The Wee Lassie canoe dates back to the early 1880s when canoeist and outdoor writer George Washington Sears, known as Nessmuk, asked John Henry Rushton, a boatbuilder in Canton, New York, to design and build a small lightweight canoe. The result was the WEE LASSIE, an open cedar lapstrake canoe 10′6″ long and 27″ wide. While Sears, a diminutive man at 5′3″ and 103 lbs, also asked Rushton to build an even smaller canoe, SAIRY GAMP, most of us would need something larger. Mac MacCarthy, a century after Rushton, stretched the Wee Lassie to 13′ 6″ by 29″ and called the new design Wee Lassie II.
Photographs by Phil Boyer
Phil completed this skin-on-frame WEE BONNIE, the first of his canoes, in 2006. The maple leaf, emblem of his Canadian homeland, appears on Phil’s boats, often more than once.
Phil Boyer of Napanee, Ontario, started work on a cedar-strip Wee Lassie II in 2005 but only got as far as setting up the molds when he discovered that canoes could be built quite quickly as skin-on-frame boats. He decided to switch techniques while using the same molds. Western red cedar, salvaged from a deck he had demolished, supplied much of the wood he needed. He skinned the frame with ballistic nylon, dyed it green, and waterproofed it with two-part urethane.
In the spring of 2006, Phil’s sister died of cancer, and when he launched the canoe, he christened it in her honor. Her given name was Carol, but Phil had always called her Bonnie. She was born while her father was overseas during World War II and away during the first 1-1/2 years of her life. A Scottish nurse helped with the childrearing during his absence, and whenever she brought the infant Carol to her mother, she’d say, “Here is your wee bonnie.” The name Bonnie stuck and WEE BONNIE is what Phil called all of the modified Wee Lassie II canoes that he built.
This cedar-strip WEE BONNIE, launched in 2007, is the first canoe that Phil started on but the second that he finished. It had to wait while he used its molds for his skin-on-frame adaptation.
In the year following the launch of the first canoe, Phil went back to his original strip-built project. He was pleased with the canoe when he got it afloat, though at 42 lbs, it was heavier than the nylon-skinned version, and he thought he could do better.
Phil’s insulating-foam version of the canoe, built in 2009, weighed 32 lbs. The hull was finished “bright,” letting the light blue color of the foam come through.
In 2009, he decided to build another stripper and make it as light as possible. He substituted 1/2″ slices of foam insulation for the wood strips. The foam was much more delicate than wood and required care to get them to take fair curves between the molds. Even when glued edge to edge, the strips were very flexible and took a light touch to fair. Carbon-Kevlar fabric would have kept the canoe’s finished weight quite low, but Phil spared himself the extra expense and covered the hull inside and out with 6-oz fiberglass and epoxy. This third WEE BONNIE came in at 32 lbs, and Phil was pleased with how well the experimental construction performed.
The 2015 WEE BONNIE, the second of the three skin-on-frame canoes, was skinned with ballistic nylon.
In 2015 Phil built another skin-on-frame canoe, using lighter nylon to save some weight and equipping it with an innovative seat. A few years earlier, while canoe camping with two of his friends on Opalescence Lake in Algonquin Park, his friend Phil was using one of the three WEE BONNIEs and had commented that the portage yoke was a nuisance when not in use and suggested incorporating a yoke in the seat. Phil liked the idea and came up with a seat that pivoted to become a yoke. The new canoe got the latest version of the arrangement; switching it from paddling mode to portage takes just 30 seconds.
Even before the last of his four WEE BONNIE canoes was finished, Phil was thinking about the next boat he’d build, a strip-built solar-powered launch. We’ll hear more from him in the future.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
There’s an interesting exhibition of art at the Georgetown Historical Society in Georgetown, Maine. Some of the pieces on display are an unusual pairing of abstract painting and wooden boat models. The disciplines of art and boatbuilding have very different goals, one purely aesthetic and the other quite practical, but both require thoughtful attention to form. The artist/boatbuilder who created these pieces is Willits Ansel.
“For boat builders to paint is not unusual,” Willits noted in his comments about the exhibition. “Fairness and balance are factors to be mindful of, whether designing a boat or painting an abstraction. What may make for beauty, particularly, is line, and balance, found in each though more a necessity in the models.”
Evelyn Ansel
The opening photo at the top shows the installation at the Georgetown Historical Society gallery. The piece here is a composition of models and half models, all initially created as boatbuilding aids.
Willits was in the middle of preparing for the exhibition when he passed away unexpectedly in April at the age of 90. His granddaughter Evelyn Ansel, an SBM contributor, wrote: “He was a painter all his life, and his last project was a collection of abstract pieces, to which he attached his entire life’s work worth of half models. Feels a little like the joke was all on us; I can hear his wicked giggle every time I look at them. He died so suddenly that a few things were half finished, but we put the show up anyhow.”
I didn’t know about Willits’s art previously but I knew of his work on historic small craft. His book, The Whaleboat, published by Mystic Seaport in 1978, was one of the first books I bought when I started building boats that same year. His interest in art preceded his work with boats. When he was 12 he took a still-life class, he started painting when he was 17. In 1970, at the age of 41, Willits went to work at Mystic Seaport and began building small boats, about 100 of them over the course of his life.
Evelyn Ansel
Willits writes: “Regarding this exhibit, I am of two minds. One is to let the abstractions and models speak for themselves and leave interpretation to the observer. The other is a written explanation where I attempt to give meaning to the abstractions, the builder’s models and why I have now put the two together. The latter is a valid question and not that easily answered. In a sense, they are worlds apart, but in some respects there is commonality.”
It’s not surprising then that his two pursuits, art and boats, intersected. (As for the “joke” of hammering a half model to the frame of a painting with a couple of galvanized box nails, I think it’s a revealing act of irreverence, a hint that the value of creation is in the process, not the product.)
Like Willits, I came to boatbuilding after being drawn to art. In high school, my interest was in science up until my junior year when I was required to take an art class. That quickly and unexpectedly changed my trajectory. Going into college, I knew I would major in art and ultimately set my sights on portraiture. While that discipline produces quite different results than the abstract art that captured Willits, the pursuit of beauty, line, and balance is the same. After I graduated in 1975, I continued drawing portraits in pencil and did a couple of busts in modeling clay.
This self-portrait that I did in my senior year at Bowdoin College was the beginning of the direction I thought I’d take after graduating.
At that time, I also was doing a lot of hiking and bike touring, and liked to travel under my own steam. I decided to build a dory skiff to cruise the Inside Passage. As the planking went on the molds, the curves began to appear and I found them mesmerizing. I experienced what Willits wrote: “What may make for beauty, particularly, is line.” At the end of a day’s work on the boat, I’d sit in a corner of my shop and scan the shape as if staring into a campfire. Building the boat was no longer just a means to an end, but the creation of sculpture.
When I built my first wooden boat, I was still focused on art, and did this watercolor of the dory skiff nearing completion. (From a print of the original)
When I taught at WoodenBoat School in the ’90s, there was a planked half model on the wall of the school’s dining hall. It was a carvel-planked keel boat, a form defined by the flow of water. As sculpture, the play of convex and concave curves and the transitions from one into another are like those on a young face, from cheek to the bridge of the nose or from lower lip to the chin.
I was enthralled by this planked half model in WoodenBoat School’s dinning room. In its transitions of convex and concave curves I found echoes of the human from.
Years later, my intersection of art and boatbuilding reached its apex in working with my friend Mary Van Cline, a Northwest glass artist well known for combining photographs with glass sculptures and panels. We had met as sea kayakers, discovered a mutual interest in art, and ultimately collaborated on some mixed-media pieces. I made frames of traditional kayaks—most of them at scale, one full size—and modified versions of Alaskan Inuit single-bladed paddles; she made hands and faces cast in glass from life molds in addition to the large glass-panel photographs. We put together one exhibition for the Leo Kaplan Modern gallery in New York City.
The collaborative pieces I did with glass artist Mary Van Cline were included in a showing of her work at the Leo Kaplan Modern Gallery in New York City. The largest piece was a 17′ Greenland kayak frame that I made of aspen wood and suspended by monofilament over three pieces of glass that echo the kayak’s shadows and sheer line. The New York office of a fishing equipment manufacturer almost bought the piece, but, alas, the kayak is now hanging in my basement.
Left: I began taking liberties with traditional forms and made traditional single-bladed kayak paddles with textured or wavy blades. This one has a bone tip and grip caps. Right: I made the model kayak frame in this piece as a straightforward representation of an East Arctic Inuit kayak documented by ethnologist David Zimmerly.
We did another exhibition in a Seattle gallery and made new works to be auctioned at fund-raising galas put on by the community of Northwest glass artists and their patrons.
My contribution to this piece was a modified partial Greenland kayak frame. I rubbed it with white paint to give it the look of bone. The piece was purchased by a San Francisco couple and was later a part of an exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
One of the pieces we produced was purchased by an art-collecting couple in San Francisco. The element I contributed was a model Greenland kayak frame with the chines and keel omitted and a pattern of curves carved into the deck beams. A few years later, selected pieces of the collection, including our work, was shipped to Boston for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. The young art student I once was might have preferred making it to the MFA as an artist, but I’m OK with making it there as a boatbuilder. There’s not all that much difference.
Matt Morello
Willits Ansel—painter, boatbuilder
With sympathy to Evelyn Ansel and her father Walt Ansel, and gratitude for their permission to use images of Willits’s artwork. The exhibition—Willits Ansel: Recent Works—at the Georgetown Historical Society in Georgetown, Maine, is open through July 10.
With this issue we’ve taken on a new name and a new look. We’ll still be doing our best to provide you with the most informative and engaging articles about small boats.
The description of the Shenandoah Whitehall was clearly too good to be true: a modern boat with traditional lines, large enough to take an adult and a kid camping, relatively seaworthy, efficient under oars, and light enough to toss on the roof of the car. According to the Gentry Custom Boats web site, the Whitehall could be built in a one-car garage workshop and, for a few hundred dollars and a few dozen hours, provide a novice with both a manageable entry into boatbuilding and a capable—even excellent—small boat for all sorts of flatwater adventures.
As a neophyte boat builder looking for a first project, I wanted all these things, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that one boat could provide them. I reluctantly turned back to the haze of internet research. For the next year it was all reading, no building, but in the end, I came back around to the Shenandoah Whitehall.
Virginia Reinhart
The author could row the easily-driven hull at a 3-knot cruising pace and hit 4.8 knots in a short sprint.
Whitehalls have a storied lineage. In American Small Sailing Craft, Howard Chapelle describes the Whitehall as “perhaps the most noted of American rowing work-boats” and notes its “fine qualities…it rowed easily and moved fast in smooth or choppy water; it was safe, carried a heavy load easily, and was dry.”
Dave Gentry modeled his family-friendly Shenandoah Whitehall after a New York Whitehall in the Mystic Seaport collection. Its voluptuous hull suggests both capacity and ease in slipping through the water. I have spent enough years in performance racing shells to understand the limitations of a skinny sliding-seat boat; I knew I wanted more than just straight-line speed, and I liked the good seakeeping ability promised by its salty lines.
While the Shenandoah Whitehall’s shape is traditional, its skin-on-frame construction is not. Transverse frames of 1⁄2″ marine plywood support redwood or Western red cedar chines, gunwales, and keel. Builders may elect to glue and screw this frame together, or to lash each joint with polyester artificial sinew. Once complete, the frame receives a covering of fabric, heat-set to a tight fit then sealed with paint. The result is a 13′ 6″ boat that has a carrying capacity of 600 lbs and weighs under 60 lbs.
Virginia Reinhart
The author added a few features that increased the weight of his Whitehall, but at around 60 pounds, it was still light enough to carry and cartop by himself.
While Gentry offers kits for the Shenandoah, I opted to work from plans. They include templates and are available as digital downloads or, for a reasonable surcharge, in printed format. I was glad to have the printed copy. The detailed 22-page instruction booklet had a reassuring heft and would prove constantly useful, and the printed frame templates were easy to spray-glue directly to marine plywood stock for efficient and accurate shaping.
The construction went quickly. Every major project I’ve ever begun has a hidden “gumption trap”—a difficult and unrewarding challenge that sucks the will to persist right out of me. This skin-on-frame boat was an exception. Each evening or weekend hour brought visible progress. In the end, I finished the boat in about 75 hours over three months, while also working a full-time job, raising a toddler, and making a pair of oars. A more experienced builder could probably finish the boat in 40 hours.
From the start, the Whitehall provided an engaging and educational build. With the strongback built and the frames in place, the boat suddenly took shape. At this point, gawkers began to show up. I met four families who have lived in my neighborhood for years but who had never stopped by to chat until they spied the Whitehall up my driveway. There’s something about the shape of a pretty boat that compels people to interrupt your work with questions.
With the frames set up, the next step was to fasten the outwales to them. In the finished boat, the laminated outwale-spacer-inwale assemblies are the largest and most rigid longitudinal members, so their shape and strength will determine the sheer. Because the sheer has a pronounced curve in the vertical plane, Gentry calls for laminating the outwales from two pieces, stacked one on top of the other, in place on the frames. The goal is to avoid edge-setting a one-piece outwale, which would tend to spring back and flatten the sheer after the boat is removed from the strongback. Cleaning up the epoxy that squeezed out of this lamination was a bear, but I won’t argue with the results. To my eye, the sheer of the finished boat looks right.
The keel and each chine must attach firmly to each frame. For these joints the instructions offer two options: lashings or screws and glue. I’ll take lashing over epoxy work any day. I used artificial sinew passed through countersunk holes drilled in the frames. This was a satisfying technique. As I worked through the joints and felt the entire structure stiffen, any lingering concerns about the strength of lashing dissipated.
Gentry’s plans call for 1⁄2″ marine ply for the breasthook and knees, but encourage the use of lumber and more traditional methods. I cut my breasthook and knees from a walnut crotch that I’d been air-drying under the house. The same slab made a handsome skeg. These highly visible pieces are worthy of solid lumber, and only cost of a few additional hours of time.
Michael Reinhart
The plans call for a simple transverse thwart in the stern. The author’s stern sheets provide a a more spacious seating area.
I milled floorboards to the specified 1⁄4″ × 2″ dimension from some salvaged tropical hardwood—possibly khaya). At each end of the boat, the floorboards rest atop the frames; in the central portion, the floorboards slide through slots cut in the center of the frames. Lowering the floor into these slots increases stability and locks each board in place. Another benefit of these slots later became apparent: when rowing in the central station, my feet naturally braced themselves against the protruding upper edge of a frame. The built-in stretcher makes the rowing all the more pleasing.
As designed, the Shenandoah Whitehall’s seating arrangements are three thwarts made of 1⁄4″ marine ply supported by cedar cleats and posts. I had some salvaged redwood and an interest in a more traditional appearance, so I opted to use solid lumber. I also chose to build stern sheets in lieu of the aft thwart. These changes make the boat slightly heavier, and yet they get a lot of compliments. Panels of 1″ closed-cell foam insulation, glued under the thwarts, provide flotation.
With the frame complete, it was time to skin. I had no experience with fabric, but following Gentry’s detailed and supportive plans was straightforward enough that I never worried. I skinned the boat with the specified 9-ounce polyester. Because the fabric is nearly entirely fastened to the frame before it is cut, this process would be pretty hard to get wrong. A hot knife (I used a flat tip on my soldering iron) makes quick work of trimming the fabric. After a few coats of paint and the attachment of the rubrails, the boat was ready for launching.
Michael Reinhart
The instructions include the option to add a forward rowing station by putting oarlocks on the gunwales and acknowledging “the oarlocks will be closer together here but do not be put off by cross-handed rowing—it’s quite easy once one gets used to it.” Outriggers, like the experimental ones here, can increase the span between the locks to match the main rowing station.
The plans indicate two rowing stations: the central thwart for a solo rower, and the forward thwart for a rower carrying a passenger. With the oarlocks for the forward station fitted to the gunwales, the resulting narrow spacing of 30″—14″ less than the span at the solo rowing station—will create either an awkward overlap of the handles or a high gearing and difficult rowing. I prototyped some steel-and-plywood outriggers to increase the span at the forward oarlocks. They drop into the gunwale spaces and lock in place with a stainless-steel machine screw set into a threaded insert in the uppermost chine. These quick-and-dirty outriggers are too inelegant and flexible for a boat this pretty and I’ll rebuild them, but they do create a comfortable 44″ span and are much appreciated when rowing with passengers.
Carrying only a rower, this light boat comes up to speed in a few short pulls and happily gurgles along under gentle, slow strokes. With a passenger and cargo aboard, the boat is notably slower to accelerate, but hardly any more difficult to keep at speed.
I measured speeds under a variety of conditions both with and without passengers using a GPS app on my iPhone. At my comfortable, all-day pace moved the boat at a shade over 3 knots. An aerobic exertion—the kind that quickly works up a sweat—would sustain a 4-knot pace. An all-out short sprint hit speeds of 4.8 knots. (Not surprisingly, 4.8 knots is the exact theoretical hull speed of a hull with a 13′ waterline length.) The Whitehall is remarkably easy to move at a pace that will get you where you want to go.
The Shenandoah Whitehall handles less-than-glassy conditions with aplomb; both rower and passenger can count on staying dry. When solo, I feel entirely comfortable rowing into Force 4 winds on the lee shore of San Francisco Bay, dodging the wakes of ferry boats and tankers. In this chop, a passenger in the stern sheets would take an occasional splash. The boat’s ample skeg helps it track well in windy conditions.
In the solo rowing position handling is excellent. A complete 360-degree turn takes me 10 strokes, pulling one oar while backing the other. Being double-ended at the waterline, the boat is well mannered in both forward and reverse. I have threaded narrow courses through shallow, rocky pools below seasonal waterfalls with complete confidence in the Whitehall.
Michael Reinhart
The maximum recommended capacity for the Shenandoah Whitehall is 600 lbs, so there’s plenty of freeboard with two adults and a child aboard.
With a guest, I move to the forward thwart to maintain trim and the resulting space between rower and passenger is just about ideal for a relaxed conversation—we’re also precisely close enough to pass each other extra-tall beverage cans (regular cans will not span). When I’m rowing in the bow, the Shenandoah is a bit more inclined to yaw, probably because I’m 60 lbs heavier than my usual passenger and sinking the bow deeper than the stern. With more hull immersed in the water, it’s also a bit harder to turn. I got used to the difference in a few hours and I don’t mind it, but I do notice.
Even with the added stern sheets and lumber thwarts, my Shenandoah is light enough for me to carry and cartop singlehanded. I take help when I can get it, but I don’t dread moving the boat myself.
Perhaps the most common concern I hear is the durability of the painted fabric hull: How has it held up to beach launches, minor collisions, and the indignities of cartopping? It’s just not an issue. There are several skin-on-frame torture tests on YouTube that demonstrate the strength of this type of boat. They endure blows from the claw side of a hammer just fine. The only dings on my paint memorialize bumps on land, usually made when I smack into something while carrying her to a launch. None of the wounds leak a drop. I take care to make delicate landings, but I don’t lose any sleep about it.
After a few months of picnic rows, exploration, and a camping trip, I’ve only scratched the surface of what the Shenandoah Whitehall can do. Sometimes I’m so impressed with its abilities that I think of it less as a boat and more of an aquatic four-wheel-drive pickup truck—something to throw everything into and ride off to the next great adventure.
James Kealey lives and teaches in Richmond, California. When he’s not chasing his toddler, he can usually be found banging away on some project in his garage workshop. In high school, he rowed in racing shells. He still gets away most summers for sail-camping trips on mountain lakes.
Shenandoah Particulars
Length: 13′ 6″
Beam: 46″
Weight: about 55 lbs
Maximum recommended capacity: 3 adults
The production of small boats was booming in the 1950s on both sides of the Atlantic, and really took off in the late ’50s with the introduction of fiberglass. Famed designers Uffa Fox and George O’Day teamed up in 1956 to create the O’Day Day Sailer. Fox is credited with introducing the technique of planing to dinghy racing and designed many significant classes of boats, including the International 14. The story goes that Fox wanted a pure racing dinghy but O’Day wanted the small cuddy added to increase appeal to the recreational market in the U.S., so Fox designed the planing hull and O’Day designed the cuddy. The resulting Day Sailer was a 16’9” centerboarder with a displacement of 575 lbs, which makes for a light load to tow behind the family car. The fractional sloop rig includes a generously sized spinnaker for exciting downwind sailing.
The first Day Sailer was sold in 1958 and immediately became popular in the recreational and racing markets. It was later designated as the Day Sailer I as four different models have since been built, with over 10,000 boats hitting the waterways. Day Sailer (DS) models I through III have been built by eight different manufacturers, with the current Day Sailer being a modified DS I with a few DS II attributes, such as the internal foam flotation and cuddy thwart. The original DS models I, II, and III were built from 1957 to 1990 by the O’Day Company in Fall River, Massachusetts. The DS I and modified versions of it were later built by Can-AM Sailcraft, Rebel, Spindrift, Precision, McLaughlin, Sunfish/Laser Inc. The current builder of the DS I+ is the Cape Cod Shipbuilding Company (CCSC) in Wareham, Massachusetts, holder of the exclusive license since 1994. The Day Sailer Class Association owns the molds that are currently used by CCSC.
Photographs by the authors
The long side benches in the cockpit provide uncrowded seating for six. The sole is above the waterline and is self-bailing.
The early DS I can be identified by wooden thwarts, seats, and cockpit sole, a centerboard lever, open cuddy, and a transom deck. The DS II came out in 1971 with built-in foam flotation. The cuddy opening is smaller than the opening on the DS I because it also acts as a thwart, and a thinner transom allows mounting a small outboard motor without the need for a bracket. The Day Sailer I and II are considered class legal for one design racing, but the DS III is not considered race-legal due to higher freeboard on the transom, which was a departure from Fox’s hull design. O’Day built the III from 1985 to 1990, so to race in One Design regattas it is important to buy a DS I or DS II. The current Day Sailer in production is a modified version of the DS I with improved self-rescuing capabilities, two sealed air tanks, and a cuddy flotation tank with a smaller hatch.
The Day Sailer, no matter which model, is a very versatile boat, easy to rig, sail, transport, and store. With the mast down the boat and trailer take up just a few feet more than an average family car, so can be stored in most garages, though the mast may need to be stowed diagonally. At the ramp, the Day Sailer can be rigged in under 30 minutes: step the mast, add the boom, bend on the jib and main, clip the pop-up rudder onto the transom, and sort out the sheets.
Stepping the mast is the biggest challenge. The 23′4″-long racing mast is stepped through the top of the cabin onto the maststep fixed to the floor of the cuddy, and that can be tricky for one person. The mast does not weigh much, but it is helpful to have a helper at the foot of the mast to guide it into the cuddy opening. The good news with this arrangement is that once the mast is stepped, it is secure, and there’s no rush to attach the forestay.
A mast hinge, a popular option, makes raising the mast much easier.
About 75 percent of the new boats are delivered with a hinged mast, eliminating the awkward gymnastics of stabbing the mast through the cuddy. Once the mast is raised and the forward hole on the hinge pinned, securing the forestay to the bow fitting takes the strain off the hinge. Side stays can then be tightened to take out the slack, but no more than hand tight. Stays that are too tight can damage the hull. Tighten the nuts on the turnbuckles and tape over any cotter pins.
There are different sheeting arrangements for the boom. Some boats have sheets attached in the middle of the boom; the sheet on a DS II starts from a traveler on the transom and ends forward on a swivel cam cleat mounted to the centerboard case. The DS II boom also has a spring in the gooseneck that allowed for roller furling— disconnect the sheet, pull the boom aft, and roll the sail onto the boom. A reefing claw has to be added to connect the sheet to the sail-wrapped boom, but this design is not optimum, nor is the wad of rolled-up sail by the boom’s gooseneck. A better arrangement is to add a conventional set of reefpoints to the mainsail. The boom also has a vang to improve sail control.
The 6′ 3″ beam gives the Day Sailer good stability, enough to keep the boat under someone standing on the foredeck.
The jib on the racing version of the DS is a standard affair, attached with hanks onto the forestay and raised with a halyard. Some skippers add a downhaul to lower the jib from the cockpit. Both the main and jib halyards are led aft on the top of the cuddy. The recreational version of the new DS I comes with a roller-furling jib, which we consider essential for sailing dinghies, especially if singlehanding. We have added a roller-furling jib to our DS II along with the mast hinge. We also added the hardware and rigging for a spinnaker, halyard, spinnaker pole, spinnaker pole control lines, sheet blocks, and jam cleats.
