A simple downdraft table can put the space between the rip-fence rails to good use.
Building and maintaining a wooden boat involves a lot of sanding and a lot of dust. I have an exhaust fan for the shop, a dust collector connected to my tablesaw and jointer, and shop-vacuum connections for the belt sander, disc sander, bandsaw, and random-orbit sander. My latest addition to my arsenal of dust-collection devices is a shop-built downdraft table. It comes in handy for capturing the dust from sanding small pieces by hand or with a random-orbit sander. There’s nothing special about the box. I used 3/4″ fir from some old shelving and 3/8″ plywood for the top and bottom. Most of the downdraft tables I found on the web had interior panels sloped to draw the coarse particles toward the hose fitting, but with my shallow box, I didn’t think they would be very effective. The top is removable, so it is easy enough to get to the interior with the shop vacuum whenever it’s time to clean up the interior.
The downdraft table must provide clearance for the rip fence. A washer and a 1/4″ nylon-sleeve spacer work for this tablesaw.
Cleats set inside the perimeter of the box provide ledges for the plywood after they’ve had their holes drilled. The top has a grid of 7/8″ holes drilled on 2″ centers; the bottom has one large hole to fit the dust-collector hose fitting, and a second smaller hole to fit the shop-vacuum hose. The bottom is glued and nailed in place. The dust collector normally does the work while the downdraft table is in the shop, and I’d take the table and the shop vacuum for jobs elsewhere. A foam plug blocks the unused hole.
I had to drill an additional hole in each of the rip-fence rails to support the downdraft table. Your tablesaw may require different modifications.
Additional pieces of plywood reinforce the perimeters of the holes for the shop-vacuum and dust collector hoses. A foam plug normally keeps the idle shop-vacuum hole closed.
The dust collector is hooked up to the back of the downdraft table, the shop vacuum at the front. The shop vacuum is used if the downdraft table is removed for work outside of the shop table; its hole is plugged when the dust collector is in use. The box is shallow enough to maintain clearance for the tablesaw’s tilt control.
Stops come in handy for keeping the workpiece from drifting while it’s being sanded. These are short sections of 1″ dowel with one end trimmed to fit the 7/8″ holes in the table top. A piece of paper draped over the unused area of the table increases the airflow around the workpiece.
A box fan with a 20″ x 20″ furnace filter will pull stray particles in. The fan’s own suction is all that’s needed to hold the filter in place. Letting the fan run whenever there is dusty work being done in the shop will recirculate air and capture dust.
The downdraft table doesn’t interfere with the operation of the tablesaw. The fence slides over it and I have enough room under it to adjust the tilt without barking my knuckles. The extra surface area supports pieces being sawn on the right side of the blade and offers a place to set push sticks, pencils, and measuring tools. The downdraft table helps assure that what happens in the shop stays in the shop.
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.
The StopLossBag system offers a way store paints and varnishes without the exposure to air that causes the contents of a partially used can to skin over.
StopLossBags provide a unique solution to a common problem. We’ve all been there. You’ve got a little bit of wear in your varnished rubrail, and it just needs to be touched up to keep it Bristol. You grab that can of varnish you know is at least half full, but you discover that it has skimmed over with a hardened amber-colored hockey puck on top. You then spend the next half hour straining what’s left of the still-liquid contents out into a new container. The quick touch-up has turned into a messy project and much of that expensive varnish has been lost.
The connection between the funnel and the bag spout is a slip fit that holds as long as both are dry and you’re careful not to pull them too far apart while pouring. Both the author and the editor inadvertently separated the connection in mid-pour, spilling some of the cans’ contents and discovering that the bag and funnel cannot be reconnected when slippery with paint or varnish. The instructional video on the StopLossBag website shows the joint being pinched by hand during the pour. A small hose clamp provides a secure hands-free connection. The clamp only needs to tight enough to gently pinch the funnel nozzle against the threads at the base of the bag’s spout.
StopLossBags are collapsible 1-liter (1.05-quart) bags that eliminate the open space, and therefore, exposure to air, which triggers curing in paint and varnish. The top of the bag has a spout with a twist-on cap. The bags are especially handy when you need only a small amount of finish. You can quickly pour out the exact amount you’ll use without fussing with a crusty lid and having the contents dribble all over the can.
Prior to the pour, the bag must be inflated for the contents to flow in from the can.
I tested the bags with Interlux Brightside Polyurethane Topside Paint and Epifanes Varnish. The collapsible, reusable funnel available with the StopLossBags simplifies transfer between a standard quart can and the bag. The rubbery funnel’s wide end stretches around the open end of the can, creating a secure seal, and its nozzle then connects around the spout of the StopLossBag. Flip the can upside down while holding the bag, and the contents transfer without the mess you’re likely to make pouring from the open can into a rigid funnel. In testing, varnish easily transferred into the bag; I had a little more trouble transferring paint. It was a little too thick to easily flow into the spout. Pumping the funnel helped coax it along.
Before putting the cap on, the bag is squeezed to push the contents to the tip of the spout, eliminating air space. Here, the clear area at the top of the bag is devoid of air; the front and back surfaces are mostly in contact with only a thin transparent layer of the product between them. The funnel was set aside to dry.
After the material flowed into the bag, I disconnected the funnel and squeezed the air from the bag per the instructions before sealing it with the twist-on cap. For cleanup, I let the funnel dry, then peeled off the dried film the next day. I used a little denatured alcohol on a rag to wipe off some residual flakes.
The interior surface of the funnel has a slick glossy finish, making it easy to remove dried paint or varnish after use.
StopLossBags have a labeling area on one side so you can record what you put in it and when it was transferred. A Sharpie pen writes well on the plastic surface. The bags are stiff enough to stand up on their own, which makes them store neatly on the shelf.
One side of the bag has a space for identifying what is in the bag and when it was poured. Alcohol will remove the permanent marker when the bag is reused and requires new labelling.
At the Center for Wooden Boats, we often have multiple varnish projects going on simultaneously, and these bags organize mixes of various ratios of varnish to thinner for quick use. The bags have the added benefit of easily allowing small amounts of finish to be dispensed. Even the slow-flowing paint was easy to dispense by squeezing the bag.
On each bag is printed: “Not for use with finishes containing acetone, benzene, lacquer thinner, MEK, toluene, or xylene.” However, Interprime Wood Sealer (Interlux 1026) is a popular product containing xylene and is notorious for quickly skimming over. The StopLossBag’s manufacturer had reported that lacquer thinner and acetone have led to a softening of the bag’s plastic laminate, but when we asked about xylene they said they hadn’t specifically tested it, so we gave it a try by filling a bag with straight xylene. After a few weeks the StopLossBag was holding up perfectly with no signs of softening. Maybe now we’ll be able to use a whole can of the sealer without having a good portion of it turn gummy. The bags can be reused after cleaning. I had good results filling them with some denatured alcohol and swishing it around the bag. The alcohol can also be used to erase the Sharpie pen for relabelling.
I’ve tried an argon-gas product meant to prevent skinning, but had little success with it. Some folks on the web suggest using a circle of waxed paper to prevent skimming, but that seems like a messy solution to me. The StopLossBags are a tidy, effective way to store different types of finishes that are going to be used over a prolonged period. The cost of the bags is easily recouped when good finish is prevented from skinning over.
Josh Anderson attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland Maine, and has since worked at several boatbuilding and carpentry shops. He and his wife, Sarah, restored a 25′ Friendship Sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh has a Masters in Maritime Management from Maine Maritime Academy and is now the Lead Boatwright at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
StopLossBags are available from the manufacturer and from Duckworks. Prices vary with single bags priced at $4.95 and sets of bags reducing the cost to $2.75 apiece. The funnel is priced at $5.98 and $7.95, depending on the vendor.
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.
Cabela’s self-inflating Moor n Stow is a good match for small boats that have little space for stowing a set of ordinary fenders.
Fenders keep docks from chewing up the flanks of our boats, but when we cast off, those fenders can eat up a lot of space on board. Cabela’s has come up with a self-inflating fender that rolls up into a very compact bundle that is much easier to tuck away. The Moor n Stow is constructed like a self-inflating camping mattress, and rolled up it is just 7″ long and 5″ in diameter. A strap with a buckle keeps the roll tight; when it is released and the valve is open opened, the Moor n Stow inflates itself in about one minute and doesn’t need to be topped off by blowing into the valve.
Fully inflated, the Moor n Stow has an ample 18″ of cushioning.
The open-cell foam core has a 1,680-denier polyester oxford cover. The fabric seems quite tough—I could stand on the fender with my 200-plus pounds without damaging it—and even if the fender were punctured, the foam is dense enough to cushion the boat from the dock. While you’re away from the dock, the fender makes a nice pillow or a low-back support cushion, but is too narrow to provide comfortable seating.
Deflated and rolled up, the fender is a compact package that is easily stowed.
Inflated, the Moor n Stow has an overall length of about 25″ and its foam-filled section measures 18″ x 6″ x 5″. That’s more than adequate for most small boats; if the fender is longer than the boat’s freeboard is high, the fender will float on a diagonal and still do its job of protecting the boat. A plastic grommet fused to the fabric provides a sturdy point for a line to hang the fender. The strap included with the fender could be used to hang the fender from a deck cleat or oarlock, but adding a short, light line would be more versatile.
A little work with a marker will tone down the large and garish logo.
The price for a Moor n Stow is quite reasonable, about $10 less than a similarly sized conventional plastic fender. My only complaint about the Moor n Stow is the bright yellow Cabela’s logo on one side. I’d rather not have any of my gear doing double duty as advertising. I’ve started coloring over the logo with a black permanent marker and will soon have a nice, anonymous fender.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The Moor n Stow is available from Cabela’s for $19.99.
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.
David MacLean lives in Sedgwick, Maine, a town surrounded by the waters of Penobscot Bay. He sails a 32′ Eastport pinky, INTEGRITY, built in Rockport in 1972, and wanted to have a tender that would complement his classic sloop. A peapod, he thought, another smaller Maine-coast double-ender, would fit the bill.
David MacLean
INTEGRITY is currently getting a new, more easily managed ketch rig. When she’s afloat again she’ll take HARMONY in tow.
David MacLean
Work began with 13 molds and two plywood forms for the stems.
David, an architect, said he decided to design his own peapod, “to expand my design sensibilities and thoughtfully explore the world of naval architecture.” His pinky is a scaled-down version of a Howard Chapelle boat, so he turned his attention to Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft and took an interest in the “Old Sailing Peapod” on page 220. The lines for the type were taken from a peapod built around 1886. It was “the last of its kind in Washington County when taken off in 1937” and “of a type once much in favor among lighthouse keepers.” David saw a strong resemblance between the peapod and his pinky.
David MacLean
During the planking of the hull, cam-buckle straps pulled each new strip tight against its neighbor. A mahogany sheer strake, finished bright, will give the peapod a more traditional appearance when the rest of the hull is painted.
David MacLean
With the cypress planking completed, the centerline can be smoothed for the installation of the keel and false stems.
He purchased the plans for the Old Sailing Peapod from the Smithsonian and used the lines as the starting point for his tender. At 15′ 3″, the peapod was a bigger boat than he required; he opted for an overall length of 13′6″. He also decided to strip-plank his peapod to save on the weight of the original lapstrake construction.
David MacLean
Work resumed on the hull after moving the project to Eric Dow’s shop in Brooklin, Maine.
David MacLean
While many peapods have curved stems fore and aft, HARMONY, like its 1886 predecessor, has a straight sternpost, which simplifies the installation of a rudder.
David MacLean
The strip-built hull, reinforced with fiberglass inside and out, offers a clean, easily maintained interior.
Tom Wolstenholme of Rivendell Marine in Monument Beach, Massachusetts, was just 4 miles up the road David’s office in Cataumet, and David apprenticed himself to Tom from the lofting to the completion of the bare hull. Together, the two planked the boat with 3/8″ bead-and-cove strips topped with a mahogany sheerstrake before work paused as Tom got busy with other projects. Progress resumed when Eric Dow in Brooklin, Maine (WoodenBoat’s hometown), agreed to help David bring the boat to completion. The hull, still on its strongback, was loaded on a U-Haul truck for the drive north. Mahogany seating and trim were soon installed along with white oak rubrails and knees and iroko floorboards.
David McLean
Trailered up in Eric Dow’s boat barn, HARMONY is ready for the water.
David MacLean
HARMONY is equipped with two rowing stations, one in the center for rowing solo or with two passengers, and one forward for rowing with a single passenger.
The finished peapod was launched on Walker Pond, a short drive from Brooklin, and christened HARMONY. David reports the tender has “proven to be a dream to row and sail.” The first year’s sailing has been done with a sprit rig meant for one of Eric’s 13′ 6″ peapods. It proved a good fit for HARMONY, and the new rig David had Eric build is nearly identical.
Chris Raphael
David reports: “HARMONY rows effortlessly, feels very stable, and…”
Chris Raphael
“…her acceleration under sail is quite impressive.”
HARMONY and INTEGRITY will make a well-matched pair on the Benjamin River, not far from David’s Maine home in Sedgwick.
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.
On August 25, Hurricane Harvey tore through Port Aransas, Texas, bringing 130 mph winds and a 9′ tidal surge. I had been corresponding with Rick Pratt, the director of Port Aransas Museum and a boat builder at Farley Boat Works, an extension of the museum. He emailed me on September 1, a week after the Category 4 hurricane. Here’s Rick’s description of the damage:
The devastation of Port A is incredible; the fact that no one died is even more so. [One Port Aransas resident who had stayed to ride out the storm was found dead on September 3. That has been the only reported fatality in Port Aransas. —Ed.] This is a storm far worse than Celia or the 1919 storm, which were on record as our worst.
Our house came through with very little damage due to skilled building, good maintenance, and a careful selection of building site. We chose a spot high in the dunes and then built a low-profile house. It worked. Then add the major ingredient: luck. Neighbors all around us took a lot of damage. Much of my next-door neighbor’s house is now in my pond.
Harry Martinez
The storage barn was the most badly damaged of the building. The photograph at the top of the page shows the wreckage behind the plywood wall in the middle of this image.
Farley Boat Works fared much worse. Our shop is coated with mud up to the 3′ mark where the storm surge came through and left indescribable mess behind. Everything is scrambled together. The motors on our big tools will need replacement. The row of boat storage barns we converted to a maritime exhibit hall was damaged but not destroyed. The row of barns immediately behind the shop is a tangled mess of boats, wires, tin roofing, rope, mud, and Lord knows what else. The antique Farley fishing boat stored there was badly damaged. The third row of barns lost a roof, battered by the parts of the building next door as it exploded and sailed away. The shop yard is covered in roofing tin, broken wood, and insulation.
Harry Martinez
This storage barn was not so badly damaged, but the storm surge got to the contents of the building, now pilled along the street.
The town is a mix of piles of rubble, seaweed and wrecked buildings interspersed with damaged, but standing, houses and then collapsed houses. Many, many roofs are gone, framing and all. Mixed in are houses with no apparent damage at all.
Several of my friends lost houses, one in particular pulled up its foundation and floated off a few feet. Another traveled 50′ and stopped in the middle of the town’s drainage channel, leaning at a steep angle.
The liquor store peeled away from its foundation but left all the bottles standing in their racks. The local scavengers made short work of that and it likely kept them drunk and happy and saved our houses from looting for three days.
The marina took a big hit and lots of boats sank or rammed into other boats and took them down. One big one broke loose and raised havoc all across the harbor finally fetching up on the Coast Guard station bulkhead. The three folks inside it were unharmed. They now have one hell of a story to tell and a big case of PTSD.
The University of Texas is nearly destroyed. Both major buildings were damaged so badly they may have to be torn down, I am told. Then insult to injury, a big drill ship moored up the channel broke loose and destroyed the university’s research pier. The ship is now grounded against the jetty.
The beach is now far wider and lots of new sand was deposited there. It is littered with a nice collection of seashells but farther down toward the south end, it is covered with wreckage. The light house, all by itself a mile from town, was damaged heavily, but all the buildings are structurally intact and the tower lost only a lantern window. The dock raised itself up to the limit of its sunken pilings—10’—and is now as high as the porch on the first house.
And on and on and on.
We are now staying at a cousin’s house on North Padre Island, about 30 minutes from town, until power is restored in Port Aransas. We are told that might be as long as a month. The power lines are all down and tangled and many poles are snapped or uprooted. Water came back yesterday, and is most welcome.
A crew of faithful followers of Farley Boat Works and some family members are on their way down today to help us dig out and recover.
photographs courtesy of Rick Pratt
K BABY was stored in a boat barn that collapsed under the 130-mph winds. Still strapped to the trailer, she floated free of the wreckage on the 10′ storm tide, fetching up in someone’s walled garden several blocks away. They found her nestled in the mud and wreckage five days later with a broken telephone pole laying lengthwise inside. With a lot of effort, Ken Curlee and crew freed the boat, removed the pole, and towed her home. She had only a few scratches.
I checked in with Rick again on September 23 and received this reply:
Things are still pretty tough here at the moment. There is some improvement, but many have lost everything and are just now realizing it. The insurance folks are coming up with amounts way below what actual repair costs are. Many of the volunteers are now gone or leaving. We are coming up on crunch time.
The annual Port Aransas Wooden Boat Festival is held in October, which would be quite soon after such a devastating event, but Rick writes, “We are going to do the show just to show the world we can.” The festival, subtitled “The Harvey Edition,” will keep to its scheduled weekend, October 20 through 22, along with the Old Town Festival and a surfing contest. I hope those of you who regularly attend will show up and be joined by anyone interested in wooden boats and willing to support Farley Boat Works and the community of Port Aransas. There are hotels in nearby Corpus Cristi and camping spaces in Port Aransas.
UPDATE: October 3. The organizers of the Port Aransas Wooden Boat Festival held a meeting today and decided it was best to postpone the festival. It will be rescheduled for the Spring of 2018 on a date to be announced.
For those unable to attend, the festival’s web site has a link for (tax deductible) contributions to support the restoration of Farley Boat Works.
Will Stirling’s 15’ Sailing Dinghy has a shape that emerged gradually over a period of 15 years. He built his first dinghy in 2002, while he was in Cornwall working for Working Sail, a boatyard that builds pilot cutters. In his time off from building cutters, most of them over 40’ long, he decided to build a boat (just for a change!) and, constrained by the size of the small bedroom/workshop he inhabited at the time, settled on the 7’10” Auk designed by Iain Oughtred.
That dinghy, built of larch on oak, ended up as the tender to EZRA, one of the pilot cutters built at Working Sail. Stirling reshaped the design of the Auk to create his own 9’ lapstrake dinghy and so started a process of refinement—adjusting the shape of the transom, the stem, the sheer, and even the number of planks—that homed in on a hull shape he was satisfied with. By 2004 he had built four dinghies, and six years later he was producing a steady stream of dinghies, ranging from 9’ to 14’ long. He’s currently building his 38th dinghy.
It wasn’t until he had built 14 or 15 of the small boats that he was happy enough with the shape to commit it to paper as a set of lines, the first of what is now a range of six dinghies available as plans from Will’s company, Stirling & Son, in Devon, England.
When it came to building a boat for himself for coastal voyaging in 2012, he naturally chose what was then the biggest boat in his range, the 14’ Sailing Dinghy, and adapted it for adventure sailing. It was on that boat that he made the first two voyages of his slightly madcap project of sailing around every offshore lighthouse in Britain. A potentially dangerous incident (a near-capsize too complicated to explain here) during a 120-mile offshore trip from Devon to the Channel Islands and back, however, convinced him he needed something a bit more seaworthy.
Will Stirling
The Stirling dinghies are all built of mahogany on oak and are copper riveted.
The 15’ Sailing Dinghy was born by simply spacing the molds of the 14’ dinghy apart an extra inch per foot. The main changes were an extension to the foredeck and the addition of side decks and a deck aft with a coaming around the cockpit to keep the water out. The longer foredeck allows someone to sleep under it without getting a shot of spray in the face. The 15-footer also has a slightly stronger sheer. Like most of Stirling’s dinghies, it is varnished on the outside and oiled inside.
Will Stirling
The rudder blade is weighted with disks cut from lead sash weights. Hammering the lead spreads it out to cover the beveled edges of the hole, locking the lead in place.
Well-thought-out details abound in the 15-footer; some are purely decorative, others extremely practical. The sheerstrake has an elegant, gold-leafed cove; the thwarts have nice decorative beads scribed into their bottom edges. The dinghy also has some special features to fit its role as expedition boat, such as the enclosed centerboard case, which prevents water flooding into the boat in case of capsize. The plate-brass centerboard will drop when the uphaul is released, but it is fitted with a downhaul in case stones jam in the board and prevent gravity from doing its job. There is even a short length of line, which Stirling calls a “pig’s tail,” secured to the lower aft corner of the centerboard so it can be pulled out of the slot from beneath the hull if all else fails.
Will Stirling
The sheer strake is protected above and below and decorated with gold leaf coves and carvings.
For planking, Stirling long ago abandoned larch in favor of mahogany (Khaya ivorensis, FSC-certified). To keep the garboard from cupping, small wedges are inserted between the plank and the steam-bent frames, and riveted through to hold them in place. It takes about 2,000 copper rivets to build the boat, with three rivets per foot on each of the planks holding the laps together and the frames to the planks. The plank ends are triple-fastened with bronze nails.
Nic Compton
The dinghy’s bottom has brass half-oval along the keel and bilge guards to protect the hull on the beach.
The boat I sailed, christened GRACE after Stirling’s seven-year-old daughter, had been out of the water for nearly two years before we launched her at the end of this past summer, yet she only took on a wee bit of water before the planks swelled up and she was watertight again. She certainly made a pretty sight, bobbing at her anchor in Sennen, Cornwall, with her balanced lug sail set. Weighing in at almost 500 lbs, she’s not the lightest boat, and while it was easy enough for the two of us to drag her across the 30’ strip of sand from the stone slipway down into the sea, we were glad to have help with her recovery eight hours later, by which time the strip of sand had tripled in size. But lightness is not necessarily what you are looking for in a small boat intended for big voyages, and this boat is built to last.
Nic Compton
Cast bronze outriggers add 18″ to the span between locks.
