. Chesapeake Light Craft had a booth there, and John Harris was in attendance. He noticed FESTINA LENTE and introduced himself to Frank, complimenting him on his work. John said that his boat was the first strip-built Annapolis wherry to be completed, so it has the distinction of being Hull No. 1.
Michael Lampi
The new owners, Giles and Cathy, learned to scull on Seattle’s busy Lake Union, but from their house in West Seattle, they could see Puget Sound, and longed to row there. They looked around for a boat that could take on the open water of the Sound. When they saw FESTINA LENTE listed for sale, they immediately fell in love with her lines. “Frank is an artist,” they said, “and he created a work of art that boat.” They row a couple of times a week, and enjoy rowing in the company the seals and sea lions, always striving for the perfect stroke.
After Frank and Linda enjoyed FESTINA LENTE for a couple of years, they put the boat up for sale. It was purchased by a Seattle man, Giles Stanton. He and his rowing partner Cathy Morgan entered the Great Cross Sound Race, a 7-mile out-and-back across Puget Sound. They won their class. That FESTINA LENTE was the only boat in her class shouldn’t be held against her. She’s one of a kind.
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Finn and Tereza enter the Iron Gates where the Danube passes between ranges in Serbia and Romania. Funneling between the steep slopes, the wind is often on the nose. Watch as they tack downstream under a reefed sail.
I have a fair number of boats in my fleet, and some are getting on in years. The oldest of the ones I’ve built is a Chamberlain gunning dory my father commissioned in 1980. The oldest of them all is an English river wherry bearing an oval brass plate that reads: T. Cooper & Sons of Shrewsbury, Boatbuilders, Shrewsbury. Dad acquired it perhaps 40 years ago and believed it was built around 1890.
All of the structural pieces in the stern have decorative touches. The builder’s plate is fixed to the thwart.
Dad may have told me where he found the wherry, but I can’t recall that detail; at the time it was just another boat in a garage crowded with racing shells and I didn’t pay much attention to any of them. As I remember the boat when he brought it home, it was entirely gray with dust and weathering. Whatever differences there were in the woods used for planking, thwarts, transom, and the rest were masked with age. It seemed that Dad might sand all the way through a piece without finding a trace of color or a whiff of fragrance that would indicate whether it was cedar, mahogany, or oak.
The seat has a mahogany backrest supported by an ornate cast-iron frame.
Years passed before Dad got around to restoring the boat, and sanding and varnish did bring out the colors of the wood, but there was no hiding the boat’s age. While some of the mahogany beamed with a coppery glow that had been dimmed for decades, all of the wood was mottled with the dark age spots befitting a supercentenarian. The passenger-seat backrest bore the scars where the tiller lines cut grooves in two clusters, separated by the shoulder widths of the people who once sat there.
After decades of use, probably by livery customers, the wherry’s tiller lines had worn grooves in the backrest
It was important to Dad to make the boat serviceable again rather than just clean it up for display, and, remarkably, all that was required was sistering the frames by the oarlocks and adding an extra floor amidships. The rest of the boat just needed varnish and paint. Dad painted the hull dark green and later blue with a white sheer, the colors of the Lake Washington Rowing Club, where he coached crews and kept racing shells in working order.
Photographer unknown
My father took took to the oars while my mother tended the tiller lines when they went out for a row on Lake Union. After restoring the wherry, he painted the hull dark green.
Dad kept the wherry at the club’s shellhouse and for special occasions the wherry would be carried to the dock and left in the water for a few days to give the seams of the lapstrake hull time to take up. I rowed the wherry on two of those special occasions, both in the months that followed my father’s passing in 2013. The first was a loop of Lake Union, rowing as a memorial to him with a fleet of club boats and rowers. The following May, the wherry was one of the three boats at the head of a parade for the opening of Seattle’s boating season; I rowed beneath a fluttering blue banner bearing Dad’s name. Since then, I’ve taken the boat out of storage a few times and rowed it in the protected waters of the ship canal next to the club.
Marilyn Goo
With the wherry now in its new color scheme, my sisters and I went out for a memorial row with the Lake Washington Rowing Club after Dad’s passing. Ellyn, in the bow, wears his Cunningham-tartan scarf. Laurie sits forward of the family private signal, bearing a design that has been flown by seven generations now.
As my father did, I consider the wherry a boat to be rowed, not a relic. I think Mr. Cooper and his sons would be pleased that their work has survived for 130 years and the wherry is not idle in some museum, but still in use and rowed by someone who appreciates their craftsmanship and knows how sweetly it moves through the water.
Built in England 130 years ago, the wherry remains in use 6,000 miles away from the shop that produced it.
One hundred and thirty years is a long time for a boat to remain in service. Even the first boats I built—the gunning dory, a Marblehead skiff, and a lapstrake Whitehall—have almost a century ahead of them to match the longevity of the Shrewsbury wherry. I think my Whitehall, in particular, has a chance. It is built in much the same way as the Coopers built the wherry, with copper fastenings instead of epoxy, solid wood throughout instead of plywood, and natural crooks for knees and breasthook instead of laminates. When I built the Whitehall, I was just 30 years old and not thinking very far ahead, only doing the best work I could.
Fastened with bronze boat nails to my Whitehall’s transom is an oval of brass with my name and 1983 stamped in it. Will someone a century from now look at that plate and wonder about me as I do about T. Cooper and his sons? Will my boat also convey something about a boatbuilder whose name alone has been carried across time from forgotten generations? While I feel confident that some of the boats I’ve made will outlast me, I’d like to think that a few will survive well beyond that and some of my work will remain after my inevitable erasure from memory.
The Coopers remind me to do good work that lasts. It may be the balm to soothe the sting of mortality.
Glen-L’s Bo-Jest is an 18′ pocket power cruiser designed in 1986 by Ken Hankinson. I loved its tugboat style and its just-right size for our cruising needs—big enough to stay in for a few days and small enough to avoid high moorage costs.
The three pages of plans I ordered from Glen-L were clear, but required extra study for me as this was my first plans-built boat. (I had previously built an Adirondack guide boat from a partial kit.) The plans were well drawn, and the full-sized patterns for the frames were accurate and required no fairing during assembly. The 16 pages of accompanying printed directions were thorough and easy to follow. The plans provide details for the installation of an inboard motor—specified to be no more than 10 hp with a weight of about 240 lbs—and the option to configure the stern to take a 5- to 10-hp outboard. I built the outboard version so I could use the space in the pilothouse that would be otherwise occupied by the inboard-motor housing.
Earl Boissonou
The plywood takes to the aft half of the hull without fuss. Forward, the 3/8″ sides need some hot water to take the curve, and the twist in the bottom has to be done with two layers of 1/4″ plywood to achieve the 1/2″ thickness required.
The Bo-Jest uses traditional plywood-on-frame assembly, and the plans call for mahogany, oak, and Douglas-fir for the timbers; I chose Douglas-fir for its strength, easy availability in Oregon, and long-established use as a boatbuilding material in the Northwest. Some steam-bending is required for the stringers, plywood at the bow, trunk cabin, and main-cabin brow.
I was 77 years of age at the beginning of the build, so I eased the physical burdens by hiring a 14-year-old boy from the neighborhood to apprentice with me. A friend helped off and on throughout the build, and many others assisted in the heavy work of flipping and moving when needed.
