The stove takes some tending to keep it going, but small sticks are all that it requires.
There was a time when a campfire involved clearing the duff from a patch of ground and making a ring of stones. As pleasant as that might have been, it left a scar on the land, both in a circle of scorched earth and butchered trees, living and dead, for firewood. Charcoal tended to get scattered around good campsites, leaving its mark on clothes and camping gear. When I saw the Solo Stoves on the web they looked like a good way to enjoy the benefits of a campfire without being so hard on the natural landscape.
I bought the Titan model, measuring 8″ tall and 5-1/16″ in diameter, advertised as suitable for two to four people. The Lite is the smallest model, listed as a solo backpacking stove for one or two people, but I didn’t need something so compact and could afford to carry a large stove aboard. The two larger stoves, the Campfire (9.25″ x 7″) and Bonfire (14″ x 19.5″) models, are more than I need. A lot of outdoor gear is designed with backpacking and light weight in mind, but the Solo Stove is made of stainless steel at about 1/40″ thick and is just as sturdy as the kitchen cookware that I’ve bashed about for decades.
Air enters the stove through the row of holes at the bottom. Half of the air enters the burn chamber through openings hidden beneath the flange supporting the grate; the other half rises between the stove’s inner and outer shells, being heated as it goes, and emerges from the row of holes at the top of the burn chamber. The cookware support is at right.
The stove itself is 5-5/8″ tall and 5-1/16″ in diameter. The cookware support brings the overall height to 8″. There are sixteen 1/2″ holes around the base of the stove. Some of the incoming air travels across the bottom of the inner liner of the stove to a central hole and then to a vent set below a heat-resistant nichrome wire grate that supports the firewood and lets ash pass through to an ash pan. The rest of the air travels upward between the outer and inner walls, getting heated as it goes, and through twenty-two 3/8″ holes at the top of the burn chamber. According to the manufacturer, the heated air results in “a more complete combustion and a hotter fire with less smoke.”
The stove is easy to light and doesn’t take any careful arrangement of tinder, kindling, and firewood. Kindling should be about 3″ long to fit into the stove. A bit of crumpled newspaper, protected from wind by the walls of the stove, catches fire quickly and gets the kindling going. I chopped sticks as thick as my thumb to 6″ lengths. That initially left one end sticking out of the stove, but as the lower end burned away the sticks would fall into the burn chamber.
When the fire is going strong there is indeed very little smoke and what does emanate from the stove dissipates a couple of feet above the ground. The visible effect of the secondary-combustion airflow is to concentrate the flame as it flows through the opening at the bottom of the pot support. With a full load of wood burning and no cookware in place, there is a satisfyingly hypnotic flame flickering 12″ high. That’s bright enough to bathe a campsite in a circle of appealing and useful amber light.
At night, the Solo Stove Titan puts up a flame bright enough to illuminate a campsite.
With pot on the support, flames licked the sides, blackening them with soot. I put a quart of water in the pot and the punky driftwood and old yellow cedar, which had lost most of its fragrant and flammable resin, brought the water to a boil in 8 to 9 minutes. The large burner on my electric range, set on high, took 4 ¼ minutes to get a quart to boil in the same pot.
The bottom of the stove is wide enough to provide a fairly steady base for cooking as long as the ground it’s on is level and flat.
Keeping a fire going in the Titan did require having wood ready to load into the stove every few minutes, but not so often that it felt like a nuisance. Tending the fire would fit right in with minding the cookpot. As for gazing into the flame, there’s still plenty of time to slip into that relaxed state between re-stoking.
Left to burn themselves out in the Titan, each of the fires I set left only a couple of tablespoons of powdery ash and a few peanut-sized coals in the ash pan. The stove’s double wall kept the bottom of the stove from getting hot; the dry grass that I’d set the stove on showed no trace of scorching. The interior surfaces of the stove got a bit sooty, but the exterior, though colored by the heat, remained soot-free and easy to put away in the included stuff sack without making a mess of my hands.
Soot accumulates only on the inside of the stove, so handling it after it has cooled down won’t blacken your hands. The included stuff sack keeps the two pieces together.
The Solo Stove Titan has a minimal impact on the environment, both in fuel it consumes and the traces it leaves behind. It’ll cook dinner and when the meal is over, it will provide the flickering firelight we have been enjoying for tens of thousands of years.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Thanks to reader Marty Stephens for suggesting this review.
Solo Stove sells the Titan model for $89.99 through their web site and a network of dealers.
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 author was equipped to spray the truck-bed liner, but while that produced the desired results, she decided that rolling the coating on would be quicker and less expensive.
The first time I saw truck-bed liner paint as the interior finish of a pulling boat was while reviewing Sam Devlin’s Duckling for Small Boats Monthly. Thick for durability and textured for traction, it immediately made sense to me. I grilled Sam about where to find the thick coating, how to apply it, how long it lasts, and if there were any fading or chalking issues with the product he used. I row year-round in the San Juan and Gulf islands, where long hours of exposure to the summer sun and gravelly and sandy beaches mean my boats get hard, grinding use. The bed liner won’t stop an errant sharp knife point from puncturing it, but it will handle anchors and anchor chain, the bottoms of coolers transferred from a sandy beach, and gravel stuck on the bottom of rubber boots. Sam has even used truck-bed liner on the exterior of some small boats where a durable finish is more important than a perfectly flat one.
Black is the longtime standard color for truck-bed liner paints, but too dark for my taste and too hot in the summer sun, so I surfed the web looking for a do-it-yourself tintable bed liner. Some manufacturers—Duplicolor, Plasticoat—make water-based bed liners that may be easier to work with, but my research suggested they produced poor results. I went with Monstaliner, a tintable aliphatic hybrid urethane polymer that can be rolled or sprayed, and ordered a couple of free paint chips from among the 39 colors available.
I chose a light slate gray color that will, combined with the pebbly texture, reduce most of the glare I used to get from the previously high-gloss surfaces in my rowing dory, MAC. It is also guaranteed to have 100 percent UV permanent color for a minimum of five years. The online application instructions are detailed and complete. Monstaliner comes in a kit that includes textured rollers, masking tape, abrasive pads, and more—just about everything you need to do the job—but I already had all of the prep materials and was equipped to spray it on, and so just bought the “coating only” kit with the coating, tint, catalyst, stirring stick and mixing paddle for an electric drill.
Proper surface preparation and careful taping are a universal requirement for applying any coating. The supplied instructions reminded me that the time spent on application is only a fraction of the time prepping and cleaning up. After taping gunwales and those surfaces I didn’t want to spray, I scuffed the remaining painted interior surfaces with Scotchbrite pads and vacuumed up the fine dust, followed by a wipe-down with a rag and MEK (methyl-ethyl-ketone). Bed liners have a high VOC rating so I suited up with goggles and a respirator and got lots of ventilation going in my shop. Just before spraying, I ran my gloved hand along the inside of the hull to make certain it was dust-free.
Whether sprayed or applied with textured rollers supplied by the manufacturer, the truck-bed liner paint creates a thick coating with a textured non-slip surface.
Following instructions, which called for over 10 minutes of constant mixing with the paint paddle in my cordless drill, I added tint, then catalyst, to the bed liner paint. To apply the coating, I used a gravity-fed spray gun and a 1½-gallon hopper connected to a 10-gallon compressor at 120 cfpm (cubic feet per minute). I used a a 1/8”-diameter texture tip on the spray gun—the larger the diameter on the tip, the more texture on the finished surface. The 10-gallon capacity of the compressor made it easier to do long sweeps with the sprayer without the compressor motor constantly running.
I went through a lot of nitrile gloves—the coating that got on them got sticky rather quickly. An hour after finishing the first coat I repeated the process. Cleanup took gallons of MEK and acetone. If you get the kit with the disposable rollers, a quart of MEK or acetone should suffice—much kinder to the environment. In retrospect I would have saved time, money, and solvent if I’d bought the kit and rolled the finish on.
The coating is quite thick, concealing imperfections and wear and tear in a well-used boat.
The results speak for themselves. Spraying all interior chines, corners, and edges prior to the sides and bottom effectively softened and hid 15 years of dings, scrapes, and small gouges that I had filled, sanded, and painted in previous years. I could see them before spraying, but they are now under a uniform, consistent, and virtually impermeable surface. The marked contrast between MAC’s unrefinished seat and the new bed liner reminds me of how worn my old boat was looking. I plan on fastening a varnished mahogany plank on top of the old plywood seat to complement the gunwales. With my old dory given a new and very appealing finish, I look forward to taking an overnight rowing/beach-camping trip with my 11-year-old grandson and seeing how the truck-bed liner holds up to the sand and gravel we’ll bring aboard when launching from the beaches.
Monstaliner is only available from the manufacturer and shipped only to the US and Canada. A gallon of base coat plus catalyst for spraying runs $128.60 and the tints, sold in one-pint cans, cost $18.50 to $48.75. A gallon roll-on kit costs $145.40.
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.
Bruce Holaday got an early start with boating. His father ordered a $50 pram from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and turned Bruce loose with the boat on a clear-water lake in Indiana. Bruce spent his boyhood summers in the company of ducks, turtles, muskrats, and fish. The experience of independence and of being in command of his own vessel stuck with him; the prospect of a grandchild got him thinking about his childhood and the important role a boat played in his growing up.
Bruce, now living in Oakland, California, and the director of an environmental non-profit, wasn’t a skilled woodworker so he decided a kit boat would the smoothest sailing to a successful build. He found Joel White’s Shellback Dinghy in the WoodenBoat Store catalogue and ordered a kit for the sailing version of the boat. The Shellback is 11′ 2″ long, has a beam of 4′ 5″, and carries a standing lug sail. In the past quarter century it has earned a reputation as an easy boat to row and sail. With a recommended capacity of 1 to 3, it could carry grandparents and an infant grandchild, and would be a good boat for a young boy or girl to strike out on his or her own as Bruce did when he was a child.
Bruce sails the boat from a ramp across from the Coast Guard base in Oakland.
The kit had all of the pieces shaped and ready to assemble, but Bruce found many ways to make the boat distinctive, from a brass name plate inside the transom to a copper plate on the breasthook to surround the painter’s padeye.
The launching of PETIT BATEAU preceded the arrival of a grandchild, by a long shot.
Bruce launched the boat and christened it PETIT BATEAU, but he was a bit ahead of the grandchild schedule. Without the boat to occupy his free hours, he felt boredom settling in and cast about for another project. He settled on writing a children’s book about the boat the fun of being a young skipper. He found a publisher in South Bend, Indiana, not far from the lake where he first took command of the Sears & Roebuck pram.
The book, A Boy’s Boat, was published in March, 2017. Bruce describes the book as “the story of eleven-year-old Jack and PETIT BATEAU, the 11-foot-long dinghy that Jack’s grandfather made for him. During Jack’s summer of learning how to row, sail, and scull the boat, he comes to know all the creatures of a small cove, the joy of warm sunny mornings on the water, as well as the darker shades of nature and the challenges they present for a small boy and his small boat.”
While this is the scene Bruce has been hoping for, the boy is not a grandson. It’s his office manager’s son.
There is no grandson Jack. The book, like the boat, is ahead of the grandchild schedule. Bruce’s daughter is engaged to be married in October, and the arrival of a “Jack” or a “Jill,” if here is to be one, may still be a long way off. He may have to come up with something else to stave off boredom. PETIT BATEAU can keep him company while he waits and hopes.
Building my first boat was a means to an end. I had done a lot of backpacking and bicycle touring but I’d grown tired of lugging a heavy pack on the trails and dodging cars and trucks on the roads. I imagined that with a boat I could travel with lots of gear and have a plenty of elbowroom, so I studied charts and set my sights on cruising north to explore the long inlets of British Columbia. I didn’t have the money to buy a boat so I had to build one. I read Gardner’s Dory Book and Building Classic Small Craft and ordered plans for a Chamberlain dory skiff. My parents let me set up a temporary workshop in the back yard, and after I had an enclosed space and a workbench hastily knocked together with construction lumber, I was ready to get started on the skiff.
I had a lot to learn about building a boat. I was 25 and I’d been using tools for quite a while and thought I was a fair woodworker. Before I turned 10, I had built a couple of forts in the back yard, in my early teens I made two bunk beds for myself and a bunch of skim boards, and at 17 I built a plywood diving helmet and a pump to supply it with surface air. But the skiff, with its curves and wide array of unfamiliar materials posed problems I hadn’t anticipated. When I started shaping the stem, for instance, I was convinced that white oak couldn’t be planed. I worked on it with files as if it were metal until I learned how to put proper edges on my growing collection of woodworking tools. I also mangled a lot of bronze boat nails hammering them into undersized pilot holes thinking the small holes would provide a better hold. With all the trouble I had, I often wondered what I had gotten myself into, but when the planks went on the curves emerged, and the frustrations began to loosen their hold on me.
Eventually I finished the skiff and rowed and sailed it north up the Inside Passage, calling it quits after 700 miles when the weather window started to close. I’d spent a good part of a year building the boat and only a month putting it to its intended purpose, but I wasn’t left feeling that I’d made a bad bargain. I could have continued using the skiff to cruise the waters of Washington and British Columbia, but I was drawn back to boatbuilding. I erected another temporary shed in my parents’ back yard and built a gunning dory for my father. Then I started building boats for my friends. I was looking at plans instead of charts; the means had become an end.
I got a commission to build six flat-bottomed rowing skiffs for a summer camp, three one year, another three the next. The repetition meant that the work got easier—I knew exactly what I needed to do—but I couldn’t put my heart or my head into it. An important element was missing. What engaged me more was building some thing new and unknown, a boat more complex than those that preceded it. I built a lapstrake Whitehall and upping the ante kept me on the left side of the learning curve where I could be more engaged in the work. But sometimes that led to unhappy consequences.
Learning “on the job” was giving me valuable experience, but it was often getting me into trouble, and having things go wrong was costly. Hammering the last nail in the hood end of a plank halfway up the port side of the Whitehall, I split the plank. The Port Orford cedar I was using was not only expensive, it was rare. I couldn’t afford to lose any of it. I also had a lot of labor invested in the plank; by the time I got to nailing it into the stem rabbet, I had already scarfed its two pieces together, shaped it, beveled its edges and fastened almost its entire length. Tapping that last bronze boat nail in was supposed to finish the job, but the plank buckled and a split started slowly working its way aft. There was nothing I could do to stop it; I had to let go and let the split run its course. I threw myself down on the dirt shop floor and pounded my fists against the packed earth.
What happened was exactly the result I would have predicted if I had put an ice pick in the pilot hole and pried it open. The hood end needed to be steamed to take the twist without relying on the nails. The mistake I had made was in not thinking things through before I embarked upon a task. When I made a mess of things like that I would end my day annoyed with myself and discouraged with boatbuilding. My last moments of wakefulness in bed would be colored by the failures I’d experienced during my day in the workshop. At some point I shifted my thinking as I drifted off to sleep and focused on the work ahead rather than behind. Anticipating and solving boatbuilding problems became my nighttime routine and usually steered me clear of trouble in the shop in the day that followed. It was also a very reliable way to fall pleasantly asleep no matter what distressing things might have happened during the day.
My replica of the Gokstad faering was my most challenging project. I had only a small set of lines to work with—no offsets, no construction details, no instructions. Almost every step required a lot of pondering in advance of execution. The stems are carved to include the upswept ends of the planks. The Viking builders, I imagine, just started with a crooked trunk and took an ax to it. I needed to take a more methodical approach and it took me over a week to come up with one. I wasn’t in the shop when I found the solution—I was in bed. On the lofting, the shape of the stem was created from the baseline up and the centerline out. That wasn’t giving me the information I needed. I eventually used a common problem-solving tool: approach the problem from the opposite direction. My point of reference wasn’t going to be the centerline but the outside face of the block of wood I’d carve to make the stem. I laminated the block, drew the lofted profile on the outside faces and then drilled holes along the plank-edge lines, setting the depth of each holes from a line indicating the face that I’d drawn on the lofting. I chopped away wood until I reached the bottom of the holes and I had my stems rough out.
The Gokstad faering has only three strakes and the planks are long, wide, and heavy, and I couldn’t manage them quickly enough to steam them and then get them clamped on the building jig fast enough to bend and twist them effectively. That became another problem to ponder while I was falling asleep. The solution was another simple reversal: instead of bringing a steamed plank to the boat from the steam box, I’d bring the steam box to the boat. I made a lightweight steam box out of insulating foam that I could slip over the end of a plank that was clamped in place to the middle of the building jig. I’ve used foam steam boxes ever since—I even wrote an article for WoodenBoat about it—and I have a problem to ponder to thank for that.
I built and outfitted my Caledonia yawl in the difficult time of a divorce and working out a new interior arrangement for the boat was my refuge at the day’s end when I needed to guide my thoughts in a way that gave me peace of mind. I continued the habit with my most recent boat and heaped up a long list of problems to solve: a pop-top cabin and doors that worked with the top up or down, a sink with running water, a heat exchanger for hot running water, an indoor rowing station, etc. While I could argue that many of the ideas I had for the boat were to make it more comfortable for cruising, I had come to enjoy drifting off to sleep with three-dimensional puzzles turning over in my head. I no longer think about boatbuilding problems as impediments to getting a boat finished. They are opportunities for solutions that I’ve learned to savor.
There are a lot of troubling things going on in the world today, the kinds of things that can keep me up a night. I have more boats than I have room for, but I need my sleep. I’ll have to make room for one more.
Moving back home to Eastern Washington after being away for decades required that I get a boat. Lakes Coeur d’Alene, Priest, Chelan, and Roosevelt, together with the Columbia and Spokane Rivers, needed to be re-explored. Alright, as my wife correctly noted, “required” is too strong a word. Nonetheless, the move gave me a good excuse to buy or build a boat.
My requirements were simple. The boat would have to be light enough to tow behind our four-cylinder SUV, small enough to fit in the garage, and capable of getting two of us and our gear the 50 miles from the south end of Lake Chelan to Stehekin on the north end and back again in the afternoon when the lake gets rough.
Although there are many affordable aluminum and fiberglass boats that would serve my purpose, I wanted something distinctive. Fond memories of my uncle’s 16′ Thompson Sea Coaster, with its lapstrake hull and mahogany deck, prompted me to look for a small wooden boat to restore, but I didn’t find one nearby. While searching for an old boat, I came across the Peeler Skiff, a 15′ plywood kit boat from Chesapeake Light Craft.
Although I am proficient in the use of hand tools and have built a model, I’d never built a boat before. Before purchasing a boat kit I studied the thorough and well written Peeler Skiff construction manual, read posts on the Chesapeake Light Craft’s Builder’s Forum, and watched YouTube videos about stitch-and-glue construction, roll-and-tip painting, rotary steering installation, and striking a straight waterline.
Fred Corbit
The kit parts are assembled using cable ties rather than copper wires. The aft frame’s center section is precut so it can be removed after it is no longer needed to stiffen the frame during construction.
Eventually, I became confident that I could build a Peeler Skiff and bought the kit. I was able to build the boat in my 12′ x 20′ garage—adequate room for building, flipping, and painting the boat. The garage is heated so I was able to build the boat during the winter using the MAS epoxy with non-blushing slow hardener supplied with the kit. I kept the garage around 60 degrees Fahrenheit as recommended for curing of the epoxy.
My inexperience with boatbuilding caused me to waste some epoxy, and as a result, I had to order more epoxy than what came with my kit. The extra epoxy allowed me to practice laying down good fillets before applying them to the boat.
There were some new tools I bought that turned out to be useful in construction, including a Shinto rasp, a Japanese saw, and a set of rifflers for smoothing fillets in tight corners. Because I was a novice at applying epoxy, and there were many high spots that had to be leveled, the tool I used most was my orbital sander connected to a shop vacuum for dust collection.
The plywood pieces in the kit are precisely cut on a CNC machine. Pieces to be joined to form long panels had tight, curvy puzzle joints. The bulkheads had tabs that fit in slots in the bottom to assure proper position and alignment, and the aft flotation-compartment sides also had tabs to fit slots in the transom and center bulkhead. Pre-drilled holes in the panels further assured properly positioned pieces.
Courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
Foam cut from sheets provides flotation without poured foam’s propensity for creating rot.
The skiff has three flotation compartments, one in the bow and two in the stern under the side benches. Together these compartments, filled with stacks of sheet foam shaped to fit, provide 1200 lbs of flotation in the event of a swamping.
The boat has to be flipped a few times during construction, so it is wise to enlist the help of some strong friends and to have sturdy sawhorses ready. During the holiday season, I had several family members over to my house to watch football and we flipped the boat during halftime.
While the hull was upside down, the extra epoxy I purchased made it possible to add an optional second sheet of 6-oz fiberglass on the bottom as recommended in the manual. The doubled ‘glass, covering the 3/4″ thick plywood bottom, the 3/4″ thick doubler over the center seam, and the two skids, made a stiff bottom.
Courtesy of Chesapeake Light Craft
The center-console option adds a seat with a backrest and a storage compartment for battery.
In a basic Peeler Skiff, the skipper sits at the stern and steers with the outboard’s tiller, but I much prefer, and strongly recommend, the center-console option. With it, the boat looks good and drives nicely. The center console brings the weight forward to help keep the bow down, provides a seat and backrest for a passenger, and incorporates a storage compartment that I use for my battery. On the console, I deviated from the construction instructions in once instance. Instead of using wood screws to hold down the top, I permanently affixed stainless steel hanger bolts in the console and used stainless steel washers and cap nuts at the top. The change provides an attractive accent that matches the steering wheel and gives me easier access to the steering system than I’d have with wood screws and finish washers.