There was a light westerly breeze and a confused sea as we headed out of Sennen, but GRACE cleared the off-lying rocks without any fuss and we were soon in the open sea making good, if not spectacular, progress. GRACE has a burdensome hull well suited to her role as expedition boat, but that doesn’t mean she’s slow. Stirling has combined a full ’midship section with moderately fine bow and a nicely tucked-up transom—a hull form that slips along very nicely indeed.
Stirling opted for a balanced lug rig, which performs excellently on every point of sail except close-hauled. The boat slowed down whenever we tried to pinch her up into the wind, and took off as soon as we eased off onto a more comfortable angle. It was probably no better or worse than on many traditionally rigged boats, where it’s usually better to opt for the extra speed rather than try to claw an extra few degrees upwind. Once she was sailing at a sensible 45 degrees or so to the wind, GRACE was unfailingly steady and, well, graceful.
Nic Compton
A half jaw is used instead of a parrel to keep the boom tight to the mast.
Even though we were only sailing 8 miles offshore and the wind was never more than moderate, mostly 4 to 6 knots rather than the forecast 7 to 10 knots, I was grateful for the extra protection provided by the side decks and cockpit coaming. The only slight drawback is that, when seated inside the cockpit, you can’t lean out as much as you would on a completely open dinghy. You soon get used to this, however, and when the boat does heel over you can sit out on the rail and take advantage of the extra comfort provided by the side decks.
On the longer journeys this expedition dinghy is intended for, you can’t always rely on having continuous wind, so it’s important the boat rows well. Stirling fitted a pair of custom-made bronze outriggers, which were bolted through the side decks and extended the rowlocks a good 9” outboard of the hull. The arrangement was fine when I rowed the boat in flat water but awkward in a seaway when the oar blades tended to catch the waves and the looms chafed the top of the coamings. Stirling has since added a pair of collars around the rowlock shafts which should raise the oars enough to clear the coamings and the water.
Nic Compton
The dinghy’s deck keeps spray out on rough passages and is wide enough to sit on to get some weight on the weather rail when the wind has piped up.
GRACE proved a pleasure to row, even against the strong contrary current we encountered at one point. I’m a sucker for rowing and will happily row at my own slow but steady pace for hours on end, but if you’re looking for a dinghy that you’ll mainly row, there are other boats that will be more nimble under oars. One obvious use for Stirling’s expedition dinghy is for so-called “raids.” The boat is both seaworthy and fast enough with two people on board to do very well in the events.
Nic Compton
The balanced lug sail is made of Clipper Canvas, a stable fabric woven of spun polyester designed to look and feel like canvas.
GRACE was sold just a few weeks after I sailed her and packed off to some superyacht in Mallorca to start a new life in the Mediterranean. Whatever use any of the Stirling dinghies are put to, it’s a comforting thought to know they will almost certainly end up as someone’s family heirloom, with owners decades down the line appreciating their handsome design and solid construction.
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. He currently lives on the River Dart in Devon, U.K.
15′ Sailing Dinghy Particulars
[table]
Length/15′
Beam/5′2″
Draft, board up/8.75″
Draft, board down/32″
Sail area/130 sq ft
[/table]
The 15′ Sailing Dinghy is a stretched version of Stirling’s 14′ Sailing Dinghy (lines shown here).
The 15’ Sailing Dinghy is available as a finished boat from Stirling & Son. The company also offers plansfor some of their other sailing and rowing dinghies, including the 14′ Sailing Dinghy that preceded the 15′ Sailing Dinghy.
I am frequently asked why I built a boat, and particularly, why I built a Glen-L Zip. The first part of the question is easy to answer: I love to build things and I can’t afford to go out and buy a new boat, so a set of plans was my preferred starting point. And why the Zip? I was initially drawn to it because it has style and character, more than I’d ever be able to find in any boat on the market, whether or not I could afford it. But I didn’t have much boatbuilding experience, other than a stitch-and-glue plywood kayak I had finished, so I was unsure if a Zip would be within my abilities. As I searched the Web and corresponded with other novices who had successfully built one, it quickly became clear that it was the obvious choice.
I am a Fire Chief in a small community in Michigan, and our Village Manager is my good friend Art Atkinson. One day Art walked into my office and said he was considering building a boat for himself. He had just returned from northern Michigan where old wooden boats are almost everywhere along the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. I told him I’d been considering building a boat for myself, too. He liked the idea, and we decided we would both build wooden boats while helping each other along the way. I ordered plans for the Zip, and Art settled on an equally classic-looking runabout, the Glen-L Squirt. Both Art and I would be building our boats in our basements and so had limitations on the size of the boats we could build. The 14′ 4″ Zip was the largest boat I could build and still get it out of my walkout basement. The 10’ Squirt was small enough to be carried up the stairs from Art’s basement, and through the kitchen to get it outside.
photographs courtesy of the author
The 5’9″ beam provides the Zip with good stability and the flared sides help keep the occupants dry.
The plans for the Zip came from Glen-L with a step-by-step instruction manual and full-sized patterns for the transom, frames, gussets, stem, breasthook, and knees. Builders can shorten the boat by 10 percent if they reduce the frame spacing, but Glen-L recommends against lengthening the Zip. There is also an option to either set the boat up as a utility skiff with an open cockpit or as a runabout with decking surrounding two cockpits. I built my boat to the designed length as a runabout.
I bought rough-cut African mahogany from a local sawmill, brought it home, and milled it for the frames. The frame pieces are joined by plywood gussets at the corners. The stem is made of two layers of 3/4″ plywood, and the transom is a single thickness of 3/4″ plywood, framed and reinforced with mahogany. Mounted on a dual-beam strongback, the three completed frames, the transom, and the stem define the shape of the hull—there are no temporary forms. The keel, chines, and inwales then connect the transom, frames, and stem. The chines were the most difficult longitudinals to install. Each is a two-piece laminate, and each of those pieces required steaming to coax it into the needed bend and twist. Later it took a lot of clamps to tightly close the glue joints between the chine halvess.
The materials list specifies 1/4″ Douglas-fir exterior plywood for the hull, and while it’s an economical choice, I had a bright-finished boat in mind and so opted to use mahogany marine plywood. For the side panels, I cut two 4×8 sheets of plywood in half and joined the pieces to make a pair of 2×16 sheets, with the seams butted and ’glassed.
With a 45-hp outboard on the transom, the Zip gets on plane quickly.
The side panels came under a bit of strain when I started to wrap them around the framework, so I applied towels and hot water to soften them up a bit. They then bent easily and held their new shape when dried, ready for epoxy and screws. The bottom went on in three pieces—one full-width piece aft and two half-width pieces forward. None required steaming to be applied to the framework. The hull, while still upside down, got a layer of 6-oz fiberglass, a skeg, and bottom paint.
Work on the interior started after the boat was flipped upright. Floorboards were not included in the plans, but I opted to add them to provide both a more finished look and a stable platform for my passengers to stand on when entering and exiting the boat. I was also worried about feet and gear getting wet, but water never seems to accumulate in the Zip. I used ash for the floorboards because of its strength and for the contrast of color.
The plans call for a deck of mahogany or fir plywood, and while that would be sufficient for a utilitarian boat, many builders of Glen-L runabouts opt to dress the plywood up with covering boards and deck planking. It makes a striking difference. I used mahogany for all of my decking. I bookmatched the broad covering boards to create a symmetrical pattern in the wood grain, then dyed them to create contrast with the deck planks. I added some decking beyond what was detailed in the plans to reduce the open area of the motorwell and provide a tidier appearance. Rather than use white caulk to accent the deck seams, I filled them with epoxy mixed with white pigment. When covered with varnish, the bright white took on a nice, aged golden color.
The plans for the Zip call for a plywood deck, but builders of Glen-L runabouts often lay deck planking over the plywood for a classic look.
Glen-L recommends powering the Zip with a short-shaft outboard of up to 40 hp, and I initially used a 1962 two-stroke 40-hp outboard on mine, but I didn’t care for the noise or the smell. I later equipped my Zip with a 1999, 45-hp four-stroke outboard. With the larger and heavier motor the Zip sits just a little lower at the stern, but when I’m riding alone or with one passenger and give full throttle to the Zip, it jumps out right on plane. With four adults aboard the boat does get up on plane quickly—it just does so a few moments after giving it the gas. I have had five people in my Zip many times, and I feel very safe in this boat with it fully loaded. I have no hesitation to go at full speed; I am just more aware of my weight and balance by always putting the heaviest passengers in the front. The only issue when it is fully loaded is that the bow will pitch up a little higher and the boat takes a few more seconds to get up on plane. The speed and handling characteristics do not seem to be affected by a full load.
Using a handheld GPS or the GPS app on my cell phone I have recorded a consistent top speed between 32 and 33 mph when I’m driving solo. The boat does well in light chop and begins to porpoise in moderate chop unless I apply full throttle and get up on plane. Once the waves get above 2′, I really need to cut the power back to quarter speed and just plow through the waves rather than subject the boat, and myself, to a lot of heavy pounding.
The boat handles like a dream, and I credit this part of the performance to the skeg; in calm water, I can race along at full throttle and make a sharp turn with little skidding. The Zip has bumper rails to protect the hull below the tumblehome at the stern; they also serve to deflect water away from the aft cockpit, but if there are passengers in the rear seats, I need to warn them they may get some spray in a sharp turn.
Builder Ted Gauthier has three young passengers aboard here, but has carried four with him in comfort.
It took me 22 months of working on and off to build the Zip, and I could not be happier with its performance. I gladly recommend the design to others. It is a great first boat to build and an exciting boat to use. It is easy to trailer, and everyone who sees it gives it a thumbs-up. The design, drawn up in 1954, prompts many people to ask how old my boat is, and they’re surprised to hear that it hasn’t been around for decades. It is a great pleasure to own a boat you can proudly say you built yourself that has both classic design and modern features. If you’re thinking of getting an outboard boat that will last for years, that will handle well, that carries up to five people, takes up little space in the garage, and won’t break the bank to build or operate, you may want to consider a Glen-L Zip.
Ted Gauthier is the Deputy Fire Chief of Bloomfield Village, Michigan. His passion outside of his dream job as a fireman has always been boating and flying. Ted has built himself many things including an airplane, a hot-air balloon, a kayak, and a CNC machine. He grew up with his five brothers by a lake in lower Michigan where he learned to swim, water-ski, and handle boats. He spent almost all his free time as a child saving for gas so he could go out in small boats to enjoy the summer days. He always remembers his first ride in an old wooden boat and has promised himself that one day he will have his own.
Ted documented his progress on the Zip in hisblog. He would be happy to help or answer any questions readers may have about building a Glen-L Zip. Emails to Small Boats Monthly will be forwarded to him. His review of a rivet spacing fan appears in this issue.
Sitting in my shop was a freshly oiled, clinker-built 14′ faering. Three friends and I, working in Russell, a coastal town on the north end of New Zealand‘s North Island, built the boat over the course of just two weeks; it was the first boat of its kind ever to be produced in New Zealand. As we prepared to carry the finished boat out of the shop and into the street where friends and reporters were eagerly awaiting the fruits of our labor, it occurred to me that we’d never measured the doorway.
I set out on the path to building this boat three years earlier when I had traveled in the middle of winter to Nordland, a Norwegian county that straddles the Arctic Circle, to produce a film about how Norwegians, considered some of the happiest people on Earth, remain so even when the sun does not shine for months on end; where the darkness is interrupted only by an ethereal blue light.
Vern Cummins, my partner in making documentary films, had come with me to make a film about a man we had yet to meet, Ulf Mikalsen, a traditional boatbuilder who is one of only a handful of people left in Norway making a living building the iconic 18th-century Nordlands boat. “Fly to Bodø,” he told me over the phone, “and drive north from there, crossing on the ferry until you reach the small town of Kjerringøy. There, go past the church on the right; my house is the one with the red trim around it.” And that was that.
Two weeks later, frost crunched under my boots as Vern and I stepped off the plane in Bodø. We drove in the February twilight and by the time we arrived at the only house in Kjerringøy with red trim a heavy, wet sleet was hammering down. Out in front of the car, through the downpour, I could just make out a figure in dingy oilskins approaching us. He walked up to the window beside me and pushed back his hood, revealing a broad smile. It was Ulf, a man who would leave an indelible mark on my life. “Velkommen til Kjerringøy,” he smiled. “Welcome to Kjerringøy, Jamie.”
photographs by the author
The village of Kjerringøy is nestled among the fjords and coastal mountains of the north central Norwegian coast. The red and white buildings on the left are part of the Kjerringøy Museum and Old Trading Post.
Inside Ulf’s cabin, it was apparent he had a love of natural materials and a superlative skill for working with them. The timber post-and-beam frame enclosed a warm, modest room where, in typical Scandinavian fashion, everything, even the most utilitarian objects, was handmade and beautiful. Hanging over the kitchen sink were clay mugs made by Ulf’s wife, Ingvild, each adorned with the names of everyone in the family. Ulf wore a hand-knit wool sweater with a Nordlands boat decorating his chest and his name stitched onto its sleeve. Ingvild showed us around the house; downstairs through a hidden doorway in the wall was the sauna, a vital Norwegian staple—without which communities like Kjerringøy would be unable to function socially during winter. Where else would you discuss politics, offshore oil drilling, or the best recipe for infusing home-distilled aquavit, if not in an excessively hot, cramped room with strangers wearing no more, and often less, than a towel?
In his shop in Kjerringøy, Ulf works on a nearly completed Nordlands boat.
Prior to becoming a boatbuilder, Ulf was a carpenter and student of social anthropology. His studies took him as far as southern Africa, as well as southern Norway, but he admits, “I knew I couldn’t live there for very long.” The call of the north lured him back, and he settled in the small town of Kjerringøy where he took a job at the museum.
At the museum, housed in an historic 17th-century trading post on the shores of the fjord, Ulf first worked on the restoration of Nordlands boats and on some of the buildings on the property, and discovered a love for joining history with craft. He enrolled in a boatbuilding school in Saltdal and returned to the Nordland Museum as resident craftsman, director, and general manager of Kjerringøy Handelssted, the Kjerringøy Old Trading Post.
Ulf’s Sami knife, forged by hand and set into a handle made of reindeer antler, is one of his most-used boatbuilding tools.
Next to the museum is Ulf’s boatshed and workshop where I spent the dark hours of the Norwegian winter mesmerized by a master artisan at work. The boatbuilders I’d known back in my home on Cape Cod worked with electric planes, drills, and band saws, but Ulf shaped sheerstrakes by eye with a Sami knife and scarfed planks with an axe. I’d never seen precision like it in my life, and I occasionally stood in the middle of a floor carpeted by fresh wood shavings contemplating what I ever had to show for myself after a day’s work back in my office: never anything so substantial nor so fragrant. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that nine out of ten visitors who stick their noses into my boatyard take a deep breath, smile and exclaim, ‘It sure smells good in here.’” It was time to toss in the towel, learn to speak Norwegian, and become an apprentice boatbuilder. I mentioned the idea to Ulf, and he just smiled.
Over the next week, Vern and I filmed a documentary that we would title “The Fox of Bloody Woman Island” (Mikalsen means “son of the Fox” and Kjerringøy translates to “Hag Island,” or as Ulf calls it, “Bloody Woman Island).” On our last day of filming, Ulf launched the largest of his Nordlands boats for us. It was only February—several weeks earlier than normal for Nordlanders to launch their boats back into the recently thawed waters around Kjerringøy—but Ulf could see this was the moment we had been waiting for.
Nordslands boats have been sailing Norwegian waters for over 1000 years, and Ulf is making sure they’ll continue to grace the coastline in the future.
We rowed out of the harbor, set the square sail, and the boat moved through the waves flexing like a snake. In the brisk winter twilight, listening to the waves slap against the hull, I began to understand why Ulf chose to live here and pursue this passion, despite the fact that the young girls working in a store near his boatshop earn twice as much as he does as a boatbuilder. “I made a decision,” says Ulf, “not to make a lot of money, but to do what I really wanted to do. Let’s say I feel quite happy about my life.” As we sailed the Nordlands boat I trolled a line over the side and landed the biggest, laziest cod I have ever caught.
About a year after my time in Nordland, my wife and I emigrated from the Falkland Islands to New Zealand where I began working with a handful of friends to establish an adventure education center called Adventure For Good. We’d settled in Northland, New Zealand’s northernmost province, on a beautiful, protected inlet in the Bay of Islands.
This was the area where the first European missionaries landed, setting up missions and trading posts at points all along the coasts. Just across the bay was the small town of Russell, New Zealand’s first capital and an important 19th-century whaling port. Looking to introduce new opportunities to the area, we decided to establish a traditional boatbuilding school to celebrate and foster the region’s rich maritime heritage. So I mentioned to the board of directors of Adventure For Good that I in fact knew of a skilled boatbuilder in northern Norway who uses the natural curves in the roots of spruce trees to create his boat’s ribs. This impressed them as it had impressed me, and the next morning my boss told me he’d received approval from the board. Within weeks a plan was hatched to bring Ulf and Ingvild from Nordland to Northland to build a Norwegian faering in the gutted remains of our Russell shop front.
A few months later, I drove to Auckland to pick Ulf and Ingvild up from the airport. It had been nearly three years since I had seen them, and I was suddenly overcome with feelings of excitement and nervousness. Would we be able to build this boat and justify this entire ordeal? As I pulled up to the arrival area of the airport, Ulf and Ingvild were already waiting for me. It was easy to spot them; Ulf was wearing a “Kjerringøy Handelssted” T-shirt with drawing of the Trading Post in the background and a Nordlands boat in the foreground.
After our Norwegian friends settled in, it was our time of reckoning. Word had gotten out about what we were up to, and we needed to get ready to build our boat. Ahead of Ulf’s arrival, we had enlisted the help of John Clode, a local boatbuilder, to organize tools, materials, and our workspace. John was an equally inspiring craftsman, largely self-taught, and had restored several steamboats for use as charter vessels around New Zealand. Like Ulf, he was an accomplished sailor, commercial fisherman, and adventurer. John and his wife Bridget opened their home to Ulf and Ingvild for their six-week stay. John, it turns out, had an immense interest in Nordic design ever since hitchhiking through Troms, one of Norway’s northernmost counties, 40 years prior in search of a fishing vessel to crew on. To my relief, John and Ulf hit it off and soon were inseparable.
The keel was assembled in the old boathouse before we moved the project to the workshop in Russell. Ulf held the stem in place to give us our first glimpse at the shape of the boat.
For our build, we wanted to build a fearing, a four-oared boat, but also hoped to do something unique, so we had left the choice of the type up to Ulf. He had given it some thought before leaving Norway and had chosen a spissbåt, a lapstrake working boat from 20th-century coastal Norway. A spissbåt is literally translated as “tip boat” or “pointed boat” and is distinguished from other similar types by that sharper prow. From the early 1900s through to the 1960s the spissbåt was one of Norway’s most popular boat designs. Prior to the introduction of roads along Norway’s vast coastline, the spissbåt was often built by its owners, who were responsible for daily duties like catching supper, taking the family to and from church, and ferrying fresh supplies home. The spissbåt’s eventual demise in the 1960s was largely due to the rising popularity of the outboard motor. The double-ended spissbåt was designed to be powered by sail and oar, but was never adapted to carry an outboard motor.
In Norway, the spissbåt is traditionally built of Douglas-fir and spruce, neither of which are in ample supply in our part of the world. That would become our first obstacle. What we hoped would be the solution presented itself in the form of an enormous boatshed stocked to the ceiling with rare and exotic woods collected from across the globe. It belonged to one of Adventure For Good’s directors, an enthusiastic Russell businessman who was more than happy to let Ulf and John rifle through its contents.
The pair looked like kids in a candy store lifting up rotting canvas covers and rummaging through dusty piles. Within a few hours, my pickup overflowed with planks of timber. We would use red cedar and teak instead of fir and spruce, and copper roves and nails instead of iron, which would not hold up well in the South Pacific. Our New Zealand spissbåt would be more fragile than a traditional Norwegian one perhaps, but it would also be lighter, faster, and just as beautiful. Ulf had never worked with cedar, but John was confident it would serve us well.
Hand axes have always been essential tools in traditional Norse boatbuilding. Ulf found an old hatchet in John’s garage and put a sharp edge on it, transforming it from a crude chopping implement to an edge tool for fine work.
At the boatshed, we milled the lumber and Ulf began construction by shaping the 14’ keel with a hatchet. I’d seen him do this in his shop in Norway, but this was new to John, who intently studied Ulf’s technique as each precise strike peeled away wood fibers in shavings instead of chips. John followed Ulf’s lead, chopping with light glancing blows and dressing newly cut surfaces with the axe head in both hands, fingers lined up on the side of the axe and pushing the cutting edge like a chisel.
When the keel was complete and the stems were attached to it, we moved the project to the shop in Russell where we’d resume construction. We set the boat’s backbone upright on a heavy beam resting on chocks on the floor. We turned our attention to the planking. Unlike many lapstrake boats, the spissbåt doesn’t begin upside-down, but rather it is built right-side up. In the Nordland style of boatbuilding there is no steaming involved in getting the planks to take their shape in the hull. Instead, each is fixed to one of the boat’s stems before being gradually and gently bent into place using one’s hips and cut-to-length, wooden props that hold tension between the interior side of the plank and an overhead beam. We pinched the laps together with shop-made wooden clamps called Brenne klammen. Ulf had brought one with him for reference and John used it to make several copies.
One of Ulf’s handmade instruments, a båtlodd, measures the angles of the planks. Much of the shaping of the boat was done by eye and feel rather than from precise measurements.
Coaxing the planks into the necessary curves and twists was a critical step in the boat’s construction—too much pressure could crack or split a cedar plank, and we would have to make a new one. Ulf listened to the boards as they bent and felt their strain against his hip. Sensing the wood’s limits, he manipulated the planks as easily as if they had been steamed.
Together we slowly planked the hull outward and upward from the keel. Ulf cut plank sections to shape on the bandsaw, then cut a scarf in one end using his axe and Sami knife. He checked the other end for fit against the stem, refined further by hand, and repeated until he nodded that it was time to make it permanent. Between strakes Ingvild and John laid a strip of thin cotton twine over a dribbling of pine tar heated slowly to thicken the consistency of honey. No other sealing was required; the cedar would swell when the boat was in the water, and the planks would press against each other to tightly seal the laps.
