Articles - Page 37 of 49 - Small Boats Magazine

Uncertain Ground

I left the launch ramp at Marysville at the peak of a midwinter high tide when flood had slowed the downstream current in Ebey Slough to a crawl. I put the outboard in neutral and eyed the swing bridge that spanned the slough a few dozen yards downstream. From my eye level, all I could see of the bottom of the bridge was a thin dark line, but that was enough. The high water left me just enough room to motor BONZO, a 19′6″ Escargot canal boat that my son had built, under the railroad’s 111-year-old swing bridge. I didn’t have to crouch to keep from hitting my head on the black, rivet-blistered steel plates, but it was good that I hadn’t put the stovepipe in place; it would have been knocked off.

The parallel concrete bridges another 100 yards downstream stood high above the slough, carrying the north- and southbound lanes of an interstate highway. The guardrails masked the cars from view, and I could see only an intermittent stream of boxy trailers hauled by semis, but the hum of engines and hiss of tires on pavement was constant. As I left the bridges behind, distance muffled the rush of traffic until it began to sound like wind-driven rain.

I dropped the anchor near the line of wrecks, just visible to the right, that were scuttled to form a breakwater to protect rafts of logs tied to the pilings that surrounded the mouth of the Snohomish River. Phil Thiel, the designer of the Escargot, never intended it to be sailed, but any boat can be sailed downwind. I installed the leeboard to make BONZO more maneuverable when under power, but it also allowed her to do a bit of broad reaching. Sailing has always been slower than motoring, but it is also quieter, so I raised the sail when I had a chance.

I kept to what I knew from the chart to be the main channel of the slough, but it was evident only by the absence of pilings. The separate streams of Ebey Slough, Steamboat Slough, and the Snohomish River were united by the apex of the tide. A following breeze came up, only enough to dimple the water, but I was in no rush and welcomed the chance to silence the outboard and set sail. I stepped the mast, an irregular 14′ spar I’d made from a spindly sapling by doing little more than removing the bark and drilling a couple of holes at the top for halyards, and raised the square sail. BONZO ghosted along leaving a softly pleated wake. When the wind shifted to the northwest I angled the sail and lowered the leeboard, putting BONZO’s course on a broad reach. The leeboard wasn’t meant to turn a boxy boat into an able sailer, but it does keep the bow from falling off when motoring in a crosswind.

I sailed along the edge of Possession Sound toward a breakwater made of six wrecked ships set bow-to-stern in an orderly line one-third of a mile long. With the tide up, only the ragged ends of frames and some of the diagonal planking were visible, blackened with age and bristled with the iron rods that once held the ships together. About 50′ from the line of wrecks I dropped the anchor, dragging it along under sail until the flukes set and brought BONZO to a stop.

It was 3:30 p.m. and I had an hour to go before sunset—time enough to get ready to spend the night. The tide had dropped only 2’ since I’d launched and would drop another 8’ to the low at 9:00 p.m.

I tidied up, rolling the sails up on the spars, coiling line, and setting FAERIE, my folding coracle tender, on the cabin catwalk. The boat settled near the outer end of the line of wrecks, which didn’t offer as much protection as a position farther upstream. I pulled the rode and got the boat moving forward, coiling it around the port post. The anchor came up with sticky, fine black silt. I set it on deck and used my 14′ push-pole to gain a bit more ground. The depth stayed a steady 6′ until I strayed close to the wrecks and found water too deep for the pole. I’d seen photos of the wrecks during a low tide and knew there were pools of water; the current running between the ships scoured a trough. I used the pole as a paddle, moving a couple of boat-lengths away until I could push off the bottom again. I dropped the anchor again well into an area of flat sand.

The air chilled when the sun slipped behind the sooty streaks of clouds above the Olympic mountains to the west, so I put the chimney in place and got a fire going in the woodstove with a pot of water on top for tea.

At dusk I put on a jacket and stepped out into the cockpit to check the depth. The ebb-drawn current was no longer trailing straight back from the transom, but veered in lazy swirls as the water around the boat grew shallow. The push-pole hit bottom 2’ down. The tide chart on my phone indicated that the water level would fall another 5′, hitting low at 9:30 a.m.

After having dinner, I raised one of the windows and aimed my spotlight at the water. It was no longer green, as it had been during the day, but tan. I must have been only about 1′ deep, but I couldn’t make the bottom. I rocked in my seat…and the boat rocked with me. I was not yet aground.

At 6:30 I stepped out into the cockpit again; it was dark enough for me to see the faint cluster of the Pleiades almost directly overhead. I checked the depth with my paddle, illuminating it with my spotlight. The blade showed less than a foot of water left, though I could see only 3″ of the paddle beneath the surface, even with my spotlight. Three boat-lengths astern of BONZO a sandbar had broken the surface. I’d be aground soon.

I went back into the cabin, chilled, and opened the stove door, pulled the coals forward with a stick, and placed some cedar kindling on top. When I opened the damper, the air rushed in and a flicker of orange light glowed through the mica window.

At low tide BONZO came to rest on the sand close to the line of shipwrecks. I didn't get to do as much exploring as I'd hoped—the mud surrounding the sand bars was far too sticky.

A few minutes later, I noticed the boat wasn’t responding to my movement and assumed BONZO was aground. I held a 2′ length of dowel at one end and let it hang vertically while eyeing the cabin door beyond it. The boat was listing only a couple of degrees to starboard—enough that I could feel it in my lower back when seated facing aft, but not so much that it would make for an uncomfortable night’s sleep.

I checked the tide chart. The curve of the graph would reach its nadir at 8:55 p.m. The point on the chart directly across from where I was now would be at 11:00 p.m. I’d be aground for four-and-a-half hours.

I heard a rattle on the cabintop that suggested the boat hadn’t stopped moving. I used my dowel as a plumb bob again. The list had doubled. With the bottom of the door lined up with the dowel, the top of the door was 2″ from its top, a list of about 5 degrees [delete: to starboard].

By the time BONZO came to rest, the top of the door was now 3″ from the dowel, a 7-degree list. While there were patches of flatter ground all around, the hull had settled in a bit of a gully in the sand. It may have been that the last of the current, seeking out the lowest ground, took BONZO with it.

I didn't far from the boat before I had to turn back to get my pattens to keep from getting stuck in the mud.

I put my boots on and stepped out over the port side. The sand was firm and could easily support my weight, so I walked around on the bar that led toward the wrecks. They were, as I had seen in photos, surrounded by water that didn’t drain on the low tide. I headed the other direction, north toward the Steamboat Slough channel, though I could not see it within the 70-yard beam of my searchlight. A few yards from the boat, the sand turned to mud and I couldn’t walk without having to pull my boots up behind me. I turned back, got my 14″-square pattens out of the cockpit, and tied them on. I clomped back across the sand to the mud and tried again to walk to the river channel. The mud was extremely sticky and the rope bindings tied tight over my boots pressed painfully across my instep. The mud stuck to the bottoms of the pattens, making them quite heavy; each step became increasingly difficult.

Turning around without falling was a bit of a chore, and getting back across the mud I had just walked over was harder than it was the first time. I was relieved to get back to the sand. I took the pattens off, swished the mud off in the pool of water astern of BONZO, and put them back in the cockpit. I retreated to the cabin, got the fire going again, and boiled up more water for tea.

I went out again at about 9:15 when the tide had just turned. The sandbar to the south led right up to one of the wrecks and I easily could walk there without the pattens. The sand was soft and spongy, but my boots didn’t stick as long as I kept moving. The hull was pinned against a tall piling, and wedged in between the two, 10′ above the sand, was the barnacle-encrusted trunk of a tree with a tangle of roots on the upstream side, looking like the carcass of a giant squid.

Above the reach of the high tide there was little left of the six nearly identical sailing ships that formed the breakwater. Where the hulls were submerged daily in salt water the planking was largely intact, and still held water back. All throughthe night's low tide I could here trickles of water dripping from the hulls.

With my spotlight pointing to the west, I could see the bow of the next ship in the line of wrecks. From the side, the hulls are just a jumble of century-old timbers rotting away, but bow-on, the ship’s full curves and sweetly lined strakes were clearly visible; the beauty that was built into the hull by long-forgotten shipwrights hadn’t been diminished by tides or time.

A fog slinked in from the north, wrapping haloes around the lights of houses lining the banks of Ebey Slough. When it reached BONZO and drifted through the beam of my flashlight, it was not a gauzy haze, but a swirling sea of luminous plankton. I put one last load of wood into the stove and slipped into my bed in the forward compartment.

I woke to the sound of something knocking against the hull. BONZO was afloat and rocking, and I thought that a stick coming from upriver might have drifted under the bow. I got up and followed the sound to the cockpit where one of the oarlocks was hanging loose on its tether, rapping the hull with each swing. I set the lock in its socket. The beam of my searchlight could reach only 30 yards in the fog that had come over the tide flats. The only feature of the landscape that I could see was the single piling that stood between BONZO and the shipwrecks when I was aground.

I was awakened again at 1:15 a.m. This time I knew what the sound was: the mast rattling in the partners. I got up, crawled out onto the foredeck, pulled the mast out, and set it with the sail and oars side of the catwalk. The fog had grown thicker and I couldn’t see anything when I turned the spotlight on. All of the light bounced back as if I’d pointed it at myself. When I turned it off there was a faint, dark streak that I took to be the line of ships, but I couldn’t be sure. I tugged on the rode and found that it was quite slack. Eventually I felt some resistance and it seemed that the anchor was still holding. I crawled back in bed and turned the GPS on. It showed my speed was zero. I wasn’t drifting.

When I woke at 3:30 a.m. BONZO was still and quiet. Outside the window, what little water I could see beneath the press of the fog was glassy and calm. The tide would peak in an hour and the currents had come to a standstill. I could take advantage of the stillness and get some sleep.

The chill was getting through to me. I pulled a third sleeping bag over the others. With the additional bedding pulled up around my head I soon warmed up, and the only cold I felt was on my teeth when I breathed in.

I woke at 6:30 a.m. to the slap of wavelets under the bow that sounded like a gallon-jug of water upended, but never emptying. The fog masked the horizon; pilings 30 yards away floated in an ill-defined, colorless space. BONZO yawed gently at the end of the anchor rode, and the piling that had been several boat-lengths to the south while I was grounded drifted past. I rolled over and watched the silhouette slip by the main cabin windows. Worried that the kicked-up outboard would hit the piling, I quickly got up and moved to the cockpit. The lower unit made it past the piling with 2′ to spare.

The wind dropped as I was having breakfast, and the water soon smoothed itself like a bedsheet pulled tight. The water was not perfectly still; the ripples were just large enough to turn the soot-black reflections of the shipwrecks into sharp, horizontal shards. The biggest waves around the boat were those that radiated out from BONZO’s hull when I shifted my weight.

The high tide had passed while I was asleep, and the morning low would be an hour on the other side of sunrise. Between them the water would drop just 3’, so the currents coming out of the sloughs and river would be gentle. There was no need to get underway quickly. As the fire in the stove had gone out and the cabin was getting the edge of a chill, I loaded the stove with a few pages torn from a Harbor Freight catalog, some cedar kindling, and fir shop scraps to get another fire going.

In the first light of the morning the wrecks were all but submerged.

A single feathery cloud in the clear sky above the fog was the first to catch the morning’s rose-pink sunlight. The eastern horizon whitened and the fog lifted, revealing to the north the wooded shore I had sailed along yesterday and the industrial fringe of the city of Everett to the south. The sun’s first rays swept away the last of the enthralling uncertainties of night and fog.

The fog had covered everything with ladybug-sized beads of water. I poured a pint out of FAERIE after I had folded it up to get ready to get underway. Although the sun was shining, it was still cold, so I rigged the outboard with the yoke on the throttle and clipped the steering lines to the tiller. I started the motor, put it in gear, and took my place in the fo’c’s’le next to the control lines. I headed downstream and out into Possession Sound before turning east again for the Snohomish River.

As I approached the channel on the south side of the wrecks, I passed into an area where the waves bunched up. The chart showed an area of shallow water. I returned to the cockpit and sounded with a push-pole. Motoring along, I had a good 5’ or 6’ under BONZO but stayed in the cockpit, sounding as I went. I made a beeline for the wrecks, expecting to find the channel there. Soon the bottom was beyond the reach of my pole, and I turned upstream again.

Everett has its back to the Snohomish River, and where its banks are not covered with brush and riprap they are lined with logs piled high for sawmills, boats in bad repair, and shacks with broken windows.

There were two high concrete bridges ahead, each with mid-river piers. On a previous trip up the Snohomish, 8 miles farther upstream, my kids and I were motoring and had just passed a railroad bridge when the outboard run out of fuel. Dead in the water, BONZO was carried downstream directly at one of the bridge piers. Without time to refuel and start the motor again before an impact, my son and I paddled feverishly to keep the boat from getting wrapped around the stone bridge support. Ever since then, I’ve refueled before going under a bridge if it has been a while since I’d filled the gas tank.

I paused just shy of the bridge, stopped the motor, and fueled it. With a full tank, I started the motor and carried on. Seconds after passing under the bridge, the motor sputtered and threatened to quit. I pulled the choke and brought it back to life, steering for the bank to avoid the bridge piers. The motor didn’t sort itself out, so I brought it aboard and put my backup 2½-horse in its place.

Edit Article ‹The maze of pilings under Highway 2 made for an interesting slalom, but eventually led to a dead end. Small Boats Monthly — WordPress

I motored a few hundred yards into Deadwater Slough and cocked the motor up when I reached a maze of concrete columns that supported two roadways and a pipeline. Standing on the foredeck, I pushed off columns and paddled between them until I discovered I’d reached a dead end. With the air filled with roaring traffic overhead and the double thump of tires crossing expansion joints, I shoved my way back out, and headed for the river.

While BONZO drifted sideways with the current, I used to oars to follow the contours of the irregular bank.

Just a quarter mile downstream is the river’s intersection with Union Slough and Steamboat Slough. I had marked my chart with a promising place less than a half mile along Union where I could spend the night—a sandbar off to the side of the slough where BONZO could dry out again on the falling tide—but its 25-yard-wide entrance was blocked by a logjam. It was still midday, so I kicked the motor up and let the current take me sideways down Steamboat Slough, using the oars to keep away from the banks.

This stretch of Steamboat Slough is known as a boat graveyard, and while it is a place where many boats come to an end, this lonely stretch of the slough seems to be a place where hopes and dreams die, and the boats waste away for years afterward.

On the right bank of the slough, stretching out for a third of a mile along the outside of the first bend, is a row of boats, many of them in bad shape. Some were wrapped in blue plastic tarps to buy time, and one lay on its side, surrounded by oil-containment boom with only its port rail and a davit above water. An old commercial fishing boat listed to starboard, its windows gone and its paint peeling away in sheets the size of letter paper. Her name, painted below the pilothouse window, was missing most of its letters, but I could read it spelled out on the bow: ELUSIVE DREAM.

This old commercial fishing boat anchored in the middle of the slough appeared to be abandoned, but as I passed by I heard a generator throbbing deep with the hull and saw a lightbulb glowing in a window. Bearing the name MIDAS on its bow, it seems to have lost its golden touch.

I poked into Deadman Slough on the right bank, a passage a few boat-lengths wide, but there wasn’t much to see, beyond a string of surplus docks and the shell of what was once a floating office, because the levee had been built right over the slough, blocking access to the greater part of it.

To explore a tide-flooded marsh I kicked the outboard up and used a push pole to get across the lagoon.

Another 150 yards downstream on Steamboat Slough, I motored into another opening in the bank. Water was flowing slowly out of the gap, a sign that the tide had turned, and over the next five hours it would fall a total of 11′. The passage opened onto a mile-wide cattail marsh that was almost entirely inundated except for some patches of dried reeds. I tested the depth with a push-pole at the opening, and it was about 8’ but soon became much shallower when I coasted near the brown stalks of last summer’s cattails. With the motor cocked up, I pushed BONZO through the stalks to the middle of the lagoon.

I didn’t stay long because it was drawing near 3:00 p.m., and I needed to figure out where I was going to spend the night. I wouldn’t be able to get to my first choice, the sandbar in Union Slough, because it was blocked by the logjam on one side and a footbridge on the other.

I had hoped to find a safe to anchor among the cattails, but a log blocked the channel to the patch of water I had my eye on.

I circumnavigated Otter Island on my way to an 80-yard-long passage connecting Steamboat and Union sloughs. A half mile down Union there was another potential overnight spot I had marked on my chart. I found the opening, only 10′ wide, to a channel that paralleled the slough on the other side of a narrow strip of land covered in brush. Beyond the channel was a cattail marsh a half-mile wide. Here, the marsh wasn’t flooded and the cattails stood shoulder high, topped with their corn-dog-like seed heads. The channel eventually opened up into a clear patch of water I thought might be suitable for an anchorage, but access to it was blocked by a log. I poked around under the boat with a push-pole; the channel was about 8′ deep and the bottom seemed quite irregular. I feared BONZO might end up resting at a bad angle when the tide drained the channel.

Once, a friend of mine who had cruised the sloughs in his Escargot canal boat had tried to spend a night at anchor when his bow got hung up on something. The stern went down, putting the boat at such a precarious angle that he feared the boat would swamp. He called the county sheriff in the middle of the night, and the boat that was sent out for him was able to get his boat back on an even keel.

The footbridge over Union Slough limited my option for an overnight stay. On a previous trip BONZO had passed under it on a high tide it only a couple of inches to spare.

I started checking the wider parts of Union Slough itself with my handheld depth finder. Just inside of the passage to Steamboat Slough there was about 16′ of water, more than enough to float through the 10′ drop to the 9:30 p.m. low tide. I took soundings as I made my way along Union Slough, all the way to the footbridge that would block my passage. The depths varied, some offering only a few feet of water left at low, others a greater margin of safety.

I wanted to wander in the flooded lowlands to the west of Union Slough, but I needed to find a place to anchor and settle in for the night.

I returned to the middle of a set of four meanders where I’d found depths of 16′ and 17′ and took more soundings across the slough. The deep water seemed to span most of the channel; I’d have plenty of water under the boat at low tide.

The tide had accelerated, and the current was about 2 knots, so I motored a few dozen yards upstream, dropped the anchor, and let BONZO drift with the current set it. I watched the trees on the bank against the hills in the distance, and when the anchor buried itself it was quite clear that the downstream drift had come to a quick end. I took the 14’ push-pole and swept the area under and around the boat looking for anything projecting upward from the bottom.

When BONZO was launched we had 13 people aboard and everyone had a place to sit. With the cabin to myself, I had room to spread out. My bed is in the bow, just over my right shoulder.

It was 4:30 p.m. and the sun was setting over Everett. Throughout the evening I kept watch on the banks as they were exposed by the falling tide. They were muddy but steep, as I had guessed and hoped. I’d have plenty of room in the middle of the slough to keep afloat at low water. At 8:30 p.m., with an hour to go and only inches left to drop, I still had 9.2’ beneath the hull.

As the tide dropped, and the ebb pulled the water from the slough, there was a steady parade of driftwood marching downstream. Broken branches scratched along the bottom and low-floating logs knocked on the hull from bow to stern.

At 8:30 p.m. I looked around with my searchlight and could see only the banks to either side, but nothing up- or downstream, because a fog had filled the little canyon of the now half-empty slough. I checked the depth and still had 9′ beneath the boat with only 6″ left to go until low. As I was reaching over the transom I was startled by a splash sounding equal to a concrete block being dropped overboard. I could make out the silhouette of a beaver upstream, his head at the apex of an arrowhead wake. I aimed my light at him and he slapped his tail again and disappeared.

I turned in, feeling I could sleep through the night without having to check on the water level. The tide would be rising, and even if BONZO kited over to one of the banks, the tide would lift the boat free.

With a clear view of the Cascade Mountains, even Mt. Rainier far to the south (behind the to bare trees above the stovepipe), the morning was off to a good start. Until I tried weighing anchor.

I got through the night without waking up every couple of hours to check on the boat. It was a bit after 6:00 a.m. and still dark, but BONZO was afloat in midstream and the slough was filled back up to the brim.

On a cold morning sitting by the wood stove cooking breakfast is the place to be.

I got a fire going in the stove and set on a pan of water for poached eggs and bread for toast. After putting the cabin in order, I went to the cockpit and got the outboard ready to start. I moved across the cabin roof to the foredeck and hauled the anchor rode in, coiling it on the starboard corner post as I brought it in. BONZO moved forward, against the current, and soon the rode was nearly vertical. I pulled, but the anchor didn’t break free. I hauled as hard as I could, but it only pushed the bow deeper into the water.

Just beyond BONZO my anchor was stuck under a log submerged in mid channel. Pulling from this bank and the far bank didn't budge it.

I spent the next hour and a half doing everything I could think of to recover my trusted stainless-steel anchor. I brought the rode aft, hitched it to a post, and motored at full speed upstream. I tied the end of the rode to a fender and cobbled together an anchor retrieval device with things I had on board. I made a ring of stiff, vinyl-coated chain that I hoped would slide down the rode, anchor chain, and the anchor’s shank. I tied a spare rode to the chain, and sent it down to get the loop over the anchor shank to pull its fluke free. That didn’t work—the chain never got a purchase on the anchor. I put BONZO ashore on the right bank, the left bank, upstream, and down, dug my heels in, and pulled in every direction. It was clear that I had hooked a heavy log.

I tried everything I could think of to get my anchor back, but I had to give up and hope "REWARD $50" drilled into a piece of hardwood that I tied to the anchor chain would someday get my anchor back to me.

After spending the best part of the morning trying to retrieve my anchor, I gave up and tied to the chain a fender and a piece of wood with my phone number on it.

The best I was able to do was to get the end of the chain to break the surface. The anchor was a good one, and I was reluctant to give up on it, but I had run out of ideas. I decided I’d write my phone number on one of my older fenders, then leave it tied to the chain. I didn’t have a permanent marker on board, but I did have a cordless drill and bits. In the firewood was a scrap of ipe decking with a 3/4″ hole through it. With a small bit chucked in the drill I made a series of holes spelling out “REWARD $50” on one side, and my phone number on the other side. I tied the fender and the wood to the last two links in the chain, then cut the rode. The fender drifted a few feet aft with only one end breaking the surface of the water and then the current pulled it down and out of sight.

BONZO drifted downstream, and since she stayed in the middle of the slough through the meanders, I just let her drift.

Mt. Baker loomed over the sloughs. In my 20s I had twice climbed the left flank and looked out over the sloughs from the summit. A bald eagle took to the air when BONZO motored beneath his perch.

When I reached the junction with Steamboat Slough, I motored over to Otter Island where I found a narrow opening in the west side of the island. I poked BONZO’s bow in and cut the engine. I poled around the first bend, thinking the water would be shallow in a passage barely wide enough to turn the boat around, but the bottom was at an awkward depth for using the pole, so I switched to sculling with an oar set in a lock mounted on the transom.

The narrow waterway in Otter Island was an enchanting place to explore, but I didn't stay long, worried I'd get trapped by a falling tide.

