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.
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!
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.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
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.
Hannah sealed the okoume transom with epoxy before a layer of glass is added for protection. Transom was cut to fit the long-shaft outboard available at the time.
Hannah Dumser, at the age of 10, passed her Michigan boating license test on her first try. It was quite an achievement, as the state’s boater education course covers some 61 topics, ranging from tying knots to dealing with an onboard fire.
Younger sister Kyla was drafted to fill the screw holes left after attaching the Atlantic white-cedar strips. She is now hooked and will start building her own boat this summer.
Having earned her boating safety certificate for the waters near her family’s summer home, she was qualified to operate a boat powered by a motor up to 35 hp as long as she took along someone over the age of 16. Her father, Jim, happened to have an old 25-hp Honda four-stroke outboard languishing in the garage at home in Davidson, North Carolina. Now all Hannah needed was a boat.
Hannah removed the drywall screws and washers that temporarily clamped the strips in place until the thickened epoxy set up. Strips were glued with Jamestown Distributors’ “Thixo,” dispensed from a caulking gun.
She leafed through well-worn copies of WoodenBoat looking for a small skiff she could build with a little help from Dad, a teacher (and at one time the Wood Arts instructor) at Community School of Davidson, the Dumsers’ home-town high school. She soon took a shine to the Jericho skiff, and when she saw the video The Road to Jericho, her mind was made up. For her 11th birthday she was given plans for the Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff.
Hannah enlisted Kyla’s help in filling all those screw holes in the interior. The team effort really sped up the process, and working with a buddy is always more fun.
Hannah and her father made the nearly four-hour drive from Davidson to Wilmington where they picked up 98 strips of Atlantic white cedar, known locally as juniper. Some of the early work on the project took place at the school shop where, in 2015, Jim and four seniors had previously built a 22′ St. Ayles skiff. When it came time for Hannah to set up a ladder frame for the molds and put the pieces together, they moved the project into the garage workshop at home.
The vacuum really got a work out. Orbital sanding and long-board fairing produced prodigious amounts of dust to collect.
Hannah worked on the strip-built hull for several months. For Christmas she got a no-feedback steering system; when her 12th birthday rolled around she got epoxy. She took a few breaks to attend wooden boat festivals like the one in Wilmington put on by the Cape Fear Community College. She picked up ideas here and there to customize her boat to suit her tastes. The design for the steering console, for example, was inspired by a boat she saw on one of the family field trips.
Hannah Dumser was just 10 years old when she decided to build a boat. At 13 she was the master of her own Jericho Bay lobster skiff.
Hannah hadn’t finished the boat by the end of the 2016 school year, so they trailered the boat up to the family summer home in Cedarville, on the shores of Lake Huron in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She spent the first week of summer vacation attending to the last details and then launched the boat, christened JUNIPER, at the end of June. “It was hard, frustrating, even boring at some parts, like sanding,” says Hannah, “but in the end it was worth it when we put it into the water together.”
Hannah Dumser, boatbuilder.
The skiff was quickly pressed into service, with Hannah at the helm, for runs to town with cousins and friends for ice cream and visits to the library, conveniently located right across the street from the dock. Hannah and family also cruise the Les Cheneaux Islands, the archipelago that protects the waters surrounding Cedarville. Hannah’s younger sister, Kyla, also caught the Dumser boat bug; for Christmas she got plans for a Glen-L Zip.
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.
When I began writing this, there was a boat standing bolt-upright on its bow, held in place by a rope wrapped around its stern and pinched in a window sash on one of my upstairs bedrooms. The boat is an 18′ kayak that belongs to my friend Freya Hoffmeister, from Husum, Germany. She’s currently paddling it around North America, not in the here-and-there sense of “around,” but as in circumnavigating the continent, some 30,000 miles of paddling.
To fix a leak at the grab-loop hole, we set the kayak on end up against my house to get epoxy to settle in the bow.
I met Freya in 2005 at a sea-kayak symposium on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. She hadn’t been kayaking for long at that point, but she had already mastered dozens of the rolling techniques that are part of Greenland’s kayaking competitions. While at the symposium she so often shared her skills by teaching other kayakers there that at the end of the event, the symposium organizers returned to her the money she had paid to attend. The following year she participated in the Greenland National Championships and won the women’s division for rolling with a score that would have put her third among the men.
Freya’s kayak was designed and built to meet her specifications. The dip in the sheer line maintains buoyancy and cargo capacity in the bow while providing clearance for her paddle stroke. Stickers lined up on the hull alongside the cockpit are flags of the 19 nations where she has paddled the entire coastline.
She’s not one to do things by half measures—in past she competed in gymnastics, bodybuilding, and beauty pageants. She took an interest in skydiving, and among her 1,500 jumps, was the first tandem jump over the North Pole. She was, of course, the pilot and not the passenger. When she set her sights on sea kayaking she aimed high, then higher. She has circumnavigated Iceland, New Zealand’s South Island, Australia, South America, and Ireland. Australia had only been circumnavigated by kayak once before, by Paul Caffyn in 1981–82.
Others had tried to duplicate the feat but failed, but Freya not only didn’t fail. She bested Caffyn’s record. He did his circumnavigation in 360 days; Freya did it 322, covering 7,446 nautical miles. She paddled around South America in three legs, covering nearly 14,500 nautical miles. Her current project started in Seattle on March 25 and will cover around 27,000 nautical miles, which will be completed in several legs over the next eight to ten years. She’ll do the circumnavigation in two half-loops ending in New York City, one clockwise around the top of North America and the other counterclockwise through Central America by way of the Panama Canal.