Merilee Corbit
The skipper has a non-skid surface to stand on; for longer runs there’s room to set up a folding chair.
The various paint and varnish options had me scratching my head, but what I selected has worked out well. For the bottom, I used Petit ViVid antifouling paint directly over sanded epoxy. For the finish coats and boot stripe, I put Interlux Pre-Kote primer on the sanded epoxy and then applied Interlux Brightside. Where my passengers and I would stand, I added Interlux Intergrip in the final coat of paint for a nonslip surface.
For my brightwork, I used Interlux Schooner Varnish. I think the varnished woodwork is what prompts many of the compliments the boat gets. I painted the bottom, transom and some of the horizontal surfaces in the interior, but the natural wood shows on the interior’s vertical surfaces, center console, splash rails, sheer strakes, breasthook, quarter knees, inwales, and outwales. The varnished okoume, with the interesting puzzle joints, is a beautiful sight.
The instructions estimate a construction time of about 200 hours. It took me about 250 hours to get from kit to launch, not too far off the mark considering the extra layer of glass on the bottom and the center console construction.
Merilee Corbit
The fuel tank rides just in front of the transom. The motor is bolted on to give it a solid, permanent mounting.
The Peeler Skiff, at around 325 lbs, is a very light boat. It is approved for up to an outboard motor up to only 15 horsepower, so I purchased a 15-hp Tohatsu with a 20″ long shaft, an electric start, and power tilt. My motor came with well designed remote controls that I attached on the starboard side of the center console. With one hole drilled in the forward corner of the main seat and holes drilled in the starboard bulkheads, I neatly routed the control cables to the motor. Because I had selected a motor that was within the Peeler Skiff’s Coast-Guard rating, I was able to have the Tohatsu dealer install it. The shop mechanics appreciated my new boat and took pride in their work, which made me comfortable when they were drilling the holes for motor mount bolts into the shiny transom.
Merilee Corbit
The center console brings the weight of the helmsman and the battery forward to improve the Peeler’s trim.
The 15 and 20 hp Tohatsu motors weigh the same, and I was tempted to put on a 20 hp motor for a little more speed. I’m glad I didn’t cheat—while I may have gotten away with using 20 horsepower when the water was smooth, I go fast enough with the 15 horsepower motor and feel comfortable loaning my boat to friends and family even though some of them are novice boaters. With 15 horsepower, with two of us aboard, and loaded with gear and gas, my Peeler Skiff quickly gets to a plane and moves along a smooth lake at 18 mph. At that speed it only uses about one gallon of gas per hour.
The boat always feels solid even though the flat bottom does cause me to pull back on the throttle to minimize pounding when the water is very choppy. At those times, I think the extra sheet of fiberglass really pays off.
Merilee Corbit
The Peeler carves through turns without skidding and banks enough to make it easy for the skipper to remain standing.
The boat rides a bit bow-high; I installed a small hydrofoil stabilizer on the cavitation plate of my motor to help keep it down. When turning, the boat is steady and does not skid around. At all times the boat feels stable, even when the people on board move around or when they shift to one side to put out the fenders while docking.
My Peeler Skiff was fun to build, looks great on a trailer and on the water, and performs as well as I hoped it would. It has now taken me on dozens of trips and has attracted numerous admirers. It is the rule, not the exception, that I get compliments about the boat at every launch ramp and gas dock. I would build another Peeler Skiff if only I had another excuse.
Fred Corbit grew up around small boats in Eastern Washington. As a preschooler, his mother would put him in a life jacket and let him alone to row a small wooden boat that was tethered by a long line to a dock on Lake Chelan. Later he learned to drive his uncle’s Thompson outboard skiff, and when he went off to college he sailed Lasers and Hobie Cats. When he began a career as a lawyer in Seattle, he raced J-24s and Soling sailboats, and kayaked on Puget Sound. He and his wife now live in Spokane where he is a United States Bankruptcy Judge.
Peeler Skiff Particulars:
[table]
LOA/15′ 2″
Beam/6′ 3″
Hull weight/325 lbs.
Rated capacity/4 persons or 840 lbs. (1000 lbs. persons, motors, gear, 15 hp motor)
We met the RoG microcruiser by JF Bedard at the Cedar Key Small Boat Meet on Florida’s Gulf Coast. First seen, she was scooting confidently east toward the bright white beach of Atsena Otie Key. The wind was variable over the southwest quadrant and puffing up between 25 and 30 knots. Whitecaps appeared, died, then hackled up again. The RoG tore along, heeled to the puffs, but its pilot started the mainsail sheet and it stopped instantly, waiting upright and stock still like a gun dog for a command, mannerly and calm. The mainsheet came in and the RoG rushed for the beach again.
Lucie Laliberte
When inclement weather threatens, the cabin can be enclosed and protected with a fabric covering.
JF Bedard (Jean-François—he’s formerly of Montréal) created the RoG as a graduation project for Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology. An abbreviation for “River of Grass,” RoG is a nod to the Florida Everglades and the Everglades Challenge that JF endured aboard the prototype. His microcruiser shows its digital heritage as a complete, compact solution to a set of intelligent parameters, which were imaged, examined, balanced, and revised in the abstract of an advanced computer’s algorithms before a single stick was cut.
RoG is constructed in stitch-and-glue fashion with 6-mm Bruynzeel marine plywood throughout. The hull, three bulkheads, and two ring frames present themselves as a solid unit of obvious strength; each member is epoxy-bonded to support its neighbors. The plywood elements themselves provide 300 lbs of buoyancy; a further margin of safety is provided by two compartments, one set low in the bow and the other in the stern under the cockpit footwell, enclosing 5-1/2 cu ft of foam for an additional 340 lbs of buoyancy.
JF Bedard
The cabin table drops down to extend the side benches into full-length bunks.
RoG was designed, in some part, for the 300-mile Everglades Challenge, a Florida thin-water endurance voyage, but for less grueling adventures the RoG is a charming miniature cruiser. It is just 15′ 3-1/2″overall, 5′ 9″ in the beam, yet it has a deep, comfortable, private cabin with built-in bookshelves forward, obviously designed for a contemplative sailor. The cabin has sitting headroom and offers a chart-sized nav/dining table that drops down to seat level to form two full-sized berths, which are 6′ 3″ long, 24″ wide at the shoulders, and 16″ wide and the head and feet.
JF Bedard
The cabin provides sitting headroom and a table for dining and navigation. Here the RoG’s designer, JF Bedard, takes a look at a chart of Florida Bay.
Aft of these bunks is considerable storage in the spaces under the cockpit seats and footwell for bedding and cruising gear. A pair of large, fixed acrylic windows and a big, airy companionway hatch reaching to the foot of the mainmast dispatch any claustrophobia. The hatch cover is poly-canvas, supported across its breadth by two sprung battens, and when furled, the mainmast and the commodious anchor well in the bow are within easy reach.
JF Bedard
The anchor is secured to a bow roller, and the well in the bow has room for the rest of it along with the rode and chain. The well has a canted bottom and a scupper to drain water overboard.
The mast tube has a drain that opens to the cabin, rather than creating a through-hull fitting and the risk that poses. The drain remains plugged until water can be drained into a bucket. The bottom of the well is angled to drain water through a scupper in the starboard side.
Lucie Laliberte
The RoG running wing-and-wing shows the open transom that makes the cockpit instantly self-draining.
The cockpit is generous: four sailors would not be crowded, with room for a fifth hanging in the big companionway. A fore-and-aft centerline ridge stiffens the cockpit sole and adds height to the rudderhead assembly. It’s a comfortable footrest when the RoG is heeled; hiking straps provide an additional connection to the boat. The high freeboard, the open stern, and the absence of a coaming and toerail make the cockpit feel vulnerable initially, but RoG’s good manners dispel the sense of risk.
Michael Johnson
As the RoG works in light air and into the lee of islands, the oars can be kept in their locks, ready for rowing when the sails aren’t filled.
Oarlock blocks are integrally mounted at the outboard edge of the cockpit, placed so a seat on the bridge deck, just forward of the cockpit, is your rowing station. The sweeps would be awkward to stow aboard a small boat, but JF provided a transom hatch through which a pair of oars up to 10′ 6″ long can be tucked out of the way and out of sight, resting in oval slots in the frame beneath the starboard cockpit seat and extending into the cabin.
JF Bedard
When the oars are not needed, they can be stowed out of the way under the starboard deck. The cover for the access hatch is retained by an internal bungee cord.
When JF is sailing RoG, however, he keeps the sweeps mounted in their locks with their blades secured by cords at the transom. This sleek, flyweight hull should row easily in anything but a stiff headwind that retards her high-freeboard resistance. During the Everglades Challenge JF could row at 2.5 knots over a long stretch, around 5 miles, and push harder for a short while to bring the RoG up to 3-1/2 knots. Having the rudder down and a bit of centerboard down helps with tracking on a longer passage.
The centerboard pendant is served by a self-tailing winch set in a recess at the forward end of the cockpit seating platform. With the board up, the boat takes 6″ of water, 46″ with the board down, with 50 lbs of lead at the board’s extremity.
The RoG is rigged as a cat-ketch with 150 sq ft of fully battened sails, 100 sq ft in the main and 50 sq ft in the mizzen. The tapered masts are of carbon fiber, unstayed and equipped with glued-on sail track. The snotter-tensioned, aluminum-tube sprit booms are angled downward and self-vanging. Simple 2x-advantage downhauls are obvious and quick. The mainmast’s foot is close at hand from the companionway hatch so the skipper has a firm footing for mainsail work. Main and mizzen sheets, along with mizzen halyard, downhaul, and snotter converge at the handling bridge/mizzen partner bisecting the cockpit athwartships. The main’s halyard, downhaul, and snotter are secured with cam cleats at the aft edge of the cabin.
In the Cedar Key puffs we took our tucks. Topping lifts keep the booms from dropping when the halyards are eased to a marked position to lower the sails. The downhaul’s hook gets reset and retensioned in a reefing grommet on the luff. A dedicated outhaul brings a leech grommet to the sprit, and the snotter is adjusted to tune the sail’s shape.
The sheet leads for main and mizzen are well placed and tacking is effortless: the tiller goes across behind the mizzenmast, the sails assume their duty on the new heading. JF’s GPS tracking indicates the RoG tacks through 90 degrees and better.
On and off the wind, the tiller was gentle and obedient, easily managed by two fingers. One of Bedard’s touches is a tiller line that loops around the perimeter of the cockpit, under the bridge deck, and across the cabin, just beneath the companionway molding. With this connection, the pilot can make course corrections from anywhere in the cockpit or even from the cabin’s interior.
In strong wind, the sheeted-home mizzen occasionally caught the RoG in irons. This is a stumble for many yawls and ketches, and can be avoided if one slacks the mizzen sheet as a craft passes the eye of the wind. As we paced his microcruiser this way and that in the heavy puffs, challenging and besting bigger boats, JF showed me RoG’s “automatic” heave-to. He started the mainsheet and, once again, the boat stopped, its sheeted mizzen managing the boat’s attitude without a swoop or heel.
JF Bedard
A pump, tucked under the mizzen partner, moves water in and out of the ballast tanks. Four valves direct the flow to and between the port and starboard tanks. The centerboard winch is visible at right.
The RoG is designed for water ballast stabilization in heavy weather. We had no ballast aboard but felt no lack of stability. JF prefers to keep the RoG light and lively and seemed reluctant to utilize the ballast option in anything but serious seaway. In that event, a diaphragm pump on the port side of the cockpit, with the help of four Y valves in a locker, moves water into, out of, and between two ballast tanks. Each has a capacity of about 9 ½ gallons—80 lbs—and is set amidships about 16″ off center and extends along the bottom then up the side up to the sheer the bottom. Filling the windward tank adds 80 lbs, which improves performance in a breeze, and filling both tanks increases overall stability and adds momentum to plow through a chop, giving the RoG the characteristics of a heavier, deeper boat.
Michael Johnson
When the breeze picks up, up to 80 lbs of water can be pumped into the windward ballast tank to help counter heeling.
Tiny and eager, it’s like a terrier when she planes; 9 knots is not uncommon. Reefed down in whitecaps and heavy puffs, we were steadily advancing, with negligible leeway, at 6 knots.
RoG is phenomenally light at 450 lbs with the sailing rig and is eminently trailerable, easily singlehanded, but is in no way a skittish craft. There is some gravitas built into the lines and rigidity in its tiny dimensions.
The virtue of the RoG is JF Bedard’s balanced design judgment. The RoG is one of a new generation of vessels appearing fully realized, not by a massive mainframe at MIT, but by laptops—a democratization of invention. Aesthetics and structure are tightly interlocked. The digital designer changes a curve of the bilge, and immediately, changes in buoyancy and wetted area are computed and shown. Optimal solutions are possible over hours rather than years of trial and error. Better solutions depend on how you ask the questions; what are the priorities?
The little RoG is a constellation of compromises, but Bedard has weighed each bargain between technology and function with delicate attention, striving for a happy solution. He’s intelligent, technically sound, confident, and he adds a human factor of delight in sailing as a dance with nature. Before giving himself over to the water life, he was a successful professional musician. The dance comes naturally.
Jan Adkins is an author and illustrator living in Gainesville, Florida. He is a frequent contributor to WoodenBoat magazine and the author of over 40 books. “Getting Started in Boats” is a regular feature he does for WoodenBoat.
RoG Particulars
[table]
Length/15′ 3.6″
Beam/5′ 9″
Draft, board up/6″
Draft, board down/3′ 10″
Displacement/975 lbs
Weight, fully rigged/450 lbs
Sail area/150 sq ft
[/table]
The orange areas are flotation compartments; the black areas are water-ballast tanks.
The cabin can sleep two. Note the oar handles extending into the cabin.
Bedard Yacht Design offers the RoG as plans and full-sized templates at $239 and as a complete kit, with around 140 CNC-cut Bruynzeel plywood pieces, for $2,549.
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!
In the autumn of 2011 Erik Schouw-Hansen and I were discussing our next adventure. In 2010 we had sailed together to the Shetlands—Erik crewed aboard my 31′ sloop on the first leg of a voyage from Norway to the Caribbean and back. We were both born and raised on the west coast of Norway, so for our next trip it was natural to look westward across the North Sea to the Shetland Islands. We wanted to try something new and settled upon rowing a small, open boat across the North Sea the following summer. We set mid-June the following year as our deadline to be ready for departure, and from that point we would wait for favorable weather conditions.
In Norway the faering is well known, and has proven its seaworthiness over many centuries. It was a natural choice for us, and we set our sights on finding one suitable for the crossing. After asking around, I heard about a newly built Sunnmørsfæring that would meet all our requirements. I called the owner, Leif Reidar Røv, and to our good fortune, he was enthusiastic about our adventure and was more than happy to lend us his boat.
Henrik Yksnøy
In the early spring we put a fresh coat of oil on the boat while preparing for the crossing. After we launched it, the seams tightened up as the wood swelled, but the boat still took on some water during the trip.
The faering was built by the boatbuilder Jakob Helset in Bjørkedalen, a small village on the northwest coast of Norway famous for boatbuilding. Hundreds of boats from faerings to replicas of Viking ships have been built here.
Leif’s faering is 17′ long and a bit fuller in the bow than most other faerings, but this suited us well, as our equipment list continuously grew longer and the space we needed grew larger. The keel was a bit deeper than those of traditional faerings, making it a better sailing boat, and adding a huge benefit: the ability to keep on a steady course while rowing in strong wind and big waves. The trade-off was that it wasn’t as good a boat for beach cruising, but we intended to launch, just once, in Norway, and land, just once, in the Shetland Islands.
We were off to a good start after finding the boat and bringing it back to my home in Volda, but there were a lot of things we needed to do over the winter. One of our most important preparations was to have covers made for the boat. They would be crucial in providing shelter and a measure of comfort on board. The cover at the stern would be a sleeping shelter. The cover over the bow would protect the gear and drinking water stowed there.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
Before departure, we tried to figure out where to store all our gear and how to distribute the weight. Here Henrik was checking the fit of the aft part of the boat where we slept during the crossing.
For our safety equipment, we brought a life raft, two satellite messengers, a handheld VHF, two survival suits, and flares. The range of the VHF would not be very far when while seated in a faering at sea level, so we would have to rely on meeting up with other vessels in transit to get updated weather forecasts.
We had to prepare ourselves as well, and spent many hours in the gym and swimming pool. During the spring, we also did some rowing in the faering. Our longest training trip lasted six hours, but six hours does not get you very far in the North Sea. It would have helped if we had rowed even more, but Erik lives in Bergen, a seven-and-a-half-hour drive from Volda, and he wasn’t able to spend many hours rowing with me in the faering before we left.
Henrik Yksnøy
While the faering was docked at a marina in Henrik’s hometown of Volda, we rigged the tarp decks for the first time, and prepared the open boat for ocean rowing.
We weren’t the first to set out on this crossing in a faering. Ragnar Thorseth, a Norwegian adventurer, crossed the North Sea alone in a faering during the summer of 1969. Olav Lie Gundersen and Tommy Skeide repeated the feat in 2005 in a type of Norwegian faering called a geitbåt; then, after reaching Shetland, they continued the voyage and rowed all the way to the Faroe Islands.
We did not have to wait long for our window of suitable weather. On the day we finished getting our gear collected and were ready to leave Volda, the weather report looked promising. We put the faering on a trailer, packed our things in it, and drove south to Florø, the most westerly town in Norway and the closest we could get to Shetland for our departure. The straight-line distance from Florø to Shetland is about 200 nautical miles. I am the optimistic one of us, so I guessed we’d make the crossing in four or five days; Erik put his money on ten days or more.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
At long last we were on the North Sea and heading to Shetland. It took a long time for the Norwegian coast to disappear below the horizon.
We were ready to launch at 4:00 am on Wednesday, June 20, 2012. We had been awake for 20 hours already, and I was tired and exhausted. We remembered most of the important things on our list, but managed to forget the tiller. I knew exactly where I had left it back home, but to drive seven hours home and seven hours back to pick it up was out of the question. From now on, every hour was valuable; we had no time to lose. We had to take this weather window, as it could easily be the only chance this summer.
We made a new tiller, improvised from a piece of wood and some pieces of thick steel wire we found in the harbor. It didn’t look as nice as the one we left behind, but it was functional.
We weren’t off to a great start, but the conditions were perfect. The seas were calm and there was a light breeze from east, just as forecast, and a light drizzle as well, but we only cared about the wind and the waves and hardly noticed the rain.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
Henrik gave our cobbled-together tiller a try. It served our needs, as we didn’t steer actively, and kept the rudder in a fixed position to keep us on track. In an attempt to avoid tendonitis, I tried some wrist braces in the beginning of the trip, but after the burn on my wrist, I had to take them off.
We wanted to take full advantage of the good conditions, so we rowed together for 20 hours straight. I could hardly stay awake, and desperately needed some rest. To get a chance to sleep, we started rowing on shifts, six hours on and six hours off. The wind was picking up, still from the right direction, over our stern, and we were making good speed, on average, 10 nautical miles for every 6-hour shift. That put us on par with our best estimates. If we could maintain a pace of 40 nautical miles per day, we could make it to Shetland in only five days.
Roger Siebert
.
It was a physically demanding task to close the distance to Shetland, but in spite of the hard work, neither of us had an appetite and we hardly managed to eat. It may be that the movement in the boat was making us a little seasick, and the exhaustion of rowing for hours on end made us long for sleep more than food. That first day we ate less than a meal, a few snacks, and a little chocolate.
Our meals were dehydrated and needed only boiling water to prepare them—simple enough, but a wave caught me off guard, and I poured hot water over my left wrist. It was a serious burn, and the only thing I could do to treat it was to reach over the side of the boat and hold my hand in the cold North Sea water. Our first-aid kit was well stocked but obviously had its deficiencies; some treatment for a burn would have been highly appreciated. After a while the pain subsided and I was back in the routine, rowing toward Shetland.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
All of our navigation was done with a handheld GPS. Here Henrik was using it to check our position and measure the distance left to Shetland. The gloves he was wearing were a crucial part of our outfitting.
We rowed through the night and in the dark passed the first offshore oil and gas platforms, our first milestone. This meant we were getting somewhere. We were definitely in the North Sea where there are quite a few platforms, and keeping the required distance away from them was at times proving to be difficult, as the wind was determining our course more than we were.
It was hard for me to motivate myself as we rowed away from the Norwegian coast. The high mountains followed us for days—they just wouldn’t disappear—and it seemed as though we made hardly any progress. That was one of the drawbacks of rowing rather than sailing—we were always looking backward. I had to remind myself to turn around occasionally and look over my shoulder to make sure the coast was clear. One time I turned my head and found an oil-rig supply vessel just a few hundred yards away. I hadn’t even heard it, and I didn’t think they noticed us until I called them on the VHF. In swells, fog, and rain, a faering is difficult to spot, and a small boat made of wood rarely shows on a ship’s radar.
On the second day, Erik had a visitor while he was rowing. A whale as long as the boat swam alongside us for a few seconds. Erik was shouting, both thrilled and frightened; I was in my sleeping bag and scrambled out as fast as I could to see what had raised the alarm. Erik doesn’t always get “port” and “starboard” correct, so I was looking in the wrong direction and just missed seeing the whale.