I sculled the bends in this little slough for about 300 yards, never able to see more than a few boat-lengths ahead or behind. The banks were overhung with grass, and the trees closest to the water were leaning over it. The blade of the oar struck submerged roots reaching out from the mud beneath the grass. I was halfway through a hairpin turn to port before I saw a log bridging the banks, a foot above the water. I grabbed a paddle and dug in over the port quarter to bring the boat to a stop.

As I sat on the cabin top I watched the ripples spread out across the slough. I could still see then=m when they reached the trunk of the tree leaning over the far bank.

I got BONZO turned around and sculled back to Steamboat Slough. There wasn’t a breath of wind on the water, and barely any current, so the sky, clouds, and trees were mirrored in the water. I ate lunch sitting on the catwalk as the shore 15’ off the stern inched by. I rocked the boat and watched the ripples radiate from the hull. They warped the reflections of the clouds, and then turned the images of the treetops ragged. I could still see the effects of the ripples 200 yards away when they reached the reflection of a lone fir tree leaning the over the opposite bank of the slough. In the moment before they disappeared, the image of the trunk had the look of a finely threaded machine screw.

On the afternoon of my last day I had Steamboat Slough to myself. The water had been so till that I regretted making a mess of it by getting underway.

I climbed down into the cockpit, started the motor, and steered for an opening in the bank to starboard where the Steamboat Slough made a tangential touch to a sharp bend in the Ebey Slough. The Ebey Slough, at 50 yards wide—half the width of Steamboat—curled around North Ebey Island in jigsaw-puzzle curves.

In a little over an hour, BONZO was back on the trailer, doing 50 miles an hour over the bridges we’d passed under at less than a tenth of that speed. The noise of engines and tires on pavement was constant; I missed the distance that made it sound like wind-driven rain.

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.

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.

Power Carving

Angle grinders are designed for working metal; equipped with flap sanders and blades designed for wood they have plenty of power to do quick work.

Some of the woodworking tasks we take on in boatbuilding have a lot in common with sculpture, as we carve our way from a block to a purposeful shape. When I started making spoon-bladed oars I used gouges, curved spokeshaves, and my father’s Stanley 100-1/2, a small spoon bottom plane. I later turned to a Makita 125mm disc sander as a quicker way to work concave shapes. It spun at a screaming 4,500 rpm and used stiff resin-fiber discs that cut aggressively. It could shape the power face of a spoon blade when the edge of the disc was set at an appropriate angle to the wood. It made for quick work, albeit dusty and noisy, but the discs didn’t last long and tended to scorch the wood when their grit dulled.

While I was looking through tool catalogs, I found woodworking discs made for angle grinders. I had a few projects on my to-do list that might be made easier by putting my grinder to work, so I bought a carving disc, a 24-grit carbide cup wheel, and 60-grit and 120-grit flap discs.

The carving disc is a 22-tooth loop of chainsaw chain that is clamped between two pressed-steel discs. The angle grinder spins it at 11,000 rpm—three times as fast as my tablesaw—which is scary enough when turning a toothless, , metal-cutting disc, but more so when spinning chainsaw teeth into an invisible blur.

The Carving Disc made quick work of cutting the hollow of a traditional wooden bailer.

The carving disc removes and throws wood particles that are heavier and that travel faster and farther than wood dust. A full-face shield and a protective glove for the hand holding the grinder are useful accompaniments to the standard safety gear of safety glasses, hearing protection, and dust mask. The carving disc is very much like the round tip of a chainsaw, and if you’ve ever gotten sloppy with a chainsaw, you know that the blade will buck up toward your head if you inadvertently catch the tip on something. The carving disc didn’t exhibit that tendency in the work I’ve done with it; it cut so fast that the wood would go flying before the teeth could get enough of a hold on it to send the tool flying. The chain is held only by pressure between the two steel discs, so it could slip if it hits something unyielding. That’s the manufacturer’s caveat; I decided against putting it to the test.

The carving disc can make plunge cuts and kerfs up to 1″ deep and, with repeated passes, is able to dig deeper and wider hollows. Using the grinder with it requires a firm grip and a steady hand because mistakes happen quickly. The disc worked well for the initial rough-shaping of a Viking-style bailer, but it cuts so quickly and coarsely that finish work requires a tool with a slower cut and finer control. [Update, April 2021: I just watched a video describing some serious accidents that happened using a chainsaw disc. I took the advice offered and put my disc in the trash. Using it isn’t worth the risk. CC]

Cutting the shallow contours of a rowing seat was a task well suited to the Carbide Cup Wheel.

The carbide cup wheel is made of steel with coarse carbide grit fused to its perimeter. Only a couple of grades of the abrasive element are available; mine has #24 carbide. For an abrasive tool it cuts quickly, and the carbide will outlast any sandpaper. The edge of the wheel doesn’t have grit in it, so it won’t cut, making it safer to use than the carving disc. For making gentle concave cuts for oar blades and rowing seats, it’s an ideal tool for shaping. It’s faster than my Makita disc sander, and it won’t wear out. The carbide cup wheel comes in handy for other jobs that require quick removal of wood; I could rough-in the bevels on a piece of white oak to use for a stem, saving my elbow grease for planing the last bit smooth and up to the lines.

After using the Carbide Cup to do the initial shaping of a spoon blade, I used the flap sanders to do the more subtle work of refining the shape.

The flap sanders for angle grinders are designed for finishing metal but work just as well on wood. The perimeter has over 70 overlapping 5/8″ x 7/8″ resin-coated fabric flaps glued to a fiberglass disc. The flaps are set at a slight angle to the plane of the disc so they get better contact with the work. The 120-grit flap sander is the finest I have (some sources offer 180) and while it leaves a smooth surface, it still cuts so quickly that changes in the pressure applied results in uneven work. To finish up, I put the grinder away and use a random-orbit sander and hand-sanding to finish the job.

If you don’t have an angle grinder, there are some inexpensive options for under $20. You may find they open up some possibilities for working with both metal and wood. Just be sure to handle them carefully and use good protection for your eyes, lungs, and ears.

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.

You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.

Helinox Chair One

I have fond childhood memories of car-camping with my family, especially of sitting around the campfire roasting marshmallows. I usually sat in a faded blue camp chair, one of the chairs my parents would also bring to watch my soccer games. When I was old enough to strike out on my own and began taking backpacking and boat trips, I had to leave bulky 5-lb camp chairs behind, instead using a foam gardening pad cut in half as a seat.

Four tennis balls slit to fit over the chair's feet keep them from sinking into sand.

When my life partner Kyle Hawkins and I were planning our Mississippi River trip, I went on a search for something that would offer better comfort and back support and found the Helinox Chair One. Weighing 2.1 lbs and measuring only 4″ x 13-3/4″ x 4-3/4″ when packed, this compact chair is made from especially strong TH72M aluminum alloy tubes, Nylon 66 junctions, and lightweight nylon fabric and mesh.

All of the aluminum tubes and junctions are linked with bungees, so there are no pieces to lose and the frame nearly assembles itself. The zippered carrying bag, also made of durable fabric, has two large loops that can be used to hang the bag from the chair for a handy storage space; it also has a webbing ladder that makes it easy to lash down or attach to a backpack. The compact package easily fits into our small hatch openings, reducing clutter in the cockpit.

When sitting in the Helinox Chair One, I am approximately 10″ above the ground—high enough to be comfortable, but low enough to easily tend to a campfire or cook on the ground. The molded feet endured over three months of daily use without cracking or breaking lose, and while they do help keep the chair from sinking fully into the ground, Helinox also offers a ground sheet, sold separately, to prevent the legs from sinking into sand or soft soil. We recently found that we could prevent the legs from sinking by putting tennis balls with slits in them to fit over the feet of the chair, distributing the weight. The tennis balls easily fit with the folded chair in the zipped carrying bag. On our three-month Mississippi River trip, we just pre-set the chairs by hand before sitting in them and they would usually stay level and support our weight just fine.

The Chair One weighs just 2.1 lbs and will support 320 lbs.

The first thing I would do when setting up camp was set up our Helinox chairs. The back support after a long day of rowing was a great relief, and I found myself sitting in mine while unpacking cooking supplies and digging a hole for the fire. Our chairs and carrying bags are a bit dirty but are as good as new. They are pricey compared to others on the market, but it’s true that you get what you pay for. Our Helinox Chair Ones have given us exactly what we expected and required: light, durable, compact, and comfortable seating.

Danielle Kreusch grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and spent a lot of time hiking and camping in the mountains. After moving to Florida to finish her BA in Psychology and Child Development, Danielle met Kyle Hawkins, who took her sailing on their third date. For the last few years they’ve been living aboard their 35’ Ben Bow cutter and cruise with it whenever possible. Their Mississippi River trip was their first small-boat excursion, and they have both fallen in love with the idea of continuing to travel in small boats.

Helinox chairs are available from the Helinox Store for $100 and from many outdoor 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.

Muck Boots

—My wife Audrey—aka “the Skipper”—and I spend a lot of time moving our small boats to and from the shore and hand loading them at boat ramps. We have tried a lot of different footwear for water but none of them kept our feet dry or warm, and as this winter approached, the Skipper complained that her feet were beginning to get cold. We decided it was time to look for boots that would work year-round, and as luck would have it, I spotted a gentleman wearing some nice-looking outdoor boots at our local grocery store. He was happy to answer questions about his Muck Boots and he said they were comfortable, warm, and waterproof.

The Women's Hale is a multi-season boot with a wrap-around ridged sole.

We bought a pair of the women’s Hale model Muck Boots. She has found that they are easy to put on—she can step into and out of them, hands free, if needed—and the fit is comfortable. The company’s sizing runs true to her shoe size when she is wearing a normal-weight sock. The inner boot is a soft 4mm “CR Flex Foam”-brand neoprene that extends from toe to top inside of a rubber overlay lower and a self-cleaning ribbed outsole.

The fashionable black and hot-pink boots have been 100 percent waterproof. Audrey is able to get in and out of our dinghies and keep grit out of the boat with a just swish of water on the soles to clean them off. What she likes best about them is that her feet stay warm because of the neoprene and the breathable mesh lining. She had a severe ankle injury a few years ago and appreciates the stable walking platform that the outsoles provide. The insoles offer good arch support, and the material around her ankles and calves is flexible for unrestricted mobility. The outsoles are flared so her feet do not sink into the sand as far as her water shoes did, and the boots are buoyant, helping float her feet up as she steps off the bottom.

The Men's Edgewater II is rated for use in temperatures from below freezing to 65 degrees and has a deeply contoured sole for good traction.

The Skipper was so enthusiastic about her boots that I decided I needed a pair. The Muck Boot Edgewater II offers features similar to those of the Hale, but with a higher rubber upper and outsole. The boots are comfortable, warm, and 100 percent waterproof as well. The tops of the boots are soft and stretchy—they can accommodate different calf sizes, I can wear my pant legs inside or outside the boots, and the upper is flexible enough to be folded down to improve air circulation in warm weather or to be folded for compact storage. The sizing ran the same as my shoe size and while there is room for a thick sock, the fit of the stretch neoprene around the ankle keeps the boots from slipping off in mud. The waffle outsole gave the Edgewater II excellent traction.

We are both very happy with our Muck Boots. They are awesome on the beach and the slippery launch ramp; we can focus on the boat and count on having good footing and warm feet.

Kent and Audrey Lewis can be found on Florida’s Emerald Coast, messing about in their flotilla of small boats. Their review of the Drascombe Lugger appears in this issue.

The women’s Hale ($109.95) and the men’s Edgewater II ($129.95) are available online direct from the Muck Boot Company. There a many other styles available for women, men, and children.

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.

Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff LIZZY B

On it's inaugural outing LIBBY B lived up to her builder's expectations.

Bob Burns, as a novice boatbuilder, once paid a visit to Joel White to get some advice on what boat to build. He had a cedar-strip canoe to his credit, had brought the bare hull of a bass boat to completion, and was ready for a new project. Joel suggested that Catspaw, a 12′ 8″ dinghy he had designed as a carvel-planked version of Capt. Nat Herreshoff’s lapstrake Columbia dinghy, would be well suited for Bob’s growing set of skills. Armed with a set of plans, Bob was soon at work in his cellar. The boat is still there, unfinished, 20 years later.

Before turning his attention to the construction of the interior, Bob filled the space under the cockpit sole with foam pool noodles for flotation.

In 2016, at 72 years old and with retirement from a career in IT management in the offing, Bob was seeing an opportunity to finish the project. That worried his wife, Beth. She imagined the dinghy setting sail from their vacation home on the shore of Lake Mooselookmeguntic, a sprawling wilderness lake in Rangeley Lakes region of western Maine. The lake is subject to sudden storms that can bring high winds and waves over 3′ high. Beth noticed Bob poring over a pair of WoodenBoat articles about the Jericho Bay Lobster skiff, another one of White’s designs. The 15′6″ outboard skiff seemed to be a better choice for the lake—she saw her opportunity and surprised Bob with a set of plans as a Christmas gift the year before his planned retirement.

The 20-hp outboard will drive the skiff at speeds up to 24.5 mph.

Beyond being a better boat for their lakeside summer home, Beth thought building a Jericho skiff, given Bob’s record with the Catspaw dinghy, would keep him busy for at least a couple of years and stave off the ennui that often settles in with retirement. She was wrong on that count. Bob started work on the day after New Year’s last year, and six months later, launched LIZZY B, named after her.

When Bob set up the molds, he stretched the length by 1′ to make more room for a center console. The new length of 16′6″ also would also meet a rule of thumb used by early boatbuilders in the Rangeley Lakes region. They believed that a boat needed to bridge the two troughs between three wave crests. Their assumption that the wave lengths rarely exceeded 8′ set the minimum boat length at 16′. The Jericho skiff’s beam could remain at 62 1/2″ because Bob would have 1/2″ to spare when it came time to move the boat out through the cellar door.

Bob made steady progress on the project this time, even though he worked on the boat only in the mornings and spent his afternoons with Beth so she wouldn’t feel widowed by the boat. On Easter Sunday, he invited his sons and grandsons to the house to take part in moving the boat and the building jig, sporting a new set of wheels for the occasion, out of the cellar. In the back yard, the crew lifted the hull off the strongback, rolled it upright on the lawn, and set it back on the wheeled frame.

The Burns sons and grandsons gathered for moving the hull out of the cellar on its wheeled building frame.

As they were rolling the boat back into the cellar, a 250-lb boulder tumbled off the stone wall adjacent to the door and hit the side of the hull. It scratched the paint, but the Alaska cedar strips, protected by 24-oz woven biaxial fiberglass on the outside and 12-oz cloth on the inside, took the blow without damage. The unintended test proved the skiff would be able to take a beating on the Maine lakes.

Lake Mooselookmeguntic rests in a bucolic Maine countryside but can get quite rough quite suddenly.

LIZZY B was launched on Lake Mooselookmeguntic, and Bob and Beth spent the summer of 2017 exploring and fishing on lakes Aziscohos, Umbagog, Richardson, Kennebago, Rangeley, and Cupsuptic and on many of the rivers connected to them. October brought cold and wind, and LIZZY B was pulled out of the water and put away in the garage for the winter. The boat, Bob, and Beth eagerly await this coming summer.

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.

A Man of Means by No Means

In Hein van Greevenbroek’s cruising story this month, he makes a reference to Roger Miller’s lyric, “I’m a man of means by no means, King of the Road.” I met such a man of means by no means in a marsh just outside Savannah, Georgia, while I was canoeing the Intracoastal Waterway in the winter of 1983. My paddling partner and I were making our way south along the Georgia coast and following the meanders of the Skidaway River as it looped in and around Savannah suburbs. At the intersection with the Vernon River we turned south into a brisk headwind, and rather than fight it we pulled ashore on a small hammock—a sliver of high ground with a ragged crown of stunted trees.

A whisp of smoke rose above the brush, and nestled in the trees we found a smoldering campfire next to an upturned aluminum johnboat. Its bow was propped up and the openings around the boat were walled in with weathered plywood. Plastic buckets were scattered around the campsite. There was no one there.

Upside down, Arthur's johnboat was his shelter; right-side up he'd row it to Savannah, carrying a bicycle to get around town. The kayak belonged to my paddling partner.

To the west, 50 yards away across a flat plain of tawny salt-marsh grass, we spotted a man in a plaid shirt and a green baseball cap walking toward us. His conversation with us had apparently started well before we could hear his voice, and by the time we shook hands with him and introduced ourselves he was well into the story of his life and how he came to be here in the middle of a coastal marsh. This was Arthur Dennan. He was 61, but his weather-creased face and silvery beard made him look a decade older.

Arthur's "kingdom" of marshland stretched for a mile or more in every direction.

He was indeed “a man of means by no means,” and although he was not “King of the Road” as the song goes, he was, at least by his own account, King of Lafayette Square. The square is an old park in the heart of Savannah where he would play harmonica with a hat out to collect pocket change from passersby. He had taught himself to play harmonica without even knowing how to hold it—“Most plays with the low notes on the left, but I play with the high notes on the left. Ain’t that a wonder?”

It was not yet midday and Arthur offered to show us around the marsh. We walked a few hundred yards through the shin-high grass to Petit Gauke Island, a half-mile-long forest of longleaf pines and palmettos. In the woods, he showed us a tree stand used by hunters and a pile of rusted steel drums that were all that was left of a moonshine still, all the while keeping up a steady line of tour-guide patter about the history of the place.

Back at his camp, he insisted we stay for lunch. From one of his five-gallon buckets he produced 10 sea trout he had caught that morning. He cleaned them, splayed them out with driftwood sticks, and set them around the fire to cook.

Arthur cooked fish around the campfire and we at them right off the sticks. There was no dishwashing to do after dinner.

After lunch, Arthur showed us one of the cast nets he had made. Spread out, it was a 12′ circle of white mesh with a perimeter of a lead-weighted cord. The netting was quite fine to keep baitfish from escaping, and Arthur’s handwork was as uniform as any machine might produce. He had another net that he was still working on and showed us the netting needle and the gauge stick he used to tie the thousands upon thousands of knots that went into each of his nets. Selling his cast nets was another source of income for him; I doubted any fisherman, regarding the nets as utilitarian, paid him anywhere near what his craftsmanship was worth.

With a gauge stick and a netting needle, Arthur turned spools of twine into beautiful cast nets.

Arthur was as adept at throwing the nets as he was making them. He showed us the technique in the clearing between the river and his camp. With the middle of the net gathered up in his left hand and the perimeter line in his teeth and in his right hand, he threw it like an oversized Frisbee and the net fanned out into a full circle. It dropped wide and flat upon the grass. I tried several times to throw the net, but I could never get it to open up and fly like Arthur could.

We spent the rest of the day with Arthur. He started playing a song on his harmonica but stopped abruptly and put it away, saying he wasn’t in the mood. There was sadness in his sapphire-blue eyes as he told spoke about the disappointments in his life. He had been a radio operator in the Marines during World War II and had grand aspirations for his return to civilian life. He wanted to be “a movie star or maybe the world’s greatest comedian,” but that wasn’t to be. “I ain’t a has-been,” he said, “I’m a never-was.”

We shared a dinner of soup and campfire-popped popcorn with him before turning in. Arthur disappeared under his boat where he had his bed, and we retired to our tent.

In the morning Arthur got the fire going again and began fixing oatmeal for breakfast. As he cooked he talked almost nonstop in a way that made me think he hadn’t had any company for quite some time. “Got the water boilin’ here. Ya’ll like raisins?” The raisins were somewhere in one of his buckets, so he up-ended two of them and spilled their contents across the ground. “Ain’t no use diggin’ down in the bucket when you can spread everything out like that an’ git right to what ya want.” He found the bag of raisins and dropped three handfuls into the cookpot. As he stirred them in he said, “I’ll just make believe you’re not here so’s you can see how I do it,” yet still kept up his narration. “A pinch of sugar. Some powdered milk; just stirring that up till it gets all milkified.”

After breakfast, we packed up and got ready to resume paddling south. We gave Arthur a Polaroid someone had taken of us in Thunderbolt, just outside of Savannah, and a plastic bear squeeze bottle of honey we’d been given on Daufuskie Island on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. As we paddled away, I kept looking back at Arthur, alone again now in his tide-marsh kingdom, with his fishing rod for a scepter. “Take the shortcut,” he shouted out to us, “not Hell Gate. Cross the Little Ogeechee River, this here next river.” He was still calling out advice and pointing directions for us to turn even after the breeze had swept his voice away.

Arthur would be in his mid nineties if he were alive today. I don't know what became of him.

Arthur’s camp was within sight of mansions on the Vernon River, but I felt it was a good stroke of luck to take refuge from the wind with him rather than at an estate where the residents have something fancier than a johnboat as the roof over their heads. Arthur owned little, but he didn’t hesitate to share what he had with strangers.

Minahouët

One of the perks of my admittedly cushy job as a freelance writer is that I get to try out a lot of different boats—everything from small rowing dinghies to large sailing yachts. Inevitably, some are more appealing than others, and I have to admit François Vivier’s 15′ 3-1/2″ Minahouët wasn’t one I was particularly excited about sailing. It looked nice enough in the pictures, but my heart wasn’t exactly pounding to get out on it. All that was to change during a two-hour sail on a gusty day off St-Malo on the north coast of Brittany.

My acquaintance with the Minahouët started on the slipway at the Anse des Sablons marina near the historic old town. That’s where I met the boat’s builder Pierre-Yves de la Rivière, founder of the Grand-Largue boatyard at nearby St-Briac. The bespectacled Frenchman had brought PIANISSIMO, a Minahouët he had built for a client. The boat was rather understated, with a good deal of paint and the boat’s brightwork finished with oil stain rather than varnish. It all looked very workmanlike, if rather plain.

François Vivier

The forward watertight compartment is accessed through two hatches because it is partially divided by a box for the forward mast partner and step. The aft mast partner—installed only for the sloop rig —is open; the mast will be lashed to eyelets yet to be installed.

Things got more interesting once Pierre-Yves had launched the boat and was setting it up to sail. The centerboard arrangement is ingenious. The board is fitted with a pin that slides down slots inside the case so that, once lowered, it can pivot like a conventional centerboard, and yet still be raised and removed like a daggerboard. You get the accessibility of a daggerboard with a centerboard’s convenience.

Nic Compton

The centerboard drops into the trunk like a daggerboard, but once it is in place it pivots on a short pin that’s embedded in the board.

The Minahouët has two maststeps, so it can be rigged either as a sloop, with the mast set in the aft position, or cat-rigged, with the mast in the forward position. With two or more people in the boat, the sloop option is probably more efficient, while the cat arrangement is easier for singlehanded sailing. Either way, the boat is lug-rigged and there’s no need for stays, so rigging is simple and fast.

François Vivier

Both rowing stations have removable and adjustable foot braces.

There are some interesting details. The bowsprit slips through a bronze hoop fastened to the port side of the stem head and is held in place in a chock on the foredeck, with a lashing to hold it in place. The tiller has a pin inside the slot that slips over the rudderhead. The pin engages a notch on the rudderhead, locking the tiller in place as it is pivoted into position. It may seem pretty basic stuff, but there is a purpose to the nearly fetishistic attention to detail: getting people on the water as quickly and easily as possible.