The stem, five frames, and the transom are connected by a plank keel, the chines, and inwales. Three battens on either side of the centerline are let into the bottoms of the transom and the frames and their forward ends stop shy of the stem. The aft two-thirds of the hull goes from a slight V forward to a nearly flat stern. There’s similarly very little shape in the sides aft, so the 3/8″ plywood goes on easily. I eased the bending of the 3/8″ plywood sides at the bow with rags soaked with boiling water, muscle power, clamps, and a come-along. The 1/2″ bottom is made up of two laminates of 1/4″ plywood; bending the thinner plywood to shape is much easier.
After the hull was finished and while it was still upside down on the jig, I made two gantry cranes equipped with ratcheted truck tie-down straps to turn the hull. (I’d use the gantry cranes later, to lift the completed boat onto the trailer.) I also devised and built a cradle to rest the hull on after it was right-side up and finished construction with the hull upright. I used the cradle as a pattern to build adjustable contour bunks on the trailer.
John Kohnen
The pilothouse and the trunk cabin offer plenty of shelter space. The settee to port in the pilothouse is a custom replacement for the galley detailed in the plans.
As I scanned the plans for Bo-Jest, I realized the original floor plan for the pilothouse and trunk cabin would be rather crowded for our use. The Bo-Jest was designed for self-contained cruising with sink, stove, refrigerator, potable water tank, and closets. I too wanted this kind of cruising ability, but I was willing to sacrifice the built-in galley for a more open space. I raised the pilothouse roof 3″, which adds a spacious feeling. Having lived now with the modifications I made for three years, I’m happy with them.
Gas cans, battery, and stern anchor are all located in the aft cockpit. The gas cans are partially hidden by hinged seats, the battery is located in the starboard stern locker, and life jackets for six are located in the port stern locker. Three to four people can sit in the open, self-draining cockpit.
An ice chest, a small butane stove, a few pots and utensils, and a dishpan are all we need for cooking. We keep a bucket-style portable toilet stored under the pilothouse settee and a small carbon-monoxide-sensing propane heater stows in a locker under the trunk-cabin V-berth. All other gear is stored in lockers in the same area.
John Kohnen
Glen-L notes that the Bo-Jest’s length of 17’10” can be stretched to 19’7″or shortened to 17’8″ by changing the frame spacing by up to 10 percent.
Our pilothouse has a settee portside with storage drawers instead of the compact galley in the plans, the helm to starboard, and a center entry door. (An inboard-powered Bo-Jest will have the door to starboard of the engine box.) Down below there is a very roomy 7′6″ V-berth in the trunk cabin. I compensated for the weight of the plans’ potable water tank, which I chose not to install, by using round barbell weights secured in the same forward location under the V-berth. This helps maintain correct trim.
The Bo-Jest was designed to be powered by as little as a 4-hp outboard, but I chose a 9.9-hp, the maximum recommended, and I’m happy with that choice. I gladly would have installed electric propulsion if it weren’t so expensive and offered greater range from a lithium-ion battery pack.
Our Bo-Jest has a top speed of 7 knots, cruises nicely between 4 and 6 knots, likes 5-1/2, and will gunk along at a snail’s pace. I wanted more positive low-speed control at the helm and achieved it by mounting an Uncle Norm’s Marine Products double-finned rudder to the cavitation plate of the outboard. This provides great low-speed steering control, which aids in docking, even while coasting with the engine in neutral. The boat has some windage issues because of its tall profile, and the steering accessory works well to minimize them. Another nicety of this hull design is its turning ability; flip the wheel riotously fast, and the boat will come about in nearly its own length! It is stingy on gas: less than ½ gallon per hour at 5-1/2 knots, and at 7 knots consumes about 6/10 gallon of precious non-ethanol gas.
John Kohnen
Powered with just a 9.9 hp outboard, painted to match the boat’s color scheme, the Bo-Jest can hit 7 knots.
I haul the boat with a 3.5-liter V6 Ford Flex. The loaded trailer pulls easily with no sway, and with the electric brakes I installed on the trailer, there’s no trouble slowing or stopping.
I would not rate this a project for a beginning boatbuilder unless the builder has previous more intricate wood project experience. However, motivation can be powerful and provide success to a dedicated novice builder like me. I spent two years and ten months working three to four hours per day, five days a week, to complete this project. Phone calls to Glen-L cleared up any questions I had along the way.
The Bo-Jest is very comfortable and roomy for a boat with a length of only 17′10″. The trunk cabin is cozy—many who come aboard enjoy napping below; two people can be very comfortable overnight. The pilothouse is quite comfortable with the settee on the port side, and a well-equipped pilot station makes navigating the boat easy.
John Kohnen
The pilot house is designed to have standing headroom from 6’1″ to 6’4″; the cabin has seating height from 4’1″ to 4’4″.
I am now 81 and have piloted our Bo-Jest many miles. I have navigated the Yaquina River near Newport, Oregon, and have made other excursions in Washington’s Puget Sound, including participating in the first Salish 100, a 100-mile pocket-yacht cruise. More voyages lie ahead, and I look forward to them.
I would happily recommend this design to anyone who appreciates its jaunty, salty looks, and quite-good handling. Unlike many small craft, this boat provides extended use at both ends of the boating season.
Earl Boissonou, 81, lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and is a retired elementary-school teacher. He is a passionate artist who draws, paints, and sculpts. He began sailing in 1968 and built his first boat, an Adirondack guideboat, in 2009 to keep busy while recovering from a major operation. He christened it CHERRILL B in honor of his wife. While building his Bo-Jest he had the help of two neighbors: young Caleb Washburn and Dr. Bruce Thomson. The boat was christened DR. PETRA, a nod to Dr. Pepper soda and tribute to his doctor friend, Bruce, and Petra, a family dog that had passed away.
Bo-Jest Particulars
[table]
Overall length/17′10″
Waterline length/17′
Beam/7′11″
Hull type/Semi-displacement
Displacement/2,660 lbs with inboard; 2,350 lbs, as-built, with outboard
A group of us in Marinette, Wisconsin, and Menominee, Michigan, were inspired by the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association to form a club with the idea to build and row a team boat. We thought the Chesapeake Light Craft Team Dory would be a good boat for us and made arrangements to rendezvous with the Les Cheneaux Rowing Club on a chilly, misty October day in October to try one of theirs on Lake Huron. The weather was less than perfect and the water around the Les Cheneaux Islands was a bit choppy, but the dory handled it like a charm. With our WISHIGAN (for Wisconsin and Michigan) Team Rowing Club newly established, we ordered a Team Dory kit.
Our kit arrived on a 4′ x 8′ pallet along with a box containing the epoxy, watertight hatches, and hardware. All of the parts were well marked and easily identified. We began building with all of the preassemblies: frames, planks, bottom, and transom. The proper alignment of the long three- and four-part planks and bottom panel is guaranteed with the precise CNC-cut puzzle joints. We dry-fit the puzzle joints and found them very tight and almost requiring a hammer to tap them together, but once they were coated with epoxy they slid together quite easily.
For the lapstitch construction, the bottom edges of the upper planks are have a 1/2″-wide rabbet, which creates an overlap and largely eliminates the imprecise alignment of the butted edges between conventional stitch-and-glue panels. The plywood parts had all of the 1/16″ wiring holes precisely predrilled. We were amazed that all the holes lined up perfectly, even where wires had to be pushed through two overlapping planks. Once the wires were tightened, the planks formed tight joints and the hull had the classic lapstrake appearance.