The Brenne klammen is a planking clamp named for Harald Brenne, a Norwegian boatbuilding instructor. It has a long reach to hold laps on wide planks and can be operated with one hand.
It was often my job to stand by ready with a Brenne clamp as Ulf brought over a new plank. With the plank locked in place, John used a traditional handheld gimlet ready to bore holes for the rivets. This was hard going and rough on the wrists, but as we became familiar with using the simple hand tools, we gained a greater appreciation for the old ways and worked through the tasks faster. In the end, we barely missed our power tools.
The sides rose up and a spissbåt took shape. “In Norway this would be the most expensive version of this boat I have ever built,” Ulf said, “but I am happy to see the different woods responding well to their new position in life.”
Ulf makes one last final check of the fit before making this strake permanent. Note the wooden props both above and below the hull helping it maintain its shape until the frames can be fixed in place.
During the construction, people stopped by daily to take a peek at the unusual kind of boatbuilding that was going on in the shop. The visitors popped in so frequently and became such a distraction that we were hardly getting any work done. I took a scrap of wood and a paintbrush and made a sign to hang on a chain across the open doorway. It read, “Craftsmen at work. Don’t feed the boatbuilders!” After that the curious continued to stop by, but were satisfied to peek through the bay windows and double doors. We felt like zoo animals, but our work resumed at a steadier pace.
After the hull was planked, Ulf and John fastened the beautiful teak gunwales, breasthooks, and coaming, then the cedar thwarts and floorboards. Two pairs of oars took shape on the workbench.
Ulf fits the first of the frames. The small gaps outside of the frame at the keel and the plank laps allow water to pass through.
As the launching of the spissbåt drew near, we held a competition among locals to name our boat. I was surprised at the number of entries we received and the thought that had gone into the names. I wrote the submissions down on a scrap of spare cedar, and each of us builders cast a vote for the name we liked most. The winner was AORUA, a Maori word meaning “Of two worlds.”
Natalie Gallant
After weeks of hard work, Ulf, Ingvild, Jamie, and John get ready to launch the spissbåt at the beach in Russell.
With the weeks of hard work behind us, it was time to move the boat out of the shop and carry it to the beach. Ulf, John, a few friends, and I lifted the spissbåt and carried it toward the shop door. It was clear that the boat was too beamy to squeeze through. We turned the boat on edge and easily slipped through the doorway. Outside we were surrounded by friends, townsfolk we recognized, and people we had never met before. Cameras flashed as we carried AORUA a block down to Russell’s waterfront. By the time we reached the beach where we’d launch, there were eight of us carrying the boat. We set AORUA down on the gentle slope of gravel in front of a 190-year-old hotel. With dozens of people circled around us, John popped open a bottle of champagne and the cork went flying over the boat. He poured champagne over the stem and white foam flowed across the breasthook.
Ulf takes to the oars in Kororareka Bay off the town of Russell.
We slid AORUA into the water, and Ulf and John stepped aboard. I kicked off my sandals, handed the oars to them, and climbed over the side to take my seat in the stern. They set the oars between the thole pins and turned AORUA parallel to the crowd gathered on shore. The honey-colored hull gleamed in the sunlight. Ulf and John took their first stroke together, the spissbåt slipped cleanly through the glassy waters, and in less than a minute we were at the other end of the bay, a hundred meters or so away.
Natalie Gallant
One of the launch party takes a turn at the oars with Jamie rowing in at the forward station and Ingvild seated in the stern.
We returned to the shore beaming. Ulf and John hopped out and were replaced by a crew of interested locals who had cheered us on throughout the process of building the spissbåt. New crews formed with friends and strangers alike, brought together by a boat from the other side of the world. Though AORUA was born in New Zealand, she is undeniably Scandinavian: handmade, utilitarian, and beautiful.
Jamie Gallant was born on Cape Cod and from a young age become fascinated by the area’s maritime traditions. He went on to explore this theme further as a documentary filmmaker, sailing Nordland boats in Northern Norway and retracing the story of the Columbia Expedition—the first American expedition to circumnavigate the globe—through treacherous seas off the Falkland Islands and Tierra Del Fuego. Today, he is a rescue specialist in the Coast Guard.
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.
Some may think vacuum-bagging is intimidating, but it is an easy, multi-purpose technique that’s within reach of most amateur boatbuilders. While vacuum-bagging an entire hull may be beyond the means and requirements of the home boatbuilder, there are lots of small parts that would benefit from a simple vacuum system.
photographs by the author
The author’s Rietschle Pico vacuum pump is now 22 years old and has a small capacity of 350 cu ft per hour, but it has been more than adequate for all the jobs he’s needed to do on his 20′ ultralight stitch-and-glue coastal trekker, including its 28′ carbon-fiber mast.
There are different types of suitable vacuum pumps. At the lower end of the scale, a salvaged refrigerator compressor is enough for occasional use. You can find compressors for under $100 on eBay. For more advanced work, rotary-vane pumps are the most popular, with second-hand prices beginning around $225 or less and around $675 new. My pump is an industrial-grade oil-free, graphite-vane pump with a small but sturdy 370-watt motor, designed to run continuously.
Small self-adhesive pads keep the airway open on this tile setter’s suction cup.
Connecting suction pipe to a vacuum bag can be done several ways. An industrial silicone vacuum cup is the most efficient, especially with a quick vacuum coupling (compressed air connectors cannot be used here because gaskets are designed to cope with internal and not external pressure), but it’s difficult to find and expensive. I use a $7 homemade alternative: The rubber disk of a tile setter’s suction cup with a piece of copper tubing, two hose clamps and some adhesive furniture pads. It works perfectly well, without any leaks. The pads prevent the cup from closing the hole in the bag.
With the relatively flat locker doors, vacuum bagging has the advantage of working several of them at the same time. Excess epoxy seeping through the holes in the perforated release film is darkening the bleeder fabric. At right is the suction cup fitting at the end of the hose to the vacuum pump and the pressure gauge is at the left.
A vacuum gauge is very useful for maintaining pressure. For a laminating process, average pressure should be around 0.3/0.4 bar (4.3/5.8 PSI), and for gluing, pressure may be higher, up to 0.6/0.7 bar (8.7/10.1 PSI). A gauge helps also to check chamber airtight integrity. When pump suction stops, the gauge needle must fall very slowly. If it falls quickly, chase the leaks!
To make my 1/4″ plywood cockpit locker doors rigid so they’d seal properly against their gaskets, and to keep them light, I stiffened them with a layer of a 1/2” PVC foam and two layers of ‘glass.
You need a mold (here a chipboard panel with a laminate surface) and a soft bag (warehouse polyethylene sheet or best, special composite nylon bagging film). A temporary gasket of double-sided adhesive tape or special automotive sealant tape between bag and mold makes the chamber airtight. Inside the bag, the first layer put on the laminate is a peel ply which helps soak excess resin and makes the surface ready for bonding or finishing.
The second layer is made of a perforated release film (obtained from a supplier of composite materials or bread packaging) to keep resin from sticking on the last top layer, the bleeder layer. Colored in brown here, it is used to suck air out of the chamber. It can be a non-woven geotextile fabric used in landscaping or a special polyester breather/bleeder film. If vacuum bagging is used to glue foam to wood or wood to wood for example, peel ply is not necessary because foam and wood have a ready-to-work surface.
When the workpieces are coated or saturated with epoxy as appropriate and all layers have been stacked, the bag is closed and a tiny hole is poked in a corner for the vacuum cup. Since my locker doors are less than 1” thick, I used double-sided adhesive tape to seal the perimeter of the bag, which is flexible enough to absorb deformation and leave the edges flat and easy to tape. The adhesive tape is easy to peel off without damaging the bag so it can be reused several times. I usually add adhesive tape—the orange tape here— all around to make a safe double seal.
The pump is started and begins to draw air out after bag is fully sealed. Air is sucked through reinforced water tubing; it resists a vacuum well and doesn’t collapse. Depending on resin formulation and workshop temperature, the pump runs for a few hours, the time for the epoxy to partially cure. Excess epoxy goes through the perforated film and slowly soaks the bleeder layer, which will later be discarded. The resulting ‘glass/wood composite is very uniform void-free laminate with just the right resin-to-fiberglass ratio, and extremely rigid and light.
The combination of plywood, foam and fiberglass made the locker doors flat and quite stiff without making them heavy.
For my outboard motor bracket, I cut a simple mold from a polystyrene block with rounded corners to create strong curves, then covered it with an ordinary adhesive PVC white film. A plasticine fillet at the base under the adhesive film helped to make a large rounded corner.
Draped over the mold, the bag had a lot of wrinkles and the edge sealing must be done with a sealant tape (found in automotive or composite supply stores) which closes the gaps created by the folds. It was quite tacky and impossible to peel the bag off without tearing it into pieces.
The outboard motor bracket had more depth than the locker door, requiring sealant tape to seal the pleats created in the vacuum bag.
To make the bracket as light and vibration-resistant as possible, I used a mix of ‘glass for shock and vibration resistance and carbon for rigidity.
Once the outside part of the outboard bracket was cured, I trimmed it to size and installed a plywood core held in place by second lamination done with the whole assembly inside of a small vacuum bag.
Inside laminates are done along with the outside layer, using it as a mold. The bag was made of two polyethylene sheets, sealant taped. The suction cup had to be placed outside of the laminate, because the vacuum level was a little bit lower under the connector and the cup would have created a bump in the laminate.
This motor mount will get a coat of paint before being put into service supporting an electric outboard.
The finished bracket weighs only 30 ounces. I used scraps of fabric and plywood, so the total cost was under $17, and that was mainly for the bag, sealant, and finishing.
Vacuum-bagging is a bit like steam bending—a bit mysterious before you try it; simple and effective afterwards.
Jean-Yves Poirier is a dedicated amateur boatbuilder with 19 boats to his credit and is a freelance writer working in France. He is a frequent contributor to WoodenBoat’s sister publication, Professional Boatbuilder.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
Mud flats don’t invite strolling, so with a pair of pattens you can have the intertidal all to yourself. A staff is a useful accessory for checking the depth of mud and water and maintaining balance.
When I rowed down the Ohio River, mud was something I had to deal with almost every day. It was the consistency of vegetable shortening and often as deep as my rubber boots were high. Ferrying camping gear from the boat to shore in the evenings and from shore to the boat in the mornings was an arduous process. I would have had an easier time of it if I had known then about mud pattens that waterfowlers use on the mudflats surrounding shoal inland waters along England’s southern coast.
If you’ve read Arthur Ransome’s book, Secret Water, you may remember splatchers: “two large oval boards, with rope grips in the middle of them for the heel and toe, and stout leather straps for fasteners.” Ransome’s drawing of them shows them about twice as long and twice as wide as the soles of the boots of the boy who is wearing them. I once improvised a pair of splatchers with driftwood and rope, and didn’t get far on an intertidal mudflat before I found myself stuck. Both splatchers were so firmly held by suction that I had to cut my feet out of the rope bindings to escape.
Boots alone sink into the mud, and suction can sometimes pull them right off your feet.
Mud pattens have been in use for centuries and are effective for walking on mud. They’re squares of wood or plywood with three cleats on the bottom, and two loops of thick rope on top. A separate length of lighter rope binds the thicker rope over the boot heel and instep. It’s best to use line that is not slippery, such as nylon, so the knots don’t loosen. I use manila; it has a coarse texture and stays tight.
Pattens distribute weight out over a larger area to minimize sinking. The positioning of the ball of the foot at the edge of the patten is what makes it possible to break the suction.
I made my first two pairs of pattens 12″ square, a common size in England. They can vary in size according to the softness of the mud and the weight of the wearer. I made my third pair 14″ square, and it’s a better match for my 220-lb frame.
Cleats on the bottom add strength and traction to the pattens.
The grain of the board or plywood runs perpendicular to the boot. The bottom is reinforced with three hardwood cleats—two running the full length from front to back and beveled at the ends, and one in the middle running side to side. The middle cleat stops shy of the longer pair; the gaps make it easier to wash mud off that would otherwise get stuck at the intersections of the cleats. The H-pattern of the cleats help the pattens resist slipping in all directions.
The traditional method of tying a platten on makes a secure connection to a boot. Manila rope holds the knots well. See the video below to see how the line is tied.
The proper placement of the boot on the patten is with the toe sticking beyond the edge. This puts the ball of your foot close to its forward edge, and your heel near its middle. When walking on mud, you use a normal stride, putting your weight first on your heel, where it is distributed evenly across the patten. At the end of the stride, your weight transfers to the ball of your foot and the front edge of patten. That edge sinks while the back edge lifts, breaking the suction and prying the patten out of the mud.
That transfer of weight to the edge is what sets the mud patten apart from the splatcher. Splatchers extend beyond the toe of the boot, as well as the heel, so the weight remains within the perimeter of the splatcher. Since you can’t use the downward force of your weight to break the suction, you have to resort to lifting. That’s not only an ineffective way to break the suction, the upward force you apply with one foot adds to the downward force on the other foot. The more you struggle to release one splatcher, the more difficult you’re making it to release the other. That’s what I discovered with the improvised splatchers I had to cut myself out of. Trying to lift them only got me more deeply mired.
This 12″-square plywood patten has ash cleats, 3/4″ by 1″, set on edge and screwed to the base. The cleats on my 14″ pattens are a bit heavier—7/8″ by 1-1/4″. The 1/4″ gaps at the ends of the middle cleat let water sluice the mud out of the corners when it’s time to clean up. The stopper knots on the rope ends are Figure-8 knots.
The 1/2″ manila loops are set at a boot’s width and each loop, requiring about 2′ of line, is laced through holes drilled 6″ apart. The lacing line, coiled up here, is about 6′ of 1/4″ manila with a half hitch in each end to keep it from unravelling. The base is made of 1/2″ plywood, the same as I used for my 14″ pattens. My other 12″ pattens have a base of 3/4″ pine.
It takes me less than an hour and a few pieces of wood from my pile of scraps and cutoffs to make a pair of pattens. With them, mud doesn’t have to be a barrier to exploration. They’ve opened up a new landscape just as snowshoes do in snow.
A note about safety: If you encounter mud that is so soft that the pattens begin to sink, retreat to firmer ground. Larger pattens may work, but it’s possible that the mud is too soft to be traversed safely. Given my experience getting stuck with my jury-rigged splatchers, I’d advise carrying a knife and extra lacing lines.
At its full expansion of 36″, the rivet spacing tool will mark twenty intervals of 1.8″, an awkward number to work with if you’re marking the intervals along a ruler.
Between 1999 and 2003 I built a single-engine airplane in my basement. Precision is important in the building aircraft, so you can’t have haphazard spacing between all those rivets that hold an aluminum plane together. Fortunately there is a tool used by many amateur aircraft builders that facilitates the even spacing of fastenings without a measuring tape, complicated math, or walking intervals with dividers. It’s called a rivet spacing tool—a lattice of stainless steel pieces with pivots at their intersections so it can be compressed or stretched. The lattice-ends along one edge of the tool have holes for marking intervals with a pencil or an awl.
My rivet spacing tool came in handy when I was building my Zip runabout. I used it to mark locations for screws at an arbitrary, but exact, 3″ interval along the edges of the plywood panels that made up the hull and deck. The screws were all countersunk and puttied, and while some would later be painted over, others along the sheer would remain visible under varnish, so even spacing was important for appearance’s sake. The device would also be handy for spacing rivets or clench nails on lapstrake boats or for spacing wire holes in stitch-and-glue boats. It can also aid in figuring out plank widths for decking.
Closed, the tool will mark twenty 1/2″ intervals.
The spacing tool comes in two sizes: 10 units and 20 units. My 20-unit spacing tool has a span of 10″ when compressed, and 36″ expanded. For wide intervals, I can just skip holes. When I found a need to mark an area longer than 36″, I would just line up my last marked hole again after sliding the tool to the first hole in the tool and keep on marking. Given the even number of holes, the tool doesn’t naturally provide a way to find a center, but if you ignore the last hole on one end, and use an uneven number of holes, the middle hole would locate the center of the span. One of the bars in the lattice has stamped diagonal lines that are used to align a crossing strip of the lattice and achieve the spacing marked next to the line. These settings are for 3/4″, 1″, 1-1/4″, and 1-1/2″.
This tool is quick and easy to use. It avoids the awkward math of fractions and decimals. The rivet spacing tool is as useful on boats as it is on aircraft and in any workshop that requires fast and accurate evenly spaced marks.
Ted Gauthier is the Deputy Fire Chief of Bloomfield Village, Michigan. His passion outside of his dream job as a fireman has always been boating and flying. Ted has built himself many things including an airplane, a hot air balloon, a kayak, and a CNC machine. His review of the Glen-L Zip appears in this issue.
The Rivet Spacing Tool is available from the Aircraft Spruce & Specialty Company and is $25.85 for the 10-hole version and $41.50 for the 20-hole version. Northern Tool also carries a 20-hole version for $39.99.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
The Tread Lightly’s mizzen was the feature that drew Steve to John Welsford’s design.
Steve Judson of Annapolis, Maryland, was thinking seriously about building a Scamp. His wife had given him the plans for Christmas and he had thought highly of the Scamp’s performance during a test sail. But he had his heart set on a boat with a mizzen so he could more easily heave to. He did a bit of research and discovered that John Welsford had designed another boat with a hull very much like that of the Scamp, but longer and equipped with a mizzen. Welsford’s Tread Lightly is 13′ long with a beam of 5’. That’s 13″ longer than the Scamp and 4″ narrower.
The shortened cabin leaves more room in the cockpit; eliminating the bulkhead and hatch makes access to day-sailing gear easier.
The Tread Lightly was designed with overnight cruising in mind and so it has a cabin with sitting headroom and room for a solo sailor to sleep with legs stretched out under a bench in the cockpit. Steve planned to use his boat primarily for daysailing and found his inspiration for a number of modifications to that end in Bob Trygg’s Tread Lightly, GIZMO. He shortened the cabin to provide more space in the cockpit, and eliminated the bulkhead that enclosed the cabin to make more a readily accessible space for stowing gear. Fore-and-aft benches took the place of the bridge deck in the original design; the side decks are 2″ narrower to keep them from crowding the side benches and footwell. The Tread Lightly centerboard was drawn offset to port, and Steve put his on the starboard side and pushed it a 2″ farther from the centerline to make more room in the footwell.
The step for the mizzen mast is above the tiller, allowing both the mast and the tiller to be on the centerline and not get in each other’s way. Note the yuloh’s fitting, which connects its handle to the blade of one of the two oars that were combined to make it.
He also made a few modifications of his own. He equipped the mast with a tabernacle to shorten his time at launch ramps. The tabernacle required the replacement the foredeck with an anchor well and moving the mast 3″ aft from its designed location.
Cutting the Tread Lightly’s foredeck provided clearance for the mast to pivot in its tabernacle and created a recessed well for the anchor.
Steve used recycled lumber for almost all of the solid wood parts, and even worked bits of maritime history into the construction of his Tread Lightly. He made his mooring cleats of teak from the decking of both the USCG barque EAGLE and the WWII submarine USS TORSK. A bit of Santa Maria, a wood also often used for decking, cast off from the PRIDE OF BALTIMORE II became another cleat and part of the pinrail. The pinrail also had some Osage orange from the schooner SULTANA. Steve’s brass builder’s plate is mounted on a piece of mahogany from the ferryboat GOVERNOR (formerly KULSHAN of Washington State) used by the Coast Guard when it operated a base at Governor’s Island in New York harbor.
He used less notable pieces of wood too: the boom was once a mast for a sailing dinghy, the yard is a section of a Star-class sailboat. The spars were dimensioned to fit a lugsail that Steve had on hand; its shape is slightly different than the main drawn by Welsford, but has the same area.
For auxiliary propulsion, Steve made a yuloh from a pair of 5′ oars that were too short to use on any of his other boats. A carbon-fiber ferrule joins the oars at the handles to make a 10′ long yuloh. He reshaped inboard and added a section of fiberglass tube added at a slight angle for a handle to get the proper feathering action when stroking.
Auxiliary power is provided by a yuloh fashioned from two short oars joined by ferrule. The two halves of the yuloh are easy to store aboard SYNCHRONY.
Steve launched his Tread Lightly this year, christened it SYNCHRONY, and has sailed solo and with his wife on the tidal waters of several of the rivers that feed Chesapeake Bay. He reports that the boat—beyond being easily trailered, launched, and sailed singlehanded—is a magnet for compliments.
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.
In the wind, our canal boat, BONZO, wanders like an off-leash dog. The design, Phil Thiel’s Escargot, is intended for thin waters that aren’t likely to be subject to breezes, but my son Nate and I often get into little skirmishes with the wind on Seattle’s Lake Union, Lake Washington, and Puget Sound. The hull draws only 6″, and above the waterline are flat sides, each measuring 70 sq ft, so when the wind’s on the beam, BONZO’s bow falls off, sometimes quite precipitously. And motoring into a headwind is like balancing a broom upside down—there’s a lot of movement at the bottom to keep the top in line. The boat is also slow to respond to turns.
The dark ipe board on the outside of the leeboard is through-bolted to the sheer guard and the hull and meant to provide a structure stronger than just a pivot bolt going through the leeboard and the hull.
I thought a leeboard, something you don’t often see on powerboats, might help. A little more lateral resistance would both keep BONZO on course in the wind and provide a pivot point for turning. I got some confirmation of the notion of improving steering just a few days before I started the project when I saw a Boston Whaler equipped with two large leeboards. Its owner had it outfitted as a push boat with two braced, vertical bumpers on the bow and was using it to move a houseboat out of a marina slip, a job that required maneuvering in close quarters. He said that he could spin his Whaler around in its own length with the leeboards in place.
The single leeboard has deep roots. Howard Chapelle notes: “The single leeboard…was a very cheap and simple off-side centerboard, in effect, which not only required no case but was also out of the way of cargo placed in the hold or on deck. The advantages of the single were so great, particularly in scows carrying deckloads, that the centerboard never replaced it before the end of sail.”
At a local store selling salvaged construction materials, I bought a gymnasium bleacher seat, 16′ of flawless 1-1/8″ vertical-grained Douglas fir. I edge-glued a full-width piece to a 3″ strip to get a 12″ wide leeboard that would fit right under the sheer guard and ride above the waterline when retracted. The 4′ length would put 30″ of the board beneath the hull when deployed.