Henrik Yksnøy
For the first days of the trip, the sea was quite flat and made the rowing easy. Here the sun had just gone down, and Henrik was preparing for the night watch.
After a while, it became difficult to separate one day from another. We did most things without thinking, and we hardly spoke to each other. When we changed shifts, we talked briefly about the distance achieved, strength and direction of the wind, and not much more. We did not have much energy left for small talk. I had the graveyard shift, from midnight to 6 a.m. Even though it was summer and we rowed in high latitudes, it was quite dark during these hours. It was cold as well, but the rowing helped keeping me warm.
After three days of mild weather, the wind freshened and the waves grew larger; we needed to pay attention to the waves, making sure we took them from the right angle. The wind helped us make good speed, but it was not comfortable anymore. Back home, we wouldn’t have launched the faering in these conditions, but underway we didn’t have a choice. Fortunately, we were familiar with the boat by then and able to manage it through the rough water.
In the growing waves and generally cold and wet conditions, we got into our dry suits and would remain in them, for safety’s sake, for the rest of the crossing. They were not very comfortable to wear, and even worse to row in. Sealed up inside the suits day and night, we were perpetually clammy.
Henrik Yksnøy
Halfway into the crossing, the wind had picked up and we needed to get into our survival suits.
After we crossed into the United Kingdom’s territorial waters, we rowed up close to a U.K. Coast Guard vessel. Over the VHF radio, they told us that we would have a few days of easterly winds, followed by a northerly gale. Erik and I calculated that we would reach Shetland before the weather took a turn for the worse.
Only 12 hours from the Shetland coast, Erik was rather cheerful when his rowing shift ended and he headed off to sleep that night. His high spirits surprised me because he is quite seldom so cheerful. During my watch, the wind picked up and I struggled to make progress. With the wind and the waves coming from the north, I had no choice but to turn the faering downwind in an attempt to ride out the gale. When Erik woke up, his good mood vanished when I told him we were still 12 hours out, headed due south parallel to the coast of Shetland, and not any closer than we had been when he went to sleep.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
The waves had picked up and made the rowing much harder for Henrik during his shift at the oars. Erik was sitting in the cabin, not yet able to sleep in the rough conditions.
Erik took his shift at the oars, and I lay under the tarp during my six hours off, hardly getting any sleep as there was a too much movement in the boat. There was no need for my sleeping bag, as we were still wearing our dry suits. When I looked out from under the tarp, I saw Erik struggling at the oars to the keep the faering headed downwind. Whenever the boat slipped away from him and veered into a broach, the cresting waves would break over the gunwales and pour into the boat.
The rudder helped keep the faering on track, but the new tiller was a bit short and difficult to reach from the rowing thwart. Although we didn’t use the rudder to steer the faering on the waves, we were be able to control the boat with the oars.
We had had water in the boat all along, but at this point we were carrying a couple hundred liters. As the boat got heavier, its handling changed and was more difficult to control, reacting more slowly to the oars and taking longer to get back on track. During our hours off we bailed, but our efforts hardly seemed to produce any results—there was still a lot of water sloshing in the bottom, and we needed to stop bailing and take some time off to rest.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
Erik took this self-portrait at sunrise. The quarters were quite close with the “cabin” in the stern right at his feet. Erik, who stands about 6’ 6” tall, struggled to find a place to lie down and stretch out after his rowing shifts were over.
When it came my turn to row, Erik and I had to switch positions. With the aft tarp up, there was only one seat free for rowing, and during the switch the faering was at the mercy of the waves. We had to make the move fast while reacting to every wave coming at us. The wind had picked up during Erik’s watch, and in his six-hour shift he had learned to deal with the waves. I had never rowed in waves like this, so it took some time to learn how to manage the oars and control the faering in these conditions.
The boat broached a couple of times, and more water came aboard. We were not pleased with the situation. Erik was not lying down to rest, but sat at the opening of the tarp, afraid of being under it in case we were to capsize. His fear, however, was no match for his exhaustion, and he didn’t sit there for long. He soon disappeared under the tarp, completely spent.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
During the final stage to reach the coast of Shetland, we rowed together for 20 hours to avoid missing landfall. We had spent almost a week within the confines of the faering.
Erik took a new turn on the oars, and after 18 hours of our trying to control the boat in the gale, it was my watch again. I studied the GPS, and saw that we would soon pass the whole length of Shetland; the next landfall would be the Orkneys, Scotland, or England.
During my next watch, it felt like the wind didn’t have the same strength as it had only a few hours earlier. The waves didn’t break in the same way and they didn’t slam against the hull with the same strength. Still, it was not possible for me to turn the boat to put it on a course toward land. To prevent us from passing Shetland altogether, I pulled out our sea anchor and threw it over the side along with 50 yards of rope, and attached the line to the stern. The sea anchor made the movement in the boat more tolerable, and, according to the GPS, reduced our southward drift. That was very reassuring as we by this time had already passed the latitude of Shetland’s capitol city of Lerwick, situated about 18 miles to the north of the island’s southern extremity.
We been carried south by the wind for the previous 24 hours when it was Erik’s turn at the oars again. I woke him up and we discussed our strategy and next course of action. The wind had calmed even more, and we could clearly see the coast of Shetland for the first time. Sighting land gave us some necessary motivation. This was our chance to reach the coast.
Henrik Yksnøy
The sea had calmed and Shetland as within sight, but there were still hours of rowing left.
We took down the aft tarp; no one would sleep now until we reached the shore. We pulled out the second set of oars, and rowed together. There were still swells from the north, making the rowing a struggle. We rowed for 30 minutes, then took a five-minute break. It was a pleasure to get off the thwart for five minutes, but even more painful to get back up on it. We had seat pads on the thwarts, but they didn’t help much anymore. I constantly had to change my position. I was so tired that Erik often caught me just dipping my oars in the water.
We were terrified at the thought of the wind picking up again and blowing us farther away from the island. Luckily, the wind was slowly dying until it suddenly went completely calm. In the still air, we could see more and more details of the coast. After a few more hours of rowing, we managed to distinguish the small island Bressay from the mainland, and we knew that Lerwick was not far away.
We took our last five-minute break just outside the guest harbor in Lerwick, and I was relieved, satisfied, proud, and completely exhausted. We arrived at the dock at 3:00 a.m., having been on the North Sea for six days and 23 hours. The final stage, where we rowed together, had lasted for 20 hours.
We made the faering fast and when we stood up, we struggled to stay on our feet, and had to sit down on the dock to keep from losing our balance. The pub had just closed—just as well for us—but some fellow Norwegians coming from the pub found us and took us aboard their sailboat. After a short celebration, we got the sleep we had longed for.
Erik Schouw-Hansen
In the harbor at Lerwick, Henrik took a last look at the faering aboard the Norwegian topsail ketch SVANHILD. We spent a few days in Lerwick while SVANHILD took our boat back to Florø.
We spent a few days in Lerwick, and had no plans for the return to Norway, either for us or for the boat. Our only goal had been to get to Shetland. But it didn’t take us long to cross paths with the captain of SVANHILD, an old galleon from Florø, the same town where we started our voyage. Luckily for us, the captain was happy to bring the faering home to Norway.
We spent some great days in Lerwick, enjoying the Shetlanders’ hospitality—especially that of Charlie Hunter who took us into his home, where we got everything we needed to recover from the voyage.
A few days later, Erik and I took the ferry to Scotland and flew home across the North Sea. Looking out of the window and down on the ocean, I was happy to be flying.
Henrik Yksnøy was born in 1987 in Volda, Norway, and grew up on and by the sea. His home is surrounded by mountains and hikes the high country year-round. His interests include hunting, fishing, sailing, and kayaking. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Administration, and a master’s in Supply Chain Management from Norway’s Molde University College. Henrik works as Senior Associate in a business consulting firm.
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.
All of the wood on the deck of the author’s boat is African mahogany. The kingplank and covering boards were cut from stock that was the lightest in color, and dye made them the darkest pieces.
My outboard runabout, WORK OF ART, often stops people in their tracks when they see the deck with its beautiful, natural-looking wood color with sparkling grain highlights. No one has guessed that much of the wood under the varnish has been dyed.
The deck planking is African mahogany, and I was hoping to find some dark pieces for the perimeter covering boards and kingplank, and lighter boards for the rest. While I did find a couple of boards wide enough and long enough to do the perimeter covering boards, they were especially light in color, the opposite of what I wanted.
I was reluctant to use stain, as it tends to muddy variations in color and mute the wood grain. After doing a bit of research, I decided to get the darker color using dye; it would provide the contrast I wanted for the perimeter and kingplank while creating a clearer grain appearance. Water-based dyes, once dry, are compatible with epoxy and varnish.
With the dye plan in mind, I resawed the mahogany to book-match the planks, and after cutting them to shape, I epoxied them to the deck’s plywood substrate, taking care with the epoxy so as not to contaminate areas to be dyed.
The Vintage Cherry dye transformed the very light mahogany—a cut-off is shown here— into a rich, dark color that enhances the grain.
I used some cutoffs to test a few water-based dyes. There are several brands available; I chose to use dyes from General Finishes. Their Medium Brown was too dark and subdued, but the dye in Vintage Cherry was just dark enough to provide the contrast I was looking for and had a pleasing ruby-red hue. I epoxied the sample to get some gloss to approach the final appearance, and I really liked it.
After a penultimate sanding of the deck, I wiped it down with a wet rag to raise the grain and then sanded the bare wood for the last time with 220-grit. I masked the areas that were to be left undyed with plastic sheeting and blue painter’s tape. Wearing latex gloves, I applied the dye with a cloth rag to the perimeter boards and the kingplank, 3′ to 4′ at a time. The instructions are to apply a “liberal amount of stain” to saturate the wood surface on manageable sections, then wipe off the excess before moving to the next area. The dye is very watery, so as with any shop chemical, use appropriate protective equipment for yourself or surrounding areas that might get splashed.
After the dye dried, I had one area that was a bit blotchy, likely caused by epoxy squeezed through a long crack in the board near its end. With some sanding and reapplication of dye, I was able to get consistent color in the area. The instructions recommend letting the dye dry 3 to 4 hours or up to 10 in cool, humid conditions. I let it dry overnight, and the following day I applied the first coat of epoxy to seal the wood, smooth the surface, and bring up the shine.
The next step for the deck involved masking the plank edges, then filling the faux caulking seams between planks with thickened, white-pigmented epoxy. Then I applied about five coats of clear epoxy over the entire deck to build the surface and smooth it over. Five coats of varnish completed the deck finishing process.
The contrast between the decking, covering boards, and kingplank brings out the color of both undyed and dyed wood.
A water-based dye makes for a remarkable finish while enhancing the clarity of the grain. The outcome was beautiful beyond my expectations, and in hindsight, I believe the effect of using dye significantly contributed to creating a boat that is a standout in the boat shows that I have entered.
Art Atkinson retired from Ford Motor Company after 31 years as an engineering supervisor at Body Engineering. He is currently the manager for Bloomfield Village Association in Michigan. Woodworking has been his hobby since high school and prior to building boats he made musical instruments, furniture, and kitchen cabinets. His review of the Glen-L Squirt pictured here appeared in our June 2016 issue.
Thanks to Small Boats Monthly reader Bosco Plana for suggesting this article.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The Veritas Cabinet Scraper has some subtle but significant improvements that make it easier to use than its predecessor.
A card scraper, held by hand, works well for small jobs and fine work, but it is hard on the thumbs, tiring in the long haul, and can get quite hot. My English-made Stanley #80 cabinet scraper does the work of holding its blade at the right angle and bending it, so it’s an easier tool to use. I’ve had mine for decades, and it’s my tool of choice for the rough work of scraping newly epoxied joints and for finishing surfaces where the grain in a board or between boards is oriented in different directions. The #80, introduced in 1898, was produced in numerous versions; Veritas makes many of their own versions of workshop standards, including the #80, so I was curious to see what they did to improve upon it.
The Stanley #80 has been a standard woodworking tool for well over a century.
The first thing I noticed was the weight. The Stanley weighs 22 oz, the Veritas 32.4 oz. The Veritas casting is thicker and the contours are a better fit for the hands. The tops of the handles feel good in the palms and the recesses underneath the Veritas handles, not so deep and wide as they are on the Stanley, are more comfortable for the fingers. More significant are the coves for the thumbs. In the Stanley, they’re not contoured to fit and the glossy finish is quite slick, so I have to grip the tool tightly. The Veritas’ matte finish and textured surfaces aren’t at all slippery, and the contours keep my thumbs in place so I can use a more relaxed grip.
The the tool’s body guards fingers from the top of the blade, making it safer to use.
The Veritas blade is made of harder steel than the Stanley’s. I’ve been doing quick sharpening of the Stanley blade with a file, but that same file slides across the Veritas steel without digging in. That harder steel is better worked with sharpening stones and holds an edge longer.
On this piece of locust, the scraper produces thin shavings and some coarse dust.
The body of the Veritas is taller than the Stanley’s and its blade shorter, so the cutting edge, when not in use, doesn’t extend beyond the tool. I’ve never cut myself on the exposed upper edge of the Stanley, but it does make me nervous. The corners are especially dangerous. Having the upper edge guarded on the Veritas is a good safety measure.
The bottom of the Veritas scraper is machined smooth and flat. The bright spot on the upward edge is a dent that was the only damage after dropping the tool on a concrete floor. The ding may have been caused by another tool that fell off a work table at the same time. Both survived without breaking.
When I accidentally dropped the Veritas on my shop’s concrete floor I yelped, because that could have been the end of it. The cast metal in my old planes and spokeshaves won’t take sharp impacts well, and I’ve lost a few tools to my clumsiness. The Veritas did get a small dent in the edge rather than a chip, a good sign that the metal isn’t brittle.
The left side of this mahogany board was sanded with a 220-grit disk on a random-orbit sander. The right side was smoothed with the Veritas Cabinet Scraper. The gloss is evident at top and the matte patches show that the the scraper is leveling the surface.
In use, the Veritas has a solid feel and dresses wood surfaces to a smooth, even, and glossy finish. The quality of the edge I put on the blade is perhaps the most significant factor, but the Veritas’ greater mass makes it much quieter than my Stanley. All the changes Veritas made improved the feel of the tool.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Stay-Afloat is a soft, sticky, wax-like material made of treated petroleum byproducts.
"A leaky boat never sinks,” or at least that is what my father led me to believe when he kept a 27′ carvel-planked sloop at my hometown’s marina. If you know a boat’s likely to take on a bit of water, you’re going to keep an eye on it and be prepared to do something about the leaks. If you’ve been lulled into complacency by a boat that doesn’t leak, a little unexpected trickle of water could lead to a sinking. A small boat kept on a trailer isn’t going to sink while it’s idle, but leaks can occur when it’s in use, so it’s a good idea to be prepared to fix them.
Stay Afloat is soft, sticky wax-like material meant to fix small leaks of the sort I get with my older lapstrake boats. None of my boats had suffered enough damage to let water aboard, but that’s a possibility worth preparing for.
To test the effectiveness of Stay Afloat I wasn’t about to poke holes in any of my boats, so I made a gizmo that could simulate leaks. It’s a plywood box with a piece of 7″ plastic drainpipe connected to it. The FAQs on the Stay Afloat website say: “Stay Afloat has been tested…at 3 meters deep for 24 hours with no compromise. It also depends on how much material you use and how big the damage area is. Common sense: the bigger the hole the more you use.”
My leak-testing device created pressure equivalent to that of 26″-deep water.
Stay Afloat’s documented testing depth of about 9′ provided much more underwater pressure than a small boat’s leak would be subject to. The pipe I had on hand, 26″ in length, would create less pressure than their test, but more than the draft of any of my boats would. The 26″ water column might represent a worst-case scenario of rough water. I kept the hose running during my tests to keep the water level from dropping when the test leaks were opened up.
I got my first test of Stay Afloat as soon as I filled the pipe with water. I had caulked the plywood box seams and the pipe-to-plywood joint, but there were several leaks. I smeared Stay Afloat wherever there was a leak and soon had my device watertight.
Cracks, mimicked by saw kerfs from 1/32″ to 1/8″, were easy to seal even with the full pressure. A thin crack was fixed with a swipe or two, wider ones needed a bit more. A 3/4″-diameter hole held the Stay-Afloat fix, even when applied with a geyser of water issuing up from the hole and with the full pressure from the 26″ water column. A 1-1/2″ hole was another matter. The Stay Afloat wasn’t stiff enough to keep from bulging up after being applied, and ultimately tore away from the sides of the hole. Putting a patch of cloth over the Stay Afloat didn’t help, but a flat piece of wood or metal did. The rigid patch provided more surface area to create an adhesive bond strong enough to hold the plug in place.
Soap, water, and a rag are recommended for cleaning your hands after using Stay Afloat. It is very gooey stuff, and a rag is necessary to rub it off. Stay Afloat is incompatible with adhesives, paint, and varnish, so a permanent fix for a leak stopped with it starts with the complete removal of the stuff from the damaged area. The website’s FAQs recommend that surfaces be scraped clean, then wiped down with an acetone-soaked rag.
After scraping a test piece to remove an application of Stay Afloat, it still repelled water, as I expected. With a single wipe-down with acetone, water still beaded up, but after three wipe-downs the water soaked into the wood grain, a sign that the wood was ready for permanent repair. That test was with a flat, easily accessible surface; properly repairing cracks and fractured plywood would likely require the removal of wax-contaminated wood. For leaks that occur while a traditionally planked boat is swelling up after a long period of dry storage, the Stay Afloat stays quite malleable and will squeeze out as the seams close.
This wax toilet ring has a color similar to beeswax, but as with Stay-Afloat, the material commonly used is a blend of petroleum byproducts.
When I was researching Stay Afloat, I saw it was being compared to the soft wax ring used to seal the connection between the bottom of a toilet and the drain in the bathroom floor. I had recently remodeled a bathroom in my home and so had a spare ring. The waxy material is like Stay Afloat in nearly every aspect except color, and performed as well. The wax, separated from the plastic fitting that it surrounds, weighed a bit over 5 oz, so a $7 ring comes out to be a bit cheaper than Stay Afloat (the math comes to $19 for 14 oz—about $6 less than Stay Afloat for the same amount). However, you’d want to carry three rings worth because a single ring wouldn’t cover a series of leaks, then you’d need a container for them and have the very messy task of freeing the “wax” from the plastic rings.
Stay Afloat is a good way to seal leaks from the inside of a small-boat hull whether they’re chronic or sudden. Having a jar of it handy, along with a few patches of plywood, would prepare you for putting a quick stop to water getting through the hull.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Seen here in the protected waters of Matia Island, IRONBLOOD slips along easily under oar power.
"After moving ashore from my first schooner, and having acquired a wife and a small son,” writes Michael Colfer of Bellingham, Washington, “I realized I needed a smaller boat.” He started his search for a boat appropriate to his new life by building a Nutshell pram. It proved too small, so he next built Pete Culler’s Good Little Skiff. Christened SHAMROCK and rigged with a spritsail, it served well for cruising the San Juan Islands and camping ashore on state park campgrounds, but while the skiff did well sailing the protected waters within the archipelago, Michael wanted a boat capable of taking on some more challenging weather in the more exposed areas around the archipelago.
Michael Colfer
The augmented keel and skeg improve upon the faering’s sailing abilities without obstructing the boat’s interior with a centerboard trunk.
In his search for a more seaworthy beach cruiser capable of carrying more gear, Michael found his way to faerings and variations on the theme by Joel White (16′ Shearwater), Iain Oughtred (14′ 11″ Elf and others), and John Atkins (18′ 7” Valgerda). All three of these designs were inspired by Hardanger faerings of southwest Norway and had similar shapes below the waterline.
Michael Colfer
Michael built two boats to his design: IRONBLOOD (at the end of the dock) for himself, and a then unnamed faering for his son. The plan was for the two to sail and row the Inside Passage, but family obligations took precedent. After sea trials, the second faering was sold.
Michael bought plans for the Shearwater and although White’s dimensions and drawings make it possible to build without lofting, he lofted the lines and began making some modifications that would make the boat well suited to all Puget Sound waters. He added freeboard throughout and extra height to the ends to provide a dry ride in steep chop. To keep these modifications from increasing the width along the sheerline, he made the sheerstrakes closer to vertical. His changes brought the length to 17′ 3″.
Michael Colfer
Easily removable thwarts and broad floorboards provide room enough for bedding down at anchor.
He wanted to improve upon the boat’s sailing abilities but didn’t want a centerboard trunk cluttering up the boat’s interior, so his keel is deeper than that of the Shearwater, adding only a little at the bow and increasing the depth to 7″ at the stern for additional lateral resistance. The change was also meant to protect the rudder, making its removal unnecessary when landing on beaches.
Michael Colfer
IRONBLOOD is quite at home in the San Juan Islands, both in the quiet coves and in the passes that funnel tides and winds.
Michael added storage compartments fore and aft for dry storage of his cruising gear. The aft compartment has a sloped bulkhead to make a comfortable backrest when taking the helm while sitting in the bottom of the boat. The three removable rowing thwarts clear the interior for a night spent aboard at anchor. The floorboards provide a flat, level platform for sleeping.
Robert Bumpus
The loose-footed sprit sail makes sailing about as simple as it gets. Light summer breezes make for unhurried passages between islands.