Freya faced a lot of skepticism and criticism when she announced her plans to circumnavigate Australia. Few thought she had a chance of succeeding, and some thought she wouldn’t survive the attempt. There were unquestionably some formidable passages and dangerous waters she had to contend with. She took a 360-mile “short-cut” across the Gulf of Carpentaria, opting for box jellyfish and sea snakes rather than follow a longer route along shore dodging salt-water crocodiles. The crossing took eight days and she spent seven nights sleeping aboard her kayak; her paddle and a pair of floats served as a stabilizing outrigger. Monotony seemed to be the main challenge—Freya called me by satellite phone somewhere in the middle of the Gulf, and in the midst of this very risky endeavor, her only complaint was about the boredom.
Freya is surprisingly dismissive of things that most of us would find unnerving at best and terrifying at worst. During her circumnavigation of South America, she was crossing the mouth of the Amazon River, at night, and got caught by a tidal bore. She was side-surfed for 5 miles, bracing nonstop into the wave with her paddle. Her GPS recorded speeds of 15 miles per hour, sideways. She ultimately was freed from the wave when she capsized. The incident left the cockpit half-filled with fine sand so tightly packed that she couldn’t scoop it out with her hands—she had to dig it out with a metal spoon. She told this story to us at a family dinner—we were all wide-eyed—and ended it, as she often does with: “Yeah, well, it is like it is.”
A week before setting out from Seattle on this latest adventure, she hadn’t decided whether to head north along the Inside Passage to the east of Vancouver Island or to take on the island’s Pacific Coast. I had only a few miles of personal experience on the west side, having rowed a dory around Cape Scott at the northern tip, only to get stormbound for five days in the first bay. I knew that the Brooks Peninsula had a reputation for nasty conditions, and while I was in the middle of cautioning her about that area, it occurred to me that anyone who has kayaked around Cape Horn won’t be daunted by Brooks.
Freya went out for an afternoon paddle here in Seattle to take a break from all the work she’s been doing with logistics and gear. After a 20-mile tour that included the downtown waterfront, she discovered a half cup of water in the forward compartment. We discovered a leak in the hole in the bow for the cord of her toggle. We removed the toggle, set the kayak against the house, stern up, and pooled epoxy in the bow until a little bit wept out of the hole.
Freya favors gloves that leave her fingertips free for operating electronics and tending to to the many chores that come up while paddling. She reports that these gloves are warmer than gloves that completely cover her fingertips. The fingernail polish is more practical than decorative. It reinforces her fingernails and makes them less prone to breaking.
With that repair made—and a trip to the salon for a manicure—Freya was ready to go. We drove to a beach in a city park north of downtown Seattle. Surrounded by a group of people who had come to see her off, she packed her kayak, dragged it across the sand, and got aboard. As we post the April issue, Freya is making her way along the west coast of Vancouver Island. She’ll paddle around the Brooks Peninsula and through whatever the Pacific has to throw at her there—it is like it is—she’ll be undeterred.
Freya got her reputation as “The Lady in Black” back in 2005 and still prefers black clothing afloat and ashore.
Freya’s gear included food in bear-proof containers, a helmet for surf landings, three GPS units, an EPIRB, and a VHF radio. She carries everything she needs to be self sufficient for weeks at a time.
Almost ready to depart, Freya finishes packing her kayak at the Golden Gardens beach in Seattle. I brought my Caledonia yawl along, with outboard power, as a photo platform.
The motto that Freya has adopted at age 52 is displayed alongside the cockpit: “Never start stopping; never stop starting.”
Freya set out from Seattle on her 30,000-mile adventure on March 25, 2017.
Freya will be documenting her progress over the next eight to ten years with regular posts on her website.
The Woods Hole spritsail boat is a good example of workboats that became pleasure craft, as happened with so many New England fishing vessel designs. When a colony of summer people sprang up in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, they quickly took note of the vessels traditionally used by the local fishermen. With some modifications to the design to make it better suited for racing, members of the Woods Hole Yacht Club began building a fleet of around 20 spritsail boats in the late 1890s. H.V.R. Palmer, writing about “those handy little boats” in the December 1968 issue of the now-defunct The Skipper magazine, describes two of these old vessels, built by Edward E. Swift between 1896 and 1913, found in a Woods Hole barn in 1965.
The Woods Hole spritsail is, in many ways, similar to the iconic Cape Cod catboat, but with a few distinct differences. The most obvious difference is that the vessel is sprit rigged as opposed to gaff rigged. Many of the fishermen of Woods Hole anchored their vessels in the protected waters of Eel Pond; to enter, prior to the installation of a bascule bridge in 1940, a fisherman would have to pass under an old stone bridge that would require a sailing vessel to unstep its mast to pass underneath.
Josh Anderson
The loose-footed sail makes for a very simple rig, but takes some practice to sail well.
“The fishermen of Woods Hole,” writes Palmer, “became so proficient at this, according to old timers around the village, that they could sail to within a few feet of the bridge before lowering the mast—sail, sprit, and all. This rig also made it easier to furl sail when the fishing grounds were reached and it was time to go to work.” The sprit rig, with its unstayed mast and the absence of a boom, allowed this to be done with relative ease. The beam of the spritsail boat is narrower than that of the cat boat, to allow it to be rowed by one person instead of two, since the fishermen of Woods Hole typically worked alone. It also has a slightly deeper draft and increased freeboard for greater seaworthiness in the notoriously rough waters of Vineyard Sound.
The spritsail boat DEWEY, named in memory of Dewey S. Dugan, a Seattle longshoreman, was built for the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle in 2000 by the students of Seattle Central College’s boatbuilding program under the direction of the former longtime lead instructor, Dave Mullens. The boat is 13′4″ long, has a beam of 6′, and draws 3′ 6″ with the centerboard down. DEWEY was built to lines taken by David W. Dillion for Mystic Seaport, from the last spritsail boat built by Swift in 1913, one of the two found in 1965. Swift had been building the boat for his brother Helon, who passed away just before it was completed. Lacking the will to launch the vessel, Swift locked it away in his barn, thus preserving the boat in mint condition.