The board is not weighted, so a haul-down is required to lower it. The line to raise the board has a single block and a runner to halve the effort required to lift the board.
I took BONZO out on Puget Sound for an overnight cruise and the leeboard seemed to live up to my expectations. Turning was sharper and in what little wind I had, leecocking didn’t seem to be a problem. When we get out of the August doldrums into the fine sailing breezes, we’ll be able to do some more testing. We’ve already rigged the boat with a mast partner and a new mast to carry a square sail I made for one of my other boats. I’d only intended it for downwind sailing, but who knows, maybe with the new leeboard we’ll soon be sailing on a beam reach in a canal boat.
The Solar Eclipse
The homeward leg of my overnight cruise with BONZO was on Monday, August 21, the day of the solar eclipse; Puget Sound was to get a 95 percent eclipse at 10:20 am. I anchored on the east side of the Sound that morning. I didn’t have goggles for viewing the eclipse directly, so I had to improvise. I took a section of the stovepipe from the stove, and used rubber bands to hold a piece of tin foil over one end and a square of toilet paper over the other. I didn’t have a pin to poke a hole in the tinfoil, so I pulled a bristle from a wire brush that we use to clean the portable gas grill we often carry aboard.
To watch the eclipse I made a pinhole viewer with a piece of stovepipe, aluminum foil and toilet paper.
Just before the peak of the eclipse, the breeze turned cool and fog settled in over the Sound and shore. It didn’t get as dark as I had hoped, but the sunlight took on an odd silvery cast. I retreated to the cabin, slipped the stovepipe into the sleeve of a black jacket, and aimed it out the slightly open doorway at the sun. Each pinhole cast a crescent image of the shadowed sun.
Each of the holes I poked in the aluminum foil projected an image of the obscured disk of the sun.
As the sun was returned to its full brightness, the fog cleared, and I headed home with BONZO, leeboard deployed, running straight and true.
The diminutive yacht OYSTER, a Milford 20, is a modern take on the early New Haven sharpies that worked the oyster beds along Long Island Sound’s Connecticut shores. Inspired by Mark Fitzgerald’s FLORIDAYS in Reuel B. Parker’s The Sharpie Book, the 20′ 6″ OYSTER was designed and built by Neville Watkinson of Milford Boats in Christchurch, New Zealand, and carries either a cat-ketch or a cat-schooner rig.
The sharpie design is well known, but the elements setting the Milford 20’s classic design apart are the counter stern and the cabin with its elliptical port-lights and trim, details that would usually be found on a much larger yacht. OYSTER has been greatly admired at recent classic and traditional boat events in our area of New Zealand. Its classic lines, beautiful counter stern, and immaculate finish readily show the careful thought that has been given to the integrity of the design and the quality of craftsmanship.
The 52-page build manual is comprehensive, with full sequential notes on the whole process enhanced with clear photographs and detailed drawings. The documentation would put the boat within the range of an amateur builder with good woodworking skills and access to a reasonable range of tools and workshop facilities. On OYSTER, the time and care that went into building the coach roof, coamings, lazarette, bulkheads, portlights, rails, and moldings were well rewarded. OYSTER took approximately 1,000 hours to build and outfit.
Neville Watkinson
OYSTER, the first Milford 20, had sapele chine logs, sheer clamps, frames floors, and keelson. Any durable straight-grained wood may be used.
Construction largely follows that of traditional plank-on-frame boats, but uses plywood for sheathing the hull. The Milford 20 is built upside down over a ladder frame without any temporary molds; the hull is built around the permanent timber frames and longitudinal members. The bottom is 12mm plywood, the sides 9mm, and the deck 6mm. To plank the strong curve of the counter, three layers of 3mm plywood were laminated. There are three 12mm plywood bulkheads: The bulkhead in the bow is open, and the stern bulkhead, set just ahead of the rudderpost, encloses a lazarette that provides buoyancy when its watertight hatch is sealed. The addition of some foam throughout the hull would be advised to add sufficient positive buoyancy to support hull and crew in event of a capsize. The hatch on the foredeck provides access to the anchor, which stows in the bottom of the boat where it can contribute to the boat’s stability.
Matt Vance
A double luff tackle (with a double-sheave block and a triple-sheave block) stretched out along the top of the trunk greatly eases the burden of raising the heavily weighted board. The anchor and chain have their place in a box in the bow.
The boat’s centerboard has an unusual construction. It’s a stack of thirty 1-7/8″-thick NACA foil sections, 17 of them hardwood, nine of them half wood, half lead, and four of them entirely made of lead, adding 121 pounds to the board’s weight. The stack is assembled on three 10mm stainless-steel rods with threaded ends for nuts and washers to pinch the epoxy-slathered sections together. The board then gets its sides sheathed with 6mm plywood, a leading edge of oak before a layer of epoxy and ’glass or Dynel.
Neville Watkinson
The plans include a sheet devoted to the installation of an air-cooled gas engine. It is “intended as a concept guide” rather than DIY instructions. In the construction manual the designer notes: “The clutch, timing belts, and pulleys cost more than the engine! I would probably just go with electric drive if starting over.”
Although not essential, auxiliary power makes it possible to get through marinas and lulls in the wind. OYSTER has a 6-hp, air-cooled Honda GX 200, an industrial four-stroke engine, neatly and unobtrusively mounted under the bridge deck. The engine was easy to start with a pull or two of its cord, quiet, and provided ample power for launching and hauling out as well as for a short passage in a short choppy seaway. Milford Boats reports that the inboard pushes the boat along at 4.5 to 5 knots and sips gas at the rate of about 1 gallon per sailing season.
Matt Vance
The optional inboard engine will keep the Milford moving at up to 5 knots when there isn’t any wind.
The engine is set to port, and a belt drive turns the prop shaft that emerges from the skeg forward of the rudder. The three-bladed prop is protected by a stainless-steel plate connecting the skeg and bottom of the rudder. The prop doesn’t feather or freewheel and causes a little drag, but this is a minor concern as the auxiliary power is a major benefit. A bracket for mounting a small outboard to one side of the hull may be a more appealing option to those who are uneasy about installing a shaft log. The long, slender hull and cockpit geometry suggest that the boat could be comfortably rowed if a builder wanted to fit a thwart or two and oarlocks.
Neville Watkinson
Sitting on the trailer designed for it, the Milford 20 doesn’t obscure the driver’s view to the rear. The towing weight with trailer, boat, rig, and gear is 1,320 lbs.
The build manual includes plans for a steel trailer custom-fit to the Milford 20. It was easy to use and, with the boat aboard, weighs around 1,320 lbs—an easy towing load for a small to average-sized vehicle.
At the launch ramp, two of us easily assembled the schooner rig in about 20 minutes. While the unstayed Douglas-fir masts, each weighing 30 lbs, are not heavy, they are awkward to maneuver, and best handled by two. Once the masts are stepped, the rest of the preparation is quickly accomplished. Most lines and sheets are kept in place when the masts are down for trailering, so it takes little time to rerig the boat at the ramp.
Similarly, retrieving the boat from the water and securing it on the trailer at the end of our outing took about 20 minutes. With all sailing gear packed easily in the boat and the masts resting in three crutches, one in each mast step and a third in the hollow rudder post, the Milford 20 is ready for travel. The compact and low profile of the boat on the trailer makes for easy towing and clear all-round vision on the road.
Neville Watkinson
The Milford 20 has a third mast step for sailing with a single sail. A deck plate covers the hole in the forward end of the cabin roof when that step is not in use.
We sailed OYSTER on the open water of Lyttelton Harbor on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island on a late autumn day under clear skies with a breeze at 5 to 8 knots, later rising to over 10 knots. The Milford 20 is only about 4′2″ across at the widest part of the bottom, but was extremely stable under sail. It proved to be a responsive and easy to handle while underway. The thoughtful placement of the fittings and lines ensures that any adjustments can be made from a sitting position in the comfort of the main cockpit.
Neville Watkinson
The low sharpie profile makes the floorboards the best seating for the crew. The mainsail sheet is led to the tiller.
The cockpit isn’t deep, so the floorboards, along with throw cushions and a broad coaming, provide comfortable, dry seating as well as a secure feeling while underway. Even as the wind strength increased soon after we got underway and both sails were reefed, it was not necessary sit out on the windward side decks to counter the heeling. If we had additional crew sitting in the cockpit forward of the bridge deck/mizzen partner, they too would have been very secure, dry, and well clear of the rigging as we sailed the boat from rear cockpit.
Both cockpits are long enough to sleep in—6′2-1/2″ forward and 5′11″ aft—but the available spaces in the forward cockpit, either side of the centerboard trunk, have maximum width of about 22” and the aft cockpit has a 4’2″ maximum width. The limited space would be rather restrictive for sleeping. It would be a much more practical proposition to carry a tent and camping equipment on board for parking the crew onshore overnight. The generous space under the fore deck and in the enclosed aft compartment provide adequate out-of-the-way stowage for cruising and camping gear.
Matt Vance
With a hull that draws only 10″ and a forefoot right at the waterline, the Milford 20 takes well to nosing up on a sandy shore.
During our sail we raised the centerboard and ran OYSTER gently on a sandy beach, stepped ashore, and made a cup of hot coffee using a small portable stove and supplies stowed in the watertight locker under the lazarette. The hull is well protected by Dynel, providing a hard, damage-resistant surface. The Milford 20’s light weight—695 lbs for the hull, including the weighted centerboard—and its shallow 10” draft made the beach landing and relaunching a very easy exercise.
The balanced rudder is 37″ long and 13″ tall at the trailing edge, and has a shape typical of traditional sharpies but with a more modern feature: a 6″-wide horizontal bottom plate to keep water from decreasing the rudder’s effectiveness by slipping under it.
Matt Vance
The cat-schooner rig, seen here, has 67 sq ft in the main and 76 sq ft in the foresail. The alternate cat-ketch rig has 80 sq ft in the main and 62 sq ft in the mizzen. The designer favors the cat-schooner rig.
The modest sail area performs very well in both light and brisk breezes. However, having a long and slender hull and a tall rig, the Milford 20, like most sharpies, needs to be sailed with no more than 10 or 15 degrees of heel. It did sail comfortably with the lee rail under, although it is preferable to reduce heel in a choppy sea to prevent water from entering the cockpit. In winds of 10 to 12 knots, reefing the main would be advised for stability and comfort and in 15 knots it’s recommended that both sails be reefed. Reefing either sail is easily managed from the cockpits.
The Milford 20 obviously does not sail as close to the wind as a sloop-rigged boat of similar size, but it was very secure with a desirable positive helm. It moved readily in light airs, in a rising wind, and was very comfortable both upwind and running downwind.
The structure and configuration of the boat makes it a safe and pleasurable sailing boat in a range of conditions on moderately sheltered waters. It is not an offshore or coastal cruiser but an able craft that could appeal to sailors of all ages and abilities. The dry, secure cockpit and centralized rig controls would obviously have a wide appeal for older sailors or those with limited mobility. For the inexperienced, it is easily managed and forgiving underway.
Overall the Milford 20 design appeals as a very elegant, classic craft for home building, and gives a great sailing experience for both experienced and inexperienced sailors. It also would be a suitable craft for a couple or family of four; a delight to sail and appealing to those who want a safe boat for leisure and pleasure.
Peter Braithwaite ONZM has had a career as a teacher, school principal, administrator, training manager, consultant and foreign-aid adviser in New Zealand and the Pacific islands. He now lives in Christchurch where he continues his lifetime passion for recreational sailing and building small boats from RC pond sailers to competitive racing dinghies and harbor racing yachts. For the past ten years he has been the organizer of the Canterbury Classic & Traditional Boats group that promotes and organizes regular regattas and activities for classic, restored, and replica traditional boats in the local region.
Milford 20 Particulars
[table]
Length/20′6″
Beam/5′8″
Draft, board up/10″
Draft, board down/3′3″
Sail area/145 sq ft
Displacement/1,360 lbs
Hull weight (including centerboard)/695 lbs
[/table]
Schooner rig
Ketch rig
Plans for the Millford 20 are available from Milford Boats on paper for $120 and as digital files for $80.
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!
Clint Chase of Chase Small Craft wrote of his Drake Raceboat: “This was the first boat that I designed totally from the numbers.” It’s the third in his series of Drake Row Boats and, at 18′3″, it fits in between the Drake 17 (17′4″) and the Drake 19 (19′2″). While the Drake Raceboat has a familial resemblance to these two American-born relatives, I suspect that there is some Finnish blood in its veins. The fine entry, the ‘midship cross section as close to semicircular as you can get with four wide strakes, and the light laminated frames look a lot like they came from the boats Finns use for racing on their vast network of interconnected lakes.
Christopher Cunningham
With no keel and very little deadrise to the garboards, the Raceboat won’t roll on its side when resting on a beach.
The Drake Raceboat kit includes all of the computer-cut plywood parts for the boat as well as engineered wood panel pieces for the building forms. There are eight molds, all notched to fit mating notches in the two girders that support them. Five of the molds are faceted where the planks land; the remaining three are curved to serve as forms for laminating the boat’s three frames. Eight 3/16” strips are glued up over the form to make up each frame, and after the epoxy cures, the frame faces are planed flat. Placed back on the mold, a template is used to trace the facets for the planks.
Each plank is made up of three pieces of 4mm plywood to be joined with an unusual three-step scarf joint, which has an internal interlocking puzzle joint concealed by the outside steps. The planks have 1/2” laps between them; to keep the limber plywood running fair between molds, a temporary clamping batten is used when gluing the laps.
The inwales, made of 1/2″ stock, extend just past the frames fore and aft. The outwales run from stem to stern and are built up of three pieces, making a distinctive broad flange that stiffens the sheer. The oarlocks rest on pads fastened to these wide rails. While the kit doesn’t include parts for flotation compartments—the instructions recommend the use of float bags instead—the boat I tested had small sealed compartments in the bow and stern. The builders, Jim Tolpin and Oscar Lind of Port Townsend, Washington, asked Clint to provide patterns for the plywood pieces. The compartments were sealed, but at my suggestion were each given a small hole in the bulkhead to allow air pressure to equalize.
Christopher Cunningham
The flotation compartments in the ends of this Drake are an option requested by the builders.
This boat tipped the scale at 82-3/4 lbs, a bit over Clint’s predicted 75 lbs. Jim and Oscar made some modifications in addition to the flotation compartments that would account for the additional weight. They substituted solid mahogany for the plan’s plywood seat, breasthooks, and stretcher; added 1/2″ brass half-oval running from stem to stern and 6’ lengths along the gunwales amidships; and applied several extra layers of paint. Even with the extra weight, their boat seemed feather light. The mahogany breasthooks made solid handholds for a tandem carry.
Christopher Cunningham
Here, with builder Jim Tolpin at the oars, the Raceboat looks quite voluminous, but the breadth at the sheer belies the slender waterline.
I’d heard from the builders that the Raceboat was rather tippy, but I think much of their uneasiness could be attributed the boat’s wide beam. Getting aboard requires a long step to plant a foot on the centerline and a long reach to get a hand on the far gunwale. The boat’s light weight and rounded midsection make it quick to react to weight planted off center. I’m 6′ tall and have limbs long enough to make the stretch and keep the boat flat. Any rower seated and centered on the thwart will likely feel stable and secure.
Christopher Cunningham
The footboard is adjustable for a wide range of lengths and provides a broad and solid base to push from to put power into rowing.
The rower’s bench is a fixed 10-1/4″-wide thwart that’s set on a short riser glued just forward of the ’midship frame. The footboard is pinned to a pair of 24″ rails with holes every 2″. Although the increment works well enough when adjusting for leg length, a spacing of 1″ between holes would offer not only finer adjustments but also the ability to set the footboard at a different angle to suit the rower. That’s a minor point and an easy modification to make while building the boat; the structure of the footboard is quite solid and provides a foundation for a powerful stroke.
The boat is quite easy to accelerate; a half dozen strokes and it was off and running. I did some speed trials in a marina where there was neither current nor wind. With a lazy, relaxed effort I easily maintained 3-3/4 knots; a sustainable exercise pace brought the speed up to 5 knots.
Christopher Cunningham/Jim Tolpin
Rowing a fast boat sometimes requires stopping quickly. Driving the feathered blades in does the job. The light weight of the Drake Race Boat makes this maneuver possible without putting undue strain on the rower.
It wasn’t easy getting a steady reading on my GPS while I was doing sprints at full effort. Even though the Raceboat is rowed from a fixed thwart rather than a sliding seat, the shifting of my weight as I leaned aft to the catch and forward at the release created an equal and opposite reaction in the boat, dramatically slowing it down on the drive and speeding it up on the recovery. Fluctuations in speed may not be quite so noticeable in a heavier boat, but in the lightweight Raceboat they spanned at least 1-1/2 knots. I’d estimate that the boat’s sprint speed averages out around 6 knots. It’s a fast pulling boat.
Christopher Cunningham
The flare of the sheer strake and the wide flange of the gunwale are evident when the boat is viewed from an end.
To make the most of the Drake Raceboat’s speed, it’s essential to have good technique and a good pair of oars—spoon blades, of course, for a good purchase, and a low swing weight for quick recoveries. On my second day of rowing trials, Tom Regan of Grapeview Point Boat Works delivered a new pair of 8’ spoons. They were a good match for the Raceboat. With slender blades that were nimble in and out of the water, the oars could keep up with the boat.
The Raceboat tracked well and there was no need to correct its course on a straight run. It also responded well to turning strokes and was easy to spin around in place as I pulled one oar while backing the other. There wasn’t much wind during the weekend when I rowed the Raceboat, perhaps about 8 knots but while I was rowing across the wind I didn’t feel the boat had any tendency to weathercock. The wind was offshore and made the water flat, but I did have a few powerboat wakes to drive through. The Raceboat cut through them smoothly and they passed by without much effect on the hull.
Christopher Cunningham/JimTolpin
Pushed hard, the Raceboat maintains its trim well and makes little fuss passing through the water.
The Raceboat I rowed arrived on a small trailer but could be set on roof racks. I regularly cartop a 100-lb tandem decked lapstrake canoe, by lifting one end at a time. A compact SUV like mine provides enough of a span to keep steady an 18’ boat as light as the Raceboat, which is much lighter and easier to manage. If your back and height aren’t a good match for the lift, a trailer is the better way to go
While the Drake Raceboat is designed “for the greater speeds in race conditions,” you don’t have to compete to appreciate the boat. It will give you an exhilarating workout and reward improvements in your stamina and technique, but it’s not so high strung that you can’t take it out for a relaxing outing.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Drake Raceboat Particulars
[table]
Length/18′3”
Beam/48.5″
LWL/17′
Depth/14”
Displacement/306 lbs
Hull Weight/75 lbs
[/table]
The Drake Raceboat will be available as a kit in November of 2017 from Chase Small Boats. You can also build from the plans package, which includes templates for the molds and forms for the bow and stern—planks will require spiling.
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!
ARR & ARR, my homemade Ross Lillistone-designed Flint, surged north-northwest under reefed sail in the Lower Laguna Madre on the Texas Gulf Coast. It was midday on a hot Monday in June, and I would be in the 14′ 10″ open boat all day every day through Friday, so I was covered from head to toe to prevent sunburn, insect stings, and lacerations. I had a neck gaiter pulled up over my nose and ears, a wide-brimmed hat, UV-blocking gloves, and neoprene booties to protect my feet from mud riddled through with jagged shells that would steal shoes, slice skin, and rub in flesh-eating bacteria. I had just begun the Texas 200.
It wasn’t as if my gut hadn’t tried to warn me back at Port Mansfield the day before, as soon as I had put the boat in. I had secured my boat in the marina slip and walked down the dock looking at other boats that had arrived for the 200, recognizing some from pictures and videos posted to the Texas 200 Facebook group and excited at finally seeing them, including the FLYING M and a Bolger Featherwind named HELLO KITTY. After a few hellos to the boats’ crews and a brief conversation or two, I walked back down the dock, and at first my slip seemed empty. Only after a few steps did I finally see my Flint way down low on the water taking up a smidgen of the available space, like a water bug in a swimming pool.
A heavy lump had settled in my gut, and I wondered then if I might have misjudged myself and my boat. I tried to reassure myself that the forecast for the week was favorable, only fair and following winds at 10 to 15 knots. The lump wasn’t going anywhere, though, and I wondered if I should pull the boat out and drive home.
Photographs by the author except as noted
ARR & ARR lies in its slip at Port Mansfield close to the start of the Texas 200, about ready to shove off. Drybags and sealed buckets loaded with lightweight, bulky gear and lashed down to anchor points at the bottoms of the frames ended up functioning only marginally well as makeshift emergency flotation.
In the morning, before the captains’ meeting, I stopped by the docks again. The sun was just below the horizon, and the sky glowed mango yellow. My boat was fine, but it still seemed so tiny and low. I told myself I could join the other entrants and drive to Port Lavaca to park our cars and trailers near the finish line, have lunch, and then decide whether to get on the charter bus taking us all back to our boats at Port Mansfield or to drive my car and trailer back to Port Mansfield and pull out of the event. There was still time to mull it over.
When it came time to get on the bus, I joined the others. As fields of corn and sorghum and windbreaks of oak and mesquite drifted by at 70 miles an hour outside the bus window, I told myself I could withdraw anywhere along the route. It would be more logistically challenging with up to 200 miles separating the boat and the trailer, but it would always be an option. My satellite tracker had buttons that could send three different messages home to my wife, Victoria, in Austin; I’d programmed one to say, “Life and limb are not in danger, but I could use your help. Please meet me wherever my track eventually stops.”
The next morning, I carried my last three dry bags of gear down to the slip, finished loading the boat, cast off, and rowed out of the harbor. The lump was gone. It seems that it fed on idleness, and I had had things to do that morning.
Roger Siebert
.
When I rowed out of Port Mansfield I was almost certain I was the last to start this year’s event. I hadn’t expected to see more than one or two other Texas 200 boats until I reached the first camp, but there they were, at least one sail on the horizon far ahead and one or two on the horizon behind. Boats that caught and passed me flew the Texas 200 burgee and crews aboard hollered and waved.