The Day Sailer is a treat to sail; it handles well, tacks with ease, and powers up quickly with its large sail area. The planing hull is responsive to the tiller, and the wide beam makes it stable. The boat will roll quickly but then sets on a tack, holding it with stable and positive helm control. The centerboard can be easily adjusted from amidships.
We sail a Drascombe Lugger and a Sunfish; the Lugger drives like the family sedan and the Sunfish like our Mustang. The Day Sailer handling is closer to that of the Sunfish—when the breeze picks up, the mainsheet needs to be held in the hand and someone should be ready on the jibsheets. The jibsheets run through the coaming on the DS I and through small cars on the DS II. For the highest performance, skippers have added tiller extensions and hiking straps. There is an outhaul on the battened main; racing versions have barber-haulers and travelers added. Pop the spinnaker, and it will scoot along quite nicely in a light breeze.
The Day Sailer carries 100 sq ft in the main, 45 sq ft in the jib and, for sailing off the wind, another 95 sq ft in spinnaker.
The Day Sailer’s 7′ 4″-long cockpit provides plenty of room for three adults, or two adults and two kids. With four adults it gets cozy; there is not much moving around, so whoever is sitting next to the tiller or foredeck needs to know what to do. It is easy to depower the main, reef it, or furl the jib as needed.
The cuddy is spacious for storing picnic or camping gear, and it affords a space equivalent to a two-person backpacker tent for sleeping aboard for overnight cruising. Adding a topping lift makes the boom nice ridgepole for a boom tent; there’s plenty of room to sleep in the uncluttered cockpit. The Day Sailer has completed many endurance cruising events, such as the Texas 200, Florida 120, and the Everglades Challenge.
A small kicker can be added for auxiliary power. We have used both an electric trolling motor and gas outboard, with best results coming from a 2-1/2-hp four-stroke that pushed push the boat to 6 knots at one-third throttle. The DS I will require a bracket to support and outboard; the DS II transom is thin and sturdy enough for a direct mount. If we’re not going far from home, we occasionally skip the outboard and carry a paddle; with her low coaming we have paddled her a bit, even backward over the transom.
The transom of the Day Sailer II will accommodate an outboard for auxiliary power. The Day Sailer I will require a bracket.
Day Sailers are easy to find and inexpensive, considering their capabilities. If you come across one, there are few important things to check. Make sure the centerboard moves in the trunk, see that the forestay tang and bow seam are not pulled up, inspect the cuddy deck for noticeable depression which would indicate failure of the maststep under the cuddy floor, and if it is a DS II look inside the flotation compartments. Rinse her off and get her ready to sail. There is a great Day Sailer Association with a web-based forum, and excellent parts availability.
We have had Day Sailers in our family since 1994. The first, named CYANE, handled the windy chop of Corpus Christi Bay with ease and the calmer waters of the St. Johns River at Jacksonville. We have had many fun adventures on our current DS II, also named CYANE. She has been launched for numerous day sails around Pensacola and Escambia Bay and has taken many family members for their first sail. She is most comfortable in a 10–12-knot breeze and wakes up for an exciting ride at 15. If you’re ever sailing in the Pensacola area, you’ll see her out on East Bay chasing dolphin.
Audrey and Kent Lewis enjoy time with CYANE, along with their small fleet of kayaks, canoe, sailboats, and lapstrake runabout. They blog about their adventures on smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com
Day Sailer Particulars
Length: 16′ 9″
Beam: 6′ 3″
Draft, board up: 9″
Draft, board down: 3′ 9″
Displacement: 575 lbs
Sail area
Main: 100 sq ft
Jib: 45 sq ft
Spinnaker: 96 sq ft
We pointed offshore into a wall of fog, following a compass bearing until a steep hump of granite appeared, rising from the foggy sea, topped with spindly spruc—a sumi-e haiku illustration rendered with a few deft strokes. After pulling our kayaks onto the sand between the smallest islands, we carried our food bags up onto a slab of granite and made our lunch. The low-lying fog was dense enough that we couldn’t see beyond the ledges just offshore, but we could feel the warmth of the sun on our skin. As we ate, the chug of a motor slowly approached and a man’s voice, tinny in the still air, floated in the fog, describing the remains of a prehistoric village now submerged somewhere beneath the boat. He sounded vaguely familiar.
“Sounds like Garrett,” Rebecca said, and I recognized the Maine accent, the cheerful, curious inflection of the mail-boat captain with whom we’d often played Pickleball over the last winter.
I said, “Guess we’re all missing Pickleball today.”
“Summer.” Rebecca spread hummus on a cracker. “No one has time.” Normally we wouldn’t have had time either. We’d owned an art gallery in downtown Stonington for a dozen years, and during idle moments I’d stand by the window, gazing out at the archipelago, imagining a trip such as this: roaming the Maine coast in our sea kayaks, camping on the islands.
The boat passed unseen, Garrett’s voice overwhelmed by the motor, then that fading until we could no longer hear it either. Rebecca lay back against the granite. “I’d be happy to stay here tonight.”
“We could,” I said, but it was the second day of our trip and we’d only paddled a couple of hours and I still felt restless, wanting to put at least a few more miles behind us.
The fog finally dissolved, and the islands ahead were revealed like stepping stones. We launched before the haze could return.
We spent a couple of nights camped off of Stonington and on the Fourth of July, a summer day with fair-weather cumuli mirrored on the glassy swells, crossed East Penobscot Bay. Deer Isle lay behind us as we paddled four miles of open water toward the islands near North Haven. Our kayaks, laden with gear, sat low in the water and were slow to turn, but once in motion their momentum made the miles go by quickly.
We landed on Calderwood Island and pitched the tent, and after dinner, we sat on a ledge as the sky grew dark, gazing over the bay we’d just crossed. Stonington was a dark shape on the horizon until a lone firework lit the sky, followed half a minute later by the faint report.
Another firework exploded, a brilliant magenta chrysanthemum, and then another. We sipped our tea, watching until the finale, a half-minute of bright, silent chaos, was reflected in streaks across the bay followed by a thunder that echoed long after the last explosion faded. I lay back and felt the warmth of the granite ledge beneath me. The stars shone, crisp and clear.
Roger Siebert
.
Rebecca and I wanted to paddle along as much of the Maine coast as we could. With no home or job to return to, we had all the time we wanted, and were limited only by the seasons and our bank balance. We’d decided our trip would be more about spending time in places we liked than covering miles.
Photographs by Michael and Rebecca Daugherty
Just off Vinalhaven, Ram Island is a tiny islet surrounded by granite ledges. It was one of the islands we visited twice, both as we headed west and later on our way back east. I busied myself with chips and hummus and dinner (most likely a curry) while Rebecca painted the trees behind me.
We’d started at Deer Isle, where we had lived and worked for 14 years, and we planned to paddle a big figure-eight: first down to Portland and back, and then up to the Canadian border before returning to Deer Isle. We’d have time to linger in our favorite places and visit many of them twice. It wasn’t until our sixth day of the trip though, when we decided to take a foggy day off and do no traveling at all—what we called a zero day—that it began to feel like the trip we’d imagined. On Ram Island, a tiny islet west of Vinalhaven in Hurricane Sound, I pitched my hammock between a couple of scraggly spruce trees while Rebecca dug her art materials from her kayak. The fog lingered, and the day passed like a dream, the church-like chime of a bell buoy tolling in the wakes of invisible ferries.
The spruce trees atop a granite ledge caught Rebecca’s attention for a 5” x 5” oil on panel, titled “Ram Island”. The scene here is the backdrop in the photograph above of me cooking dinner.
The next day we crossed West Penobscot Bay and traded idyllic solitude for a night at a campground, topping-off our drinking water, recharging batteries and getting our first showers in a week.
We meandered down the coast, camped on an island off of Tenants Harbor, and then on another in the middle of Muscongus Bay. We’d wake before sunrise, but we were often slow to launch, especially if the island had a good spot for a hammock. If it did, I’d linger with my coffee and catch up on notes and reading, while Rebecca roamed with her sketchbook. Hauling gear and boats down to the water took long enough that, by the time we launched, we’d be a little exasperated by the effort and eager to get moving. We’d paddle a dozen or so miles to the next island. We camped only at designated campsites, most of them stops on the Maine Island Trail.
After another zero day, tucked in the Damariscotta River on Fort Island, we paddled back out the river. Along the way we refilled water containers at the firehouse in East Boothbay, and picked up a few supplies at a convenience store. We could carry almost a week’s supply of fresh water with us, but we always had resupplying in mind. Each day we tried to find food and water along the way to our next camp.
A storm threatened as we crossed Sheepscot Bay on the approach to Reid State Park on Georgetown Island.
With a storm approaching, we let the flood tide give us a push up the Sheepscot River and camped beneath massive oaks on an islet no bigger than a tennis court off of Spectacle Island. The next morning, we headed out the Sheepscot in a cool, soaking rain. At Reid State Park, on Georgetown Island, we passed beneath the rocky bluff of Griffith Head, where a couple of coin-operated binoculars stood like massive silver Viewmasters anchored atop swiveling iron stands, pointing seaward. A few intrepid visitors were afoot up there, hunkered beneath raincoats. We passed below their perch, paddling, for a change, with the wind behind us.
Bangs Island, not far from the Portland waterfront, is one of many Casco Bay islands in with public campsites. Worried about ticks in the taller grass, we camped on the beach and worried instead about the rising tide. Neither the tide nor ticks turned out to be a problem. Despite worrisome news reports about rising populations of ticks and increasing incidents of tick-borne illnesses, we found only a few ticks all summer.
After two weeks of wandering down the coast, we arrived at Casco Bay, intent on getting a glimpse of the Portland waterfront before we turned around and headed back, but with the fog, there wasn’t much to see. The occasional rumble of a ferry out in the soup discouraged us from poking around blindly in busy channels, so we contented ourselves with a few zero days on islands near the city.
There are at least 15 Crow Islands along the Maine coast. This one is in Casco Bay, just off of Great Chebeague Island. Aside from the sandy beach that’s not swallowed up by the high tide, we loved the sprawling oaks, which gave me a good spot for my hammock.
Rebecca painted. I swung in my hammock. We finally made it to Fort Gorges, a granite-block Civil War-era fortress guarding Portland Harbor, and the fog cleared long enough for a glimpse of the city, but we were glad to get back to 100-yard-long Crow Island, with its sprawling oaks and a pair of sandy crescent beaches. And, having made it to Portland, we gradually lost that feeling that there was anywhere else we needed to be.
The water was less chilly here than it was Downeast, and during the afternoon we took occasional swims. I retreated to the hammock to dry in the sun, and we waited for a mid-day change of the tide to begin our trip back east.
This 5” x 7” oil on panel, “Low Tide Sandbar, Little Hen Islands,” is one of the small paintings Rebecca did on location with the intent of using them as studies for larger paintings.
We zig-zagged along the coast, up the New Meadows River for a visit with old friends. It felt good to rinse-away the salt and grime, to wear dry clothing, socks and shoes, and to eat in a restaurant, but I began to feel uneasy until we were back in our boats the next day, traveling once again. After a night on Ram Island in the Sheepscot, we paddled a long day to Muscongus Bay, and there spent three nights, each on a different island as a storm passed through and left us perfectly poised with calm weather to get out to Monhegan, an island community some 6 miles out to sea from the nearest coastal island.
Eastern Egg Rock, the island we floated alongside, was a treeless hump of rock, only a few acres, ragged with weeds and tangles of washed-up driftwood, and reeking of guano. A heap of lobster buoys lay beside a makeshift plywood sign: TRADE. Next to it stood another sign bearing a red drawing of a lobster. A young woman suddenly emerged from one of two tiny weathered outhouse-like buildings. Carrying a net, she raced down the ledges and swept it over a puffin that had just landed. A young man emerged from the other blind and helped her, kneeling over the captured bird.
A group of puffins swam away from the couple, toward us. The birds were always smaller than I expected, but their beaks looked too big for their bodies, and too brightly colored, like oversized masks colored by a child. We’d followed a string of islands pointing the way to this last solitary rock that separated the mouth of Muscongus Bay from the open Atlantic, and we floated in our kayaks, watching the puffins, sheltered behind the island from the bigger swells beyond. We had about 6 miles of open ocean between us and Monhegan, our next landing, and, at some point, I would need to pee. Landing on Eastern Egg Rock, a bird sanctuary, was prohibited.
We ventured from the lee and paddled into the swell. Monhegan lay on the horizon, but we veered southeast, toward Shark Island—a mile and a half distant— another treeless, fin-like rock pile rising from the depths where the open ocean swells reared and broke through a sieve of jagged rocks and boulders. By now, my plans for a bathroom break had turned into a desperate hope I could get there in time. There was no obvious landing spot, but I told myself I’d made surf landings on rocks before, though not in such a heavily laden kayak.
Rebecca asked, “Are you sure about this?”
I answered by putting my helmet on and aimed for a nook in the lee side of the island where the waves wrapped around and met in a jumble of slippery boulders. Getting out of the boat went well enough, but, ready to paddle again, my relaunching took a few tries as dumping waves filled the cockpit. Finally, I paddled back out, soaked and a little bruised, and came alongside Rebecca. We pointed our bows toward Monhegan.
The swells around us, glassy smooth, reflected cotton-ball clouds. Ahead, a pair of distant blue hills gradually resolved themselves into two islands. Storm petrels skimmed just over the waves, dipping into the troughs; gannets arrived and scared the other birds away.
Soon we could make out the lighthouse atop Monhegan, then the houses below it. Nearing the island, we paused at some ledges where we encountered a pair of kayakers: a boy, followed by his mother, who was paddling with a toddler on her lap. She asked, “Did you just paddle from the mainland?”
“Yeah.” Behind us the mainland was a low, dark line on the horizon above the broad stretch of ocean we’d just crossed.
She sighed. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
I felt a little pride. I’d always wanted to do it too. And now I had.
After lunch in the village, we paddled around the island, beneath the 150′ cliffs and bobbed in the southeast swell, but we didn’t linger. We still had far to go. There’s no legit place to camp on Monhegan, and the lodgings were out of our budget. Besides, we were lucky to have the good conditions for paddling open water and that could change very quickly. At the north end of Monhegan, we aimed north, across six miles of open ocean toward Allen Island, and the protection of the coastal islands.
The conditions had indeed changed overnight. We woke on a scrubby islet called Griffin Island and rode fat, lively following seas into Port Clyde for a few groceries. We let the wind and waves push us another dozen miles to the campground where we’d stayed three weeks earlier.
By the next day, the weather was perfect again. West Penobscot Bay stretched ahead of us, an undulating plane reflecting a pale sky. Beyond it lay a group of low, dark shapes more than 5 miles away. We pointed our bows toward them and fell into our familiar rhythm.
The persistent mid-tide currents pushed us inland, to the north, but we attempted a straight line by pointing up-current, keeping a range on the faraway cliffs and lobster buoys ahead of us. When we reached a buoy, we’d line up our next range.
In the swells, Rebecca and I often paddled too far from each other to converse, but when she drew near she asked, “What do you want to do when the trip is done?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I’d been gazing at the mirages emerging in the steamy atmosphere. Islands beyond the horizon appeared as if floating in the air like clouds.
We had both worked long and hard to be able to take a summer off and take a trip like this one, but we hadn’t talked much about what we would do afterward. September hung beyond the horizon like an island we couldn’t yet see, and most of the time we just focused on what was in front of us.
“Right now,” I said, “I don’t want this trip to end.” Rebecca smiled.
Goose Rocks Light, built in 1890 at the entrance to Fox Island Thorofare, north of Vinalhaven, is one of several “spark-plug” lighthouses seen along the Maine coast. It is still an active navigational aid maintained by the Coast Guard, but it’s now owned by a non-profit that maintains it with funds generated by nightly rentals.
We spent three nights camped on islands around Vinalhaven, and then took the long way back to the Stonington archipelago, crossing the mouth of East Penobscot Bay and circling Isle au Haut, before paddling 1-1/2 miles to Harbor Island, a 6-acre knot of woods fringed by gentle slopes of gray granite. From our camp we could see the familiar glow of Stonington in at the northern edge of the night sky.
South Little Hen Island lies off Vinalhaven in Seal Bay, a popular anchorage. We took a zero day here and idly watched cruising boats come and go.
The next day, paddling toward our home town after a month of kayaking reminded me of so many other times I’d returned home from countless shorter paddling excursions. But we weren’t returning home. We were stopping only briefly for fresh water and whatever groceries we could scrounge from the shoreside convenience store. We dropped in at the library, just across the street from the water, to say hello to the librarian, a friend of ours, and she passed along a massive zucchini that someone had left her—a dubious gift in summer when everyone with a garden has more zucchini than they need—but it would feed us for the next couple of days.
After another night in the Stonington archipelago, we crossed Jericho Bay in the fog to Marshall Island, the largest uninhabited island on the eastern seaboard. We camped with some friends, and the next day paddled with them north. We left them finally and turned toward Greenlaw Cove, where we’d begun our trip more than a month earlier. We spent the next couple of nights in the guest room of the friends who’d loaned us their cabin over the previous winter. In between rinsing our gear and picking up groceries, we were immersed in our hosts’ busy summer social life, taking another guest for a paddle, and chatting for hours over brunch. I became increasingly restless, and when Rebecca and I were finally on the water again, it felt like a miracle. We hurried the 10 miles across Blue Hill Bay, island hopping to the south end of Mount Desert Island.
A crowd lined the rails of the walkway below the lighthouse at Bass Harbor Head, and farther down they dotted the steep rocks with splashes of color like confetti, which, as we paddled closer, turned out to be visitors at Acadia National Park. We paddled close to shore, alert to waves that lifted us as they passed and crashed into the rocks. People waved at us as we passed and Rebecca, always polite, waved back. I felt awkward, as if I’d joined a parade, and focused on my paddling.
Beyond the lighthouse, there were no crowds and on an isolated stretch of the bare granite shoreline we saw a man, alone, stepping from rock to rock. He shielded his eyes from the sun to watch us pass. I thought of him as a traveler like us, and waved.
Some islands have only a thin layer of soil supporting a dense spruce forest, like this one in Pleasant Bay.
Beyond Mount Desert Island, the coast was more remote, with geographical features named for the ships or sea captains who had foundered on them. Halifax Island, 7 miles northeast of Jonesport, was named for the British schooner that broke-up on the rocks there. Baileys Mistake, a harbor 6 miles from the Canadian border, was named after a Captain Bailey who ran his lumber schooner aground at the harbor entrance; rather than face his employers back in Boston, he and his crew settled there, building homes with the ship’s cargo. This coast is steeped in such mythology. The lighthouses along this stretch of the coast speak of fog, shipwrecks and loneliness. The tides and currents are more extreme, and the sea is less predictable here and intimidating, but this coast felt larger than life and there was something about it that resonated with me. I felt at home.
Campsites were scarce, and we paddled longer days to get to them. We rounded peninsulas that jutted into the sea far from the villages that lay at the heads of long estuaries. In Jonesport we filled water bags and bought what useful things we could find at the shoreside variety store. Everyone we met looked right at us, smiled, and said something encouraging. We paddled 11 miles to Ram Island, a grassy hilltop barren of trees, inhabited by a pair of black-faced sheep who tolerated us from a distance. From our camp on this 1/4-mile long speck of land, the broad expanse of the Atlantic stretched to the south beneath a vast, empty sky. We watched the sun dwindle into the horizon clouds and almost immediately the fog appeared, further separating us from all we’d left, reducing our world to a hump of grassy rock.
As the sun set on Ram Island, Rebecca painted the islet’s moss-draped trees. The longer we spent in a place, the more Rebecca found to paint.
At around noon, the fog surrounding Ram Island finally cleared and we could see Cross Island, four miles distant and rising from the peninsula beyond it north, of 26 radio towers, some nearly 1,000′ high, built by the Navy to communicate with submarines operating in the Atlantic.
We got to Cross after an easy paddle: a welcome break, since our next day would be the toughest. Cross Island was the last stop before the Bold Coast, a 20-mile stretch of formidable, cliffy shoreline overlooking the Grand Manan Channel, known for its tricky currents and lack of places to land. From our campsite, we planned our moves for the next day and stared out across the narrows, where the fog had obscured all but the tops of the enormous radio towers, their red lights pulsing through the gloom.
In the morning, already shivering from a steady rain, we paddled across the narrows and headed northwest along the Bold Coast, passing seals flopped upon ledges like beanbag toys. The current was against us, so we stayed near shore, following a twisting path of rougher water where the back eddies could help us along. The near-shore rocks formed rockweed-draped mazes; cliff-lined slots rose up into the clouds. “You warm enough?” Rebecca asked.
“Yeah,” I said, but mostly out of habit. I was looking forward to our break. After nearly three hours in our kayaks, we finally landed at a cobble beach just before Moose Cove – just long enough to get into dry clothes and eat.
By now, the tide had turned and the flood’s current would be in our favor, but strongest well offshore. We lingered below the cliffs that rose straight up from the sea to disappear into a layer of fog. At the head of a rock-strewn cove lay an old wreck of a fishing boat. Layers of orange-red paint had peeled away from a bow and its stern had been torn off, presumably by the storms that pummel this shore. A quarter-mile offshore a whistle buoy hooted; we could barely see it.
The fog was always thick when we passed through Quoddy and Lubec Narrows. This time we had a strong current behind us that buoyed us quickly past the Lubec Channel Light.
We finally left the shore and paddled east into the fog to catch the current, leaving the cliffs in the mist behind us. The lighthouse at West Quoddy Head lay invisible five or six miles distant. The lobster buoys showed us the direction of the flow, and we aimed toward the ones with the most vigorous wakes. Occasionally we could hear waves beating the shore, and we steered more seaward. The grumble of a distant lobster boat reached us, but we saw only the gunmetal surface of the sea beneath the fog. After an hour, pushed by the 3-knot current, we arrived at West Quoddy Head.
The lighthouse there sits on the easternmost point of the United States; it is painted in horizontal red and white stripes, but without the red it would have invisible through the fog.
The hidden sun infused the fog with a pale, amber glow as we followed bearings from the lighthouse northwest into Quoddy Channel and then struggled against the ebbing current in Lubec Narrows, the 300-yard-wide gap between the Maine mainland and Canada’s Campobello Island. I’d powered past the breakwater, but Rebecca went to the Canadian side to ride an eddy and hugged the shore until the current lessened, and we met at an island up-current. Surrounded by fog, we searched out eddies to help us on our way.
Shackford Head was a shoreline of dark cliffs that we kept close by to avoid the standing waves just offshore. I’d hoped then we’d be able to see Sumac Island, where we’d camp, but the fog was still too thick. I would need to dig another chart out of my day hatch to get a bearing. It was only a mile away. We drifted for a moment, sipping water, and then, just like that, the fog lifted. One moment we looked out into a dense wall of it, the next we easily identified the small island where we would camp.
I put my water bottle away and took a bearing off the deck compass, in case the fog returned, and we dug in for one last stretch– our 34th mile for the day.
Sumac Island has about as much area as a two-car garage, with barely room for our tent amid the trees and fragile vegetation, but it would be home for a needed rest day. In the morning, we lingered in the tent, listening to drips of condensed fog falling from the trees and tapping on the fly. I opened the vestibule and gazed out at the miniature terrarium world of the forest floor, the princess pine and British soldier lichens, and plush, bright mosses. Beyond that was dense fog. I crawled outside and stretched.
After two nights on Sumac Island in Cobscook Bay, we went into Eastport, hoping to continue across to Deer Island, in Canada. Unfortunately, the customs office there had closed—but we were happy enough to return for a third night on Sumac, before turning around for the last leg of our trip.
With the tide out, Sumac Island stood like a small mountain of dark, angular rock, draped with rockweed. Atop it lay about 4′ of black, loamy soil, held in place by roots; in its interior is a secret garden thick with delicate, ankle-high flowers and greenery sprouting from the pine-needle duff. We tiptoed carefully around it, stepping only on logs and rocks.
I climbed into the hammock with my coffee. A metal skiff motored past, then pulled up onto the ledges. The skipper stepped ashore and wandered among the seaweedy boulders, bent over at the waist, collecting periwinkles. A beat-up aluminum canoe arrived next, with a man sitting in the stern steering with a small outboard motor. Black handles of clam baskets arched above the gunwales. It was Sunday morning. The fog gradually thinned, revealing houses and low, rolling pastures on shore. Later, we paddled the 3 miles to Eastport, where we spent the day replenishing supplies.