SBM
The mast is set without head stay or shrouds, making it easier to unstep.
The vessels in the CWB livery fleet are rented to the public year round and get quite a bit of use, so they need to be strong enough to take a beating. DEWEY has been a mainstay at the Center for over 15 years, due in large part to her stout workboat construction. The boat is built with 3/4″ Port Orford cedar carvel planking on 1″x1″ steam-bent, white-oak frames, and fastened with silicon-bronze screws. The similarly beefy stempost of sawn oak measures 2-1/2″ x 5″, and transitions into an equally thick keel.
There is a 5″-wide keelson with 3/4″ floor timbers fastened on top of the keel. The mahogany transom is 1″ thick and has a 1″ x 2″ perimeter frame, and a 1/2″x 1-1/2″ cap. It is tied into the keel with a 1″-thick knee. The centerboard trunk ties into the forward and middle thwarts. Though the spritsail boat is an open boat, it would handle well sailing in a little bit of a sea, as it has a 6″-wide side deck outside of the 1/2″x 5″ coaming. The side deck is supported by 1″-thick hanging knees screwed to the frames underneath.
SBM
E.E. Swift built the centerboard trunk in the original boat with an open slot at the top. Enclosing the board keeps DEWEY’s interior drier in rough water.
DEWEY’s wide beam provides a roomy interior, which can comfortably seat four while sailing. The three thwarts are 11″ wide. The mid and aft thwarts tie into two 16″-wide side benches, which are supported by knees. The benches and thwarts sit 8″ above the sole, providing a comfortable sitting height for sailing. The sole covers the entire interior and transitions into a ceiling; even when the boat is heeling, the sailors’ feet never rest on the frames or planks. The 15′ 6″ mast is made of spruce and is 3-1/2″ in diameter at the gate, tapering to 1-1/2″ aloft. The bronze gate in the bow makes it easy to raise the mast—it doesn’t have to be lifted to drop through a partner. The spruce sprit is 17′ 10″-long by 2-5/8″ in diameter and tapered up to the peak of the sail. The luff is attached to the mast with steam-bent hoops.
SBM
The broad thwarts and benches provide comfortable seating.
The Woods Hole spritsail boat was designed to be easily singlehanded and to sail well in fairly heavy weather without the need to reef. The boat is fun to sail, especially with a bit of a breeze. Interestingly, as a rental boat, DEWEY’s boomless sprit rig is sometimes passed over for the more familiar, marconi-rigged vessels. However, when provided with a bit of instruction, many of CWB’s livery customers find that sailing the Woods Hole spritsail boat is a pleasure.
SBM
Unlike a catboat rudder, where the tiller runs horizontally along the top of the blade, a spritsail boat’s tiller is slipped into a mortise in a rudder head.
The beauty of the sprit rig lies in its simplicity. Setting and dousing the sail is easily done, with the help of a snotter that is equipped with a block instead of a thimble. Once the throat halyard has been hauled tight and cleated, the top end of the sprit is passed through a grommet on the peak of the sail and its foot is then attached to the snotter. To set the sail, the snotter is tensioned—pushing the peak up and aft to stretch the sail out—and then made fast to a second cleat on the mast. Dousing is simply the same operation done in reverse.
Josh Anderson
Having the snotter led to a cleat on the mast makes it unnecessary to reach up to the heel of the sprit, but leading the tail end of the snotter aft makes it easier to adjust the shape of the sail without leaving the tiller.
It can take a few adjustments to find the ideal tension for the snotter. This isn’t much of a problem if you are sailing with someone else, but when sailing alone, it can be a bit clumsy and even dangerous to leave the tiller to shuffle forward to make adjustments. It was an easy fix to lead the snotter through a small block at the base of the mast and aft to a cleat installed on the centerboard trunk, where it can now be adjusted without having to leave the helm. This has the added benefit of quick scandalizing; a stopper knot tied at the appropriate spot along the extended snotter line prevents the sprit from lowering too far, which could cause the heel of the sprit to get hung up on the boat.
The sail on the spritsail boat is without a boom, which has advantages and disadvantages. It’s nice not to worry about getting hit in the head by a boom, but it can also be a bit tricky to learn how to trim the sail correctly, especially in light air. When sailing close to the wind, if a boomless spritsail is sheeted in hard to the center of the boat, the clew will curl in and ruin the shape. I found this frustrating the first time I sailed DEWEY, as the boat is fitted with a conventional traveler, which makes it awkward to trim the sail correctly when sailing close to the wind. About 15 minutes into my sail, I discovered that there were two Turk’s Head knots tied on the outermost corners of the traveler that were perfect for hooking the sheet block to. This kept the clew farther outboard, which made a big difference in the boat’s performance to windward.
SBM
This spritsail boat isn’t yet equipped with oarlocks. The original had rowing stations at the center and forward thwarts with oarlocks mounted on blocks fixed outside of the coaming.
DEWEY lacks the two rowing stations indicated in the plans, and relies upon a canoe paddle or a tow from a CWB chase boat when the wind dies. Next time DEWEY enters the CWB boatshop for maintenance, it will get a pair of oarlocks and a set of oars, as its workboat predecessors originally had.
Overall, the Woods Hole Spritsail boat is a fun and straightforward boat to sail. The sturdy workboat design is roomy and comfortable for a complement of four, while at the same time it is simply rigged and manageable enough to sail alone safely. The design provides decent windward ability for a traditionally rigged craft, and good maneuverability even in the tight quarters of CWB’s busy waterway. The greatest testament to this old workboat design is the handful of people who have discovered what fun it can be to sail this small boat and come down to CWB just to sail DEWEY. After 17 years of use in CWB’s livery, DEWEY is still in great condition, and will certainly spend many more years demystifying the sprit rig and getting people out on the water.