The winds were a perfect 10 to 15 knots and building, and my destination for the evening lay another 10 miles downwind. The water was dark olive green under mostly sunny skies, and as each wave caught me, it lifted my boat’s stern, hissed and gurgled its way forward just beneath my gunwales then rolled off ahead, a lacy train of foam on its back.
The Texas 200 started in the Lower Laguna Madre without much wind, but by midday I had to put two reefs in. It may look like there is a lot of loose gear in the cockpit, but everything stored outside the boat’s buoyancy compartments was tethered to the boat or to me on the assumption that everything on board would at some point try to jump ship and either sink or float away. The tethers paid off later in the day when ARR & ARR capsized.
Land lay at the horizon to the left and right, but it had changed from thin, mostly gray fuzzy lines in the distance to thicker green ones near enough to make out the wind turbines strung out all along the mainland coast. The land closed on me over the next few miles until I entered the Land Cut, where the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) becomes a 20-mile-long, 100’-wide dredged path through the Saltillo Flats, a low-lying stretch of mud, shell, sand, and salt flats. Spoil islands lie on the east side of the channel, mostly covered with scrub and grasses, some bearing fishing shacks. Smaller cuts lead away from the channel into the flats on both sides.
The wind had been shifting from southeast to more easterly throughout the day, and at the start of the Land Cut, the channel turned slightly east of north, which put me on a beam reach. The water was only ruffled, but the wind was barely hindered by the spoil islands and made for some exhilarating sailing.
What appeared to be the last of the sails behind had come near enough to tell that it was the Pathfinder I had first seen at Port Mansfield Harbor two days earlier. My boat seemed to have slowed to only a knot or two, so I figured it was the perfect time to shake out a reef and put some distance between me and the Pathfinder again.
I hadn’t gone half a mile with that reef out when an exceptionally strong gust hit and heeled the boat over hard. I let the sheet fly, but it was too late. The leeward gunwale submerged, the boom hit the water, the wind pushed the boat on over onto its side, and I plunged in feet-first.
I righted the boat and reboarded, and the Pathfinder, Peter Menegaz’s FLYING M, pulled alongside, luffed, and slowed to a crawl. Peter and his crewman Joe asked if I was all right. Joe offered a bilge pump, but I declined, figuring I could empty the water faster with my bucket.
FLYING M circled while I emptied the water and put the reef back in my sail. I sheeted in and got moving again, and FLYING M fell in behind me. The capsize and recovery had taken only minutes, and I was embarrassed but cooler for the dunking.
The Texas 200 is not a race. No one seems to care who reaches the finish at Magnolia Beach first, and no one records results anywhere that I know of. You challenge yourself, not others, which made my failed attempt to outpace another boat even more ridiculous.
FLYING M followed me all the way to the first camp, a mud and sand beach on the spoil island side of Land Cut, the dredged channel between Lower and Upper Laguna Madre. I beached my boat just inside one of the side cuts that heads out into the flats. My feet sank in the mucky sand beneath the shin-deep water next to my boat, but on shore, the footing was firm as I lugged camping gear from the boat to the dry spot I had picked out among the yellow beach daisies and fleshy green glasswort.
On the first night we camped on one of the Land Cut’s spoil islands. I set my tent near a side cut, visible at the right, that leads out into the Saltillo Flats.
My original plan was to take the battery that powered the boat’s electrical system inside the tent each night to recharge my cell phone, handheld VHF, and video camera, but the capsize had fried the battery. My phone had been on all day, so its battery was mostly drained. I had packed two spare phone batteries, an older one that holds only about half a charge and a new one. I decided to reserve the older battery for emergencies and to save the new one for the fourth day of the 200, when I’d need to navigate through passes in almost a dozen oyster reefs over a course of about 40 miles.
Just beyond our camp was a fishing shack, a ramshackle box missing huge swaths of siding and with exposed, rotting rafters, sitting on a pier that was missing almost half of its planks. Still, the shack provided the only shade at the camp, and sailors filled almost every inch of that shadow.
I returned to my tent and nibbled at a mix of dried fruit and nuts—what was supposed to have been my lunch—debating whether I wanted to also heat up a dinner. Kim Apel walked over from the next tent and insisted that I join him and his group after they got their gumbo going. I ended up in a long conversation with Joe and so missed out on the gumbo, but I was grateful for the offer, and it felt good to be among such people.
At dusk I crawled into my tent, its flaps rolled up to prevent it from becoming a sauna, and bedded down. The wind stayed strong into the night and beat, fluttered the rolled-up flaps, and drummed the windward panels, which kept me from falling asleep for a good while.
I woke during the night to a deep thrumming permeating the night air. A tugboat was pushing two barges through the Land Cut, appearing ghostly gray in the light of a gibbous moon. After the tugboat passed, it revealed all along the western horizon, countless blinking red lights atop the mainland’s long stretch of wind turbines. I kept an eye on our boats pulled up along the shore to see if the tugboat’s wake might do anything that would need attention, but it left barely more than a ripple. A few of our boats adjusted their haunches, as if snuggling into different sleeping positions, and that was it.
I woke again while it was still dark, feeling rested but hungry. With my phone turned off, I wasn’t sure what time it was, but I guessed from the position of the moon that it was close to dawn, so I made a cup of coffee and ate a baggie of granola with milk. A coyote yipped in the distance. Shortly after breakfast, the eastern sky lightened, and other sailors began to stir, so I broke camp and loaded the boat.
The wind hadn’t slackened overnight, so I left the two reefs in my sail, humbled into taking more care after my dunking. Through the morning’s sail, the clouds grew more numerous and larger, their bellies turning gray while still glowing bright white around their edges. Each time I felt like shaking out a reef, I glanced behind and saw the gurgles and foam in my wake slipping away at 3 or 4 knots, and I left things alone. I scarfed down a bit of jerky and an energy bar while I was still in the Land Cut and had the chance, assuming I would have my hands full managing the boat later in the day.
The day turned windy, with gusts reaching 25 knots. In Baffin Bay, with the waves on my quarter and building, my push-pull tiller required a fair bit of force to keep the boat from broaching. The daggerboard tapped against the sides of its slot, spilling water into the forward section of the cockpit. Sharp wave crests lapped a cup or two over the windward gunwale. The waves were only 2′ tall, but big enough to push my boat around.
A half dozen dolphins surfaced around my boat; two leapt half out of the water right next to my bow. I had been quite anxious about the waves and the water coming aboard, but the dolphins, playing as if we were in a kiddie pool, calmed me. ARR & ARR apparently wasn’t going fast enough or creating a big enough bow wave for the dolphins, and they soon they headed over to a small sloop gaining on my starboard quarter.
After I crossed the bay, I ducked in and out of the shelter of some spoil islands, and where the waves were smaller I could move to the center thwart and sponge out the water that had spilled into the forward half of the cockpit. When I built the boat, I thought about running a couple of tubes through the bottom of the center-thwart buoyancy compartment to allow shipped water to flow aft where I could bail it out. I wished I had done that.
ARR & ARR rests on the bottom in only inches of water at Camp Two, on the west side of Padre Island, about halfway between Baffin and Corpus Christi Bays. Other Texas 200 boats here include a Bolger Dovekie (cream topsides and leeboard); a sloop designed and built by the late Joe Dobler (yellow topsides), renamed JOE COOL by its current owner; and a couple of Jim Michalak-designed Mayflies (dark brown boat and tan boat at right).
Camp 2 was on the western shore of Padre Island. The ground was sandy and flat for about 100’ inland, where it rose up in grass-covered dunes. Between the shoreline and the dunes, a meandering rivulet of water snaked inland from Laguna Madre. A black skimmer swooped in and raced within inches of the water angled its lower bill almost straight down, ripping a miniature bow wave and wake down the rivulet’s middle.
The next morning, on the way to Corpus Christi Bay, the wind blew 10 to 20 knots across water sheltered by Padre Island, so I made good headway on nearly flat water on a broad reach, even with two reefs in. Four dolphins rose from the dark olive water right next to me. One surfaced so close that I could have reached out and touched its curved, gray back.
The winds built and became more easterly as the day progressed. By the time I entered the bay, the wind had backed from my quarter toward my beam, and with a fetch of 2 to 3 miles, the waves built up to 2′ again. The boat started taking water. I heeled the boat to raise the weather rail, but there was a limit to how much I could do that without dipping the lee rail, and as wave tops continued to splash aboard, water accumulated forward where I couldn’t get to it.
I headed up toward the windward shore to get into sheltered water; sailing on a close reach left my starboard flank less exposed and only a few wave tops spilled aboard.
On the morning of Day Three, we sailed north along the 42-nautical-mile length of Upper Laguna Madre on the way north to Corpus Christi Bay. The lagoon is 5 miles wide and yet has an average depth of only 3’. The stern light is wired to a 12-volt system that powers the boat’s lights, horn, and sound system.
The chop stirred up the bottom across miles of shallows, turning the water gold under the midday sun. I closed on the windward shore until I was in calmer water, where waving swaths of dark brown sea grass waved across the bottom. Water had almost filled the forward part of the cockpit, and instead of turning to parallel the shoreline and sponging out as I sailed, I beached the boat and took a break. I pushed the button on my satellite tracker to send Victoria the preprogrammed message that I wasn’t on my planned route, but everything was okay. I bailed out the boat and tucked my last reef.
It was a gorgeous beach, with calm water, fine sand, and grass-covered dunes. I checked my chart and found my position on Mustang Island. I pushed my boat into knee-deep water and climbed aboard, eager to get going again. I was glad to have the company of the two other boats, even if for a short while. Within a couple of miles, the Hobie left the sloop and me behind, and I followed the sloop through Shamrock Cove and toward Stingray Hole, where the sloop went around Point of Mustang and also disappeared. I was undercanvased, but I didn’t want to shake out a reef and then have to hike out. I wanted to keep my weight low for stability and to be able to move forward when necessary to sponge out the cockpit.
ELSIE B, a folding schooner, passed me in the Intracoastal Waterway on the way to Corpus Christi Bay on Day 3. On the gunwale at the boat’s middle is a large hinge that allows the boat to be folded in half for transport and storage. ELSIE B has participated in every Texas 200 so far and is the model for the Texas 200’s logo.
I arrived at Camp 3, Mud Island, about two hours before sunset, to the sight of nearly 60 boats pulled up all along the shoreline. This year, the Texas 200 offered two routes; the traditional 200, from Port Mansfield at the southern part of the Laguna Madre to the finish at Magnolia Beach; and the “Hard Way,” which started at Magnolia Beach, joined us traditional types at Camp 3, and then headed back to the finish back at Magnolia Beach along with the rest of us. Mud Island was the first time the two fleets were combined as one.
After setting up my tent, eating a hot meal, and studying the next day’s route on the charts, I was disappointed that not enough daylight remained to walk the beach to see the Hard Way boats and meet many of the sailors I had read about.
Day 4 was the longest, at 43 nautical miles, and most difficult of the trip. Some of the oyster reefs would be easy to avoid—the deep-water gap between Poverty and Spalding Reefs is about a quarter mile wide and easily negotiated with chart and compass alone. Other passes, like that between Cedar and Ayres Reefs, were narrow, and sometimes winding, requiring either local knowledge, a GPS device, or the patience to slowly poke and prod your way along. Day 4 was what I had saved the better of my two charged phone batteries for, and I wasn’t sure how long it would last while constantly operating a navigation app with the phone’s GPS enabled, so I checked and double-checked my planned route for accuracy in case I had to fall back on navigating with chart and compass.
I launched shortly after sunrise but was still behind half the fleet, a loose trail of sails sprinkled across the water all the way to the horizon. Behind me came FLYING M and one of the Hobie trimarans. The air felt cool with the sun still mostly tucked behind clouds at the horizon, and my boat left a gurgling wake in nearly flat water. The more Mud Island shrank behind, the more fetch the wind had to build the waves, and I was soon pushing and pulling the tiller to stay on course again. The action wasn’t as extreme this time and the sailing was actually pleasant.
FLYING M and I sailed side by side only 100 yards apart as we neared the wide gap between Pauls Mott and Long Reef. A line of white tumbling wave tops appeared directly ahead of me, running out from Pauls Mott to starboard. I turned to port and aimed around the farthest edge of the churning waves and toward FLYING M, but I hadn’t reacted quickly enough. My daggerboard plowed into the shell bottom. I spilled the air from the sail and jerked the daggerboard up. The grinding ended, and ARR & ARR moved ahead again. Once the churning waves were behind, I pushed the daggerboard back down clear of the boom. FLYING M had pulled ahead during my grounding, and I fell in behind them on a course that would take us between Poverty and Spalding Reefs 2 to 3 miles ahead and then to the more challenging Cape Carlos Dugout.
Before this trip I was worried about having a daggerboard instead of a pivoting centerboard. When the daggerboard hit bottom—and in the Texas 200, it is “when,” not “if”—something would break or the boat would capsize. Because I was mostly sailing downwind, I kept the daggerboard as high as I could without allowing its top to get in the way of the boom and had originally thought that my kick-up rudder blade, sticking farther beneath the surface than the mostly raised daggerboard, would warn me when I got into less than 2 feet of water. But the daggerboard always hit first. Sometimes it would grind on the shell bottom like at Pauls Mott, and at other times it would hit mud and feel more like I had firmly pressed a brake pedal. The boat was never moving so fast that it broke anything or capsized. After the shells on the bottom had worn down the edge of my daggerboard, it was easy to shrug off additional damage and accept that it had become my makeshift depth sounder.
Dolphins are a common sight in the Texas 200, and they are not at all shy. One surfaced repeatedly next to ARR & ARR on the approach to Corpus Christi Bay on Day Three.
Cape Carlos Dugout and Cedar Dugout were unexpectedly easy channels to navigate. I had my phone’s navigation app, the pilings marking the channel, and FLYING M traveling the same course only 50’ ahead. It was easy to be cautious as the water in the dugouts was smooth between the surrounding reefs and a shortened sail nudged me along at only 2 or 3 knots. In Cedar Dugout, the water lapped the edge of a long shoal only inches deep to starboard, and a few dozen bright pink roseate spoonbills sauntered ankle deep on the shoal, a few here and there dipping and swishing their long paddle-like beaks.
After crossing Mesquite Bay, I followed the bottom contours of my navigation app into Ayres Dugout, which ran adjacent to a small island with a short, steep beach. Three or four boats were pulled up on the beach, so I came ashore for a quick break too. One of the sailors helped me land and held my bow until I got out and took the boat from him. I thanked him, pulled the bow onto the beach, and began sponging out the forward area of my boat. The other crews relaunched and sailed into Ayres Bay on a path that would take them around the southern edge of the Second Chain of Islands. They seemed to be following the course I had plotted for the bay, so I quickly tucked my sponge away and shoved off to follow them.
Little by little, their sails shrank in the distance ahead. After I entered San Antonio Bay and set my course northeast toward Panther Reef Cut, the other boats passed Ayres Point and turned more eastward, toward the southern edge of Panther Reef and much closer to Matagorda Island. The water would be calmer there, which was enticing. On my chart, I didn’t see an obvious path through the reef where they were headed, but I knew that at least some of those sailors had completed previous Texas 200s and wouldn’t be going that way if there weren’t a way through.
After I passed Ayres Point, I turned toward the other boats and shot a bearing on their cluster of sails so I’d know what course to steer after they’d disappeared over the horizon. I wished I had plotted several courses for each day, a primary course and a couple of alternative ones. As it was, deciding to alter course meant juggling phone and chart and trying to memorize new courses on the fly.
I pulled out my phone to see where my new bearing would take me, knowing that the navigation app would show greater detail on the depths at the reef and probably the way through, but my phone’s battery was dead. I pulled out my chart and between double-checking my course against the sails on the horizon, steering the boat through the waves, and glancing at the chart to figure it all out, I determined I was heading toward Pelican Point some 5 or 6 miles distant, with the low green line of Matagorda Island stretching across the horizon to starboard a mile or two away.
I was back on a close reach, but the waves remained choppy and water continued to come aboard. Whenever the chop subsided for three or four waves, I crept onto the main thwart and sponged out some of the water, and whenever the chop steepened, I pointed higher to take them more on the bow, but still, little by little over the next 4 miles, the water coming aboard outpaced my sponging and was within inches of the top of the main thwart in the forward area.
The boat was sluggish as a result, and of course the water always went to the side of the boat that was lowest, which was like having a crewman constantly moving to the wrong side of the boat. On one steeper dip to leeward, water flowed over the lowered end of the main thwart into the part of the cockpit I occupied. I leveled the boat and bailed that out. I was pleased with the discovery that I could shift some of the water aft simply by heeling the boat, and then could bail it out from where I sat.
Asmus Freytag
With me and all gear aboard, the ARR &ARR floats low in the water, while sailing in Aransas Bay on Day 4. I had reduced my original inventory of gear from 240 pounds to 150 before leaving home, but I could have ditched more. I carried water for the entire trip, but I could have taken on fresh water at Corpus Christi, halfway into the 200, and carried only half of the 65 pounds I had on board at the start. A lighter anchor with less chain would have helped as well.
I wanted to land somewhere I could bail everything out. A pair of white beaches lay about a mile dead ahead, and I was still within about a mile of Matagorda Island to starboard. I couldn’t tell whether the white beaches to the east or the green land to my southeast were closer. I checked the chart and figured out roughly where I was, and it appeared even on the chart that I was about equidistant to both shorelines. The beaches to the east were closer to my destination, so I continued toward them.
As I approached the two beaches, the gap between them grew. I aimed for the windward beach, so I could use the leeward one as backup in case I had more leeway than I was guessing or in case the wind backed before I got there.
I sailed and bailed, but it was difficult to keep up with the water coming aboard. The more water the boat had in it, the faster it came aboard. It sloshed around 6” deep even in the main area where I sat, and I became disheartened with the whole trip. I couldn’t help concluding that it had been stupid of me to enter the Texas 200. It wasn’t the boat—it was a good boat, just not the best choice for me for this event. It wasn’t the conditions—wind speeds were perfect, and the chop was only 2 feet high. It was my lack of experience—I had sailed this boat in windier conditions plenty of times, but not in such shallow waters and in this sort of chop.
I wasn’t in danger. Land lay on every side, albeit over the horizon much of the way around; the water was wading depth sometimes a half mile from shore and so warm that hypothermia was virtually impossible. My boat has somewhere around 600 lbs of buoyancy and would float fully swamped. Indeed, it can still make headway under oars while swamped. The most realistic threats were sunburn and dehydration, but I had plenty of sun protection and drinking water. What seemed threatened more than anything else was my pride, and the fact that I was even thinking about such a dumb thing irritated me. So the boat slogged toward shore at about a knot, and I bailed and bailed, grumbling at myself for worrying about how stupid I might appear for—get this—having been stupid.
I was only a couple hundred feet from the searing white beach on what I guessed was Pelican Point when the daggerboard grated against the shell bottom. I pulled the board out, clambered overboard, and dragged the boat toward shore, more relieved than happy. I was too tired and disgusted with myself to be happy.
As I waded, the bottom dipped once, from thigh to sternum deep, but then rose again, continuously this time, until I had the boat’s bow pulled up on shore. I bailed most of the water out then pulled the boat higher onto the beach to finish bailing and sponging.
The beach was steep and made of coarse shells almost too bright to look at under the afternoon sun. A light breeze came over the ridge of greenery inland, and it felt pleasantly cool because I was drenched up to my armpits.
I flipped the page on the chart book looking for the spot where everyone would converge for the night’s camp, Army Hole, an abandoned airfield near the far end of Matagorda Island, but it wasn’t on the chart. I flipped another page. There it was, still at least 15 miles away. It was already midafternoon.
I tucked the third reef in the sail, pushed the boat out to thigh-deep water, and climbed aboard. It was good to have a responsive boat again. I sailed around Panther Point without grounding, although the chart showed only 1’ of water there, and stayed within a mile of the shoreline for the 6 or 7 miles to the First Chain of Islands. There were times when water would still sneak aboard, but I knew that the more water I had aboard, the more work it would take to match the pace of the ingress, so I sponged it out as soon as it came in. With less sail up, and with the responsiveness of a drier boat, it was easier to sail even while forward removing water. While it helped that the chop was gentler this close to the windward shore, I suspected I’d gotten at least a little smarter about how to handle it all. Whatever the case, I was enjoying myself again.
The Corpus Christi Bay side of Mustang Island provided the perfect opportunity for a quick break. The Gulf side of the island sees people take a break of a different sort, Spring Break, when thousands of college kids descend upon the miles of broad, sandy beaches.
A lime-green Goat Island Skiff shot by with almost all sail up, passing me about 100 yards to starboard. It was John Goodman aboard GIR. He yelled out “Woo-hoo!” as raced ahead on plane, heading straight for the islands I had set my course to. It felt as if Superman had swooped in to show me the way through.
I followed GIR as she headed straight for what appeared to be a small wooden water tower on one of the islands. GIR shrank in the distance and doglegged left, cutting around the northern edge of the island.
I followed, although at a fraction of the speed. I cut left at the water tower, and then doglegged back right at the island’s edge, and my daggerboard ground to a halt on the oyster-shell bottom. I got out and walked the boat to deeper water, got back in, and promptly ground to a halt only 50’ farther on. I walked the boat again and, that time, left the islands behind.
I was elated that GIR had shown me a way through and that only deeper water remained between me and Army Hole. I had 8 or 9 miles to go but there would be no more reefs.
About 4 miles later, as I approached Vanderveer Island and the last stretch to Army Hole, the sun hung low in the sky, about to duck behind the denser cloud cover at the horizon. I doubted I’d reach Army Hole before dark, and I didn’t want to be on the water at night. Every once in a while, a wave top tossed a pint or so of water into the front of the boat, and water was sneaking in through the daggerboard slot again. I sponged it out but I wasn’t ready to shake out a reef.
Ahead there appeared to be beaches suitable for campsites dotted along the Vanderveer Island shoreline. I considered heading for one and setting up camp by myself while it was still light and meeting up with the rest of the boats at the finish the next day. I could send Victoria two messages: one letting her know I was stopping for the day and another letting her know that although I wasn’t on my planned route, everything was okay.