“The great advantage of the Minahouët is the ease of launching,” says Pierre-Yves. “You can do it on your own, so if it’s a nice day and you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, you can put the boat in the water on your own, and ‘baff,’ as we say in France, off you go, because it’s really very easy.”

Nic Compton

Vivier traces the development of the 15′ 3.5″ Minahouet to his 14′ 4″ Ilur and its predecessor, his 14′ 1″ Aber. All three have the option to rig with for a lugsail alone or as a lug sloop with the bowsprit and foresail.

Pierre-Yves and François had been collaborating for a number of years to develop new boats—mainly a 22′ dayboat and an 11′ 10″ pram—when they decided their next project should be a sail-and-oar boat. François had already designed several boats of this type, such as the Aber and the Ilur, and knew what the challenge was: “I tried to make a design that was as balanced as possible,” he says, “stable enough for family sailing, but also light and narrow enough to be enjoyable to row.”

To make the boat accessible to as many amateur builders as possible, the components were designed to be cut out by a CNC router. The approach marked a significant shift from the more traditional boatbuilding methods the pair had been using.

“It was first time we really explored potential of CNC cutting and of modern plywood construction,” says Pierre-Yves. “All the parts lock together. The longitudinal pieces lock into the transverse parts; you simply click them into place and everything falls into place naturally. When you build a boat manually, there’s always the risk of making mistakes when you line up the planks and the bulkheads can move. But with a computer design, there’s no possibility of error.” The plan seems to have worked and, since the Minahouët was launched in 2002, about 30 of the 40 boats launched were built by amateurs, mostly from kits, while the rest were built at the Grand-Largue boatyard.

Out on the bay off St-Malo, a brisk offshore wind was ruffling the surface of the sea, and ominous black clouds were piled up on the horizon. Alone aboard the Minahouët, Pierre-Yves shot across the bay, the very picture of insouciance. The wind continued to build, and after a couple of near-capsizes, Pierre-Yves lowered the mainsail and put a reef in. With the sail area reduced, the boat settled down and became more easily managed.

Nic Compton

With 135 sq ft of sail flying and the wind building, Pierre-Yves de la Rivière, the builder of this Minahouët, soon tucked a reef in.

After a little while, I traded places with Pierre-Yves and tried rowing the boat with the sails lowered. The owner he had built the Minahouët for had opted for single thole pins and grommets instead of rowlocks, which took a bit of getting used to. I’m not convinced there’s any real advantage to this setup, though it does look good and, providing you row against the grommet rather than the pin, the oars will rest alongside the boat if you let the handles go. More to my liking were the adjustable and removable footbraces fitted on either side of the centerboard case to give you something to push against while rowing.

Nic Compton

The side benches are below the thwarts and provide a shelf for storing the oars out of the way when they’re not in use. The centerboard trunk is also well below the thwart level to make it less of an obstruction when moving about the boat. The foot bracing for the forward station is split into two halves, one one each side of the trunk.

Once under way, I made good progress rowing against wind and tide and managed to row a fair distance back up the bay toward St-Malo. I’ve been spoiled by having my Western Skiff to row, which is considerably lighter than the Minahouët and therefore easier to row, but I had to admit that, in the windy conditions off St-Malo that day, the Minahouët carried its way better than my skiff would have. I could quite imagine rowing it several miles up an estuary or into harbor, although sailing probably is her best mode of propulsion.

Eventually, Pierre-Yves joined me on board and we shook the reef out of the main and raised the sails again. With the wind abating slightly, we eased onto a reach and sailed toward the off-lying islands of Le Petit Bé and Le Grand Bé. I felt immediately at ease with the boat, as if I’d been sailing it all my life. There was nothing unexpected, nothing to worry about; everything was where it should be.

Nic Compton

The unstayed mast of the sloop rig carries the 108-sq-ft main and 27-sq-ft foresail.

The Minahouët’s performance under sail was better than I expected. It was faster and pointed higher than I’d anticipated, and perhaps that was why I felt so relaxed on board. From the moment we set off, it performed impeccably and made me feel I was doing a good job; I didn’t need to squeeze that bit of extra speed, worry about the set of the sail, or try to point that little bit higher. The boat performed without being coaxed. It helped that we were going nowhere in particular and that it was a perfect autumn day and the coast was aglow with late afternoon sun. What was not to like?

I came ashore feeling rather pleased with myself. The boat had handled well, under both sail and oar, and I felt I’d got its number. It was only later I realized this feeling of satisfaction was what François and Pierre-Yves had aimed to achieve all along. It was thanks to their unassuming and deceptively simple design and its whole host of clever little details—an out-of-the-way place under the thwarts to stow the oars and a low centerboard trunk that’s easy to step over, among others, including many I probably didn’t even notice—that I was able to jump in the boat and sail it with such ease. My feeling of well-being was a direct result of their hard work.

There was one feature that looked like it might cause a minor problem while we were taking the boat out of the water. Unlike several other Vivier designs with well-rounded bows that lift themselves onto the trailer as they move forward, the Minahouët has a plumb stem, and may need to be lifted it to get it onto a normal trailer. The solution for PIANISSIMO was to ride a break-back trailer, which hinges in the middle until the roller is under the stem and then is straightened and locked into position before winching the boat the rest of the way up. Once on the trailer, there’s an elongated hole in the stem for a line to hold the boat in place.

Even though I had started out feeling decidedly skeptical about the Minahouët, at the end of two hours’ sailing I was completely converted to this deceptively simple little boat. Not only that, but I was pretty well convinced this was a boat a lot of people would find well worth owning. Park it in your drive, and the next sunny day, “baff, off you go!” Well, they do say it’s the quiet ones you have to watch.

Nic Compton is a freelance writer and photographer who grew up sailing dinghies in Greece. He has written about boats and the sea for more than 20 years and has published 12 nautical books, including a biography of the designer Iain Oughtred, available at The WoodenBoat Store. He currently lives on the River Dart in Devon, U.K. He previously wrote about his adventures in his Western Skiff.

Minahouët Particulars

[table]

Length/15′ 3.5″

Beam/5′ 1.4″

Draft, board up/6.3″

Draft, board down/3′ 3.3″

Weight/551 lbs

Sail area/Loose-foot lug, 114 sq ft; Sloop, 135 sq ft

Maximum outboard power/4 hp

Kit construction time/450 hours

[/table]

Building plans for the Minahouët are available from François Vivier, Nautical Architect for 200 €.

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!

Penobscot 14

The Penobscot 14 is a versatile sail, oar, and motor boat designed by Arch Davis in the early ’90s. His goal was to design a boat that was easy to build, had pleasing lines, and offered excellent sailing and rowing performance. He did not take inspiration from any particular existing design, and says his design was “based on many years of looking at boats and trying to figure out what makes a good one.”

He was influenced a bit by the Whitehall-type boats, but most have a narrow beam in proportion to their length and rarely a sailing rig, so Davis gave the hull more bearing to enable it carry sail and drew three sail plans—gunter sloop, lug cat, and sprit cat—to meet a variety of needs. Arch built the first Penobscot 14 in 1992, and the result was a seakindly hull with striking lines. Hull No. 1 sits in his garage, not taking up much space, and he still takes it out to row. He published plans in 1993 and since then has sold over 1,500 sets of them.

Kent Lewis

The stringers that back up the laps strengthen the hull without the need for frames.

The glued-lapstrake 14′ plywood hull has an innovative structure with wider, and therefore fewer, planks, simplifying construction. The internal framework of longitudinal stringers is anchored to the stem, two bulkheads, and the transom. Two temporary molds help fair the stringers while the six strakes are applied. These stringers provide exceptional strength along the plank laps. The planks are attached to the stringers with glue and stainless-steel screws, and so fewer clamps are required.

Woodworkers with some experience can turn themselves into boatbuilders by following Davis’s excellent study package and watching the companion DVD. There are several helpful offerings to choose from: a 14-page set of plans; an illustrated 74-page builder’s guide; full-sized Mylar patterns for bulkheads, stem, transom and molds; and a frame kit, which includes bulkheads, temporary building frames, and transom frame. Kits for the sails, spars, and rigging are also available. If a builder needs help along the way, Davis responds to phone calls and emails; he was a big help to us during the construction of our P14.

Kaitlynn Lewis

The authors, here aboard their Penobscot 14, ST. JACQUES, opted for the sprit rig. The brail, clearly visible here against the tanbark cloth, makes quick work of gathering up the loose-footed sail.

Construction begins with the assembly of a jig built of common lumber. Davis emphasizes that a variety of materials may be used during all phases of construction, and recommends taking advantage of locally available materials. The boat is built upside down both on the temporary molds and what will become the bulkheads, stem, and transom. We chose okoume plywood planking, cypress stringers, and a white oak keel.

The keel can be built with a slot for a daggerboard or a centerboard, or left solid if the boat is intended solely for rowing. After the stringers and sheer clamp are added, planking begins from the garboard. When the deadwood is attached and the planking is complete, the boat is flipped right-side up, and it’s time to add the centerboard or daggerboard trunk. The bulkheads are meant to enclose watertight flotation compartments in each end, but we varied from plan and opted for readily compartments under the bow and stern seats and use spare PFDs as flotation in them. The breasthook, quarter knees, gunwale, and railcap complete construction of the hull.

In the three rigs Davis provides in the plans, the lug rig carries 77 sq ft of sail, the sprit rig 73, and gunter rig 95. The spars for all of the rigs will fit inside the hull when not in use. We chose the small sprit rig for ease of rigging and handling on our gusty bay.

Audrey Lewis

John Stevenson’s SWEET DREAMS carries the boomed standing lug.

The boat is lightweight, easy to trailer, and getting underway is simple: Step the mast, bend on sail, and ship the rudder. At our beachfront home we launch with a dolly and further afield the boat is light enough to launch easily via trailer on a ramp. We can be underway in about 20 minutes. We wade the boat out a few feet and climb aboard over the side. Davis says that he boards over the transom, then pushes the rudder down with the trailing foot as he gets underway.

Once onboard we drop the centerboard a bit, row a few feet to get deep enough to drop the rudder blade, and look for the wind. When we find it, we loosen the brail and the sprit sets nicely. The sprit’s snotter runs down to the mast thwart and is tied off to a belaying pin. We use another pin for the brail. The sheets are easy to reach and to route aft for singlehanding.

The Penobscot 14 is a stable sailer, well suited for skinny water, and very comfortable for the crew with plenty of room for camp-cruising gear. With the sprit rig, heeling is minimal, and the boat exceeds 3 knots with little effort when we are out messing about. It will not point especially high; its favorite point of sail is a beam reach. The hull has just the right enough of keel and deadwood to sail in shallow water with the rudder retracted and the centerboard up.

The arrangement of the sides and seat offer many convenient places to sit with comfortable back support. The skipper’s favorite position is reclined against the transom with her foot up on a side seat. The stringers act as “mini shelves” that can hold gear such as a boathook, a paddle, or coffee cups. A small section of floorboards may be added, but we left the bilge open so we can see where all the spilled coffee went.

Audrey Lewis

The Penobscot 14 rows with ease, carries well, and tracks straight. Davis recommends 8′ oars. With the two rowing stations the boat can be rowed tandem.

When we can’t find the wind, there are rowing stations forward and amidships. There is plenty of room to row from either station, and the boat is well balanced with our crew of two—skipper on the aft seat and the first mate taking his place amidships or forward. The Penobscot 14 rows with ease, carries well, and tracks well. The oars may be left in the oarlocks when not in use, with the blades tucked neatly under the breasthook. There is also sufficient room to lay them on the side seats. Our neighbor has built two Penobscot 14s and has rowed them over 1,200 miles, so it is safe to say that it is good rowboat.

There’s a notch in the transom for those who have a knack for sculling, and, if motoring appeals, the plans included instructions for equipping the boat with a small outboard of 2 to 3 hp.

The plans for the Penobscot 14 have provisions for mounting a small outboard. In this case, the transom is made thicker and a small, removable section is cut to accommodate a short-shaft motor. If the motor is not permanently mounted, the section that has been cut out is designed to be dropped back into place to restore the appearance of the transom.

The Penobscot 14 is easy to care for and store. After a day on the water, it is a simple task to wipe down the hull and cockpit by sponging the water (and coffee) out from easy-to-reach low points. The spars, sail, and rudder stow in the hull, then we throw on a custom-made Sunbrella cover.

The Penobscot 14 performs well as-designed and is delightful. We highly recommend it to anyone looking to build a boat with a few attractive curves and a versatile rig for messing about. There is great support community for owners of Penobscot 14s as well. We can confirm what Davis has to say about the boat: “The attention she draws wherever you take her, and her excellent performance under sail or oars, will give you great enjoyment for years to come.”

Audrey and Kent Lewis live in Florida and enjoy small-boat sailing, restoration and boatbuilding when she’s not designing costumes or he’s flying. They launched their Penobscot 14 in 2017, and in 2016 they restored an 1880s Mississippi River Skiff for the Beauvoir Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi. Their personal fleet includes several Sunfish, a wooden Sailfish, wooden Sunfish, Catfish catamaran, O’Day Daysailer, Drascombe Lugger, and Drascombe Dabber. They have also rescued and fostered over 30 boats since 2011. Some people describe them as “boat-struck.” They document their boating pursuits in their blog.

Penobscot 14 Particulars

[table]

Length/14′

Waterline length/12′ 8″

Beam/ 4′ 6.5″

Draft, board up/ 7″

Draft, down/ 2′ 6″

Weight/155–175 lbs

[/table]

Plans for the Penobscot 14 are available from Arch Davis Designs: Study Package (covers Penobscot 13, 14, and 17), $15; Boat Plans, $125; Frame Kit, $850. Inquire for details on other kits. WoodenBoat chronicled the construction of the Penobscot 14 in Nos. 138, 139, and 140.

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!

A Boat for the Summer

Back in the ’60s, Roger Miller sang, “I’m a man of means by no means, king of the road.” My son Koen and I are men of means by no means, but we had an ambition to make the coast of British Columbia our road.

I had read and heard about the wondrous waters of British Columbia and long ago had my heart set on sailing them, so I proposed to Koen that we take a cruise. He studies math at the university in Vancouver and was doing quite well in his courses, so he could afford to take a semester off to join me. We looked into renting a boat or buying something cheap, but couldn’t find anything that would fit the bill. We shifted gears and decided we could build a simple boat in a month and still have enough of the summer left to head north along the mainland coast.

We let the idea ripen for a few weeks. It still felt good, so during lunch one day I grabbed a pencil and in a burst of inspiration sketched the simplest form I could think of. Most boats are designed to last for decades, but there was a time when people just hollowed out a log if they wanted to cross the swamps. On Lake Titicaca, people would bundle reeds and have a boat in short order. In other parts of the world people made birchbark canoes, coracles, or balsa rafts using the materials available to them. We’d do the same; in our case we had access to cheap plywood and construction lumber. And to outfit the boat for our voyage, the Vancouver area has no shortage of boatyards and chandlers, supermarkets, and secondhand stores.

We needed a place to build the boat, but Koen suggested that there were some things that didn’t lend themselves to preparation and we shouldn’t spoil the sense of adventure by having every last item planned in advance. I made my travel plans, and we would thereafter trust in chance. That became the beauty of building the boat as well as exploring the coast.

Koen works on storage compartments in the cockpit. The bottom, bulkheads, transom and foredeck were made with 5/8" fir plywood and 3/8" plywood used for the rest. The lumber for the building jig was later transformed in four oars.

I arrived in Vancouver early in April 2017, while Koen was still finishing his spring semester, and we made his room at the university our base camp. After I unpacked my drawing, the sails from my Ness Yawl, and some blocks, cleats, and ropes, I began the search for a place to build the boat. I walked the banks of Fraser River under a gray sky and peeked around big sheds, small shops, and seemingly deserted mini-marinas. I wasn’t finding many people around, but then someone yelled at me. A man alarmed by my snooping around by his trailer stopped me. I explained my intentions to him; he warmed up to me, introduced himself as Ken, and we shook hands. We parted and I continued strolling the waterfront. I hadn’t gone far when a car pulled to a stop next to me. It was Ken and he had chased me down to say his friend Alan could offer us his shop for a month. It was just the stroke of luck that our plan not to plan had allowed to happen.

With a building site secured, we ordered materials at a nearby lumberyard, and bought a saw, a square, and a small plane. The owner of the shop was so enthused by our project that he loaned us a circular saw, a jigsaw, and a straightedge.

We surprised ourselves by working seven days a week, finding it difficult to stop. We enjoyed taking bevels, chopping away at an oar or leeboard with an axe, or bending a rubbing strake, but we didn’t linger on the tasks or strive for a fine finish. The goal was to get the boat launched and use it. In four weeks, it was afloat, ready to sail, and fully loaded with provisions.

The boat was launched without ceremony or christening in the backwaters of the Fraser River. It floating high and had no leaks. The fisherman’s anchor had its place in a recessed part of the foredeck.

On Sunday, May 14, the forecast called for stable, sunny weather and light winds. We cast off and took to the oars. A yell came from the muddy banks—Alan was waving a last farewell. The ebb flowing down the Fraser River was in our favor, but the oars, each coarsely shaped out of 2×6, proved too long for good balance—so when a southwesterly breeze piped up, we tried sailing. We tacked slowly downriver. The tiller interfered with the mainsheet, so Koen pulled out a saw and cut the tiller to suitable length, all while keeping a steady course. Our pointed box, as rough as it was, was rising to meet our expectations.

The deep buzz of the city dwindled until there was little more than the occasional cry of a gull to be heard and we grew more aware of the murmur of waves and our own wake. Koen and I were quickly at ease with the boat and we adjusted sheets, shifted leeboards, and steered to the wind almost without thinking. Now and then we burst out in wild laughter—an indication, we realized, that we were tired and a bit nervous, but deeply satisfied with what we had accomplished so far.

While the tide nudged us slowly past Steveston at the mouth of the Fraser, a fisherman aboard an aluminum skiff came by and hailed us. In our conversation, we told him about our adventure and learned he was heading out to tend some nets, a method of fishing allowed for First Nations people. He was taken aback by the boat’s diminutive size and the magnitude of our voyage, and surprised us by asking, “Have you obtained permission of the tribal elders to pass into our territory?” Without waiting for answer he laughed loud, opened the throttle, and sped away. The thought hadn’t occurred to us, and although the native fisherman was just giving us a good ribbing, it made us aware of another aspect of our whereabouts. Suddenly we felt a bit arrogant, as though we were trespassing like early explorers Cook, Vancouver, and Bodega y Quadra before us.

Later that day, with the city of Vancouver abeam as we headed north, a 4′ slab of styrofoam, carrying two masts and sails, crossed our track. This unassuming, unmanned craft had survived freighters, passenger ferries, and the shifting weather, keeping a steady northwesterly course. The little ketch was a reassuring sight and boosted our confidence.

The fo’c’s’le offered good place to be in the evenings. It housed a bookshelf, a table, a wine and beer cellar, and two bunks.

The wind died slowly, and we rowed several hours in the darkening evening, growing ever more tired after a day at the heavy oars. With the help of a flashlight we found a mooring buoy in a small cove on the southeasterly tip of Bowen Island and tied our painter to it. We could hear the shore close by, but it was hard to see in the feeble light of our modest flashlight. An easterly breeze came straight into the cove and stirred the rig. I would have gone straight to bed, but Koen always has a healthy appetite, so he put a late dinner together. We finally crouched through the narrow opening to the “fo’c’s’le” and laid our tired bodies to rest. Koen was off to sleep in a minute, but for me it was an uneasy night worrying about the wind and waves.

On waking early I found the boat swaying and slamming in the waves in an uncomfortable way—the southeasterly had piped up considerably. I looked outside and in the morning light I could see the steep, rocky, wave-lashed shore just 100′ away. The marine forecast promised more wind from the southeast and a lot of rain, so we were eager to get away. Taking to the oars, we took up the fight against the wind and chop. The bow slammed back and forth; the rocks to leeward terrified us and made us row like madmen. We eventually managed to get far enough from the shore to stow the oars and hoist the sails.

We sailed closehauled along Bowen Island’s steep, wooded shore heading for Snug Cove, hoping it would live up to its name. We were over-canvassed, but reefing down wasn’t an option; any leeward drift while putting the reef in would push us dangerously close to the rugged coast. After 4 miles of anxious sailing we rounded the entrance to Snug Cove and found the marina inside so well protected that we had to row the last yards in the still air. We tied up to a floating dock, rigged a tarp, and let the rain come.

Soon after we had ducked out of the weather, a man approached in a boat and asked from under his dripping southwester what he could do for us. The nerve-wracking experience was probably showing on our faces; I blurted out, “A shower!” An hour later, after this kind man drove us across the island to home, Koen and I were washing away the sweat and grime. He and his wife also offered a beer, advice on not-to-be-missed spots, and some old charts as well. The tension in our shoulders slowly slipped away in the warmth of their hospitality.

When we rowed into Smuggler Cove we heard the occupants a 21' sloop anchored there say: "Well, here we have an even smaller boat!" As small as our boat might have appeared, it was big and heavy enough to make it unwieldy on shore. We had often wished we’d had a dinghy, something foldable, for more convenient access to land.

The following week, we crept along the Sunshine Coast and got acquainted with the scale of the British Columbia landscape, a tidal range approaching 16’, and an abundance of drifting logs and deadheads. We made an overnight stop at Wilson Creek and raided the town’s supermarket the next morning, stocking up on flour, oats, nuts, raisins, and powdered milk. Although our supplies were as simple as the boat itself, Koen saw to it that we would have a culinary high point every day. He had brought his sourdough starter; it was so dear to him that it even had a name: Jesaja. In the morning, the sweet smell of fresh bread filled the air; Koen was beaming at what he had created in our two frying pans.

I had been wondering why almost all of the boats in the area had dodgers and awnings, and got my answer on our 9-mile crossing from Secret Cove on the mainland to Squitty Bay on the southern tip of Lasqueti Island. The air was cool so we sat in the blazing sun to keep warm. By the time we reached Lasqueti we were well cooked.

We dropped the sails and rowed into a 30-yard-wide natural harbor under the watchful eye of a perched bald eagle. We tied up at the government dock, and when the harbormaster came down, we paid her the fee for us to stay the night. We asked her about drinking water, and she told us that people on Lasqueti live off the grid and provide their own power and water. She directed us to a man living nearby who would be able to fill our 15-liter canister. We met him standing on the float beside a beautiful 23′ sloop, and found out he had built this gem of a boat of mostly driftwood from that very beach. He had milled it with a chainsaw and worked it with hand tools. The water running from his tap at his house was like tea, colored by cedar trees, but he declared it was good drinking water.

After a few days of exploring Lasqueti and nearby Jedediah Island, we recrossed Malaspina Strait back to the mainland, rowing in a dead calm a dozen miles eastward to spend the night at Madeira Park. We were used to sailing Europe’s coastal waters around the North Sea, where the tidal range is around 8’, and were eager to see what tides twice that do in the many rapids of the B.C. coast. What we’d heard about Sechelt Rapids sounded like something almost from a different planet. We sailed and rowed north then east along the half-mile-wide Agamemnon Channel into the mountain-fringed waters of Jervis Inlet and moored at the small town of Egmont.