Michael christened his faering IRONBLOOD, drawing upon the meanings of his surname, Colfer: col is a Gaelic word for blood, as in blood relative, and fer is the French for iron. IRONBLOOD would be at home in the fjords of Norway, but sails the waters of Puget Sound. She can carry enough gear for a week’s beach camping for two, makes way under oars well, and is stable and smooth under sail, making very little leeway.
Michael Colfer
Waters along the northern perimeter of the San Juan archipelago can get quite choppy—winds from the north and northwest have 15 nautical miles of fetch. The higher ends and freeboard keep the going drier. Here IRONWOOD is bound for Matia Island.
Michael says that IRONBLOOD “will run like a scared rabbit for hours at a time given the right conditions.” The increased height at her ends keeps her dry in a chop as he intended.
He writes: “I have had her now for 12 years, and even though I am sure I will build other small boats, I doubt that I will ever sell IRONBLOOD. She is perfect for me.”
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.
My father passed away three years ago at the age of 91, and I certainly won’t need Father’s Day this month as a reminder to think about him. My home is filled with things that he made; the ones I value most he whittled from bits of wood.
As a young man he carved half models of sailboats he grew up with. To pass the time while he was in boot camp at the Marine Corps base on Parris Island, South Carolina, he whittled figures: a Mohican with a tomahawk, Toad from The Wind in the Willows, a Scotsman in a kilt drawing his sword. When my sisters and I were young he whittled toy boats for us; when we were older and went backpacking he carved spoons and dolphins at camp.
My father whittled this man on a stool, with a block of wood in one hand and a knife in the other, from a piece of sugar pine in the 60s.
My father passed away three years ago at the age of 91, and I certainly won’t need Father’s Day this month as a reminder to think about him. My home is filled with things that he made; the ones I value most he whittled from bits of wood.
As a young man he carved half models of sailboats he grew up with. To pass the time while he was in boot camp at the Marine Corps base on Parris Island, South Carolina, he whittled figures: a Mohican with a tomahawk, Toad from The Wind in the Willows, a Scotsman in a kilt drawing his sword. When my sisters and I were young he whittled toy boats for us; when we were older and went backpacking he carved spoons and dolphins at camp.
During one summer vacation in Marblehead, Massachusetts, he carved a nude female torso in mahogany. I was not yet 10 and didn’t think much of it until he brought the work-in-progress into the kitchen during my lunch and asked Mom to raise her arm. He studied her armpit, compared it to the carving, and after that I felt awkward about that sculpture, knowing it was my mother I was seeing.
The living room of the house I grew up in smelled like Alaska yellow cedar. My father was a crew coach for most of his adult life and he was forever whittling small oars to give as awards for his rowers. He did the work with a jackknife, a set of five small carving chisels, and small bits of sandpaper. The fragrant shavings and wood dust fell on his lap and on the large, brown, braided rug that my grandmother made. That rug was not hard to vacuum, but the grass-green shag carpet that replaced it in the ’70s didn’t give up the shavings so easily.
I don’t remember when Dad gave me my first pocketknife, but I do remember being sent to the principal’s office when I used it to sharpen a pencil in my second-grade classroom. I had to wait there for Dad to make a special trip to pick me up. When he arrived, he got an earful from the principal, Mr. Garrison, who considered the knife a weapon instead of a tool. Afterward, as we walked from the office to the car, Dad sidled up to me slipped the knife into my hand and said: “Just keep it in your pocket.”
I took to whittling when I was still quite young, and Dad let me learn about sharp blades through experience. I got my first gash, now a crescent-shaped scar across my left thumb, while I was whittling a piece of pine with an X-acto knife. I happened to be swinging on the swing set in the back yard at the time. I gave up trying to swing while using cutting tools, but I still nick myself. I was in my late 30s when a sharp carving knife split the tip of my thumb on Halloween. The trick-or-treaters, in the spirit of the night, weren’t fazed by the bloody rag I had wrapped over the wound when I came to the door with a bowl of candy.
In my 20s I took to whittling oars like Dad did. I didn’t have quite so strong a connection to crew, but I was drawn to the sculptural shape of spoon blades, particularly at the throat, where the central ridge of the blade meets the roots of the edges and the crest of the loom. Set upright in mahogany bases, the oars were, like those my father made, simple but pleasing bits of sculpture.
I remember Dad carving half models of the boats that he owned—a lapstrake Herreshoff Amphi-Craft dinghy and a Tumlaren sloop—and I followed in his footsteps carving half models of my boats. I made model boats and oars as gifts for friends and family, and took special pleasure in giving them to my father.
After he passed away, many of his carvings and all of the carvings I’d made for him came to be displayed in my home. They don’t merely remind me of him; they remind me how much I have wanted, in many ways, to be like him.
My grandfather kept MOLLY MAY at Marblehead Harbor. Dad grew up sailing her and made this half model.
Another half model carved by my father
The upright oar at the back is one Dad carved as an award. The blade is painted in the colors of Lakeside School in Seattle, my high school and where Dad was an English teacher and crew coach. The two oars in front of it are sweeps, mementos of Noble and Greenough, the Boston-area school where Dad first took up crew. The middle two oars are sculls he never finished. The two in front are fixed-thwart oars that I made.
I carved this oar last year for Sherri Cassuto, an Olympic silver medalist who had been coached by my father, as what I hoped would be a pleasant distraction while she was hospitalized.
One summer Dad carved three toy boats for my sisters and me. I got this 6″-long tender with an outboard-ready transom. All three were painted for use in the bathtub.
I don’t recall if I painted this tiny skiff or had Dad do it. I don’t think it meant that I would have rather had an aluminum toy boat.
I wasn’t allowed to play with this peapod. The hull is just a shade over 1/32″ thick and it glows when I shine a flashlight through it. Dad hollowed out the inside with just a pocket knife and while the surface has a bit of texture to it, the flashlight shows that the thickness is uniform throughout. It’s a daring piece of woodworking.
Dad would char the dolphins to smooth the knife marks and darken the wood.
Dad owned a Knud Reimers-designed Tumlaren for many years and sold it after I built a gunning dory for him. I have his half model to remember the sloop by.
When I was 12, I briefly strayed from the path.
Dad instructed his crews to “finish on a bent oar,” so I made a bent oar for him. He also discouraged his crews from spending time on an ergometer because the exercise machine fosters bad rowing habits. I made an “Ergomet-oar” for him with spinning blades that would solve the problem.
I often carved boats without any existing design in mind. I bought some crooked knives to make carving out the interior easier and cleaner.
Video by Ed and Zach Heaton
As a gift to my father, I made a half model of the Gokstad faering I’d built and rowed up the Inside Passage.
After I read Paddle-to-the-Sea to my son, he wanted a canoe of his own.
To make a toy cabin cruiser for me Dad carved a plug for from a block of mahogany. To me as a young boy, it was just a means to an end. Now it’s a work of art that I keep on display in my home.
The 15″ cabin cruiser, made from the mahogany plug, has a motor powered by four C cells. It’s over a half century old and still works.
I carved this 17″ Whitehall for myself and as a plug for fiberglass copies.
After I carved the Whitehall, I did as my father did and made a mold from it. I made several ‘glass Whitehalls as bathtub toys for my kids and my sister’s kids. An outwale finished the rough upper edge of the hulls.
On April 20, 2017, Dick Wagner passed away at home at the age of 84.
I first met Dick in 1976 or 1977 at The Old Boathouse, a small-boat livery he and his wife Colleen were running out of their floating home on northwest corner of Seattle’s Lake Union. In their watery “back yard” Dick had a handful of pulling boats; I rented a White Bear skiff a few times to take a girlfriend out rowing on the lake. I was then recently graduated from college and wasn’t quite sure what I would do with my life. I had done quite a few backpacking and bicycling trips through my teens, and in 1978 decided I’d do some long-distance cruising in a small boat. I didn’t have enough money to buy a boat, so I started reading up on boatbuilding. That same year Dick and some other devotees of wooden boats created the Center for Wooden Boats and put on the first Wooden Boat Festival.
The community that Dick was instrumental in bringing together played a large part in steering me toward a life devoted to small boats. The Center was a place where I could meet with others interested in wooden boats, and the festival was an event where I could learn from experienced builders. The beautifully crafted boats I saw there set the standard for the boats I would build.
When I brought the first of my boats to the festival, I wanted my work to pass muster with the other boatbuilders there whose craftsmanship I admired. And when I found myself on the receiving end of praise for my work, I was even more inspired to make every boat I built better than the one that preceded it. The festivals became the highlight of my summers. Dick orchestrated them with efficiency and grace and I was happy to repay in some small measure the opportunity he had provided me by staying after the festivals closed to help clean up the site.
As I gained experience in small-boat cruising, Dick invited me to contribute articles in Shavings, the Center’s newsletter, and he even ran the story of my first long cruise in a special edition that was distributed at the festival. He also asked me to do presentations at the Center’s monthly Third Friday Speaker Series.
My early travels in small boats were just personal adventures, but Dick showed me that they had more value than I had placed upon them. I doubt that the trajectory I took when I first started building and traveling in wooden boats would have taken me as far had it not been for the boost I got from Dick and the Center for Wooden Boats.
The Center has remained an important part of my life for almost 40 years, and even now, when I’m out paddling or biking, I’ll often stop to visit. There may not be anything new to see from one week to the next, but I feel the same fondness for the place as I do when I stop by the house where I grew up. In recent years, I would often find Dick there. He had handed over the day-to-day running of the Center to others quite some time ago, but I suspect he was there for the same reasons I was. It was always a pleasure to cross paths with him. He had aged well and exuded a fatherly warmth.
His passing is certainly a great loss to our community, but the effects of his vision, his wisdom, and his generosity will be felt for generations to come. I am just one of the innumerable people who are deeply indebted to him.
Our family of five has been sea kayaking and canoeing for several years around the islands and coastline of Maine’s mid-coast. Paddling took us where we wanted to go, but on some days when a breeze came up and we were fighting headwinds home, I started to think about a larger boat, one that would sail well to weather and would row easily when the wind died. I wanted it to have some of the simplicity of our kayaks or canoes and allow us to continue day-trip exploration and overnight adventures.
Buzz Bilik
The gunter rig comes into its own in a 10-knot breeze and the boat can get up to 6 knots and better.
I wanted a boat that would fit the Maine-coast aesthetic, be light enough to launch easily, and could remain watertight after prolonged dry storage, so I focused on glued plywood construction. The length had to be around 18′, small enough to fit in our barn, alongside the kayak fleet, yet big enough to feel safe and comfortable out in open water.
It didn’t take long for the Penobscot 17, designed by Arch Davis, to get to the top of my list. Even at a first look it seemed the perfect blend of all my requirements, and it was beautiful from any angle. The sweeping sheer, the shapely wineglass transom, and the almost-plumb bow made the Penobscot 17 look like it was designed a century ago.
Elliott Arons
The gunter rig requires standing rigging—a forestay to a stemhead fitting and shrouds to the forward pair of oarlocks—but both the schooner and the ketch rig have freestanding masts.
My wife bought the set of Penobscot 17 plans as a Christmas gift to me. The plans package is great, with everything laid out very clearly. Eight large bluelines detail every stage of the construction, and two large Mylar sheets provide full-sized patterns for the stem, transom, bulkheads, centerboard, and trunk, rudder, and other parts. A lengthy spiral-bound book covers much of the building process and includes a complete materials list.
The Penobscot 17 is not a project beyond most craftsmen with moderate experience. Over the years I’ve built furniture, stitch-and-glue kayaks, and skin-on-frame kayaks, and I’ve restored cedar-and-canvas canoes, so I felt comfortable tackling the building. I figured a good year working part-time would result in a nice boat. I was familiarizing myself with the project when I discovered a beautiful Penobscot 17 for sale online on the WoodenBoat website. After speaking with the builder, Jim Schlough, by phone and seeing a few pictures, I knew it was built as well or better than I could have, would probably cost less than I might have spent to build my own, and would get us out enjoying the boat a year sooner.
We’ve sailed PISTACHIO for two seasons now and have not been disappointed. Launching and retrieving the boat by trailer is easy, either working alone or with my wife. We can step the mast, get her rigged, and be on the water in 15 or 20 minutes. We keep the boat on a mooring during the summer, but she would be easy to put in and take out on a daily basis if needed. We pull PISTACHIO with our Subaru Outback, which has more than enough power for a boat and trailer of this size.
Elizabeth Root
The boat has two rowing stations and can be rowed tandem, but the author, seen here rowing solo, found the boat was so easily driven that he stopped bringing a second pair of oars.
The Penobscot 17 has two rowing stations and rows easily from either. Although there aren’t any foot braces, I haven’t felt the need for them. It would be simple to attach some to the floorboards if we were so inclined. In a departure from the plans PISTACHIO has dedicated fittings for the shrouds, leaving the forward oarlocks available for rowing, but if the mast of our sloop rig is up, it doesn’t allow the forward rower to lean back to finish the stroke with full power. The ketch and schooner rigs are rowed solo from the forward station when the masts are in place. The boat rows well enough with one person at oars that we quit bringing the second pair along.
Rick Kapellen
The side benches and thwarts, all on the same plane, provide unlimited seating options and an easy conversion to a roomy sleeping platform.
The cockpit layout provides a generous seating arrangement in what’s more a deck with footwells than thwarts and benches. The seats along the sides and stern are particularly good spots to lie down and take a nap while at anchor or even while underway. The boat easily fits one to four people; when waters are calm, we’ve had as many as six or seven adults aboard while I’ve been rowing, and it’s very stable and solid. With a 15′ 8″ waterline length and pretty substantial skeg, the boat tracks beautifully. Once up to speed, PISTACHIO cruises without a lot of effort on the oars. I haven’t measured her speed while rowing, but it is not appreciably slower than our kayaks.
Davis drew the Penobscot 17 with three rigs: gunter sloop, ketch, and schooner. PISTACHIO is set up with the gunter sloop rig, which is the only stayed rig of the three layouts. It has two shrouds and a forestay. The mast simply slides through a hole in the forward deck and then drops into a square step on the keel. All the middle bulkheads have open cutouts for storage, so it’s easy to see the foot of the mast to make sure it lands securely. It’s simple to raise the main and jib and be underway in a couple of minutes.
Our Penobscot 17 cruises along in light air and really gets going with 5 to 10 knots of wind. In a 10-knot breeze she easily makes 6 to 8 knots according to GPS. We have only one set of reefpoints in the main, so we haven’t been out in much over 15 knots. I think it would be good to add a couple more reefs for when winds unexpectedly get stronger.
The seating options are quite varied, and there’s never a problem shifting weight across the boat to respond to gusts and lulls, or to fine-tune fore-and-aft trim. The boat is unballasted and doesn’t have an exceptional amount of freeboard, so a good puff can put a rail down near or in the water. A friend took the helm of PISTACHIO last summer and dipped a rail for a bit, which created a bit of excitement for us, but the boat didn’t capsize, and to my surprise not much water came aboard. The boat seems to like to roll up on her curves and stay there. The Penobscot 17 is built with substantial foam under the seats and watertight compartments in the bow and stern. There have been very few times I’ve felt we were at much risk of capsizing.
Courtesy of Rick Kapellen
In light air, the Penobscot 17 can still make satisfactory headway.
On most points of sail the boat tracks and stays on course, likely because of the fairly large keel/deadwood and centerboard. The tiller is attached to the rudder with a very simple mortise-and-rope lock and requires just a very light touch. The rudder blade is pretty large, and although it does kick up, it’s simple to lift off and stow, so I tend to do that when beaching. The rig is very well balanced, and I’ve noticed almost no weather helm. We’ve been in some short 2′ chop and bigger swells, and even when beating into the wind, things stay dry inside. It’s a comfortable ride most of the time.
The Penobscot really excels while cruising among small islands. It is so simple to drop the sails in the lee of an island, pop the oars in, and row ashore. Schlough designed a simple boom crutch that pivots off the port end of the aft bulkhead. It keeps the boom off the centerline of the boat and gives the rower room to sit comfortably with the boom and sail off their right shoulder.
With her shallow draft we usually pull up to a beach, unload, and then let her float off the beach with an anchor or tied to shore. As for leaving her on a beach, I think using a couple of fenders as rollers would work to get her up or down, but with plywood bulkheads and a lot of hardwood trim, she does weigh a few hundred pounds. Depending on angle and make-up of the beach as well as tide heights, it could be harder to pull her around on shore. With the round bilge and deadwood, she will want to lie to one side as well. Usually the anchor seems simple, so we go that route.
I feel the Penobscot could be a good camp-cruiser, and I’ve been thinking of designing a boom tent for sleeping aboard. The footwells could easily be covered to create sleeping platform for two people. The Penobscot 17 can carry quite a load of camping equipment. There are open compartments under the transverse seats which provide spots to tuck gear, although water can slosh through these, so it’s good to stow things in dry bags. There is also stowage under the perimeter seats, but it is a bit more limited. Some cargo netting could work well to hold things in place there. We usually keep some gear in dry bags in the footwells also.
Jim Root
The keel and the deadrise will set the hull over on its bilge if the boat is dragged up on the beach, so anchoring is preferred for stops ashore.
I’ve been really impressed with the Penobscot 17. It sails and rows well and is easy to trailer and store. Almost every time we’re out, someone stops and asks about the boat, and I’m always a bit sad to say we did not build her, but I am proud to be the owner of such a beautiful boat.
Jim Root has posted videos of his Penobscot 17 rowing and under sail (1,2,3). He makes his home in Barrington Hills, Illinois, where he works in communications and advertising. He has a passion for painting and has a second home in Round Pond in mid-coast Maine where he finds subjects for his paintings of landscapes and boats. You can see his paintings at his website.
Penobscot 17 Particulars
LOA/17′0″
LWL/15′ 8″
Beam/5′ 4″
Draft, Board up/9.5″
Draft, Board down/3′ 0″
Weight/260 to 300 lbs
Sail area
Gunter rig/132 sq ft
Ketch/118 sq ft
Schooner/139 sq ft
The Penobscot 17 is available as a plan set, which includes full-sized patterns and a building manual, for $200. A bulkhead kit, including the six bulkheads, transom, stem, and plans, costs $975. Other kits are available from Arch Davis Designs.
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Having owned several larger cruising boats, I thought a simple, lightweight, and easily trailerable boat would be great way to downsize. For years, I’ve admired the designs of Sam Devlin, and I even owned one of his cruisers. When I stumbled upon the Pelicano 18 design, the classic look, along with Sam’s lyrical Design Notes, sucked me right in.
It’s remarkable that he created such graceful lines using only six flat plywood panels. The Pelicano might be a perfect starter boat, but for me the attraction was its economy and simplicity: it can be stored on a trailer without marina fees, haulouts, and storage. There is no pesky bottom growth, no through-hull fittings, no oily bilges, no systems to troubleshoot, and nothing to winterize.
Devlin Designing Boat Builders
In the Devlin shop, the first Pelicano 20 takes shape on a form of interlocking pieces of oriented strand board. The plywood bulkheads and frames appear solid here, but openings, interior shapes, and deck and cabin-roof contours have been partially cut by the CNC router.
The Pelicano hull shape was inspired by Mexican pangas—long narrow skiffs that are easily driven with modest outboard power and typically operated off the beach. With this in mind, Devlin designed the Pelicano to handle frequent beachings and to rest upright on her body with minimal tilt after a fallen tide. The stem-to-stern hardwood keel covered with a full-length stainless-steel shoe can take the wear. This boat is made to hit the beach.
Devlin Designing Boat Builders
The sharp entry and deep-V sections forward soften the ride in choppy water.
I found online pictures of beautiful Pelicanos built by the owners, but the boats were often multi-year projects. We wanted a boat sooner than that, and we were well aware of the reputation of Devlin’s factory-built boats for quality and attention to detail. We talked Devlin into building us a stretched version of his Pelicano 18 to gain a bit more space in the cockpit, and the result, our 20′ 2″ ADELINE, was the first Pelicano 20. The design has now been added to Devlin’s line of plans and kits.
For the do-it-yourselfer, Devlin’s stitch-and-glue method offers builders a straightforward way to construct a beautiful and seaworthy craft with basic tools. The building starts with a series of frames that form the mold for the exterior panels, and these frames become an integral part of the finished boat. You can start from scratch cutting panels to shape using the offsets provided in the set of plans, or you can order a kit with the panels CNC-cut to size.
Henry Clews
With its keel protected by a full-length stainless-steel shoe, the Pelicano is meant to come ashore on gravelly beaches.
Our Devlin-built Pelicano 20 is a real jewel. We were impressed when we first took the boat out for sea trials. Even with that big 115-hp Mercury outboard hanging on the stern, she floated perfectly on her lines, and performance turned out to be nothing short of breathtaking. We saw top speeds of over 35 mph, but more importantly, she cruised 20 mph quietly and effortlessly at half-throttle. Handling was excellent, with just the right amount of banking on the turns to keep you centered in your seat.
A sharp entry helps the Pelicano 20 handle choppy water with aplomb. The pronounced, full-length keel also cuts the water before it hits the hull, thus minimizing pounding. The ride might not be as cushy as it is with a deep-V hull, but the trade-off here is efficiency. The aft portion of the hull transitions to a very shallow V section that provides a large, nearly flat surface aft. The shape allows the boat to get on plane more easily and with minimal bow rise, while contributing to the boat’s stability.