I continued to skirt the island and rounded the turn in the island, and with the sunlight coming from behind me, Army Hole’s long main building and picnic pavilion roofs gleamed white against the darkening horizon ahead. The final 2 or 3 miles would be in the lee of Vanderveer Island, which meant flat water the entire way, so I crawled forward and took out a reef. ARR & ARR sped up, but it still didn’t seem fast enough. As the sun had slipped to within a few degrees of the horizon, I shook out another reef, sat on the gunwale, tucked my toes beneath the hiking strap, and pulled in the sheet. The boat took off, and I thought I might make it after all.
The sun set when I was about a mile out, and the light and the wind faded, but I was so, so close. I was too close to save any time by stopping and shaking out the last reef, so I kept sailing.
I made Army Hole in the last of the twilight, and another sailor helped pull my bow onto the grassy shore. I set up my tent in the dark, slipped inside, and ate a quick cold dinner. I was wet, hungry, sore, and exhausted, but I had made it, more than 40 nautical miles in one very long day. I stretched out on my sleeping mat in my still-damp clothes and fell into a long, deep sleep.
Spending five days with the Texas summer sun beating down on and reflecting off of the water makes complete coverage a necessity. Previous Texas 200 participants have had to drop out as early as Day Two from sunburn alone. Lightweight, quick-drying synthetic pants and shirt are best—cotton doesn’t provide adequate protection, especially when wet. Carrying a change of clothes prevents daily apparel from becoming too foul. I had only one neck gaiter and it was quite rank by the end of the event. I enjoyed my separate set of sleeping clothes—a pair of shorts and a T-shirt until Day Four when water seeped into their dry bag and soaked them. The bicycle mirror provides a limited but useful view of where I was heading when I was rowing. I commute by bicycle, so I was already used to that type of mirror.
It was already light when I woke to the last day of the 200. Only about 20 miles of easy sailing lay between me and the finish at Magnolia Beach. I took my time eating breakfast, taking down the tent, and preparing the boat.
Most of the fleet was already gone by the time I pushed off. The wind blew a steady 10 to 15 knots with gusts up to 20, and I had 4 or 5 miles of a broad Espiritu Santo Bay to cross, so I sailed double-reefed.
The bay is only about 6′ deep, so the waves were choppy, even if only about 2′ high, but they were regular and going my direction. With the steeper sets, water sprayed outward from the gunwales.
Water flowed from the daggerboard trunk into the forward cockpit, but I’d lashed an empty 5-gallon water can in that part of the cockpit and functioned as a buoyancy tank, making it unnecessary to bail. I made good headway across the 4 ½ miles of Espiritu Santu and threaded through the ruins of more than a dozen platforms about halfway across the bay, so I certainly wasn’t at risk of dozing off or anything, but the whole thing seemed routine by then. Just outside the entrance to the channel between the islands, a lone dolphin surfaced 50′ off my port bow. It moved slowly and surfaced only once. Its dorsal fin had a chopped, jagged edge; an old wound likely from a boat’s propeller. I felt for the poor thing but admired its resilience.
Roger Siebert/Ross Stapp
I was all smiles at the finish at Magnolia Beach. Beaches like these, made up of coarse shell fragments, may seem benign, but even the slight rocking caused by waves as small as these would wear through paint in just a couple of hours.
I negotiated the narrow 1/3-mile-long passage between Dewberry and Blackberry islands and sailed into the sheltered waters of the 175-yard-wide ICW channel behind Blackberry. After about 5 miles of dodging barges and powerboats, I exited the channel between the twin jetties at Port O’Connor, and headed northwest toward Magnolia Beach, sailing the last 8 or so miles in the lee of the shore, close enough to stay sheltered but far enough out to enjoy the ride. I landed on Magnolia Beach, the finish of the Texas 200. It had been a long, wet, hot five days with plenty of stumbles, but with a wealth of amazing moments too. At the post-event dinner, I stuffed myself with shrimp, sausage, corn, and potatoes and swapped stories with the other sailors. I hadn’t even pulled the boat out of the water yet, and already I wanted more.
Roger Siebert is an editor in Austin, Texas. He rows and sails his Flint on local lakes, and has trailered it to a few of his favorite places on the Florida coast.
The Ross Lillistone Flint
The Flint is a 14′ 10″ open boat Ross Lillistone designed primarily as a rowboat but which can also take sails or a small motor. It’s built using 1/4″ plywood and dimensional lumber. A profile of the design appears in Small Boats Monthly’s October 2016 issue.
I built my Flint to use the 55.7-sq-ft balance-lug sail. I also coated the outside of the hull with fiberglass, beefed up parts such as key joints and the rudder, added inwales and splashboards, and replaced the designed tiller with a push-pull version. My modifications added at least 50 lbs to what is normally a very lightweight boat.
I set out on the Texas 200, with about 150 lbs of gear, including a 22-amp-hour battery, and 8 gallons of drinking water. The weight turned out to be too much for the conditions, even as mild as they were. I originally thought I would have about 10” of freeboard at the sheer’s lowest point, which isn’t much. A few weeks after the event, as I was patching dings and scratches on the boat’s bottom, I noticed watermarks on the topsides that indicated the actual freeboard during the event had been only about 7″. It’s no wonder I had such a difficult time in the bays. The load also made the boat easier to capsize, in that not much heeling was required to push the leeward gunwale under.
The Texas 200
Although the route runs through parts of the Intracoastal Waterway, the Laguna Madre, and the bays of south Texas and is protected from the Gulf by barrier islands, the wind can build up a steep chop over depths that average in the single digits. For more information, visit the club’s website or Facebook page.
Editor’s note: Hurricane Harvey
On August 25, 2017, the eye of Hurricane Harvey swept over the Texas coast near Corpus Christi, right at the halfway point of the route of the Texas 200. Texans from outlying areas converged on the stricken area with small boats to aid official agencies in the rescue effort. The damage caused by high winds, storm surge, and flooding has yet to be fully assessed, but it seems clear that the area will take years to recover. Donations to charitable organizations will help provide much needed assistance to Texans suffering the consequences of the storm.
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.
If there is one thing that can improve upon a pleasant day on the beach, fresh baked bread might be it.
My wife and I went canoeing on our very first date and I proposed to her while we were on a 72-day canoe trip to Hudson Bay. We continued to canoe-camp after getting married, but now that we have kids, I often feel like we are relearning how to enjoy it. The biggest difference is the amount of time we spend in camp. In addition to hauling a huge dry bag full of painting supplies, board games, and books, we started bringing a reflector oven, plus mixes for baking cookies, cakes, and breads.
I once looked forward to camp sweets just as much as our young daughters do now. Pineapple-cherry dump cake baked in a Dutch oven was a staple of my Boy Scout troop campouts. The recipe was easy: dump a can of pineapples and cherry-pie filling in the Dutch oven, top with a cake mix, put the lid on and cover oven with coals. Dutch ovens can be used to make a wide variety of cakes, pies, and casseroles. Many are cast iron, which is way too heavy to carry on a portage, but we often use a lighter, aluminum one that heats almost as well and doubles as a frying pan.
Set in the coals of a fire in a campsite’s steel fire box, an aluminum Dutch oven bakes a blueberry cobbler with the addition of heat from coals set on a lid with a rim.
When I started guiding canoe trips, I learned an easier and lighter baking technique for a one-burner camp stove that bakes with steam. It uses two pots—one that fits inside the other. Place a few pebbles in the bottom of the large pot and cover them with water. Pour the cake, muffin, or bread mix in the small pot and set it inside of the large pot. With the lid on the large pot—tinfoil will do in a pinch—turn the stove to simmer. Add more water before it all boils off and the pot gets damaged. Breads and cakes won’t get a crisp brown crust, but they will always be moist.
These peanut butter-chocolate rolls were baked using a pot-in-pot method. Three rocks in the larger put elevate the smaller pot to keep boiling water under the smaller pot. Not shown is the pot lid. The rolls aren’t browned, but they’re fully cooked.
Neither of these techniques is as fun or versatile as the reflector oven we’ve been using more recently. Our oven weighs just 17 oz and folds nicely into notebook-sized pouch. The oven is placed close to the fire and uses radiant heat to cook. It’s more versatile than our Dutch oven because it acts like a regular oven—we’re only limited by the size of pan. I’m careful to keep an even fire heat, and I rotate the baking pan to prevent burning. Like all outdoor baking, there’s no temperature control, so I do a knife test occasionally to see if it’s done. Cookies, cakes, and breads have all turned out great, and I’m looking forward to trying my luck roasting stuffed fish.
Baking in a reflector oven doesn’t require a large fire. Chocolate-chip cookies are almost ready to eat.
If there’s a downside to the reflector and Dutch ovens, it is that you need a campfire. During dry summers, fire bans would prevent their use. When fires are permitted, many places we camp have established fire rings, and other areas (such as the coast of Lake Superior) have rock or sand beaches where fires can be made that have no lasting fire scars, and wood is plentiful. The camp stove used for the pot-in-pot method aren’t often subject to fire-hazard restrictions.
You don’t need to have kids to have a good excuse to add baking to your camp cuisine. The aroma and taste of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls in the wilderness is something you’ll not soon forget.
Andrew Breckenridge is a geology professor living on Lake Superior in Duluth, MN. His fleet includes four canoes, a sailing dory, and a nearly finished Core Sound 17. His current dream trip is the Inside Passage.
Recipes
We usually just use mixes available at the store or find a recipe online. Here are two of our favorites.
Cinnamon Rolls
These were my go-to dessert on layover days when I guided trips for the Boy Scouts.
biscuit mix
sugar (white or brown)
cinnamon
margarine or butter
Nutella
Stir water into the biscuit to make a firm dough. Add some sugar to the dough. Roll out the dough on a flat surface (like the bottom of a canoe) to around 1/4” thick and coat with sugar, cinnamon, and melted margarine. Cut the dough into 1” strips and roll up. Place the rolls into a greased pan, with ample space for them to expand, and bake. Drizzle with Nutella.
15-year-old Birthday Cake
This is the one and only birthday cake I’ll never forget. It was a surprise cake that was served on my 15th birthday during a 9-day canoe trip on the Bloodvein and Gammon rivers in eastern Manitoba. If nothing else, the recipe proves that being on the trail makes everything taste better and creates great memories.
chocolate cake mix
peanut butter
grape jelly
15 wooden matches
Bake two layers of chocolate cake using the package directions and a round cake pan. Spread peanut butter and jelly over the bottom cake layer. Add the second cake layer, then top with 15 matches. Light quickly, and sing even faster.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The bungee doesn’t need to be removed to use the tiller. Just push or pull the tiller and the bungee will hold it at the new angle.
In my years of solo cruising in small boats I’ve found that there are many times when it’s helpful to have both hands free while sailing. I can free one hand by securing mainsheet with a cam cleat or slippery hitch, and then I just need something to hold the tiller in place so I can grab a bite to eat, take a compass bearing, or pull on a jacket.
There are a number of tiller tenders available commercially, but they tend to be bulky, overly complicated, and come at an added expense; from what I’ve seen, many of them also require you to engage and disengage them or adjust their tension.
On a recent cruise, though, my brother showed me a tiller tender that eliminates all those problems. It’s cheap, simple, and utterly reliable. It doesn’t need adjustment and there’s nothing to engage or disengage; you can steer the boat normally with the system in place, and whenever you need to let go of the tiller, it stays where you positioned it.
To set this system up for a conventional tiller, run a line athwartships under your tiller from rail to rail. If your boat has open gunwales or a pair of cleats well aft on the gunwales, you don’t need to add anything to anchor the ends of the line. This line needs to be just taut enough to minimize play in the tiller when the system is in use.
The tiller tender requires only a short line run across the boat under the tiller an toggled bungee loop to squeeze that line to the tiller.
Next, take a short bungee loop with a plastic ball on the end and pass the looped end around both the tiller and the loop you just rigged. Take enough turns with the bungee around both the tiller and the loop of line to pull them tightly together before tucking the plastic ball through the bungee to finish the wrap. You can always adjust the tension if you find the bungee is not tight enough and not providing enough friction to hold the tiller in place, or too tight and making the tiller hard to move.
That’s it. Your tiller tender is ready for action. You will still be able to steer normally, but the friction of the system will hold the tiller in place when you let go. You can set the tiller to hold a steady course or push the tiller hard over to tack or jibe while you tend to the sheets.
After rigging this system on my own boat, I found myself sailing hands-free most of the time, with just a slight nudge of the tiller now and then. I doubt I’ll ever go cruising again, or even daysailing, without having this simple tiller tender in place.
One caveat: as with all tiller tenders, be aware that your boat will keep right on sailing if you fall overboard with this system rigged. Act accordingly.
Tom Pamperin is a freelance writer who lives in northwestern Wisconsin. He spends his summers cruising small boats throughout Wisconsin, the North Channel, and along the Texas coast. He is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly and WoodenBoat.
Editor’s note:
A bungee loop can also be used as a tiller tender on a Norwegian tiller.
To give this system a try, I made a standard tiller that I could attach to the rudder of my Caledonia Yawl (pictured here in the photographs above) and sailed without the mizzen mast in place. I was impressed how well the bungee worked with a standard tiller and wanted to use the same method to create a tiller tender for a Norwegian tiller. I first thought about using the same length of line but set fore and aft instead of athwartships, but a thole pin presented itself as a better place to start. I put the bungee loop over the push-pull tiller and then wrapped it around both tiller and thole.
With a Norwegian tiller, the bungee can be looped onto a thole pin or other upright fixture. If the bungee loop has the tiller running through it before it is wrapped, the tiller can be lifted to disengage the tiller tender without loosing the bungee.
That’s all it took, and the bungee worked just as well in this new arrangement. I could change course by pushing or pulling the tiller and leaving it to make the boat come about or hold a straight course. I could also disengage the tiller by lifting it—along with the bungee—from the thole and have complete freedom of motion. The tiller follows me after I tack and gets wrapped with a thole pin on the windward rail.
The tiller should be held on the weather rail where it is accessible when the boat heels in a gust.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
Closed up against rain or cold, the tent is cozy without feeling cramped. The attached flap of PVC vinyl provides a place to take shoes off to keep dirt out of the tent.
If you learned “Waltzing Matilda” in grade school you might recollect that the song is not about a dancing girl, but about a “jolly swagman camped by a billabong under the shade of a coolibah tree.” The coolibah tree is about the only thing in the song that is what it sounds like, a tree. Waltzing is Aussie slang for traveling on foot and Matlida is slang for a bedroll, or swag. The swagman was a drifter who had fallen on hard times and was looking for work. The song was written in 1895, and these days the term swag has come to mean a portable sleeping shelter falling somewhere in size between a bivibag and a tent. They’re common in Australia, and have recently crept into the North American market.
The swag has webbing and buckles to keep the tent and mattress tightly rolled up.
Like drifters, many of us who cruise in small boats need a place to sleep, and a swag tent could be an option worth considering. The Pioneer Swag Tent is made of 12-oz ripstop canvas made waterproof by its tight weave and durable water-repellent (DWR) coating. I poured a quart of water into a bowl I formed with the fabric and left it there for a couple of hours. No water seeped through, and the underside of the fabric felt dry. The rain that fell on the tent overnight beaded up and rolled off.
The instruction included with the swag notes: “All canvas camping equipment should be seasoned. This is when you wet the fabric to let it swell around the stitching. This will make the stitching seams waterproof.” The fabric has been treated with a waterproofing product to make rain and dew bead up and roll off.
The bathtub floor is made of coated vinyl and rises up about 1-1/2″ to meet the canvas top. An extra piece of the vinyl is sewn on to serve as a foot mat. It’s a nice touch that keeps grit out of the bed and stinky shoes out of the tent. I tucked my shoes under the mat and they stayed dry on the night it rained.
Three sectioned aluminum poles support the tent. Guy lines to two tent pegs pull the canopy tight. Another four pegs anchor the corners of the floor.
Rolling back the canvas top exposes the bug netting and allows a cooling breeze to flow through. The netting can be rolled back as well for entry and stargazing.
The top of the tent unzips and rolls back to uncover a nearly full-length bug mesh that also unzips to uncover the interior space. The head end of the tent has a doorway with a bit of an awning over it and provides another way to get into the tent. I had enough room in the tent to crawl in through the end doorway head first—easier than backing into it—and I turned around once inside. The tent is 7′ long and 3′ wide, slightly longer and narrower than an American TwinXL bed. At the head end the inside space is 31″ high, 17″ at the foot.
The door at the head end of the tent is rolled up to the right. The opening was a tight squeeze as an entry, but a reasonable option in a downpour. I could crawl in faster head first and then turn around inside. The guy line wasn’t a significant obstacle.
The mattress is egg-crate foam with a non-woven fabric cover, equipped with a zipper to make it removable for washing. The foam is 2” thick and surprisingly comfortable. I’m used to self-inflating sleeping pads that allow me to set a level of inflation that keeps my hips and shoulders off the ground, so with just 2” of foam, I expected to ground out and feel pressure points, but I felt evenly supported and remained comfortable through the night.
The 2″ egg-crate foam, zipped into a washable cover, is surprisingly comfortable on hard ground. I preferred having the textured side down.
There are two pockets inside the tent—one canvas and one mesh—for storage of glasses, a flashlight, and other small items. The tent comes with a zippered duffel made of the same rip-stop canvas as the tent and it’s made oversized to accommodate a sleeping bag. I’d recommend a waterproof duffel or dry bag for carrying the swag tent in an open boat to keep it fully dry and to serve as flotation.
In a timed trial, I set the swag tent up in 3 minutes and 45 seconds and then got it knocked down, rolled up with a sleeping bag and pillow in it, and zipped into the duffel in 3 minutes 47 seconds. The duffel measures 36″ x 14″ x 14″.
The duffel has some extra room beyond what the tent and mattress require, so the swag tent can be rolled up along a sleeping bag and pillow inside and still fit. While the duffel is bulky, it takes up as much space as the four or five separate bags the gear might ordinarily occupy.
The first two nights I slept in the Outback Swag Tent were at the end of summer days with temperatures in the high 80s. With canvas covers the top and the end unzipped, the mesh allowed a cooling breeze to make it easy to fall asleep. On the rainy night, I kept the top cover zipped up and opened the end door for fresh air. On all of the nights I slept in the swag tent, I was just as comfortable as I would have been in my bed at home and I even slept longer.
In the middle of a cool morning, with the temperature at 60 degrees and a bit of a breeze blowing, I stepped into the swag tent for a nap and zipped up the cover. I felt warmer immediately just being out of the breeze. I didn’t have the sleeping bag with me, but I didn’t need it. The small enclosed space and the insulating properties of the canvas are good measures against the cold. In 20 minutes the temperature inside the swag tent had gone from 60 degrees to 78 degrees, warm enough to nap comfortably without a sleeping bag.
The nights I slept in the Outback Swag Tent, I was just camped in the back yard. After one night in it I had the information I needed and could have gone back to my bedroom, but I liked the cozy space and slept well. The Outback Swag isn’t meant for backpackers. At 18.7 lbs for the tent, mattress, poles, stakes and duffel, it’s heavy by backpacking standards, but it’s also heavy duty and should hold up to a lot of hard use providing years of comfortable camping.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
GYPSY SOUL brightens up a dreary winter landscape.
Scotty Pugh of Sardis, Tennessee, grew up riding dirt bikes and later indulged his passion for motorcycles as he collected vintage Harley-Davidsons. But a ride gone wrong landed him a hospital trauma ward for a week and he was forced to consider something else to focus his interest upon. “Wooden boats,” he thought, “will keep me entertained.”
Scotty’s shop was an old rural grocery store that was part of his childhood. He couldn’t stand to see it torn down, so he bought it and rebuilt it as his boat shop. The photographs on the wall are a mix of motorcycles and wooden boats.
After he built his first small wooden boat there was no turning back. GYPSY SOUL, a Caledonia Yawl, is his fourth boat. While he had acquired a lot of the necessary skills building the first three boats, “the road to building the yawl was not without some curves and potholes.” Work was interrupted when he was installing floorboards and “acting like I was 20 again, inflamed a muscle in my hip and mashed a sciatic nerve. That took me down for couple weeks.” While work on the yawl was slow, it was not without its daily rewards. “The more I’m buried in technology at work, the deeper I bury myself in wooden boats at home.” Scotty’s career has been in the highly technical field of robotic welding, so he counts the time he spends with a hand plane as meditation.
As engineer and longtime woodworker, Scotty is, by his own admission, “a bit ticky about correctness, so construction took awhile.” His tidy work with the epoxy fillets paid off in the bright-finished boat.
Scotty spent five years building GYPSY SOUL, often working with Juilio, his sweetheart at the beginning of the project and his wife by its conclusion. One cold morning in December last year, Juilio called from work: “If I can get the afternoon off can we launch the boat?” The yawl was not quite finished, but close enough that it was ready to sail. Scotty called his parents to announce the plans to launch, and his 83-year-old mother insisted that they wait for her to get to the ramp. She warned him that if she wasn’t “standing on the dock when the boat hit the water there would likely be adjustments to the will.” Scotty agreed to delay the launch long enough to give his parents time to get to the lake. “Pop has some neat old tools,” thought Scotty, “so it wasn’t worth the risk to rush.”
The most recent version of the Caledonia design calls for seven strakes; Scotty opted for the original four-strake hull.
At the ramp, GYPSY SOUL slipped into the water for the first time. Scotty and Juilio hadn’t sailed a lug rig or a mizzen before, but hauled in the main sheet and took off. “We peeled off into a close-hauled beat, sailed across on a beat, and back on a run. Upwind she is a filly! On a reach you could pull a water-skier. What wonderful big-block power those sails gather. Downwind, stable, light on the tiller, a wonderful gurgle of chines underwater.” His mother, who had never seen a boat sail, said, “When the wind took that boat, the way it moved was like magic.”
Scotty has two cat-rigged boats and two sloop-rigged boats, but the Caledonia’s lug rig with the mizzen is his favorite by far.
Since the winter launching, Scotty and Juilio have sailed many of the lakes and rivers of West Tennessee, and while GYPSY SOUL’s home waters are well inland, she’s not landlocked. Scotty and Juilio have entertained the idea of driving 45 minutes from home to launch in Pickwick Lake, make their way to the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway, and in a week’s time sail out into the Gulf of Mexico.
GYPSY SOUL does most of her sailing on the Tennessee River, but she was built with island-hopping the Florida Keys in mind.