The next morning we paddled into a thick wall of fog at Shackford Head and caught the ebb that carried us back beneath the Roosevelt International Bridge in Lubec, where the din of the rushing current echoed through the quiet town. We let the tide take us past West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, and out into Grand Manan Channel. The land soon disappeared behind us in the fog. Heading back down the coast, we’d begun the last leg of our trip.
Miles from an invisible shore, we watched the water surface for clues, looking for the strongest current to push us back down the Bold Coast. But we had different ideas about which way we should go. I favored the magnetic bearing that roughly paralleled a route south along the coast. Rebecca, wanting as much help as possible from the current, veered seaward, paddling away from me until she nearly disappeared into the whiteness. With more than 30 miles to paddle that day, we needed help from the current, but I worried about getting too far out to sea. Still, with my wife about to disappear altogether, I abandoned my bearing and followed her. Together we watched for lobster buoys, the only indicators of the speed and direction of the current, and every now and then we’d hear the muffled thunder of surf and adjust course to paddle farther offshore. A lone puffin found us and circled overhead a while before flying off into the fog.
Rebecca paused and cocked her head. “Hear that?” I couldn’t, but she described the hooting of the whistle buoy off of Baileys Mistake, a 3/4-mile-wide bay on the mainland. A mile off maybe? Two? Again, we adjusted our heading offshore and we encountered great floating rafts of rockweed and other surf wrack, and guessed that it had drifted out of Baileys Mistake. After a while, we paddled into another patch of debris, and it made sense that it had probably floated out of Moose Cove. The current had slowed though, and we soon found lobster buoys bobbing over slack tethers. We’d paddled into Grand Manan Channel nearly three hours earlier, and now the tide was changing direction. We took a bearing toward shore.
Ram Island in Machias Bay feels far more remote than it is, only 1-1/4 miles off the nearest mainland point. Now owned by Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the island’s vegetation is kept in check by a pair of semi-wild sheep. In the distance to the east, Libby Island Light is one of the foggiest in Maine, and the site of numerous shipwrecks.
We camped again on Cross Island, our second night gazing across the channel at the slow pulse of red lights marking the grid of the Navy’s radio towers, and in the morning, foraged blueberries in the meadows around the old lifesaving station. Any island we camped on for more than a night became a favorite, hard to leave, but we finally set-out, across Machias Bay and into Little Kennebec Bay, borne inland on a bumpy ribbon of quick current, finally following a narrowing maze of channels into a secluded tidal pond. Here we would spend another two nights, taking shelter from strong winds and seas, and visiting Dickinsons Reach, a now vacant community of remote wooden yurts built by simple-living guru Bill Coperthwaite and his like-minded friends.
The current carried us back out to sea, and we wove through the Roque Island archipelago on our way to Jonesport, where we again resupplied at the variety store and, as a downpour began, let the current buoy us down Moosabec Reach.
The next morning, on Sheep Island, we sat at the picnic table, gazing at the chart spread before us with rain pattering down on the dining fly over our heads. We were having our second round of coffee. Fog had been coming and going, sometimes enveloping us completely, but then drifting away to reveal the shore of Cape Split or the distant islands. But it was dry beneath the rain fly, and even a little warmer, and we had enough water to make hot drinks all day long.
It was Saturday morning, and we could see all of the probable moves to get us back home to Stonington by Thursday or Friday. We measured the distances on the chart with a string, guessing where we might paddle each day, and which campsites we might get to each evening. We stared at the chart. I wanted to finish what we’d set out to do, but I didn’t want the trip to be over.
“Well,” Rebecca said. “We can come back any time.”
“Sure.” But our schedule wasn’t the only thing that would change. The air already felt cool, as if autumn were upon us. This trip would soon be in the past. Maybe that’s why we were taking another zero day. We could have paddled in the fog and rain, but we liked the island; we even had a privy and a picnic table. Most of all though, we wanted to preserve this feeling of being in our own world and feeling at home in it. Over the last 50 days we’d fallen into a rhythm that doesn’t come on a weekend outing. And the feeling of home came easier when we had no home elsewhere.
Not much more than a ledge, Dry Island in Gouldsboro Bay was true to its name the night we were there, and remained dry, though I woke before high tide just to be sure. Legit camping options are scarce between Frenchman Bay and Petit Manan Point, so we took what we could get.
A group of paddlers in orange and yellow tandem kayaks came around the end of Sheep Porcupine Island, flying along downwind, some with their paddles held aloft to catch the breeze. The frontrunners came abreast of us, shouting like kids on a carnival ride.
Mammoth cruise ships lay at anchor off Bar Harbor, their shuttles zipping back and forth, and a couple of bloated motor yachts were parked in slips at the public dock.
Though Bar Harbor is known for its cruise ships and crowds of tourists, we could usually find a stretch of steep shoreline not far from town for ourselves, like this one along Long Porcupine Island.
We pulled the kayaks onto the sand and headed into town. Rebecca and I had lived outdoors for the summer, crouched on rocks while we cooked, and slept on the ground. My clothes were stiff and streaked white with salt; my tan tinted with grime. The sidewalks were filled with ambling tourists flowing in and out of restaurants, gazing into shop windows. When they caught sight of me, they quickly looked away.
I longed to get back on the water, and I dreaded the end of our trip.
We spent our last night on The Hub, a tiny island, lying out on the warm granite slabs, watching stars and satellites until we could no longer keep our eyes open
On the hottest day of the summer, we paddled across Blue Hill Bay and back into the orbit of Deer Isle, closing the loop that had taken us over 600 miles and nearly two months. As we approached our take-out at Stonington, the heat was replaced by a cool north wind and we paddled hard just to stay warm, as if the season had turned the corner in a single day. We lingered in our boats and pulled alongside each other. We were looking forward to showers at the campground, clean clothes, and a dinner at a restaurant in town, but we were in no hurry. We’d lost whatever sense of hurry we’d had at the beginning of the summer, but knew that would begin to change the moment we landed. We looked at each other. We were both salty, dirty and exhausted, a little gaunt around the cheekbones, but all that only made our smiles brighter.
Michael and Rebecca Daugherty are back in Stonington operating a kayak guide service. Michael is the author of AMC’s Best Sea Kayaking in New England, and Rebecca has a studio and gallery. They paddle out to the islands as often as they can. A book-length version of this story, illustrated by Rebecca, will be available soon.
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.
With the pressure in the tank at 40 to 50 psi, the water flows as powerfully as it does from my outside faucets at home.
There are just a couple of launch ramps in my part of Puget Sound that are equipped with hoses to give boats, trailers, and sandy or muddy boots a fresh-water rinse before I hit the road to get back home. So, to keep from making a mess of the car or having salt water to eat away at my trailer, I made a pressurized water tank for my car’s roof rack.
The back end of the tank has a cap that is drilled for a hose bib and a Shrader inflation valve.
The Shrader valve’s interior flange and gasket keeps it airtight. The bib relies on its threads and a two-part urethane ABS-compatible adhesive to seal it to the pipe cap.
The parts are all commonly available at home-improvement and auto-parts stores. The core of my tank is a 6-1/2′ length of 4″ ABS drain pipe, cut to match the length of my Chevy Blazer roof. On the forward end of the pipe is a 4″ x 3″ closet elbow. It serves as an opening to fill the tank and has a 3” cleanout adapter and plug to close the tank. There are other fittings that can do the job as long as they create a fill opening above the pipe and can be sealed airtight. The back end of the tank has a glued-on cap.
The forward end of the tank has an elbow that reduces the diameter from a 4″ pipe to a 3″ clean-out. The clean-out threads are made air-tight with PTFE tape. The tape stays in place nicely, but may need to be replaced periodically. The brass drain cock is a fitting for a car radiator; here it’s an air vent.
The threaded plug on the filler gets a radiator drain cock that’s used as an air vent, and the cap gets a metal Schrader valve stem, which is easier to install than the rubber stems you see on most car wheels. The cap also gets a hose bib/faucet. I drilled the holes for the bib and the drain cock undersize and filled the openings until the fittings’ threads could cut into the ABS plastic. I backed them out, applied JB-Weld Plastic Bonder (a two-part urethane adhesive that works with ABS and metal), and screwed the fittings in tight. The inside end of the drain cock needed to be cleaned of the adhesive before it set.
After filing off any burrs left by cutting the 4” pipe, I did a dry fit of the pieces and used bits of masking tape to assure I would pushed the fittings completely together during gluing and oriented with the drain cock and bib opposite each other. Gluing the ABS fittings to the pipe is quite simple. Apply a thick coat of ABS cement to the end of the pipe on the outside and a lighter coat on the inside of the fitting. Press the two pieces together with a quarter turn and hold them tight for about a minute while the glue sets.
The cleanout and its plug aren’t meant to make an airtight seal under pressure, but a few wraps of PTFE thread tape will remedy that.
I had intended to put nuts on the threads of the drain cock and the bib to hold them in against the pressure in the same way the valve stem’s flange does, but those fittings both have tapered threads, common among plumbing parts, and there were no matching nuts. After I glued them in place with the Plastic Bonder, I did a pressure test and at 100 psi everything held; the cleanout plug just hissed a little. When doing a pressure test, it’s best to fill the tank and leave only a couple of cubic inches of air space. The tank will quickly come up to pressure and if something fails, the small volume of air in the pipe will equalize quickly, exerting a minimum of force. An empty tank that’s been pressurized with air has much more energy to release.
I made the tank as long as the top of my car roof, maximizing the volume of water I could carry without the ends interfering with the rear hatch or hanging over the windshield.
Closed-cell foam, cut from a exercise/stretching roller, cradles the tank and straddles the roof rack.
My system holds about 5 gallons of water, and I’ll fill it completely before heading to the launch site. On a sunny day, the black pipe will absorb heat and warm the water. While I’m boating, I open the drain cock just as a precaution against pressure building up.
To pressurize the tank, I use the 12-volt tire pump that I always carry in the car for keeping the tires filled with air.
You can use any standard hose nozzle. This brass Little Big Shot Super Nozzle is compact and shoots water quite far. I added the yellow inline valve to cut the flow quickly and keep the nozzle setting I need. The self-coiling 15′ hose is easy to stow.
After I’ve hauled the boat out of the water, I fit a shower nozzle to the faucet so I can rinse salt and sand off myself. With the drain cock open and the tank unpressurized, the full 5 gallons provide 10 minutes of shower time. A short 2-minute shower will drain a gallon and prepare the tank for pressurizing.
Before pumping air into the tank, creating some air space in it, about 20 percent, will provide enough air volume for pressurizing the tank and using the hose. With the faucet and drain cock closed, I connect a little 12-volt electric air pump to the valve. It’s the same pump I keep in the car to inflate the tires. (I’ve used a manual pump too, but because its hose is short, the tank has to be on the ground.) Bringing the pressure up to 40 or 50 psi is sufficient to propel the remaining 4 gallons of water out of the tank. The nozzle I have on the hose will shoot 30′ and, when wide open, empty the tank in 1-1/2 minutes. I can always carry extra fresh water in the car if I need to reload the tank.
The parts for the tank (not including the hose and nozzle) cost about $75 and required only a couple of hours of shop time. It’s a worthwhile investment in salt-free skin, a cleaner car, and a longer-lasting trailer.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Magazine.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Magazine readers by sending us an email.
The planer has a broad paddle switch for quickly cutting the power. Just above the feed opening is a gauge that shows how much wood is being removed.
Back in 2016, Audrey and I were asked to restore BARBASHELA, a Mississippi River skiff designed in the 1880s by Natchez Steamboat Captain Thomas P. Leathers. She was made of cypress and needed some new planking to get her shipshape, and, luckily, we had a cypress mill nearby to supply the 4/4 rough-sawn stock. The mill could have planed the boards for us, but we needed to get the perfect thickness to match the original planks as we scarfed them together, so we purchased a DeWalt DW734 Benchtop Planer to add to our arsenal of tools.
We try to keep the shop footprints of our tools low, so we use portable saws and benchtop tools that can be put out of the way when they’re not in use. A large, heavy planer would have been great, though expensive, and would have taken up a lot of room for the few planer jobs that we need to do. Hand-planing the planks was also out of the question, so we researched benchtop planers and decided the DeWaltDW734 would meet our requirements. Its 12-1/2″-wide bed could handle the 12″-wide garboard that we needed to replace, and its 6″ thickness capacity it would come in handy for shaping some 4″ stock for the stem. The 734 weighs a sturdy 80 lbs, a bit heavy for moving around, but solid and stable in use, especially when working with long stock.
For BARBASHELA’s planks we wanted to remove just over a 1/16″ from the rough-sawn boards to reach the target thickness and that required several passes per plank. We set up to remove 1/64″ per pass to reduce the load on the feed rollers and found that the 15-amp, 20,000-rpm motor was up to the task. The 734 has powerful feed rollers and provides 33-1/2″ of support from the infeed and outfeed tables, so it can handle 6′ to 8′ boards. For the 16’ and longer planks we helped push and pull the stock through.
The cutter head is equipped with three knives and turns at 10,000 rpm. The manufacturer’s specifications note that the blades cut 96 times per inch, which gives a smooth finish to the planed surface. The knives are reversible, and after three years we have yet to change them out, but when we do there is an alignment system of pins on the cutter head and holes on the blade to ease the process. The planer comes with a tool to change the knives; it neatly stows on the motor housing so it won’t quickly get lost.
A thickness scale and a separate material removal gauge make it easy to set the 734 for the right depth of cut. When I slide a workpiece to the cutter-head carriage, I use the material removal gauge to set the carriage height for the desired cut. There is also an adjustment wheel marked in 1/64″ increments to move the carriage. The carriage itself has a lock bar that positively locks to the four columns and controls snipe, a deeper cut at the beginning and end of a board, a common planer problem. There is also a turret depth stop to set frequently used thicknesses for uniformity among projects.
The planer comes with a dust hood that works well with a properly sized shop-vacuum hose attached. The planer generates a lot of large shavings, and a vac will fill up fast! Without a vacuum attached, the dust-hood exhaust port shoots out a very large debris field to clean up. With an aggressive cut, shavings can quickly clog the port. We are experimenting with a cyclonic dust collector with 5-gallon waste bucket, and have had positive results so far, even with mismatched hoses.
We have used the planer to reduce the thickness on some Peruvian teak to make a 1/4″ transom cap flexible enough to take a bend, and to make boards to match the exact thickness of the lone surviving piece of BARBASHELA’s stern seat. The planer can remove a lot of material fast, especially with softwoods, and cut up to 1/8″ per pass, but we rarely remove that much material at a time.
The 734 has held up well in our very humid Florida swamp environment and we have had fun using it to surface and dimension lumber for lots of different projects. We spent more for this tool than any other tool we own, and it paid for itself with its first planking job.
Audrey and Kent Lewis are guardians of a small fleet of canoes, kayaks, sailboats and a vintage lapstrake runabout, currently seeking prizes in the NW Florida Panhandle. Their adventures are chronicled on their blog.
With its webbing coiled around a spring-loaded drum, the Quickloader makes a tidy package when not in use.
A friend of mine demystified ratchet straps for me last summer. I had given her a dinghy, and when she came to pick it up, she walked me through using the straps she’d brought. I know and trust knots so I’d always preferred to keep a length of line in my trunk for tie-downs, but I liked how the flat straps can be cranked down so quickly and snugly. Keeping the strap from getting twisted was annoying; the tail end had to be tucked away to keep it from flapping in the wind, and, when not in use, the straps didn’t coil as tidily as rope. It wasn’t until I tried Quickloader ratchet straps that I was convinced to make the switch from rope and knots for securing cartop loads.
When the ratchet release (just to the right of the handle) is pulled, the handle can be fully extended, letting the drum unwind and the webbing run free.
Quickloader Retractable ratchet straps are thoughtfully engineered and simple. The QL15 model has two black, rubber-coated metal S-hooks, one of which is on a 9-1/2″ piece of 1″ polyester webbing, and the other is at the end is a neatly coiled 1″ polyester webbing stored around a spring-loaded core. Fully extended, the Quickloader has a reach of 12′. The strap feeds out and retracts like a tape measure so there’s never any slack to get knotted, tangled, or twisted. A loop sewn into the webbing limits the extension so the spring-loaded coiler isn’t damaged. The self-coiling tail end is a great advantage over common ratchet straps; I don’t have to worry about extra strap material getting loose, potentially dragging under a trailer tire or flapping in the wind. The QL115M has a 500-lb working load and a 1,500-lb breaking strength.
The ratcheting mechanism is of high-quality steel with a slightly iridescent finish and a powder-coated texture. The Quickloader’s action instills confidence; the ratchet’s clicks are distinct and reassuring. The handle is 6-1/8″ out from the center of the barrel and with a few wraps of webbing around the barrel, the handle has a 16:1 advantage. A video on the Quickloader YouTube channel shows a Quickloader used as a come-along to drag a boat, and while the device has plenty of power, the distance you can drag anything is limited to about 14″ by the number of wraps the barrel can take before the webbing binds against the frame.
When the two S-hooks are attached, the drum takes up the slack with a single turn. The webbing is then locked on the drum and ready to be tensioned.
The ratchet release located at the end of the handle and is easy to operate. Pulling the ratchet release and fully opening the handle unlocks the ratchet so the barrel can spin to let the strap run free. If the webbing gets bound up between the barrel and the frame, there’s a wing on one end of the barrel you can easily twist to free the strap.
The wing just outside of the ratchet makes it easy to unwind the drum if there is too much webbing on it. This Quickloader has a piece of leather, attached with a cable tie, to keep the metal frame from damaging whatever is being strapped down.
If the Quickloader is pressed up against the hull of a boat, the metal could scratch the finish or gouge the wood, a problem with any ratchet, so I may attach a bit of soft foam or fabric to the device’s back side. For now, I carry a pad of soft material to tuck between the Quickloader and an easily marred surface.
After tying a dinghy down on my roof rack, I pushed and pulled on the boat in all directions and it was solid as heck, ready for a 65-mph trip down the interstate. I totally dig my Quickloader Retractable ratchet straps. They’re easy to use, hold tight, and stow neatly.
Anne Bryant is associate editor of Small Boats Magazine.
The QL115M goes for about $23 and Quickloader’s array of retractable ratchet straps is available from various online retailers.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
Even when DREAM WEAVER is at rest, her deck conveys fluid motion.
Claudia Miranda Monteleagre was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and, like all kids, liked toys, but in her case, so much so that she decided that when she grew up she was going to be a toy designer. When Claudia was older, she relocated to Europe and while there continued moving from country to country. By the time Claudia graduated from high school, she spoke five languages and could continue her education almost anywhere in the world. In 2013, she enrolled in the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia, a college with one of the best industrial design programs in America.
Claudia Miranda Monteleagre
Claudia’s presentation of her digital sketches for the project includes ideas for paddles, a skeg, and even deck-mounted wireless speakers.
In one of her first classes, “Introduction to Industrial Design,” Claudia met Jacob Phillips, and the two became good friends with a shared interest in design concepts and ideas. In 2016, they both took a class that involved building a kayak. It started with the whole class working on a strip-built kit kayak from Guillemot Kayaks as an introduction to boat design and construction. The class then split up to design and build their own kayaks using the experience they’d gained. Claudia and Jacob teamed up and began their design process by studying existing kayaks and making sketches, CAD drawings, and scale-model prototypes with 3D printers and CNC routers.
Claudia and Jacob didn’t have a garage for the build and set up shop in the living room of the house they were staying in. They protected the floor with several sheets of oriented-strand board. The Georgia summer temperatures, rising to 100 degrees, forced them to work indoors with air conditioning and fans.
Collaboration was a big part of the building process; Claudia and Jacob worked on the kayak day and night to complete the project in 10 weeks.
Neither Claudia nor Jacob came into that class with much experience in marine design beyond scanning online videos and blogs. For guidance on construction, they studied Nick Schade’s The Strip-Built Sea Kayak. While pondering the practical elements of kayak construction, they also considered the artistic possibilities offered by wood strips. For the deck, they sought to bend accent strips of exotic hardwoods to mimic the rhythm of waves and ripples and “guide the eyes of the viewer through a vibrant path of beautiful colors and intricate forms.” Western red cedar would be the canvas on which they painted with padouk, wenge, curly maple, and zebra wood.
Emily Galvin and Natalia Serrano
The foredeck, coaming, and paddle have delicate details that unify the decorative design.
Jacob Phillips
The strips left over after the construction of the kayak went into a distinctive, complementary double-bladed paddle.
When the kayak was finished, there was a lot of wood left over, so Claudia and Jacob designed and built a striking double-bladed paddle with edge banding that flowed around the blades and across the loom.
Cody Moore
DREAM WEAVER’s first touch in the water was in Ocean City, Maryland. Claudia takes the first strokes while a foredeck-mounted GoPro records the moment.
Emily Galvin and Natalia Serrano
The hull is made of cedar strips all of the same color and gets its variations from the play of sunlight reflected by the ripples on the water.
The kayak was named DREAMWEAVER and the project was a success. Claudia and Jacob both earned an A for the class. After graduating from SCAD, neither, sadly, continued with boatbuilding. Jacob now teaches design tech at a high school. Claudia became an industrial designer, but never lost sight of what she wanted to be when she grew up. She has worked with toy giants Fisher-Price and Mattel and had a hand in creating The Scooby-Doo Haunted Ghost Town Playset. You can see more of her work at her website.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Magazine readers.
Nathaniel Holmes Bishop III was born in Medford, Massachusetts, on March 23, 1827, and died in Glens Falls New York, July 2, 1902. In his time, he was quite well known for books he had written about his travels in small boats. I first heard about him, quite by accident, in the spring of 1982. I was working part-time at the Wooden Boat Shop, located, appropriately, on Boat Street in Seattle. On a sunny summer morning, I was manning the front counter when the mail came in and among that day’s mail was the latest issue of Wooden Canoe, Volume 11 of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association’s magazine. The store was empty so I had some free time to browse through it.
This issue of Wooden Canoe introduced Nathaniel Holmes Bishop to me. Eight years later my son would be named Nathan in his honor.
I skimmed over an article written by Walter Fullam of Princeton, New Jersey about building canoes by laminating kraft paper with glue. That was mildly interesting, but what captivated me was an excerpt from Bishop’s Voyage of the Paper Canoe: A geographical journey of 2500 miles from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, during the years 1874—5. Hungry for the rest of Bishop’s story, I found an old copy in the University of Washington’s library and read it from cover to cover. His writing was certainly a product of the 19th century, but charming and evocative:
Finding that the wind usually rose and fell with the sun, we now made it a rule to anchor our boat during most of the day and pull against the current at night. The moon and the bright auroral lights made this task an agreeable one. Then, too, we had Coggia’s comet speeding through the northern heavens…. In this high latitude day dawned before three o’clock, and the twilight lingered so long that we could read the fine print of a newspaper without effort at a quarter to nine o’clock P. M.
And he did not lack a good sense of humor. About his parting with David Bodfish, his traveling companion, briefly, from Quebec City to Troy, New York, he writes:
I had unfortunately contributed to Mr. Bodfish’s thirst for the marvellous by reading to him at night, in our lonely camp, Jules Verne’s imaginative Journey to the Centre of the Earth. David was in ecstasies over this wonderful contribution to fiction. He preferred fiction to truth at any time. Once, while reading to him a chapter of the above work, his credulity was so challenged that he became excited, and broke forth with, “Say, boss, how do these big book-men larn to lie so well? does it come nat’ral to them, or is it got by edication?
Having grown up on the West Coast, I knew about the Inside Passage woven into the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, but I had no idea that there was an even longer and better protected thread of waterways that connected Canada to Florida. After I returned Voyage of the Paper Canoe to the library, I paid regular visits to the book with a weighty pocketful of nickels and carefully photocopied every page of it. I needed to have a copy because I’d decided, even before I’d finished reading the book, that I would build a paper canoe and retrace Bishop’s route. He would be my guide. I was approaching 30, not quite sure what I was going to do with my life, and had no obligations to prevent me from embarking on a voyage that would take several months. I spent the next year trying to figure out how to laminate a paper hull, and in the late fall of 1983, with a craft-paper canoe of questionable durability on my Volkswagen bug’s roof racks, I headed to Quebec City. Four months later I had reached Cedar Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The voyage had only whetted my appetite.
I kept my copy of Four Months in the chart case and kept up with Bishop day by day as I descended the Ohio River and then the Mississippi with him. Not all of the landscape had been changed by the 110 years between us. Cave-in-Rock, a 30′ wide cavern on the Illinois side of the Ohio is still there, as is the burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia. And most of the Mississippi is isolated from civilization by levees so it’s the same wilderness the Bishop rowed through and the people who live along the river were every bit as interesting and generous as they had been in Bishop’s account.