The next day we hiked to the Sechelt Rapids along a footpath through a lush cedar forest. We’d had several warm, sunny days and it was nice to stretch our legs in the cool shadows of the woods. Beyond the trees that surrounded us, we heard a muted rumble that grew louder as we got closer. Quite suddenly we were at a barren rocky patch just a few feet from the rapids. From the southeast, millions of gallons swept across our overwhelming panoramic view racing to the northwest at bewildering speed. The ebb-powered current piled standing waves up against small islets as if trying to push them out of the way. At the tip of one, water cascaded down 6′ into a chain of deep, ever-widening whirlpools.

We sat there in amazement for almost an hour, as the hissing and roaring rapids accelerated to 17 knots on the spring tide. If this was what the British Columbia rapids looked like, how could we even consider taking our boat through those that lay ahead of us? From far upstream, an aluminum crab boat was bearing down on the rapid. Weaving and swaying, it skirted the worst turbulence as it sped downstream. The skipper leaned half out of his window and waved to us. That broke the spell, and we came to our senses again. Koen and I started walking back along the trail, discussing our possibilities. The current in each rapid changes direction four times a day, and we’d have windows with little or no current. We ended up with the feeling that we stood a good chance getting through any of the rapids that lay ahead.

Koen was a picture of concentration as we raced wing on wing with a reefed main along Malaspina Strait. We initially used an oar as a whisker pole to hold the jib out for downwind runs, but later found a piece of driftwood to do the job.

Two days later we were again on our way back to Malaspina Strait. The weather had changed; during the night a southeasterly had swept through, bringing wind and rain squalls. We set out from an anchorage in Ballet Bay on the south shore of Blind Bay, and the water grew more exposed. We needed to reduce sail. Tucked in the lee behind a small island, we put two reefs in the main and struck the jib. Koen and I decided to head back out into the Strait and test the boat and ourselves. If something didn’t feel right we would turn around, seek shelter, and wait for better weather.

We got hit by a few gusts, but everything seemed under control. Out in the Strait we jibed and set a course back into the protection of Blind Bay. I asked Koen what his gut feelings were, and he thought we just could continue sailing north along the Strait. I was a bit more hesitant, but there were many places where we could take refuge. Koen steered out of the bay again. It was our first sail in more than a gentle breeze, and we felt comfortable on a downwind run. We raised the jib opposite the main and used an oar as a whisker pole to spread the jib out to better balance the main and ease the pressure on the helm.

We were making good speed when suddenly a scraping and rumbling resonated in the hull, and then there was a strong jerk at the tiller. At first we were worried that the boat was breaking up, but it soon dawned on us that we had run over one of those logs that float so low in the water that they are almost impossible to see in the waves. It slipped astern; the boat was intact. The collision and the day’s gray skies didn’t keep us from enjoying the sailing. The boat really moved well. By the time we sailed into Lund we had covered 30 sea-miles in 6 hours, not bad for an ugly duckling.

After an overnight stay in Lund we sailed to Desolation Sound. Our plan to proceed without a fixed plan left me and Koen to decide on our strategy for the coming days and weeks. To the north, two deep inlets—Bute Inlet, 43 miles long, and Knight Inlet, 67 miles—promised hidden jewels of nature well inland, but we didn’t like the prospect of long days of rowing the steep and likely windless fjords. To the west, the route through the islands clustered between the mainland and Vancouver Island would lead us through several rapids. The neap tides were upon us, so we would traverse the rapids at their least dangerous and could safely make our way to the Broughton Archipelago. Cruising in the rather gloomy Desolation Sound left us wanting to see the horizon again, and the prospect of sailing along the islands on edge of Queen Charlotte Strait appealed to us.

We anchored in the still waters of Roscoe Bay on West Redonda Island. We were lured by the promise of a short walk along a trial to Black Lake where we could bathe in fresh water. The walk turned out to 20 minutes of bushwhacking.

From our anchorage in the still waters of Roscoe Bay on West Redonda Island, we had a magical tailwind following us north along Waddington Channel, west along Pryce Channel, through a U-turn to the south in Raza Passage, and giving as a final push northward on Calm Channel.

We spent a short and uneasy night anchored by the spooky, and apparently deserted, village of Church House.

Underway again, we steered for the gap between Sonora Island and Stuart Island, where Yuculta Rapids was hiding just around the corner, followed close behind by Gillard Passage and Dent Rapids. We had left in good time and were carried by a fresh southeasterly under sunny skies, putting us two hours ahead of the slack water. We had studied the charts together and decided we would hug the shore to starboard first, then cross and hug the shore on the other side, to avoid the worst and possibly even get some back-eddies to help us through. We entered sailing the jib only, and yet had just enough speed against the 2- to 3-knot south-going current.

We had to wait for the tide to rise for us to cross a shallow spot in Cramer Passage at Broughton Island, so Koen passed the time doing some solo sailing.

Just as we proceeded to cross to the port shore, two bald eagles gave alarming shrieks and flew over us, startling us. There were some tide rips, but they were easily managed and our transit of the rapids worked out much better than we had feared. In less than half an hour we had passed Yuculta and were still hugging the shore to port.

To avoid the rapids in Gillard Passage, we tried the narrow opening south of Inner Passage. While a few dozen sea lions watched us from barren Sea Lion Rock, we hoisted the mainsail to power up. We had to perform a tight turn to port against 3 or 4 knots of current working against us in a channel less than 30’ wide. We succeeded in the turning but failed to make progress: we had to slip out the main’s reefs while being set back in the direction of Sea Lion Rock. We did it in record time, and began to make progress against the current again. Keeping close to the lee shore gave us the most wind and the least current. Carefully, we steered just clear of the boulders underwater and tree branches overhead; a fortunate gust or two helped us inch to wider waters.

By the time we arrived at Dent Rapids a mile and a half farther along, the turning of the tide was near. We sailed close to Dent and Little Dent islands against the last bit of flood entering the wide Cordero Channel. Koen and I felt victorious, and to celebrate we decided to put in for a break at Shoal Bay, just 7 miles from Dent .

The 600′-long wooden pier loomed 20′ above us while we tied up at the floating dock. We strolled down the pier, which connected to a wide valley. Six cottages and a vegetable garden occupied the land where there had once been a thriving town with 5,000 inhabitants.

A driftwood log (at the left) crept by very slowly and paid us a visit behind Gilford Island near Thompson Sound. We were moored in a tiny shallow cove, with lines to shore off the bow and stern holding us just off a tiny beach.

The next afternoon, we rowed and sailed in light air north from Shoal Bay into Phillips Arm. Five miles in, the wooded hillside was fronted by a grassy foreshore. From a distance, we could see a brown spot slowly working along the shore. We hesitated on how close to get. Can grizzlies swim fast enough to get to us? We kept a good 70 yards away and soon saw a second, lighter-colored bear. They were both eating grass and sounded just like grazing cows. We rowed to a pair of anchored logs, tied the boat alongside, and continued to watched the sow and her large cub grazing while we prepared dinner The two bears finally meet in a mock battle, towering high on their hind legs. The cold air dropping down from the snowy slopes far above made us seek refuge in the fo’c’s’le when the light faded. The bears disappeared in the woods. We closed the hatches in case they changed their minds and wanted dessert.

We let the boat drying out in Potts Lagoon and were surprised to see the receding water reveal a bear paw's print just beside the boat. The boat’s flat bottom made it easy to take the bottom and wait aboard the boat for the next tide.

We easily negotiated the last two rapids, Green Point and Whirlpool, thanks to the neap tides of the quarter moon. The moderate southeasterly breezes of these days suited us well, and before long we arrived at Port McNeill on the Vancouver Island shore. It was a dull place, but had a convenient harbor and shops. From there we went on to the island towns of Alert Bay and Sointula.

From the outset, I had been dreaming of sailing farther north, but we decided not to. Instead we chose to explore the close-by islands during the remaining three weeks. The Broughton Archipelago offered a myriad of islands and islets, and the open waters of Queen Charlotte Strait were never far off. Leaving Sointula, we rounded the red-topped lighthouse at Pulteney Point on Malcolm Island, and half sailed, half rowed in a dwindling westerly breeze. Looking north across Queen Charlotte we saw the snow-capped mountains of the Coast Range. Would we tempt fate and row across the 11 miles to the mainland shore in the sunny calm? It was early enough in the day to say yes, so we set to work. But after a quarter of an hour, a light breeze brushed our cheeks, and with relief we laid the oars aside and set sail.

A First Nations woman had recommended we keep an eye out for trade beads, the trading currency that dated back to the voyages of Cook and Vancouver. I found one on the beach here near the site of Mamalilaculla on Village Island.

Within 20 minutes the northwesterly became a fresh breeze. The mirror-like water was soon fractured and began to build up in small seas, each with a glassy green crest. The waves threatened to board us, but our rough-and-tough plywood box answered by dancing elegantly from one peak to the next. Just over halfway across the Strait, the Numas Islands offered shelter to put in a reef and continue north across the open water to the north being a bit more relaxed. As we approached the mainland, we could shake out the reef and carry on under full sail. Soon we glided into Wells Passage. The low sun gave the shoreline a tranquilizing golden glow, and we coasted into a bay on the north side of Dickson Island to drop the anchor for the night.

The diversity of Broughton’s islands made for interesting adventures. Sometimes we would hide from high winds in a small cove or deep in a fjord, then in lighter conditions we would venture out into the Strait. We squeaked through the narrow entrance of a lagoon, and a small family of curious Pacific white-sided dolphins appeared under the bow. In another lagoon we let the boat dry out on an ebb, only to find bear prints just beside the boat when the falling tide revealed them. We anchored off a deserted First Nations village where a frame made of three immense logs was all that remained of what must have been an immense longhouse. Crossing the entrance to Knight Inlet, we heard a loud hmpfffff as a fin whale rose less than 100’ away to take a breath.

The boat had served us well in the two months we’d been sailing. It would have deserved to have a name painted on the transom, but we never did a proper christening. The boat was as unfinished as the trip was unplanned, and both had their practicality and their charm. It was not a disaster for the rough plywood hull to bounce over a half-submerged log any more than it was a loss of progress to wander aimlessly from our northern course.

The boat was a temporary vehicle meant to satisfy our urge for a summer’s travel. At the beginning, we thought we might leave the boat on a beach or set it on fire when we were done with it, but we began to wonder if it could brighten someone’s life when it was time for us to return home. At Port McNeill, we met a fishing guide who lived with his wife and two small kids, working their float-house fishing lodge in Cramer Passage in the summer. We offered the boat to them, thinking it could be a nice distraction for the kids since they had no nearby neighbors to play with. We were as happy as they were that our boxy boat would have a new home after having served us so loyally, and were met with grateful tears when we delivered it.

Koen and I returned to Vancouver by bus and ferry. Back home, in the midst of telling my daughter about the adventures I’d had with her brother, she grabbed me and insisted that she and I have a new experience for the two of us sometime in the future. I replied with a smile, “How could I say no to that?”

Hein van Greevenbroek is a carpenter and a builder of furniture boats who is currently living in the Hardanger region on the west coast of Norway. He emigrated from The Netherlands 12 years ago on a 49′ catamaran he designed and built. He has done most of his sailing on traditional boats in Holland’s inland waters, but has done some seafaring as a mate on schooners and smacks. He once owned a 66’ tjalk (a type of Dutch sailing barge) which he operated as charter vessel, has worked at several boatyards in Holland and Norway, and sailed his Åfjord square-rigged halvfjerrømming from Trondheim to Amsterdam. He hates engine noise.

In response to a reader’s request for plans for the boat, QUICK AND DIRTY, Hein provided these drawings and offsets:

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.

Doughnut Fenders

In the eyes of our traditionally minded peers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my wife Jenny and I tread dangerously close to the gates of hell by sailing a fiberglass boat. Our redemption comes by way of the plywood lapstrake dinghy we built as a tender to it. I had installed a robust length of line along the sheer to provide a nice cushion to protect the mothership, but we needed something more to protect the tender from the dinghy dock and the loitering tenders-of-others.

My Internet search for rope fenders led to a lot of cylindrical versions similar in shape to their modern air-filled cousins. Scrolling down a little further in the search results, I eventually found doughnut-shaped fenders that I discovered were not difficult to make.

The basic principle of most rope fenders is to create a core and then wrap it prettily. My process may be different from others, but once one method is understood, variations come easily. The core of the doughnut fender is a coil; I use a darker line for it, which has the pleasing effect of contrasting with the lighter-colored line I use on the outside. I wrap the core using a type of loop hitching. To see other ways on how to wrap the core, you’ll find examples of ringbolt hitching and buttonholing in The Ashley Book of Knots, pages 569 to 571. (The book is also available in digital format for free online.)

To create a core, coil a single length of line, making sure that each loop lies close to the previous one. To keep each loop from drifting away or crossing over the others, stitch marline through the loops to hold them together as you lay them down and to keep the core a consistent diameter. I sequentially increase and then decrease the number of loops. The first row—the innermost one—has one loop; the second row has two loops; the middle row three; the fourth two again; and the last row one loop. Larger fenders will require more loops for the core.

To begin the decorative wrap, I stitch a lighter-colored line to the core loops for a few inches to fix it in place. I begin hitching with a loop on the outside, tucking the working end under the standing part. Drawing the line around the core, I pull the end up through the just-made loop, snug it up, and continue with another loop. I keep each turn tight against its neighbor, and take up any slack before moving too far ahead. When the core is covered and I can make no more turns, I lock the hitching with a simple overhand knot after drawing the line up through the last loop. I leave a generous amount of line to secure the fender to the dinghy and whip the tail end.

The core starts with a single loop with an inside diameter of about 3". The 9 loops of 3/8" Spunflex 3-strand polypropylene the author uses for the core take up around 9' of line. stitches of marline hold the coil together.

The lighter colored line used for the wrap provides contrast for a decorative effect. A 16' length of 3/8" polyester New England Vintage 3-strand covers the core and leaves a tail to secure the fender on the dinghy's rail

The loop hitching for the wrap begins with a twisted loop.

The tail end of the line passes around the coil and through the loop.

The next loop is made, a repeat of the first.

The loop hitching continues around the coil and back to the beginning.

A half hitch in the tail end, pulled up tight against the last wrap, keeps the fender from getting looser with use and age.

Andy and his wife Jenny have been messing about in small wooden boats since they met in 2005. They have built and restored a number of boats that they use for canoe-camping in the Adirondacks and sailing in company with their fellow Delaware Valley TSCA members. When their daughter Ella came along eight years ago, they needed a larger vessel and bought the aforementioned fiberglass boat for weekend outings on the water. They cruise the upper Chesapeake Bay and explore its shallow creeks and byways in their homebuilt tender.

Editor’s notes:

I found that I could make the core coils faster and more uniformly by using a jig. I cut a 3” disk cut from 1 ½” stock and fastened it to a 7” plywood disk. Eight bandsaw kerfs accept lengths of marline that will later hold the wraps of the coil together.

The jig is designed for 3/8" line and requires about 25' to make one fender, with a continuous core and wrap. The first wrap starts at the top and winds down around the core three times. Needles temporarily hold the coils together and tight. The pencil-marked kerf indicates where the transition to the next wrap starts.

The second set of three coils goes from the bottom up.

The last wrap adds three coils, wound from top to bottom. This core, like Andy's, has 9 wraps, but they're arranged in a cross section that is a square (3-3-3) rather than his diamond (1-2-3-2-1). When the wraps are applied, the cross sections of both become nearly circular.

Once the eight lengths of marline are tied around the core, the needled can be removed.

The entire fender can be made of a single length of line. Here the first hitch of the wrap has been made directly from the coil. The remainder of the process follows Andy's instructions.

The fender on the left was wrapped with Andy's form of loop-hitching. The two fenders on the left are wrapped with kackling, hitches that alternate left and right. The loop hitching I used for my first fender took up 27' of line; the Kackling took 25' and I could get two fenders from a prepackaged 50' length of 3/8" sisal.

You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.

Mantus Headlamp

A full charge on the battery is rated for 6 hours with the light on high, 20 hours on low, 60 hours for the red light, and 48 hours for the SOS.

I have had all sorts of headlamps over the years, but none have impressed me as much as the Mantus Headlamp from Mantus Marine. It’s built around a rugged, watertight, aluminum-alloy case that houses a rechargeable and replaceable battery. The included 2600 mAh, 3.7-volt lithium-ion battery takes a full charge in about 3 hours. The single LED light, mounted in the middle of the housing, has a high output of 770 lumens, a low output of 150 lumens, an SOS beacon light, and a red light setting for preserving night vision.

The head strap can be switched out for a smaller strap to attach the lamp to a wrist or a PFD.

To test the manufacturer’s claims, I ran the battery at the high-beam setting at a full charge to see how much juice it had. The light started to get slightly dimmer after about 5.5 hours, but did not go off. If I plan to use the headlamp for periods longer than the battery can hold a charge, additional batteries are available online and at electronics outlets.

The light is seated in a soft, curved rubber fixture, and the easily adjusted head straps are comfortable. The head straps can be removed and the light can be mounted on an included wrist strap. With the shorter strap, the light can also be mounted on a PFD as an emergency light. To adjust the angle of the beam, the whole light rotates inside the soft rubber mount. There’s no rigid, breakable pivot mechanism to worry about.

Mantus built the headlamp with SCUBA diving in mind, and carries an IPX8 standard that indicates that you can trust the light to work down to depths of 10 meters (33′). The manufacturer has tested it to a depth of 100′ and didn’t see any water intrusion. The deepest water my light has been in so far was some dinghy bilge-wash after it fell out of my bag as I was loading the boat. I have also been able to test its performance in some wet and windy weather conditions.

The rubber end cap incorporates the switch and a cover for the USB charging port.

The single large button switch is easy to operate, even with gloved hands. It has an advantage over my former favorite head lamp, which has two separate buttons for red and white lights, both small and hard to press separately one from another. When the button on the Mantus headlamp is pressed, the light cycles through all of the various modes in order: first red, then white low, high, and SOS. It’s the way the red light works that makes it a gem. When navigating at night, you’ll want a red light to preserve your night vision while reading charts, so the red light is always the first to turn on. After the red light has been on for more than 4 seconds, pushing the button again will turn the red light off, instead of cycle through the white lights spoiling your night vision with bursts of white light. When you turn it on again, you get the red light again

At 6.4 oz, the Mantus Headlamp is heavy, more than twice the weight of other headlamps I’ve used, but its durability and features make it worthwhile for me to get used to the weight. I like the ability to recharge—sparing the expense and waste of single-use batteries and the easy operation when I’m wearing gloves during the bitterly cold Maine winter. I feel like I’ve finally moved up to a headlamp that I can count on when I need it most.

Anne Bryant is the associate editor of WoodenBoat.

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.

Sleeveless Sanding Drums

I most often use my decades-old 2" drum chucked in my drill press and wrapped in fine-grit sandpaper.

My main drum sander is a simple shop-made affair: a plywood box containing a salvaged motor fitted with a chuck to hold a 3″ sanding drum. With a 60-grit sanding sleeve on the drum, it’s a real workhorse when it comes to smoothing curves, but I don’t use it for finish work. Sleeves with finer grits are available, but they’re $4 apiece, hard to get on and off the rubber drum, and too stiff to smooth radiused edges. For finer work, I’ve been using sleeveless sanding drums. They are built around rigid foam cylinders and hold strips of common sandpaper. The exterior of the cylinder is padded with a layer of 1/8″ neoprene, and one end of the cylinder is fitted with a cast-aluminum flange and a steel axle. The ends of the sandpaper strip are tucked into a slot in the drum and led to a long, round hole where a length of steel oval tubing rotates to secure them. A lever is inserted into the tubing to rotate it, but a straight-bladed screwdriver will do the job just as well when that little lever included with the drum goes astray.

The the drive shaft has a diameter of 1/2" where it joins the fitting on the drum, but is reduced to 3/8" to fit most drills.

The literature describes the drum’s core as foam, but it is quite hard and very durable. I’ve had my 2″ drum for close to 30 years and it is still going strong. The system for holding the sandpaper was getting a bit loose, but a wrap of making tape around the oval tube cured that. I recently bought a 3″ drum; it appears to be made of the same materials, and I expect it will hold up just as well.

A keyhole slot traps the ends of the strip of sandpaper and an oval steel tube locks them in place. I've marked the drum with the size of the strip the drum uses.

I made a plywood jig to tear 3″-wide strips of sandpaper to fit the drums. It has an alignment fence along one edge and a hacksaw blade at a right angle and loosely anchored with two screws.The toothed side of the blade does the tearing. I’ve made markings on the plywood indicate where I need to align the paper to tear off the strip I need.

I can quickly tear strips of sandpaper using a jig that has a fence and a hacksaw blade loosely screwed to a piece of plywood.This side work for the 3" x 7-3/4" strips I need for the 2" drum.

For the 3" x 11" strips I need for the 3" drum, I added a metal strip to the board 3" from one edge

The sheet sandpaper isn’t as durable as sanding sleeves and requires a lighter touch, but the flexibility of the paper and the cushioning of the rubber behind it allow the sandpaper to mold to the contours of the workpiece. I can sand rounded edges without making unsightly, unwanted facets. I spin the drums on my drill press when working small pieces; when I need to bring the drum to the work—e.g., for smoothing oar blades and stem heads, or sanding frame ends sandwiched between inwales and outwales—I chuck the 2″ sanding drum into an electric drill.

It is important to secure the sandpaper tightly on the drum. If it is loose, it will begin to pucker, the puckers will turn to creases, and eventually those will wear through. The damage occurs on the trailing end of the sandpaper, so even when it begins to wear out and tear, the drum will still pull it and do useful work. I can get a couple of strips for the drums out of a single sheet of sandpaper, so the cost is pennies per strip, far cheaper than the cost of sanding sleeves.

My oldest sleeveless sanding drum has been among the most-used and longest-lasting tools in my shop and does finish sanding on many projects much faster than I can do by hand.

Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.

Sleeveless sanding drums are available in a number of sizes from several sources. I bought my 3″ x 3″ drum from Lee Valley for $23.50 plus shipping.

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.

ATNA

Gary Strombo of Everett, Washington, told his friend John Leyde that he wanted to build a boat. As often happens, the moment you speak of your wishes to someone else, the momentum to carry them out begins to build. Gary had had no experience building boats, but John got his start decades ago and had several boats to his credit, including two electric launches and a diesel launch that he later converted to steam power. Gary had taken an interest in Adirondack guideboats and found plans and instructions for a strip-built version in Building an Adirondack Guideboat by Michale Olivette and John Michne.

With John looking on, Sigrid takes the measure of the first 15 of 29 frames.

John volunteered the use of his shop and tools for the project, and for about 16 months the two friends got together for a few hours every Tuesday to work on the boat. For jobs that were easier and faster with more than two pairs of hands, like milling the cedar strips, they had friends pitch in on occasional Saturdays.