While wiring the parts together was tedious, we were amazed at how quickly the boat took shape. We checked the boat for twist and symmetry using winding sticks at the frames. We departed from the kit instructions at this point, which suggested turning the boat upside down and applying beads of epoxy to the laps between the wires to lock the shape. We were satisfied with the alignment of the hull while it was right-side up, and we opted to add the epoxy tacks between the wires on the inside of the laps.
Four of the five 18mm-thick plywood frames come in halves with puzzle-joint connections between them. The fifth frame, which gets placed in the stern, is a single piece. The frames are sandwiched between pairs of 6mm doublers that extend below the seat level. These reinforcement pieces are set about 1/4″ back from the frame perimeter to make extra room for the structural epoxy fillets between the frames and the bottom and garboard planks.
The gunwale pieces have precut scarf joints and are ready to be glued together. After the epoxy cured and the gunwales were ready for installation, gluing them to the sheer planks required using every clamp we had and every clamp we could borrow.
Chesapeake Light Craft
The rowers’ seats are enclosed compartments that serve as foot bracing and, with watertight hatches installed, as flotation and storage. The seat for the coxswain will have a third panel, removable for access to the storage space.
The seats were assembled while we were finishing the sanding of the gunwales and inside of the boat. The top of each seat is 14″ wide and rests on the top of the frame doublers. Bulkheads forward and aft extend down from the seat at a 30-degree angle; the forward bulkheads of the aft three seats serve as foot braces for the rowers facing them. The seats are positioned 45″ apart.
The bottom and garboard planks get a layer of fiberglass in between the frames before the seats are installed. The boat interior, gunwale, and seat assemblies get sealed with epoxy, and the seats’ exteriors are sheathed with fiberglass. The seats get dry-fit to the boat then attached using generous fillets. Watertight ports are added to the aft side of the seat enclosures for access and storage of small items. The coxswain’s seat has a three-piece top; its port and starboard panels are epoxied in place, and the center section is removable for access to storage underneath. Limbers permit drainage from the compartment.
The exterior surfaces of the bottom and garboards get a layer of fiberglass and epoxy; the rest of the planking receives a sealing coat of epoxy. The skeg is fastened to the bottom with thickened epoxy and screws driven from inside the hull and fillets reinforce the connection. During the boat’s first winter maintenance we added an oak “wormshoe” from the skeg to the bow to protect the bottom.
We modified the oarlock pads by increasing their height to allow additional oar-to-leg clearance for rowing in choppy water. Even though the boat is designed with a single oarlock at each station, we installed oarlocks both port and starboard at every rowing location to permit switching the oar to the other side on long rows.
Chesapeake Light Craft
The rudder extends only as deep as the bottom of the skeg, so it can stay with the dory when it’s on the beach. With the boat afloat and the crew aboard, the rudder blade is well covered for effective steering.
Building a CLC Team Dory is a very enjoyable project. The manual is complete and easy to follow; construction is well suited to a novice or an experienced boatbuilder. Following the instructions will make it a very rewarding experience. We built our boat during a winter with crews of two to five people working six to eight hours a week. Our best advice: Careful attention to detail and care in the use and cleanup of epoxy will certainly eliminate a lot of tedious sanding.
Mark Hawkins Photography
The boat has a maximum displacement of 1000 lbs, so a full crew will have plenty of freeboard.
Our first oars were the traditional carved straight-bladed oars made to the patterns furnished with the CLC kit. The oars were 9′ 6″ long. Our second set of oars had blades of 3mm plywood, bent and epoxy-glued in a curved fixture. The blades were then attached to shafts 9′ 6″ long creating oars 10′ 6″ long. A year later we made an additional set 11′ 6″ long. The shorter oars are ideal for rowing in choppy water and the longer oars are used in calmer water. This year we have started using the 10′ 6″ oars in the 1st and 4th position and the longest oars in the 2nd and 3rd positions. The rowers sit on the centerline of the boat and the distance from oarlock to handle differs 6″ and this was an attempt to equalize the balance and mechanical advantage for all positions. However, the effectiveness of this change is still inconclusive, perhaps more mental than physical.
Mark Hawkins Photography
Two good rowers can move the Team Dory at a good clip, often faster than a full crew. The 9′ 6″ oars are being used here.
We now have two Team Dories, and this is our fifth year of rowing them. Our group comes from a varied background of fixed and sliding-seat boats with each person handling two oars, so the first things we had to get used were each pulling only one oar and following the cadence set by the rower in the stroke, who sits directly in front of the coxswain. Initially, the boat would rock side to side, but once we synchronized our stroke, the boat rode level. A practiced crew rowing together cruises at a speed of 4 to 5 knots.
The Team Dory is light, about 250 lbs, and easily rides the top of the waves. We have taken our dories out with waves of 1′ to 2′ and have never taken any water over the sides. We carry water scoops and sponges but thus far they’ve been idle. The low profile of the boat gives little resistance to the wind. The boat responds well to the rudder and turns quite easily without the coxswain having to direct rowers to row harder or ease up on one side.
Mark Hawkins Photography
The Team Dory is well suited for training new crews. As Meat Loaf might sing for this crew, “Now don’t be sad, ’cause three out of four ain’t bad.”
While the boats are designed for four rowers and a coxswain, we take the Team Dories out with only two rowers and a coxswain. We balance the boat with one rower at the bow and the other at the third seat. They have oars of different lengths—the boat has a narrower beam at the first seat—and produce an imbalance in thrust, but the coxswain can easily maintain a straight course with a slight angle on the rudder. Rowing with a crew of three has little effect on the speed of the boat; two good rowers can often be faster than a full crew of five.
We often travel to participate in regattas with other teams, and modified a trailer to accommodate one Team Dory with a second nested inside it, resting on styrofoam pads on the seats. An event flotilla usually consists of Team Dories and 33′ pilot gigs, each with six rowers and coxswain. The Team Dories outrun the gigs on a course with twists and turns, but have difficulty keeping up on a long, straight course.
Mark Hawkins Photography
The rowing stations are 45″ apart, a generous spacing which will keep the crew on good terms, even if the stroke is in mid-drive and third seat is on the recovery.
Most of our rowing has been on the protected waters of the Menominee River, but we have also had the Team Dories out on Green Bay, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior in waves up to 2′ and have yet to take on any water. And while neither boat has ever foundered, the air-tight seat compartments provide reassuring flotation. The dories are also tough in spite of their light weight; we have inadvertently hit everything possible from docks to bridge supports with little damage aside from scuffed paint and varnish. We highly recommend the Team Dory. It is an exciting construction project, and the finished boat is a pleasure to row with our friends.
Scott Craw of Marinette, Wisconsin, was Lead Structural Engineer at Marinette Marine, a ship-building company that produces vessels for the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard. He retired in 2011 and, during the first winter of his retirement, he built a Wineglass Wherry, noting “winters are long in Wisconsin.” His plan was to use the boat to fish the local waters but he discovered the joy of rowing and, as he puts it, has yet to drown a worm. Scott started following the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association on Facebook. He and a fellow rower, Mike Kushman, wanted to have a similar group on the Great Lakes and the WISHIGAN Team Rowing was born. The club offers free rowing to the community twice a week.