Josh Anderson and Sarah McLean Anderson both attended the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine. They restored a 25′ Friendship sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh also attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland, Maine, and is now the Lead Boatwright at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
The postwar market of the 1950s saw a boom in the market for home-built boats. With such a high demand for construction plans, naval architect Glen L. Witt founded his company, Glen-L Marine Designs, in 1953. That fledgling enterprise offered both plans and frame kits, making it a competitor to the Kit Boat Division of the now iconic Chris-Craft brand. Although Chris-Craft closed down its Kit Boat Division in 1958, Glen-L Marine Designs remains.
Chris Atwood
Chris Atwood gave the Utility he bought high marks, saying, “I think that it is one of the most underrated boat designs out there. It is extremely versatile and fast, and has plenty of freeboard to keep you dry, and will let you play with the big boys.”
The Utility, a small general-purpose outboard, was designed in 1953 and is among Glen-L’s earliest designs. For over six decades, it has endured as a standard offering in the Glen-L catalog, and with good reason. It was specifically designed to be affordable and easy to build for the first-time, amateur builder. So it was then, and so it is now. A rank newbie with no woodworking experience whatsoever can build this boat. I know. I’ve done it.
The boat is a planing hull intended for small outboard motors up to 15 hp. Its standard length is 11′, although the builder has the option of lengthening or shortening the hull by up to 10%—up to 12′, or as short as 9′ 7-1/2″. These variations are achieved with proportional adjustments to the spacing between the frames.
Michael Maddox
The black hose and the wiring on the transom of the author’s Utility are connected to an automatic bilge pump. The battery is housed under the foredeck.
An enduring representation of the era in which it was designed, the Utility features the characteristic curves and graceful geometry of 1950s boats. The sheer creates a sweeping curve from the broad foredeck to the narrow transom. The transom has gently curved sides that flare, ever so slightly, as they rise from the water. Typical of the era, the transom has a cutout to accommodate the short-shaft motors that were the norm of the time. Fortunately for today’s builder, new short-shaft motors are still readily available in this horsepower range. The Utility has a 5′ beam and a substantial flare in the forward section to give the hull added buoyancy and stability. As designed, the seating features a full-width thwart forward and benches aft along the port and starboard sides, though some builders omit these in favor of a second, transverse thwart.
The plans for the Utility are unmodified reproductions of the originals. Full-sized patterns make lofting unnecessary, as the parts can simply be traced onto the wood. The boat is designed for plywood-on-frame construction, and, like most Glen-L designs, is constructed upside-down on a simple form. The frame pieces are fashioned from solid stock—mahogany and white oak are recommended—joined with 1/4″ marine-plywood gussets. There are only two frames between the transom and the stem, adding greatly to the design’s simplicity. The curved stem is made from two pieces of 3/4″ plywood laminated together.
The breasthook is typical of Glen-L designs: it’s a large piece of laminated plywood—two layers of 3/4″ ply—notched around the stemhead and fastened to the sheer clamps. The forward frame includes a crowned deckbeam to support the aft edge of the 1/4″plywood foredeck. The aft frame is open at the top and its side members have small cutouts that are designed to accommodate full-length seat risers, though some builders omit these and install short risers just under the thwarts.
The transom, set at a 12-degree rake, is 3/4″ marine-grade Douglas-fir plywood, with an additional outer layer of 1/4″ BS 1088 meranti plywood to match the deck if finished bright. Its perimeter is framed with of solid 1″ (nominal) mahogany. A rectangular reinforcement is attached to the inner surface of the transom, centered under the notch for the motor. I used mahogany for this “motor board,” though oak is also recommended in the materials list.
Chris Atwood
Chris Atwood clocked his 11′ Utility at 24.2 mph with two adults aboard and a 8-hp, two-stroke outboard running wide open. His boat stays on plane down to 13 mph.
The transom knee is somewhat unusual in its design. Rather than having a single knee bolted to the transom and keel, the Utility has twin plywood knees fastened to either side of the keel. A piece of blocking, the same width as the keel, is attached to the centerline of the motor board, and the knees are fastened to the sides of the blocking. Altogether, it provides a strong structure to support the outboard motor. The keel itself is made from 1″ stock with a layer of 1/4″ plywood laminated on its top.
The 1×2 floor battens are set at toed-in angles from the transom to Frame #2, rather than parallel to each other. The inner floor battens pass through the frame; the outer ones end just shy of it, getting beveled and twisted to lie flat on the plywood bottom when installed. Sheer clamps and chine logs are sprung into place, fitting into notches in the frames. White oak is the preferred material for the chines and sheers; I substituted southern yellow pine. It bends easily and is very strong and here in Georgia, the stuff grows like weeds, so it’s plentiful and dirt-cheap. The downside is that it’s soft.
Chris Atwood
With a hull weight of just 140 lbs, the Utilty is an easy load to trailer behind a compact car. This boat is built without the full-length risers noted in the plans.
After fairing the longitudinals and framing, 1/4″ plywood panels are attached to the sides and bottom to create the hull. The plans call for Douglas-fir exterior AB plywood, which was commonly used for boatbuilding when the plans were first created; I used BS1088 meranti plywood. Fiberglassing the entire hull or just the seams is optional, but recommended. Once ‘glassing is completed, builders can add spray rails and a 1/2″ oak false stem, though some omit them, as I did. Once hull construction is completed and the boat is flipped over, the interior can be finished. I deviated from the plans only slightly, opting for a second thwart aft, rather than the twin side benches.
Chris Atwood
The plans call for two side benches in the stern, but this Utility has a second thwart instead. It helps keeps the helmsman’s weight centered.