The Pelicano 20 can cruise effortlessly at 20 knots with a 70-hp motor, while a similar-sized deep-V would require much more power and use more fuel. With a V-hull, the water is pushed out to the sides so there’s less lift. Many small deep-V hulls plow along with their bow high in the air and don’t plane below 15 knots. The Pelicano’s superior performance can be attributed to its light weight, a benefit of its stitch-and-glue construction.
Jim Perkins/Devlin Designing Boat Builders
The Pelicano 20 can get on plane with very little bow rise so there is no awkward speed where visibility forward is obscured.
Unlike many small planing boats, the Pelicano 20 has very little bow rise as she planes, which means you can run the boat very comfortably at any speed. ADELINE is fitted with hydraulic trim tabs, which are not really necessary for this boat but have been handy for leveling the hull when two heavy people sit on one side. They are also useful for lowering the bow for a better ride when pushing into a heavy chop.
One of the best features of this boat is easy trailering. To save on shipping costs, I towed the boat back home to New Hampshire from Washington State, crossing the country with our modest, mid-sized SUV. The Pelicano 20 didn’t require a heavy-duty pickup truck for towing. Total height on the trailer, when hitched to our car, is 7′4″, just right for storing the boat in our garage. This can be dropped to less than 7′ by lowering the trailer tongue, should that be necessary to get through a lower garage door. Our trailer also has a folding tongue that shortens its length by 30″ and brings it even with the bow of the boat.
Since then, ADELINE has put in many road miles. I have launched and retrieved her single-handed on a number of occasions; her light weight makes it easy to recover the boat with a simple hand winch. I estimate that with the 115-hp outboard, she weighs in at just under 2,000 lbs. Total towing weight, including trailer, is about 2,500 lbs.
While Devlin offers the Pelicano 18 and 23 in three versions—the bassboat, a shrimper with a hardtop over the helm, and an open fisherman with a center console—the Pelicano 20 is currently offered only in a bassboat configuration with a roomy cabin and a windshield for the helm. There’s room below for a small portable toilet and a V-berth big enough for two 6′-tall occupants.
Henry Clews
The cabin can comfortably accommodate two adults for nights at anchor.
Although several builders of the Pelicano 18 have added a shelf with a small sink and a fresh-water pump, we have not done so on ADELINE. Our boat has storage shelves over the bunks on either side and small storage lockers beneath. Up forward there’s an open storage area where we store life jackets, miscellaneous gear, and the portable toilet when it is not in use. Ahead of this open locker there’s an access port to the anchor-rode locker. The cabin has two stainless-steel, opening ports with screens, and a large overhead hatch that provides good light and ventilation.
Access to the forward cabin is through a sailboat-style companionway. The top is hinged, and folds against the windshield where there’s a brass hook to secure it. To close the entrance, two mahogany plywood panels are dropped in vertically, and the hatch folds down on top of these; it can be locked with a hasp.
The side decks are wide, allowing easy access forward. All the deck surfaces have a nonskid coating. Devlin has artfully worked the nonskid treatment around every cleat and deck fixture. At the bow there’s an anchor roller and a capped stainless hawsepipe to guide the anchor rode down into the locker below.
Henry Clews
The cockpit has room for two folding deck chairs, making comfortable seating for four while underway.
We added a folding canvas top with a large clear panel above the windshield, which allows full vision forward while standing at the helm, plus side panels and a back canvas that provide full enclosure of the helm and cockpit. We have two adjustable helm chairs and a pair of rod-holders along each side of the cockpit—simple notches cut in the plywood frames.
The cockpit is not self-draining; the floor is not high enough above the waterline to make this viable. Instead, water on the cockpit floor drains aft into a small well where it is then removed by an automatic electric bilge pump. When the boat is on the trailer, we open the transom drain plug. With the canvas cover in place, no water collects in the boat; rain is shed off the sides and aft into the self-draining outboard splash well.
In the center of the cockpit floor, just aft of the companionway, is a watertight hatch that provides access to the bilge and battery compartment. The 18-gallon fuel tank is tucked aft under the outboard splash well and is translucent so you can see the fuel level. There’s also an electronic fuel gauge. We figure we have a range of about 80 miles at fast cruise and quite a bit more if we run at a more leisurely pace. Over our first summer, ADELINE averaged 5.4 mpg.
Jim Perkins/Devlin Designing Boat Builders
Powered by a 115-hp outboard, the Pelicano 20 should achieve speeds of 40 mph. Designer and builder Sam Devlin is at the helm.
Being able to take this boat overland has opened up many possibilities. We have access to many beautiful inland lakes that used to be off-limits to our larger boat. We can trailer the boat from New Hampshire to Ontario’s beautiful Georgian Bay. By boat, a trip like this would require the better part of an entire summer to complete. We have very much enjoyed the versatility and portability of this little cruiser. Everywhere we go with this boat, on land and on sea, we get stares, comments, and thumbs-up; a lot of pride comes with such an uncommon and beautiful boat.
Henry Clews and his wife recently moved from New Hampshire and now make their home in Jensen Beach, Florida. They write extensively about their travels by boat on their blog, Sno’ Dog Log.
It was a quiet Sunday morning, August 15, 2016, and a thin fog, lit only by the dim glow of dawn, was lingering over the glassy water of Wisconsin’s St. Croix River. The sun had not yet risen and the only sounds were birds singing in the wooded valley and the whisper of the river. The sun began to lighten the sky as it came above the tall cliffs looming over the river, and its first rays caused the fog to slowly dissipate and reveal bright green trees. My life partner Kyle Hawkins and I had gathered with his parents and mine and his sister at the river’s edge to launch SØLVI, the 20′ faering we’d built in a shed in my parents’ side yard.
Holding the painter, I waded up to my knees while gliding the boat off the trailer. After we said our goodbyes I hopped aboard, took my position at the oars and Kyle shoved us off. We drifted while waving goodbye to our families, then rowed until they were just specks on the shoreline. Ahead was a long river of unknowns—a journey under oars and sail from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico.
We rowed SØLVI downstream together. The water’s surface was calm and blue, reflecting the luscious green of trees thick with leaves on the shorelines, yet we were enjoying our new boat as much as the landscape. Building it had consumed hundreds of Western red cedar strips and 1,400 hours of work over three months, and now the endless hours of sanding were paying off as the wood glowed in the midday sun, the varnish glistening, color radiating from each strip.
Photographs by Danielle Kreusch and Kyle Hawkins
A smile of running satisfaction came over me on our second go of Lake Pepin, the largest lake on the Mississippi. Our first attempt pitted us a against a strong headwind. We had to give up the fight, retreat, and wait to try again. Our patience was rewarded the next day with 30 miles of easy sailing.
We raised the sail even though the breeze was quite light. My chafed beginner’s arms and hands appreciated the break as we drifted leisurely down the river and the current moved us more than the wind. Nine miles downriver from the launch, Kyle spotted a break in the trees with patch of flat sand. We set up camp and enjoyed a glass of red wine by the campfire. We were both unaccustomed to rowing, and our muscles ached as we lay down in the tent. Sleep came quickly.
We covered about 8 to 10 miles a day for the first few days, and as we became comfortable rowing long hours we averaged 17 miles a day. The St. Croix River meanders 150 miles between Wisconsin and Minnesota and brought us through a few towns—Osceola, Stillwater, Hudson— but we had 10 days’ worth of food and water aboard so we rowed on by, preferring the quiet of the river valley, where we were surrounded by towering cliffs and dense forest.
As we were closing in on Prescott, Wisconsin, and the end of the St. Croix, we were rowing into the evening against 15 knots of wind and being chased by a thunderstorm. Kyle and I pulled hard on the oars as we went under first the highway bridge, then the railroad bridge, at the mouth of the St. Croix, marking the start of our journey on the Mississippi River. The deep blue water below us became murky until it faded into an opaque brown.
Quickly pulling up on Prescott Island, we found that we were sinking into deep muck surrounded by poison ivy. It would be getting dark soon, and with the thunderstorm approaching, we did our best to secure SØLVI on the muddy shoreline and set up camp while avoiding the poison ivy.
After we broke camp the following morning, I took my place at the oars and Kyle pushed us from the black mucky shoreline. I carefully guided us around the fallen trees and pointed the bow into the south wind. We rowed together for a few minutes before we could see our first lock and dam. Kyle stowed his oars while hailing the lockmaster over the VHF radio. At the same moment, a large towboat was working downriver which forced us to maneuver quickly to the other side of the channel to get out of the way.
With wind howling, small wavelets splashing, and a fast current, we eagerly waited for the okay to enter the lock. At the sight of the green light and the sound of the horn, Kyle and I rowed cautiously in. Lines were handed down to us, and we relaxed a bit while the lock slowly lowered us down. The large doors creaked open and we rowed past the cement walls and back into the open river. We heard the voice of the lock master come over channel 16, “Row, row, row your boat…,” his raspy voice sang. Laughing, we looked back and waved to the gray-haired man watching us from above.
At De Soto, Wisconsin, the flooded Mississippi River had us taking refuge under our boom tent. We waded through a nearby drainage tunnel that took us under a railroad to a lively pub where we enjoyed our first cold brews of the trip.
By the end of our third week, Kyle and I were covering 20 to 30 miles a day. On good days more than half of those miles were under sail, but when there was either too little wind or wind in the wrong direction we spent our days rowing.
We left camp and rowed into the chilled, fog-covered river, crossing the Wisconsin/Illinois border as the sun was rising and. As we made a turn out of a small side channel the wind howled, and instantly we felt the oars get heavy. We worked against a 15-knot headwind, staying close to the shore to avoid its full strength.
Two weeks into the journey and SØLVI was still so shiny! My faithful bicycle mirror, clipped to my sunglasses, guided the way. We kept our life jackets at our feet, ready to grab, for the entire trip.
Two hours later, we were 10 miles downriver, still tugging hard on the oars. Kyle checked the chart, and noted a series of sloughs that ran parallel with the main channel. At our first opportunity we veered left into a narrow slough. This provided a welcome reprieve and we meandered through a slender waterway covered with a canopy of trees. Unfortunately, none of the sloughs lasted long, and each time we poked our bow out into the main river, the wind pushed relentlessly against us.
Camped on an island across from Fort Madison, Iowa, we found a cellular hotspot that gave us internet access in a beautiful setting. Kyle checked the weather and responded to some emails while I set up camp and prepared for dinner.
While Kyle was busy making lunch, I continued to row us downriver. If I set my oars down for a split second, the wind would push us back upriver. We were exhausted and fed up with the fight against a wind gusting to 20 knots when Kyle spotted a large tree slowly drifting downriver, quickly rowed over to it, and looped our painter around the mostly submerged trunk. Giggling at our strange tow, I stowed my oars as the log pulled us down river at a fairly consistent 2 knots, not quite as fast as the 3 knots we had been making rowing into the headwind, but a great relief that gave our arms a rest and lifted our spirits.
The constant commercial traffic of the Mississippi kept us on our toes. Here, near Memphis, southbound barges slid by at 7 knots, nearly silent until the three-engine tow came along side us, black smoke lingering behind it.
Our confidence and strength grew as we voyaged down the Mississippi. We became comfortable making 30 miles a day, and mud and mosquitoes became our new normal. The river grew too, as we cleared the last lock and dam near St. Louis and entered the lower Mississippi. Many of the towboats there pushed rafts of over 40 barges, more than three times the size of the rafts we’d become accustomed to.
Kyle and I found a pleasing rhythm in our days; the river and its shoreline became our home, the people along the way became our community, and sailing, rowing, and caring for SØLVI was our job. Each night we’d haul SØLVI ashore on a sandbar, quickly turn it into a temporary home by stringing up clotheslines to air clothes and sleeping bags, laying out a kitchen around a campfire, and setting up our tent. Each morning, as we pushed SØLVI off the beach, we’d look back at the footprints we’d left behind, knowing those would be gone with the next rain or rise of the river.
After a long muggy day of rowing 33 miles near the Kentucky/Tennessee border, we landed on one of the many massive sandbars that the line the lower Mississippi River. We pulled SØLVI up on inflatable rollers, and hauled her a good safe distance from the water. Kyle drove a stake to secure SØLVI for the night and we each went our own direction in our wordless routine. I grabbed the tent, sleeping pads, and bag; Kyle headed for the driftwood on the far end of the sandbar island. The sun descended over the riverbank, and the sky glowed orange, yellow, and pink. I grabbed the ground tarp, gave it a couple shakes, and let it flutter to the area of sand that would be our home for the evening. Spreading the ground cloth, tent, and fly was like making the bed at home.
When fish leaped from the orange-tinted river I would stop to watch their rings of ripples drift downstream and then realize I was standing stock still as if time had stopped. In spite of my halting progress, within 30 minutes the empty sandbar was transformed into a temporary home. I placed our books and notebooks in the tent and walked over to the smoking fire pit Kyle had dug into the sand. I plopped down in my folding chair and opened cans and measured rice for a dinner of burritos. Hours slipped by as we enjoyed a warm meal, then glowing embers, and then a clear, starlit sky.
The Lower Mississippi is surrounded by farmland, but it is isolated by levees that create a sense of solitude and independence. Kyle and I were grateful for our little boat for getting us so far.
"Do you feel that?” Kyle’s sleepy voice asked in the predawn morning. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I sat up, still cocooned in our double sleeping bag. I felt a cool breeze rush across my face through our open tent doors. A northerly wind. I imagined what it would be like to have a full day of running downwind. Kyle and I packed up camp, made breakfast, and prepared SØLVI for the day; we both moved a bit quicker than usual, eager to take advantage of the favorable wind.
An hour later, I was in my rowing seat as Kyle pushed us off the sandbar. I untied the tiller as Kyle heaved on the main halyard releasing our tanbark sail from where it had been resting during the last windless week. Now the wind was blowing at a consistent 8 knots from directly astern and we were on a stretch of river between Missouri and Kentucky that was fairly straight, with only small and subtle bends. A luscious green shoreline surrounded us on both sides and as I watched the trees go by the sound of water rushing under SØLVI’s hull filled my ears as we cruised down the middle of the empty river.
Kyle lay on his back playing his harmonica, improvising gentle tunes for a quiet morning. With each gust SØLVI surged forward. As the sun made its way across the blue sky, the wind picked up and we put in a reef. We passed under a bridge where a man in a lift was working—he stopped what he was doing to wave and watch as we sailed by below him. By 4:00 p.m. we had covered over 30 miles under sail and were ready to camp. We dropped the sail and rowed to the left bank where there was a break in the trees and a small sandy beach.
A few days after reaching Tennessee, we rowed around the south-pointing tip of Mud Island, a nearly 3-mile-long peninsula really, into the small inlet between Memphis, Tennessee, and the river. Having no idea where to stop or put the boat, we headed for a small cluster of masts a half mile to the north. A small sign indicated we had arrived at the Memphis Yacht Club. We secured the boat at the fuel dock, grabbed our water jugs and a few dollars for ice, and went to inquire about a place to stay for the night.
The woman working at the yacht club stared at us and our boat quizzically for a moment before showing us the hose and ice chest. When we asked if we could spend the night in a slip, her surprised response was, “Can you sleep on that thing?” After I explained that our boom tent and sleeping boards converted the boat into a compact and cozy liveaboard, she gave us the okay. We rowed SØLVI into an oversized slip and arranged docklines.
A few minutes later, a man who was staying on a massive yacht a few slips down came and introduced himself as Captain Mark. He had lively blue eyes, a friendly smile, and a very firm handshake. He asked about our boat and our journey. After a few good laughs (and after making sure we had indeed come all the way from Wisconsin), he volunteered to drive us to the store to resupply our groceries. At other towns we had walked as many as 4 miles to get to a grocery store, so we gladly accepted his offer.
After shopping, we put several full bags in the back of Captain Mark’s truck, grateful we wouldn’t have to carry the load in my backpack. Later that afternoon we walked into Memphis, the first big city we had visited since leaving Wisconsin 1,200 miles upstream. I caught myself gaping at all the cars, people, noises, construction, and tall buildings. Even the smell of the soap on my hands after using a public restroom was overwhelming.
Kyle and I kept wandering and ended our evening at a small cafe on Beale Street listening to the blues harmonica. It was dark by the time we retreated to the boom tent covering SØLVI.
Two days south of Memphis, a blustery southern wind had kicked up. Rowing into it was so exhausting that we decided to sail, tacking back and forth across the river. While tedious, it provided a reprieve from the slow grind of rowing into the strong headwind. Fall was approaching and the number of towboats making their way upriver for the autumn harvest increased, adding other obstacles. When a tow was coming our way we dropped the sail and rowed out of the channel. Even with the frequent interruptions to sailing, we passed the morning maneuvering downriver rather effectively.
The sun was sitting just above us as a tow was making its way upriver, so we hugged the inside channel markers, thinking we could safely continue sailing just on the edge of the deep water. The towboat made a change of course that we hadn’t anticipated, so to stay clear we moved just outside the channel. SØLVI came to a sudden stop to an excruciating sound of wood splitting and water rushing into the boat. I shouted at Kyle, “Water’s coming through the daggerboard trunk!”
Thirty miles South of Memphis, we hit a submerged wing dam and Kyle was soon surrounded by all our floating belongings. Despite my constant bailing I was unable to get the water below this level. Fortunately everything within the lockers stayed nice and dry.
We had struck a wing dam, one of hundreds along the Lower Mississippi River. They are rows of piled rocks sticking out from shore to hold the river in its course and keep silt from accumulating in the channel. During low water the wing dams are exposed, but at normal river levels they may be hidden just below the surface of the muddy water.
The current, running only about 2 knots, was a powerful force pushing against SØLVI. We dropped the sail and struggled to pull the daggerboard free. Kyle hopped out and got SØLVI to heel enough to free the board; I bailed frantically while he got back aboard. Bailing seemed useless as the water didn’t seem to go down, but it never rose above the seats—SØLVI had plenty of built-in buoyancy, enough to keep us afloat. My heart was racing as Kyle rowed us to the nearest sandbar.
We came to a halt and got out to haul SØLVI up onto the bar. We inspected the damage. Kyle grabbed the daggerboard and began to laugh. “I guess I overbuilt this,” he said. “It was supposed to break, not the trunk.” The board was mangled but otherwise intact. We were both laughing as we put our gear on the sandbar.
We had enough fiberglass and epoxy in the repair kit to fix the damaged trunk during a forced stay on a Mississippi River sandbar.
Kyle laid out fiberglass, epoxy, fumed silica, gloves, and mixing cups, then with a look of satisfaction said, “We can fix the boat right here.” We made camp, and over the course of three days put SØLVI back in working order. We added piece of cedar driftwood as a support beam with the hopes of preventing the daggerboard trunk from breaking again.
We always carried enough food and water to tide us over in case of emergencies, so we enjoyed the layover. At night, after hours of repairwork, we sipped a bit of red wine and played Frisbee, taking full advantage of being shipwrecked.
Rowing along one afternoon we heard the soft, kind voice of an older gentleman from the shore: “Do you guys want to come visit?” We spent the afternoon on the deck of his cabin, eating lunch and enjoying the view; one of the many joys the leisurely pace of life on the river encouraged. We camped on the Mississippi side of the river, downstream from Helena, Arkansas.
Our repair held, and we continued downriver and crossed the Arkansas/Louisiana border. Keeping away from the large tows was beginning to wear on us, so to avoid the even heavier ship traffic from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, we decided to take a route less traveled: The Atchafalaya River. This distributary is 137 miles long and would take us to Morgan City, a Mississippi River delta town just 25 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
Just south of Vicksburg, Mississippi, we made camp early to celebrate Kyle’s 30th birthday. We stayed the next day to weather some rain and high winds. This was the only time someone asked us to leave a campsite along the river. The island’s caretaker was polite and let us stay until morning, but claimed they had suffered vandalism and theft at the hands of campers.
Eight river miles north of Baton Rouge, we took a right turn off the Mississippi and entered the locks at the Old River Dam. As we were lowered, the old lock creaked and groaned in the early-morning quiet. The lock gates opened to the largest wetland in the United States. Muddy shores were covered in green marsh and cypress trees; alligators basked in the sun. With the wind behind us we set sail and maneuvered down the middle of the river, and didn’t see a single boat the entire day.
The Atchafalaya river was a great treat after the heavy commercial traffic on the big Mississippi. Camping could be a challenge because of the often endless mud banks, but this spot was nearly perfect.
The wind followed us and as the sun settled on west bank, we searched under a pastel-streaked sky for a place to camp. Mud lined the river as far as we could see, so as Kyle rowed us toward shore, I slipped on my rubber boots. I stepped into the deep mud and we maneuvered SØLVI onto a roller, but neither of us wanted to haul our gear across the mud, so we decided to sleep in the boat. We had become quite accustomed to spending nights aboard the boat and slept quite well.
Along the Atchafalaya we saw bobcats, eagles, and more alligators. Except for a few fishing boats, we had the river to ourselves and let SØLVI drift wherever she wanted to during our lunch breaks. We reached Morgan City in mid-November, and surged down the last stretch of the Atchafalaya at a steady 6 knots with a 35-mph wind behind us.
This camp on a crushed-shell beach at the mouth of Oyster Bayou was our last night in protected waters before we ventured out into the Gulf.