As far as sailing goes, it had been a summer of frustrations for me, with one boating trip after another canceled or cut short while I dealt with life ashore. A series of job interviews seemed to be heading nowhere I wanted to go. My house was an affliction of leaking faucets, sagging gutters, and wildly overgrown hedges, and the car wasn’t much better—wheel bearings, transmission, tires, all the tedious consequences of chronically unenthusiastic maintenance arriving all at once. Then an unexpected funeral brought me back early from a solo cruise on Georgian Bay. I kept hoping that one morning all these unwelcome obligations would drain away like an ebbing tide, leaving me free to hoist a sail and set out along the margins of the world to find a place where the water’s crooked fingers had dug deep into something worth seeing.
A cold and rainy September seemed likely to finish the dreary season entirely. But then a narrow window of freedom opened unexpectedly just as the weather promised to improve, and I was off with my boat and a pile of camping gear before complications could arise, with no clear destination in mind except “away.” A quick look at a rest-stop road map an hour down the road reminded me of a sprawling lake system in northern Wisconsin, 15 miles from the Michigan border, created by a dam at the confluence of the Turtle and Flambeau rivers. I hadn’t been there for a couple of years, which seemed like reason enough to make it my destination now. After a phone call to convince my brother Lance to meet me there with his Phoenix III for a few days, I was moving again. “The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous,” Thoreau assures his readers, and by this definition I am nothing if not wise.
Roger Siebert
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“Paul Bunyan was too busy a man to think about posterity,” wrote Aldo Leopold, noted conservationist and author of the classic A Sand County Almanac, “but if he had been asked to reserve a spot for posterity to see what the old north woods looked like, he likely would have chosen the Flambeau.” The ancient pine forests of northern Wisconsin were gone before the 20th century began, as Leopold knew all too well; his essay on the Flambeau River is in large part an elegy to a vanished world. By the time he wrote it, sometime in the 1940s, the Turtle-Flambeau Dam near the river’s headwaters was 20 years old. But despite the irresistible advance of modernization—Wisconsin’s burgeoning dairy industry needed such dams for rural electrification—the state government had also moved to preserve a 50-mile stretch of wild river on the upper Flambeau, just below the dam. Leopold again: “Slowly, patiently, and sometimes expensively the Conservation Department has been buying land, removing cottages, warding off unnecessary roads, and in general pushing the clock back, as far as possible, toward the original wilderness.” It was a wilderness that would later expand to include the new man-made lake that had swallowed the floodplains of the two rivers for a few miles above the dam.
As I pulled into the parking lot at the main boat ramp of the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage—all but empty on a Sunday evening in mid-September—it seemed to me that the clock had been pushed back far enough to seem almost irrelevant here. The lake lay hidden within a forest of pines and hardwoods already more than 100 years old. The shoreline wandered across the map in a series of elaborate flourishes for more than 100 miles, enclosing 14,000 acres of water and nearly 200 undeveloped islands—and, almost unbelievably, dozens of free first-come, first-served campsites accessible only by boat. Here was a sail-and-oar wilderness at the scale of a long weekend, along with an astonishing absence of bureaucracy. No fees, no permits, no reservations. The clock, it seemed, had not just been pushed back. In some ways it had stopped running entirely.
Photographs by the author
Just minutes from the boat ramp, Lance and I were well on our way into the heart of the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage. Aboard the Alaska, the space between the forward thwart and the mast serves as the cargo hold, leaving the rest of the cockpit clear; storing most of the gear in two large duffel-style dry bags makes unloading simple when camping ashore.
Lance was already at the ramp when I arrived. We launched our boats, hastily transferred gear, parked our cars, and set off under oars down a narrow channel that ran northward between a chain of tiny islands to starboard and a long peninsula to port. When we reached open water, we hoisted our sails and began working our way southwest in light winds as the sun dropped toward the horizon. An hour later, we sailed into the wind shadow of an unnamed island—one of many—near the center of the flowage and turned north again, ghosting along in winds too light to feel. One of the unwritten rules of evening sailing was holding true: the closer we got to our destination, the fainter the breeze became. No matter, though. We were in no hurry. We simply glided along past island after island, moving so slowly that each boat seemed to be floating atop an impressionistic portrait of itself, Monet trading his lilies for lugsails.
We beached our boats below an empty campsite at the northern tip of an unnamed island and unloaded our gear. We had come only 2 miles from the ramp, but distance is not the only measure of solitude. There is magic to camping on an island, however near the mainland it might be—just ask Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. Two miles on the map had become 100 miles in my mind, a welcome unburdening from life ashore.
Our campsite’s location near the center of the flowage offered a good view of Big Island to the northwest and opportunities for exploring in any direction, no matter what the wind decided to do that day.
Our island had been a low ridge on the east bank of the old Flambeau River before the dam swallowed it up. Now the river was gone, along with a dozen smaller lakes and waterways: Rat Lake, Horseshoe Lake, Townline Lake, Baraboo Lake, Otter Creek, Beaver Creek, and more. But other than the wide band of gravelly beach surrounding each island, the mark of midsummer drawdown at the dam, there was no obvious sign of the lake’s industrial origins. There were a few cabins and lodges along the northern and western sides of the flowage, I knew, but here we seemed surrounded by pure wilderness.
The boats rested in still water while we unloaded gear at camp. The Alaska’s boomless lugsail makes brailing a simple option for quick stops ashore, even without a dedicated brailing line.
After setting up our tents and cooking supper over camp stoves, too lazy to bother with a fire, we watched the moon climb through the treetops. The wind died away entirely as the evening grew darker. When the islands had faded to nothing but jagged silhouettes in the moonlight, I returned to the water’s edge to check on the boats before retreating to my tent for the night. But, as usual, the temptation was too much for me. Instead of going back to camp, I shoved off and set out under oars with no intention but to continue moving slowly through the night until I had seen something of what there was to see.
Working to an easy rhythm with the oars floating lightly in my hands, I glided over water so dark and still that it might have been a photograph. With each stroke, water ran down the oar blades to fall drop by drop onto the surface of the lake, and the sweep of the oars on the recovery drew long arcs of slowly expanding circles alongside the hull. It was the only sign that the boat was moving at all.
I kept rowing gently through a maze of islands that were nothing more than looming shadows in the darkness. For how long—an hour? Two? It was impossible to know. Somewhere out on the water a loon called, and called again. And far above the earth, beyond the darkness of the night sky, the stars continued their slow-moving circumnavigations around the pole star, measuring out the hours almost imperceptibly.
Morning brought an autumn chill and cloudy skies. We dawdled through an unambitious breakfast in camp, waiting for the slow sunrise to dry the dew a bit before setting out for the day. Soon enough, though, we were ready to be moving. Our island campsite was comfortable, especially considering the price—a picnic table, fire ring, and open-air toilet hidden back in the woods—but we hadn’t come this far to stay ashore all day. We pulled out our maps and started to look things over.
A southeasterly breeze made the choice of where to begin an easy one: we would sail north, following the original channel of the Flambeau until we reached the northern shore of the flowage, where we would have to work our way westward under a low bridge and around the northern end of the aptly named Big Island. From there, we’d be entering the course of the Turtle River, which we’d follow down the west side of Big Island to the dam. Then north again, roughly paralleling the old Flambeau channel once more past dozens of smaller islands, to close the loop at camp. Ten miles, give or take. Just about right for a casual day’s journey.
The bridge connects Big Island, on the left, to the mainland. The band of darkened rocks along the shore show that it’s more important to pay attention to the “Low Bridge” sign before the summer draw-down at the dam.