The plans do not include dimensions for an intermediate deckbeam between Frame #2 and the breasthook. This is left up to the builder to determine, taking measurements from the partially finished boat. Copying the crown of Frame #2’s deckbeam provides a very good starting point. The intermediate deck beam is attached to blocking that is secured on the inside face of each sheer clamp. Once this is in place, the 1×5 centerline carlin is installed from Frame #2, passing through a notch in the intermediate deckbeam, to the top of the breasthook. The deck framing is faired, and then the deck is installed as two panels joining along the centerline. The plans include optional accommodations for oarlocks.
Chris Atwood
The author’s Utility gets up on plane with an 8-hp outboard and two aboard. For heavier loads, a 9-hp motor would be a better fit.
I found the Utility to be surprisingly stable, given its small size. It does roll a little bit side-to-side so I prefer to fish sitting down. However, the wide flare at the front of the boat does a superb job of providing ample buoyancy at the front of the boat and I feel comfortable leaning over the side to, say, retrieve some item from the water. The wider V-shaped sections there resist being pushed downward into the water as the boat rolls or leans. While the boat gives me a lot of confidence in doing this at the forward thwart, I would not attempt a strong lean at the stern, as the sides there are lower and almost vertical, and don’t offer the same degree of reserve stability.
Being only slightly rounded through the middle and almost flat-bottomed at the back, the Utility is certainly not a rough-water boat, and it’s a roller-coaster ride in chop. It can, however, handle boat wakes and moderate chop with confidence. An 8-hp outboard provides plenty of power and agility with only one passenger aboard. The very first time I made a full-throttle run, I was pleasantly surprised when the bow quickly eased back down as the boat came on plane. With one passenger, an 8-hp motor propels the boat about as fast as a boat its size needs to go.
With two passengers, however, the boat is somewhat under-powered with and 8-hp outboard. A 9.9-hp motor would be better. I have ridden in a 12′ version with a 15-horse, and that is about perfect for the longer hull, especially with two aboard. A 15-hp on an 11′ or shorter version of the Utility might be more than the boat could safely handle.
Chris Atwood
The author powers his Utility with an 8-hp four-stroke outboard. It didn’t perform as well with two adults aboard as Atwood’s two-stroke 8-hp did.
For a first-time builder, the Glen-L Utility is plenty easy to build. Trust me, if I can build this boat, anybody can. It offers a tangible link to the graceful designs of the past, while fitting within a modest budget. Building a Utility in your garage brings to life the curving, elegant simplicity of 1950s-era design and all in all, it’s an eye-catching boat that you’ll be proud to say you built yourself.
Michael Maddox was born and raised in Georgia, where he still lives. He’s a single father of two who works in industrial advertising. As an adolescent, his interest in wooden boats was sparked by the Venice boat-chase scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He had gone to see the movie with his dad, and until that scene, he had never seen a wooden motorboat. A decade later, his fascination with them was cemented during a trip to northern Italy. He was more enamored with these mahogany motoscafi (water taxis) than some of the destinations they ferried him to. He has wanted one ever since. A few years ago, he discovered the world of boatbuilding, and was hooked. He is currently building his second boat and records his progress on his blog, Barnacle Mike Boats.
Five weeks into our 1987 voyage from Puget Sound to Juneau, Cindy and I were well into the daily rhythm of life aboard ROWENA, the 21′ Gokstad faering I’d built for the trip. After traveling the Inside Passage through British Columbia we were leaner and stronger, our hands and our butts had toughened up, and we could row long hours, often covering over 30 miles in a day.
Photographs by the author and from his collection
Our first landing in Alaska was on Tongass Island, the site of a U.S. Army fort in the late 1800s and a native village after that. The only remains of the settlement we saw were fragments of brick scattered on the beach. A heavy rain had soaked our tent the previous night and we spread it out to dry.
Our first camp in Alaska was on Tongass Island, just 6 miles north of the US/Canada border and the site of an Army fort established in 1868, a year after Alaska had been purchased by the U.S. from Russia. The only remnants of the fort and the native settlement that later took its place were fragments of brick scattered among the white-quartz cobbles along the beach. With ROWENA anchored, we took a walk around the island. Cindy found a large yellowed tooth, perhaps from a bear and we saw in the dirt paw prints as big as my hands. I picked up a weathered beer can and filled it with a few pebbles to make a rattle to announce our presence to whatever company we might have on the island. Back at the beach I spread our tent out to dry on the driftwood at the top of the beach—it had rained hard during our last night in British Columbia—while Cindy cooked potatoes, carrots, cabbage and beans for dinner.
Roger Siebert
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The Tree Point Lighthouse dead ahead faces the open Pacific Ocean. Automated in 1969, it guides mariners across Dixon Entrance. The area can be quite rough, but we had an easy row around the point into Revillagigedo Channel.
We woke to the alarm at 5:00 a.m. and got underway during the morning calm to round Cape Fox, the most exposed promontory at Dixon Entrance. Long fingers of dense fog stretched seaward out from the pass to the south of Tongass Island and from Portland Inlet just beyond the border, but we had good visibility to the north and got around the Cape and the tall white lighthouse at Tree Point with only a northeast breeze and some chop to contend with. Farther north, Revillagigedo Channel was quite calm under clear skies and easy going.
Ketchikan was a nice, quiet town when we arrived.
We arrived at Ketchikan, rowed past the 180′ buoy tender PLANETREE at the Coast Guard station, and pulled in at the first marina we came to. Cindy stayed with the boat while I trotted into town to check in with customs. The agent queried me about my vessel and crew and asked, “Did you have any repairs made while in B.C.?” I told him I’d had a root canal during a stop in Nanaimo.