I made good time, especially along the Gulf Coast where I had some good sailing, and reached Cedar Key in 2-1/2 months. Although my pursuit of Bishop was suddenly over, he had given my life a new and clear trajectory, one that eventually lead me here, to Small Boats Monthly.
Of the last night of his voyage, Bishop writes:
Lying there under the tender sky, lighted with myriads of glittering stars, a soft gleam of light stretched like a golden band along the water…. It seemed to be the path I had taken, the course of my faithful boat. All I could see was the band of shining light, the bright end of the voyage.
What he had seen behind him, that bright path, was what I had seen stretching out ahead of me.
Bishop was traveling and writing long before his well-known voyages. This journal, dated 1852 and written when he was 15, is titled “Nathaniel Bishop’s Journal of a Pedestrian Tour from the Town of Medford, Mass, to the White Mountains, N.H., Embracing nearly 300 Miles Travel on Foot.” He also kept a journal later in his life called “Log of the Lorna,” an account of travels by boat with his wife, Mary Ball. I saw this journal, and other Bishop memorabilia, in the archives of the Ocean County Library, in Toms River, New Jersey.
The two routes, paper canoe on the right and sneak box on the left, both end at the Cedar Keys on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Together they add up to more than 5,000 miles.
Bishop travelled from Quebec City to Troy, NY, in a lapstrake double-ender, MAYETA, an 18′ lapstrake canoe, which proved too heavy and unwieldy. Bishop had heard about the tough, lightweight boats being made of paper by Waters & Sons, the only company making paper boats, as well as observatory domes and racing shells. The company was in Troy, so he ordered a paper canoe. This letter, dated October 12, 1874, seems to be an announcement of the completion of the canoe. Nine days later, having christened the 58-lb canoe MARIA THERESA, Bishop resumed his trip southward on the Hudson River. George Waters, paddling his own paper canoe, accompanied him for a few miles.
Bishop’s paper canoe became a selling point for the Waters company. His books were quite popular and often given out a prizes to school children.
Bishop rowed MARIA THERESA through southern waters in February of 1875, and the cool weather would have kept the insects at bay and made the alligators sluggish.
News of the Voyage of the Paper Canoe raced down the East Coast ahead of Bishop. The town of St. Marys, Georgia, awaited him with this elaborate document, “An Address of Congratulation and Welcome from the Inhabitants of St. Mary’s” that was presented by the city’s mayor.
This undated photograph of Bishop paddling MARIA THERESA is the only photograph I’ve seen of that famous paper canoe. Bishop spent most of his time rowing instead of paddling; the outriggers are here folded back to rest on the deck. [Update: Ken Cupery, who once published The Paper Boater (no longer being issued but selected articles appear in Ken’s website, www.cupery.net), notes that the boat pictured here is not MARIA THERESA, which had a much longer cockpit. The photo has no notations and the boat’s identity is unknown.]
After I’d paddled MARIA THERESA’s route from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, I caught up with Mr. Bishop at the Riverside Cemetery in Toms River. That was in January of 1984. Two years later I’d be back on his trail, close to finishing my retracing of his sneak-box voyage.
Traffic on the Mississippi River has changed over the last 143 years. In 1876, Bishop’s sneak box, CENTENNIAL REPUBLIC, may have been among the smallest boats on the river, but she was certainly not the slowest.
While Bishop was spending the night in New Orleans, he was discovered by “roughs” and taunted while he was trying to sleep. Having the benefit of his experience, I spent my night in New Orleans tucked deep under a large pier where no one could see me.
The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway wasn’t fully developed in Bishop’s day. Where he had to travel overland, there are now canals.
Bishop traveled 2,600 miles aboard CENTENNIAL REPUBLIC. The route from Pittsburgh to Cedar Key is now almost 200 miles shorter.
When I left New Orleans on a foggy Mississippi River, I had followed Bishop’s two long voyages for 4,500 miles and had another 400 miles ahead to get to the finish at Cedar Key, Florida. In the end, it was over all too soon.
Walter Fullam, whose article on paper canoes helped me build mine, shared with me an abiding interest in Bishop. After I finished my sneak-box journey, I built this model of Bishop’s CENTENNIAL REPUBLIC for him. We remained friends until his death in 2000 and his wife Dorothy and I sent each other Christmas cards for many years afterward.
Bishop did quite well for himself in his later years. He was a successful cranberry farmer and owned over 60 plots of land as well as homes in New Jersey, New York, Florida, and California. In 1880 he was among the two dozen paddling enthusiasts who founded the American Canoe Association. I found this portrait of him in Toms’ River, in the library he funded in his will.
I set out to build a boat to commute the two miles between the boat I was living aboard and my job at The Center for Wooden Boats (CWB) on the shore of Seattle’s Lake Union. I wanted something that would be inexpensive to build, big enough to carry a group of four friends, easy to row, and able to carry an outboard. I also wanted to build something with ties to the history of the local waters. I perused over 100 small-boat plans of many of Seattle’s famed yacht designers that have been cataloged and digitized by Paul Marlow of Puget Sound Maritime. The boat that caught my eye was a flat-bottom skiff designed by Edwin Monk in 1943 for Bryant’s Marina.
Ed Monk was a famous Seattle-based naval architect renowned for designing attractive motor-yachts; Bryant’s was a local yard that outfitted fishing vessels. This 13′6″ skiff was likely a meant to be a working tender for fishermen, one that could be quickly built by the yard. The stem and frames are all straight, so I thought the build would be a pretty straightforward, given that there would be so few curves to cut.
Monk’s plans consist of two sheets of drawings. The first has construction drawings with scantlings and materials. The second has simple lines drawings in plan and profile with the offsets on each station. The plan view depicts two hull options on the same centerline: one with a 4’6” beam on one side of the centerline, and one with a 5’ beam on the other. While there’s enough information provided to build the boat, to get a better feel for Monk’s building style, I read his book, How to Build Wooden Boats with 16 Small Boat Designs, published in 1934. Monk’s earlier boats utilized wide, old-growth red cedar that was readily available on the West Coast at that time. Most of his small-boat designs feature wide, flat sides and bottoms, with hard chines, shapes that readily lend themselves to substituting marine plywood for planking.
In the 1940s, waterproof glues improved and boatbuilders started to embrace the use of plywood, and Monk’s drawings for the Bryant’s skiff highlight that transition—a traditional lapstrake with 5/8″ red-cedar planks and a 11/16″ cedar bottom is detailed alongside a hull of 3/8″ waterproof plywood. For the latter, fewer frames are needed. The construction drawing indicates that they can be on 24″ centers rather than on 16″ specified for cedar planking.
Josh Anderson
The plywood version includes chine logs to provide gluing surface at the edges. The cedar-planked version can use bronze or galvanized fastenings between the bottom and the side planks.
I constructed a 16′ x 4′ strong back on which to build the boat that would double as a lofting platform. Just four lines—the sheer and chine, each in profile and plan view—require drawing with flexible battens, making the skiff a great first boat for people to learn lofting. The plans show the heights and half breadths—to the nearest 1/8″—on the drawing rather than a table of offsets. I carefully lofted the lines for the skiff with the 4 6″ beam.
At each of the six stations I made a plywood pattern upon which I would construct the frames. The plywood patterns will quicken building more skiffs in the future; for a one-off build, the frames could also be assembled over drawings on the lofting. I marked the bevel for the planking on the patterns, as each frame is different, then started constructing the frames. Each consists of two sides joined to a bottom piece. A temporary cross spall, set to a baseline representing the strongback, helps keep each frame’s proper shape.
With the three frame pieces and cross spall on the pattern I joined the frame’s laps with three screws, securing the bottom frame to each side frame. A notch cut in the outer corner will accept a chine log. (The cedar-planked version is built without them.)
With the frames set up on 24″ centers on the strongback, the transom and stem are also put in place. The plans call for a transom of 1 1/8” yellow cedar. I used white oak instead, edge-glued with epoxy and biscuits. The inner part of the two-part stem—2-1/2″ oak on plans—gets a consistent bevel to receive the plank ends.
The chine logs were let in and secured with epoxy (though galvanized bolts are specified) tying the whole structure together
Josh Anderson
The optional plywood construction required fewer frames—6 instead of the 9 required for cedar planking—but a lot more clamps for the epoxy bonding.
The bottom consists of two pieces of 3/8″ plywood scarfed together, glued and fastened with screws into the bottoms of the frames. Gluing the bottom down took every clamp and heavy object I had in the shop.
For plywood construction, Monk specified a single broad sheet of plywood for each side. The cedar-planked version has three lapped strakes; I thought that lapstrake would look a little nicer, so I chose to do a glued-lap version with plywood planks. To squeeze the laps during gluing I used waxed sheetrock screws with washers under the heads.
Josh Anderson
The plans call for a plain thwart in the stern and a sculling notch in the transom. The author built the skiff for motoring and installed stern sheets for more comfortable seating at the helm.
Once the planking was finished and the cutwater attached over the trimmed forward ends of the planks, I sanded and faired the hull. The plans call for paint at this point, but since this boat would live most of its life on the lake as a rental boat at CWB, I wanted it to be fairly indestructible. The bottom was fiberglassed and the rest of the plywood was epoxy coated three times. After the epoxy cured, the skeg and bottom runners were attached. The boat was then flipped upright, the frame ends were cut, and the sipo mahogany rub rail, inwale, breast hook, and knees were all installed with epoxy. I then cut out a notch in the transom so that a standard shaft outboard could be mounted. I also installed a beefy 2″-thick sipo transom knee and 1” pad to support the outboard. After the interior was epoxy coated, everything was primed and painted, expect the breasthook, knees, oar lock pads, and transom knee, which were oiled. I made the thwarts of vertical grain Douglas fir, and the sole of vertical grain red cedar, all of which was also oiled.
As I was building this boat, I realized this design would lend itself well to boatbuilding classes at CWB, and I made patterns of all the molds and parts so that they could be duplicated for future skiffs. Monk’s design would be easy for novices to understand and his plans could easily be used to teach either modern or traditional building techniques.
SBM
The forward station puts the boat in good trim with a solo rower.
On the water the skiff is quite stable—you can stand up and do jumping jacks in this boat and it will not toss you overboard. With its high freeboard, it can hold a lot of weight and accommodate up to five adults comfortably, with enough stability to switch seats in the middle of the lake.
The two rowing stations are for either single or tandem rowing. For going solo, it rows really well from the forward station. The skiff’s flat bottom and low draft make it very maneuverable and responsive. Without a lot of weight aboard, it glides through the water easily. The high freeboard results in a fair amount of windage and in strong winds the boat gets pushed around a bit when under oars.
SBM
The 4′ space between rowing stations gives a synchronized pair of rowers enough room to keep out of each other’s way.
Rowing in tandem significantly eases the work of getting the boat moving, especially with added weight aboard. The two rowing stations are 4’ apart, providing plenty of space for comfortable tandem rowing without clashing oar blades.
SBM
The skiff is at its fastest when there is some weight forward to keep the bow down.
The skiff is very responsive and stable when powered by an outboard. It even handles very well in reverse. I’ve gotten the boat up to 5 knots with a Seagull outboard and up to 4 knots with an electric EP Carry outboard. With a 4-hp four-stroke outboard on the transom and two people on board, the top speed at full throttle was 6.5 knots.
A passenger seated forward helps keep the boat trimmed along the water line. With the skipper motoring alone, the bow comes out of the water making it a little difficult to see, not surprising given the bottom’s rocker. The beamier version of the boat is 5” wider across the bottom of the transom and might be better able to support the weight of the motor and solo skipper. Nonetheless, the boat still handles well. With the outboard at full throttle, the speed for solo motoring was reduced a little bit, down to 5.5 knots.
SBM
With the motor at half throttle, the skiff keeps in reasonably good trim with a lone occupant at the helm.
SBM
With the motor at full throttle, the bow rises well out of the water.
To reflect the no-nonsense hardworking purpose of Monk’s skiff, I named it PRUDY, after my hard-nosed great-grandmother. By the time it was completed, I was no longer a liveaboard and no longer needed a boat for commuting, so PRUDY is now part of CWB’s fleet.
Josh Anderson
The ample stability and carrying capacity has made the skiff a favorite among the rental fleet at CWB.
Equipped with an outboard, she has served as a safety boat for our youth camps, and as a rowboat, she keeps busy as a rental in the livery. Renters at CWB often have never been in a boat before and Monk’s skiff, with its remarkable stability and carrying capacity, quickly puts them at ease. It has quickly become the most popular rental in the fleet.
Josh Anderson attended the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine. With his wife, Sarah McLean, he restored a 25′ Friendship sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh also attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland, Maine, and built boats for Artisan Boatworks in Rockport Maine. He is now the Maritime Operations Manager at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
Thanks to Dustin Espey for his service as passenger and rower and to Shelby Allman for piloting the chase boat for the SBM photos.
Monk Skiff Particulars
[table]
Length/13′6”
Beam/4′6” (reviewed here) or 5′
Depth amidships/20.5”
[/table]
Digital files for the two sheets of drawings for Monk’s skiff are available from Puget Sound Maritime. The charge is $50 for the first page, $10 for the second page. Orders are made as “Research Inquiries.” Specify Monk drawings 710-1 and 710-2 for the 13’6” x 4’6” skiff for Bryant’s Marina.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!
You wouldn’t know from its good looks, but the Salt Bay Skiff is a quick-and-dirty boat to build. I discovered the skiff through the Willamette Sailing Club (WSC) in Portland, Oregon, where RiversWest Small Craft Center hosts an annual family boat-build on a summer weekend. For the past ten years, each participating family builds their own Salt Bay Skiff. Chuck Stuckey, one of the founding members of event, said, “We picked it because we believe it to be a real boat, not a 12′ toy.”
In 2017, my brother and I, with two of our friends, joined in the largest group to date, with 16 families packed into the club’s modest boat-parking lot. We started on a Saturday morning and the next afternoon rowed the unpainted hull across the Willamette River. With four adults aboard, it rode pretty low in the water but it did not swamp. With a rated capacity of 300 lbs for passengers and gear, the 500-or-so lbs we had aboard was, admittedly, pushing it.
Photographs and video by Jay Hideki Horita of Outdoor Asian
On the starboard side, amidships, you can see the tongue that holds the leeboard in place. The chine logs, on the outside of the hull, simplify and speed construction.
Designer Chris Franklin set out with the intention to create a simple, sturdy boat. It was introduced in Getting Started in Boats, Volumes 7 and 8, supplements to issues of WoodenBoat in the winter of 2007-08. These issues were specifically geared toward building boats with kids. Thanks to the simple design and ease of construction, there is plenty of flexibility for personal modifications. Most Salt Bay skiffs are built as rowboats, but some build them as driftboats by omitting the keel and skeg. The skiffs can be sailed, and the plans include dimensions and drawings for adding a leeboard, a rudder, a gunter rig with boom, and jib. Some builders have rigged the boat with the gunter without the boom, or without the jib, or with a lug sail instead of a gunter.
I decided on a sprit rig, for greater sail area aloft for the 9′4″ mast height, and included a boom for better downwind performance. I wanted a camp cruiser that I could sleep in, so I stayed with the leeboard to preserve cockpit space that would be taken up if I opted to install a daggerboard trunk. With a 12′ overall length and a 4′ beam, there’s not much extra room. A sprit rig and a leeboard may not be best for sailing upwind, but if I ever needed to travel against the breeze I figured I would simply strike sail, pull the board, and row.
The boat requires two 4′ by 8′ sheets of marine plywood: one 1/4″ sheet for the sides, and one 3/8” sheet for the bottom. A half sheet of 3/4″ plywood provides the transom, rudder and leeboard. Add to that a few boards of pine for the seats, quarter knees, breasthook, keel, and frames, and some strips for the gunnels, chine, and stem, and all that’s left to buy are glue, screws, and paint. At the family boatbuilding event, we used marine-grade polyurethane glue in place of the epoxy recommended in the instructions, as the two-day event couldn’t afford the time it takes epoxy to cure.
The volunteers who prepare the kits each year spend about two months of weekends and evenings for 12 to 16 boats, giving builders at the weekend event a head start. If you begin with nothing but a pile of wood and a bucket of screws, getting to a finished, painted boat rigged for sail can easily be done in the span of a summer.
The author’s sprit rig is a departure from the gunter rig in the plans.
The sail is where I diverged most from the original Salt Bay plans. Drawing upon the information in David Nichols’ book, The Working Guide to Traditional Small-Boat Sails, I determined the dimensions of the spritsail that would best fit my boat and my weight: 6′8″ luff, 7′7″ foot, 9′5″ leech, and 4′2″ head. I aimed to keep the mast height low to preserve stability by reducing weight aloft, and that led to the short luff. The boom could also only be so long before it extended beyond the transom, resulting in a shorter foot. Even with these limitations, the spritsail carried more area than the gunter main, while still meeting the constraints of the spars. The longer leech and head make up for the shorter luff and foot. The Salt Bay Skiff works with a variety of sails in the range of 30 to 50 square feet. My sail is 44 square feet.
I made the spars from spare lumber I scavenged from the RiversWest shop—primarily cedar, Douglas fir, and white oak. Though I made the spars lighter than the ones in the plans, they have held up to 15-knot breezes well enough in my opinion, and suggest the originals are more than stout enough.
The instructions don’t mention what material to use for the sails. The low-budget option is to make one from polytarp or Tyvek house wrap, and I considered this at first, but decided against it because the sails I had seen made with these materials appeared to stretch too easily. Luckily, another builder in the shared RiversWest workshop had an old genoa, and I reused its fabric for my own sail. The Dacron sailcloth was a little wrinkled, but to me looked much nicer than tarp or Tyvek.
The plans specify an one-piece plywood rudder. The author made his rudder with a kick-up blade for sailing shallow waters.
The only changes I made to the leeboard were for aesthetics rather than improved performance. I made the rudder with a pivoting blade, rather than fixed, to make for easier beaching, and added an extension to the tiller. The rudder is a bit large for this size of boat, but that is useful when navigating at low speeds, not to mention sculling through lulls by wigwagging the tiller. A leather guard across the transom is important to protect both the tiller and the transom from abrading each other. The leeboard is symmetrical around its vertical axis and can be mounted on either side of the boat, and switched at any time. The tongue that slips inside of the gunwale fits nicely between the mid-frame and aft oarlock mounts.
The designer recommends 7′ spruce oars for rowing and a pair of 5′ oars as auxiliary power when sailing. The shorter oars will take up less room in the cockpit when under sail.
For a boat that you can practically make with spare change and scrap lumber, the Salt Bay holds its own on the water. No one would expect it to break speed records, or to endure the ravages of estuary bars and whitewater rapids, but for having fun with friends or kids on a calm summer’s afternoon it does quite nicely. I found on my 100-mile voyage on the Columbia River that it can also serve as a cozy camp cruiser for protected waters.
For voyaging, the boat is really best suited for one adult. When messing about and traveling short distances, two adults or an adult and two kids is a comfortable occupancy.
The skiff has great secondary stability. When sailing, I have sometimes heeled the boat until the gunwale is inches from the water. This has also proved useful when I want to pool water along the chine for bailing. My friend John modified a Salt Bay by installing airtight tanks along the sides to provide flotation in the event of a capsize or swamping. Closed-cell foam blocks, tied down between the frames or under the thwarts would also keep the boat afloat.
Chances are, if someone is in a Salt Bay, it’s not going to be for clocking speed. Indeed, I haven’t myself. I’d estimate I row it at a steady 2-knot pace, with sprints just over 3 knots. Sailing downwind in a good breeze is the fastest way to go, topping out between 4 and 5 knots. What really matters is that it moves fast enough to feel like I can get somewhere.
The cost for my boat, including the sail, rigging, trailer, and cover, came in at just over $1,000. Keep in mind that much of it was bought secondhand or salvaged. For one who wants only to build the boat and has no need for a trailer or cover, the cost would certainly come in under $500.
The Salt Bay Skiff was easy to build, inexpensive, and car-toppable, but is also pleasing to the eye, and impressively functional. Taken in the context of the boating world at large, it’s a humble boat. But for those who own one, it often represents a first step into boatbuilding and boating. I could not think of a better companion for such a milestone.
Torin Lee lives in Portland, Oregon, and wears a few hats at a local solar installation company. On summer weekends he teaches at the Willamette Sailing Club. He learned to sail in college, racing Flying Junior dinghies. He still enjoys racing with the club fleets, and got the boatbuilding bug from the folks at Portland’s RiversWest Small Craft Center.
Salt Bay Skiff Particulars
[table]
Length/12′1″
Beam/4′4″
Sail area, main/38 sq ft
Sail area, jib/13 sq ft
Weight/ under 100 lbs
[/table]
The full-sized printed plans mentioned in the articles are available for $50 from designer Chris Franklin at [email protected]. Plans and instructions for the Salt Bay Skiff are available as digital downloads of Getting Started #7 and Getting Started #8, available from The WoodenBoat Store for $1.95 each.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Magazine readers would enjoy? Please email us!
When I moved to the Belfast area of Maine in 1989, I brought with me ACE, a 14′ sailboat that I had built in North Carolina. She had a light, planing hull, and with a crew of two or three she was fast in a good breeze. I had had a lot of fun with her. Getting very wet in the process was no imposition in warm Southern waters.
The water in Maine’s Penobscot Bay is not warm, but after the sultry calms of the Carolinas, the brisk summer winds promised good sailing. My wife is a somewhat reluctant sailor, so I had rigged my boat with a trapeze and long tiller extensions for solo sailing. While I was on the trapeze, with two sheets in one hand and a tiller extension in the other, ACE was something of a handful, but in the right breeze she would take off like a scalded cat. Sometimes I would out-pace powerboats across the upper reach of the bay in the triangle of water north of Isleboro, between Belfast, Castine, and Searsport.
The wind had to be just right, though, for those exhilarating rides. Too little wind and the boat might zip along with a humming daggerboard and a flat, fizzy wake, but wouldn’t quite reach the frantic pace that, once experienced, made anything pale in comparison. About 15 knots of wind was ideal. Much more than that—well, that is what this story is about.
I had taken to sailing out of Searsport to avoid the beat up or down Belfast Harbor. One late spring morning, with a brisk northwesterly promising a thrilling sail, I hitched the boat trailer to my old Plymouth, and headed north along Route 1. On the drive to the launching ramp I passed flags crackling in the breeze and looking out over the bay I saw a carpet of whitecaps. Maybe I should tuck in a reef before heading out, I thought.
I’d had the good sense to invest in a wet suit soon after discovering just how cold the bay could be. Icy spray on a warm day was one thing, but the uncontrollable shivering that followed full immersion for more than a few minutes provided a salutary warning of the dangers of hypothermia. I rigged the boat, pulled the wetsuit on, and looked out from the launching ramp. The wind was blowing directly offshore, and the water’s edge was calm, only ruffled by the wind, but the whitecaps farther out were plain to see. I should reef, I thought again, but what if I could handle a full mainsail? If I could keep the boat on her feet, she might take off as never before. The temptation was too much, and with my mouth somewhat dry, I pushed off, and hopped aboard.
Arch Davis
“Gust after gust found her heeled way too far with me hanging on by the skin of my teeth.”
It was hairy, right from the start. Close to shore the breeze was gusty; its direction inconsistent. An accidental jibe would have meant instant capsize, so I tacked downwind, letting the boat round up and spilling the wind in the gusts, and jibing in the lulls. As I moved further out into Searsport Harbor the wind steadied, but it was strong, and the boat felt twitchy, darting ahead, then rounding up and heeling hard, with too much weather helm for comfort or good speed. Obviously, I needed to get out on the trapeze if I were to keep ACE on her feet, which she needed to be if I was to make the best of her planing bottom.
This wasn’t easy. There was that dodgy moment as I crouched on the deck and clipped the harness to the wire—I hadn’t got my weight out yet, the sails weren’t sheeted properly, and I needed to change my grip on the tiller extension. The wrong gust just then, and I’d have been over. I swallowed my apprehension, and managed it without fumbling; now the boat moved faster and toward more open water.
It was clear, though, that ACE was still not happy. The wind continued to increase farther offshore, and gust after gust found her heeled way too far with me hanging on by the skin of my teeth, sheets eased and sails flogging, the tiller hard to windward, and the rudder dragging. Then I would get her back on her feet, struggle with the sheets, only to be knocked down again.
I needed to come up into the wind just a bit, I thought. If I could trim the sails just right and get her properly up on plane, she’d outrun those gusts, and I’d have better control. I had more sea room now, and I set about trying to find that magic combination of sail trim and course that would set ACE free.