With a base camp to return to, we didn’t need to load much gear—just water bottles, rain jackets, and a few snacks. Then we hoisted our sails and shoved off from the beach, riding north on an easy broad reach. After a mile we turned west, skirting a chain of piney islands on a run dead-downwind, jibing now and then. The breeze was light enough to let my Alaska edge slowly ahead of the Phoenix III—no surprise with an extra 10 square feet of sail, and a waterline more than 2’ longer. But it was really no more than a slight edge. The two boats seemed well-suited for cruising together. Before long, I pulled into a shallow reed bed to drop my sail and mast so we could pass under the bridge connecting Big Island to the mainland. I started to pull out the oars, but we were already moving straight toward the bridge. The wind would push us through, I realized. We drifted easily along the marshy shore and under the low bridge, where a bright yellow sign needlessly proclaimed Caution Low Bridge Narrow Channel. I smiled. There was barely room for the hull to slip between the rocky banks—and that in a narrow sail-and-oar cruiser with a 4′ 8″ beam. I could have stood in the center of the channel, knee-deep in dark water, and touched the stones on each shore. But our boats floated through without so much as brushing the bottom. With water levels so low, I didn’t even have to duck my head.
We beached the boats just north of Big Island, at the end of the road on the northern approach to the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage. Big Island is a state wildlife refuge with miles of trails, and a few boat-in campsites on its eastern shore.
We beached our boats on a wide sandy beach on the far side of the bridge, 3′ below the summer high-water mark. A low tide in the north woods begins in July when the spillways open to maintain water flows for the electric plants downstream, and lasts until spring. No need for complicated anchoring systems or clothesline moorings here—at least, not if we returned before April. But I took my 6-lb Northill anchor up the beach anyway, and set it firmly at the sand’s edge, wary of an unintended marooning should my boat somehow float away. Overkill, I knew, but I’ve learned to accept that overkill is generally more tolerable than underkill.
Overhead, gray clouds were breaking up and streaks of bright blue were showing through. We left our boats on the beach and crossed the bridge onto Big Island to walk a long way along the trails. Autumn was just beginning to show itself in muted browns and oranges, and monarch butterflies flickered back and forth above our heads as we dawdled along. That’s the beauty of a small wilderness: no urgency, no reason to push on for mile after mile. Plenty of time for side trips.
Eventually we returned to the boats and set off again. The Flambeau was behind us; our course followed the Turtle River channel west and south from here, down the western side of Big Island. We sailed a slow beam reach through 100 yards of reedy shallows, rudders kicked up but still dragging, before reaching deep water and turning south.
I’ve logged over 1,000 miles in my brother’s Phoenix III, and now, three years after launching my Alaska, I’m nearing that milestone in it as well. The Phoenix III seems to have the advantage to windward, while the Alaska really takes off with the wind behind the beam.
It had been a while since I’d been on a two-boat trip with Lance, and I was quickly remembering how much I liked it. As always, we made for an unruly armada, breaking formation on the merest whim, but generally remaining in sight. With the wind behind us, the Alaska edged ahead at first; then I cut inside a couple of small islands to hug the shores of Big Island while my brother took the outside route to regain the lead. And promptly surrendered the lead again by landing at one of the campsites on Big Island while I kept drifting slowly along the main channel, sitting to leeward to keep my sail filled in the light breeze. And so it went.
As we reached the far western side of Big Island, the winds picked up and the channel veered south, making for a tough beat. With all the miles I’ve spent aboard my brother’s Phoenix III, I’ve come to appreciate its excellent performance to windward. Now, falling behind in my Alaska, I found myself wishing his boat wouldn’t point quite so high, or tack so quickly, or slice so cleanly through the chop. Or maybe it was more the skipper than the boat. Either way, aboard my Alaska it was getting windy enough to be interesting. Before long, I headed into the wind and dropped the sail to tie in a reef. But the wind kept building, stronger and gustier. Even with a reef in, it was getting to be a handful. And then a double handful. I’ve learned that my Alaska, with its narrow beam, slack bilges, and low sweeping sheer, is not shy about dipping a leeward rail when pressed hard. That had been alarming at first, until I learned to trust that it would heel only so far and then keep sailing right along. Still, I’m too lazy to really enjoy hiking out and pushing hard. Better to keep things in control.
We found several long sandy beaches on the western side of Big Island, overlooking the old channel of the Turtle River. With the wind picking up, I took the opportunity to pull ashore and tie in a second reef.
When I spotted a long sandy beach on the western shore of Big Island, I steered right toward it at speed, sheeting in hard, then pulled up the rudder and let the sheet fly just as the stem scraped the sand. With my weight far back on the sternsheets, the boat glided well up onto shore and ground to a stop. I dropped the sail and tied in a double reef. Lance joined me on the beach a few moments later, and tied in a reef as well—more to let me keep up, I suspected, than because he needed it. But I wasn’t going to try to talk him out of it.
Of course, there is nothing so fickle as the wind. The approaching frontal system swept past quickly in a riotous jumble of clouds and rainy gusts, and before I had managed to sail a half mile, it was time for the full mainsail again. Already the Phoenix III had opened up a wide gap. It was definitely faster to windward, where the Alaska lost ground on each tack, its long flat keel needing to be sailed around in a gentle turn. At least I was finally gaining ground under full sail, I consoled myself. Or at least, not losing ground anymore.
Sailing through the narrow dog-leg channel separating our campsite from the next island to the north made for an interesting light-air challenge. With patience, we both managed to reach camp without resorting to oars.
I followed Lance toward the foot of Big Island, dodging through a field of stumps that would have been hidden at higher water. More than once I found myself tacking within inches of a stump I’d seen too late, hoping I wasn’t about to sail right over another that I hadn’t seen at all. Worse still were the occasional angled logs still rooted in the lake bed but barely visible—or not—above the surface. At one point I felt a booming thump on the hull as I sailed right over one of them. All right, at more than one point. Apparently the warning on the Department of Natural Resources’ map I’d picked up at the boat ramp before launching—“The Turtle-Flambeau Flowage has an abundance of stumps, logs, floating driftwood, and rock bars”—wasn’t as irrelevant to a boat with a mere 7” draft as I had assumed, at least not in September. I glanced at the map again. There, too, was the obligatory “The map should not be used for navigation” disclaimer. Busted again, navigating when I wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes it seems like I’ll never learn.
But finally we sailed free of the stump field—which, I reminded myself, has probably done a lot to keep the jet skis away, so it’s not all bad. And then we tacked past the Turtle Dam with its long line of yellow buoys and turned north again, heading downwind along another string of islands. Off the wind, the Alaska pulled ahead of the Phoenix III, sail area and waterline triumphant again. We finished the day by approaching camp from the east, slipping through the narrow dogleg channel that separated our island from its nearest neighbor, skirting a few downed trees that rose from the water like grasping hands, before sliding up onto our home beach again. An evening of thunderstorms and hard rain drove us to our tents early.
The next day brought clear weather at last. The wind had swung around to the southwest, bringing some fierce gusts, but it wasn’t enough to keep us ashore. We launched our boats and tacked down to the southern tip of our island, where we started to beat our way southward through the biggest stretch of open water on the flowage. Again I waffled back and forth: one reef, two reefs, no reefs. Gusts. No gusts. Strong wind. Light wind. Light wind, strong gusts—an interesting combination, impossible to reef for. Lance pulled ahead steadily in the Phoenix III. I tried not to notice.