With all of the frames in place, planking with the red-cedar strips can begin.The guideboat project was squeezed in John's boat shed alongside his steam launch GALILEE.

The most frequent helper was Gary’s 10-year-old daughter Sigrid, who rarely missed a Tuesday or a Saturday session. Gary had grown up with a father who was a hardworking logger: “There were four of us kids, two boys and two girls, and I am not 100-percent sure Dad could tell us apart. He expected the same hard work, craftsmanship, and attention to detail from all of us.”

Gary has included Sigrid in all of his projects to give her the same kind of experience he had while growing up with the hope that she will become a competent, confident, and capable adult.

With thousands of screws holding the planks to the frames, Sigrid kept busy placing them in predrilled holes so John could maintain a steady rhythm with the drill/driver.

The guideboat described in the Olivette/Michne book is 16′ long, a bit too long for strips cut from their readily available 16’ stock to wrap around the molds, so John and Gary decided to shorten the guideboat to 14′8″. John was not timid about modifying desigsn, having departed from the plans for a few of the boats he’d built— changing sizes and even converting a transomed design into a double-ender.

They milled western red cedar 1x4s into cove-and-bead strips for the planking and Douglas fir for laminating stock for the frames. Strip-built boats can be built with fiberglass inside and out strengthening the hull, but Gary and John—and Sigrid—invested the time and effort to make the 50 half frames and lap them in 25 pairs on a ¼” plywood plank bottom. “Cutting, bending, laminating, and then cutting individual ribs from the shaped blanks and attaching them to the bottom board,” John noted, “proved to be a laborious process and probably where most of the building time was spent.”

Gary and John step back from their work after saturating a layer of 'glass with epoxy.

The delicate frames add considerably to the beauty of the boat, and echo the construction of the original guideboats, without taking on the extraordinary challenges of the traditional beveled, smooth-skin planking. In another nod to traditional construction, each strip was screwed to each frame. Sigrid was charged with placing a good portion of the more than 2,000 3/4″ flathead wood screws.

Planking complete, the hull was taken outside to be admired. Sigrid celebrated the occasion with a lollipop.

The hull was sheathed in fiberglass and epoxy, then outfitted with an inwale, which was a departure from tradition but serves as a useful handhold for carrying the boat and as good place for tying docking lines.

On launch day, the guideboat, sporting a Norwegian flag was christened ATNA with a bottle of water from Norway's Atna River.

The finished guideboat was launched on Lake Ki, a stone’s throw from John’s shop, and christened ATNA, after a river that passes the Strombo ancestral farm nestled among the inland mountains of southern Norway. Gary’s wife, Kristina, surprised him by providing a bottle for the christening; it was filled with Atna River water that had been sent by his Norwegian cousin for the event.

In 2017 the guideboat was put to good use doing a little fishing and cruising in the lakes and rivers in the Everett area. Among the plans for the coming summer is a 60-mile cruise down the Clark Fork of the Columbia River and past the farm in Montana where Gary was raised.

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.

Coming in from the Cold

The cabin of our Escargot canal boat, BONZO, is quite cozy. The woodstove keeps it warm and cushions on the seats make it comfortable. While we’re at anchor or having dinner drifting across the lake everybody is content, but at some point, someone has to step out into the not-so-cozy cockpit to start the motor and steer the canal boat back to the launch ramp. That task usually falls to me or to my son, Nate.

Aboard BONZO, my sister Laurie serves up our favorite family dinner—a chicken, rice and broccoli casserole. The little round window over the bunks forward was our only view forward.

There’s a bit of shelter in the cockpit behind the cabin’s aft wall, but that only blocks a bit of the wind and rain. Nate and I usually keep each other company and keep our collars zipped up and our hands stuffed in jacket pockets while one of us steers straddling the tiller. When someone opens the cabin door to offer us something to eat, some of the warm air in the cabin escapes and wafts around us.

The forward end of the cabin was designed as sleeping quarters, with windows only on the sides of the cabin. We added a round windwo on the door, but it proved to small to be useful.

A few years ago, for a cruise up the Snohomish River with Nate and my daughter Ali, I had installed a round 4″ plexiglass window in the door to the foredeck and installed a loop of line from the rudder and single line from the outboard’s kill switch. We could get out of the weather to steer, but the view forward was limited and the seating was uncomfortable, so we resigned ourselves to taking the helm in the cockpit.

The view forward was improved by the addition of three large windows.

This year I revived the idea of a sheltered helm. I put three large forward-facing windows in the front of the cabin, reinstalled the rudder and kill-switch lines, and added a pair of lines to control the throttle. A stick clamped to the outboard’s bracket holds the tiller upright, and a yoke pressed on the throttle provides some leverage and finer control. Taking out two of the sleeping platform panels and replacing them with short seats provides a footwell for comfortable upright seating.

What was originally the boat's sleeping quarters now serves as the pilothouse when underway in foul weather. The orange line at the top is connected to the kill switch, the line just below the window with the wooden bead controls the throttle, and the line at the bottom with the dowel attached operates the tiller. The plywood panel that is part of the sleeping platform has been temporarily replaced by a smaller piece that leaves an opening for a foot well.

We took BONZO out for an early family Thanksgiving dinner on a clear cool November evening. There were six of us aboard, and we ate our fill while taking in the night skyline of downtown Seattle and its glittering reflection on the inky black water of Lake Union. When it was time to head back to the ramp, Nate took the helm in our fo’c’s’le-turned-pilothouse and I slipped out to the cockpit to start the outboard before taking a seat alongside Nate. I had the advantage of having a bulkhead backrest that was warmed by the wood stove on its other side.

There are a few lines taking up space in the cockpit, but now I only need to be there to start the motor.

Nate must have appreciated the comfort more than I did. He has done several weekend trips from Lake Union to Lake Washington’s Andrews Bay, the only place within the city limits where boats are permitted to anchor. It’s a four-hour passage each way, and on at least one trip BONZO was fighting a stiff headwind and a chop that sent blasts spray across the cabin roof.

There are, of course, lots of factory-made systems that bring all of the controls of an outboard forward, but our sticks-and-string system cost next to nothing, and there’s the pleasure of seeing that our Rube Goldberg version actually works.

Eel

When I sail WINKLE, my William Garden–designed Eel, people almost always take out their cameras. The 18′6″ canoe yawl was designed as a slightly shorter and much lighter version of the original Eel designed by George Holmes in 1895. Holmes was one of the pioneers of the canoe yawls that became popular in England at the end of the 1800s. Recreational boating was then in its early stages, and canoe yawls, derived from canoes and other small boats meant for work and pleasure, appealed to sailors drawn to longer cruises in more open waters. They were perhaps the first “pocket cruisers,” a category of small boats that have recently become popular once again.

Those 19^th-century canoe yawls were often sailed on the rivers and estuaries of England and so were typically of shallow draft. The Garden-designed Eel draws only about 11″ with the board up. It can be nosed up to a beach, but its 330-lb external lead keel, about 4″ square and about 4′ long, makes it impossible to drag the boat up on a beach. You can omit the lead keel and use bags of lead shot as internal ballast instead if your sailing regularly brings you ashore.

Plans for the Eel consist of five sheets of drawings and a table of offsets that detail how to build the boat using carvel, strip, and cold-molded construction methods. I chose strip-building, as I had previously built a Wee Lassie cedar-strip canoe. My hope that the Eel would just be a bigger version of that project was not off the mark. Its hull is like that of a canoe, the lack of reverse curves simplifies the planking, and it’s built upside down, with the strips glued together over lofted station molds.

The strips were 3/4″ thick and 1-1/4″ wide—harder to bend than the strips I used for the Wee Lassie—and it was necessary to kerf some of them to take the tight curve around the canoe stern. I made a thin, 2′ cut down the middle from the end of the strip so I could more easily bend what had become, in essence, a pair of flexible 3/8″ strips instead of a stiff, single 3/4″ one. And yet, while strip-building is probably the simplest way to build the hull, the Eel is not a beginner’s building project. Doing the lofting, making the lead keel, building a cabin, and making spars call for some advanced skills and patience.

The Eel has a gunter rig with a vertical gaff that is an extension of the mast. I have come to really appreciate the rig; the shorter spar lengths are much easier to manage. I have built a tabernacle for the mainmast, and now I can quickly raise and lower it by myself. Another advantage of the gunter rig is that when you reef, you are lowering the gaff along with the sail, decreasing the weight aloft.

Apparently, some owners have complained that the gaff needs to be lowered all the way to the cockpit to change the attachment of its halyard for reefing. I added a second halyard that goes from a block higher up on the mast to a point higher up on the gunter. To reef, I slack the primary halyard and pull this one in. It works very well and makes for rapid reefing, shaking, and resetting. It does complicate the rig a little more with the addition of another line; however, this boat is light, and it is important to have the correct amount of sail up, so I think that it’s worth it.

I built the main mast and gaff hollow using the bird’s-mouth method, and the weight savings is significant. It does take some intricate work to mill the eight strips, tapered on one side and notched on the other. It is really fun and exciting when you put them together, and they create a long, faceted cylinder. The mizzen mast and booms are solid.

The centerboard has an arm going forward out of the top of the trunk. A line from the tip of the arm goes forward through blocks and then aft to a cleat in the cockpit. The board can be raised and lowered from the cockpit and works well. The plans call for the centerboard to be made of 5/16″ steel plate, which would weigh about 100 pounds. I made mine of 3/4″ marine plywood enclosed in fiberglass to save money and get a little bit of a foil shape. I added two lead inserts, but it still doesn’t weigh that much. I have thought about adding additional weight to the keel. My boat does seem a little tender as it heels quickly in puffs; it may a little underweight. Other Eel builders who kept to the plans report their boats are stiffer under sail.

The only other major modification I made to my Eel, beyond the tabernacle, was to the shape of the rudder. Garden’s plans call for a deep, removable spade rudder that can be pulled out through a trunk when encountering shallow water; then a paddle or an oar serves as a rudder. There are many bars and shallows where I sail, and I worried about snagging the rudder, or even bending the rudder shaft and then not being able to pull the blade up into the trunk. I had seen a picture of an Eel in WoodenBoat (Launchings, Sept/Oct 2001) mentioning a “winged” rudder. I was able to chase down the owner and creator, Roger Dahlberg in Tasmania, Australia, who graciously shared his plans with me. His rudder doesn’t extend below the keel and has a horizontal plate along the bottom to improve performance. It has worked well for me.

Randy Colker

The centerboard trunk divides the cabin’s sleeping quarters, but barely intrudes into the cockpit.

The cockpit of the Eel is very comfortable. After consulting a furniture-making manual, I made some alterations to improve the seating. I slanted the coamings outward about 10 degrees and the seat bottoms at about a 6-degree angle. This was extra work, but really added to the comfort. While the coamings offer good back support, but angled or not, they rise high enough above the deck to make hiking out impractical and uncomfortable.

The Eel is a very dry boat, and handles chop well. The cockpit is not self-bailing, which is not unusual for a boat this size; I don’t have a cover for the boat and I have to bail water after a rainfall.

I did not build cruising accommodations in the cabin, as I expected I would only use the boat only for daysailing. Other Eels have been equipped with two comfortable 6′-plus berths in the cabin and a good bit of storage, making them better suited for cruising. In 1983, Bruce Baker sailed his newly purchased Eel from Schooner Bay Boat Works (where about a dozen Eels were built in the 1970s and ’80s) in Anacortes, Washington, to his home near Juneau, Alaska, a trip up the inland passage of about 900 miles.

Tom Wessels

With 201 sq ft of sail, the Eel makes good speed. The design calls for 300 lbs of lead in the keel and a steel-plate centerboard to stiffen the hull for windward work.

Space in the cabin is tight and it takes a bit of flexibility to move around in it. There is about 38″ of headroom under the forward part of the cabin top, and 43″ aft. If you are sitting on the sole, without anything built in, you can sit upright. The plans call for hinging the cabintop at the front so that it could be raised for more headroom in the back. I did do this in case I ever decided to use the boat for cruising, but haven’t yet added the canvas panels to cover the openings at the sides.

While I was building my Eel, I read about the perils of sailing a boat without built-in flotation and so, despite the extra shop time it added, I put a watertight compartment in the bow and foam flotation under the deck, seats, and floorboards. I wanted to buy a flotation bladder to go under the aft deck, but couldn’t find one in the shape I needed, and the bladders I did see were prohibitively expensive. I settled on two heavy plastic bags filled with empty 2-liter soda bottles and gallon milk jugs.

Originally, I had intended to use a Seagull outboard for auxiliary power. The classic motors are light and in keeping with the character of the boat. Unfortunately, the Seagull I had was not cooperative when it came to starting and idling. I then tried a Torqeedo 1003 electric outboard. It comes apart in three pieces, which makes it easier to put the engine on and take it off. The Eel has a canoe stern, so the outboard needs to be mounted on a bracket hung over the side, and my preference would be to take it off while sailing for appearance’s sake as much as to keep it from dragging while heeling. Taking the three pieces apart and putting them back together wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped, so I settled for tilting the engine up, and swinging it over on the deck on its side when it is not in use. This has proved satisfactory, though the motor goes through one charge of the battery fairly quickly. Rowing is another option for auxiliary power. The Eel can be outfitted with elevated locks for stand-up, forward-facing rowing, but I have not yet invested in the locks and oars.

The Eel is very easy to trailer and launch. I have done it comfortably with my mid-size, six-cylinder Toyota sedan. With three sails, five spars (seven including the bowsprit and boomkin), roller-furling jib, and my reefing system, there is a lot to be assembled. It takes an hour to an hour and a half to set up at the launch ramp.

Randy Colker

Instead of incorporating the rudder specified in the original design—a vertical blade that retracts into a trunk—the author’s Eel has a rudder that is even with the keel and extends aft rather than down, allowing it to be used to sail in shallow water.

My mainsail cover fits around the gaff, sail, and boom. This creates a nice package that can be taken off the mast in one piece and tied down for transport. The bowsprit and boomkin can stay in place while the boat sits on the trailer, though I wouldn’t want to tow it any distance with the boomkin on, as it would be too vulnerable sticking out the back. The mast can stay folded down in the tabernacle for both storage and transport, which is very convenient.

Leigh Fenigsohn

Dropping the main and leaving the jib and mizzen flying reduces the sail area while keeping the helm well balanced.

Once the Eel is in the water, getting under way is rapid and easy. The jib’s roller-furling is a joy to have. The Eel is great fun to sail. It is fast, very responsive, and with 201 sq ft in the jib, main, and mizzen, it sails surprisingly well in very light winds. With a mizzen staysail rigged, I have sailed at 2 to 3 knots in 5-knot winds. I don’t think you could use the staysail in winds any higher than this without being overpowered. The fastest speed I have measured was 6.1 knots in about 10 knots of wind without really trying. I was happy with this as the theoretical hull speed for a boat this length is 5.7 knots. Maximum speed for just the jib and mizzen in higher winds has been 5.2 knots. It points very well with the full suit of sails, though not quite as well closehauled with just the jib and mizzen. Having the three sails makes for a very balanced boat with little weather helm. It also provides many sail combinations for different wind conditions, which is important for a light boat with this much sail area.

Tom Wessels

The author reports that his Eel, WINKLE, is “a joy to sail, fast and responsive. Immensely satisfying.”

My Eel took over five years—and an enormous amount of patience from my wife for a project that took over half of our garage—for me to build, but it was well worth the effort. It has been a pleasure to own and sail, and generates many compliments. WINKLE sails the Poquoson River which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay just below the York River. My wife often joins me, and many of the folks who helped build the boat volunteer to serve as crew. Whoever comes aboard is soon smiling.

Randy Colker is a retired psychologist living in Yorktown, Virginia. He started building boats after attending a class at The WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, and built several working his way up to the Eel. He loves beautiful wood and working with it.

Eel Particulars

Length: 18′ 6″
Waterline: 14′ 10″
Beam: 6′
Draft, board up: 5″
Draft, board down: 1′ 3″
Displacement: 1,350 lbs
Sail Area: 201 sq ft

Plans for the Eel are available from the WoodenBoat Store for $100.

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Pooduck Skiff

The Pooduck Skiff had long been a bucket-list item for me. Almost 20 years ago I bought and read Eric Dow’s book, How to Build the Shellback Dinghy, and every so often I’d take it off the shelf and reread it, rekindling the longing to build a boat and learn how to sail. It wasn’t until recently, as an empty-nester, that I finally had the time, means, and space to build a boat. I bought the plans for the Pooduck Skiff, designed by naval architect Joel White for sailing, rowing, and, sculling.

The Pooduck, at 12′10″, is 20″ longer than White’s Shellback, but they are otherwise quite similar and Dow’s book—with its step-by-step instructions for the glued plywood lapstrake construction, outfitting the interior, and building the sailing rig—can be used as a guide for Pooduck as well. I entered the project with moderate woodworking skills acquired from years of home-ownership and taking woodshop classes, so I appreciated the book’s tips on what tool is best for what job, and on building useful jigs. As an example, I don’t know how I would have transferred the angle and curve of the hull to the edge of the seats, without the using the jig presented in the book. I also had some help from my friend Steve, who had some boatbuilding experience. Still, we both learned a lot with this project. I approached the build as several smaller projects ranging from tool sharpening to knot tying, and got a lot of help along the way from instructional videos on YouTube.

Thomas Guertin

While this skiff has only a single rowing station, the plans call for a second station at the thwart that serves as the mast partner.

I have a fairly well-equipped woodshop, and while my power tools were invaluable and did some jobs faster and more precisely, not all tasks lent themselves to using a bulky tool with an electric motor. The Pooduck project deepened my experience with hand planes, and I made certain they were sharp. A bullnose rabbet plane is especially handy for working in tight spaces and for shaping plank bevels and gains.and

The plans I purchased from The WoodenBoat Store are straightforward and contain every bit of information you need to build a Pooduck, though novice builders will benefit from Dow’s book as an supplement. The six pages of plans include full-sized patterns of the molds, stem, transom, breasthook, knees, and the boat’s single frame. Patterns for the planks are not full size, but described by a measured drawing. When plotting out the coordinates of the planks on the 3/8″ plywood, double-check your measurements. The plans note: “it is advisable to get out the planks a little oversize (1/4″ to 1/2″ in width), then determine the final shape on the jig.”

Thomas Guertin

The plans don’t call for floorboards, but they’re easily added to separate the occupants from water in the bilge. Note the elongated hole for the mast and crescent-shaped plug on the thwart. The plug goes forward of the mast when the jib is used, and aft for sailing with the main alone.

The Pooduck Skiff materials list calls for 3/4″ (18mm) mahogany marine plywood for the bottom and transom and 3/8″ (9mm) for the planking. The 12′ and 14′ sheets called for may have been available when the plans were drawn up in 1990; the 8’ sheets available today will need to be scarfed together to get the necessary length for the planks and the bottom. Solid mahogany is specified for the gunwales, breasthook, knees, and trunk cap; white pine for the thwarts; oak for the maststep and jam cleats. I wasn’t able to purchase mahogany in lengths sufficient to form the gunwales, so there was some scarfing done here as well.

The center frame is laminated from twenty 1/8″- thick strips cut from dimensional lumber. The plans call for fir or mahogany, but Steve suggested sawing the strips from clear 2×12 spruce. The quality of 2x12s is better than that of 2x4s because they come from bigger trees, and usually have fewer knots. I cut more strips than I needed and selected only clear strips from the best part of the 2×12. It’s best to buy quality lumber, so I avoided the big box stores and went to my neighborhood lumberyard.

The mast and spars are also made of spruce. The plans recommend using two clear 2x4s for this. As with the spruce we used for the frame, I found the quality of 2x12s to be better. With a little care, one can select the optimum pieces from the best part of the 2×12. A portion of it may go to waste, but the added expense is minimal.

An advanced builder could do it alone, but I had an extra pair of hands when attaching the planks. I found there to be a little variation between the planks as drawn and the shapes determined by the molds (as one should expect), which necessitated having a helper to locate each plank and refine its shape. Likewise, it was also nice to have someone around to help align the drill when drilling the pilot holes for fastenings, especially where the planks meet the transom.

For a bit of style I strayed from the plans, and instead of using a single piece of pine for thwarts in the bow and stern, I used leftover 18mm marine plywood to make slat seats. I used the same material to make floorboards. The one frame in the boat is under a thwart, so it’s possible to find comfortable seating anywhere in the bottom of the boat, but I’d rather be seated above any water that might get aboard. I also added two Shellback-style knees made from solid mahogany to the thwart that serves as the mast partner for additional strength. I adhered these to the hull using 3M 5200 marine adhesive instead of epoxy so it would be possible to remove them if necessary, to touch up the paint. The transom is drawn with a notch for sculling, but I didn’t include that in my boat because I had no intention of propelling it in that manner.

The boat is light, only about 200 lbs even with my extra features, and it trailers well. I treated myself to a brand-new trailer which came with two flat, carpeted bunks. They mate pretty nicely with the flat bottom of the boat. I use a ratchet strap to secure the boat to the trailer, with rags under the straps where they meet the gunwales to prevent chafing.

Empty, the Pooduck Skiff draws only about 6″, which makes it easily managed on the beach. Getting in and out of it isn’t bad either, though you have to get your weight planted in the center or have a shipmate holding the opposite side, or you may have a couple of gallons of water come over the side. It’s easier moving in and out of the boat while it is at a dock because you don’t have to climb over the gunwale. Once you’re aboard, the skiff is stable enough to stand in while afloat.

While rowing, Pooduck moves right along with little effort and tracks very well. With one person rowing, the skiff sits right on its lines with the transom just out of the water. There is plenty of room and freeboard to accommodate three average-sized people.

Pam Payson

The option to shift the rake of the mast helps keep the rig balanced. The mast is angled aft here, shifting the main’s center of effort aft to compensate for the addition of the jib to the sail plan.

I found that rigging for sail is best done on the trailer. The running rigging consists of the main halyard, sheet, and downhaul and the jib halyard and sheet. It can get a little awkward keeping them all straight and in the proper position if the boat is bouncing in the surf or spinning in the wind.

Under sail, I found it somewhat difficult to move from sitting on the floor to a position up on the gunwale. This winter I plan to extend the middle seat to provide an intermediate place to sit. Under sail, two adults are the limit. My buddy and I are both about 5′6″ tall, and I suspect two large individuals would feel a bit cramped for space.

The skiff sails equally as well with or without flying the jib. The hole in the thwart that serves as a mast partner is elongated and equipped with a crescent-shaped plug, allowing the mast to be angled and maintain the rig’s balance when shifting between sailing the main alone or main and jib. I’m not an experienced sailor, but I couldn’t tell the difference between sailing her with or without the jib. She seemed to beat to windward equally well under main alone or main and jib. Sailing without the jib is much easier, as you have less to do and there are two fewer lines to tend to.

Pam Payson

When taking the helm, sitting on the bottom is the most convenient position. Floorboards make that a more comfortable option when some water gets aboard.