On my way back to the boat I ran into Tony and Betty, a couple we’d been seeing regularly in ports and anchorages since we first met in Butedale. Their cruising trawler SPIRIT was, of course, much faster than ROWENA, but they stayed longer in the places they visited. They told me they’d be happy to have us spend the night aboard SPIRIT and then went off to arrange for reporters from the local newspaper to interview us that afternoon back at ROWENA.
The following morning we woke aboard SPIRIT, ate breakfast with Tony and Betty, and then Cindy and I walked into town to mail some postcards. Three cruise ships had recently arrived and passengers were flooding into town. The streets were suddenly teeming with throngs of camera-toting tourists. We quickly retreated to ROWENA and cast off.
When we left Ketchikan it was quite crowded. Hundreds poured out of the three cruise ships and the streets were suddenly packed elbow to elbow with tourists.
We rowed north along Tongass Narrows past the row of cruise ships; a woman standing on a dock just to the north of them was waving a newspaper at us. She’d read about us in the morning paper and offered to give her copy to us. The tide was carrying us too fast to get over to her so we could only wave back and shout back our apologies for not stopping. A chop picked up in mid channel so we headed toward smoother water along shore. A man in a T-shirt painting a house rust red yelled, “North to Alaska, wahoo!” A few hundred yards farther along a man stepped out of a house holding up three cans of 7-Up and yelled “Can you use these?” For that we made a U-turn and pulled ashore.
After leaving Ketchikan, we sailed north along Clarence Strait, a 4-mile wide passage between the mainland and Prince of Wales Island. While I’d made the traditional side-hung rudder for the faering, it was easier to steer with an oar. The rudder tended to loosen the ropes that held it in place and the transverse tiller, which would be behind me, was awkward to hold.
The side-hung rudder meant for the Gokstad faering creates a bit of drag that would turn the boat to starboard if not for the blade’s asymmetrical cross section, which creates a bit of port-turning lift. The rudder was effective, but because we frequently switched between sailing and rowing, we rarely used it.
Tongass Narrows dropped us in Clarence Strait where we picked up a strong wind out of the southwest. We set the square sail and reached crossed the 6-mile-wide mouth of Behm Canal. The sail occasionally got backwinded and when it popped back with a loud whump, Cindy would look at me with eyes open wide. The wind died when we finished the crossing at Caamano Point, so we dropped the sail and rowed for a while along the mainland side of Clarence Strait. When the wind picked up, from the south this time, we set sail again. The following seas built quickly and we were soon surfing at speeds we hadn’t experienced before. We could ease the sheets to keep from being overpowered, but that did nothing to reduce the sail area aloft and if the bow veered, the sail, stretched wide along the yard, would pull at the masthead and roll a rail uncomfortably close to the water. We dropped the sail, rolled it up around its yard and tucked it out of the way.
On our way to Meyers Chuck we had a fresh following breeze, too much wind for the square sail, so we set the tarp as a spinnaker. The photo was taken by some friends we made along the way who were traveling north in a cruising trawler. Many of the motor cruisers tended to stay for long periods in anchorages and harbors, so we regularly caught up with them.
Cindy threaded the halyard through the webbing loops on one end of our nylon tarp and tied sheets on the opposite corners. As a makeshift spinnaker it provided all the power we needed, and with the sail area down low we had a much more comfortable ride. The southerly carried us about 19 miles to Meyers Chuck. Cindy was at the helm as we sailed into the cove there, skimming over shoals at the entry in less than 2′ of water.
We spent the night at Meyers Chuck and woke to a thick fog. With time on our hands, we rowed into town, if a store and a post office that serve a few dozen residents could be called that. We stocked up on cookies and gingerbread, and rowed along the shore where most of the houses were perched on pilings either above the water or on the steep rocky slopes. It was past noon when the fog lifted; we rowed 2 miles along Clarence Strait, turned east into Ernest Sound and followed the ragged south shore of Etolin Island to Canoe Pass. The 9-mile-long channel between Etolin and Brownson Island funneled down from nearly a mile wide at its mouth to less than 80 yards in its northern third.
We enjoyed being in well protected water with the shoreline close by to make the scenery interesting, but horse flies found us and made a nuisance of themselves. They were a big as pinto beans and had a painful bite. We couldn’t outrun them so we had to fight back. I’d wave them off my arms and neck, but used the tops of my thighs as bait. I’d let them settle and prepare to cut into my skin and then sneak a hand up from the side and smack them from behind. Between the two of us, Cindy and I had 16 kills. We flicked the bodies overboard.
We anchored at the north end of Canoe Pass and on our second day rowing along Etolin, the skies cleared early in the day and the sun beat down on us. There wasn’t a breath of wind to cool us and the rowing was miserably hot. We found a small cove guarded by an islet at its mouth and fed with a small stream at its back. We filled our black water bag with fresh water for rinsing off, dropped anchor in the middle of the cove, and slipped over the side for a swim.
On an oppressively hot day of rowing around the east coast of Etolin Island, we ducked into a little cove for a refreshing swim and an opportunity to inspect the faering’s bottom.
After around 800 miles of cruising, ROWENA was in very good shape. We had taken great care whenever we brought the faering ashore and the varnished hull was still undamaged.
The varnish was in good shape but I was surprised to see that barnacles had made their homes in the decorative grooves on the plank edges.
I dove under ROWENA and noticed that barnacles were growing on the varnish below the waterline. They were tiny and easy to scrape off with my thumbnail. Back aboard the boat we rinsed with warm fresh water, pumped the bilge out, and left the cove to continue north to an overnight stop in Whaletail Cove.
Two powerboats came into Whaletail Cove after us, checked some crab traps, and left as quickly as they came. We had the cove to ourselves for the night.
We put an early end to the day’s rowing and settled in for a quiet evening and night in the cove.