We worked our way toward the southern reaches of the flowage, taking time to stop at several islands along the way. A few more thumpings of the centerboard when I cut too close to shore at one point reminded me too late of the “abundance of rock bars” the map had warned about. Still, no harm done. At least, not this time.
Navigating the narrow, twisting channels of the far southern reaches of the flowage involved maneuvering in shifty breezes that seemed to come from all directions at once.
Before long we were well past the farthest point that we reached on our last trip two years earlier, into a chain of smaller lakes that was almost a river again. Tacking and jibing in the shifting gusts that swept the narrow channel, we sailed south and farther south. Finally, though, the low water levels defeated us. At the mouth of Otter Creek, at the very end of the flowage, the Alaska ground to a halt among the reeds, keel dragging in the mud. Even in a kayak I couldn’t have made it into the creek and continued upstream.
Forced to turn around, we sailed our way back to open water with no regrets. It had been a perfect day exploring a wilderness that seemed as if it must have been created for sail and oar. No motors, no people, nothing but sun and wind and solitude, the gentle motion of the waves, an occasional splashing of spray over the coaming. Island after island, tall pines and birches shuffling in the breeze, the quiet splashing of small waves on the shore. Seen from a small boat, the southern half of the Turtle-Flambeau seemed like pure pre-industrial north woods—no cabins, no cottages, no roads, only an unbroken forest of mixed hardwoods and pines.
But of course, like so much that seems too good to be true, the Turtle-Flambeau is as much illusion as it is reality. What looked like pure wilderness was only a clever ruse, I knew, the result of what the Department of Natural Resources calls “a 300′ aesthetic zone”—a fringe of timber left perpetually unharvested around the entire shoreline of the flowage, with provisions for selective logging and intermittent clear-cutting still in place farther inland. Still, it was better than nothing at all. Give me a small boat, a sail, and a good pair of oars, and I’ll work my way along the margins of the world past whatever fringes of the wild remain, wherever they lead. That was exactly what I had come looking for, after all.
September days are short in northern Wisconsin, but the evening light can be magical. For our four-day trip, we had the flowage almost entirely to ourselves.
It was late afternoon by the time we headed north toward camp, paralleling a chain of islands up the western shore of the flowage. Light winds gave way to lighter winds. The sun dropped below the trees, but still the light caught our sails in a soft golden glow even as the water beneath grew ever darker. Eventually we turned up a narrow passage that ran through a jumble of small islands, where the breeze faded almost to nothing. We floated up the channel side by side, the Alaska slowly pulling ahead thanks to its larger mainsail.
Still a mile from camp, we starting to lose the wind. Aboard the Alaska, my simple line-and-bungee “autopilot” took over the steering while I got photographic proof that the Phoenix III isn’t always in the lead.
The sky faded to a deep blue, and stars began appearing overhead. And for more than a mile, for more than an hour, we sat silent and unmoving in our boats, drifting along so slowly that it was hard to perceive any motion at all. Only the faint ripple of our wakes and the whisper of moving water along the hull disturbed the sensation of utter stillness. Weight to leeward to keep some wind in the sails. Steering with the barest nudges of the tiller. Slowly and ever more slowly, our two boats slid over the dark water.
Somewhere a loon called. The moon rose slowly over the trees, casting its rippled light over the water. And far behind me, the victim of a shorter waterline and a smaller sail, my brother’s boat hung altogether motionless atop a sea of blackness, white hull clearly outlined against a seemingly endless backdrop of jagged islands and dark pines. An illusion, I thought to myself again. But one worth seeing.
Our trip ended just as the weather turned, bringing a few miles of rowing through dead calms and a cold rain.
Tom Pamperin is a freelance writer who lives in northwestern Wisconsin. He spends his summers cruising small boats throughout Wisconsin, the North Channel, and along the Texas coast. He is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly and WoodenBoat.
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 new set of homemade clamps have a reach of 16″. Here one is applying enough pressure to keep the clamp from pivoting under its own cantilevered weight and resting on the edge of the plywood.
When I built a reproduction of the 9th century Gokstad faering, I encountered a number of challenges I hadn’t faced with any of the other boats I’d built; one was working with very wide planks. The faering has only three strakes, and the planks are 12″ to 14″ wide amidships. I had a collection of Brenne-style cam-lever planking clamps that had a 10″ reach, enough for even the rather wide planks on dories, but they couldn’t span the middle of the faering planks.
I made my first set of Brenne-style clamps in the late ’70s and they’ve see a lot of action, but there are some jobs that are just beyond their reach.
I made a set of three extra-long clamps for the job; I used my tap-and-die set for wood to make threaded dowels as the means to tighten them. They worked, but were unwieldy and much slower to operate than the cam-lever clamps.
A Brenne clamp, like the fist planking clamps I made, could easily be scaled up to provide more reach, but the cam and the metal straps connecting it to the clamp jaw opposite have a limited operating range. I’d made one of my earliest clamps in that style with longer straps that had additional holes, but adjusting it to fit the work at hand was never something I thought to do until I had a batch of epoxy mixed, and the clock was ticking.
When I made a new set of long-reach clamps, I used the cam idea but did away with the metal straps and used a single length of cord instead. It allows instantly changing the clamp to fit jobs of different thicknesses. I didn’t bother with the semicircular notch for the cam that’s cut into the jaw; it’s the fussiest part of making Brenne clamp and unnecessary here. I went through a few iterations of the new design, with each less complicated than the one that preceded it and, as is often the case, the simplest solution, presented here, was the best solution.
The dimensions aren’t critical so you can build the clamp to suit your needs and available materials. The 2-1/2″ circle seems to be a good size for providing good clamping pressure.
For a clamp with a 16″ reach, I cut two 24″ jaws out of softwood 2x4s. The tips are about 1-1/4″ wide, the tails 3″, and in between, the jaws curve smoothly and taper gradually. I glued and nailed two 1/2″ plywood cheeks to one jaw, then set the other jaw between the cheeks, with a 1″ gap between the tails, and drilled a 5/16″ hole for a 1/4″ carriage bolt.
The jam cleat is just a piece of hardwood with shallow-angled cuts on the bottom. I didn’t sand those cuts smooth; I left them rough for a better grip.
Roughly 16″ in from the tip of the pivoting jaw I drilled two more holes, one above the other. I made a 4″-long hardwood jam cleat and screwed that to the plywood cheek over the fixed jaw. The fixed jaw will be on top during use, and because I’m right-handed, I put the cleat on the right side.
When I checked the clamping pressure on a bathroom scale, the results were around 50 lbs. I can get over 60 lbs if I apply the clamp, then flip the cam lever forward, tighten the cord to pull out the slack, and flip the lever back again. I couldn’t measure the clamping pressure of my Brenne clamps this way because they can’t function on an arrangement this thick.
For the cam lever, I used a piece of hardwood (ash); the lever is subject to a lot of pressure and hardwood is less apt to be crushed. It’s 9-1/2″ long, 1-1/2″ thick, and the circular end has a diameter of 2-1/2″. The hole drilled in it needs to be lined up with the circle’s center. Put a square on the side of the handle that meets the circle at a tangent, draw a line through the circle’s center, and drill the hole on that line.
I tied a stopper knot in a length of rather stiff 3/16″ kernmantle cord and threaded the cord through one hole on the lower jaw’s left side, through the hole in the cam lever, and finally through the other hole in the lower jaw.