After a 25-year career, Scotty is ready for an early retirement so he can devote his time to boats. “I don’t want to build wooden boats for a living, but for the poetry of it.” While there will be other boats, GYPSY SOUL is tied to an important time in his life. “I had my house rented to pretty young gal who turned out to love classic literature and history. I taught her to sail, we built GYPSY together, got married, and the small-boat thing fits us and our lives perfectly. I may be buried in GYPSY.”
When Scotty taught Juilio how to sail, she was quick to pick up the skills and “the touch.” She’s handling the main sheet here, but Scotty notes: “She’s the best helms man or woman I’ve ever sailed with.”
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 few years ago I adapted my W.P. Stevens-designed decked lapstrake canoe for sliding-seat rowing. The canoe has taken well to oars and outriggers and now makes better speed than with a pair of paddles, but it’s no longer so easy to see where I’m going. Out on open water I can look over my shoulder occasionally and not worry about running into something, but I prefer getting my exercise on the flat protected waters of Seattle’s ship canal where I have to keep an eye out for tugs, barges, pleasure craft, and racing shells, as well as often erratic rental kayaks and electric launches. An occasional glance forward isn’t enough to spot and keep track of everyone, so I never get to settle into a steady rowing rhythm. I’ve tried those little mirrors that clip onto glasses, but they didn’t work for me. I never was able to develop a knack for getting my head aimed in the right direction.
The side mirror, during a trial with a suction cup on a piece of acrylic sheet screwed to the port outrigger, gave me a blind starboard side and left me guessing where I was headed.
I happened to have an inexpensive (around $10) wide-angle mirror that I use for backing my car up to a trailer hitch. It’s designed to clip on to a car rearview mirror, but will just as easily clip to a piece of plywood. My first attempt for a forward-view mirror for my canoe was to mount the mirror on my outrigger. Although the mirror wobbled a bit as the outrigger flexed, it was steady enough during the recovery to get a good view. But while I could see forward, it wasn’t readily apparent where I was headed. I saw the bow in the mirror at an angle and had to imagine an extended centerline to guess where I was headed.
The fitting at the top of the dowel provides vertical adjustment for the mirror.
We had done a Reader Built Boat article on a boat designed in Finland for racing; it was equipped with a mirror set on a short “mast” on the centerline, aft of the rower. I thought it looked rather clunky but decided to give it a try. I used a 3′ length of 1-1/4″ oak dowel for the upright and a block of mahogany with a matching hole for its base. I cut a slot in the top of the dowel for one leg of an aluminum angle and screwed the other leg to a piece of plywood cut to accept the rearview mirror.
The saw kerf through the hole makes the fit snug without binding the dowel so it can be rotated to aim the mirror. I’ll get rid of the clamp after I screw the block down.
I clamped the block to the plywood base for my outriggers and the setup did indeed look clunky, but I got the mirror aimed and headed out rowing. The mirror, measuring 11″ by 3″, isn’t very tall, but it offers a nearly panoramic view forward, and although the convex curve of the mirror shrinks things, I could see even small objects like ducks quite easily. With the 3′ dowel, the mirror is just high enough to see over my head—any lower and I’d get distracted by my hat moving about. The mirror quivers a bit at the catch, but that’s not a problem. Any rolling of the boat will cause the mirror to move side to side, but the image remains stationary.
The wide-angle mirror shows what’s ahead as well as enough of a view to the side to hold a course at the right distance from shore.
Because the mirror is centered on the boat, there’s no guessing what I’m headed for: my course will take me right to whatever is in the middle of the mirror. The wide-angle view makes it easy to row along a shore or a marina and keep a safe and steady distance. I can even row with confidence down the narrow space between parallel piers or docks.
I had anticipated that I’d have to shorten the dowel, but I like having it tall enough to keep the top of my head out of the mirror image.
The dowel, of course, is right in the middle of my line of sight over the stern, but that’s a small price to pay for the improved view forward. I still check over my shoulders now and again, but I can row at a steady pace without having to ease off to twist my spine to look over the bow. The mirror is almost as good as having eyes in the back of my head.
I have been told that one should build the boat that best suits the nearest body of water—that’s the way to get the most use out of it. My closest body of water is a reservoir that limits powerboats to 10-hp engines, and on any given weekend sailboats, kayaks, and aluminum fishing boats abound, but there are no big powerboats. I didn’t take the advice and built a classic runabout with a 40 horsepower motor. The closest water without a horsepower limitation is at least an hour’s drive away, boat and trailer in tow. Seven years later, and now with a toddler in tow, it is nearly an all-day event to take the runabout out and we are using it less and less. I found myself longing for a vessel to take advantage of the manmade lake just 10 minutes from home, so I began searching for an outboard skiff design that could handle our family of three with 10 hp or less. I discovered that there are many choices among small power skiffs between 12′ and 17′, and just deciding what to build turned out to be quite the exercise. I wanted something that stood out and found what I was looking for in the Tango Skiff.
Brad Boelke
The transom extensions flank the motor, supporting its otherwise cantilevered weight and bringing the Tango on plane faster.
The Tango Skiff has interesting hull extensions that create an attention-grabbing geometry aft of the transom. The additional running surface and buoyancy of the extensions appealed to me because of my previous experience with small outboard-powered boats. When operated solo, many of them with a conventional transom will squat under the weight of the motor and the skipper and set the bow pointing skyward.
The Tango Skiff is a modern design that evolved in the early years of the new millennium as designer Hank Bravo experimented with a way to overcome the squat by adding volume and planing surface behind the motor. His 12′ prototype, powered by a 3.5-hp outboard, jumped on plane and ran 20 percent faster with the extensions than without and that he didn’t need to shift his weight forward or carry ballast when running solo. Tango Skiffs continued to evolve from that first 12′ boat and are now available in 12′, 13′, 14′, 15′ and 17′ versions.
I chose the Tango 13 because it would fit in the “half” section of my two-and-a-half car garage. My big runabout, and, most importantly, my wife’s car, also still fit in the two garage bays. The Tango Skiff measures 13′ from the bow to the end of the extensions.
The plans for Tango Skiff come in PDF file format; no full-sized, printed patterns are provided. The shape of each part is transferred to the plywood using a grid scale shown on the plans of 1 grid square equals 1” square. Many parts are cut oversize and trimmed to fit during assembly, which helps eliminate much of the fear of not transferring something properly. The instruction manual included with the plans has lots of helpful color photos and a detailed materials list.
The Tango Skiff 13 is built entirely from five sheets of plywood, three at 1/4″ and two at 3/8″. I think the most daunting part for a new boatbuilder is scarfing plywood panels together. I overcame this by doing half-lap joints that I cut with a router instead of true scarfs. I found this much easier especially on 1/4″ ply. By February the project was ready to move to the garage for assembly, but it was still too cold for epoxy, so I waited until April to do more work.
Once the project was moved to the garage the assembly went quickly. Assembly is just like any other stitch-and-glue boat. The panels are stitched together and epoxied, the stitches are removed, fillets are made, and fiberglass tape is applied to the seams then a lot of sanding follows. There is one interesting departure from the normal stitch-and-glue process: a built-in chine step. It is formed when the side planking laps past the bottom planking in the forward third of the chine. This creates a void, which is then filled flush with thickened epoxy. In the finished boat, this functions like a sprayrail to keep the occupants dry.
Chris Atwood
At the bow, the edges of the bottom and side panels are not butted together, as typical in stitch-and-glue construction. The side panels overlap the bottom panels; when the open angle between them is filled with epoxy, it creates a step that will knock down spray.
The hull gets stitched together with cable ties around a center half-bulkhead, then the bow and stern compartments and the seats they support are added. I found the center seat flexed more than I liked when I sat on the forward or aft edge, so I added small knees beneath it for support. Two triangular panels are stitched to the extensions of the bottom panels to create the distinctive stern.
The Tango Skiff 13 calls for a 6-hp motor, which is a nice fit for the boat, but I purchased a 9.9-hp, which, at 84 lbs, weighs 24 lbs more than a 6 hp. I emailed the designer about this change and while he recommended sticking to his 6-hp maximum motor size he suggested beefing up the transom. To help with the added load and strain, I added a 3/4″-thick laminated knee to tie the transom to the bottom of the boat, added an additional layer of plywood to the transom, and added 3/8″ knees to tie the top of the transom to the gunwales.
The only lumber required other than plywood is the material for the rubrails. The plans actually call for the use of plastic material sold at home-improvement stores as exterior trim, but I substituted African mahogany. I used Interlux Brightsides paint—Hatteras White on the bottom, Flag Blue on the sides, with a boot stripe of Fire Red. I launched the boat after 140 hours of construction. We christened it HALF NUTS.*
Chris Atwood
With a hull weight of about 130 lbs and an engine weight of 84 lbs, the Tango 13 draws only a few inches.
The Tango Skiff 13 sits lightly in the water, drawing only a few inches; the added flotation of the extensions aft of the transom clearly helps offset the weight of the motor. I was curious about lateral stability with the relatively narrow beam of 4′8″, but the boat is quite stable for a vessel of these dimensions. I believe the extensions contribute to this as well.
I really like the contour the designer put into the seats; it adds another elegant touch to what is mostly a simple boat. The fore and aft seats of the TS13 provide ample storage underneath with hatches for everything needed for a day trip to be stored out of the way. The plans come with an alternative seating arrangement combined with a center console if you prefer. Another great built-in feature is the fuel tank tunnel in which the aft seat bases are divided into two separate compartments with space between them for the fuel tank. A 3-gallon tank fits nicely there and provides plenty of range.
Brad Boelke
With only its skipper aboard, this Tango, with a 9.9-hp outboard, more powerful than the 6-hp motor recommended by the designer, can reach a speed of 24 mph.
The Tango, thanks in large part to the stern extensions, has very little bow rise when coming on plane and will stay on plane at speeds as low as 11 mph. With just myself onboard the boat feels very light; it seems to more ride over the water than cut through it. On a windy day the boat is so light you can feel the wind trying to push the vessel off heading as the gusts come and go. Another effect of the hull extensions is that the skiff corners flatter than similar boats. There is no skeg to provide lateral resistance, so the boat tends to skid slightly in high-speed cornering, but backing off the throttle slightly will bring the bow down enough to carve a nice corner without skidding.
In slow-speed maneuvering there are no surprises and the extensions allow more than enough room for the tiller to be turned nearly hard over. The anti-ventilation plate of the motor sits just below the bottom of the extensions so there is never any worry about the prop contacting the hull. While I have not yet had the boat out in any serious chop, it rides right over small boat wakes and slowing to the minimum planing speed allows the bow to cut right through larger wakes. The little Tango feels solid for such a light stitch-and-glue skiff.
Brad Boelke
With a family of three aboard, there’s plenty of room and capacity to take on almost another 200 lbs.
I clocked the maximum speed at 24 mph with just a slight porpoise when riding solo at full speed, which I could attribute to the transom angle. When built per the plans, is only about 8 degrees; not angled enough for the prop shaft to be positioned perfectly parallel the bottom of the boat without shimming the motor. With my 35-lb son onboard the porpoising is eliminated and the boat hits 23 mph. With our family of three onboard (totaling about 310 lbs—maximum capacity is 500 pounds) top speed only drops to 21 mph which is rock-steady and comfortable to cruise at all day long. You can really cover a lot of water in a short time at 20 mph, so I am very happy with the decision to go with the 9.9-hp motor. It is almost too much motor when I’m solo, but add even the lightest passenger and it is perfect. My only concern with it is trailering over our rough highways and for that reason I use a transom saver to transfer some of the motor’s cantilevered weight to the trailer while transporting. If towing a long distance I may elect to unbolt the motor and remove it from the transom.
With sizes from 12′ to 17′ there is a Tango Skiff for just about anyone. It’s a wonderful multi-purpose boat that is simple and quick to build, and can be made to look elegant as well. The Tango Skiff 13 fits the bill perfectly as a small, lightweight boat for a young family or for older kids learning to handle an outboard. For more utilitarian purposes, most people would want at least the 14′ version. We look forward to exploring more waters with our Tango Skiff.
*The name HALF NUTS is a play on the boat’s diminutive size and a reference both to our rambunctious three-year-old son, for whom this boat is meant, and my surviving testicular cancer. My wife bought me the plans for my birthday in August 2016 and I planned to begin the build January 1, 2017 so that our three-year-old son and I could enjoy the boat the following summer. In November 2016 I was diagnosed with stage-III testicular cancer at age 35. My world was turned upside down, but in the back of my mind I still wanted to start this project at the first of the year. It turned out to be great therapy. I wasn’t even strong enough to drive a car in the beginning of the build, but with the help of my father, we drove the 5 hours, round-trip, to pick up the BS1088 plywood in January as planned. We got right to work, and in my basement I transferred and marked each part on the plywood. My Dad cut them out with my sabersaw as I was too weak from chemo to cut a straight line or stand for long. After we had all of the pieces cut we had to wait until spring for the temperatures to rise enough to use epoxy. I had major surgery at this time to remove what was left of my cancer and it took a couple months to recover. I am now cancer free.
Chris Atwood is a 35-year-old corporate pilot and flight instructor, a metastatic testicular cancer survivor, and repeat boatbuilder having previously built a Glen-L Zip runabout and a CLC Wood Duck kayak.
When John Harris of Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) came to WoodenBoat School here in Brooklin to lead a six-day class in building his newly designed Tenderly Dinghy and brought two finished boats with him, I jumped at the opportunity to see the progress as he taught, and to take the finished boats for a spin in Great Cove.
While Harris didn’t draw inspiration from any one particular lapstrake design, the general English clinker day boat aesthetic is apparent. He was looking to do justice to a vision from Swallows and Amazons in a kit boat with attributes that would make for a great dinghy—plenty of volume, good to row, and a worthy daysailer. Harris aimed for a salty-looking design with good stability and carrying capability, and achieved that in a boat 10′ long with a beam of 52″ and a payload limit of 425 lbs. “At a more technical level, what I was pursuing was the most shapely boat I could manage in an amateur-construction context,” said Harris. “Tenderly has a lot of shape for a stitch-and-glue boat. The really full bow in plan view transitions seamlessly into a hollow waterline.”
A few details elevate the Tenderly from a simple kit boat to classic lapstrake heartthrob. The open gunwales, the breasthook and quarter knees, the bead wale, and lovely sheerline belie her mostly plywood construction. When the eight optional floorboards are added, which make for more comfortable seating in the bottom of the boat and drier gear, the very finished appearance is the icing on the cake. What a looker.
Anne Bryant
The transom and the full bow offer room to stow proper oars. Handholds in the transom ease the tasks of handling the boat on a cart and launching into a chop from a beach. Note the plug closing the daggerboard trunk.
The recommended 8′ oars fit inside the boat when shipped, which is a great advantage. Oftentimes, tenders have to give up 6″ to 12″ of oar length to make the oars short enough to stow in the boat. With a guest or two and some groceries in your Tenderly on the way to your boat at anchor for a sundowner, you’ll be glad to have the proper oar length.
Aaron Porter
Floorboards come in handy as dry, comfortable seating for sailing in light air; the sturdy aft thwart extends forward into the boat and acts as a perch for when bigger wind requires weight to counter the boat’s heeling.
The Tenderly has a lug rig. It is an easy rig to handle, set up, and stow onboard should this be a tender for a larger vessel and need to have its rig fit inside. She’s also got nice bit of sail area, 62 sq ft, and needs very little hardware to deploy it: a couple of small cleats do the job for the downhaul and the halyard, which runs through a dumb sheave—a hole—in the masthead. The head and foot of the sail are lashed to the yard and boom with 1/8″ line. I suppose one could add a jam cleat to the aft edge of the daggerboard trunk for the mainsheet that could effectively free up a hand should you need it.
Aaron Porter
While the Tenderly is well suited for solo sailing, the CLC web site notes it has “plenty of sprawling room for two adults or a bunch of kids” while under sail.
In Harris’s Build-Your-Own Tenderly class each of the seven students began their own boat on Monday and the following Saturday had the assembly complete to take home for finishing. The Tenderly kit employs CLC’s LapStitch construction method, which eliminates the traditional setup of molds on a ladder frame, so builders can quickly assemble the hull around three full frames and two partial frames; tabs on these pieces fit in precut slots in the planks to assure proper placement and alignment. The transom, quarter knees, and breasthook are installed after all of the planks have been stitched together.
Anne Bryant
The LapStitch hulls go together quickly. The serpentine line aft of amidships is made up of the interlocking puzzle joints that join the plank sections.
The seven boats were well underway when I visited on day two, and the builders, most of them beginners, had already gone from a stack of kit pieces to stitched-up hulls. With the hulls flipped upside down, cyanoacrylate glue, dripped into the laps between stitches, would hold the pieces together when the wires were removed and before epoxy could be dribbled into the laps between planks. On the third day the hulls were flipped upright and given the first epoxy fillets and a layer of fiberglass on the interior up to the top of the fifth strake.
Anne Bryant
Fiberglass is cut into wide strips to fit between the frames. The ‘glass on the inside covers five of the seven strakes; ‘glass on the outside covers four.
On day four the hulls were flipped and the bottom four strakes were ’glassed with 6-oz cloth, and the skeg and bead wales were epoxied in place. Builders installed the daggerboard trunk, center thwart and mahogany inwales, outwales, and spacers on the fifth day and finished the interior installation on the sixth. The boats were then ready to take home for paint and varnish and putting the sailing rig together.
The class was an accelerated process with long days in the shop; a builder working at home on the sailing version with daggerboard trunk, rig, rudder, etc. could spend about 150 hours building the Tenderly. The 250-page building manual is geared for the amateur builder and has many color photographs and well-thought-out instructions.
Anne Bryant
The Tenderly will fit in the bed of a full-size pickup truck. State laws may limit the how far a load can project (4′ is common) and may require flagging.
With a hull weight of 100 lbs (130 lbs rigged), the Tenderly was an easy two-person lift to get it into a pickup truck; the 52″ beam gave just enough clearance between the walls of the bed. A dolly made it possible to move the boat around solo.
Anne Bryant
With a cart, the Tenderly is easy to move around singlehanded.
Empty and with the daggerboard up, the Tenderly only draws a few inches, which is great when you’re launching from a rocky beach. It hovered lightly in very thin water, and as I hiked a leg up to get aboard, then shifted my weight across the gunwale, it was stable even though I didn’t plant my foot directly in the middle of the floorboards. As a cruiser who appreciates a dinghy that is easy to load, board, and launch from a beach, I find this high degree of stability a necessity.
Anne Bryant
When rowed solo, the Tenderly picks up speed quickly. The cap on the daggerboard slot helps keep the rower’s seat dry.
I rowed the dinghy over to the dock and it took off like a shot with just a couple of strokes. I think the flat bottom, sharp entry, and light construction were working with me; it responds quickly and well to turning strokes when approaching the dock or making a sharp turn.
Anne Bryant/Clint Chase
With a capacity of 425 lbs, the Tenderly can take three on board and still maintain good freeboard for rowing.
The wind was light when I headed off from the dock under sail. The Tenderly moved right along and I immediately felt safe and sound as I tacked, even though I didn’t shift my weight speedily to the windward side. The Tenderly’s stability was forgiving through my quick tacks, and it stood up as I took my time to move from the lee. The lug rig doesn’t go to windward exceptionally well, but this is a daysailer for leisure and fun and the sailing performance is perfect for that.
Aaron Porter
The standard kit includes a mast step and the daggerboard trunk; the optional sailing kit includes CNC-cut plywood for the daggerboard and rudder, blanks for the spars, and a Dacron sail.
The next day, I went out again with Andrew Breece, the publisher of WoodenBoat. I sat in the aft thwart and Andrew sat at the forward rowing station. With two people aboard there was good trim and balance, and the dinghy hummed right along.
We rowed out to Andrew’s yawl, MAGIC, to pull the Tenderly along for a while to see how it towed. Andrew said that he could feel very little drag as we towed the dinghy at about 2 to 3 knots while leaving the mooring field. We increased our speed to about 5 knots, and to feel the drag for myself, I pulled on the painter to see how hard it would be to get the Tenderly closer. It was sitting high in the water and came without complaint or too much effort.
courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
Under tow, the Tenderly behaves itself and runs true.
When we returned the Tenderly to the dock, there were a few people looking to try it out. Our friend Megan picked up another school instructor, Clint Chase, to bring him back to the dock from a mooring he just tied a skiff to. He did the tricky shift from one small boat to the other, then leaned over the Tenderly’s gunwale to retrieve his gear from the skiff. The Tenderly’s stability kept the maneuver from being awkward or dicey. Megan rowed from the forward station while Clint, a tall gent indeed, sat aft. Well balanced, the Tenderly picked up speed despite the load. Megan didn’t have a problem staying on or changing her course.
Anne Bryant
The forward rowing station maintains the boat’s trim while it’s being rowed with a single passenger.
We weren’t able to get our hands on a manual-recommended 2-hp motor. Given the smooth towing and the nice balance while rowing, I’d say that a bit of speed and some weight aft is going to be just fine.
courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
The Tenderly is rated to take an outboard motor of up to 2.5 hp.
The Tenderly is a boat that is easier to build than some of CLC’s other kits, performs extremely well, and is a stable pickup truck of sorts, able to cart around your guests and your provisions. All of us here at WoodenBoat who got aboard it are still talking about how much fun we had. The Tenderly is a stout, seaworthy, and accessible design.
Anne Bryant is WoodenBoat’s Associate Editor.
Tenderly Dinghy Particulars
[table]
Length/10′ 0″
Beam/52″
Weight, bare hull/100 lbs
Weight, rigged/130 lbs
Payload max./425 lbs
Sail area/62 sq ft
Outboard/2.5 hp, max.
[/table]
The Tenderly is available as a kit ($1,699) and as full-size plans ($125) from Chesapeake Light Craft. Add-on kits include sailing components ($1,199) and floorboards ($215).
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!
From the 1,900′ summit of Mount Maxwell on Salt Spring Island, my wife and I looked out over dozens of emerald islands spread out all along the southern horizon. With their forested slopes and rocky shores, these islands are the broken edge of the land, where a continent buckles under an ocean. I opened my sketchbook and drew each hill and bay, and each shadowed shore rising from a silvery sea. We had caught a glimpse of British Columbia’s Gulf islands while aboard the ferry on its hurried passage from the mainland to Vancouver Island, but as I drew the outline of each island I couldn’t help but yearn to trace their contours in my own boat, following my own route on my own schedule.