Of course, I should have seen that it was impossible. What followed were two broad reaches, from Sears Island to the Searsport shore, and back to the island, in a series of swoops as each attempt to find the sweet spot led to a knockdown. A tugboat near Sears Island on its way to Belfast would cross my course, and caused me to come up into the wind, and tack to head back the other way. By the time I reached the Searsport shore, the tug had moved out into the Bay; now, I thought, with the harbor to myself, I’ll make ACE fly.
Roger Siebert
.
But conditions were worse than ever. The wind had continued to increase, and again and again I was knocked down, releasing the sheets and regaining control only with the utmost effort. Closing in on Sears Island, the inevitable happened. I could no longer risk a jibe, and as I hardened the sheets and came up into the wind to tack, a gust hit, and we were over.
Now, I had capsized this boat may times in pursuit of thrills, and normally I could get her right back up. As ACE went down, I would climb over the windward gunwale, stand on the daggerboard, haul her back, scramble aboard, and be off again. This routine depended, of course, on the daggerboard being there. This time, it wasn’t. In my haste and trepidation on the launching ramp, I had neglected to secure it with its bungee cord. Now the daggerboard had slipped out of the trunk, and began to float away as the boat continued to roll until she had completely turned turtle.
For a moment I stood on the bottom of the hull, my eyes fixed on the drifting daggerboard. Without it, I was completely helpless, but could I haul myself back onto that slippery bottom if I swam after it? Well, nothing for it but to try, I decided, so in I dived. I retrieved the board, swam back, and found that by hooking my fingers into the daggerboard slot I could just wriggle my way aboard the capsized hull again. I fished under the boat, found a jib sheet, stood back on the chine, and hauled. Slowly the boat came up, and flopped back onto her feet again.
I tumbled aboard and lunged with the daggerboard to shove it back into its trunk, but before I could do that, the wind caught the flogging sails, the bow swung to leeward, the sails filled, and over she went again.
This time, at least, I didn’t have to swim for the daggerboard, but when I got ACE upright once more, the sails filled, and over she went again.
I don’t know how many times the same exact thing happened. In that wind, I just couldn’t get the daggerboard down quickly enough. Without it, there was nothing to stop the bow from being blowing downwind, the sails filling, and the boat capsizing. It seemed futile, but there was nothing I could do but keep trying. At some point I noticed that the tugboat was no longer heading for Belfast, but was sitting motionless a half-mile or so down the Bay. If I hadn’t been so busy, I might have paused to imagine the comments on my idiocy passing between the occupants of her bridge.
My life was not in danger. I was drifting toward the rocky Sears Island shore. At worst I would have swum ashore and made a long, uncomfortable walk back to the launching ramp. The prospects for the boat were more dire. Soon, her mast would touch bottom and probably break. There would be no hope of keeping her off the rocks. I carried a paddle, but there was not the smallest chance that I could use it to work along the shore to a safe landing. The fetch from Searsport to Sears Island is about a mile and a half, but although the waves were not big, they were angry enough to make short work of a light plywood hull on those sullen rocks. Thanks to my wet suit, and my exertions, I was not cold, but I was getting tired. Soon, I knew, I would not have the strength for another effort.
Then, I had an undeserved stroke of good fortune. As the boat came back up one more time there was the merest lull; I managed to ram the daggerboard home and slam the helm down, and the boat rounded up, sails spilling the wind. For a moment I could rest. I bailed ACE out and sorted out the tangle of sheets and halyards in the cockpit.
Arch Davis
“The tugboat was now steaming southward; perhaps I thought that I could show her crew that I knew what I was about after all.”
Now, I should be able to report that at this point I dropped the jib, reefed the main, and headed for home. I did not. The tugboat was now steaming southward; perhaps I thought that I could show her crew that I knew what I was about after all. I got out on the trapeze, and headed back for the Searsport shore, in one more wild pursuit of glory.
I was no more successful than before. The wind was now, if anything, even stronger, and the struggle harder; I did not even come close to getting ACE up on plane. I wrestled with the tiller, eased the main to its fullest, and laid back hard in the trapeze; at every second another capsize threatened.
Then, when I reached the Searsport shore, I could not get the boat to come about. I could not come up into the wind, so I had to try to tack from a reach. The boat was not going fast enough to carry her way through the eye of the wind; she would falter, and fall off on the same tack, heading for the rocks. I tried again, and then again.
Clearly, I had to do something. A jibe was out of the question, and the rocks were getting uncomfortably close. Now, at long last, I came to my senses. I let the sheets run free, scrambled onto the little foredeck, pulled down the jib, unhanked it, stuffed it under the foredeck, and reefed the main.
The boat was still over-canvased, but at least under control. I was able to tack away from disaster on the rocks, and belatedly admitted to myself that there could be too much of a good thing; another attempt at glory would be unwise, I headed back for the launching ramp. I still needed to put my weight out on the trapeze even with the reduced sail, but at least I could work to windward, and pretty soon I was back at the ramp and loading the boat on the trailer.
On another occasion soon after this episode, I was broad reaching well out into upper Penobscot Bay in far too much wind, again chasing thrills, only to find that I had taken on more than I could handle. I didn’t capsize this time, but when I realized that I was really being pretty stupid, and headed back to Searsport, close hauled under just a reefed mainsail, I still needed the trapeze. It was rough out there, with short, steep, tumbling seas. I was well offshore this time, with not another vessel in sight, and I would much rather have just hiked out just on the side decks, but there was no making headway like that, so heart in mouth, I beat back hanging on that slender wire, wishing I’d stayed ashore.
That was about the last of that foolishness. Not long after, I became a father and found that having a small child at home quickly knocks some common sense into your head. I still sailed ACE, often singlehanded on the trapeze, but I gave up the pretense that I could make a 14’ daggerboarder fly in a gale of wind. I have to say that, being more prudent, I had a lot more fun.
Arch Davis grew up in New Zealand, where he learned the elements of boatbuilding and design, and sailed out of Auckland on the Hauraki Gulf and beyond. He moved to Maine in 1988, where he builds and designs boats for the backyard boatbuilder. In 2012, with his daughter Grace, he launched the GRACE EILEEN, a 30’ light displacement cruising sailboat, which they sail on Penobscot Bay and the coast of Maine. He no longer has an ACE 14, but he still takes the original Penobscot 14 out for an occasional row on Belfast Harbor. Plans and kits for his designs are available at Arch Davis Designs.
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.
This $17 bearing replacement kit includes bearings, rear seal, and cotter pin.
Spring is our time to recommission our fleet of four trailers, so I recently made the rounds to check the condition of lights, tires, axles, and bearings. I found that the grease in the bearings of one of our trailers had a milky brown appearance, rather than the clear, thick motor-oil appearance that it normally has. The change in color was an indication that water had found its way into the grease. Grease that has been overheated by friction-generated heat will be darker than new grease. With this trailer, it’s likely that the seals had failed and the bearing needed to be removed, cleaned, and inspected. The cleaned bearings or their replacements then get repacked with grease and reinstalled with new seals.
Repacking a bearing with grease is a messy job, but relatively easy and even somewhat fun. Round up a couple of rolls of paper towels, protective gloves, and a piece of cardboard for a clean, disposable work surface. You’ll need bearing grease; boat trailer bearings require marine-grade grease, which has more hydrophobic qualities than regular trailer bearing grease.
Ensure that the trailer tongue is well supported, either blocked up or hitched to a car with the parking brake on, and chock the far wheel. Jack the trailer up until the wheel is free to spin, and support the trailer with blocks or a jack stand, just in case the jack fails. Hold the tire on both sides and twist it back and forth. There should only be a little play. Then spin the wheel and listen to it. If it’s making any noise, it’s likely there is damage to the bearings and/or races. Lower the trailer until the tire makes contact with the ground, then loosen the lug nuts, jack the trailer up again and remove the wheel and tire. Any grease on the inside of the wheel’s inner rim is an indication of a failed seal.
Bearing Buddies are removed by gently tapping them off with a rubber mallet or hammer. If you use a steel hammer, hold a piece of wood against the Bearing Buddy and tap it to prevent damage. Protective grease caps with a flange resting against the hub can be removed with a screwdriver. Clean the Bearing Buddies or caps and set them aside.
Bearing Buddies are not difficult to take apart for cleaning. Inside the shell of the Buddy, there’s an O-ring set in a groove, and the sliding “piston” seals against the O-ring. As you fill the Buddy with grease through the fitting on the piston, use a light touch and let the piston move outward as the grease fills the space behind it. As the Buddy reaches it’s maximum capacity for grease, the piston will slip past the O-ring and excess grease will slip leak to the outside. If you push against the piston as you pump, the piston will remain sealed by the O-ring and excess grease will be forced past the seal over the inner bearing. That might not damage or dislodge the seal, but the escaped grease will make a mess of the inside of the wheel.
Once the cap or Bearing Buddy is off, clean up the old excess grease from the hub and remove the cotter pin that keeps the castle nut from rotating on the spindle. After your remove the castle nut and washer, you can slide the hub off the spindle. Keep track of the castle nut, washer, and cotter pin; they can be used or replaced as needed.
The hub has an outer bearing and an inner bearing, along with the inner and outer races that they ride against. Pull the hub off; the outer bearing will come with it and you’ll be able to remove it. Pry the seal off the back of the hub. The seals are inexpensive and it’s prudent to replace them whenever servicing the bearings.
Prying the old seals out may damage them, but they should be replaced whenever you work on the bearings.
Another way to remove the seal is to tap a large dowel against the inner bearing . It will push the seal out ahead of it. The hub is elevated to give the pieces room to fall out.
Remove the inner bearing. Take the old grease out of the hub and clean its interior. Wipe the old grease off the spindle, hub, bearings, races, and cap, keeping any eye out for metal shavings that would indicate bearing failure. Then clean any remaining old grease off with parts cleaner. Because grease comes in many different compositions and not all are compatible, all of the old grease must be removed before applying the new.
Discoloration on the rollers and the retaining ring are signs of corrosion and pitting. This bearing needs to be replaced.
Take a look at the condition of the bearings and the races inside the hub. They all should be bright and shiny with no rust, pitting, or discoloration. If they are not shiny, they’ll need replacing. Check the spindle for wear by sliding the inner bearing over the spindle. It should be snug with no play.
This race, still in the hub, has stripes indicating wear.
The race on the left is badly pitted, and done for. The race on the right is still smooth, but the blackened edge is a sign of heat damage. It too needs to be replaced.
If you need to replace the races, set the hub flat and tap the old races out with a punch or a stout screwdriver, working one side then the other to keep the race fairly flat as it moves.
With the tip of the punch set on the protruding edge of the race, hold the punch tight against rim of the hub on the opposite side. The exposed part of the race may be very narrow, so make sure the tip of the punch has a crisp edge—a rounded edge will slip off the race. Tap on alternate sides to coax the race out. The race is made of very tough steel and not easily damaged, so don’t be timid with the hammer.
This race is halfway out, showing the ledge it rests on when in use and the punch pushing it out.
Getting the race all the way out will require elevating the hub.
To insert a new race, gently tap it in until it is flush with the hub, then insert one of the cleaned bearings. Center a large socket or dowel over the bearing and hit that with a hammer to drive the race in until it is fully seated.
The thick side of the race goes into the hub. A few taps will get it started.
After the race is started, a block of wood makes a good driver. You can hit it in the middle and get the race to go down flat, rather than one side, then the other. When the race is flush with the hub it’s time to switch to another device to drive it home.
You can use an old bearing to drive a new race in place. A wrench socket, set in the recess around the bearing’s bore, can transmit the hammer blows. See the video and the comment below for alternate methods for driving races.
If using a wrench socket isn’t effective, use a large dowel or chamfered block of wood to drive the bearing and the race.
To pack a new or a reusable bearing, squeeze out a palmful of new grease and scrape the bearing across the grease to force it into the edge of the bearing from the large end until it emerges from the small end, making sure the grease works its way all the way through the bearing assembly, rollers, and cage. Rotate the bearing to help distribute the grease. A bearing packer, available from auto parts stores or online retailers, will do most of the job, but the fine tuning of grease distribution on the outside face of the rollers will need to be done by hand.
This plastic universal bearing packer cost just $7.50. With a grease gun connected to its fitting, grease is pumped through the bearing from top to bottom, assuring its interior is properly filled. The exterior will need a coating applied by hand.
Now everything can go back together. Grease the inner race, then put the grease-loaded inner bearing into the hub. Grease the inside of the seal and gently tap it into position. Place a wood block over the seal to hammer it home. Preload the hub with fresh grease and grease the spindle. Slide the hub carefully over the spindle to avoid damage to the seal as you slide it in place over its matching surface on the spindle. Grease the outer race and install the greased outer bearing. Next, install the washer and castle nut. Reinstall the wheel and lightly tighten the lugs. Spin the wheel and tighten the castle nut with a wrench or channel locks until the wheel starts to drag when spun. Pull on the wheel, one side then the other, to make sure there is no side to side movement, then back the castle nut off to the first spot where the cotter pin can be inserted. There should be a very slight motion when you tug on the sides of the wheel/tire.
To finish up, reinstall the Bearing Buddy or protective cap, then get the tire safely back onto the ground and fully tighten the lugs. Recheck the lugs after 1, 10, and 100 miles to make sure they’re still tight after driving. While you’re at it check for wobbles indicating the bearings are loose. With a lightly loaded trailer you may not need to jack, but on heavily loaded trailers you’ll need to take a bit of weight off the wheel to be able to wiggle it.
A spare bearing replacement kit with bearings, races, a seal, and a cotter are handy things to have in the road-trip kit, in case the loose bits go missing on a dusty roadside bearing job. Better yet is to purchase a spare hub, and build it up with races and bearings, all packed with grease. At this point you could simply install the new hub, secure it, replace the tire, and be on your way (versus swapping bearings and races in the auto parts store parking lot).
If your hubs have caps, you should consider replacing them with Bearing Buddies. Bearing Buddies use a spring to provide a slight pressure to the grease in the hub to keep water out. We have used Bearing Buddies in the past, now all of our trailers are equipped with PosiLube spindles. The spindles have a hole through the spindle so grease pumped through the fitting goes to the inner opening of the hub and flows through the inner bearing, the hub, and the outer bearing. The old grease is pushed out by new without having to remove the hub or bearings.
After driving the trailer to the ramp, it is a good plan to find a few things to do to give the hubs have time to cool, as immersing a hot hub in cold water can cause water to be drawn in. So, rather than load your boat when it’s at the dock, put gear aboard before backing it down the ramp and into the water. Rigging our sailboats takes care of this cool-down step.
Check those bearings, take care of them, and they will take care of your boat and trailer.
Kent Lewis sails, rows, paddles, and motors a fleet of small boats in the Florida Panhandle. Through the years he and his wife Audrey have owned over 20 trailers and have fond memories of changing trailer bearings in Pecos, Texas, during the heat of summertime with two toddlers supervising.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The plans include a dust-collecting cabinet that supports the bandsaw at a working height.
My woodworking began with house repairs with one project leading to another, and one required that I cut box joints. My research on the web led me to a gear-driven box-joint jig created by Matthias Wandel, a Canadian engineer, woodworker, and YouTuber. If you somehow haven’t stumbled onto his videos yet, you’ll want to pack for a long visit. The jig uses three wood gears, which require a bandsaw to cut them; I didn’t have a bandsaw, so I decided to build Wandel’s 16” bandsaw. It’s up and running and someday, I suppose, I’ll get to the box joints.
The blade guides are hardwood and have the advantage that they’ll never dull the blade teeth. The thrust bearing meets the blade with it edge, rather than its face, as typical in commercial bandsaws.
The digital plans for the bandsaw include thorough instructions with over 120 photographs, complete materials and cut lists, PDF print-ready full-sized templates of key parts, and Sketchup 3D digital models. Sketchup is a free CAD program that allows you to see the complete bandsaw and every part from any angle. I highly recommended using it. The plans also refer the reader to Wandel’s website with exhaustive articles and photos about this project, and to 19 bandsaw-related videos on his YouTube channel.
With SketchUp, all of the assemblies can be exploded and each part can be viewed from any angle.
The most elegant aspects of Wandel’s bandsaw design are the frame and wheels. The laminated softwood frame is very stiff, lightweight, easy to build, and cheap—I built mine largely with scrap lumber. Turning, truing, and balancing the plywood wheels and the pulley, with their own bearings on stationary axles, allows for reliable precision with no special tools.
The bulk of the material needed is wood, and Wandel encourages using shop scraps and reclaimed lumber, so builders will probably find the only significant costs to be bearings, shafts, blade, drive belt, bolts/screws, and a motor. The tires are made from bicycle inner tubes! The average cost for everything, including the motor, is between $200 and $500. Wandel, in a video about the cost of his tools, noted that salvaging a motor—his 1/2-hp motor was from a furnace—is what makes the homebuilt bandsaw a good bargain. The 16″ saw uses 105″ blades—the same as used by commercial 14” bandsaws with risers—available at most woodworking outlets.
A SketchUp view of the frame shows the laminates that go into it.
The frame is made of eight laminations of interlocking 3/4″ softwood boards. After the first layer is carefully made flat and square, with all parts edge glued on a dead-flat surface, all the subsequent layers easily fall into line on top. The multiple glue-ups will require some creative clamping, weights, and occasional screws, which must be removed to avoid accidentally drilling or cutting into them later.
The wheels are made of plywood and have inner-tube tires. The four holes in each wheel are finger holds for turning the wheels when installing a blade.
The wheels are made of two layers of 3/4″ fir plywood. Flanges made of ¾” Baltic-birch plywood glued on either side of the wheels capture the bearings. The higher quality plywood is required to provide a tight and long-lasting connection to the bearings. The holes for the bearings are drilled slightly undersized, and big C-clamps and sacrificial blocks, along with a bench vise, press the bearings into the very tight holes. The instructions suggest using a mallet to drive the bearings in place; on one of Wandel’s videos he uses a vise as a press. With each wheel slipped in turn over a stationary axle, a temporary pulley from junk plywood is used to spin it for shaping and truing. The lower wheel includes a drive pulley made of 3/4” birch plywood. It is trued and gets its V-belt groove cut while the temporary pulley turns the wheel.
The top drawer built into the base catches sawdust.
After the motor is installed and the wheels on the frame are running true with a blade in place, now comes perhaps the most satisfying part of the whole project: turning the saw on and using it to cut the curved parts for the saw’s own tilting table’s trunnions. A delightful experience.
The bottom drawer holds blades and accessories.
I initially installed a salvaged ¼ hp motor, less power than the 1/3-hp to 2-hp range Wandel recommends, and it stalled sometimes, so I shopped around online and found a 1-1/2-hp motor on sale. It was a tight squeeze getting the slightly larger motor on the mount. You might consider making the motor tray area a little long to more easily accommodate whatever motor you install.
With the more powerful motor, my finished bandsaw made quick work of 4″ thick, well dried cherry wood, and I’ve made a sled so I can mill up small logs of salvaged wood. The saw has the capacity for cutting wood up to 10-1/2” thick, though I haven’t yet fully tested its limits. The saw runs with only minimal vibration—I’ve been able to balance a coin on edge on the table while the saw is running.
Blade tension is provided by three wooden leaf springs.
Building the bandsaw stretched out over months as I was working in spare time squeezed between family duties and a full-time job—but someone who could devote more time could surely run through the whole project in a week or two.
I added old toothbrushes to scrub the tires and keep them cleaner; Wandel favors letting a layer of sawdust build up on the tires as a way of preventing wear to the rubber and increasing the life of the inner-tubes. I’ve thought that a plexiglass window in the cover to observe blade tracking might be nice. I have also wondered if I could have installed some sort of simple belt-tensioning system other than the slightly elongated motor-mount bolt holes. The saw captures its own sawdust passively in a drawer built into the base. A bit of fine dust leaks out, but one could tweak the enclosures to plug leaks. A dust port for a vacuum would be easy to add.
Wandel’s plans are thorough and easy to follow, and the saw I ended up with is powerful and accurate. I enjoyed the build so much I may not be able to resist giving it away so I can build another one. I’m tempted to build Wandel’s larger 20″ saw next.
Charles Kiblinger is an environmental consultant taking a sabbatical to pursue tinkering, woodworking, and making things in a one-car garage. His boating experiences have mostly been in canoes and kayaks. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son.
The air-cooled tool guide angles upward underneath the wheel. The top face of the wheel can be used, with the help of the tool support at left, for large or curved blades. In the box at right there is a slotted disk that provides a view of the blade being sharpened on the tool guide.
I spent a few years looking at some pretty crusty plane irons and chisels, tried sharpening them with conventional stones and old-school methods, but I was not satisfied with the dubious results that I was getting. So, I did some research on sharpening systems and came across Work Sharp’s WS-3000 Woodworking Tool Sharpener. It promised consistent and accurate sharpening of the tools that I use in boat building and restoration, so I bought it to give it a trial run.
The Work Sharp WS-3000 is a dry sharpening system that uses air cooling while sharpening, avoiding the mess of a wet system. The high-torque 1/5-hp motor turns the wheel at just 580 rpm, which keeps tool heat down during sharpening. The WS-3000 has a cast-aluminum top and a sheet-metal housing, yet it has substantial weight to minimize vibration. It has four tabs for mounting the machine on a benchtop, but the machine doesn’t vibrate enough to walk across the bench, so it’s not necessary to bolt it down.
Chisels and plane irons up to 2″ wide rest beneath the wheel on an adjustable guide that incorporates fan-forced airflow to take heat away from the tool being sharpened. This sharpening rest allows precise, repeatable bevel selections of 20, 25, 30, and 35 degrees for chisels and plane irons up to 2″ wide. Another feature of this “plunge-pull” sharpening port is a 2″-square pressure-sensitive-adhesive (PSA) P400 ceramic oxide abrasive patch on the port’s tool rest that removes the burr that curls away from the tool’s bevel. It hones both sides of the tool in a single operation, speeding up the process.
The WS-3000 works quickly and is easy to use. The face of the horizontal sharpening wheel provides more sharpening surface than that of a vertical wheel system. The kit comes with two tempered glass wheels with flat and true surfaces on which to attach various PSA abrasive discs. Different grits of PSA abrasive discs are included; we set our wheels up with 120, 400, 1,000, and micro-mesh 3,600. Finer grits and a leather strop wheel are also available. A crepe-rubber stick is included to clean the abrasive discs. The glass wheels are changed out with the twist of one knob, which makes it easy to start with a coarse grit to remove nicks in a blade and then put a fine edge on it.
The kit also comes with an “Edge-Vision See-Through Slotted Wheel”. The slots, when matched with the same pattern of slots on the abrasive disks, allow observation while sharpening so I don’t have to remove the tool repeatedly to check progress. That makes the job not only faster and easier but lets you know when to stop.
On top of the WS-3000 there is an adjustable tool rest for sharpening blades wider than 2″ and the curved blades of gouges.
I like using hand planes and chisels, but I’ve never acquired the skill and patience required to get good results with sharpening stones. The WS-3000 helps me keep my woodworking tools at a respectable level of sharpness with minimum effort.
Kent Lewis and his wife Audrey have a small fleet of boats in Florida, having built a Penobscot 14 and restored many other wooden boats. They blog about their adventures in their blog.
The W-3000 is available from Work Sharp for $249.95 and comes with a 2-year warranty. Prices listed by online retailers are as low as $190.
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.
James made his Wee Lassie frame from oak, cedar, spruce, cherry, and marine plywood. The hull is a vinyl-backed polyester covered with marine varnish.
James Shamis grew up in the Adirondacks, where traveling among the lakes and ponds required boats that were lightly built and easily portaged. In his late teen years, he spent his summers working for Milo Williams restoring antique Adirondack guideboats. While working in Milo’s shop on the north shore of Little Moose Lake, he grew to appreciate the beauty of the guideboats and the pleasure of working with wood.
Among all of the boats Milo had under his care was a Wee Lassie, an undecked canoe designed by Henry Rushton. “I had never seen such a small boat before,” James said. “I thought it was a child’s boat the first time I saw it, and, after many days of prodding on my part, Milo finally let me bring it down and take it for a paddle. I was in love!” James had enjoyed rowing the guideboats, but the Wee Lassie, powered by a double-bladed paddle, was light and quick. And he was on his own. “No room for a guest, just me and the water.”
James made up his mind that he’d someday have a Wee Lassie, but the years slipped by and he never found one he could buy and restore. Still, his fondness for the canoe endured for decades.
James preferred lashing the frame together over the messier work of using screws and epoxy.