In use, the cam lever is set on the top jaw with the handle facing away and the hole and cord set on the bottom. With the clamp’s tips set on the workpieces, the cord is drawn tight and wrapped around the jam cleat. The cam lever is flipped, raising the hole and adding tension to the cord. The cam will roll backward as the lever is brought down on the jaw and the lever will tend to rise and release the tension. Sliding the cam lever forward will change the angle of the cord and cause it to hold the lever down.
This version of the clamp applies the same amount of pressure, about 50 lbs.
A long-reach clamp can also be built with a ratcheting bar clamp. Cut a slot in each jaw to give the bar a loose fit by drilling a row of holes and remove the wood remaining between them with a knife, chisel, or coarse file. The clamp will probably have a rolled steel pin in the end of the bar. Tap that out with a hammer. Remove the clamp’s sliding jaw, insert the bar through the slots in the jaws and replace the sliding jaw. It may help to grind or file a corner off the end of the bar to ease reinserting it past the inner workings of the ratchet mechanism. If the release trigger is too close to the jaw, cut a groove in the back of the jaw to make room to get a finger under the trigger.
Slots in the wooden jaws accommodate the bar of a ratcheting clamp. Note the shallow groove in the wooden jaw, which provides clearance for the release lever, and the rounded end of the bar, which eases reinserting the bar through the ratchet grip.
You can tap the rolled pin back in or leave it out to make it easier to switch back and forth between the ratchet clamp’s normal use and its place in the long-reach clamp. The clamp I built this way is the size of the cam-lever version above, and has the same reach and applies the same pressure.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
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When I finished our Penobscot 14 back in 2017, I intended to row it around the river inlets and shoreline of our bay. One of the pieces of gear that I was going to need was a nice pair of gloves to prevent blisters on my hands, as I didn’t row frequently enough to develop calluses. I had tried a few styles but was not happy with the fit or feel until I came across Gill’s Long Finger Deckhand Gloves.
Audrey and I do a bit of sailing and paddling in addition to rowing, so I also wanted gloves that were versatile, easy to put on and take off when wet, and that dried fast. The Deckhand Gloves have lightweight polyester-spandex shells with doubled synthetic suede Amara reinforcements and padding. None of these materials hold much water, so they dry fast. The elasticity of the shell makes it much easier to put on and take off than a leather glove. A side benefit is that the materials provide UV50+ protection, an important factor for us in Florida.
Photographs by Audrey Lewis
After a year in use, the gloves show little evidence of wear.
Audrey, a talented seamstress who has made gloves in the past and knows how they’re put together, looked the Deckhand Gloves over, inside and out. The fabric panels on the sides of the fingers, the fourchettes, are cut from synthetic suede for lightness and comfort and the tops and bottoms, the tranks, are cut from spandex. The palms and the insides of the fingers are reinforced with the Amara suede for better grip and padding; the suede is wrapped around the tips of the middle, ring, and pinky fingers, which places the seams on the backs of the fingers to keep from creating pressure points. The thumb and index-finger tips are open for an undiminished sense of touch. The suede also wraps around the side of the index finger and thumb, which makes a big difference when handling lines. The hook-and-loop closures at the wrists are easy to grip and adjust.
The open thumb and index-finger tips come in handy when manipulating small bits of hardware, using electronics, and fastening gear like PFD buckles and zippers. I also tried gloves with all of the fingertips open but found that I didn’t really need the tactile feel on the other three fingers for rowing and paddling. I prefer the protection of closed fingertips.
The fit of the gloves allows gripping oar handles without forming creases in the palm. The black suede material wraps around the thumb, over an area where the skin is prone to blistering during long rows.
As for sizing and fit, they gloves are snug, which is what prevents loose material bunching up in the palms while rowing. If you prefer a looser fit, I’d suggest ordering one size up. There three versions: Short Finger, Long Finger, and Junior Short Finger. The Long Finger version I have comes in five sizes, XS to XL. I’ve been using the Deckhands for a year now and, they have proven durable and comfortable. They are thoughtfully designed, sturdily made, and affordably priced.
Audrey and Kent Lewis mess about in an armada of small boats on the bays and rivers of the Florida Panhandle.
Extensions make it possible to get away from the motor while still steering and controlling the throttle.
Outboard motors are handy things on small boats, but they’re demanding devices. Hanging off the transom as they often do, they require a broad stern to support not just their weight, but the weight of the person stuck with holding the motor’s tiller.
Rigid extension handles make it possible to stand while at the helm and sit farther forward to lighten the burden in the stern, and articulated extensions, equipped universal joints, provide more options for where you plant yourself. I’d been using a plastic pipe as a rigid extension and thought I’d give an articulated extension a try. I found two: the Handi-Mate from Davis Instruments and the HelmsMate from Ironwood Pacific. They were both described in similar terms, so I thought one would be about as good as the other and bought the less-expensive Handi-Mate.
The Handi-Mate’s outer tube slides over the universal joint to switch from articulated to ridge.
The Handi-Mate was packaged in clear plastic, and it looked okay until I got it home and was able to get a look at the universal joint. The handle is made of two nesting aluminum tubes; the inner tube slips out to provide the adjustable length and the outer tube slips over the U-joint to make the transition from articulated to fixed. The snap buttons for both tubes were small and difficult to operate. When I exposed the U-joint, I was disappointed to see that it was plastic and very small. The larger tube has a diameter of about 7/8″, and the U-joint had to fit its 3/4″ inside diameter.
The Handi-Mate’s U-joint is made of plastic and has to be small enough to fit inside the aluminum extension tube.
I slipped the Handi-Mate socket over the handle of one of my outboards, a 4-hp Yamaha four-stroke. Tightening the socket’s knob presses a bar against the handle’s rubber grip. It holds it in place, but the pressure is applied only on the underside of the bar and on the opposite side of the rigid socket, so I suspect the socket will shift in one axis on a small handle. More troubling were the stops molded into the U-joint. They limit the extension’s range of motion and could leave the handle hanging in midair when released, a very vulnerable position; given the great mechanical advantage of the handle over the U-joint, I thought any force applied to the suspended handle would destroy the joint. I’d seen enough and didn’t need to try it on the water. I put it back in its package and returned it to the store for a refund.
The HelmsMate impressed me from the start. It comes strapped on a cardboard panel with everything showing, including the stout, stainless-steel U-joint. The device to lock the joint is a 3-7/8″-long aluminum tube that fits over the outside extension tube, so the U-joint’s size is limited by the largest tube’s 1″ outside diameter instead of its inside diameter, as with the Handi-Mate. The locking device has a textured plastic grip and an ingenious diagonal slot that tightens the connection between the outboard tiller and the extension, making it quite rigid. The 5/16″ snap buttons are easy to operate.
As a fixed extension, the HelmsMate provides a wiggle-free connection to the outboard’s tiller and throttle. The skipper can get their weight to the middle of the boat and stand for the best view forward.
The HelmsMate’s socket is slotted and the thumb screws that tighten it squeeze around the circumference of the outboard handle. The inboard end of the socket has two openings for access to those kill switches that are mounted on the tip of the outboard’s handle. (If you have an outboard with a tethered dead-man’s switch, you may need to add an extension to it to clip it on your person when you’re using the HelmsMate.)
The HelmsMate’s universal joint is stainless steel and fits the 1″ inside diameter of the locking device, at right.
The U-joint has a good range of motion that varies from 75 to 90 degrees depending on its rotation, enough to let the handle drop to the floorboards before the joint has to take the strain. The extension tubes add from 32″ to 48″ to the reach of the outboard’s handle in six 2-3/4″ increments.