We got a fast, if brief, ride north from Whaletail with wind and tide in our favor. We sailed 8 miles before the wind died and we had to row the last 12 miles to Wrangell.
After a stop for pizza and an overnight stay in Wrangell, we headed for the islands at the mouth of the Stikine River. We had been warned to avoid the broad mudflats that surrounded the islands, but the mud turned out to be more entertaining than hazardous. We had arrived on a rising tide, so we wouldn’t get stranded, and the mud was firm enough to support our weight when we stepped out of the boat. The thin layer of creamy fine mud on top was slick as grease. Barefoot, I could dig my toes in and run, and when I got up some speed I could jump, land on both feet and slide for about 20 yards. It was like skim boarding but without the board.
The silt deposited by the Stikine River was quite fine and and slippery, but wasn’t so soft that we couldn’t get out of the boat to stretch our legs.
We didn’t stay long because we were eager to get to LeConte Bay where we expected to find a glacier and icebergs. The mouth of the bay was five miles away and while we didn’t see any ice when we arrived there, we could feel the river of cold air flowing out between the banks. A mile in, we found icebergs, and they grew more numerous as we went farther in; the flood tide had been pushed them all back toward the glacier.
The glacier gave the inlet its own climate, cold and windy, while the weather elsewhere was warm and calm. The front of the glacier was about a mile wide and booming now and then as the ice cracked. In the years following our visit, Le Conte glacier retreated a mile from where is it here.
The bay followed a serpentine path and we didn’t get a view of the glacier itself until we were five miles in. At that point we were surrounded by ‘bergs, none of them much bigger than the boat, and most of them nearly transparent, having been melting in the sun. Closer to the glacier they were much larger, white and streaked with a Windex-like blue. One of the larger ‘bergs broke apart and the sound of the ice fracturing and the water pouring off it as it rolled echoed across the bay. The flow of cold air was kicking up a chop and was strong enough that we set sail and let it push us back out to Frederick Sound. The sun had dropped behind the mountain range that surrounded us and the shadow that swept across the ‘bergs and the glacier robbed them of their color, turning them a dusty gray. The tide had turned and many of the icebergs were now drifting out in the Sound.
The cold air sliding down the slope of the glacier created a sailing breeze on our way out of LeConte Bay.
It was late in the day and we needed to find a place to spend the night. We dropped the anchor in a small cove just to the north of the entrance to LeConte Bay. As Cindy got the stove out and started dinner—miso soup with potatoes, carrots, and cabbage—an iceberg a bit larger than ROWENA drifted by just 15′ away and came to a stop. It had grounded itself and now the tide that had carried it here was swirling around it. I pulled the anchor up and rowed us closer to shore. The ‘berg broke in half and the two pieces followed us. We had to leave.
Cindy kept cooking as I began the 7-mile row across Frederick Sound. We ate along the way and then rowed together in the dark under a moonless overcast sky for the last couple of miles. At Mitkof Island we entered a half-mile wide bay, more open than any place else we’d anchored, but it would have to do. I sounded with the anchor until I found about 20′ of water and then set it.
We had ideal conditions on Frederick Sound for our morning row to Petersburg. We could see Devils Thumb, a distinctive spire beyond the Alaska Coast Range and just across the border in Canada. The aptly named Thumb is visible here in the distance, just to the right of center.
When we stopped in Petersburg the harbormaster didn’t charge us for moorage because we had no motor. It rained all night but we were quite dry under the canopy.
After a 15-mile row to the north end of Mitkof, we took a day off in Petersburg before rowing north to Farragut Bay. We’d rowed 25 miles to get there and fought against a strong flood tide for much of the day, working the back eddies when we could, and making several sprints around points where rowing flat-out gained only a few inches per stroke. We arrived at Farragut tired. By the time we found an anchorage on the east side of Read Island, a two-mile long wooded island that lies just inside the mouth of the Bay, it was raining, and then we were tired and wet.
Crossing Farragut Bay in the fog kept us on alert, listening for fishing boats and looking for land.
We were enveloped in fog the next morning. We decided to row the 3-1/2 miles across the mouth the bay and set our course to err on the side of making land inside the bay rather than straying out into Frederick Sound. We had rowed for a long time in the murk and I was just beginning to get worried when we saw the dark shadow of land ahead. We turned south and followed the shore for 12 miles until we reached Cape Fanshaw. There fog lifted and we rowed another 4 miles and stopped for the night in a cove behind Whitney Island.
This little cove would have been the most beautiful and comfortable campsite of the entire trip, but we arrived in a flat calm that offered a quick, safe transit of Stephens Passage.
Our plan for the following day was to get in position to make the 8- to 10-mile crossing of Stephens Passage to Admiralty Island. We rowed north about 15 miles and found a cove that would put us in good position for an early start the next day. The white gravel beach allowed us to pull ROWENA ashore; the spruce trees surrounding it were draped with Spanish moss, there was a flat mossy place for the tent, there were no bugs—it was the best camp site we had found in Alaska. But Stephens Passage was glassy and absolutely windless. We looked north and south and there wasn’t so much as a cat’s paw anywhere.
Unusually calm conditions gave us an opportunity to make a quick afternoon crossing to Admiralty Island.
It was 5:20 p.m.; we’d be across in a couple of hours with daylight to spare. We shoved off and made a beeline for the south end of the Glass Peninsula, settling into a fast, steady pace. Even moving at a good clip, ROWENA hardly left a wake behind us. We made the crossing in 1 hour and 40 minutes. We rowed another 3 miles north along the west side of the peninsula and anchored in Blackjack Cove. The following day we rowed and sailed 24 miles up Seymour Canal to Pack Creek where we hoped to meet Stan Price, the man we’d heard about who lived with grizzly bears.