In 2015, doctors discovered James had a vocal-cord cancer. Glottic cancers respond well to radiation treatment and are almost always curable, but the health scare was a wake-up call for James. During his radiation treatments, his thoughts were drawn to his teenage years and the time he spent paddling the Wee Lassie on Little Moose Lake. The memories were his refuge during a difficult time, and after a few rounds of radiation he decided to bring a Wee Lassie back into his life—he’d build his own.
James added decks as reminders of the Adirondack guide boats he used to work on as a teenager.
Rushton’s original Wee Lassie, built in 1893, was 10′6″ long, weighed just 20 lbs, and was a delicate lapstrake construction of cedar planks, just 3/16″ thick, on closely spaced steam-bent oak frames. Building a replica true to the original would require the skills of an experienced craftsman. For a first boatbuilding project, James was drawn to Dave Gentry’s version of the Wee Lassie, an adaptation for skin-on-frame construction that would be quick to build, require nominal skills, and yet be as light as the original.
James tries the frame on for size before skinning the canoe. Cody imagines swimming alongside.
In July 2015, James had his last radiation treatment and rested for just two days before beginning building his Wee Lassie. Working in his barn, he got off to a slow start as he gradually regained his strength. When he would return to the house after working for a spell on the canoe, his wife would ask, “What are you doing out there in the barn?” “Building a boat,” he’d reply. She would laugh and say, “Oh, okay….” Weeks went by before she came out to the barn and, to her surprise, there was indeed a boat taking shape there.
James made a woven Adirondack pack basket as a fitting accompaniment to his canoe.
In the Gentry plans, there are two options for fastening the longitudinals to the plywood frames: lashings or screws and epoxy. James opted for lashings. The nylon artificial sinew gave the connections flexibility in addition to great strength. He departed from the plans to add decks fore and aft to give his Wee Lassie a touch of Adirondack-guideboat class. This decorative touch brought the weight to 25 lbs, a bit over the 19 lbs specified in the plans, but still an easy carry.
James’s version of the Gentry Wee Lassie came in at 24 lbs, an easy carry in the backcountry.
James finished the canoe in three months, christened it WEE LASSIE SURVIVOR, and took his first outing on the waters of Lake Delta, not far from his home in Rome, New York. The moment she was afloat transported him back to his summers paddling Milo’s Wee Lassie on Little Moose Lake.
Cody heels dutifully by land and by lake.
Winter descended not long after that first October outing and WEE LASSIE SURVIVOR went back into the barn. The following spring, James joined a Boy Scout canoe-camping trip. He had brought his dog, a golden retriever named Cody, but expected him stay ashore. James was well on his way when he discovered Cody was swimming in SURVIVOR’s wake. The two of them have since enjoyed many small ponds together, one paddling and the other dog-paddling.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
History has been shaped by crossings. Traveling by boat along the shore can be paralleled overland on foot, but for most of human history, reaching distant, even unseen lands has required boats and navigators willing to set a perpendicular course that leaves familiar land behind. Erik the Red in the 10th century and Columbus in the 15th sailed west into the unknown Atlantic to discover the New World. Australia and the Pacific islands were settled in vessels launched from Asia. In recent times, crossings in small boats have been personal challenges. Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo were, in 1896, the first to cross the Atlantic under oar power. Ed Gillet paddled a kayak across the Pacific from California to Hawaii in 1987.
I made my first crossing in 1965, when I was 12 years old, and while it didn’t shape history, it shaped me. I had bought a flat-bottomed skiff from a kid who lived a block away from the home in Edmonds, Washington, where I grew up. I paid $15 for it, a few weeks’ worth of my allowance. I don’t know who built the boat, probably some penny-pinching amateur, because the plywood that made up the hull was textured and meant for house siding. The boat was too heavy for me to cart the half mile from home to the shore of Puget Sound, let alone drag over busy railroad tracks to get to the beach, so Dad let me keep the boat at the Edmonds marina alongside his 27’ Tumlaren sloop. He also let me use his 5-1/2 hp Johnson SeaHorse outboard on one condition: I had to stay close to shore.
The marina was a 2-mile bike ride from home, and during the summer I often went out boating, by myself, along the Edmonds shore. I’d leave my bike on the dock, get the gas tank, oars, life vest, and throw-cushion out of the cabin, and load up the skiff. I had rigged the motor to be steered by means of a plastic-covered wire clothesline that I’d looped through pulleys around the perimeter of the cockpit so I could sit forward to bring the bow down.
Rick Myers/rickmyersart.com
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One bright sunny day, when Puget Sound was drowsing in a silvery calm, I biked to the marina, fired up the outboard, and motored out from behind the boulder breakwater. In the cool air, the Kingston shore, 5 miles to the west, was sharply defined and seemed much closer than it usually did through a scrim of midsummer haze. I turned west and aimed the bow at the Kingston ferry dock. After I set the throttle at a comfortable cruising speed, I stepped forward and sat in the bottom of the boat with my legs tucked under the foredeck and my back resting against the thwart. The steering line, running along the beam supporting the deck, was at shoulder level and only occasionally needed tending. The air coming over the bow cooled my face, but the still air in the cockpit let the warmth of the sun come through. In the middle of the Sound, a ferry on its way from Edmonds passed me, and passengers lining the railing on the upper deck waved and I waved back. In 1965, apparently, seeing a recently graduated sixth-grader alone in a small boat in the middle of Puget Sound wasn’t cause for alarm, and there were neither cell phones nor 911 anyway.
As I neared Kingston I steered for a narrow sandy beach just yards to the north of the ferry dock. I killed the motor, kicked it up, and used an oar to pole across the shallows to the beach. With my weight in the stern and the bow lifted above the water, the boat skidded ashore. I crawled over the foredeck and set foot on dry land.
I didn’t stay—touching that far shore was all I’d set out to do—and shoved off straightaway to head back home. At the halfway point, the sky had pushed the land around me tight against the horizon. I could barely make out individual buildings on either shore, so certainly no one could see me. I was miles from anything and anyone and on my own in a way that I had never been before.
I didn’t tell my father about that crossing until I was in my mid-40s. He wasn’t at all surprised that I had broken our agreement and ventured far from Edmonds; he had expected it. He’d been a boater his whole life and he knew the lure of a distant shore, and, as a father, he knew that one day I would have to sail away from the security of my home shore and the timidity of always doing as I was told.
I work as a naval architect designing high-speed naval craft in an office where the engineers and the most senior naval architect all have the same credo: Never own a boat you can’t carry. Given my career, I felt it was my duty to build a boat with my son and daughter. I considered designing the boat—I certainly have the technical skills—but thinking I could get the design spot-on on the first try seemed hubristic, so it just made sense to go with a proven design. The Chester Yawl fulfilled many prerequisites and needs.
My home in Norfolk, Virginia, is just 250 yards from the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, so I usually hand-launch my boats from the beach. I also have two teenagers, so I need boats big enough to include them on my outings; my rule is to own only boats that I can launch with a dolly, so we needed a boat in the 150-lb range.
Length would be limited to 15′—my garage is 19′ x 19′, and we’d need room to walk around the boat while building it—and a rowing boat would be the best addition to the fleet. I already have two small sailboats and didn’t need a third; and I didn’t want a canoe because its paddlers are facing the same direction, not ideal for conversation. With a rowboat, I could take to the oars and chat with a passenger sitting in the stern. The boat had to be able to handle some waves—the southern end of Chesapeake Bay can quickly turn into a mess of 1′ to 2′ waves when the wind picks up. I wanted an aesthetically pleasing boat with some built-in flotation and the ability to self-rescue if needed. I also wanted an interesting project, not, for example, a single-chine hull we could throw together in a single weekend. And finally, it had to have an aesthetically pleasing, classic shape—I wanted an heirloom, not a workboat.
Robert Bice
The plank pieces are joined with precise finger joints for proper alignment.
My search led me to Chesapeake Light Craft’s (CLC) Chester Yawl, a 15′ Whitehall-type rowboat. It has beautiful lines, and the complexity of the project seemed just right: enough to feel like an accomplishment without being daunting. The Complete Rowing Kit I ordered from CLC included CNC-cut parts of marine okoume plywood, epoxy, fiberglass, oarlocks, and a 68-page manual. I also ordered the optional second seat. To create full-length pieces, the rubrails have precut scarf joints and the plank pieces have tight puzzle joints that assure that the mating pieces are properly aligned and the curves of the planks will be fair.
I ordered the kit in June 2015 and scheduled a week off from work for the build. I told my wife and kids we would be halfway done by the end of that week and finished by August. I got the month correct but not the year. We launched the boat in August 2016.
Robert Bice
While the kit outfits the Chester Yawl for fixed-seat rowing, the open cockpit and the easily driven hull are also well suited for a sliding-seat rig. CLC offers instructions for installing a Piantedosi rowing rig.
The Chester Yawl build uses CLC’s LapStitch construction, with precut rabbets in the planks’ lower edges to make the laps of adjoining planks self-aligning and create the appearance of traditional lapstrake construction. The gains that taper the laps and bring the forward ends of the planks have to be cut using a guide and a small rabbet plane. The hull consists of 12 strakes. For strength and abrasion resistance fiberglass cloth and epoxy were applied below the waterline and along the stem.
Building the yawl was just challenging enough without getting frustrating, and the assembly turned out to be easier than the sanding and finishing. We used the tricks outlined on the CLC website for smoothing the fillets with denatured alcohol. After the epoxy has cured enough to stiffen, you can put on a glove, dip a finger in denatured alcohol, and quickly smooth the fillet without the hard work and dust of doing the job with sandpaper after the epoxy has fully cured.
After we had started construction of our Chester Yawl, CLC came up with an option for a spacered inwale, which would provide additional stiffness in the gunwales, add easy attachment points for fenders and lines, and create a look that was too tempting to pass up. To accommodate the addition of the new inwales, I had to cut the breasthook and quarter knees out, and notch the frames and bulkheads.
Buying a kit was the best decision I made, as it is unlikely that I would have been able to cut the planks correctly. The most thoughtful part of the kit was that the holes for the stitching wires were predrilled. That made the construction much easier and made for a neater-looking finished product—it’s not easy to eyeball and space hundreds of wire holes. All of our labor—mine and the kids’—was a bit over 400 hours, and it was wonderful family experience.
SBM
The slots in the center and aft floorboards are for the foot braces, not for the seats, which are held in place by the weight of the rower. The frames are flush with the floorboards in the middle of the boat, providing a place to stretch out. (This is a very early version of the Chester Yawl and some of its details aren’t representative of CLC’s current version.)
The boat has three removable plywood floorboards that fit between the frames. The center and aft floorboards each have rows of notches to anchor footboards. The five notches in each row are 2” long—to fit the tabs on the bottom of the footboard frames—and spaced on 4″ centers, so the footboards offer a 16″ range of adjustment in 4” increments.
SBM
The support frames for the foot braces have tabs to fit in the floorboards slots.
The foot braces are solidly anchored, and the footboards are set at a comfortable angle. At 5′ 10″ tall and 180 lbs, I have no issues with the width of the floorboards. They appear to me to be wide enough for someone larger as well. I often row barefooted and enjoy the feel of the varnished wood under my feet.
The seats don’t have tabs to fit in the floorboard slots and are held in place by the weight of the rower. Surprisingly, they don’t move while rowing, and I can only adjust the seat by taking most of my weight off it. There is a trick to get the seat in just the right position, because inevitably the seat moves a wee bit as I sit down. After a few tries I was able figure out how to place the seat so that it is perfectly positioned when I do sit down. I like the flexibility of adjustable seats compared to a fixed thwart. The curve of the plywood top takes a bit of pressure off the tailbone at the finish of the stroke.
There are flotation compartments at the bow and stern. The stern compartment is enclosed and has a 1″ drain plug; the forward compartment has a 6″ deck plate in its bulkhead for access and ventilation.
Robert Bice
The Chester Yawl’s Whitehall ancestry is made clearly evident by the wineglass transom. The partially closed notch captures a sculling oar and keeps it from lifting away.
The sculling notch in the transom is partially closed to help keep the oar in place. I don’t yet have an oar well suited for sculling the yawl, so I have sculled just once with one of the oars we use for rowing. I was barefoot on a wet and slippery floorboard, but even then, the boat was stable and it was somewhat like a stand-up paddle board. I am looking forward to installing some nonskid on the floorboards this spring.
Robert Bice
Propelled by two rowers, the yawl can easily reach 5 knots.
We have been using our Chester Yawl for two full years now, and it rows wonderfully. When I’m alone on the boat with just a small ice chest aboard, I can row all day at 3 to 4 mph. It rows well with two people at the oars and easily reaches a top speed of around 5 knots without much effort. My favorite way to row is to use the forward rowing station while having a conversation with someone sitting on the aft seat. My kids like the boat for fishing and messing about.
While it’s a pleasure to row the Chester Yawl, one of the things I really like about it is that the floorboards cover up its shallow frames, and with the seats and foot braces moved out of the way, it creates an open space perfectly suited for an afternoon nap.
If you’re looking for an attractive lightweight rowboat, I don’t know that you could find a better design. I couldn’t ask for more—the build experience was fantastic, and we love the boat.
Robert Bice, P.E., grew up in southeastern Texas and spent his childhood exploring and camping on the banks of Village Creek, a tributary to the lower Neches River. He graduated from Texas A&M in 1995 and has been a practicing naval architect for 24 years, primarily focusing on hull structure and stability. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, with his two teenaged kids. In his free time he likes to explore the endless backwaters of the Chesapeake Bay or use Google Earth to plan his next adventure.
Canoeist Bill Burk, in an article linked to the Moccasin 14 page of the B&B Yacht Designs website, writes that he had built a Moccasin 12 and enjoyed it for day use and fishing but needed something larger to take canoe-camping at lakes in the Pacific Northwest. Regulations at the Bowron Lakes in British Columbia required at least 16″ of freeboard, Ross Lake in Washington State limited length to 14′, and Bill anticipated carrying up to 120 lbs of gear, setting the displacement at 350 lbs. That established the design criteria for Graham Byrnes, and he drew up what would become the Moccasin 14.
Opening photo Graham Byrnes, this photo Christopher Cunningham
The five pieces of CNC-cut plywood for the hull are joined with these sawtooth finger joints.
B&B’s Basic Kit for the Moccasin 14 includes a 24-page manual, illustrated with drawings and photographs, and the plywood parts for the hull and paddle blades, all CNC-cut from 4mm plywood. The hull is made from five precut pieces: a center panel and four identical end panels. Each end panel incorporates half of a side panel, one side of the bow or stern, and the end of one side of the bottom. Finger joints, slathered with epoxy, hold all five pieces together. After the epoxy has cured, the joined pieces lie in a flat plane, ready to fold into shape.
Christopher Cunningham
The forward end of the chine transforms from a pronounced angle to a smooth curve.
The center seam at the ends is stitched together with cable ties, bringing the ends from flat to vertical. The sides, now splayed out, get stitched next. The chines have interlocking tabs that assure exact alignment, so there’s no fussing with an edge-to-edge contact and poking at wired ties. Pulling the chine joints tight forces shapely compound curves in the ends of the hull, and the side panels eventually meet amidships to get connected with plywood butt blocks.
Christopher Cunningham
The plywood doubler that spans the area between the two thwarts reinforces the seating area.
At this point the hull is hogged, and that’s where a building a cradle comes in. It’s one of the many add-ons to the basic kit and will assure the hull takes its proper shape. The center of the cockpit gets a second layer of plywood, and as that doubler is glued in place, screws driven along the centerline pull the hull down to the cradle’s long wooden I-beam. When removed from the cradle, the hull has a straight keel.
From this point on, the canoe’s completion is standard boatbuilding. Breasthooks, inwales, outwales, and thwarts can be cut to patterns in the basic kit or purchased as an add-on, ready for installation. A keel, epoxied to the bottom, protects the hull from gritty shores and gives the hull better tracking. The plywood paddle blades, supplied with the basic kit, take on a curve when glued to the paddle shaft, also supplied as a pattern or as a factory-shaped piece.
Christopher Cunningham
The seat, provided as an add-on kit, is a worthwhile addition for the comfort and paddling efficiency it provides.
The seat is sold as an optional kit, and I’d recommend adding it to your order. Sitting on the hull puts you too low for comfort or power, and cushions make a sloppy connection to the boat. The B&B plywood seat is set at a comfortable angle and high enough to put your hips higher than your heels—much better than sitting with your legs straight out—without compromising stability. The seat’s frame is contoured to pull the seat top into a single broad curve at the back, providing relief for the tailbone, and a double curve at the front to cradle the legs.
Christopher Cunningham
The broad pivoting backrest offers comfortable support.
While the kit doesn’t include a foot brace, you could, and should, take a cue from the backrest mounts and set a stretcher from side to side, high enough to meet the balls of your feet. With a foot brace, you can press yourself into the backrest, stay locked in the seat, and paddle with more power.
The canoe is light—it should come in at 38 lbs—so it’s easy to carry. The inwale provides a good grip for a solo carry with the canoe hung over a shoulder. The seat isn’t secured in place, but it will rest against inside the canoe, kept from sliding out by the inwale. Adding a yoke to put the weight on both shoulders with the canoe overhead would be a good shop project if you have in mind to do canoe tripping with long trail portages. For a tandem carry, the breasthooks offer good handholds.
Christopher Cunningham
The inboard ends of the paddle blades are shaped with a small lobe that sheds water before it can run along the shaft and get the paddler’s hands and lap wet.
When the canoe is sitting in the water, the seat is set between to two long cleats that center it and allow fore-and-aft adjustments. With a paddler’s weight on the seat, it stays put. I could make adjustments by pushing down against the hull with my knuckles to unweight the seat and scooting it where I wanted it.
The backrest has three positions to get the paddler in the right place for proper trim. The aft setting was appropriate for my 6’ frame. The backrest’s curved plywood panel was comfortable and provides good support down low where it doesn’t interfere with torso rotation during a full, powerful stroke. The seat was comfortable too, and if I’d had a foot brace I could have added a bit of leg drive to the stroke, pivoting my hips slightly in the seat.
The Moccasin 14 is rated to carry an adult and one or two kids. With my 200+ lbs aboard, the canoe had about 8” of freeboard, and with a beam of 28″ the gunwales weren’t so high that I had to reach over them. I could paddle with a low, relaxed stroke. The initial stability was a little soft, but very good given the 28″ beam. I was quite comfortable taking my hands off the paddle to take notes. The secondary stability kicked in quickly and reassuringly when I edged the canoe.
Underway, the Moccasin tracked well and didn’t yaw excessively between strokes. Turning in place through 360 degrees took 14 strokes—seven forward on one side, seven backing on the other. The keel makes the canoe favor tracking over quick maneuverability, appropriate for a canoe designed for tripping, traveling lakes and slow-moving rivers. The Moccasin took well to being sculled sideways; it was a fun way to maneuver.
Graham Byrnes
Putting the power on, the author was able to push the Moccasin at 5-1/3 knots. It maintains good trim even at speed.
Equipped with a GPS, I did some speed trials. I could easily sustain 3-1/2 knots at a relaxed cruising pace. Working up to an aerobic exercise pace brought the Moccasin to an average of 4-1/3 knots. Paddling all-out for a few dozen yards, I did 5-1/3 knots. At top speed, the canoe stayed in good trim and its stern didn’t squat.
I didn’t have much wind during my two trails, just 8 knots. Paddling across the wind, I didn’t detect any weathercocking. I’d take a course across the wind, stop paddling, and watch the bow; it didn’t veer to windward. There were no waves or wakes, so I could do any rough-water testing, but, as an open canoe, the Moccasin 14 would have limits to the amount of chop it could handle. For lake tripping where adverse weather could make the going sloppy, spray decks and flotation, either as built-in airtight compartments or float bags lashed in place, would be in order.
The Moccasin 14 has an unusual construction that makes for a quick build and a shapely hull. And while it was designed for cruising with a big load of camping gear, unburdened it’s quite playful. It could make use of those brief windows of time when there’s a break in your schedule and the weather, and just as ably turn a vacation into a memorable adventure.
Christopher Cunningham is editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Moccasin Particulars
[table]
Length/14′
Beam/28″
Height/11.5″
Weight/38 lbs
[/table]
The Moccasin 14 kits are available from B&B Yacht Designs. Prices range from $415 for the Basic Kit, with just the plywood pieces, to $1,025 for The Works, with everything you need to complete the build, ready for paint or varnish.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!
After seven days in equatorial Africa I was still acclimating—the hazy air had weight. Ten days earlier I was at home chopping firewood in the snow in New York; now I was walking a dusty road and drained by the sweltering sun. Ted Cooney, Brent Simpson, and I made up a three-man caravan. Ted and Brent had just finished their two-year stints as Peace Corps volunteers in the Republic of Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and were more at home in the unrelenting heat. The three of us had spent the last two days in the mission town of Bulape, Zaire, making preparations for the march overland to the Sankuru River, where we would find the pirogue that we’d paddle downriver to the Kasai and Congo rivers.
As college roommates in Maine, Ted and I had canoed and camped together and following his Peace Corps posting to the Kasai province of south-central Zaire, we corresponded often by mail. In August 1985, Ted wrote a letter from his mud hut in the town of Demba saying he had ridden his motorcycle “to a village 150 km from here to the north on a big river called the Sankuru. The last 20 km I had to have a guide to show me the way and to help pull and heave the moto over fallen trees on the forest path. The village is Bongongo, about 30 km upriver from Kilendjale, if you can find that on your map. They have the rep of being the best pirogue makers in the area. In short, I put in my request for a large boat and three paddles, delivery to be taken on or about January 20, ’86. The trip downriver is all flat water for approx. 600 miles (three to four weeks max). However, one must bear in mind that the trip will involve the navigation of the confluence of some of the world’s largest rivers—Sankuru and Kasai, Kasai and Zaire. The section spent on the Zaire is but a few days at best….”
Ted was recruiting Peace Corps pals to join in and hoped I could make the trip too. So, in February 1986, Brent, Ted, and I were retracing Ted’s route from Bulape to Bongongo.
Tom DeVries
Brent Simpson, Ted Cooney, and Tom DeVries, (left to right) out in the noonday sun, were eager to find some shade on the two-day overland hike to Bongongo.
Heading out at 5 a.m. gave us a few hours’ refuge from the sun. We’d walked for an hour by flashlight, passing a village singing and drumming in mourning for a recent death, exchanging moyos—greetings—with hunters heading for the Bulape meat market with bloody monkey haunches, and passing a group of uniformed children making their way in the dawn light to the mission school. Two hours later, we climbed up into the bed of a big truck heading 45 miles along our way on the rutted, sandy road. At a fork in the road, we parted company, payed the driver, and continued by foot to the Lubudi River. There, a ferryman got us and our packs settled low in his pirogue and paddled us, herky-jerky, across the racing current. That wobbly ride left us a bit apprehensive about what lay ahead. Brent and I both groused to Ted, “Man, I hope our boat’s a hell of a lot more stable than that!”
Back on the trail, we trudged along, pack straps wearing grooves in our shoulders. The sun bore down relentlessly. That night, completely burned out, we threw down camp on the top of a sweeping savanna that commanded the green and brown hills of Kasai. By seven o’clock we were under mosquito nets on the hard ground listening to the bugs click and buzz and gazing at the dazzling diamonds in the African night sky. At 4 degrees south latitude, a 12-hour night follows a 12-hour day year-round, so we got a long night’s rest following our hard day laboring under the sun.
Roger Siebert
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The next morning, we followed the single-track trail off the grassy highland, across plains and through forest, occasionally passing a lone walker or a few grass huts. In one parched village there was a single tree centered in a bleak, boulevard-wide dirt plaza. Under the shade of the tree lay a bony, frothing dog. We beelined for the shade, dog be darned, and guzzled our water jugs. No one else stirred in this high-noon ghost town. Farther on there was cool water at a tree-lined stream swarming with thousands of blue and green butterflies. There were also nipping bees that found Brent and Ted, so we scrambled out of there. We guessed that the bees were attracted by the salt in the sweat on their shirts. The bees didn’t sting me. I hadn’t sweated all day. I was bone-dry dehydrated.
My mates were a bit concerned about me and tried refreshing me with mental popsicles by reciting, among other gems, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.
I was more apt to conjure dismal images from Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s novel about a brutal voyage up the Congo River, than from Robert Service’s story of sourdoughs freezing on the Klondike, but it was good diversion just the same. My shirt was finally as soaked as theirs after a most welcome afternoon storm that drenched us sideways and pelted us with hail.