We spent the night anchored in a marsh and woke to a still, muggy day. We rowed across a bay surrounded by tall cypress trees, each stroke bringing us closer to the Gulf. The smell of salt was in the air as we turned out of Fourleague Bay into Oyster Bayou and caught our first glimpse of the Gulf of Mexico. The sun was setting over its broad arc, and a pair of dolphins swam alongside SØLVI. Two more burst from the water, airborne. We camped on the edge of Oyster Bayou, and when we crawled into the tent, sleep came fast as the Gulf swell gently broke on the shoreline.
Kyle and I spent the next five days cruising eastward along the open Gulf and hiding behind barrier islands when possible. Our only company was that of dolphins and pelicans. Crossing 6 miles from Isles Dernieres to Timbalier, SØLVI rose on the Gulf swell as we sailed on a beam reach across open water. We made camp on the inside shore of this uninhabited barrier island, then took a walk to the Gulf side. As the sun descended we stood together with our hands clasped, the endless horizon stretched out in front of us.
From Timbailier we made a 16-mile crossing under oars to a sandbar near Port Fourchon, and landed on the beach just as a dark thunder cloud moved in off the Gulf. The next morning Kyle woke me, saying enthusiastically, “Rise and shine! Twenty-one miles of open Gulf today. Let’s go!” It was still dark as we packed up and wolfed down breakfast.
The wind was blowing from the east-northeast as we rowed out into the Gulf; we raised the sail and turned east with the main sheeted in tight. I sat to windward while Kyle pinched into the wind as much as possible to keep our heading. SØLVI pounded into 3′ waves and spray swept over the boat. At midday the wind made a shift to the north and we enjoyed a beam reach, and sailed parallel to the shoreline. Twenty miles later, we were a mile offshore, south of Grand Isle, Louisiana. The wind had all but vanished in the midday heat, so we dropped the sail to let SØLVI drift. Salty, sweaty, and smelly, we plunged into the water and swam around our boat’s scarred blue hull.
We rowed to Grand Isle refreshed. It was the evening of November 25, the setting sun was casting an amber glow on the houses lining the beach. Inside the breakwater, we floated for a few moments and looked out into the Gulf, the sun reflecting on SØLVI’s worn varnish.
After checking in at a marina and converting SØLVI into our tented home, we went searching for some cold drinks and warm food to honor our longest open-water crossing. We opened the iPad for our weather and route research while enjoying some pizza on a patio overlooking the marina. Kyle let out a heavy sigh. The forecast threatened weeks of blustery winds, 8′ to 12’ seas, and severe thunderstorms.
We had hoped to continue island-hopping eastward and eventually make it to my parents’ home in St. Petersburg, Florida, but with large exposed areas between islands, I knew high seas and 35 to 40 knots of wind would even impact the waters behind the barrier islands. Continuing on in SØLVI was neither safe nor feasible.
We retreated to SØLVI where we had a restless night of sleep; the wind picked up and shook the boom tent loudly. The following morning we sipped hot coffee while arranging to ship SØLVI to St. Petersburg. Kyle was scrolling through flight options to get us home while I sat across from him checking the forecast as though it would magically change. We had planned to make it from Wisconsin to Florida under our own power, and I was still determined to do that. “Let’s walk!” I exclaimed.
Kyle was unenthused, but I could tell by his smile that he had another plan. Two days later, SØLVI was on a trailer and on her way. A shiny new tandem bike was delivered to us. SØLVI had done her part, carrying us safely for 2,000 miles, and over the next three weeks DAISY, our tandem bike, carried us the 500 miles to Florida where our family picked us up just in time for Christmas.
While our five-month, 2,500-mile voyage didn’t go exactly as planned, Kyle and I reached Florida together—our bodies, minds, and partnership stronger than we could have ever imagined.
Danielle Kreusch grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and spent a lot of time hiking and camping in the mountains. After moving to Florida to finish her BA in Psychology and Child Development, Danielle met Kyle Hawkins, who took her sailing on their third date. For the last few years they’ve been living aboard their 35’ Ben Bow cutter and cruise with it whenever possible. This river trip was their first small-boat excursion, and they have both fallen in love with the idea of continuing to travel in small boats like SØLVI.
Shortly before embarking on our voyage I took my first solo sail on SØLVI on the upper St. Croix River. This section of the river was Kyle’s boyhood playground.
SØLVI
Bearing a Norwegian name meaning Sun Strength, SØLVI is a faering designed by John Harris of Chesapeake Light Craft. The 19′ 8″ by 4′ 6″ hull was designed for stitch-and-glue plywood, but SØLVI is strip-planked. While strip-planking is most often employed for rounded hulls, SØLVI maintains the chines of the original design. Before fiberglass was applied, Kyle draped blankets on top of the upside-down hull and space heaters beneath it to heat the cedar. The blankets and heater were removed and the fiberglass and epoxy were applied. As the cedar cooled and contracted, the wood’s pores pulled the epoxy in. Deck panels were stripped as flat panels and ‘glassed on both sides before being installed on the boat.
While Harris’s drawings included a pivoting centerboard and rudder blade, SØLVI has a daggerboard to reduce the intrusion into the cockpit. The damage to the trunk that occurred on the Mississippi River was caused by a lateral impact, so a pivoting centerboard may have suffered some damage as well, though the larger area of a longer trunk’s connection to the hull might have fared better.
SØLVI’s outriggers are made of solid 1″x1″ aluminum, 8″ long at the forward rowing station and 13″ long at the aft station. They’re equipped with Concept2 oarlocks. The all-carbon oars are also by Concept2 and originally had hatchet blades. Kyle replaced those blades with more traditionally shaped ocean-rowing blades to make them better suited for rough water. Danielle’s oars were shortened by 6″. In retrospect Kyle would have made the blades 1″ narrower to make them easier to pull during long hours of rowing.
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 wood I like best for cleats, snotter thimbles, and parrel beads is locust, and I get all I need for free by the side of the road after a wind storm. Making the first cuts on the bandsaw used to be the part of the process that made me rather nervous.
The worst of the winter storms here in Seattle produce some very good wood for salvage. High winds drop a lot of limbs from my neighborhood’s hardwood trees and wind-whipped waves bring fresh driftwood to the local Puget Sound beaches. City crews often cut locust, cherry, and alder windfalls into short lengths and leave the wood in the roadside brush; yellow and red cedar occasionally get added to the driftwood that piles up above the high-tide line. Some pieces of wood are too good to pass up—I’ll often collect locust for cleats and parrel beads, and yellow cedar for carving and modelmaking.
The hardest part of putting this found wood to good use is making the first two cuts to turn round logs and irregular driftwood into dimensional lumber. I’ve freehanded pieces through the bandsaw, but the cuts aren’t straight, and working unstable round shapes on a bandsaw scares me. I found some gizmos on the web—bandsaw log milling sleds—that make the job of getting straight cuts on logs a lot easier.
The hardwood runner glued to the bottom of the plywood fits the miter gauge slot in the bandsaw table. The extra bit extending beyond the plywood makes it easier to locate the runner in the slot.
The sleds are guided by a hardwood strip milled to slide in the miter-gauge slot on the bandsaw table. A piece of plywood serves as the sled’s base. I used 9mm plywood, thick enough to do the job without taking up too much of the bandsaw’s capacity. On top of the plywood I secured two blocks of ash, each with a couple of holes to fit a pipe clamp. The diameter of the pipe is just over 1″, so after drilling the holes with a 1″ Forstner bit, I had to use a rattail file to open them up to get a slip fit.
A short length of pipe is added to the tail end of the clamp. Loosening the foot of clamp makes some of its threads available for the extension.
The fixed jaw of the pipe clamp is threaded onto the end of the pipe, and by backing the pipe off halfway I could thread in a short length of pipe to provide an extension to slip into one of the 1″ holes in the ash blocks.
Running the sled through the bandsaw trims the slightly oversized base to size and after that, the pipe clamp is taken apart and reassembled between the two blocks. With the driftwood or windfall clamped in place, I’m ready to saw.
Trimming bark away from the top and bottom is sometimes required to provide clearance. This first iteration of my sled had a 3/4″ x 2 1/2″ stiffener. It turns out that it wasn’t necessary and only got in the way, so I removed it. This locust log shown has been drying for a few years.
Bandsaw blades can drift to the side when using a fence that is parallel to the blade or when using the miter slot as a guide, so I minimized that three ways: I centered the blade on the crown of the bandsaw wheels, used extra blade tension, used a sharp blade, and went with a slow feed rate to minimize deflection caused by pressure and heat.
The piece of Alaskan yellow cedar driftwood has exceedingly fine grain, around 100 rings per inch. Wood gathered from a beach often has sand driven deep into the cracks; the grit can quickly dull a blade.
My sled is short because the wood I mill will be used for small pieces; fire-wood lengths are what I often find. Shorter cuts make blade drift less of a problem. The blade might go 1/32″ into the sled or veer away by as much but that’s not enough to worry about.
This piece of locust was a bit long for the clamp in its normal configuration, so I slipped the moveable part off and set it outside of the block. A bit of scrap wood bridges the gap. After I trimmed the bark from two sides, the log measured about 7 1/2″. To get enough clearance I removed the bandsaw’s upper guide.
Removing the upper guide adds 1″ of additional clearance.
With the upper guide removed, I temporarily bolted a piece of hardwood to the back of the upper blade guard. It is sized to just touch the back of the blade when it is centered on the wheel. I didn’t bother with installing blocks at the sides of the blade. Using a slow feed rate and applying very little pressure on the blade allowed it to cut with a minimal drift.
After making the first cut, the newly sawn flat surface is placed on the base of the sled for the second cut. With two cut surfaces at right angles to each other I can continue milling with the sled or move the work to the tablesaw.
Having made two cuts with the sled I can continue working using the usual fences on the bandsaw or tablesaw.
The sled has turned my bandsaw into a mini-sawmill, and I can work salvaged wood faster and with greater safety.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
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Back in the ’70s, I used to make some of my own raingear, at first using coated nylon, then switching to Gore-Tex when it was introduced in the last half of that decade. The early versions of the waterproof, breathable fabric didn’t keep me dry in a prolonged downpour, so I often wore a yellow Helly Hansen slicker over my Gore-Tex jacket. More than three decades later I still have that slicker, and with the exception of two very small tears, it is still a great raincoat.
As much as I relied upon that old standby in the wettest weather, it was high time to see what Helly Hansen is making now. So, during this especially rainy spring here in Seattle, I’ve been wearing Helly Hansen’s Newport Coastal Jacket and Newport Pant. The shells of both are made of “Helly Tech,” Helly Hansen’s breathable waterproof fabric. All the seams are sealed with transparent tape fused to the fabric. Both garments were completely waterproof.
The pant legs were just barely large enough to be coaxed over my size-13 shoes and mukluks, but the mesh and light nylon fabric lining got hung up on the toes and heels. It may be easier to pull the pants over smaller footwear, but for me it was best to slip the rain pants on over my stocking feet or do as firemen do—slip the pant legs over the boot tops before putting the boots on. Velcro cinches at the cuffs to hold them tight around the ankles and keep the fabric from getting under heels. More Velcro cinches at the waist keep the pants in place just as a belt would.
The high bib provided an extra layer of warmth around my core.
Because the pants don’t just hang from the suspenders, it was easier to sit or crouch. The pockets, one over each thigh, were a whole lot easier to access, especially when sitting, than conventional pockets located closer to the waist. Patches on the seat, knees, and cuffs reinforce the areas of greatest wear. The zipper is long and protected in front by a Velcro-lined flap and in back by a large gusset. The gusset provided extra warmth and was loose enough to be pulled out of the way to get to the fly of base-layer pants.
The high, fleece-lined collar protects the neck and conceals the hood.
The jacket has a high collar with fleece on the inside. When the front zipper was all the way up, the fleece wrapped around my neck and came up to my nose. It was toasty-warm. The hood tucked inside the collar is made of a highly visible breathable/waterproof fabric and has a mesh liner. An adjustable elastic cord at the back pulls the sides of the hood back for a wider field of view, and another cord around the face opening tightens the fit to keep out wind-driven spray and rain. The hood moved with me so I had good visibility when looking over my shoulder while rowing. Quite by accident, I discovered that the collar itself can be inverted to become a second inner hood for extra warmth.
The collar wasn’t designed to serve as an inner hood, but it fit well when inverted and was especially warm.
Each wrist cuff has an inner layer of stretchy rubberized fabric that created a seal to keep water out when I was reaching overhead. The protective outer cuff could be tightened up to keep it clear of my hands while I was working, or loosened so I could pull my hands in out of the wind. Both cuffs are adjustable with Velcro patches that will accommodate a wide range of wrist sizes.
The jacket has two waist-height pockets with top-loading cargo pockets that have beneath them side-opening hand-warming pockets with fleece linings. The side-opening breast pockets are also lined for warmth.
There are SOLAS retroreflective patches on the shoulders, on the forearms, and at the top front of the pants bib (which are covered up when wearing the coat). Both the jacket and pants have loops for hanging on a hook to drip-dry. The loop on the back of the pants is at waist level, which is great for hanging on lower hooks.
The hood moved with my head so my view wasn’t cut off when I looked over my shoulder.
When I’ve taken the Newport jacket and pants out rowing in the rain, they’ve kept me dry, and got only a bit clammy, not sweaty, inside when I was rowing hard. The jacket offered nothing to snag while I was rowing, and none of the Velcro’s prickly hook side came in contact with my skin.
Some of my rainy-day chores around the house were as good as any to test the cuffs. During thunderstorms, tending to plastic tarps over the four boats I have in the yard is always good for getting a bit soggy. I also unclogged a downspout, the part that angles under the eaves from the gutter to the side of the house, which guarantees a good soaking. Working overhead on the downspout usually makes a funnel out of an ordinary coat sleeve, but the inner cuffs only let a trickle run down to my elbow. The sleeve’s liner absorbed the water, and a few minutes after I’d cleared the downspout, the breathable outer shell had allowed the moisture out and I was dry again.
I’m in no hurry to retire my old yellow Helly Hanson slicker—I have a shot at getting a half century of use out of it—but for boating, it was clear that the modern materials and design that Helly Hansen put into the Newport jacket and pants are a quantum leap forward in protection, utility, and comfort.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Far from the canals and lagoons of Venice, Richard Nissen plies the pastoral waters of the River Thames. His oars are crossed in the alla valesana style.
Richard Nissen lives in a houseboat on the Thames, and naturally he has gathered a collection of small boats for taking advantage of the river that flows past his home. He has an 1890s lapstrake single racing shell that he restored, a double, and a catamaran single—all for sculling—a stitch-and-glue canoe that he and a friend paddled 200 miles down the Thames to its mouth, and GEM, a 1920s electric launch.
Phil Wragg
With an additional forcola forward, the s’ciopon can be rowed with a pair of oars. The stern rower, popièr, customarily rows a starboard oar and the bow rower, provier, rows port.
Richard traveled to Venice and while there took a lesson in Venetian rowing. The experience piqued an interest in forward-facing, stand-up rowing. The Venetians have two techniques: alla veneta with a single oar, in the manner of gondoliers, and alla valesana with two oars crossing each other—the port oar is rowed with the right hand and the starboard oar is handled with the left. Both methods take a lot of practice to master and Richard wanted to continue working on his Venetian technique when he returned home, so he decided to build a Venetian boat.
Phil Wragg
As a workboat, a s’ciopon doesn’t have a forcola as elaborate as those used aboard gondolas.
He chose the smallest and simplest of traditional designs, a s’ciopon. The name is derived from the Italian word for rifle, and reflects the design’s original purpose—hunting waterfowl. The boats are about 15′ to 18′ long and were once meant to carry a massive gun up to 9′ long with a 3″ bore. Richard bought plans for a 5-meter s’ciopon from Gilberto Penzo, one of Venice’s leading authorities on traditional boats and rowing. To get the project to fit into his garage shop, he had to shorten the length from 18′ to 16′.
Richard Nissen
Nissen’s s’ciopon has traditional framing, making it quite stout, but the plywood sides and bottom reduce the boat’s weight.
The plans provide beautiful drawings, but not much advice on the construction, so the project was ambitious, especially as Richard’s first venture into building a boat from start to finish. The wooden oarlocks, or forocle, are complex pieces with many curves, each meant for a particular stroke, and the oars, remi, have some subtle asymmetries, but Richard took on those challenges. Workboats in Venice can have very crude versions of these two items, but Richard’s efforts were to his credit.
Phil Wragg
A Venetian oar, called a remo, appears to be quite simple, but it is neither straight nor symmetrical in plan or profile.
A traditional s’ciopon would be heavily built, and that weight, settling the hull well into the water, provides stability. Richard used plywood for the bottom and sides, which reduced the weight and, as he discovered, “the lighter the boat, the less secure you feel standing up in it to row.” He got used to the lesser stability, but as a precaution for choppy water, he lowered the center thwart a few inches from its normal position just below the sheer, and added a set of oarlocks so he could row sitting down with conventional oars.
Phil Wragg
With the lowered thwart amidships and a pair of spoon-bladed oars aboard, this s’ciopon can be rowed with the oarsman seated.
Richard takes his s’ciopon out on the Thames in the evenings when the river is usually undisturbed by large powerboats. He continues to work on rowing alla valesana and says, “with the traditional open forcula you can take the oar out when you want, but keeping the oar in place is terribly hard. Every time I go Venetian rowing I take lots of strokes perfectly, and then suddenly the oar pops out.”
Phil Wragg
The ‘midship thwart was originally intended to support the butt of the large rifle that a s’ciopon once carried. Richard lowered the thwart in his s’ciopon so it could also be used for conventional rowing.
Once he gets his two-oar technique honed, he’ll take on rowing solo alla veneta where the veering of the bow away from the oar has to be corrected by angling the blade of the oar forward and keeping it submerged on the return stroke. Holding a straight course isn’t easy. The intersections of Venice’s canals require boats that can spin around a tight corner, so their bottoms have lots of rocker and aren’t outfitted with skegs. Boats like the s’ciopon have very little directional stability.
“A Venetian boat is designed for operating in Venice and, culturally, are a million miles from other sorts of boats,” notes Richard. “They are seldom seen in other parts of the world.” At least one is now seen on the Thames.
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I first saw designer Andrew Wolstenholme’s Coot dinghy at the Beale Park Boat Show around 10 years ago when his own Coot was being sailed on the lake by his daughter Jo. Somehow, that boat caught my eye among all the other traditional gaffers and luggers at the show.
I’d been looking for a design to build following the sale of my Iain Oughtred Whilly Tern, and had whittled my criteria down to something around 12′ that would be manageable on the beach, easily sailed singlehanded, and roomy enough for two or three when needed. And, of course, it had to be pretty.
Graham Neil
Designer Wolstenholme describes the Coot as a Swallows and Amazons-style rowing and sailing dinghy. It should have a broad appeal beyond the fans of Arthur Ransome’s books.
I’m not sure why it caught my eye. Perhaps it was the cat rig with its high-peaked gaff, which, although common on the eastern seaboard of the USA, isn’t seen much in the U.K. Or it could have been that delicately elegant sheer that got my attention. Whatever it was, I was smitten.
Beale Park is the kind of boat show where it is possible to chat to designers, builders, and owners as you enjoy the atmosphere, so I took the opportunity to spend some time with Wolstenholme and get a closer look at his boat.
Colin Stroud
The plans include an option for a high-peaked standing lug rig.
The Coot is 10′11 1/4″ in length with a beam of 4’7 1/4″ and carries a single high-peaked gaff sail of 70 sq ft (an optional lug rig is described in the plans). The pretty lapstrake hull has a traditional appearance with a near-vertical stem filling out amidships to firm, round bilges before tucking up to a sweet little transom. While many traditional dinghies of a similar size are almost indistinguishable from one another, there is something instantly identifiable about the Coot’s unique combination of hull and rig.
The interior arrangements are fairly conventional for a small, open boat. There is a central thwart for rowing solo, with a second rowing position on the forward thwart to help with trim when a passenger is sitting in the stern sheets. The mast is stepped well forward in a distinctive arched partner, leaving plenty of room on the forward thwart for an adult passenger or maybe a couple of children. Both the centerboard and rudder pivot for those times when the water gets a bit thin.
Andrew Wolstenholme
The arched mast partner provides a nice complement to the curve of the sheer.
The plans, which include full-sized patterns for the molds, are designed for boatbuilders with some experience: step-by-step instructions are not included. The Coot can be built with glued-lap plywood, strip planking, or cold-molding. For my preferred method of glued-lap plywood, the plank shapes aren’t given with the plans, so I would have to line off the planks myself, something which made me a bit nervous. With 10 planks per side there was a lot of scope for me to get things wrong. While I was considering the Coot, Wolstenholme was working with Alec Jordan of Jordan Boats to provide a CNC-kit of planks. I soon had a set of plans from Wolstenholme, and a kit of precut planks was on its way from Jordan.
Kelly Neu
The 10 pre-cut strakes of this kit-built Coot show the midsection’s rounded bilges.
The kit includes all the plywood parts for the hull, leaving it up to the builder to source the timber and fashion all the other parts to complete the boat. I chose locally grown Douglas-fir for the spars, transom, and keelson and experimented with sweet chestnut for the thwarts and gunwales. I’ve been very pleased with the results. The build took me about 18 months working in my spare time, and the boat was launched with the usual formalities on Barton Broad in Norfolk.