Three years later I slid ROW BIRD, my 18′ Iain Oughtred Arctic Tern, into the waters bordering the town of Sidney on Vancouver Island. I was launching very late in the day—I’d just finished a 200-mile drive from my home in Portland, Oregon, followed by the two-hour ferry ride—but I didn’t mind. Ahead of me I had a week to cruise among the islands I had drawn from the heights of Mount Maxwell, now visible, 8 miles to the north and looming over Sidney’s shore. The southern Gulf Islands, scattered to the east, promised an ever-changing horizon along with the pleasures and challenges of new anchorages.
Roger Siebert
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I usually sail with friends, but this would be a solo trip with the freedom to do as I pleased without negotiating routes, times, or decisions. If I wanted to spend two nights in a secluded campsite or to row all day, I could. My travel would be limited only by the tides and winds and my goal was to shake myself free of electronic leashes, bolt from thoughts that tie my brain in knots, and find my freedom in the present moment.
The sun had started to set, but the air was still a balmy 65 degrees and the honey-colored water was placid and inviting. It was mid-June, and Canadian kids were still in school, so the flood tide of summer tourists hadn’t started. ROW BIRD was the only boat on the water. With no wake but my own, there was barely a ripple to be seen in any direction. I rowed a half mile north along Sidney’s suburban edge to a cove I’d found while studying satellite photographs on my computer back at home. It had just room enough to allow my boat to swing at anchor between a commercial dock, the boulders protecting a waterfront trail, and a tattered, creosote-stained pier.
As I set up my cockpit tent, three pairs of walkers on the trail stopped to watch me preparing to spend the night aboard. I stretched my nylon cockpit tent between ROW BIRD’s masts, and tied down the rib-like battens that make the whole thing look like a Conestoga wagon on the water. With my sleeping bag unrolled on the floorboards, my pillow and book at the head of my bed, I lay down with a view of waterfront hotels and condos illuminating the edge of town. People watching me from shore must have thought a small open boat would be cramped place to spend a night, but being aboard ROW BIRD felt right; after years of camp-cruising, I knew every inch of the boat, and her familiar motion in the water made it easy to make myself comfortable and content.
photographs and video by the author
Although lacking facilities developed for small boats, downtown Sidney made an easy first overnight and a convenient stop for anything I needed. Within a five-minute walk of the water I found two grocery stores, lots of restaurants, and shops.
I awoke earlier than I’d hoped, thanks to an early-morning delivery truck rumbling by. Soon after the sunlight hit the water I brought the boat to shore, and three people approached. A young couple who love to kayak told me about their favorite stops in the islands. Then a silver-haired woman in an exercise outfit asked where I was headed, and when I told her of my plans, she spoke of her own small-boat adventures through the islands and stared wistfully at the islands a few miles away.
The tide was rising, so I set a 4-lb claw anchor off the stern with an Anchor Buddy, rowed ashore to set my 8-lb Danforth-style anchor on shore and let the elastic stern line pull the boat into deeper water. With ROW BIRD afloat, I headed for Beacon Avenue, Sidney’s main shopping street, and bought a cup of coffee and a pumpkin scone; I was ready to start my journey.
After stowing my anchors in their canvas bags, I took to the oars. I set a course 8 miles south-southwest for D’Arcy Island and listened to the weather report on my VHF radio. In Canada the weather is announced in both English and French, so the broadcast cycle is twice as long as what I was used to. Impatient to get to the English version, I struggled to translate French and convert metric measurements, reaching back to rusty skills acquired in high school. A high wind advisory had been issued for Haro Strait, the dog-leg channel separating B.C.’s Gulf Islands from Washington State’s San Juan Islands.
The wind would be a problem for me because D’Arcy lies in the middle of the 7-mile-wide north-south leg of the strait and is exposed to an uninterrupted 20-mile stretch of open and often rough water to the south. Not quite 3/4-mile long and 1/2-mile wide and without any well-protected anchorages, D’Arcy sits apart from the rest of the Gulf islands and its isolation helped shape its history. For three decades, ending in 1924, it served as a leper colony for Chinese immigrants; during Prohibition it was a hideout for bootleggers smuggling whiskey into the States. Now part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, D’Arcy was high on my list of islands to see, but with the wind predicted to build over the next few days, I had a small window to get there and back.
I should have hustled if I really wanted to explore D’Arcy, but I found the rocky shores of Sidney and James islands were less developed and more enchanting than the San Juan Islands I was familiar with. And no one was out on the water. Wherever I looked, if I saw boats, they were way out in the distance.
I had to navigate rocks, islets, and tidal currents, keeping an eye out for the many ferries that use Sidney as a hub. They generally stay on a defined route, but some of the passenger ferries reach speeds of up to 30 knots and can sneak up in a hurry if you’re not paying attention.
After three hours of rowing and slow, close-hauled sailing, I approached D’Arcy’s north end—a craggy, coarse shoreline behind offshore rocks and beds of hose-like bull kelp. A few fragments of lichen-encrusted concrete walls, the remnants of the leper colony, stood eerily at the edge of the forest. The wind was patchy as I neared the kelp beds, so I raised the centerboard and took to the oars. Kelp wrapped itself around the blades like spaghetti spun on a fork, forcing me to stop every few strokes to free my oars.
The large logs lining the shore of D’Arcy Island are a testament to the strength of the winds and storms that hit the exposed southern shore. Visitors arriving by kayak and other hand-carried small craft can take advantage of a primitive campground near the cove, but I had no safe place to anchor if the water got rough.
I rowed the mile around the west side of the island and arrived at the southernmost point close to low tide. Bony fingers of jagged granite stretched into the water. Even for a small boat, this was a treacherous place to maneuver; every few strokes I had to look over the bow for unseen rocks. After several moments of uncertainty, I spotted a silvery mast behind a rocky outcropping and knew I’d come to a place more suitable for landing.
“Ahoy,” I called to a deeply tanned man relaxing in the cockpit of the sloop, “how’s the anchorage here?”
“Fine now,” he answered. “But I was anchored out here recently, and that time it was too rough to go ashore and too rough to leave. I didn’t sleep so well.”
If the wind that had been forecast didn’t kick up I could spend the night anchored here near the gravelly beach, so, hoping for the best, I pulled the bow of my boat ashore and set an anchor near the beach wrack from the last high tide. I spent a few hours exploring D’Arcy’s brushy trails and drawing in my sketchbook, but late in the afternoon, the treetops above me swayed as the predicted southerly front arrived. Thinking of the sailor’s recent experience, I decided that staying could make for a dicey situation. I boarded ROW BIRD and headed north for the more sheltered waters that the other Gulf Islands could provide.
Although I had been looking forward to spending a quiet night at D’Arcy, I wasn’t disappointed by the change in plans. I had no specific route to follow, just a list of places I wanted to see, and the weather, tides, and currents would guide me. Content to go with the flow, I felt a greater sense of freedom than I would have had if I’d held tightly to a fixed itinerary that put me at odds with the elements.
The locals warned me that Sidney Spit can get quite crowded during the summer when the passenger ferry is bringing visitors from the mainland, but I arrived in the off season and it was very quiet.
The front’s early wind provided a gentle push and I sailed northward on a broad reach, winding my way through a series of rocky islands, uninhabited but for the scores of seabirds I could hear calling in the distance. Sidney Spit on the north end of Sidney Island’s was the one bit of island coastline that was free of rocks, but I was unsure about it as a place to go ashore, having read that it can be as crowded as Coney Island on a hot summer weekend. But when I approached the slender mile-long neck of sand at the north end of the island that evening, just two people were strolling the beach; a quiet group of kayakers had settled in at the campground, and a few larger craft were tied to the mooring buoys, and floating above a vast eelgrass bed. The dock was empty—I’d have it all to myself. At dusk, voices in the distance softened, then grew quiet, and the only sound was the wind ruffling my cockpit tent.
Just before dawn I was awakened by a raft of river otters foraging and splashing around the docks; I got up before the sun was in the sky, and the light scattering of clouds indicated a clear day ahead. I intended to head northeast toward the eastern Gulf Islands that back up against the rough waters of the Strait of Georgia. The first step was to make the 8-mile passage to North and South Pender, a pair of islands separated by a slender 30-yard-wide gap. During the night, the flood tide had flowed into the 100-mile-long strait and in the early hours of the morning all that water retreated on the ebb, straining through the passages between the Gulf islands. I tried to time my departure to coincide with the slack tide’s still water and catch the flood that would push me much of the way to the Penders, but my start was a bit too early, and I made it only about 4 miles.
Traveling by a shallow-draft boat let me get in among the kelp and massive rocks to watch intertidal life and seabirds. I made a temporary anchor by wrapping the painter around a few thick stalks of kelp.
I had to tie my boat in a patch of kelp off Imrie Island, a 70-yard-wide grassy islet, and wait out the last of the ebb. It was a peaceful place to be—the kelp dampened the waves and the patches of smooth water between its stalks provided a clear window to the underwater world. Milky white jellyfish the size of saucers pulsed below, and dull-green fish hid in the kelp fronds. Oystercatchers with their bright blood-orange hued beaks paced about their stony nests on the outcroppings of lichen-tinted rock surrounding Imrie.
By the time the tide turned and the flood began to work in my favor, an intensely puffy headwind was blowing from the northeast against the current, causing steep choppy waves with a height that matched to ROW BIRD’s freeboard. Each time ROW BIRD started to move, there was a moment of quick acceleration, then heeling, followed by spray splashing over the gunwale. When I stopped to put another reef to the mainsail, I drifted toward half-submerged rocks. Setting the newly shortened sail again just in time, I slid away from the rocks.
The sound of water on the hull made it seem like ROW BIRD was rushing forward, but in the sloppy waters our actual speed was a crawl. Keeping the boat flat was the main thing on my mind, but after a few minutes, I realized that if I was going to make forward progress, I’d need more sail up, so I stopped and let a reef out. I hauled the main up again and while the chop persisted, this time there was almost no wind. Seconds later it reappeared, shot the boat forward and only by hiking out, something I never do in ROW BIRD, was I able to keep the rail out of the sea.
The winds were irregular but never entirely absent, so I usually rowed with the masts up, ready to take advantage of any breeze that might pipe up.
I had to concede that the water was too rough, so I abandoned Pender as my destination for the day. Portland Island was about 3 miles to the northwest, and I figured I’d find easier going in the sheltered coves on its south shore, so I steered for Princess Bay, the island’s biggest anchorage. Initially, I couldn’t see the ¼-mile-wide anchorage even though I was looking right where it should be, but as I got closer the islets that masked its entrance seemed to separate themselves from the island creating openings that had looked, just a few minutes earlier, like an unbroken wall. The water in the bay was still and flat, sunlight glinted off the smooth water, and crooked, weathered trees clung to the rocks at the edge of the bay.
I set my anchor and started cooking dinner. ROW BIRD’s cockpit is snug but the floorboards have room enough for my kitchen activities. Sitting cross-legged, I tended my camping stove, which I set near the centerboard trunk. I mixed couscous in a dried lentil soup mix, added water, slowly stirred and simmered it to a thick, mortar-like consistency. Then I turned the stove off, covered my concoction and waited until the pot cooled enough to hold in my bare hands. As I ate I was warmed by a small south-facing cliff that radiated the heat it had gathered from the day’s sunlight.
The anchorages at Portland Island range from open bays with sandy bottoms to steep, rock-bound coves. Ferries, like the one just coming into view at left, leave wakes known as “ferry wash” and can cause rolly conditions. It’s best to get the boat off the beach before the wake hits and, at night, to anchor with a stern line tied on shore to keep the bow facing the wakes.
The next morning I got up early to catch the flood tide toward the Penders, hopeful I’d reach the pair of islands this time. I put my drysuit on but the cool gray sky chilled me, and as I emerged from Princess Bay, a breeze from the southwest filled from behind. The tidal atlas indicated that a shift in the current’s direction lay ahead and I anticipated bumpy sailing.
Through my binoculars, I saw dark ripples in the water and low-lying rocks near the northwest edge of Moresby Island. Rounding the dark line a few minutes later, instead of the sailing getting gnarly, the wind abruptly died, and I took to the oars, leaving the sails up, and “motorsailed.” When smooth, leaden water between Moresby and Pender islands stretched as far as I could see, I dropped the sails and continued rowing. I set a course across 2 miles of open water toward the Penders and lost myself in the rhythm of the oars.
ROW BIRD handled the changeable spring conditions well, including calms, lumpy seas, and strong winds. The mizzen sail is a useful safety feature for heaving-to.
The pale rocky cliffs of North Pender shimmered in the tiny ripples around ROW BIRD as I drew near the island. Pigeon guillemots, soot-black but for white patches on their wings and comical cherry-red feet, came and went from their nests in the cliff’s hollows 50′ above me. Then, with a quarter mile left to go before making the entrance to Bedwell Harbour, a 2-1/2-mile-long inlet between the two islands, I felt myself being pushed back. An unanticipated current seemed to be pouring out of the harbor. The flood should have been flowing in by this point, pushing me into the harbor, but I was being moved south away from the island. I pulled hard on the oars to keep myself from being carried toward open water. I crept through the current and eventually glided into slower moving water on the opposite side of the mile-wide entrance.
I poked along the north shore of South Pender Island, weaving around huge boulders rising from the water—arranged as if they were in a Japanese stone garden—and skirting the towering hills that rose from a gray band of deeply fissured rock. The breeze was light and fluky, but after the hard pull on the oars, I couldn’t be troubled to row to the campground, so I raised the main and mizzen and sailed slowly up Bedwell Harbor.
The Beaumont campground by Skull Islet, like others in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve with protected beaches and easy access to well-maintained tent sites and trails, are geared toward small boats.
I came ashore at the Beaumont campground on the shore of South Pender. ROW BIRD was the sole boat there; the whisper of the wind in the trees was interrupted only by the calls of birds. The beach was a shell midden, white with countless bleached fragments of shells that crunched underfoot.
After I set up my tent, I walked the steep Mount Norman trail. By the time I reached the 800′-high summit, the highest point on the Penders, my shirt was soaked in sweat despite the cool air. From an observation deck above the trees, I stared out at the islands below, tracing my route to the campground below and envisioning where I’d go next as I drew the scene in my sketchbook.
First Nations people in British Columbia still use parts of the National Park Reserve for traditional hunting and gathering and some areas, such as the burial ground on Skull Island (seen off the bow), are closed to the public as a sign of respect to the local tribes.
At dawn the next day, I sat on the shell beach looking over to Skull Islet, a round, 60-yard mound of slanted rock strata crowned with a dozen trees that was a burial site for First Nations people. The harbor waters were tranquil, but the weather radio predicted a strong storm two days out, and I knew I’d have to run for home or hunker down. I reviewed the tidal atlas to see where I could go with my remaining two days. Its arrows marked the flow of water through the islands that would push me north, south, or east—all the wrong direction—so I’d likely need both days to get safely back to the ramp at Sidney.
I spent the day at camp, and the following morning I headed homeward through the choppy waters of Haro Strait. Once I cleared the 2-mile ope- water crossing, I hugged the south shore of each of the Gulf Islands I came to. The intricate shorelines, rocky outcroppings, weather-worn shingled cottages, and meadowy pockets offered much more to see than the open water the shortest course would have taken me through. None of the islands—Moresby, Rum, Brethour, Domville, Forest—offered a good place to anchor for the night, so by late afternoon so I had decided to return to Sidney Spit for my final night.
The plip-plop of rain on my tent started slowly as the morning sky lightened. I sat on the floorboards, tidying up the cockpit, reluctant to don my raingear and head back to Sidney and bring an end to the trip. Low clouds blocked the sunrise. I eventually got underway and despite the drizzle, decided to loop around some of the islands closest to the town of Sidney before heading to the dock.
The Gulf Islands are in Vancouver Island’s rain shadow. While the west coast of Vancouver may receive more than 120″ of rain a year, the east side can receive less than 35″ annually.
ROW BIRD slid through the still, rain-flecked water as I rowed past the end of the spit. A half mile later the flag on my mizzen, a navy blue silhouette of a bird in flight on a white field, flickered about, so I set sail. As the wind grew, the hull started to hiss as it cut through the water. Close-hauled, I traveled past a cluster of rocky islets called the Little Group. When spray started to splash aboard and darker clouds approached from the south, I sensed that the full force of the predicted storm was coming. Soon, I had to feather the mainsail to handle the gusts as ROW BIRD bounced along parallel to the Sidney waterfront. I was in control for the moment, but I knew that with the rising wind, it was time to head in.
Two hours later, having put ROW BIRD on her trailer, I stood overlooking the cove where I spent my first night in Sidney. The flags along the edge of town snapped and blew straight back. Eastward, whitecaps covered the water between the shore and the nearest islands.
I ducked into a café for a cup of tea. As I flipped through my sketchbook, I paused at the drawing of the islands I’d made with pencil and pen, brush and watercolor at South Pender on the summit of Mount Norman. I had sailed the archipelago and now knew something of those islands, rocks, and coves. I’d traced their edges with ROW BIRD’s wake and filled the space within their outlines with my footsteps.
Bruce Bateau, a regular contributor to Small Boats Monthly, sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his web site, Terrapin Tales.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
The author’s red mizzen staysail was designed and made for WAXWING, his François Vivier-designed, lug-yawl rigged Ilur. Sailmaker Stuart Hopkins writes about this sail: “We drew a 40-sq-ft sail to be tacked on the weather rail forward and sheeted to the leeward rail aft. We cut it rather flat from 3-oz polyester (instead of nylon) ‘storm spinnaker’ cloth, in the hope it will prove useful even with the wind a little forward of the beam, and keep its shape in slightly stronger winds.”
My camp-cruising boat is rigged as a lug yawl, with a powerful and well-behaved pair of sails that is ideal for solo sailing. My cruising grounds tend to have very light morning winds during the summer months, and despite my boat’s ample sail area I have looked for ways to improve light-air performance. Enter the mizzen staysail.
I first saw one in use on the Maine coast, where Harris Bucklin and his wife Barbara were flying one in ghosting conditions on their Ian Oughtred-designed Caledonia yawl. The blue sail was not only eye catching, it was also a demonstrably effective bit of sailcloth, providing a notable gain in speed over several other Caledonia yawls sailing in company with them.
When I contacted my sailmaker, Stuart Hopkins of Dabbler Sails, he was enthusiastic and replied “I’ve had four yawl-rigged boats through the years, and every one of them had mizzen staysails—lovely, useful things.” A few weeks later I had taken delivery of the new mizzen staysail and was out on Lake Champlain in 5–7-mph winds, doing sea trials aboard WAXWING, my Vivier-designed Ilur.
The staysail is 40 sq ft of 3-oz cloth, which represents a 30percent increase in sail area over the original rig’s 133 sq ft. Deployment is straightforward. I had lashed a small block to the head of the mizzenmast, and placed a halyard cleat on the mizzen step. I already had four small horn cleats, one at each corner of the cockpit, which are normally used when setting up my boom tent for camping aboard. Once the boat settles in on a reach, I hoist the staysail by its halyard, and take the tack line forward to the cleat on the windward gunwale. The staysail sheet runs from the clew, passing through a low-friction thimble on a Dyneema loop aft that’s dropped over the leeward cleat on the aft gunwale. The staysail sheet can be secured with a small clam cleat within easy reach while I’m at the helm.
John Hartmann
The mizzen staysail’s tack is tethered to the windward rail, here secured to a cleat originally installed for the boat’s overnight canopy.
Over a series of trial runs with and without the staysail set, the new sail translated into a roughly 10 to 15 percent gain in speed as measured by GPS. The increased speed is noticeable even without GPS. When shooting pictures for this piece, my friend Christophe was the photographer. He sails a Sea Pearl, which has about the same sail area (136 sq ft) as my boat, but with a waterline line almost 6′ longer than the Ilur, usually leaves WAXWING well astern. I was ahead of Christophe as we started out, and I set the mizzen staysail. A few minutes later, the Sea Pearl was still well astern. Christophe hailed me: “Hey, luff up and let me catch you!” I think he might have said that to make me feel good, but the staysail was clearly making a real difference.
My staysail is a low-aspect sail, and doesn’t add noticeable heeling moment to the boat; it doesn’t affect the balance of the helm significantly either. It is a reaching sail, and in the 3-oz fabric, is stiff enough to manage sailing as far upwind as a close reach.
Tacking is easy, even singlehanded. With the boat balanced to sail hands-free, I walk forward, uncleat the tack line, and return aft. I then bundle the staysail to the mizzenmast, and come about. Once the new heading is established, I unbundle the staysail and go forward again to cleat the tack line to the new windward cleat before returning to the helm and trimming the staysail sheet.
The mizzen staysail is a beautiful, effective, and easily managed addition to a yawl or a ketch rig’s quiver. It isn’t a sail I’d deploy in close quarters or when short-tacking in confined environs, but on a longer light air reach, it is indeed a lovely, useful thing.
John Hartmann lives in central Vermont. He built his Ilur dinghy, WAXWING, to sail the 1000 Islands region of the St. Lawrence River, Lake Champlain, and along the coast of Maine. He details the Pythagorean mooring system he used at Nubble beach in the Technique article in our November 2016 issue.
More on Mizzen Staysails
Christopher Cunningham
The editor’s mizzen staysail for his Caledonia Yawl was made from a jib he had salvaged. Angling the foot up for clearance was the only modification required. The jib’s cut had a bit too much luff curve for the sail’s use as a mizzen staysail and loses power when on a close reach. As Stuart Hopkins suggests above, the sail should be cut rather flat with only a slight curve in the luff.
Marty Loken
The cat-ketch rig of this Core Sound 17, with its tall mizzen mast, allows flying a large (85 sq ft) mizzen staysail. Drawings for this mizzen staysail call for a nearly straight 17′ luff, 6″ of round in the 12′ 8″ foot just forward of center, and 6″ of hollow in the 13′ 7″ leech just above center. Here the main and mizzen are still reefed after the wind eased and the mizzen staysail went up.
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photographs by the author