As we neared Bongongo, we started seeing more people on the path. Passersby greeted us with grins. It seemed to me they were whispering, “It’s them.” Someone passed around some palm wine. Someone else ran ahead to announce our arrival. We crossed a final bridge and entered the village as night fell. We had made it to the Sankuru! We were greeted as welcome guests. I drank water like a draft horse, met our hosts, and faded off to sleep.
Tom DeVries
It was wonderful to watch ALICE MAY get a final fairing. A few of the boys made a little money selling us their slingshots.
In the morning we got our first look at the pirogue Ted had commissioned. The barefoot, barrel-chested boatbuilder was still whacking out chips with his adze. The boat, a six-man canoe, measured some 33′ long, 3′ in the beam, and less than 20″ deep amidships. The sides at the sheer were 1” thick and thicker a bit closer to the bottom. There was no flare to the sides. The bow and stern each angled up from the flat bottom for 3′ or 4′ and tapered stylishly. Inside the hull were wedged three hardwood sticks used as thwarts. We christened the canoe ALICE MAY, after the derelict Yukon stern-wheeler used to thaw Sam McGee. Ted paid the builder with a shotgun forged near Bulape and shells for it.
We were eager to get on the water. Though we had little more of a plan than “let’s follow the rivers,” we had plenty of work to do before we launched. We bought three paddles and a bailer for the boat. The used wooden paddles, nearly 9’ long, were intended for paddling while standing. We were more familiar with Old Town canoes and thought we might be more successful paddling sitting down, so we bought stools. As word spread that the mundele—white guys—were shopping, young and old brought wares and it suddenly became market day. ALICE MAY was the main attraction, and we were the side-show curiosity. We made bargains for bags of rice, bananas, and hard candies; machetes, spears, arrows and slingshots; decorative fabrics, necklaces, and other local crafts. That evening there was palm wine and a pleasant feast.
Tom DeVries
Among older dugouts at this most pleasant cove in the jungle, ALICE MAY looks bright! We were more likely thinking about dinner food (maybe duck?) than the poetry of the place.
The whole village was out the next morning to drag, shove, and tug the new canoe to the river. The big dugout had dried some and a little water bubbled through some cracks as she was set afloat. Undaunted, our builder caulked them with burlap using a machete to drive it in tightly, and assured us everything would swell up soon enough. We had lashed together a cargo rack of bamboo and vine, and Ted had packed a tarp for rain cover. After we had loaded up, we bid farewell, and paddled off downriver—standing—a green pirogue carrying green piroguers. Around the first bend, and out of sight of the village, we sat down on our stools.
There was no guidebook for the Sankuru, Kasai, or Zaire rivers, and what information we had was just hearsay. No one we talked to knew of anyone who had made this trip by pirogue. Our Bongongo host, a retired riverboat pilot, guessed we’d be all right. We had a 1:3,000,000-scale map of Zaire which showed cities, towns, and larger villages, as well as missions along our route. We could make estimates of distance but at first had no good idea of how fast the muddy current carried us. We paddled mostly to keep in the main channel, and let the river do the work. While scouting for boats, Ted had been warned that he should watch out for crocodiles, hippos, and whirlpools. So we did.
Brent Simpson
Tom DeVries (left) and Ted Cooney enjoy paddling in the cool morning drizzle on the Sankuru River. ALICE MAY had plenty of room for the three us and our gear.
It sure felt good to be on the water. No more trudging under heavy packs. We sat, drifting. There were screeching monkeys and red-tailed parrots and fish eagles in the trees. Brilliant blue and orange kingfishers darted along tan sandy banks. The sun was blazing, so we often dipped into the river to cool off. ALICE MAY’s husky hull barely heeled when we climbed back aboard. We paddled standing. We paddled seated. We drifted. We were three boys on a lark—Huck Finns on a raft—adrift in the Congo Basin.
The wind picked up that afternoon and storm clouds threatened. Standing up, we paddled through the chop as rain started to fall, and with some effort reached a sand bar where three men had brought their pirogues ashore; two were butchering monkeys and one had a couple of fish. We brought a large catfish to cook for lunch and were invited to wait out the downpour in their riverside shelter. The boiled fish tasted like it had been slathered in butter and there was a lemon to drizzle on top—restaurant quality—but the monkey meat they were eating was unappealing. These Sankuru River natives had leathery faces, gnarled hands, and mashed feet with toenails missing. They were rugged, ragged, and gracious.
Tom DeVries
We tried avoiding any place with an official look to it. A Zairean flag flies over this Sankuru River compound.
That evening we stayed in a village on the south side of the river. As was the custom, someone gave us the use of their dirt-floored, thatch-roofed, stick-and-mud hut. For dinner, a woman cooked the remaining catfish with rice for us and later we enjoyed a conversation with some of the local folks about the existence of God. French is the language of Zaire and Tshiluba the local tongue of the Kasai region. I understood a little in French and could greet passersby in Tshiluba. Of course, facial expressions mean a lot, but my participation in any meaningful local exchange relied on the well-versed Peace Corps fellows interpreting.
The mosquitoes that night were fierce. We had lit coils and hid in our nets, but the three of us only escaped the whining torment by wandering in circles outside until dawn.
For breakfast we kindled a small fire and boiled water for oatmeal and tea. The Quaker Instant oatmeal that I’d brought from the States wasn’t normal fare in Zaire and was a small pleasure from home for Ted and Brent. Bidia was the staple of the Zaïrois cuisine and we ate it often during our time in the country. It’s a manioc and cornmeal mush that resembles Play-Doh in texture and taste. Bidia is best served with matamba—greens—or a little chili pepper sauce, but sometimes we’d have it plain. We could often find citrus fruit as well as bananas for sale at villages along the river. We carried our large bag of rice and tins of pilchards and a few candies, although the M&Ms were long gone. Drinking water was plentiful; we always treated it with iodine.
We carried our paddles, stools, and bags down to the boat and got back on the water early. Feeling rushed, Brent quipped, “It’s not a race, it’s a river trip,” but I was driven to make progress. My visa was only valid for a month, and I didn’t want a hassle if I overstayed. We rotated paddling positions throughout the trip. This morning I was the stern man with Ted ahead of me and Brent in the bow. We paddled for a few hours and then sat for a break and drifted. We picked a village on the map for our next layover. The haze on the brown river gave everything the look of a sepia-toned photo. The rainforest dripped with heavy dew. Sometimes we heard talking or drums echoing. Paddling, we were mostly silent, lost in the wonder of the place. Fishermen and local travelers glided past in pirogues. They all asked where we were going and when we answered Kinshasa, they’d say “Ah, ah, ah!” with eyebrows raised in disbelief.
Keith Peterson
ALICE MAY was a “six-man” pirogue. We—(from left) Ted Cooney, Tom DeVries, and Brent Simpson—are putting our backs into it as the laundry dries. The hardwood paddles are flexible and strong.
Our third night on the Sankuru we stayed in the big village of Butala. We guessed we’d traveled 85 miles or so from Bongongo. ALICE MAY had tightened up and was no longer leaking, and the three of us felt like seasoned watermen. A barefoot crowd welcomed us to Butala and helped carry our gear up the muddy bank at water’s edge. Though we were strangers, we were treated as special guests. Butala was accessible by road but quite some distance from any pavement. Most huts were mud with thatched roofs, but the relative wealth of a few residents was evidenced by their metal roofs. At a roadside market stand we found some cigarettes, matches, canned tomato paste, chicken-fat soap, and local bread for sale. We bought a chicken for dinner to go along with some bidia and good palm wine. With machetes, we gathered some firewood, thinking the next night we could camp out on an island or find a fisherman’s hut on a sand bar. The map showed we’d be on the bigger, busier Kasai soon.
Sooner than expected, we reached the Sankuru’s confluence with the Kasai. There’d be no camp-out on the Sankuru. With two hours of daylight left we crossed, a hard 45-minute ferry against the merging currents. We paddled until shortly before sunset to make it to the town of Basongo on the southern shore of the Kasai. After a cooling bath in the river we secured our boat with cable and lock and hiked up the bank into town. On the trail we were met by Peace Corps crony Greg Mock, grinning ear to ear. He had been scanning the river, hoping to see three white guys paddling by.
Tom DeVries
Keith Peterson (left) and Greg Mock worked their stroke on a calm Kasai afternoon. Their pirogue, FIFTY GOOD ONES, had wired and stapled tin strapping holding the bow together.
I had met Mock in Bulape where he was enjoying the company of a wayfaring Swiss gal while he was recovering from a bout of malaria. He had committed to Ted’s river adventure early on but wasn’t in shape to make the overland trek. Mock and our fifth compatriot, Keith Peterson, had traveled by train to the port city of Ilebo to find and join us on the Kasai River. Ilebo marks the end of navigable water on the Kasai and the terminus of a railroad that leads southeast to the mining city of Lubumbashi. Big river barges move fuel, equipment, goods, and people from Kinshasa to the railhead and return loaded with the production of the country’s mines, forests, and fields. After arriving in Ilebo, Keith had the equivalent of $250 stolen from his room while he was out having a beer, and in the dust-up that followed, passports were taken and threats were made by the local authorities. Mock made his way to Basongo, while Keith stayed behind, trying to get both the money and passports back.
In Basongo, green-uniformed gendarmes checked our papers. The Peace Corps boys had special passes permitting their passage down the Kasai and Congo. Their years in the country had taught them how to deal with Zairean officials, but bribery and theft were familiar here. My passport had a full-page visa stamped and signed at the consulate in New York, and Ted and crew kept me safely in their care. We were set up in what was once a fine colonial-era Belgian home, now empty, dingy, and derelict. The place was fair shelter, with a commanding view of the river, but we felt a bit unsettled under the watchful eye of the dictator Mobutu’s police.
Tom DeVries
These guys at a hunting and fishing camp on the Kasai River looked tough. None of them waved.
Two days passed before we got back on the Kasai. The first morning, Brent and Mock headed for Ilebo to reinforce Keith. Ted and I repaired and reorganized our gear, re-provisioned at ramshackle market stalls, and rested travel-weary muscles. Keith and his mates returned, having recovered only 2,000 Z ($50), about enough money to buy a second pirogue—three Americans and their kit seemed to crowd ALICE MAY. The second day in Basongo, while Keith and Ted were bargaining for a two-seater, the rest of us each enjoyed a dix-huit (French for 18)—a roasted guinea pig costing 18 Z—for lunch. For dinner, celebrating the new boat and new crew, we feasted on wild boar that we boiled and fried over an open fire. Fearing another hot, sticky night, we looked forward to an early start.
We were refueled and refreshed after the two-day layover. The five of us now floated on the waters of the Kasai River. Mock and Keith settled into our paddling and drifting routine. Their boat was christened FIFTY GOOD ONES, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a drill-sergeant of a supervisor the Peace Corps boys had all endured. It was shorter, narrower, and had less freeboard than the ALICE MAY. They paddled sitting on stools as we had first done on the Sankuru but were soon on their feet with their long paddles pulling. Keith was in his element on the water (he’d captained his university swim team) but Mock became somewhat withdrawn as the river widened and we ventured away from shore. We would drift apart or raft up as we explored or shared food and mapped out our overnight destinations. Everyone’s baggage was stowed onboard the bigger ALICE MAY.
Tom DeVries
Greg Mock (left) and Keith Peterson often paddled FIFTY GOOD ONES canoe-style. Only in overloaded pirogues did we see Zaireans seated.
On setting out together that first morning there was smoke far off in the distance. Black belches clouded the sky. As we got nearer, we saw the hillsides all around were planted in neat rows of nut palm trees. We could smell the diesel smoke and hear the pounding and rumbling of the palm oil factory sprawling along the southern shore. A river barge as long as a train thundered along the far shore. Pirogues, large and small, plied the river. People were fishing, traveling, and ferrying goods. The mystery and tranquility of our magical days on the Sankuru had given way to a busy, boisterous, commercial waterway.
By midday we passed the Loange River, which formed the boundary between Kasai Occidental and Bandundu provinces. We were surprised at how fast we were traveling. Our navigation and dead-reckoning skills were not keeping pace with the flow of the river. Some passing piroguers said we could get to a mission in Dibaya-Lubwe by nightfall so, with the sun setting fast, we pushed ourselves hard.
Tom DeVries
As we were cruising across the Kasai River at dusk, these guys paddling made us think they were dancing on water.
We hadn’t had lunch, only oranges and a few hard candies, so the promise of a meal at the mission was good motivation. A fisherman hailed us in French as the sky darkened. He cheerfully guided us across the river under moonlight to the town’s landing. After unloading, we doused ourselves in mosquito repellent and, with many helpful local hands, carried our gear the mile from the river, through the village to the mission. We were welcomed by a kindly Belgian nun who passed around cold, fresh water, offered showers for all, and fed us well. Dinner was a light green soup, bread and margarine, fish, instant potatoes, and a fresh lettuce salad, and vanilla pudding for dessert. We left no crumbs. After a fine night’s sleep on mattresses with cool, white sheets, we were treated to a first-rate Belgian breakfast with European coffee. As we said our good byes, the sister snuck two tins of hot dogs in our bags.
For days, the weather had been calm, sunny and hot, with no rain. This morning big thunderheads brewed overhead. We got off the river at a plant that processed sisal for burlap near the town of Mangai. For 20 minutes we weathered the storm on shore, hosted by the Greek fellow in charge. Back on the river in the drizzle we noticed little whirlpools in the gurgling brown flow. Many locals we passed said we wouldn’t make it in our pirogues farther down the Kasai because of big waves ahead.
Dugouts and barges, large and small, negotiated the currents of the Kasai. It widened and formed channels around low islands and sand bars as it flowed toward the Zaire River (now called the Congo River) and the sea. One afternoon we were paddling toward a southerly runoff when two pirogues raced upriver to intercept us. The fishermen warned that there were hippos down that way. In the dry season the sand bars are where the hippos hang out, but at high water they move into the bush along the tributaries. We made our way upriver, not wanting a confrontation, though disappointed to miss a photo opportunity. Ferrying back across the river, here nearly 2 miles wide, we arrived at the village of Kilima.
Tom DeVries
This entire Kasai River village came out when we landed to wait out an afternoon blow. Here Ted Cooney, Greg Mock, Bent Simpson, and Keith Peterson (left to right) are surrounded by a sea of curiosity.
Our reward for another hard day’s paddle was an overnight at a riverside hotel consisting of a few bare rooms in a musty concrete block building. The sound of a running generator promised cold beer for our parched throats. After sundown we were roused by the rumbling of a mighty riverboat slowing its downriver run, making a 180-degree turn to point into the current and easing into shore, cabling off to a tree. In the jungle darkness, this ship looked to be more than 100′ long and 25′ or so wide. I climbed up to join Ted and Brent in the wheelhouse and learned from the bleary-eyed second captain that his tanker was one of three running diesel fuel from Kinshasa to Ilebo for the copper mines at the end of the rail line. This trip took five days upriver, full, and three days back, empty. He and his crew were stopping for much-needed sleep.
We reviewed the kind captain’s charts and recorded distances. Nine miles from the confluence of the Kasai and the Zaire was a perpetual 35′ whirlpool on the southern bank. It was something to avoid, so we would pull out into the middle of the river when we reached the Zaire. Now we had a check on our progress and a fair idea of what lay ahead. We had been on the Kasai for three days and were averaging close to 60 miles per day. With fair weather and steady progress, we could make the 317 miles to Kinshasa in a week.
Fair weather was not to be. Heavy rains kept us in Kilima until late morning. We left in a spattering breeze with hopes of gaining 31 miles and making another mission by nightfall. Ted was stern man in ALICE MAY this day; Keith and Mock in FIFTY GOOD ONES followed us. Cross-winds increased and made steering difficult. We tried the lee of an island but grounded on sand bars. A half hour of hand-hauling the heavy boats got us afloat. Later, Keith drove FIFTY GOOD ONES back down a channel toward the north shore, waves piling on. We followed. Bailers got steady use. Looking ahead, we saw a curious crowd of hundreds running alongshore, watching as we made landfall in the gale. Everyone on shore was giddy. Some of the kids had never seen mundele before! A few tried wiping the white off my face with nervous fingers. We were white dots in a sea of brown. After staying an hour in what we called the “Hurricane Village,” sharing the excitement, we decided to push back out into the obstinate wind. The rest of the day we paddled from our stools, hunched low in the blow, grinding on until we made the mission.
Brent Simpson
A heavy head wind blew and the heat was wearing us down so we hand-hauled the boats. Here, Ted Cooney is happy we didn’t surprise any crocodiles.
The following afternoon we pulled toward a village, hoping to find provisions. Another crowd gathered, but the villagers here were agitated and loud so we backed away. Some local official yelled at us to come back. Brent kept asking “Why?” but got no answer. We carried on downriver. Looking astern, we saw ten men in a big pirogue coming after us. We kept up a slow, steady stroke, keeping our boats close. The chasers eventually overtook us and demanded identification. There were billy clubs and metal rods in the bottom of their boat. After examining our passes (a few of the fellows “reading” paperwork upside down), they permanently “borrowed” our bailer, wished us well, and put their backs into a very long return home, upriver.
For days the surrounding countryside had been sprawling lowland, tree-spotted savanna. Now forested hills were prominent. The Kasai choked down and we were in the Narrows. Channel markers bobbed in the quickening, turbid current and the wind left us alone. Without a breeze, the African sun scorched us, but the paddling was pleasant and we made good time.
On the 13th day since launching ALICE MAY, we stopped midday at the mission in Bendela. We washed clothes in the river. Ted and Keith bought 20 loaves of bread and we enjoyed our last tin of hot dogs in bread-slice buns for lunch. In the afternoon we steered wide of what looked like an abandoned army post in Dima, on the river’s south bank. Past that village, the Kwilu River added its brown water to the Kasai and the valley opened up again. We ended the day’s paddle in Kutu-Moke on the north bank and were once again welcomed by strangers as long-lost friends. Here we were housed in a swampy concrete office building erected in the 1950s during the heyday of Belgian colonial rule. Villagers brought us a basin full of manioc, bananas, tins of sardines, and matches. Some came by to socialize. The village chief shared his knowledge of the river, including what he knew of the whirlpool on the Zaire.
After dinner, while Ted, Brent, Keith, and I played cards, Mock lay low, lost in a book. My innards were unsettled but my card mates were able to enjoy some beer. There was a tap at the door. Keith answered and said there were well-armed military guys outside. An officer looked over our papers and said he wanted us to go to Bandundu to see the colonel. After ten minutes of futile argument, Ted said he’d go. Brent and Keith agreed to go too; Mock wanted nothing to do with the authorities and he stayed with me under house arrest. Our Three Musketeers dressed in their finest clothes that night and Ted and Brent strapped on their Bowie knives, while Keith left his Mom’s phone number in my notebook in case he was detained (he hadn’t yet recovered his passport, lost in Ilebo). Out into the night they went—“up the river.” Finding it hard to sleep, Mock and I listened to what was happening in the rest of the world on his shortwave radio. Later I finished reading The River Congo, by Peter Forbath, which gave me a better understanding of the country I was in. We both hoped for the best.
The next morning, the two of us shared the last of my oatmeal for breakfast. Roosters crowed. The soldiers who had been guarding us were nowhere around when I found my way to an outhouse. Our three bedraggled boys returned around 9 a.m. Nothing came of their all-night shakedown. They never saw the “colonel” and were worn out by the bogus runaround. A benevolent river man had bought them bread and coffee and run them back down river in his 25-hp pirogue. We accepted a tow downriver a ways from Kutu-Moke, for we wanted to get to the mission in Mushie that night. Corruption and kindheartedness were both ingrained in Zairean society. A night at a mission offered respite.
Tom DeVries
Any port in a storm. FIFTY GOOD ONES and ALICE MAY chained and cabled to a driftwood mooring alongside a bulky freight pirogue on the Kasai River. We had a lot of bailing to do.
Getting to Mushie was a push. Our fisherman friend had given us landmarks. This stretch of the Kasai was unsettled country, and he instructed us to look out for three prominent points of land and then a village on the left bank, after which we should be in sight of the mission town across the river. We paddled in the main channel until a fresh wind whipped up with angry, gray sky all around and frothing brown water splashing over the bow. In the ALICE MAY, we did the tarp drill, covering our gear, and snuck in toward a near-shore island. FIFTY GOOD ONES followed. Several 2′ swells rolled over the sides of the big pirogue as we paddled. We pulled into a cove and shared some bread. With three hours of daylight left we decided we could push and pull our craft, walking through the shallows, hand hauling to make some headway. Black clouds rushed overhead and lightning flashed to the north. Rain fell ahead of us and to the south. We crept along the island. The wind let up, the sky cleared, and the rains passed us by. Night fell as we paddled into the mission town.
Everyone was drained. The Musketeers had had no sleep the previous night. The rough water and waves were disquieting to Mock and he was on edge, knowing that only bigger water lay ahead. My bowels were rebelling, and even though I could purge at will while in the water, the bloat left me feeling feeble.
Our spirits were raised once more by the goodness of a stranger. The kind père of the mission in Mushie fed us soup and bread. There was summer sausage with mustard and mayonnaise. He served cold water, peanuts, pastrami, and more bread with butter. Real butter! This man could speak fair English, so even I could enjoy some table conversation. We talked for hours, in spite of our weariness. For dessert there was a beautiful, ripe papaya. The priest’s advice to chew up some papaya seeds helped calm my rumbling gut. He told us there were very few people living along the river where we had recently passed because of the prevalence of the tsetse fly. He called the area “The Sleeping Sickness Capital of the World.”
At Mushie, the tan waters of the Kasai are joined by the black waters of the Fimi River. From Mushie to the Zaire River the waterway is known as the Kwa. Entry to the Zaire River, the Congo, was only a day away. I had read in Peter Forbath’s book that following Portuguese making landfall in the 1400s, the names Congo and Zaire have been used interchangeably to describe the world’s second largest river. The indigenous people of the great river basin were part of the powerful Kingdom of the Kongo. The name Zaire comes from a Portuguese translation of a Kongolese word meaning “the river that swallows all rivers.” In 1971, the land known as the Belgian Congo officially became Zaire, as the newly independent African nation tried to move on from its brutal colonial past. A hot day of paddling on the Kwa, with very little wind, got us to the lumbering port of Makayuba.
Tom DeVries
This was, by far, the biggest dugout we saw on the Sankuru, Kasai, and Congo Rivers.
Up early next morning, we paddled the 9 miles to Kwamouth where we checked in before embarking on the Zaire. It was another hazy, hot morning. The busy port of Kwamouth was bustling with people and pigs boarding the wooden banana barges that moved much of the river’s local commerce. We were told by port officials that we didn’t need guides for the Zaire, “Just pull out into the current and stay toward the middle because of the whirlpools along the bank for about 2 miles or so.” We remembered the tanker captain in Kilima had said to look out for whirlpools 9 miles after the confluence.
After finalizing paperwork and eating a bit, we headed out. The powerful current was palpable and for an hour we zipped along. On our right, on the western shore of the mile-wide Zaire River, was the People’s Republic of the Congo (which existed from 1969 to 1991). As a communist nation, it was not known as a friendly place for Americans. That foreign shore was defined by stony bluffs. Looking back, upriver, we noticed a dark sky threatening rain. We stayed in the middle to avoid whirling waters but started to draw to the left. A roar like a freight train grimly rumbled. “Looks like we’re in deep shit,” Ted mumbled. We doggedly paddled for the far Zairean shore. We hollered at Keith and Mock to do the same. “Holy crap!” they cried.
A fierce wind whipped up the river and rocked us. Rain blasted. Brent struggled steering the ALICE MAY. Keith and Mock fell behind. Brent yelled, “They swamped!” I looked around and they were gone. We were struggling, too. I was pulling furiously in the bow. Ted was frantically bailing. We kneeled, knees wedged against the hull like we were running haystacks in a Class-IV rapid. Brent urged, “Come on boys!” straining to hold us into the wind. We labored. Muscles drained, we eventually gained the sandy shore and poled to a small landing. A crowd of tough Zairean fishermen had gathered. They applauded our efforts, shook our hands. But no one had seen FIFTY GOOD ONES.
Winded and worried, we searched the main current and the far shore through a camera with a telephoto lens. The three of us were racked with anxiety for our mates. The wind abated and the river flattened some. We didn’t spot anybody or anything floating. About a third of a mile downriver we saw a small, steel-hulled riverboat, hove-to in the current. Had it passed us in the storm?
The wind diminished. We headed back onto the river to find out what the boat’s captain had seen. As we took off, the riverboat sounded its horn and moved out into the mainstream too. Closing together, we made out a white man in the wheelhouse. It was Mock! Then we saw Keith on deck, smiling and waving. FIFTY GOOD ONES was in tow.