I tow the boat on a combi-trailer—a launch cart piggybacked on a road trailer— and can easily handle the 230-lb boat and 78-lb cart for launching and recovering. Getting the Coot rigged and ready to launch is a quick and straightforward operation. The mast drops through the partner and is held in position with a single forestay. With the boom’s gooseneck fixed to the mast, and the gaff jaws held in place by a parrel, the mainsail is ready to be raised with the throat and peak halyards pulled together. Clip on the mainsheet and the Coot’s ready to go.
Andrew Wolstenholme
The topping lift, seen here crossing the middle of the sail, is doubled and wraps around the boom and sail to serve as lazyjacks when the sail is dropped.
A very useful addition to the rig is the double topping lift, which keeps the boom up out of harm’s way while rowing and acts as a simple form of lazyjack to gather the sail and gaff when dropping them. All lines are brought back to the aft end of the centerboard within easy reach of the helmsman.
This little boat is very light and responsive, and will look after you while forgiving your indiscretions most of the time. The single 70-sq-ft gaff sail is easily handled and powerful enough to drive the hull at a good pace. The Coot goes to windward really well, is very well balanced with just the right amount of weather helm, and will punch its way through the chop with the occasional drenching of spray just to keep you awake.
It comes about in its own length, and I’ve never missed a tack. It’ll handle breezes up to Force 4 and 5 before needing to reduce sail. There are two sets of reefpoints, which I have set up for single-line reefing, and although Wolstenholme claimed he had never reefed his Coot, I can tell you that I have. Off the wind, especially on a dead run, there is the usual catboat’s tendency to roll, which can be a bit uncomfortable but easily tamed by sheeting in or tucking that reef in.
If there’s a need to heave-to for any reason—to take a picture, or have a bite to eat— I simply bring the bow into the wind, push the tiller over, release the mainsheet, and the Coot will sit quietly. Coming onto a beach or a dock, the boat can be slowed by releasing the peak halyard and scandalizing the main, or by dropping the sail into the double topping lift to make rowing easier.
Graham Neil
While this Coot has a single rowing station, the plans call for a second at the forward thwart for rowing with a passenger in the stern sheets.
I’m not much of a rower, but there will always be times when a little boat like this needs auxiliary power and it would be a shame to put an outboard on her. I’ve been told, by those who know these things, that a good pair of oars makes all the difference, so I have a pair of 7-footers, a nice compromise of length over stow-ability, always a problem in a small boat. I keep mine with the looms tucked up on either side of the mast where they can be quickly shipped when needed.
My first real experience of rowing any distance was when I joined my fellow boatbuilders in the UK-HBBR (Home Built Boat Raid) on their annual voyage down the River Thames. I thought I would be able to sail at least part of the way, but the weather gods had other plans, and I found myself rowing, loaded with camping gear, for the entire 70 miles of the five-day trip. So I can say with some authority that she is a handy little rowing boat, she tracks well, helped by her small skeg and her carry, which keeps her moving well past the recovery.
Andrew Wolstenholme
The floorboards provide comfortable, dry seating while sailing in light air.
I’m happy to say I arrived with barely a blister at our destination, the Beale Park Boat Show where the little boat took best in class in the amateur boat-building awards. The Coot is a proper little boat. With respect on your part it will look after you, take you on mini adventures on rivers, lakes, and estuaries, and be greatly admired wherever it goes.
Graham Neil’s first boating adventures were as a 12-year-old boy in his native Scotland paddling a Percy Blandford-designed, canvas-on-frame canoe built by a friend’s father. Back then it was all woolen jumpers and Wellington boots, not a life jacket in sight. Later, in high school, he helped to build a 10’ stitch-and-glue rowing boat which still survives nearly 40 years later. Since those early days he has built several boats including an Iain Oughtred Whilly Tern, his Andrew Wolstenholme Coot, and KATIE BEARDIE, a sailing canoe designed together with friend Chris Waite. After a career in surveying and cartography, Graham is now retired and lives with his wife near Southampton, U.K., where he enjoys sailing his Coot dinghy in Chichester Harbour with the Dinghy Cruising Association and meeting other kindred spirits at UK Home Built Boat Rallies.
The All-Rounder, as its name indicates, is classified as an all-round, general purpose SUP. It is beamy to give it stability, and has a flat bottom with a horizontal bow to ride over the water as opposed to the vertical bow of a touring or racing board designed to cut through it. The sides, rather than being single vertical panels, have a bit of flare at the bottom and a bevel at the top that keep the All-Rounder from having a boxy appearance. There may be some practical benefits as well. The two obtuse angles should be less prone to wear than a single right angle between top and side and a little kinder to the paddler who might fall on it. It adds an extra seam to be stitched, filled, and sanded, but I think it’s a nice touch well worth the effort.
Christopher Cunningham
The beveled side, a carry-over from some of Pygmy’s kayaks, gives the All-Rounder a distinctive look.
The top of the board has three fittings: an attachment point aft for a leash, a rubber-and-webbing handle in the middle, and a vent forward to equalize air pressure when the board is not in use or when in transit through changes in elevation. The deck also has some discrete, transparent, textured strips for traction.
Christopher Cunningham
The forward and middle sections of the bottom are cut from the same piece of plywood, so the grain and color runs through the forward puzzle joint.
The 11′ board has a single 10″ fin set in a glass-filled nylon fin box built into the bottom. The box is longer than the top of the fin, offering the option to adjust the fin forward for better maneuverability or aft for stiffer tracking. The glass-filled nylon fin is removable, easily replaced if damaged, and offers more convenient storage of the board, advantages over a permanently attached fin.
courtesy of Pygmy Boats
The interlocking framework gives the board stiffness without making it heavy.
Pygmy’s kit comes with 26 pieces that make up the lattice internal framework and 19 panels that form the hull and deck. All of the parts are cut from 3-mm okoume BS-1088 plywood. The longitudinal pieces have wave-like puzzle joints for easy and precise assembly. The puzzle joints for the exterior panels vary in size—small on the sides, large on the top and bottom—and are aligned with each other, making an attractive pattern around the board.
Christopher Cunningham
The puzzle joints are used to align the top, bottom, and side panels.
The aft 7′ of the deck is flat and the assembled lattice framework is fit and epoxied to the ‘glassed underside of that portion of the deck first, using a piece of plywood as a work surface. The forward end of the framework is epoxied to the deck in a second operation where the deck is elevated to its designed profile curve using some graduated lifts. The top and bottom side panels and the tail block follow.
The joining of the panel edges is not done with copper wire laced through pairs of holes in adjacent panels as they are in the stitch-and-glue construction of Pygmy’s kayaks. The edges are instead held together with strips of Gorilla tape, spot-glued with a thick superglue (cyanoacrylate), and ultimately bonded with epoxy/wood flour fillets. The bottom panel goes on last, set on a thick mixture of epoxy and wood flour applied to the edges of the framework. While the underside of the deck is fiberglassed, the interior surface of the bottom is not, and neither it nor the framework are coated with epoxy, thus minimizing weight and expense.
The exterior seams are filled with beads of a slightly thinner mix of epoxy and wood flour that get shaped when cured with a sharp file. Fiberglassing the entire exterior and installing the hardware follow. Sanding and varnishing complete the board, which tips the scale around 35 lbs.
The board’s light weight made it easy to lift and the handgrip attached at its center of gravity made it easy to carry. I liked this secure, comfortable handhold that I could wrap my fingers around over the finger slots I’ve used on other boards. The board could have used a patch of foam around the handgrip to ease the pressure of my knuckles against the deck. The handgrip didn’t get underfoot and trip me up with the paddling I did, but if you decide to take the board surfing, where a lot of fancy footwork is required, or do yoga on it, a recessed slot would be a better way to go. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create one in wood or add a commercially made one while building the board.
Christopher Cunningham
Floating without a paddler aboard, the rocker of the bottom is evident.
When I got aboard the All-Rounder it felt quite solid—I didn’t feel any give in the deck underfoot—and I liked its solid stability. I don’t get out paddling SUPs often, and while my balance is pretty good in a skinny, tiddly kayak, the skill doesn’t transfer well to standing up on a SUP board. The high stability will be a comfort as well to novices, SUP anglers, and yoga practitioners.
The board’s thickness maintains its stability for paddlers like me who weigh over 200 lbs. The chine between the side panels was right at the water’s edge with me aboard, so even when I had my weight to one side the board still felt stable. If the board were thinner and water washed over the deck when my weight was shifted to the side it would have been a different story.
I had no trouble walking and hopping back and forth on the All-Rounder to change my position. The board I paddled had non-slip strips in the middle, not all the way to the tail, so I didn’t shift my weight as far aft as I should have to get the bow up out of the water for sharp turns. The board was easily maneuvered even so and with the good stability I was comfortable doing cross-bow strokes for quick, tight turns.
Christopher Cunningham/John Lockwood
With my weight shifted to my right and the full width of the board’s left side showing, the deck is still dry and the stability still firm.
The single skeg was effective when I got some speed up. The first few strokes pushed the bow away from the side I was paddling on, but once I had some water moving past the skeg I would do seven to ten strokes on one side before switching to hold my course. In the still water of the marina, my GPS indicated I was doing 2 1/2 knots at an exercise pace, and 3 1/2 knots in a sprint.
Christopher Cunningham/John Lockwood
The All-Rounder is not designed for speed, but it will provide a good workout.
Outside of the marina the waves were small, less than 1′, and the only wake I had was from a distant ferry, so I didn’t have much to play with, but the board behaved itself in the waves I had. Riding the ferry wake, I was able to race ahead and plow the bow underwater in the back of one wave without any loss of control or stability. I never fell off the board unintentionally, but I did hop off several times and had no trouble scrambling back aboard and getting back on my feet.
The All-Rounder earns its name and should serve a wide range of SUP paddlers, especially new ones and large ones, and perform well in a wide variety of uses. If paddling with a dog or a child, fishing, yoga, exercise, or even napping is your thing, this new offering from Pygmy might be just the ticket.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
My life totally changed in my mid-20s when a casual invitation to a wedding in India unexpectedly became six months of travel through South Asia. Upon my return to the USA, I realized I was addicted and decided to travel the world full-time. The next target of my travels became Africa, where I planned to cross the continent from Cape Town, South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt. I was a year into that journey, having just ridden a single-speed bicycle across Botswana and the Kalahari Desert, poring over maps of the continent and planning my route north, when I came across what would become my next challenge: Lake Tanganyika.
Sandwiched between the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west and Tanzania to the east, the lake is 418 miles long and up to 4,820 feet deep. It is not only the longest and largest of the African Rift Valley lakes, it is the longest, second largest by volume, and second deepest body of fresh water on the planet. As I learned more about this natural wonder, I couldn’t get it out of my head and began dreaming up ideas of how to explore it for myself. The plan I came up with was to paddle the length of the lake, south to north, solo, in a locally built wooden boat.
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The southern tip of the lake lies in Zambia, where I’d been for the past three months, and from the lakeside town of Mpulungu I took the MV LIEMBA, a former German World War I vessel built in 1913, north into Tanzania, where I began my search for the boat I would paddle up the lake. In this part of the world, all life and commerce revolves around fishing, so boats are a way of life. Although there are a handful of steel or fiberglass boats on the water, they are limited to the cargo ships that travel the lake and a few foreign fishing vessels.
I would guess that 99 percent of the boats are made of wood by local craftsmen on the shore, using only hand tools with not a measuring tape in sight. I saw a range of wooden boats between roughly 12′ to 35′ long, all using the same general design and construction techniques: 1″- to 3″-thick planks laid out parallel and end-to-end, fastened with common nails or staples, a few haphazard ribs and thwarts, and cotton or scraps of cloth for caulking. In Africa, “watertight” is a relative term, and I never once saw a boat that didn’t leak a good amount of water and require nearly constant bailing.
I disembarked LIEMBA at a small tourist lodge near the village of Kasanga, situated 18 miles from Mpulungu on the Tanzanian shore. The lodge became my base camp to outfit myself for the journey ahead. While I would have liked to begin the journey at the true end of the lake, my Zambian visa had expired. I’d also been told by locals I would have better luck finding a boat on the Tanzanian side of the border. I had been spending much of my time staying in the bush earlier on the trip, so I already had all the necessary camping gear, and after a few long bus trips to towns in the surrounding area I had gathered about two weeks’ worth of dry food, coils of rope, 3 gallons of unleaded gas for my camp stove, and everything else I could think of.
The owner of the lodge obviously had grand visions for the place, but it was miles from any paved road and had nothing you could even call semi-modern infrastructure; I only saw a handful of local guests during my weeklong stay. It didn’t have a bright future, but the owner was friendly and acted as a middleman to help procure a boat from a local fisherman, even though he obviously didn’t understand what I was trying to do or why.
Photographs by the author
Despite seeing boats everywhere, it took surprisingly long to buy one. This photograph of the author’s boat is from the first time he ever saw it at the lodge run by the man who found it for him. The lodge owner then had three men work to repair the boat prior to his setting off.
The boat looked pretty bad when I first saw it. There were surprisingly large gaps between the planks, big enough to fit a pencil through. The ribs and thwarts had been rounded smooth by many years of use, and the miscellaneous pieces, some bare wood, others showing traces of different colors of paint, showed how the boat had been cobbled together from various other boats during its hard life.
The head builder, wearing white, hammered a nail into the hole he had drilled. The board was then laid along the one below and another nail was added on the other end. No other fastenings were added.
I watched over the next two days while it was repaired by three local boatbuilders with handsaws, an eggbeater drill, and new cotton caulking. I felt satisfied with its condition. It still wasn’t great, but that’s part of the adventure, right? Besides, I didn’t know anything about this kind of boat, it was the only boat available to me, and because I traded my bike as part of the deal, I only spent $19 cash for it. This was the first boat I’d ever owned.
The day I loaded up my new boat and set off for the very first time I felt confident, even though I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into. There was no guidebook for this kind of thing. I had no idea how long it could take, no ability to contact the outside world if things went wrong, and had done no real testing of my boat. I didn’t even have a chart, just printed photos I’d taken from a country-scale map. I had been told that I was going to be traveling between dangerous and unforgiving shores on the west side of the lake and the truly remote African bush to the east.
Minutes before setting off the author posed with his unnamed craft outside of Kasanga, Tanzania. He had three paddles, all different, that he’d use as oars. He was ready to begin the adventure.
Boats such as mine are usually paddled like canoes with two to four people, and often sailed with sails that were usually made of rice sacks sewn together. Paddling solo would be awkward, so I had to take a different approach. I made holes in the gunwales with my Leatherman tool, then looped and tied rope through them, making primitive oarlocks so I could row the thing. With calm water as far as I could see and clear skies, I happily pushed off into the unknown.
The first two hours of my journey went well enough, and I made slow but steady progress north. Then the wind picked up, and with it came the waves, and suddenly I was struggling to make any forward progress. I scanned the shore, and there was no place to land—it was all too rocky or dense with brush. A beam sea crashed against the boat, dumping water in and knocking loose the cotton that sealed the hull. An unstoppable cartoon-like fountain of water sprang up from the bottom, and suddenly I was in panic mode, worrying about capsizing and sinking. I feared this might, at best, end my trip up the lake and at worst that I might be injured, or lose critical gear and not be able to finish my trip across Africa.
My only option was to keep fighting. I saw a few mud huts indicating a village a few hundred yards ahead and paddled as if my life depended on it. I nearly capsized as I finally came to shore, and a group of locals rushed down to help this crazy white guy who had just made quite an entrance into their settlement. After we dragged the boat ashore, the villagers carried my bags for me and brought me to the headman (who spoke no English), paraded me around the village, and fed me dinner. The whole time, a group of 15 children stared at me. At the end of the evening, I was taken back to the headman’s mud-and-grass home where I slept on the dirt floor. It had been an interesting first day.
As he left the village that had taken the author in on his first night, the chief, wearing the black shirt, and a group of young boys stood on a pile of nets and ropes to watch him leave. He was used to getting strange looks from locals and this day was no exception.
Luckily for me, the next few days on the lake were less chaotic and I began to get the hang of what I was doing. Each morning I would wake up early, eat a cold breakfast, pack up camp, and hit the water. As I rowed north, I quickly learned that I was rarely alone. Even though I was seldom close to other people or boats, I could almost always look in the distance and see fishermen on the water somewhere. They were often sailing farther out than I was, in search of fish in the deeper water near the middle of the lake.
The sun-faded clothes that had already taken him halfway across Africa served well for rowing. The bicycling gloves he happened to have were a life-saver for his hands. The improvised plastic rope oar locks needed to be replaced every day or two.
Most places that had enough sandy beach to pull up boats and any sort of flat space on the land would at least have a few grass-roofed mud huts. This made finding private campsites a real challenge, and I found myself the accidental center of unwanted attention more than a few times.
Along the shore there were small settlements, villages, and a few places that could be called towns. Even those had neither paved roads nor electricity. Some of the people I met in these places were able to make a modest living by pulling out enough fish to dry in the sun on drying racks made of sticks and reeds. They’d bag them up and sell them to passing traders. Many others, often refugees from the Congolese War on the other side of the lake, struggled as subsistence fishermen.
Even when things were going well, safety was always on my mind. I’d been warned about hippos and crocodiles, and a kid was actually killed by a croc just outside where I was staying one day. I was so concerned about my boat, the difficult shoreline, and the afternoon wind and waves that I didn’t have the energy to worry about crocs and hippos.
After observing how the locals repair their boats, the author followed suit and came up with a method: a rock and a table knife to tap the cotton back into the massive gaps in his boat. While some of the joints were tight, most were not and leaks were a constant problem.
My boat was terrible. Even under the best of conditions there were always two or three inches of water in the bottom, keeping my feet soaked. As a matter of routine I bailed every couple of minutes, but sometimes the boat would spring a leak that required my immediate attention to keep from sinking. I’d bought a large ball of cotton to do my own repairs along the way. I had a table knife and rock to pound it into the cracks, which I did frequently.
The other big problem I had with the boat was its immense weight. I could never pull it up the beach and totally out of the water. Overnight, the waves would beat on it, sometimes creating leaks that required hours of work to repair each morning. The shoreline was problematic because it was so rugged there were often long stretches, sometimes a kilometer at a time, with no opportunities to land a boat. Either it was a cliff, or it was lined with boulders, or the bush was so thick all the way to the water’s edge it was impenetrable.
Cliffs like these were just some of the stunning elements of this wild landscape. The author stopped briefly here to admire the cliff swallows that had built nests on the rocks, but didn’t linger. If the wind and waves that arrived daily came early, it would be impossible to get off the water in a place like this.
I quickly learned just how dangerous this was as I became accustomed to the winds that arrived every afternoon. I noticed the fishermen usually headed to land in the afternoons as well. Maybe two or three strong men could paddle one of these boats in rough conditions, but there was simply no way I could make any real progress rowing solo once the winds began. I was constantly looking for places to get safely to shore. Landings were scarce, and I sometimes had to backtrack to stop for lunch or make camp. If I found myself in one of those long stretches with no pullouts when the winds picked up, I knew my boat would simply be blown to shore with me in it and I’d have to watch it be slowly smashed to pieces on the rocks.
Although some fishermen on the lake used nets, most used improvised hand lines. Scraps of metal were often used to sink a line with multiple hooks to the depths where the fish were.
Some days I would come across people fishing or traveling by boat to another town who spoke a little English, and we would exchange a few sentences before running out of things to say. Most of the time I would simply shout “Jambo!”—hello in Swahili—while rowing and bailing out my boat, hour after hour.
The going was always slow, and to be honest I never really knew where I was. My map showed major towns, but when I’d ask locals about the names of places, it seemed I rarely got the same answer twice. The people were always very friendly; smiling, waving, and often even giving me fish as a gift. This was certainly not a place that sees foreigners, much less ones using a boat like theirs. I was clearly an oddity, but I always felt respected and was absolutely certain I could count on the locals to help me if I needed anything.
From a distance he could hear a large group of people cheering, so naturally he went to have a look. What the author found was a group of men, boats circled up, working together to pull up a large net full of fish. All the young boys of the village were there to watch and play, and everyone was very excited to see a strange white man show up.
During the first few days, I hadn’t gotten far and my boat was a constant problem, but I felt about as comfortable as possible for being a strange white man rowing my way along a wild African shore. So long as I was on the lake, I decided I’d better start eating the local fish, and one afternoon bought a bunch from a local man who spoke no English, as we both bobbed about, far from land. That afternoon I found a little cove with clear blue water, a sandy beach, truck-sized boulders on each side, and monkeys chattering in trees.
The author’s campsites were often stunning spots. Almost every night he found himself alone on sandy beaches, between boulders and lush greenery and looking over the lake toward the Congo on the other side. Here you can also see his jug of tablet-purified water, gas for his stove, and his PFD and drybag, which he kept inside another sack to protect it from sun and abrasion.
It looked like something from a fantasy movie, and I was in high spirits. I cooked the fish for dinner that night, and shortly after lying down to bed realized I was about to suffer a serious round of food poisoning. Alternating between mattress-soaking sweats and waves of cold that seemed to defy all logic, it felt like my intestines were full of razor blades. I had one of the worst nights of my life and spent the next two days and nights lying in the bush in such intense pain I couldn’t eat or sleep. I was hardly able to move or even keep my eyes open. Four nights passed before I was able to leave that spot.