On one occasion, my inexperience led to capsizing in a strong gust. The skiff righted easily, but this is mostly because it was full of water. I did not have an easy time bailing out and I was not able to get back in without refilling the hull with water. I had to be towed to shore, with the boat half swamped. The incident turned out okay because I was on a small lake, but it got me thinking about equipping the boat for self-rescue. Flotation isn’t mentioned in the plans or Dow’s book, but I’d recommended at least adding some foam under the two center seats as close to the bottom as possible.

Building a Pooduck was everything I had hoped it would be; it was challenging enough to make it feel like a real accomplishment. It was an enormous learning experience with many take-aways that I can apply to other projects down the road. I’m proud of the way it turned out. The Pooduck’s design provides a true feel for traditional boatbuilding. It is well suited for rowing but is just gorgeous under sail. I receive compliments every time I take the boat out, and I have already begun to meet others who took on similar wooden boat projects.

Tom Guertin lives in Warner, New Hampshire, 15 miles from Lake Sunapee and near several other lakes. His love of boats began in his youth fishing on Long Island Sound, not too far from Mystic Seaport. He sails, paddles, and fishes for bass in the many lakes of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. He works for the State of New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services.

Pooduck Skiff Particulars

[table]

Length/12′10″
Beam/4′6″
Draft, board up/6.5″
Draft, board down/1′9″
Weight/about 130 lbs
Sail Area/Main, 65 sq ft; Jib, 14 sq ft

[/table]

Plans for the Pooduck Skiff are available from the WoodenBoat Store for $75.

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Wolf Rock Light

"Arrfff! Arrfff!”

This was the sound of a large gray seal as it poked its head out of the water and looked in my direction with unabashed interest. Now, I love seals as much as anyone and relish my regular encounters with them while I’m rowing on the river near my home in South Devon, England. But this was different. This seal was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, eight miles off Land’s End, and I, rather than being safely ensconced aboard my skiff, was bobbing about in the water in a semi-inflated dry suit, just a few feet away from it. And, was it my imagination, or was this seal much, much bigger than the ones back home?

After a few moments’ contemplation, the seal sighed and slipped under the water again. A feeling of relief was quickly followed by unease at the thought that this huge creature was now swimming somewhere beneath me and I had no way of knowing where it was or what it was going to do next. Even though I knew a seal was highly unlikely to hurt me, my instincts told me a different story. So I crashed about and made what I thought were suitably macho seal noises.

“Arrfff! Arrfff!”

Almost immediately the seal appeared on the other side of me, and once again gazed at me with those big dark eyes. I had assumed it was a male seal protecting his territory, but it occurred to me then it might be just trying to be friendly, or possibly more. Perhaps a bright yellow dry suit holds an irresistible attraction to an ocean seal, normally sheltered from modern pinniped fashion trends.

Our moment was interrupted by the appearance of Will Stirling’s 15′ dinghy suddenly looming large with her bold cream-colored lugsail. The seal glanced over, its eyes bulged open in alarm and, with a grunt, it dove underwater. It didn’t reappear again, and I was relieved when Will luffed up beside me and I was able to clamber out of the water to safety.

The incident took place while I was a participant in Will’s madcap plan to sail around every offshore lighthouse in Britain. The project began in March 2012 when he and his wife Sara sailed around the Eddystone Lighthouse, 13 miles south of Plymouth, in a 14′ open dinghy. The couple did that trip to raise money for WaterAid, a global nonprofit devoted to bringing clean drinking water and hygiene education to disadvantaged communities, and the idea grew from there. Will’s scheme is an ambitious one, not least because of the sheer number of offshore lighthouses—at least 50—but also the remoteness of some, for example, Sule Skerry is 35 miles north of Scotland. But Will isn’t in any hurry, and regards it as a lifetime project.

By summer 2017, he had ticked six more lighthouses off the list: Les Hanois in Guernsey, La Corbière in Jersey, Godreavy near St. Ives in Cornwall, both lighthouses on the isle of Lundy in the Bristol Channel, and the Longships off Sennen, Cornwall.

In one 120-mile voyage he tackled two lighthouses, Les Hanois, and La Corbière in a 14′ open sailing dinghy, a type he has been building at his boatyard for the past 15 years, but an incident during that journey convinced him he needed something a bit more seaworthy. He and a crew member were off Jersey, hanging onto a mooring buoy to hold their positon in a strong adverse current, and almost capsized the boat. Will decided there and then he needed a boat that could cope with a greater angle of heel.

The result was GRACE, his 15-footer with side decks and a cockpit coaming all around to keep the water out, and an extended foredeck to give more shelter to anyone sleeping in the bow. I joined Will for the second attempt on his eighth lighthouse: Wolf Rock, 8 miles off Land’s End at the westernmost tip of England. He had to abort his first attempt because of bad weather, and indeed our departure was postponed when a Force 5 headwind and driving rain appeared on the appointed day. The next day, however, the clouds cleared and, after rejecting several possible launching places on the south coast of Cornwall, we finally launched GRACE at Sennen on the north coast, which we judged would give us a better sailing angle in the west-northwesterly winds that had been forecast.

Leaving Sennen, Will keeps an eye on the sail as we round the end of the breakwater. His 15’ Expedition Boat was a development of his standard 14’ dinghy with side decks and a longer foredeck added to provide more protection from the elements.

Sennen is a picturesque Cornish village, popular with vacationers and surfers alike. At its western end is a beautiful little stone harbor, whose main claim to fame is being the most westerly harbor in mainland England. It is still used by a fleet of fishing boats that are dragged by tractor up and down the beach for launch and haul. A steep slipway runs down from the parking lot to the beach, which made launching the 500-lb boat slightly treacherous. The last time Will launched the boat here, his van couldn’t cope with the gradient and had to be towed up by the tractor.

Will is one of these very organized skippers who’ll send you a passage plan several weeks in advance, complete with course information, estimated timings, local tides, times of sunrise and sunset, and even the phase of the moon. He is also reassuringly safety conscious, and brought along all the essential safety gear in a waterproof bag, including EPIRB, GPS, VHF, compass, and flashlight. All I had to do was turn up with my lifejacket, a dry suit, a packed lunch, and a waterproof camera.

A light northwesterly breeze was blowing as we headed out of Sennen at 11 a.m. sharp, 30 minutes ahead of Will’s schedule. The Cornish coast is famously rocky and thousands of shipwrecks litter its shore; we were put straight to work just off the harbor entrance negotiating a reef growling ominously to windward. We cleared it without any trouble and a few minutes later passed one of the most dangerous rocks along this whole coast, the infamous Longships, the site of dozens, if not hundreds, of shipwrecks. Even after a lighthouse was erected there in 1873, that didn’t stop the 282′ steam-powered coaster BLUEJACKET being driven onto the rocks just a few yards away from the lighthouse, nearly destroying it in the process, on a perfectly calm, clear night in November 1898. The crew was saved but their embarrassment was never-ending.

Having overshot Wolf Rock on the previous tack, we approaching it from the southeast. The east-going tide added about 45 minutes to our crossing, as we had to claw our way back upwind.

Given the fearsome history of this coast, it might seem foolhardy to navigate it in such a small boat, and certainly the sight of those shadowy cliffs rising dramatically on our port side made me feel very small and insignificant indeed. But there were definite advantages in having such a diminutive steed. For a start, we wouldn’t have been able to sail between the rocks and the shore on a bigger boat, and would have had to take a longer route around the seaward side of the Longships. And even if we had hit a submerged rock with the dinghy, in most cases it would have been a case of simply raising the centerboard and sailing into deeper water, something that was definitely not an option for the unfortunate BLUEJACKET.

Will had a more philosophical take on going to sea in a dinghy, quoting first a great poet and then a great explorer: “As T.S. Eliot said: ‘Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.’ To start with I didn’t know the capabilities of the boat or myself. But with each trip I’ve got more confident and realize we can do this. My planning’s got better too, because that’s the key. And as [Roald] Amudsen said: ‘Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.’ You have to be prepared, and then hopefully you can sort out whatever’s thrown at you.”

Land’s End. The very words conjure up a feeling of foreboding, and before Europeans discovered America it had a much more literal meaning. Nowadays, while the cliffs are as dramatic as ever, with clusters of fierce-looking rocks peppering the coast, the overall impression is slightly marred by a hotel and tourist developments that look anything but wild.

By the time we passed Land’s End, a quarter of a mile off to port, the Wolf Rock lighthouse was clearly visible as a faint finger on the horizon, 8 miles to the southwest. For centuries, the semi-submerged rock that the lighthouse rests on presented a hazard to shipping passing around Land’s End. A local diver estimated there are at least 100 wrecks between the rock and the mainland alone. From 1795 onward, four attempts were made to erect a beacon on the Wolf, all of which were smashed to smithereens by the sheer power of the Atlantic waves. Finally, in 1848, a 14′-high cast-iron beacon filled with concrete rubble was built and held fast. In 1861, work started on an elegant 135′ tower modeled on the Eddystone lighthouse. It took eight years to build, with work interrupted by severe weather and brutal waves. The new light was first lit in 1870 and operates to this day, sending out a single white flash every 15 seconds when darkness falls.

It was bright sunshine as we headed for the Wolf—so named because of the howling noise the wind makes when it blows through the islet’s fissures—and GRACE seemed to delight in the steady westerly Force 3 breeze. It was certainly a fine day to be out at sea on a small, exquisitely built wooden boat, with the sun high in the sky and the water just a few inches away. Behind us, the rocks of west Cornwall receded into the distance, while ahead of us lay what looked like an endless expanse of sea. Next stop, the Azores.

Passing the western side of the rock during our circumnavigation. Wolf Rock was the first lighthouse in the world to be fitted with a helipad on top of the tower.

We were soon surrounded by wildlife, another advantage of traveling by sail in a small boat. An endless array of seabirds passed us by; the ubiquitous gannets, a Manx shearwater, and what I took to be a black tern, went about their business without the slightest concern for the little wooden cockleshell in their midst. Halfway to the Wolf, I spotted a big, floppy fin straight ahead and steered GRACE to leeward of it. It turned out to be an ocean sunfish, a strange-looking white slab of a fish, as tall as it is long, that seems to be all head and no body or tail. It seemed reluctant to interrupt its sunbathing and only dipped down under the surface at the last minute, passing so close we could have touched it.

Soon after, I spotted some strange splashes in the sea about 200 yards off our starboard bow. Eventually I could identify the commotion as some dolphins, but far from being the being the playful, friendly sort who come and frolic off the boat’s bow, these guys were hard at work apparently using shock-and-awe tactics to confound a shoal of fish. We passed by unnoticed.

With the boat anchored off Wolf Rock, Will swam ashore with our cameras, phones, and VHF in a dry bag.

With the Wolf Rock light drawing closer, Will made a strange confession. As he described his previous trips on the boat, he admitted that none of his crew had come back for a second go, so each trip had to be done with a new crew. That gave me pause for thought. I was crew No. 8.

With the wind backing to the west and a stronger-than-expected current setting us to the east, we weren’t able to make it to the Wolf Rock in one tack. Instead, we overshot it and took a few short tacks to windward, and soon the lighthouse began to loom large over the port bow, its elegantly tapered tower making a distinctive L shape with the rock below. One of the rules Will has set for himself is to sail completely around every lighthouse on the list, so we rounded the Wolf to port and made a counterclockwise circumnavigation, and then dropped anchor in a small cove in the lee of the rock.

Can’t go over it, can’t go under it. The only way to get ashore safely was to go through the wash. We floated onto the rocks in our dry suits, relying on their buoyancy to keep us afloat.

Anchored about 50’ away from rocky islet, we were faced with the same dilemma the builders of the lighthouse and its subsequent keepers faced: how to get on and off it. Even in the relatively benign conditions of that sunny August day, a big swell surged around the rock, rising and falling about 6’ and creating swirling eddies. Back in the days when the lighthouse was manned, the keepers came up with ingenious ways of transferring people and stores from ship to shore, including using a kite to fly a line out to the relief ship. Once the ship was in position, the men put their feet in a bight in the line and hung for dear life as they were winched on or off the rock.

This seemed to be a favorite sunbathing spot for seals. They scampered away when they saw us. The 1848 beacon is visible on the left. The landing area between the beacon and the lighthouse built in 1870 was a key part of the building the towers, as well as making it easier to get keepers and stores on and off the rock.

Judging by news clips from 1950 and 1952, it was pretty hazardous in good weather and completely impossible in bad, which meant the keepers often went weeks on end without supplies or a relief crew if a storm was blowing. The problem was finally solved in 1972 when a helipad was built on top of the lantern, the first lighthouse in the world to be modernized in this way. Once the lighthouse was fully automated in 1988, there was no need to transport keepers or bring supplies.

Will climbed to the top of the 1848 beacon. Made of cast iron and filled with concrete rubble, it was the fourth attempt to build a light on Wolf Rock--all the others were swept away by the power of the waves.

Our solution to the problem of getting ashore was simpler. With the dry suits zipped up, they provided enough buoyancy to more or less float us over to the rock. Then it was a matter of choosing the right rock and the right wave, washing onto it, and hanging on for dear life as the water rushed out again. Will went first with the VHF and cell phones in the dry bag (in case the dinghy were swept away while we were on the rock), and I followed behind slightly apprehensively.

Will Stirling

The Trinity House logo, cast in bronze above the main entrance, includes its motto Trinitas in Unitate—Three in One.

It was certainly more tiring than it looked, and by the time I had flapped my legs and arms at full tilt to navigate from boat to rock (pulling a leg muscle in the process, as I discovered the next day), then scrambled up the rocks and climbed up the platform sides, I was puffed out. That only added to the sense of achievement, however, as we stood there and gazed over what was really a different world.

The base of the lighthouse forms what must be one of the strangest mooring docks ever built, with rings to attach lines to, steps at the northern end (away from the prevailing winds) and the remains of the crane used to hoist those keepers and parcels onto the rock. Everything is covered with an even layer of barnacles, like a giant’s sandpaper, a reminder that everything we were standing on is submerged for much of the time. To one side, built into the concrete dock, is the 1848 beacon, a specter from the past, squat and defiant, an embodiment of man’s struggle with nature.

Standing guard over all of this is an almost dainty lighthouse. You would hardly believe this lofty structure is made up of 3,300 tons of granite, tapering from 41′8″ at the base to 17′ at the top, and completely solid for the first 30’. Above that, the walls of the hollow section are tapered, starting 7′9″ thick and gradually thinning to 2′3″ at the top—every external stone dovetailed not only to the ones on either side to it but the ones above and below it. It’s poetry in granite, and a complete contrast to the stumpy, rubble-filled beacon built 20 years earlier, yet equally able to withstand the might of the Atlantic storms.

When Will climbed the bronze ladder rungs to reach the lower front door of the lighthouse, he found it too was made of solid bronze. Above the doorway, also cast in bronze, is a bas relief of four sailing ships on a shield and the words Trinitas in Unitate—Three in One. It was the coat of arms of Trinity House, a charity devoted to maritime safety, responsible for all lighthouses built in England and Wales since 1514. Its motto is a reference to its original purpose of running lighthouses, providing pilotage, and serving as a charity for distressed sailors. It’s as if the builders recognized that, even in this harsh environment, a decorative touch would help ease the burden of the unfortunate souls confined to this inhospitable place for months on end. Sadly, this grand entrance has been blocked on the inside since the construction of the helipad.

We clambered around the rocks and a herd of seals sunbathing on the south side of the rock squirmed back into the sea when they caught sight of us. I climbed down to where they had been and was surprised to see a rainbow on the side of the lighthouse: dark brown barnacles at the bottom merging with the bright green seaweed which became yellow where it was dry, followed by pinky brown granite which became black at the top. Even in this most austere of places, nature performs its magic.

It was while photographing GRACE from the water, to provide documentation that Will had actually sailed around the lighthouse, that I had my close encounter with an amorous seal.

The wind was easing, and we were all too aware that if it died altogether we would have to row the 9 miles back to Sennen. So, about 20 minutes after we landed, Will swam back to the boat, while I swam farther out to sea to take pictures of GRACE sailing past the lighthouse—proof that we had indeed sailed there and that he could tick it off his list. It was then that I encountered my overly friendly seal. And to those who might scoff at my trepidation, I say: you weren’t swimming out at sea with a large sea mammal making unwanted advances.

A stronger-than-expected west-going current swept us off course and pushed us onto the infamous Longships Rocks (visible behind Will). Some committed rowing was required to get us past the rocks and into a more favorable current.

Having been rescued by Will, and with both of us safely back aboard GRACE, we set course for Land’s End. As we feared, about halfway back the wind died and we were forced to bring out the oars, first Will rowing on his own with me at the helm, and then the two of us rowing side by side, each wielding an oar. It was at this point we realized we had misinterpreted the tidal charts and underestimated the strength of the west-going current, which had set us nearly half a mile west of our intended course. It doesn’t sound like much, but it meant we had to row straight into the current to stop ourselves being swept onto the Longships rocks, and added nearly an hour to our time. Once we were inshore of the Longships, however, we found a favorable tide which swept us back to Sennen.

The sun was setting as we pulled the boat out of the water and packed our gear. Our total journey time was 9 hours, quite a bit longer than the 6 hours Will had estimated in his passage plan, but then the wind was considerably less than forecast and we had had our mishap with the tidal charts.

Next on Will’s list is the Bishop’s Rock, 29 miles west of Wolf Rock, which guards the western edge of the Isles of Scilly. Would I be tempted to join Will again and become the only person to crew for him more than once on his madcap quest? Without a doubt.

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.

Sliding-Seat Conversion

Many years ago, I built a sliding seat for my Delaware Ducker using salvaged tracks and a carriage from a canoe’s rowing rig. The Ducker is a pretty quick rowboat, and can be kept over 4 knots; while I couldn’t go faster, with the sliding seat I could go fast longer. Equipping a traditional rowing boat with a sliding seat—without outriggers or longer oars—is an idea that has been around for a while. Mystic Seaport’s elegant Bailey Whitehall, built in 1879, has one and in the early years of the rowing revival, Dick Shew of South Bristol, Maine, was rigging his 16’ Whitehalls to switch between fixed and sliding seats, rowed with the same oars and with the locks set on the gunwales.

I’d been thinking about building a sliding seat for my dory, so I clamped the Ducker slide into it for a test. I knew there would be clearance for the oar handles over my thighs, because I could sit on a throw cushion and still have room. I rowed 15 or so miles in 4 hours, much farther than I anticipated. I liked it, and decided to make one for the dory.

The sliding seat rig, spanning a thwart in the author's dory, has shorter tracks than those used in racing shells, but is well suited to using the same oars and locks that are used for fixed-seat rowing. Note the foot brace secured to the floorboards under the aft thwart.

I dug around my shop and came up with a couple of tracks and a seat. The tracks didn’t need to extend very far forward of the fixed thwart—as with most fixed seats, my legs are fairly straight when I am on the thwart. I found I could move 7″ or so aft of the thwart before my shins hit the after thwart. The standard length for tracks is 32″ to 34″, longer than required for the length of the stroke in my dory; I trimmed mine to 20″, a couple of inches longer than I needed. The tracks each had a stop in one end, and I split some dowels for the other. Another option for stops is to secure blocks of wood across the ends of the tracks.

The distance between the seat’s wheels determines the span between the tracks and the length of the boards they’re mounted to. Some careful layout is required to make sure that the tracks are parallel. When everything was square, I drilled holes for the bolts to hold the tracks.

The extruded aluminum tracks are very strong and don’t require any additional support where they cross the thwart. If I had a nice varnished thwart, I’d glue a bit of carpet or neoprene to the track undersides. The wood boards joining the tracks also serve to locate them on the thwart; turn-buttons made of 1/8″ aluminum bar hold the rig in place. I put a hinged strut under the edge to help support my weight when I’ve moved aft for the catch.

The tracks rest directly on the thwart, keeping the seat as low as possible. A hinged support takes the weight at the catch.

With a GPS logging my speed, I found that switching from the fixed thwart to the sliding seat consistently added half of a knot. The 16’ dory isn’t fast, and I have to work hard to maintain 3.5 knots rowing from the thwart; with the sliding seat it is easy to maintain that speed. Rowing 24 strokes per minute, I could have kept going for hours. Pushing off with the balls of my feet helps power the drive; to get the full advantage of the sliding seat you should have a stretcher at the appropriate height. With the sliding seat I can reach farther aft at the catch, so the oar blades reach farther forward , and with the longer stroke I can get the blades buried and have more time to apply more power through the middle of the stroke where it does the most good.

One of the biggest issues with dory is its windage. The additional power of legs makes a significant difference on those days where I only gain half a boat length on a stroke. I took the dory out on an unpleasant rowing day; when I stopped rowing, a nasty chop with wind and tide pushed me downwind at 1.5 knots. With the rig in place I was able to make 2.5 knots to windward, barely 2 without it. I did switch to my shorter oars, shortened the stroke, and sped up the stoke rate, and if it had been rough enough to roll the seat off the tracks, or I had a problem getting the blades out of the water, I could have easily removed the seat and rowed from the thwart.

At only about 20″ long, the sliding-seat rig is compact enough to stow easily. Not having the outriggers and long oars typical of drop-in sliding-seat rigs keeps the versatility of a fixed-seat boat. Perhaps the most interesting possibility is the ability to use this compact slide with a sail-and-oar boat.

This design, with the tracks right on the fixed thwart, keeps the sliding seat as low as possible, so if you can sit on a boat cushion and row, you’ll have enough clearance. You could make higher rowlock socket pads if needed. The length of the rails depends on the rower, but they won’t extend much further forward than where you ordinarily sit. To check how far aft of your fixed thwart the tracks can go, take some scrap and make a temporary seat.

Seats and tracks can be bought from Latanzo or Pocock. They’ll run about $150 to $200. If you are near a rowing club, you may be able to find an old wooden seat, as most racing shells have converted to carbon-fiber seats.

Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.

Editor’s notes:

I liked Ben’s idea and decided to put a sliding seat in my New York Whitehall. (If you’re wondering why they’re called sliding seats when they actually roll rather than slide, the earliest sliding seats, circa 1870, were wooden seats that had grooves on the bottoms that fit over brass tracks fixed to a thwart. They required lard for lubrication and would slide 10″ to 12″. The “sliding” part of the term stuck even after the transition to wheels.) All during my childhood, my father repaired racing shells and our garage was full of seats, wheels, and tracks. They were just common objects then and it didn’t occur to me then that one day I’d wish I’d kept a few for myself. To make my sliding seat I had to improvise with readily available materials.

If a carved seat (center) isn't an appealing project, a carriage with flat plywood base can support a manufactured seat (left) or a homemade closed-cell foam pad.

I had kept a lot of worn-out inline-skate wheels, and the bearings would serve as wheels. I carved the seat from a piece of 1-1/4″ vertical-grain Douglas fir from a salvaged gymnasium bleacher. Modeled after the molded seat shown above, it is 12-3/4″ wide, 7-1/4″, front to back; the centers of the 1-7/8″ holes are 4-1/2″ apart and 3-1/4″ forward of the aft edge; and the notch is 2-3/4″ deep. The carved contours are only about 1/2″ deep. If that project is a bit more work than you’d like to take on, a piece of dense foam cut to the outline of a rowing seat will serve well. The the large notch and the holes take the pressure off your tailbone and sit bones.