It was a relief to reunite onboard the riverboat. Mock was tight-lipped but Keith was animated, describing how the waves filled the boat, and with only two aboard bailing proved impossible, and they foundered. They held on and floated about half an hour in the turbulent river. Keith stuck his white T-shirt on the tip of his paddle to flag the riverboat as it passed.
Mock’s days in a pirogue were done. He had fulfilled his promise to accompany Ted. His friendship was sincere, but this upset on the Congo River was enough. He remained in the safety of the wheelhouse while we all caught our breath. Keith was game to carry on. After 20 minutes in tow, four of us climbed into ALICE MAY, handed up Mock’s duffel, and were floating the mighty Congo once more.
Keith, Brent, Ted and I enjoyed each other’s company, and the six-man canoe was a fine vessel for four. Our daily rhythm on the Congo River proved similar to our routine on the Kasai. We got on the water early, we paddled, and we drifted. We ate fish and rice, bidia and chicken, papaya and bananas. We passed riverboats and barges, all manner of pirogues, riverside villages of mud and thatch, river cops, and military outposts. We weathered wind and rain and blisteringly hot sun. We played cards at night and got going at first light. We kept a closer weather eye now and stayed close to the western shore. We respected the power of the “river that swallows all rivers.”
Tom DeVries
We watched this fellow fishing for ten minutes as we drifted past the plantation palms. His cast-net technique was well practiced but we didn’t see him land any fish.
We saw Mock unexpectedly two days later. We had only been paddling a few hours on what turned out to be our last day on the river when a motorized pirogue came alongside. We were told that we needed to check in at the military post in Maluku upriver. So back we went with ALICE MAY in tow behind the pirogue. Mock met us on shore, once again grinning ear to ear. It was evident that with solid ground underfoot he had regained his good humor. His riverboat ride had gotten him to this town, and here he had sold FIFTY GOOD ONES. He was still waiting for final approval of the sale before he could go to Kinshasa. After a quick visit, the army commissioner amicably approved our papers and we shoved off from shore one last time. Stanley Pool, where the river widens to 15 miles and wraps around dozens of islands, gaped ahead with the Crystal Mountains looming beyond. We finished our journey in the company of clumps of flowering water hyacinth—flotsam flushed from some unknown river, hundreds of miles away, swallowed by the Congo.
Keith Peterson
We relished the fantastic weather among the sand bars and islands of the Kasai River. By this time we had found our paddling rhythm. From left: Brent Simpson, Tom DeVries, and Ted Cooney.
For a few days, the five of us got together in Kinshasa and enjoyed the good food and cold drinks the city had to offer. Brent left for unfinished business at his post in the city of Mbudji Mayi. Keith helped me get my visa sorted out. His next stop was an Indian Ocean beach in Mombasa, Kenya. The last time I saw Ted in Africa, he was getting on a ferry to cross over Stanley Pool, making his way to Mount Kilimanjaro. His African adventures weren’t over yet. Mock stayed with me then and helped me get to the airport in Kinshasa that night as I headed back to New York. With my luggage were three 9′ paddles carefully wrapped in a rain tarp.
Tom DeVries and his wife Tina live in New Braintree, Massachusetts. Now that both of their kids are off to college, he spends more time in Beyond Yukon Boat and Oar, his woodworking shop, and imagines that with the kids away he and Tina will be spending more time together fishing, paddling, and sailing in little boats. In years gone by, Tom has also canoed on the Yukon, fished commercially in Alaska, and sailed his skipjack on the Chesapeake. He wrote about DIY riveting hammers in SBM, December 2018.
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 equipment includes three glass flower vases I bought at Goodwill for 69 cents apiece. A thin stick and some small spring clamps hold the tangs out of the acid. Drain cleaner provides sulfuric acid to etch the files and a saturated baking-soda solution neutralizes the acid. The third vase has a fresh-water rinse. The file card (lower left) cleans file teeth and shop-made tools of copper, brass, and steel remove the debris the file card leaves behind.
Files don’t get the attention that planes and chisels receive, but they are cutting tools too work best when they’re sharp. Because files are made of hardened high-carbon steel and their teeth are numerous and small, the easiest way to sharpen them is with an acid. I’ve used vinegar—acetic acid—and drain cleaner—sulfuric acid. The acids react with the iron in steel, removing metal from the surface. A dull cutting edge is rounded over with wear, and as the metal dissolves, the radius of the curve diminishes and the edge gets sharper. Before putting acid to work, the file needs to be cleaned. Anything stuck between the teeth will prevent the acid from getting to the metal. A wire brush will get some of the debris left by the work, but a file card, with its short, stiff wire bristles will do a better job.
I work files with my vise holding a block of wood that I’ve run through the table saw to make a raised lip along to restrain files set on the flat and a couple of grooves to hold files on edge.
A pistol-grip bar clamp with padded jaws holds the file for cleaning. This file is clogged with paint. Its back is rounded so it covers a bit of the lip on the wood block.
The first step is to scrub the file with a file card. If you don’t have a file card, use a stiff steel-wire brush. Even after a thorough scrubbing, some debris remains.
If there is still debris stuck fast in the gullets between teeth—paint, epoxy, and aluminum are my usual culprits—a piece of copper pipe with one end flattened or a piece of brass will dislodge it. Pushed parallel to the file’s teeth, the copper or brass will wear away, creating a saw-tooth-like edge with tips that reach down into the gullets. For very stubborn debris, piece of mild steel, heated and hammered thin and flat, is the most effect cleaning tool I’ve found. I used a piece of 1/4” steel rod; a big ungalvanized nail could work too.
Whatever debris that the file card leaves behind can be forced out by pushing parallel to the grooves with metal softer than the file’s hardened high-carbon steel. Here a flattened brass rod does the work on a 4-in-1 rasp and file.
The flattened end of a piece of copper pipe can also work down into the grooves. For stubborn bits of debris, called “pins,” angle the flat edge of copper to apply pressure with one corner.
I made this file cleaner from a length of mild steel 1/4″ rod that I heated to red-hot with a propane torch and hammered flat. Pushing the tip parallel to the file’s grooves quickly creates an edge of teeth that will chisel out debris. The soft steel won’t damage the file. The same grooves develop when using copper and brass to push the pins out.
White vinegar is often recommended as the acid for sharpening files. The type you’ll find for kitchen use is 4-percent acetic acid. There’s also a 6-percent cleaning version that you’d find at the store among household cleaning products. Even the stronger version is very slow at etching a file. I found that after three days it would begin to make slight progress. The sulfuric acid that is available as drain cleaner is much more aggressive and can do the work in about an hour. The Clean Shot Drain Opener I bought at a home improvement store is 93 percent sulfuric acid. It contains “metal inhibitors,” but they clearly don’t prevent the acid from sharpening files. This high concentration of acid makes the product very harmful if it gets on you or almost anything else, so it requires handling with care. I wear glasses, the full face shield I use for lathe work, rubber gloves, and an apron.
This drain opener with 93 percent sulfuric acid, gets diluted with water to a 10-percent solution that can sharpen a file in about an hour. When the acid is poured into water it generates heat, so I prefer to use glass instead of plastic containers that might get softened when warmed. I bought these three glass flower vases at Goodwill for 69 cents apiece. I prefer the vases over glass baking dishes because I can suspend the files and keep the tangs away from the acid and dry for safe handling. The vases also give the acid less surface area to emit vapors and I can clearly see the acid at work. In a baking dish the bubbles would obscure the view through the surface of the liquid. I marked the acid vase with levels for the water (9) and the acid (10) so I could easily make the solution and require I pour the water in first. The other vase gets filled with water and then baking soda is added until no more can be dissolved. The third vase, to far, right is water for rinsing.
The acid is too strong to use undiluted; 10 percent acid/90 percent water is strong enough. Never pour water into acid. It can splatter and raise a little cloud of vapor because of a quick exothermic reaction. You’ll notice that a bottle of sulfuric acid will feel heavy. It is almost twice as heavy per unit of volume than water. When poured into water, the 10-percent solution will noticeably warm up, which is why I prefer glass containers to plastic. Keep away from the vapor rising from it by working outside or wearing a respirator.
Prepare a baking soda solution to neutralize the acid after the file has been etched. Mix baking soda until the water can dissolve no more and soda begins to accumulate at the bottom.
Before you immerse the file, check how sharp it is by pressing a fingertip against the teeth and slide it toward the tang. With a dull file, you’ll feel some resistance but won’t feel the teeth catching the skin.
Submerge the file in the acid solution and give it a gentle swirl to dislodge any air bubbles. The chemical reaction will quickly produce very small bubbles of hydrogen. The acid does the work in about 60 minutes. To check the progress, I remove the file from the acid and rinse it in water. I do the same fingertip test and when I feel the teeth catching, the sharpening is done.
Dipping the file in the baking-soda solution will neutralize the acid. The residual acid on the file will produce a flurry of carbon-dioxide bubbles. Rinse the file with fresh water and dry it with a heat gun, hair drier, or a blast of air from a compressor.
After dipping in acid, baking-soda solution, and water, the file needs to be thoroughly dried to keep from rusting. When the file is dried, rubbing chalk or soapstone on it will absorb any remaining moisture. I lightly brush the excess off with a brass-wire brush. Soapstone, often carried by art-supply stores for carving, is slippery stuff and leaving a thin film on will, for a while at least, prevent clogging when the file is in use.
Some do-it-yourselfers spray a lubricant such as WD-40 on the file to prevent rust, but I find that gets pretty messy and the lubrication might make the teeth slide across the work rather than cut into it. Rubbing chalk or, my preference, soapstone over the teeth will assure the file is dry and won’t rust, and then help prevent clogging when it’s being used.
After rubbing the newly sharpened rasp with soapstone, I use a brass-wire brush to clean up.
To dispose of the sulfuric acid solution, I fill a 5-gallon bucket half-full of water and pour the solution in. Next, I slowly pour the baking-soda solution into the bucket. It creates a lot of froth as carbon dioxide bubbles up from the reaction. The mix is still likely to be acidic, so I sprinkle in baking soda, straight out of the box, until the frothing stops. It can take a whole 1-lb box. At that point, the mix in the bucket is no longer acidic and the remaining by-product of the reaction is a solution of sodium sulfate, a neutral salt. It is safe to pour down the drain—it won’t harm plumbing—and isn’t an environmental hazard. The sodium and sulfate ions in the solution are, according to the source linked above, “ubiquitous in nature.”
While you’re devoting some attention to sharpening your files, consider grinding the teeth off one side. Some flat files come with toothless safe edges to assure you’re only working one side of an angle. I use square files for cutting through-mortices in the gunwales of Greenland kayaks. With cutting faces on all sides, it’s difficult to tune the corners accurately.
Grinding a safe edge on a file can make it easier to work accurately, working a corner one surface at a time.
By making one face smooth I can concentrate on one mortice surface, knowing the adjoining surface will be unscathed. I remove the teeth with a bench grinder and a 1×30 belt sander/grinder. As an added benefit, the intersection of the safe surface and the cutting surface will cut a sharp, precise corner. The file’s original edge cuts a slightly rounded corner.
All of these files and rasps got a better bite after a dip in the sulfuric acid solution.
After you’ve sharpened your dull files, treat them with the same care you accord your other cutting tools. Keep them separated from each other instead of tossed together in a drawer.
Christopher Cunningham is editor of Small Boats Monthly.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The router we’ve used for years was suitable for many tasks, but it was too large and heavy to use on the many small pieces that went into the Penobscot 14 we built. We did some research and were intrigued by the compact routers designed for trim work, so we picked one up and gave it a try. We were very pleased with the range of projects it could do.
Kent Lewis
DeWalt’s DWP611 weighs 4.6 pounds and has a 1-1/4 hp motor.
The tool we chose, the DeWalt DWP611 Compact Trim Router, has a 7-amp, 1-1/4 hp motor with variable speed of 16,000 to 27,000 rpm. The clear plastic base and two built-in LED lights make it easy to see the bit and the edge of the piece being worked. The 4″-wide base provides a stable platform, and 1/4″-shank bits are easy to change with multiple spindle-lock detents and a single wrench. The motor has a soft-start feature and an automatic electronic control to keep bit speed constant. The router has a depth adjustment with a range of 1-1/2″ and a clamping mechanism to lock the vertical position with a quick flick of a lever. The 8’ power cord is long enough to move around our work area. There are standard 1-3/8” template guide inserts and a vacuum-hose attachment available for use with the router.
We have used the compact router on cypress, white oak, mahogany, white pine, yellow pine, and Peruvian teak. It powered through some white pine with a Roman ogee bit with no problem, and eased the edges of the cypress, pine, and teak with round-over bits of different sizes. The variable speed is handy to get the best performance on different materials, the lower speeds especially, to minimize the chance of router burn on hardwoods. The router’s contoured grip is set low and is easy to handle on the smaller pieces, and I do not have to fight the torque that the larger router puts out. With the high horsepower and amp rating, the router runs cool. The aluminum base is textured to provide a secure grip while keeping fingers clear of the bit. Many jobs were simplified by being able to hold the router with one hand and steady the workpiece with the other.
One of our first thoughts when we bought this compact router was to set it up with a dedicated round-over bit and leave it that way, but we quickly found that it can handle a variety of bits on a variety of large and small projects. For one of those projects we set up a scarfing jig and put an 8:1 scarf on several sheets of 6mm plywood, with complete control of the router during the precise cut. We find that the DeWalt DWP611 is a very useful tool for our shop.
Kent and Audrey Lewis paddle, row, and sail a small armada of boats in the skinny waters of Northwest Florida. Their messing-about reports can be found at their small-boat restoration blog.
Soon after Kent sent me the draft of his review of the DeWalt router, I went shopping for a compact router for myself. I’ve had a small Makita router, the now extinct 3608B, for 30 years and it has worked well, but even as small as it is, it is often awkward to handle. Kent convinced me of the advantages of a compact trim router, and I wasted no time shopping for one. I settled on the Ridgid R2401, which is in many ways like Kent’s DeWalt DWP611 with a soft-start motor and very precise depth adjustment. The one-handed operation, the clear base, and the built-in lights would have been enough of a step up from my Makita, but there are several other features I appreciate. The soft-start feature on both the Ridgid and DeWalt routers won’t test your grip. The Ridgid router has a flat, rubber-guarded top so it will sit upside down for changing bits without marring delicate finishes. The on/off switch is on the top of the router, so it will turn itself off when set upside down. It’s a pull-push switch, so a quick slap will also turn the router off—you don’t have to go hunting for it. The Ridgid R2401 is a good value for the $99 price tag.
Christopher Cunningham
The Ridgid R2401 weighs 3.8 lbs and has a 1-1/2 hp motor.
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.
I first used a Versa Vise in 1988 when I was working for the Smithsonian Institution, making mounts for art objects in the National Museum of African Art. Those brass armatures could be very complex with very odd shapes, and the Versa Vise had a nearly unlimited range of motion to accommodate working on them. I liked the vise so much that I soon bought one for my own shop.
The jaws of the vise open to 4-7/8″ and have smooth, flat faces 3-1/2″ wide and 2-1/4″ high. With that wide area of contact and the absence of knurling common to the jaws of other vises, the Versa Vise won’t mar wood or metal. On the body of the vise, behind the fixed jaw, there is a 1-3/4″ square anvil surface. I do light work on it and leave the heavy hitting for some big slabs of steel that can take no end of abuse. The vise sits on a base with three legs and a 1-1/2″-diameter post and can swivel freely around it. There are two matching 1-1/2″ holes in the vise, one on the bottom to hold it in a normal upright position and the other on the side for a horizontal orientation.
The swivel base adapter gives the vise additional ranges of motion.
I recently purchased the Versa Vise swivel adapter. It’s an aluminum cylinder that attaches horizontally to the vise base and locks with a T-handle screw. The Versa Vise then slips over the other end of the adapter for a new range of motion, tilting front to back. Newer models of the vise have a threaded hole in the vise for locking on to the adapter. My vise, without that hole, locks on the adapter when the jaws are tightened. I’ll likely drill and tap the hole so the vise will stay put when I open the jaws. The new models also have a pair of holes in each jaw sized to take screws to hold wood faces in place.
If there is no pressure on the vise jaws, the vise easily slips on and off the post, so it’s easy to change its position or remove it if it’s in the way of a project on the workbench.
The little arm to the left, the “dog,” pivots around the small pin. As the vise grips something, it presses down on the dog’s set screw, and then the dog presses against the base’s post, locking the vise.
When the handle is turned and the jaws are squeezed on something, the movable jaw pivots slightly around the barrel nut for the screw and the bottom of that jaw presses on a “dog,” a little rocker that then presses on the base’s post. That prevents the vise from pivoting. The tolerances are close enough that there is no perceptible shift of the moveable jaw as it presses down against the dog.
I use my Versa Vise for working brass, bronze, steel, and wood. Set horizontally, it will hold a board on edge on the benchtop for planning, a sheet of plywood on edge on the floor. If I need to use my chopsaw on the workbench, I can quickly slip the vise off its post to get it out of the way.
With the vise set on its side over the post, the jaws can hold a board on edge for working with a plane or a router.
With the vise on its side and its jaws facing outward, a sheet of plywood, resting on edge on the floor, can be held upright.
Rotate the vise and it will hold a board vertically for cutting dovetails.
With the adapter connecting the vise to the base, the vice can rotate in a vertical plane.
This arrangement with the vise and adapter will hold a workpiece flat.
In the Versa Vise’s long history, it has been through several different manufacturers and a few changes, some not for the better. Harry Bryan (who wrote about small-boat seating in our January 2015 issue) reviewed the Versa Vise for WoodenBoat in 1996. He had purchased a Versa Vise in 1971 and liked it so much that he bought four more for his kids, and then 10 more that he sold to his friends. Later, he purchased one in 1995 and received one in 1996 for the WoodenBoat review. All of the vises were made by Gaydash Industries of Uniontown, Ohio, but the two newer models didn’t grip the base’s post as firmly and would pivot when they shouldn’t. The older vises had round knobs on the ends of the handle while the newer had the ends pressed flat and flared, and the screw’s barrel nut showed scoring from sawing instead of being tooled smooth. In the review, Harry wasn’t able to recommend the newer Versa Vise as it arrived from the manufacturer, but he offered instructions for tuning it up to work as well as the older model that he liked so well. “You should not have had to do the work,” he noted, “but the result is you have ready for a lifetime of use the best all-around woodworking vise I know of.”
My vise has the pressed ends on the handle and the saw scoring on the screw nut—indications that it was a version that didn’t perform as well as its predecessors—but I haven’t had trouble with the vise pivoting. I haven’t done any measurements, I just tighten the vise until it doesn’t pivot. It’s important to tune the jaws to meet parallel, favoring the first contact at the top of the jaws. The screw in the dog makes that adjustment. The higher up the jaws apply pressure, the tighter the dog presses against the post, eliminating unwanted rotation of the vise.
The Versa Vise is now being manufactured by Jon-Mar Gear and Machine of Canal Fulton, Ohio. It has the rounded knobs on the handle and the smooth tooling. I got a bit of the history behind the vise from Larry Murgatroyd, the company’s owner. For 18 years he had worked for the Wil-Burt Company, where the vises were made prior to manufacturing by Gaydash. While Jerry purchased the equipment that was used to make the vises in the ’30s and ’40s, he uses CNC machinery to make parts faster and more precisely. He has made a number of improvements in the Versa Vise and elevated the level of durability and quality to meet or exceed the standards set by Wil-Burt.
The Versa Vise was invented by John R. Long of Springfield, Ohio, and was granted Patent #667,151 in 1901. While the patent has expired, the name, Versa Vise, is still a protected trademark. There are several knock-offs on the market under other names: caveat emptor.
Now, three decades after I bought my Versa Vise, it is still anchored to the corner of my workbench and I’ve never given a thought to replacing it.
Christopher Cunningham is editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The Versa Vise is manufactured and sold by Jon-Mar Gear and Machine for $79.95. The Swivel Base Adapter sells for $34.95. The company has a 90-day return policy.
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.
BLUE PEARL is a boat that was conceived when grandson Henry said to his grandfather, “Let’s go fishing.”
Young Henry got lucky with his choice of grandparents. Grampy, known to the rest of the world as Mark Bonnette of Holland, Michigan, had a degree in industrial design, taught illustration at a university, worked in the aerospace industry, and was the director of design in the marine industry for 7 years and owner of his own design firm for the past 29 years. Henry liked to build things and Mark knew how to build them.
Whenever Henry came up with an idea for something to build, he’d tell his grandfather about it and at some point announce: “We need a blueprint, Grampy.” He would climb up on Mark’s drafting table and start to draw. Armed with the “blueprint,” grandson and grandfather would head for the shop. They have already built a pirate ship play structure, a Herman Miller slat bench knock-off for Henry’s mom, a toy box, and an assortment of swords, shields, and other weaponry.
One day, Henry decided he’d like to go fishing, and when Mark pointed out they didn’t have a boat, naturally Henry said, “Well, let’s build one.” The conversation led to setting the design criteria. Henry came up with seats for the two of them, an anchor, oars, and a motor. Mark had his own set of criteria. The boat had to be small enough to build in the garage, and the project could not require expensive tools or materials. Plywood would fit the budget and speed the construction, though perhaps not enough to meet Henry’s projection of having the project wrapped up from start to finish in a single weekend.
Mark set the length at 12′. The bottom would span 4′, no wider than of a sheet of plywood, and the sides would be constrained by the 24″ width of a half sheet. He created plans on an AutoCAD program and, after completing the drawings, made a cardboard scale model. The pieces of the model went together well and gave the green light for buying materials for the full-scale boat.
A bill of materials for 10 sheets of 1/4″ plywood and two sheets of 3/4″ plywood (for cradles, seats and bulkheads) plus clear pine lumber came to about $300, doubled to $600 to account for other supplies and incidentals. That was more than Henry’s allowance could cover, so Mark stepped in to be the project’s financier.
Henry favored using the cordless drill, so he was tasked with removing all of the screws and pads that held the three-layer laminated bottom to the curve of the building cradle.
The boat took shape from the bottom up. Three panels of 1/4″ plywood, each scarfed together from a sheet and a half, were epoxied together, one on top of the other, and temporarily screwed to a cradle shaped to give the bottom its stem-to-stern curve. After the epoxy had cured, the screws were removed and the bottom cut to shape with a saber saw. That power tool made Henry a bit anxious; he was more comfortable with the cordless drill and took charge of removing the screws, though he was afraid all of the holes left behind would sink the boat.
The sides were also composed of three layers of 1/4″ plywood. After the first layer was attached to the stem, transom, and bulkheads, Mark mixed a pot of epoxy and from that moment on, the clock was ticking. It took both grandson and grandfather working together to spread the great expanse of epoxy, position the next side panel, and drive the screws to pull the plywood panels together. Henry got his first taste of a job that demands focus, quick action, and working without a break until the task was complete.
Decked out with protective clothing, Henry could roll epoxy on the hull without ruining his tie-dye T-shirt or shorts.
With the all of the pieces assembled, the project looked like a boat, and Henry thought the end was close at hand: Throw on some paint, and it’s fishin’ time. Mark, having designed mahogany runabouts for Grand Craft, had a different view of the work remaining: a stainless cutwater, transom straps, mahogany chine boards, and on and on. One of Mark’s friends offered him some good advice: “What are you thinking? ’Glass it!”
Henry’s first idea for a color scheme involved all the colors of the rainbow, but he changed his mind and chose blue, all the better for sneaking up on fish.
For Mark, fiberglassing meant blowing the materials cost estimate out of the water. For Henry, it meant forced labor dictated by epoxy pot life. After seemingly endless rounds of squeegeeing and sanding, he decided that a career laminating fiberglass or boat finishing wasn’t going to be in his future.
Grandfather Mark decided even a little boat meant for fishing deserved a touch of class and went for some mahogany, finished bright.
When the ’glasswork was done, Mark gave into his runabout inclinations and added mahogany gunwales and foredeck, all finished bright. But he gave his grandson the choice of color for the paint for the rest of the boat. Henry decided that “rainbow” would look good. Mark thought “great, how am I going to pull that off,” but when the two went to the marine-supply store, Henry took a look at the color chart and, much to Mark’s relief, chose “blue, that way the fish won’t see us coming.”
Young Henry saw his grand plan through to a successful completion.
BLUE PEARL was launched late in the fall, more than two months over Henry’s projected timetable and a couple of thousand dollars over Mark’s estimated budget, but the bond between a grandfather and grandson is worth every dollar and every hour spent together.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
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Photographs by Phil Boyer