I recovered eventually and, oars in hand, returned to the lake to keep going. Feeling surprisingly normal again, I propelled my heavy, graceless boat through the water. It continued to leak, and keeping the thing afloat was a full-time chore. I was only eight days and maybe 75 km up the lake, but I was fed up with the boat, and questioned my journey and its chances of success, but still I rowed on, hour after hour, day after day. I found a large, unoccupied beach, made camp, and tried to get some sleep. But this proved a challenge, because the wind and rains picked up and I spent all night listening to the waves pound my boat, expecting it to be destroyed or float away in the night. The boat stayed put, and come morning it took four-and-a-half hours of repairwork to get back on the water.
He stopped for food at the main harbor outside of Wampembe. In the two weeks he spent on the lake, not once did the author see a dock. All boats are simply dragged onto the sand in common areas, and a line tied to the shore keeps them roughly in place.
It wasn’t long before I came to the town of Wampembe, and I paddled onto the reddish sandy beach, crowded with dozens of large fishing boats. The usual throngs of people came to stare at me as I tied up my boat and walked the dirt path to town. It was the largest village I’d been to since leaving Zambia, meaning there were a few concrete buildings with metal roofs, a truck or two, and some small shops.
I managed to find a cold Fanta soda, which at the time, was something truly wonderful. I bought some fruit, vegetables, and cookies from a woman sitting on the side of the road. It was the first time I’d gotten fresh food since setting off 10 days earlier, and it really did lift my spirits.
Sails on the local boats were simple: three flexible wood poles, a few ropes, and sewn-together rice sacks. The boat the author had was also set up to sail as this one is doing, but he did not want to add that complication to the trip and did not buy the rig when it was offered. He had doubts that such a setup could actually be sailed upwind.
That same day, I arrived in another town to spend the night, where I was taken in by the teacher of the local school. He was a huge man, with hands that made me feel almost like a child when we shook hands and a warm, inviting smile. He spoke English very well, and we sat down to dinner of beans and ugali, a cornmeal dish that is the staple food of the region. We ate with our hands and talked about village life. I woke up after a good night’s sleep, the first in a while, and watched his students outside, picking up sticks and leaves to clean the school yard and then exercising together. With their morning routine over, they carried my bags to the beach to send me off.
The people of the lake had once again welcomed me with open arms and brightened my day, but as I hit the water and my boat began filling with water at a rapid pace, my frustration with it grew stronger. I rowed and bailed for a few miles, but then I heard the sound of hammers in the distance and knew it was a boatyard of sorts. I could get some more lasting repairs than I had been able to make.
Local boat builders re-caulked the boat in a tiny town of unknown name. The yellow caulking here is the oil-soaked cotton, something the author paid extra for, and that was supposed to do a better job of keeping water out.
“Boatyard” is perhaps too grand a term for what I found when I came ashore. It was just a sandy beach between a few boulders, lined with wooden boats and mud huts—but there men were working on boats, and it was just what I needed. I found a helpful man named Daniel, and in no time at all he had a team of men replacing a plank and recaulking the entire boat.
Daniel and I drank tea and ate fried dough as we talked; he told me about fishing, marriage, growing up as a refugee fleeing violence in Burundi, and much more.
The repairs didn’t take long, and after I’d had experienced boatbuilders working on my boat, I was once again optimistic, but that optimism faded quickly. Despite all the work done, it leaked just as much as before. That was when my spirit just kind of broke. I still had a few gallons of gas for my cook stove, and the thought crossed my mind that I ought to just torch the thing and walk away. However, as much as I was beginning to despise the boat, I didn’t want to destroy it, when people here had so little. Destroying something as valuable as a boat, even a leaky one, would be the height of arrogance. I decided to sell it at the next possible opportunity and give up on my boating journey.
Every few minutes the author attended to the ritual of bailing out his leaky boat. Here you can also see the coil of cheap rope that he used to improvise short-lived oar locks. He used the rest to tie the boat to shore when he was unable to get it out of the water for the night.
Giving up was not something I took lightly, and although it was easy to place the blame on my boat, and probably rightfully so, it was still an extremely tough decision to make. I felt like a failure, which made me a little angry. I still had three tough days of rowing ahead of me before I reached Kipili, an old mission station that I decided would be my new end point, and there was no time to relax. The scenery was still otherworldly, with brightly colored lizards, house-sized boulders along the shore, and rainbows that appeared during brief rain showers. I did my best to still take it all in, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Those last days of the trip dragged on, and on my last full day, the afternoon headwinds and waves caught me out on the lake. I was trying to find a pullout when an especially large leak formed, and my boat was soon one-quarter full of water. Just 100 yards from land, I was rowing with all my strength but wouldn’t make it to the nearest land, and would be blown instead into a large bay to the south where my boat would surely sink. My situation got even worse when one of my rope oarlocks broke and I was suddenly reduced to using a single oar, hanging over the bow and paddling the heavy boat as if it were a canoe. In a panic I considered jumping overboard and swimming the boat to shore by the bowline. By some miracle I made it to shore, then collapsed in exhaustion.
Eventually I did make it to Kipili, 14 days and roughly 95 miles after setting out, 310 miles short of my original goal. I can’t say I felt any sort of accomplishment in those final moments of the trip, but knowing I’d never have to spend another minute rowing that boat gave me tremendous relief.
My continuing journey across Africa went on for many more months by foot, using local buses, a train, and eventually another wooden boat on the Nile (which I hired along with a guide this time), and through many more countries before I reached Egypt and dipped my feet in the Mediterranean Sea, but nothing I did before Lake Tanganyika, nor after on the trip, was comparable. The remoteness and isolation from the outside world, the unforgiving environment, my interactions with the people, the constant danger and the time alone on the water, with nothing but my thoughts, was an experience I will treasure for the rest of my life.
I think if I’d set out with a boat that didn’t require daily repairs, rowing the entire length of the lake would have been possible, and knowing that still bothers me a bit. I have occasionally fantasized about returning to Tanganyika to finish what I started, but I know that will never happen. All I can do now is look back at what I saw, what I did accomplish, and what I learned along the way. When I do that, I can recall even the bad times with a smile on my face, and when I retell the stories with friends and family, all I can do is laugh.
Scott Brooks grew up in Seattle, Washington, with outdoor activities in the mountains being his family’s primary recreation. Hiking and skiing were their main sports but multi-day canoe and kayak trips were not uncommon. Scott also did a bit of sailing in high school. He and his wife live in Washington’s San Juan Islands, where he climbs and cuts trees for a living. His home and job are on different islands, so he uses a 12′ aluminum boat (that he got for free) with a 9.9 outboard to commute, rain or shine. It could hardly be more different from his time on Tanganyika, but he still loves being on the water.
Boatbuilding in Kasanga, Tanzania
I never once saw any sort of power tool, these and a few other hand tools were all that the locals used to repair my boat before I set out. I especially like the hammer head welded onto a piece of pipe for a handle.
Rip-sawing has a different look in this part of the world. Having two hands on the handle makes good sense, even if the grip is unconventional.
This is a very simple type of adze that I saw in many parts of Africa and used for countless purposes. Here the man is using it to trim down a board in order to make a tight fit in the boat.
This egg-beater drill was probably the most high-tech tool I saw anywhere. In the construction process, metal fasteners were used very sparingly, but to keep this unlikely union of plank pieces together, a hole for a nail was drilled.
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.
Some years back I was rowing in a race with my good friend Bill Gribbel in his tandem wherry, DONOGHUE. She was a copy of a circa-1870 pulling boat found, restored, and documented by the late Westport, Massachusetts, boatbuilder and designer Bob Baker. The wind was up and for 4 miles we pulled into it, catching a bit of spray, and then it was around an island and down the home stretch. It should have made for a quick and exciting downwind run, but that’s when the fun stopped. With the stiff breeze on our quarter, we spent a lot of time pulling on one side to keep DONOGHUE on the right heading. Our trim was a bit bow-down, so the boat was constantly trying to turn upwind.
Weathercocking is the tendency of rowing and paddling craft to veer up wind in a crosswind. The leeward bow is subject to increased pressure as the boat moves forward and the wind blows it downwind. The stern meets lower pressure, a result of the turbulence created by the boat’s passage through the water. The stern drifts downwind through this turbulent area faster than the bow does through undisturbed water, so the boat angles into the wind. Rowing or paddling harder only makes the problem worse.
Many sea kayaks are equipped with a retractable skeg or a rudder that, when deployed, can mitigate the downwind drift of the stern and eliminate weathercocking. A boat without a retractable skeg or rudder can be loaded stern-heavy; the increased draft reaches below the turbulence to diminish the downwind drift. And, as the stern sinks, the bow rises, which lessens the water’s grip on the forefoot and increases the area acted upon by the wind. The result is a balanced downwind drift, without the bow turning into the wind.
Ben Fuller
Without ballast, the dory TIPSY sits right on her lines, with her boot top parallel to the water’s surface (top). With ballast in the stern, the bow rises, exposing more bottom paint, and the stern sinks, submerging the boot top (bottom). The change in trim will improve the dory’s tracking and downwind performance.
A well-designed kayak or rowboat normally has a slight stern-down trim to better hold a straight course. As Bill and I discovered aboard the DONOGHUE, that trim may not be sufficient to get the boat to maintain a steady course in a crossing wind. Adjusting the trim to remedy weathercocking can be achieved by taking along some movable ballast.
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This double-ended gunning dory, like the author’s Swampscott dory, has no skeg, so dory stones can settle the stern deeper in the water and improve tracking in a following sea. The three stones here together weigh about 60 pounds.
Fishermen in Maine would carry dory stones—head-sized beach rocks—and use them to change the trim of their boats. Their boats were usually light in the stern, so the stones would be set well aft. If Bill and I had carried some dory stones aboard DONOGHUE, we would have trimmed the boat by the stern and she’d have run easily. They would not have affected the upwind performance.
My Swampscott dory TIPSY can be a challenge to row in calm and windy conditions. Like most dories she’ll spin in her own length when light and rowed solo. Her stern sits just a few inches into the water and, unlike a flat-bottomed skiff or a round-bottomed rowboat, she doesn’t have a skeg. It makes her very maneuverable at the expense of good tracking. A few dory stones, found in any Maine cove, do the job of helping her track better in a calm and in wind.
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A small bag, loaded with bird-shot or sand, can fit well aft in the tight spaces of a double-ender.
My Dias-designed Harrier, RANTAN, has the same problem as DONOGHUE. As built, with two of us at the oars, she is a bit down by the bow and in a crosswind will inevitably be “griping,” tending to turn into the wind and difficult to keep on course in a calm. Because RANTAN is a double-ender, space is too tight at the stern for large rocks, so I had to find a small, very heavy bag that would fit well aft, on top of the mizzenmast step.
I remembered that old-time sailing canoeists often carried bags of shotgun shot, so I bought two 25-lb bags of #7 birdshot, the modern, lead-free kind. A couple of canvas bank coin bags fit the plastic shot bags nicely, protecting them and giving me something easier to grip. RANTAN is now much better-behaved when I go rowing with a friend.
The trim ballast is also a bonus when I’m sailing RANTAN. I can set it to windward on a long tack or set on the thwart near the leeward rail on a light day when I don’t want to sit cramped up in the middle of the boat.
Ben Fuller
Five gallons of water provide 40 lbs of ballast in the stern of the author’s Swampscott dory.
I’ve more recently gone to water ballast. There is plenty of room in TIPSY’s stern for a 5-gallon water bag weighing just over 40 lbs, and the bag doesn’t ding up the dory’s interior. I could fill it with seawater at the start of any outing or carry it empty until I need ballast, but I like to have some drinking water aboard. Since the dory spends the boating season afloat on a haulout I just fill a bag with tap water, leave it amidships when she is swinging on the haul out, and shift it aft as needed.
I usually row solo from the center thwart, and put the water bag in the stern for downwind rowing. But, if I am heading downwind in a real breeze, I’ll need more weight aft than the bag will provide, so I will pull from the aft oarlocks, and have the bag far enough forward to balance my weight a bit and keep the bow from rising too high. A bit of bilgewater lets me see the boat’s trim; it will stay amidships when things are balanced and run aft when I have the stern-down trim I need.
Few things are as frustrating in a rowboat as difficulty in keeping it headed where you want it to go. Pulling hard on one oar to fight weathercocking to keep a poor-tracking boat on course can ruin a nice outing. A bit of ballast will trim the boat out nicely.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
From left: The NRS Expedition DriDuffel, the Watershed Yukon, the SealLine Zip, the Ortlieb Duffle, and the Seattle Sports Nav Duffel.
In small boats, space is limited so it’s important to have good ways to stow gear. Many of today’s open boats have buoyancy chambers that can double as watertight storage space, but it can be awkward to stuff gear through small hatches and even more awkward to pull it out. Compartments at the ends of the boat put the weight where it will make the boat less nimble in a seaway.
I prefer to store the bulk of my gear in waterproof duffels lashed securely near the center of the boat. They offer better access to the contents and additional buoyancy if the boat gets swamped, especially if inflated with air after packing. At the end of a long day, I find it far more convenient to pull one big dry bag from under a thwart, carry it ashore, and sort through my gear in camp than it is to manage several small dry bags. Duffel dry bags have long side openings and are easier to pack and unpack than top-loading dry bags.
The five waterproof duffels here are all well-built and made of tough, high quality materials. I evaluated them for ease of use and tested them for waterproofness by submerging each bag at a depth of 3′ for 10 minutes.
Expedition DriDuffel from NRS
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The NRS Expedition DriDuffel has webbing handles that wrap all the way around the bag, relieving the strain a heavy load would put on the fabric. Daisy chains on each side offer multiple tie-down points, and there are additional dedicated tie-down points on each end of the bag. A conventional handle and additional carrying handles on each end make this bag easy to carry for short distances. A shoulder strap is included for longer carries. The centerline Tizip zipper runs the full length of the bag and a little beyond, providing easy access for packing and unpacking. The zipper passed the immersion test and kept the duffel’s interior dry.
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The Expedition DriDuffel has a waterproof Tizip zipper, a shoulder strap, and handles on each end.
A tube of lubrication for the zipper is included with the bag, as is a shoulder strap. The NRS Expedition Duffle is a little more expensive, but it is the toughest, burliest bag I tested and should last many years.
Yukon Duffel from Watershed
Tom Pamperin
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Watershed’s Yukon Duffel was completely dry after the immersion test. The opening—a beefed-up zip-lock closure—runs the full length of the bag on the centerline, making it easy to pack and unpack. To open the Yukon, you pull the attached center loops with your thumbs and push with your fingers to bend the ZipDry in an S shape, which breaks the seal. The ZipDry needs to be kept free of sand and grit, and requires a little patience while closing to get a watertight seal. Watershed recommends 303 Aerospace Protectant as a lubricant, but a little saliva can serve in the field. The ZipDry seal is noticeably slower and fussier to close than waterproof zippers. If you need to access the contents of your bag frequently throughout the day, it’s probably best to choose a zippered bag.
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The ZipDry has interlocking flanges that assure a waterproof seal.
The webbing handles make the bag easy enough to carry from boat to beach, but the optional shoulder strap helps for longer hauls. I’ve owned the Yukon for five years and made two month-long whitewater trips through the Grand Canyon with it. I have complete confidence in my Watershed bags, and they have never leaked, even after near-disastrous runs through Lava Falls.
Zip Waterproof Duffle from SealLine
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The SealLine Zip Waterproof Duffle has a submersible YKK zipper set at a diagonal and protected by a fabric flap. The zipper is not as long as the zippers on the other duffels and access is a little less convenient, but it kept the Zip dry in the immersion test. There are no special tie-downs, but the handles on the ends of the bag can be used for securing it aboard. With its clean design, compact oval shape, and handles on each end, the Zip was the easiest to carry. No shoulder strap is included, though there are D-rings on the ends of the bag to take one.
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The SealLine Duffle has a YKK waterproof zipper.
The bag’s low-profile oval shape makes it particularly well suited for stowing under a low thwart or bench aboard a small boat. I really liked the Zip, and depending on where you plan to stow a bag aboard your boat, it offers a good fit for tight spaces.
Waterproof Duffle from Ortlieb
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Ortlieb’s Waterproof Duffle is made of tough, abrasion-resistant fabric that will stand up to the wear and tear of camp-cruising. There are three screw fittings at each end to fasten interior pockets and a lock-down for the zipper. I’m happier without “through-hull fittings,” but these attachments seem beefy and secure. Four slots for tie-down straps on each side of the bag offer snug, secure attachments. The long centerline Tizip zipper runs the entire length of the bag and partway onto the ends to create a wide opening for easy packing.
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The Duffle has a cable under the zipper pull permits using a padlock to lock the zipper. The hook at the end of the zipper engages the button at the bottom of the duffel.
The Duffle has padded shoulder straps for use as a backpack, making it well suited for long-distance hauling. A Velcro handgrip fastens the shoulder straps together to form a standard duffel handle. There is an interior zippered pocket at each end of the bag for stowage of small, easily lost items such as keys, and one small exterior mesh zippered pocket. An interior compression strap helps hold gear more compactly and takes the strain off the zipper when closing over a full load. A cable loop at the end of the zipper makes it possible to padlock this bag shut.
Nav Duffel from Seattle Sports
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The Nav Duffel from Seattle Sports has a wide mouth, short collar, and roll-top closure. Roll-top dry bags, particularly those with large openings and those made of heavy material, don’t offer a seal that can withstand full immersion. Pressure at depth pushes water around the folds and in though the ends, so I was not surprised to see some leakage after I subjected the Nav to a brief immersion. In normal use aboard a small boat, a dry bag isn’t going to be submerged unless the boat capsizes, so the Nav would be a fine choice as an affordable duffel to keep things dry in spray or rain. Electronics, cameras, or other gear susceptible to water damage merit more than one level of protection and I’d keep them in small, lightweight dry bags inside the Nav. The roll-top doesn’t require the same care and maintenance that zippers do and is unaffected by sand and grit. The roll-top closure is a little slower and less convenient to use than the zippers on some of the other bags, but would still work well for stowing things that you need access to throughout the day.
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The ends of the duffel have buckles to secure the roll-down closure and D-rings for a shoulder strap.
Two plastic D-rings serve as tie-down attachments. It’s easy to carry this bag for short distances with the webbing handles. For longer carries, an adjustable shoulder strap is included. The padded portion of the shoulder strap is set up off-center and works very well with the bag slung over your shoulder vertically. This bag has an interior pocket with a Velcro closure for storing small items.
Any one of these duffels would serve very well for stowage aboard a small boat, and the variety provides options based on budget and individual requirements.
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.
One morning, several years ago, I looked out the shop window to see a vibrant, bright green Friendship sloop sitting at the dock. The contrast between it and the sea of white yachts surrounding it was so dramatic that I couldn’t help but introduce myself to the owner to find out more about the boat. I asked him where I could find topsides paint in such beautiful colors, and he told me I should call George Kirby down in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The rich palette offered by the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company is distinctively different from other marine paints, and over the years I’ve kept coming back to Kirby paint because its high quality is what the beauty of a hand-built boat deserves. The customer service is outstanding, there are 55 stock colors to choose from, and they can color-match anything.
Kirby’s Topside Hull and Deck paints are traditional oil-based alkyd enamels that come in gloss, semigloss, or matte; you can order a premix nonskid SoftSand rubber granules if you’re using it for a deck. I usually use semigloss as it hides the scrapes and dings that accumulate after years of use. Kirby’s gloss would offer an eye-catching but unostentatious shine if you have new or well-coddled boat with unblemished surfaces.
Once ignored by visitors to the Center for Wooden Boats, this Whitehall was rented more often after a facelift with Kirby paints.
We’ve seen an uptick in rentals at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle once we started using Kirby paints to make our small-boat color schemes more fun. We painted the hull of an old Whitehall with #7 C Green, which has a nice blue tone to it, trimmed it out with #32 Sand, which is a light cream color, and painted the interior with a light #19 Blue. Now visitors take notice of this bright little boat.
Surface preparation is pretty straightforward. I make sure everything is well sanded before the first coat, and I lightly sand with 120-grit between coats. I’ve also used the paint on fiberglass-and-epoxy sheathing. I just make sure that any blush from the epoxy is washed off with soap and water.
When you dip a brush into a can of Hull and Deck paint, you’ll notice it is rather thick. This minimizes runs on vertical surfaces; one new coat usually hides the previous color if it’s not too dissimilar. Although Kirby states that priming isn’t necessary for the paint to adhere to new surfaces, if I am applying the paint to a new surface, or one that was recently stripped, I often start with primer, and then apply two finish coats. Sometimes on the second coat the paint will drag a little too much, especially if it’s cold, in which case I’ll mix in a capful of thinner. This helps with easier flow on the surface and better leveling of brushstrokes.
The paint dries moderately hard, and I have found it to be quite durable. It tends to abrade rather than chip off, so it can withstand rubbing against a dock or from frequent hauling on a trailer. The paint also blends in pretty well if you have to touch up any big scratches. I like to try and reapply a maintenance coat every season, keeping prep work to a minimum, but I’ve had Kirby paint last a couple seasons just fine with only a little muting of the color.
The George Kirby Jr. Paint Company also produces other traditional marine products such as pine tar, canvas filler, and deck oil. The company was founded in 1846 to supply durable paint for the local fishing fleet, and is still owned and operated by the same family.
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 for the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
Topside Hull and Deck paint is available from the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company. Quarts cost $30 to $32; gallons $75 to $80.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
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photographs by the author