The inline-skate bearings fit 5/16" bolts. The hole in the aluminum angle is threaded and the nut opposite the bearing locks the bolt in place. I filed the bolt head smooth and polished it to minimize drag when it contacts the track's upright surface. Grease on both of each track's surfaces makes this arrangement run smoothly.

The skate bearings fit nicely on 5/16″ bolts. Two pieces of 3/4″ aluminum angle serve to hold the bearings; they’re drilled and tapped and nuts lock the bolts. The same aluminum angle stock serves as the tracks. The bottom part needs to be kept smooth, so I added 3/4″ square ash pieces to the plywood base and drilled holes and countersinks in the vertical sides of the angles to fasten them to the ash. I screwed a block to the underside of the seat and two blocks to the plywood base as stops to keep the seat from running off the tracks.

I spent about $10 for the aluminum and the rest of the pieces were shop scraps. The bearings and the bolts can drag on the aluminum tracks, but an application of grease makes for smooth rolling (see Update below). I’ll be rowing my Whitehall a lot more now. My thanks to Ben for a great idea.

The support on the aft end of the base is a shouldered tenon that fit into a mortice that extends through the plywood into the hardwood stop block.

The aft thwart is my preferred rowing position. I have a full foot board solidly attached to the floorboards and no obstructions for the sliding-seat stroke.

With a few modifications to get the centerboard pendants out from under the base, the sliding seat will fit over the the center thwart. The footbrace is slung from straps around the aft thwart. While that works for fixed-thwart rowing, I'd prefer a fixed footboard that braces the entire foot for sliding-seat rowing. My reach into the stern for the catch was slightly limited by the contact of my shins against the aft thwart.

UPDATE

While taking a long row with the sliding seat in my Whitehall, I discovered that the lubrication on the bearings, bolt heads, and tracks would get pushed away and the bolt heads would then create some drag on the sides of the tracks. This was especially noticeable when I turned to look over my shoulder. That would twist the seat in the tracks, and when there wasn’t enough lubrication for the bearings to slip back into alignment with the tracks, I’d feel the bolts grating on the aluminum. I added strips of UHMW plastic in between the bearings. The surface of the plastic is just proud of the bolt heads and still fits in the tracks; it keeps the seat aligned and provides a low-friction contact against the aluminum. A dense hardwood, well greased, might be an adequate substitute.

Strips of dense, slippery plastic now keep the bolt heads from grating against the sides of the aluminum tracks.

You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.

GoBag

For years, I kept my cell phone in a resealable plastic bag that was originally packaging for dried fruit. I knew that a critical and expensive piece of equipment should have a more secure means of protection, but I wasn’t impressed by dry bags designed for electronics. Each seemed likely to leak if I didn’t roll or zip the opening tightly enough.

Magnets embedded in flexible strips make the GoBag self-closing. The magnets can attract iron particles from sand and soil; it is important to keep the sealing surfaces clean.

I recently upgraded to a new smart phone and decided that a reliable dry bag was in order. The staff at my local kayak shop pointed me to the GoBag, manufactured by H2Odyssey, a longtime scuba, surf, and watersports company. It is an envelope of clear TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) film with an unusual closure system. The top of the Dolphin model I bought has two thick, sturdy flexible plastic strips, each studded with 12 powerful magnets. The two strips snap together quickly and automatically, sealing the bag. Once secured, this row of magnets folds down onto a second row of a dozen magnets, forming a tight double seal that further inhibits water from infiltrating the opening.

In immersion tests on a freshwater lake, the GoBag Minnow shown here endured a half dozen trips to the bottom, around 45' deep, without any leaks. Tissue paper was used in the bag for the test to safely indicate any intrusion of water.

The seal is so tight that I can’t squeeze excess air out after closing the bag. Having a bubble of air around the phone makes it difficult to operate, so the air must be squeezed out before the bag is closed. Once sealed, the bag is completely waterproof and is rated by the manufacturer for depths of up to 100 feet.

The transparent TPU film allows full operation of the touchscreen, camera, and telephone functions of my phone. With the GoBag I can safely operate my GoPro camera using the app on my phone, confident it won’t get wet. Further, the clear plastic doesn’t significantly affect the quality of photos I take with the phone’s camera, an advantage when taking a quick shot or video on a splashy or rainy day when I’d hesitate to use my bulky, more vulnerable camera.

The GoBag comes in a range of sizes that will accommodate devices from small smart phones to tablets as large as 8″ by 11″, which could be useful if you’re using navigation software on a tablet. If your phone is in a rubberized case, get a slightly larger bag to allow easy in and out. Even for a penny-pinching person like me, the GoBag is a worthwhile investment for protecting critical electronic devices.

Bruce Bateau sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his website, Terrapin Tales.

The GoBag is available from GoBagPro.com. Prices range from $24.99 to $44.99. UPDATE 1/2/21: The company web site no longer exists, suggesting the company has gone out of business. Some retailers appear to be selling remaining stock. Do a Google search for “gobagpro” (in quotation marks) and select shopping from the search options.

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.

Ugo

The Ugo's laminated fabric includes a layer of foam so the case doesn't depend entirely on the enclosed volume from buoyancy. The seams are all RF welded rather than sewn.

I’ve had a snap-on case for my phone and a roll-and-clip style drybag for a few other things, and both left a lot to be desired— the former’s seals failed in less than a year, and the latter turned out to be not-so-dry when I was swimming ashore from my boat at anchor. Ugo has made a superior, truly dry case for my phone, which does duty as a navigation device, text messenger, journal, emergency beacon, and social-media hub.

The Ugo has a single Tizip waterproof zipper, smaller than the waterproof zippers on drysuits but equally reliable, and has an IP68 rating and was tested to be submersible to 15′ for 24 hours. There is flotation between the layers of the back panel, which will still buoy the bag with up to three phones in it, so in normal use it’s not going to be subjected to pressure at depth. My iPhone 7 itself has a rating of IP67 (submersible to 1 meter for 30 minutes), but I regard that as a measure of protection against accidental drenching and dunking, and not suited to regular exposure to water, particularly salt water.

The compartment for a smart phone has a window that allows the use of the phone's touch screen.

The zipper allows for a clam-shell opening for easy access to the contents. On the front of the bag there are two D-rings perfect for hanging my phone from a gunwale via carabiner with a navigation app open. Inside the Ugo, there is a pouch to hold the phone up to the clear front surface, and on the back of the divider are some credit-card-sized slots. Then there’s a main pocket area about 1″ wide, and finally there’s an inner zippered pocket that is quite slim, but suitable for cash, business cards, or anything else you’d want tamed with a zipper.

Behind the compartment for the phone there is a space to organize ID, credit cards, cash, and your stash (tea).

When I made phone calls with the phone in the Ugo, I could hear and be heard just fine. I could take video with the front camera and record sound with very little muffling, and of course, I could take selfies. Also on the plus side, I don’t have to remove my phone from its impact-resistant case to use the Ugo, which makes it more convenient to use than smaller, tight-fitting waterproof bags and cases.

The Ugo does have some downsides. The camera on the back of the phone is enclosed by the Ugo and can’t be used. My phone’s fingerprint identification function didn’t work through the Ugo window, so I had to turn that locking function off, and I had to press the home button quite hard to wake my iPhone, but those are acceptable inconveniences for the serious protection offered by the Ugo.

I often row a dinghy in rough, wet weather to get out to my boat and to take the dog ashore while I’m cruising. I also row for adventure. My Ugo provides compact flotation and impact protection for my phone, the medications I carry, and important papers. I can chuck it into the bottom of the rowboat without a worry.

Anne Bryant is WoodenBoat’s Associate Editor.

Ugo is available at Ugowear.com for $129.

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.

KRAKEN and THE G.O.A.T.

The Museum's Workshop on the Water provides students not only with tools, materials, and instruction, but also a real-worked application to their classroom studies.

The Independence Seaport Museum sits on the banks of the Delaware River in the heart of downtown Philadelphia. Like most museums, it preserves artifacts of the past, but the Independence Seaport Museum is also preserving skills. It has an active boatshop, Workshop on the Water, that is bringing the traditions of wooden boat building to the city’s youth. Among the programs at the shop is SAILOR—Science and Arts Innovative Learning on the River—for middle and high-school students. Groups of 10 to 14 students build small boats learning STEM skills (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the boats go to the museum’s community boating program fleet.

The Harbor Master Skiff was designed by John Brady, the President and CEO of the Museum.

This past year 103 students from five local schools built two skiffs designed by the museum’s president, John Brady. The Harbor Master Skiffs are 11’6” long and have a beam of 4’. They’re flat-bottomed rowing boats meant for beginning rowers on calm waters. Plans for the skiff are not available for sale, but the museum offers drawings and plans for over 80 boats native to the Delaware River, the Schuylkill River, Delaware Bay, and the North Jersey shore.

The skiffs combine traditional riveted lapstrake planking on the sides with a plywood rather than a cross-planked bottom.

Alor Henderson was one of the students who built the skiffs—KRAKEN and THE G.O.A.T.—that were launched this year. Before joining SAILOR, she didn’t know too much about the program “except my school told me it was a four-year program with a STEM focus, and I love math. Building a boat sounded interesting and different. I don’t often get to experience water, so to learn how to build a boat and then launch it in the Delaware River basin was a new experience for me. I’ve learned patience, as we have to pay attention to key details.”

Alor Henderson, left, and Kawthar Aguivi are two students who worked on the Harbor Master Skiffs under the direction of David Dormond, center, an Independence Seaport Museum Boatshop educator.

Kawthar Aguivi was encouraged to join the SAILOR program by her soccer coach. “He told me it was going to involve a lot of engineering, and I really like engineering and have always been interested in the subject. I also thought it would be a fun way to make new friends. I learned how to work better with a team. When I was in middle school I didn’t like working in groups; this project taught me how to work with a team and what being a good leader to my teammates means. I like that I can learn how to build something I never thought I’d know how to build. I was so excited when I found out that we would be building a skiff this year. It helps me determine what I like and don’t like within the engineering field. Participating in this program has confirmed that I want to pursue engineering in the future.”

After launching, FRAKEN and THE G.O.A.T. joind other small boats in teh Museum''s livery.

KRAKEN takes a spin with three of the student builders aboard.

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.

All-Terrain Roller

I have developed a pretty good system for getting my lapstrake rowing canoe to the water. The canoe alone is pretty heavy, close to 80 lbs, and with the sliding seat, outriggers, and oars aboard, it tops 100 lbs, a lot more than I want to lift all at once. I keep the canoe on a shelf built into the garage so it slides straight across to my car’s roof rack and at the launch ramp I drag it off the back of the car, rest the stern on the ground at the water’s edge, and then lift the bow off. A pool noodle is all it takes to roll the canoe down the ramp into the water.

Getting the canoe launched at a beach is more of a challenge. I’ve been using the roller carts that I built for Ben Fuller’s article in our January 2017 issue. One has a wooden roller and the other a plastic pipe. The pipe has a larger diameter, 7”, and I figured it might work on sand. With the cart strapped to the canoe about amidships, the pipe made a lot of noise but worked fine over pavement, a gravel path, and a boardwalk. To my dismay, the pipe couldn’t handle sand. In short order, it bulldozed a pile of sand ahead of it and that was the end of it. To be fair, Ben had noted in his article that these carts are used upside down on soft ground and remain stationary while the boat rides the upturned roller. That does indeed work, but I have a broad beach to get across, and moving the canoe one boat length at a time and shuttling the roller ahead makes progress slow and tedious.

Several years ago, I had toyed with the idea of using an inflatable boat fender as a roller. The type of fender with a hole down the middle makes it possible to skewer one with a steel rod for an axle. The roller cart I made worked, but I didn’t really need it because I could just as easily carry a kayak on my shoulder. If I made a cart for the canoe with a larger fender, I thought I might have an easier time launching my canoe. Fenders are quite expensive, but I’ve had the good fortune to live by a mile-long lake almost completely hemmed in by marinas and there are a lot of runaway fenders. Just this fall I found five tucked under wharves and in the brambles.

A fender with a hole through the middle looked like a promising solution for managing hard and soft terrain.

I bought a length of 1/2” steel rod for an axle to fit an old fender 24” long and 10” in diameter. With the kayak roller cart I’d made previously, I had hammered a length of PVC water pipe down the length of the hole in the fender to create a more rigid “bushing” for the axle. I didn’t bother with that for this new cart. The distances I haul the canoe are relatively short, and if I did wear through the hole down the middle of the fender, it had cost me nothing.

The wooden frame was easy to make from a piece of 5/4” Douglas fir that was once a gymnasium bleacher and some ash milled up from a windfall. The fender bowed up in the middle when I put weight on the axle so I pumped some more air in and added extra clearance under the deck of the cart frame.

The fender rolls almost as easily as the solid rollers on my other carts and is a lot quieter—the molded ridges on the fender make a nice soft on rumbling sound on pavement. On grass or cobbles there isn’t perceptible difference in drag and on sand, even soft dry sand, there is surprisingly little extra resistance to rolling. The roller has such a large area of contact that it doesn’t sink or pile sand up ahead of itself. The flattened trail it leaves doesn’t even fill in the deepest footprints in the sand. When the canoe is afloat, I unstrap the cart, slide it to the side and it floats to the surface.

The old fender and I had some good runs before it gave out. A newer fender less prone to cracking may be the solution.

My fender cart worked like a charm, but the old fender eventually gave out. I had noticed a small crack at the edge of the inflation valve, a sign that the aging material was losing its flexibility, so it wasn’t a great surprise to have a leak develop where axle bears on the hole at one end of the fender. I’ll try again with a fender that isn’t quite so old and still has good flexibility. Maybe a pair of smaller fenders. And I may take another shot at bushings, at least short ones in the ends. For now my heavy-duty all-terrain cart, built on the cheap, just needs the right fender to go adrift.

19′ Bartender

Back in 2004, I was looking for a boat to take us to our cabin on Galiano Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands in British Columbia. We can only get to the cabin by boat, so I needed something that would safely and reliably transport my family of four, our dog, and enough provisions for a week through what are sometimes pretty rough conditions. I was drawn to the Bartender design for its reputation as a capable rough-water hull, for its beautiful lines, and for the fact that it would fit in my garage, which is also my boat shop.

Don Froese

The guard that rises toward the stemhead is an extension of the planing wing.

The Bartenders, in six models ranging from 19′ to 29′, were designed by George Calkins during the 1950s to negotiate the river bars along the Oregon coast. He died in 2008 at the age of 97. Bill Childs owned the rights to the designs, so we went to visit him in Bellingham, Washington. Bill was kind enough to spend some time with us, answer all of our questions, and show us his cuddy-cabin 22.5-footer and some of the boats under construction in his shop. The Bartenders were even more beautiful up close, and I ended up buying a set of plans for the 19-footer. Plans are available for Bartenders up to 29′, but for me, the best boat is the smallest one that will do the job.

I started building my Bartender in 2005 and it took approximately two years of evenings and weekends to complete. The 19-footer just barely fit in my enclosed one-car garage when it was positioned diagonally. At the time, Bill sold frame kits, and this was a great way to get started. The frames, constructed of 3/4″ meranti plywood, fit together quickly and accurately on the jig.

The only fiberglass called for in the plans was on the bottom for stiffening and to provide a more abrasion-resistant surface for beaching. Standard 8′ plywood sheets were used for the bottom and side panels, and were butt-joined using an overlapping reinforcing piece of plywood, located between frames. The hull was sheathed in 3/8″ meranti attached with epoxy and silicon-bronze screws above the waterline and stainless-steel screws below. Bill strongly emphasized that the Bartender should be lightly built, very close to the plans with few or no modifications, especially those that would increase the weight of the boat or affect the hull shape or balance.

The plywood was coated in epoxy resin below the cockpit sole, and painted with a two-part industrial epoxy paint. This paint was also used on the sole and as a primer on the outside of the boat. The hull was finished off with Pettit EZ-poxy marine paint above the waterline and antifouling paint below. The finish has stood up very well, and has been refinished twice over the ten years the boat has been in the water.

Don Froese

The long motorwell and the planing wings are two of the Bartender’s distinctive features.

Two very important features of the design are the planing wings and the motorwell with its plug. The Bartender is a planing-hull boat, and the 19-footer needs the surface area of these essential components in order to plane and handle properly. The motorwell plug is critical to the performance of the boat and must be made to fill as much of the area as possible in the motorwell. The plug is a plywood box-like fixture that has an angled forward face to reduce drag and push water down. It hinges down as the motor is lowered, and then locks in place. Lifting the plug and motor is a two-step process where the motor is lifted partway up, the plug is raised, and then the motor is lifted the rest of the way up. The extra step is unusual, but it allows the plug to be built with as much surface area as possible.

George Costakis

For the motor to tilt up, the plug has to be pivoted to a vertical position. This motorwell has faceted expansions on its sides to provide room for the motor to turn.

Modern four-stroke outboard motors are much larger than the early two-strokes that were prevalent when the Bartender was first designed, and may require that the top of the well be flared outward to accommodate the power head and to allow the motor to turn. This modification to the well is not part of the plans, and its shape will depend on the motor to be used. The newer outboards—especially the four-strokes—are also much heavier, so choosing as small an engine as possible is a good idea. We decided on a four-stroke, 40-hp Mercury outboard. This motor uses the same size block as the 30-hp version and weighs approximately the same; it’s much lighter than the 50-hp, which is the next size up. With the 40-hp outboard the Bartender has a top speed of 25 knots and outstanding fuel economy.

Bill Childs

The standard 19′ Bartender has a low windshield built on top of the deck.

The boat was going to be in the water year-round, so it needed to have a self-bailing cockpit. The cockpit sole is elevated above the waterline, and scuppers drain water out through the motorwell. I also installed an electric bilge pump in the sealed compartment beneath the sole to remove water that seeps through seams and access hatches, but I have rarely needed to use it. The plans include details for positive flotation, which consists of blocks of foam glued underneath the fore, aft, and side decks. I also built sealed compartments in the bow and stern to help keep the boat afloat if it ever flooded.

Don Froese

The author elevated the windshield of his Bartender to provide more protection from the wind.

One aspect of the design that we did modify somewhat was the dashboard/windscreen area. We wanted a bit more protection from the elements. Bill had advised me not to increase the cockpit height too much to avoid problems with windage and weight balance, so we built a 10″-high step on top of the foredeck and attached the wind screen on top. There is plenty of sitting headroom under the dodger and very good protection from spray and rain. We had the dodger sewn up with a zippered panel above the driver’s seat. My usual driving position is sitting on top of the seat back with my head poking out above the top of the wind screen. This is a comfortable position for me and provides very good visibility.

Don Froese

The author designed and built cockpit seating that conceals the gas tanks. Folding seats face aft for extra passengers.

The seats, which are my own design, are simple plywood boxes with fold-down seats on the rear-facing side that provide access to storage in the backrests. The portable fuel tanks are located under the seats, and the battery is just forward of the motor below the cockpit sole, keeping the weight of those items low and near the middle of the boat.

The boat comes up to plane very easily with the 40-hp motor, thanks to the planing wings. There is no noticeable change from displacement to planing, just a gradual transition as the bow drops a bit and the speed increases. The hull performs very well in both smooth and rough seas. The double-ended stern handles a following sea nicely, easily surfing down the wave faces, and doesn’t get pushed around by waves as transom stern would. Having the motor located close to the center of the boat gives it sharp handling. It likes to carve a turn and tracks very well. The only downside of the motor location comes when we’re towing anything from the stern cleat—it is difficult to turn. This problem would be easily solved with a towing post closer to the motor but has not prevented us from pulling the occasional water skier. The 40-hp outboard is just enough to get a slalom skier out of the water.

George Costakis

A Bartender with another builder-designed modification has a cuddy-cabin roof supporting the windshield.

The Bartender has a generous dory-hull flare, and the beam at the waterline is just 58″. The narrow waterline beam makes the hull quite tender during boarding and very sensitive to weight shifts while under way. Moving around in the boat definitely makes the boat harder to handle, but if passengers stay seated the boat is a lot of fun to drive.

The hull’s flare provides very good secondary stability and handles waves and rough water very well. The only issue I have had is when crossing waves at a shallow angle. If the waves are almost parallel to the boat, the stern can sometimes break loose, causing the boat to spin out. This is easily avoided by approaching waves closer to head-on. The hull has a lot of freeboard, and the combination of flare and spray rails keeps the spray out of the boat.

We have been using our Bartender at least once a month for the last 10 years with very little maintenance and have been very happy with it. It does everything we want it to do and more. There is plenty of space for two adults, two kids, our dog, and all of our supplies. We have used the boat for fishing, water-skiing, and hauling way too much stuff to and from our summer cabin. The plans were very detailed, providing a materials list and all the information required. The building process was straightforward, and the Bartender forum group was a great resource.

The Bartender is a high-performance design that is fun to drive, safe to ride in, and sweet to look at. Ours gets a lot of attention at the dock, and I am surprised how many people recognize it and ask, “Hey, is that a Bartender?” It’s a great feeling to answer, “Yes, and we built it ourselves.”

Don Froese is an electrical engineer living in North Vancouver, B.C. He has built several small kayaks and rowing boats in addition to his 19′ Bartender.

19′ Bartender Particulars

[table]

Length/19′

Length on waterline/16′

Beam/6′8″

Draft/8″

Weight/1,350 lbs

Power/25- to 50-hp outboard

[/table]

Plans for the 19′ Bartender are available from Bartender Boats for $225. Plans with patterns sell for $325.

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!

Noank

Noank is a village in southeast Connecticut that looks out over Fishers Island Sound and the Mystic River. In the 19th century it was a major shipbuilding center, and about 700 wooden sailing ships came down the ways in shipyards in this picturesque little town. Noank is also the name given to an 18′ 2″ pulling boat designed by Nick Schade, whose small-boat shop is about a mile, as the gull flies, from the village. He is well known for his line of Guillemot kayaks, strip-built in wood, then ’glassed, varnished, and made show-room pretty.

photographs by the author

The seat support rail is designed for the Piantedosi sliding seat rowing rig. Under each deck is a sealed compartment for dry storage and flotation. The manual includes instructions for making the hatches from plywood.

The Noank, also strip-built, is his first boat with a sliding seat. It is a half-decked recreational boat, beamy at 36″, with generous freeboard, and designed for exposed, choppy water. Schade also intends this to be a light and fast camp-cruiser, so the bow and stern have large, dry compartments for camping gear.

Like Schade’s other designs, this is a pretty boat, such is the judgment of five of us, all local rowers, who took it out for a spin. Tom Sanford, Janis Mink, Biddle Morris, Tom Tobin, and I are all members of Mystic River Rowing, and collectively, we have about 140 years of experience rowing in boats with sliding seats. All of us have seat-time in both recreational and racing boats, and most have taught sculling using boats similar to the Noank. Biddle has done hundreds of miles of distance rowing-camping and is our go-to guy on open-water rowing.

With the rowing rig occupying the space along the centerline, the rower has to get aboard with a foot planted slightly off to one side.