The locking device has a rubber grip and a diagonal slot that engages a push button. When the device is twisted, the connection between the socket and the extension is quite solid.
Having the HelmsMate’s U-joint locked out provides positive control of the motor, and I was comfortable using even the full extension while the motor was at full throttle and pushing the boat at 5 knots. With the diagonal slot tightening the connection and the socket squeezed tight on the tiller handle, the only play is in the tiller’s connection to the motor head. I like motoring standing up, and the HelmsMate, locked straight, works very well for that.
While the articulated extension looks like it might function like a Norwegian push-pull tiller, it does not. It takes two hands, not one, and a lateral sweeping motion instead of a push-pull.
When I tried the HelmsMate with the U-joint in play, I had the instructions provided for both it and the Handi-Mate in mind. The Handi-Mate’s instructions advised: “Steering with the swivel engaged should be limited to trolling speeds. Do not operate at high speed without first locking into rigid position.” The HelmsMate instructions read: “Intended only for use at trolling speeds. Do not use at higher speeds.” I’m not a fisherman, so I had to look up trolling speeds. There’s quite a range, from 1.7 knots for trout to 8.5 knots for marlin. With my boats and motors, I’m lucky to hit 5 knots, but it was easy enough to determine that the warnings applied to the lowest end of the trolling-speed scale.
When the U-joint is being used, turning the motor can align the extension and the motor’s tiller. It’s important to have two hands on the extension to control the motor.
I had thought that putting the U-joint in play would be very much like using a Norwegian push-pull tiller on a rudder, but I was quite wrong. The two arms of a Norwegian tiller are always at an angle, and never lined up with each other. You can manage it with one hand, like a push broom. An articulated outboard extension is like an upright broom; it takes both hands, especially when sweeping across the point where it lines up with the outboard’s tiller. That “top-dead-center” (TDC) point is more than just a weak point. The torque created by an outboard and its propeller tend to twist the motor into a turn, to port for most small outboards, and the boat doesn’t need to be going fast for this twist to happen. (For more information, see the afterword of this outboard review.) With the HelmsMate, my Yamaha 2.5-hp would snap through TDC only when turning to port; turning to starboard was fine. My son and I quickly learned to put both hands on the extension before initiating turns. Doing that while seated is easier than while standing.
The U-joint turned the throttle smoothly with the extension angled up to about 60 degrees from straight and beyond that it continues to work if the throttle is at a position that puts the square piece in the U-joint on a diagonal. If that piece is level, when the extension is beyond the 60 degrees, the U-joint won’t rotate. The limitations on the range of motion weren’t restrictive in our use of the extension. The positions we took up when using the extension happened to keep the HelmsMate away from angles that compromise the U-joint’s smooth operation.
The HelmsMate is sturdily built and is a cinch to use in its rigid configuration; it just needs a bit of practice and caution when used as an articulated extension. I won’t be taking it back for a refund.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The Handi-Mate is available from some marine stores and online retailers, but the product has been, wisely I think, discontinued by Davis Instruments. The HelmsMate is available directly from Ironwood for $61.95 and from some online and conventional retailers.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
With his newly finished boat out of the shop, it’s easy to see why Alf was drawn to the trap skiffs of his youth.
Alf Manuel has deep roots in Twillingate, a small town on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Seven generations of his family have made their home there, and it was only in Alf’s lifetime that a causeway and bridge, built in 1973, connected it by road to the rest of Newfoundland. Naturally, boats and boatbuilding are steeped in his bloodline.
Alf Manuel
An eye auger would be a curiosity or an antique to most, but to Alf, it’s a tool that hasn’t yet outlived its usefulness. The axe in the background to the left belonged to Alf’s father, but it is not the one Alf used to make toy boats.
As a boy, he would sneak an axe from his father’s shop and chop a boat out of a scrap of wood. There were a number of boatbuilders near his home, and he was inexorably drawn to their shops to watch them at work. At 19, he built his first boat, a plywood skiff, and “it worked out all right,” he says, so he went to a trade school to learn more. Now 80 years old, he works in the shop that had belonged to his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He has a long string of wooden boats, up to 56′ long, to his credit and is a highly regarded boatbuilder.
Alf Manuel
Alf used crooks to to a create a strong structure at the stern of the skiff. Against the back wall he has two ways of coping with the Newfoundland winter: a snow shovel and cross-country skis.
His most recent boat was inspired by the trap skiffs that he used to watch as they worked the Twillingate waters. They ranged from 28′ to 34′ long; the smaller ones, with a crew of two aboard, were also used for hand-lining cod in the fall when the lobstering season closed. The original skiffs were more boat than he needed, so he had in mind to build one 21′ long. There were neither surviving boats nor plans for the trap skiffs, so he started with a half model, carving the shape from memory. Lofting followed, and he drew full-sized lines for a skiff 21′ long with a beam of 6′6″. He gathered materials for the build. From a local sawmill he got live-edge Newfoundland black spruce for the planking and black spruce timbers for the keel; with the help of his son and grandson, he cut tamarack crooks for the stem and frames. Stainless-steel fastenings would be used throughout. Wanting to power the boat in the traditional way, Alf acquired a single-cylinder make-and-break engine.
Alf Manuel
The hull, even as a lattice of sawn frames and temporary battens, already shows the handsome shape that began as a half-hull trap skiff carved from memory.
He built the skiff over the course of two years, working only during the winters, often wearing a heavy coat and wool gloves while tongues of wind-driven snow lapped at the floor beneath the shop doors. He assembled the keel and frames upright, and then as the planking proceeded, he tilted the nascent hull to angles convenient to the work he needed to do.
Alf Manuel
Rather than crawl under an upright hull to spile and install the garboards, Alf set it on its side. The first half-dozen planks from the sheer down hold the shape.
After Alf launched the boat, the 4-hp Acadia motor he had installed developed a number of problems, so he switched to a more reliable and more powerful 13-1/2-hp Volvo Penta two-cylinder diesel. It pushes the skiff along at about 5 knots.
Alf Manuel
The finished hull has lodging knees on two of the thwarts to stiffen the hull. The enclosure aft conceals the make-and-break engine initially installed; its vertical exhaust pipe is to starboard.
Alf does day cruises and some recreational cod fishing in the waters around Twillingate. Notre Dame Bay, which surrounds the North and South Twillingate islands, is cradled in Newfoundland’s ragged and island-speckled northeast coast and has no shortage of nooks and crannies to explore. In the late spring and early summer, the harbors and coves may be free of ice, but icebergs, spawned by Baffin Island and Greenland and carried south by the Labrador Current, are regular visitors, so numerous that Twillingate bills itself as the Iceberg Capital of the World. Verdant hills and wandering mountains of brilliant white ice make a spectacular seascape for Alf’s cruising.
Stephanie Manuel
Alf, his wife, son, and daughter-in-law motor out of Twillingate’s inner harbor. The make-and-break’s exhaust pipe is gone and the skiff is now powered with a diesel engine with a wet exhaust above the waterline on the starboard side.
Alf has spent a lifetime building and using wooden boats, but the boy who was often scolded by his mother when he came home with pant cuffs wet after wading from shore with his axe-hewn boats remains every bit as fascinated by them.
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The Danube carries Finn and Tereza through Croatia to Serbia and a stop at Belgrade. Fall brings shorter days, nearly freezing nights, and rain. See how they’re holding up two months into the voyage.
Photographs by the author