Beyond good looks, what does the Noank offer? How well will it handle in the afternoon southerly that’s common to Fishers Island Sound, the place the designer had in mind when he went to his drawing board? How is its calm-water performance? Does it track well? Turn easily? Is it slow or will it go? Is it fragile? Would it be hard to build? The short answer is that the Noank does well what it set out to do. It is fun to row, forgiving, and tougher than it looks.

The specifications call for planking of 3/16″ x 3/4″ cedar strips, shaped over forms cut from 1/2″ MDF or plywood and spaced at 12″ intervals on a strongback. The stripped hull is sheathed inside and out with 4-oz fiberglass cloth set in epoxy, and the ’glass is doubled on the bottom. Built to the designed specifications, this will be a strong, tough boat. The high crown of the decking helps stiffen the hull without adding much weight.

The Noank was designed with the Piantedosi rowing rig and conventional sculls in mind. For rowers new to sculling, the 6″ overlap of the oar handles will take some getting used to.

Schade notes that the Noank could be built without the decks and bulkheads if a lighter boat for protected water is the goal. The reverse transom keeps the waterline length almost the same as the overall length for speed’s sake. He says, “I really like the arched reverse transom, but it is a bit complicated. You could just have a flat vertical transom without changing the performance significantly.” A paper template, wrapped around the stern, indicates where it is to be cut to accommodate the curved transom panel. The stern is planked extra-long to make modifications possible.

The seat-support rail is designed to fit a Piantadosi rowing rig and adds significant strength to the hull. It is a wooden box beam 3-1/2″ x 4″ x 8′ 5″, with cutouts to reduce weight and provide drainage and ’glassed inside and out for rigidity. The anodized aluminum monorail of the rowing rig is held to the seat-support rail by two machine screws that are removable without tools. The rig weighs 22 lbs, and it can be put in the boat or taken out in less than a minute. It is designed to be rowed with racing sculls, which have a standard length of 284 to 290 cm (around 9′6″)

In a sprint, the Noank will do about 6 knots.

When completed, the Noank should come in around 53 lbs and all up, with rowing rig, weigh 75 lbs. For those of us who are not power lifters, loading a boat of this weight and girth onto a cartop carrier would be a two-person task. If it is to be beach-launched solo, a dolly or trailer is in order.

Getting in and out of wide rowing wherries can be awkward—for some it’s a long reach to get their weight planted over the centerline. The complication in getting onboard Noank is that you can’t put a foot on the centerline—the seat-support rail is in the way. Most of us just put a foot up against the box beam, held onto the oars, and accepted a quick heel angle as we shifted our weight onto the inboard leg. There is enough static stability in the Noank for this maneuver and for a rower to exit sideways, swinging both legs over the side to stand up in shallow water. The boat heeled sharply, but did not bury its rail. We tried the “Look Ma, no hands” routine while seated, letting go of the oar handles, and while this will result in a quick swim in most shells, the Noank only wobbled and did not flip. If you lashed the oar handles together in the middle of this boat—they overlap by 6″, the standard for sculling boats—the boat could look after itself while you eat lunch or take pictures.

The Noank would put beginning scullers on an easy learning curve. We would expect a novice to feel comfortable by the second or third lesson. That is largely because of the boat’s inherent dynamic stability: It wants to run on an even keel and if it is rocking side to side as it moves along, this is the rower’s fault for not sitting up straight and keeping the oar handles level. With its long skeg, Noank tracks straight, but is still easy to turn. In a moderate crosswind, a rower should have no problem dialing in a crab angle and maintaining a compass course.

Hobby-horsing can be a significant issue for most boats with sliding seats. The rower’s weight is two or three times the weight of the boat and rowing rig, and with that much mass moving back and forth, around 2’ with each stroke, the bow and stern want to bob up and down, killing speed. The goal is to keep the boat running level, and to that end this hull is designed with little rocker in the keel (only about 1”) and an almost uniformly rounded cross-sectional shape throughout the long cockpit of the boat. That provides needed buoyancy under the rower at both ends of the slide. Another speed killer, wetted surface, is kept in check by narrowing the beam at the waterline. The Noank has a beam of 36″ at the rail amidships; at the waterline it is 23”. The narrow waterline and arc cross section cuts down the area of skin subject to friction as it moves through the water. It also reduces lateral stability, but the flared sides above the waterline give the Noank an abundance of reserve stability when heeled.

Scullers like to talk about speed. None will admit that their own boat is a slowpoke, and many of us tend to boast a bit, claiming speeds too good to believe—“stretchers,” as Mark Twain called them. For the Noank, our numbers come from an impartial GPS during speed trials on a light-wind day with calm seas and no current. It takes a few pulls to get the boat going, but once up to speed the boat carries and glides well. This is a 4-5-6 boat: In the hands of an experienced sculler, rowing leisurely at a pace that can be held indefinitely, it will run at 4 knots. To reach 5 knots calls for rowing at a racing pace that’s sustainable over a 2,000-meter course. And 6 knots calls for a sprint, a “Power Ten” in crew parlance, and holding that speed for any distance would involve serious pain. The Noank moves as well as could be expected for a displacement hull with its 17.7′ waterline length. Once the Noank exceeds its theoretical maximum speed of 5.63 knots, even super-athletes are going struggle to make it move faster for very long. We found nothing to complain about in the Noank’s speed curve.

Building a Noank will call for time and patience, requirements for any high-quality, strip-built boat, whether the builder starts with plans or a kit. Both are available for the Noank. The finished product will require a reasonable amount of maintenance, but the construction is sturdy, and unless the boat is abused or neglected, it should outlive its builder. The five of us rowers agreed that the Noank is an all-round performer that rates well in its class. Tom Tobin even bought the plans and intends to build one.

Carl Kaufmann trained to be a naval architect and marine engineer, but a career in journalism paid the bills for five decades. He has always had a second career: making things out of wood. Most of his time has been spent building boats from scratch, 10 in all. His current family fleet ranges from a 12-ton, 40’ yawl down to a 34-lb cedar shell. For variety’s sake, he made some mandolins and acoustic guitars. His home is on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, but he spends a lot of time at his winter address in Mystic, Connecticut. He has a workshop in each place, so he is never at a loss for something to do in retirement.

Noank Particulars

[table]

Length/18′2″

Beam/36″

Draft/4″

Freeboard/8″

[/table]

Full-size Plans for the Noank are available from Guillemot Kayaks for $130. Kits are available for $1850 from Chesapeake Light Craft.

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!

Back Door to Georgian Bay

I crawled out of the boat tent as soon as the sky started growing light; a few leftover raindrops rolled off the edge of the tarp and down my back as I wriggled past. I had spent the evening huddled in my sleeping bag reading and looking at charts, shuffling gear around to keep things dry as rain pattered steadily on the tent. With a wide sleeping platform and a tent to keep me dry, my new boat was proving to be luxuriously comfortable, at least by backpacking standards, but September nights on the Great Lakes are long. After so many hours aboard, I was ready to be moving again. I climbed out into knee-deep water and waded ashore.

I left my malfunctioning VHF radio in the car and returned to simpler methods of weather forecasting for this cruise—methods as simple as hearing the patter of raindrops overhead. An improvised boat tent and plenty of books helped me wait out the rain at South Benjamin Island.

The morning was clear and cool; the sky had washed itself clean of the thick gray clouds I’d encountered on yesterday’s 10-mile passage from my launching point in Spanish, Ontario. I’d never come to the North Channel so late in the year before. The sun hung low in the sky, casting long shadows across the beach and promising shorter days. A stand of yellow-leafed birches at the edge of the beach shifted slowly in a slight breeze, and an osprey flew past with a faint flumph of wings. A dozen small islands and granite outcroppings rose from the water just offshore, and beyond them was the chain of pink rocks named the Sow and Pigs. Otherwise, nothing. There were no other boats in sight—and this at South Benjamin Island, one of the most popular cruising destinations in the North Channel.

After several hours of sailing to reach the Benjamin Islands, I was ready to leave the boat for a while. A tricky scramble through thick brush and up a steep granite slab led me to this overlook at the southern tip of South Benjamin Island.

By the time I had eaten a bowl of oatmeal, stowed my gear, and had the boat ready to go, a strong northwesterly wind had come up. The open water to the east was a flurry of whitecaps, and the big pines along the shore were shifting and creaking restlessly overhead. A bit uneasy, I rowed through the rocky maze at the tip of South Benjamin and out of the lee of the island. It was windy—maybe too windy for the 20 miles I’d have to sail to reach Bay of Islands, my next planned anchorage. I’d had visions of an easy broad reach and a few pleasant days of sailing to begin with while I learned what my new boat, a Don Kurylko–designed Alaska I’d launched in June, could do. Instead I’d be starting off close-hauled on a double-reefed mainsail. Maybe triple-reefed. Well, I told myself, you can’t always wait for perfect conditions.

With no tides, it’s always easy to get to your boat when you need to. I replaced the mast gate shown in the Alaska plans with a simpler lift-out partner, which made stepping and unstepping the mast from shore a little simpler.

I started pulling out the sail to tie in a deep reef, but stopped a moment later, shaking my head. What was I doing? I wasn’t on any schedule other than a vague plan to sail eastward into Georgian Bay for as long as the weather was good. To set out in conditions like this, triple-reefed, suddenly struck me as asinine. Laughing out loud at my near-stupidity, I set the sail aside, then pulled out the oars. I wasn’t going to raise the sail, but that didn’t mean I had to sit around on the beach waiting for the wind to die down.
I spent the morning rowing up the eastern side of the Benjamins, dodging through the wide band of rocks and shoals guarding the approaches to neighboring Fox Island. The boat, loaded heavily with cruising gear and ballast, took a half-dozen strokes to get up to speed, but kept moving through the waves with little effort and no fuss at all, no surprise for a design modeled on a classic Whitehall hull. With a deeply reefed sail, it would have been a struggle to work my way north. Under oars, it was a pleasant way to keep warm.

Looking over the chart at my South Benjamin anchorage to pick a destination for the day, my standard post-breakfast routine. With good visibility and no tides or currents, navigation on the North Channel rarely gets more complicated than eyeballing the islands as you sail past.

The west side of Fox Island was all bare-boned ridges, dark pines, and narrow passages cutting through broad expanses of smooth granite. I rowed past the outlying rocks and up into Fox Harbor, a deep inlet I’d never explored before because it was always crowded with deep-draft sailboats and motoryachts. Today it was empty, except for one sloop anchored far up at the head of the narrow bay.

I worked my way up Fox Harbor, making detours up the many side channels and backwaters whenever the opportunity arose. They were dead ends, I knew from the chart, but still worth exploring. Near the head of the inlet I turned to port into one last dead end that led me to a narrow channel lined with cliffs, barely wide enough for my oars. At a few places, with less than a foot to spare on either side of the boat, I had to trail the oars close alongside the hull and let the boat’s momentum carry me through. And then all at once I was past the narrows and into a wide bay—a bay on the north side of Fox Island, and, according to the chart, completely unconnected to Fox Harbor. I had rowed right through a gap that wasn’t supposed to be there, the kind of unexpected opportunity that sail-and-oar cruising has to offer.
I spent the rest of the day working my way through unlikely passages along the edges of Fox Harbor, slipping through channels so narrow I sometimes had to stand in the boat and paddle with one oar. Summer had been rainy, and water levels were about 3’ higher than indicated on the chart, opening a complex web of passages that would have been dry land on my last trip here three years ago.

With the wind out of the northwest at 20 knots or more, I was happy to spend a day exploring the rocky interior of Fox Island under oars. The narrow channels and sweeping granite slabs provide a good preview of Georgian Bay and the Thirty Thousand Islands.

After an afternoon of poking around and keeping out of the wind, I emerged on the south side of Fox Island and followed the shoreline east. After a mile or two, I rounded a corner to find a hidden alcove carved into the stony shore, a tiny bay hardly bigger than my boat. A lichen-spattered granite dome rose 15’ above the water’s edge on one side, with a single stunted pine standing just below its summit. I glided to a stop in a stand of half-drowned willows at the foot of the rocks, tied off to some branches, and waded ashore.
The wind seemed to be dying down. I had a quick snack and wrote some notes in my journal, then set out again under sail. Once out of Fox Island’s lee, though, the wind swept in even stronger than before—too much to face so late in the day. I lowered the sail, dropped the mast, and headed back to the hidden alcove under oars, easier and faster than sailing in this wind. I tied the painter to a stout birch stump, then pulled my gear out of the boat—a single trip, with only two large waterproof duffels to carry—and brought everything up to the top of the dome. I’d arrange things later. For now, leaving the bags at the foot of the lone, sentinel pine, I set out to explore the island. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking broad pathways of bare granite past reed-fringed ponds and forests of white pines and birches. Just after sunset I returned to camp, ate a supper of black beans, tomatoes, and chiles sprinkled with lime juice, then set up my tent at the very edge of the granite cliffs and sat back to watch the darkening sky fill with stars.

Fox Island’s rugged southern shores offer plenty of good campsites overlooking the water, and a pleasant break from sleeping aboard. Here the view is east toward Amedroz Island and the Bay of Islands beyond.

Morning brought blue skies and light winds. I ate breakfast—oatmeal again—and prepped a Thermos meal of red beans and rice for supper. After repacking the boat, I rowed a few yards offshore and raised the sail. After half an hour, though, I’d barely cleared Fox Island, and the breeze was swinging around eastward, forcing me well off my desired course. I dropped the rig and settled in for a long session at the oars. Far ahead, the rugged pine-clad La Cloche Mountains rose from the mainland to the northeast, with a line of big islands—Amedroz, Bedford, and East Rous—forming the southern edge of a broad channel leading eastward. Somewhere just beyond the horizon was Great La Cloche Island and, along its northern edge, the back door to Georgian Bay.
Eventually a westerly wind came up, putting me on a broad reach—perfect sailing. I let my 59-cent autopilot, a simple bungee-and-line tiller tamer, keep me on course. With the wind holding steady, I tied the sheet to an oarlock with a slippery hitch, and sat back to enjoy the ride. The wind grew stronger as I sailed on, the boat surfing the steeper waves with a smooth rush of speed and showing no inclination to broach. Perfect sailing indeed—20 miles of it.

Guarded by extensive shoals and a narrow, winding entrance, this hidden cove at the gateway to the Bay of Islands is a perfect small-boat anchorage. Even in mid-September the water was warm enough for a brief swim before supper.

When I reached the entrance to Bay of Islands, I turned up into a beam reach and the strength of the wind suddenly became obvious, then made way up the shore of Great La Cloche Island: a dead-end bay for keelboats, but not for my Alaska. Twenty yards offshore I dropped the rig and rowed through a narrow knee-deep channel that led, eventually, to a sheltered bay hidden between a cluster of tightly linked islands too small to be named on the chart.
I dropped my 6-lb Northill anchor from the stern in the middle of the bay and rowed up to shore as the line ran out, cleating off just as the bow edged toward the rocks. Stepping out into knee-deep water, I took the painter ashore, tied the end to a tree, and headed off to explore, but it didn’t take long. The islands were nothing but jumbled heaps of moss-covered boulders that rolled and clattered underfoot, with nowhere to pitch a tent. I set up the sleeping platform and boat tent and got ready for a night aboard.
I woke in the night to the sound of loud splashing and grunting just outside the boat. Bears? I wondered, but dismissed the idea almost immediately—I’d expect a bear to approach from shore, and these sounds were coming from behind me, out in the water. I pulled up the side of the boat tent. Five or six white-whiskered faces were just visible in the darkness. They vanished with a sudden series of huffs and splashes as soon as I poked my head out. A minute later I heard them surface farther down the bay. Otters. They splashed their way out of the cove and the noise faded to silence. I went back to sleep smiling.

Rowing past Great La Cloche Island on a typically calm North Channel morning, I covered more than 10 miles under oars before the wind came up. I was pleased to find my new Alaska as well-suited for the task as I had expected.

Daylight arrived without wind. No matter—I had oars. I pulled out a can of peaches to eat underway, packed up the boat, lowered the mast, and shoved off from shore, retrieving my anchor along the way. Soon I was rowing east along the north side of Great La Cloche Island, slipping along the southern margins of the Bay of Islands. Somewhere a loon called. Farther on, a bald eagle stood on the rocks at the water’s edge tearing a fish apart.
The water was dead flat, and the boat moved smoothly and easily. I was traveling 15’ per stroke, I decided, watching the hull slide through the water. A hundred strokes for 1,500’, 400 for a nautical mile. I pulled out my watch, set it on the bench beside me, and started counting strokes. Twenty minutes later, pulling steadily and easily, I hit 400. Twenty minutes meant 3 knots. And that was moving at an all-day pace, with the oars slipping in and out of the water so silently and smoothly that it felt like the boat was rowing itself. It hardly seemed necessary to have a sailing rig at all.
By late morning I reached the double bridge that joins mainland Ontario to Great La Cloche Island—my secret small-boat passage to Georgian Bay that bypasses the crowds, strong currents, and the open-on-the-hour swing bridge at Little Current on the south side of Great La Cloche Island. The bridges on my route were fixed: too low for even a short mast, and too narrow for oars, making it impassable for larger boats. In my Alaska, all I had to do was pull the oars in close to the hull as we coasted through.
I reached Killarney by early evening, and dropped the sail to row through the narrow dock-lined channel separating the town from George Island. With excellent anchorages just a few miles away at the northern edge of Georgian Bay, I had time for a stop in town to phone home. I pulled the boat onto the grass alongside one of Killarney’s many marinas, called my wife, and bought a few groceries. On my way back across town I treated myself to a local fish fry. As I was leaving, I saw a woman loading some bags into my boat.
“It’s the last day of our trip,” she said as I approached. I hadn’t even asked a question. “And it looked like you could use them in your little boat.”
When I opened the bags I found boxes and boxes of expensive cookies and candies: maple shortbreads maple creams maple peanut brittle maple sugar leaves maple everything. Only in Canada, I thought. And only in Canada would you find people putting stuff into your boat.

There was less than an hour of daylight remaining by the time I left Killarney. Out in Georgian Bay, beyond the end of the narrow Killarney Channel, a strong southwesterly was blowing, sending big waves crashing into cliff-lined lee shores. Not eager to face those conditions in the fast-approaching darkness, I turned back toward town and found a small sheltered bay near the end of the channel, just west of the lighthouse at Red Rock Point. I tied the boat up to a waist-high granite outcropping, slipped a cushion between the hull and the rocks, and set my tent up on a granite slab at the water’s edge.
The little bay was less than a mile outside of Killarney. It might as well have been a hundred. I spent the last of the day’s light looking over the small-craft charts for Georgian Bay, then sat outside the tent on a pile of boat cushions until late in the night, watching the broad belt of the Milky Way fade away with the light of the rising moon before I crawled at last into the tent. I drifted off to sleep to the sound of waves still crashing on the rocks below.

The good weather was holding, but I didn’t trust it. The long low slant of the sunlight, the coolness of the air, the emptiness of the popular anchorages—everything seemed to suggest the end of the season, as if November’s cold winds were waiting in the wings to sweep in and slam the door shut on summer. I didn’t want to be too far from my car and trailer when that happened.

Sailing eastward through Collins Inlet, a narrow cliff-lined passage 10 miles long. With a following wind that grew stronger as the day went on, I kept the boat on a broad reach and tacked my way downwind to avoid constant jibes in the shifting gusts.

I’d left Killarney the day before, sailing a dead run eastward through Collins Inlet, a narrow fjord-like passage that ran for 10 miles along the north side of Philip Edward Island—an inland waterway lined with 50’ cliffs, occasional cabins and cottages, and here and there an outboard-powered fishing boat buzzing past. Now, tacking my way down Beaverstone Bay, the eastern end of Collins Inlet, I knew I’d have to decide soon: continue east to the Bustard Islands, or turn west and begin working my way back toward Spanish.
First, though, I had to find a way out of Beaverstone Bay. After a few false starts among the seemingly endless rocks and reefs, I found what I thought must be the entrance to an intricate boulder-studded passage just west of Toad Island. I short-tacked my way out through the gap, fighting strong winds dead on the nose, surging over steep waves that smashed themselves to spray on half-submerged rocks and shoals all around me. The boat handled it beautifully under full sail—I had learned to expect nothing less. It seemed a long time ago that I had been hesitant to set off from the Benjamins.
Once past Toad Island, I kept tacking out into Georgian Bay to get some sea room, heading south past the outlying rocks until there was nothing but hundreds of miles of open water ahead—a broad blue sky, a flat horizon, and an endless succession of waves rolling in from the southwest one after another, row on row, and row on row, for as far as I could see. Two miles offshore, far enough to be clear of shoals and shallows, I luffed up and released the sheet and let go of the tiller, leaving it to my bungee autopilot to hold us steady while I pulled out my large-scale chart. The boat drifted slowly downwind, rolling and yawing with each wave. I made dividers of my fingers and measured distances. It was 20 miles to the Bustard Islands—three days just to reach the islands and return to Killarney, and another three days back to Spanish from there at a minimum. Add time to explore, and I wouldn’t get back to my car until sometime in October.

Two nights in the Fox Islands gave me lots of time to explore. While circling West Fox Island on foot, I was caught by the play of light and shadows on the wave-sculpted granite.

I finally decided it was better to turn west and start closing the loop. The Bustards would have to wait. Taking a last look out across the open waters of Georgian Bay, I folded the chart and turned off the wind on the port tack, heading east. Close-hauled, I could just hold a course for the Fox Islands. I hauled the sheet in tightly and moved up onto the rail, smiling as the boat surged forward, shouldering past the waves and sending glittering arcs of spray flying over the water. I leaned farther outboard and reached one hand down to skim the surface of the water as we flew along.

North Benjamin Island’s hidden west-side lagoon is inaccessible to all but the shallowest-draft boats. With water levels 3’ above chart datum this year, the channel was less than 4’ deep.

Late that night, on a broad bare summit at the eastern end of the Fox Islands, I unzipped my tent and stepped out into the darkness. I could hear the quiet rush of waves on the slabs below, the ceaseless surge and retreat of wind-driven water that had scoured and smoothed the rock I was standing upon, and would continue to wear away the edges of the islands, slowly shaping them into fair curves and flowing forms until there is no water left for the wind to move, and no wind to move it.
From somewhere within the shadow of the pines a barred owl called. Slowly the northern sky filled with twisting ribbons of green, gold, and white, broad translucent bands of living light rising from the dark horizon in shifting curves to weave themselves together in silence, glowing brighter and still brighter until it seemed the sky was filled with fire.
I stood and watched until the colors began to fade, then made my way barefoot over cool, smooth stone down to the water’s edge where my boat was waiting, anchored just offshore. Her pale green hull, lit by a quarter moon, was mirrored in dark water that rippled and wavered and reformed itself beneath her with each breath of air until it was impossible to see where the work of human hands ended and the endless smoothing and shaping of the wind and waves began.

Tom Pamperin is a writer and small boat sailor based in northwestern Wisconsin, and the author of JAGULAR Goes Everywhere: (mis)Adventures in a $300 Sailboat. He is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly.

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.