A fair wind gave us a chance to relax as we headed north up the 40-mile long Seymour Canal. The tiller extension and an oar serve as whisker poles to get the most out of the sail. My waterproof camera, strapped to a raft of inflatable fenders, snapped this picture with its timer.
Cindy took advantage of sailing up Seymour and napped in the shade of the main; I busied myself with raising more sail when the wind weakened.
We landed at Pack Creek that afternoon and found Stan at home in a shore-side cabin he’d built on a raft of logs to float it during especially high tides. He invited us in and Cindy took a chair by the door and I sat at his table. The walls were wide planks of rough-sawn lumber, the gaps stuffed with tissue paper and wrappers to keep breezes out.
Stan built his home on a log raft that floated at high tide in the backwaters adjacent to Pack Creek. Stan died in 1989 and little remains of his home. The area is now the Stan Price State Wildlife Sanctuary.
Stan was 87 years old but still had a full head of hair, bright eyes, and a quick smile. We asked about the danger of the brown bears that we had seen feeding on salmon in the creek. He said they had plenty of food and posed no threat to people. He added that might might attract some unwanted attention from the bears if we’d been cooking over a campfire and walking around, “smelling like a Big Mac.”
Stan Price was 87 years old when we visited him and he had been living at Pack Creek for 42 years. He told us about working in his younger years in the silver mines in Virginia City, Nevada, where the camp cook served antelope meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We had been chatting with Stan for about an hour and a half when an enormous brown head poked through the door right at Cindy’s shoulder, then turned to look at me, sweeping its snout right over her lap. Cindy froze, eyes wide; Stan grinned and said, “That’s Lucy.”
Lucy, the bear who had poked her head in while we were visiting Stan, took a dip in the rising waters by his cabin. She was probably looking for salmon.
We spent the night at nearby Windfall Island and in the morning rowed under a cloudy sky past Swan Island. We rounded its northern end and the skies cleared as we entered the upper reaches of Seymour Canal. The air was still and warm and the water serenely still. To the east, cottony cumulous clouds rose above the mainland; the steep, thickly wooded hills to the north and west of us were edged with grey bands of bare rock at the water’s edge.
A break in the weather made for very pleasant rowing as we headed north from Pack Creek. Here in the middle of Seymour Canal I used the mast as a floating monopod for the camera.
We didn’t have many photos of ourselves rowing, and the setting deserved to be preserved on film. I had a camera equipped with radio-controlled shutter, so I just needed a place to put my camera in the middle of the canal. I tied the anchor chain to the top of the mast and slipped both carefully over the side. The mast had just enough buoyancy to support the weight of the chain and float vertically with its heel about 4′ above the water. I taped my non-waterproof SLR camera and the attached remote receiver to the mast and Cindy and I rowed around it, triggering the shutter with the transmitter.
The “selfie stick” for the previous photo was ROWENA’s mast with the anchor chain tied to the masthead to get it to float vertically and the rowing rudder lashed at the waterline to keep the camera steadily pointed in one direction. The antenna for the radio-controlled shutter is visible just to the right of the mast.
We had heard about a railway portage across the narrow neck of land that connects the slender, 43-mile long Glass Peninsula to Admiralty Island but didn’t know if it we’d find it in useable condition. It had been built in the 1950s by members of the Juneau Territorial Sportsmen’s association using rails and trams from old gold-mining operations. The latest we’d heard was that it had been rebuilt a few years ago.
As we paddled across the shallows to the mouth of the stream leading to the rail portage, salmon whipped up the still water.
The flood tide pushed us along toward the dead end at the farthest northern reach of the canal. To the west, a 25′-tall waterfall fanned out like a veil over a large rock in the middle of the falls. We were two hours ahead of the high tide and there was a broad expanse of muddy tidal flats separating us from the tall grass that surrounded a creek that we believed led to the portage. I took the anchor rode and two other lines, tied them together and to ROWENA’s painter, and we got out of the boat to wade closer to shore. Our rubber boots stirring up black mud; the air was foul with the odor of decay. I made the line fast to a large rock at the top of the flats and we headed to the creek, crossing a trail of 6″-wide bear-paw prints on our way.
We tried hauling the boat up one creek looking for the portage. I kept an eye out for salmon and gave them time to get out of the way. This turned out to be the wrong creek and we had to back ROWENA back into deeper water.
The first creek we tried was so full of salmon that we had to pick our steps slowly and carefully to avoid stepping on them. Some had made depressions in the gravel, exposing circles of light gray sand. Some of the fish had patches of grey and white on their backs. The dead fish that were completely white. We later found the right creek. It had a cabin about 150 yards from the tide flats and the cart was parked a few yards from the end of the rails, saving us a walk to the other end of the portage to retrieve it.
The rain came down in earnest as we started the first of several trips to get all of our gear to the railhead.
The creek we had to ascend was only a couple of feet wide and half as deep for much of its length, so we wouldn’t be able to float ROWENA up to the rails even at the peak of the high tide. We had to haul all of our gear to the railhead before dragging the lightened faering up the creek.
The direct path from the boat to the railhead was through shoulder-high grass, and we feared we might startle a bear hidden there.
When we got back to the boat to carry the first load, the tide was already up to the rock I’d tied the extended painter to. We coasted ROWENA to the channel leading up to the creek and pulled her up to the edge of the grass and set the anchor upstream. The clouds had been closing in above us, and it had started to drizzle as we were about to make the first carry to the railhead. We put on our rain gear and took the quickest route to the cabin, straight through the shoulder-high grass. We were both nervous about being in bear country near a stream teeming with salmon, walking through grass tall enough to conceal a bear.
We kept ROWENA upright so that only the keel came in contact with the rocks. Its ironbark shoe could take the wear and tear.
When we picked up the second load, it began to rain hard and stayed that way for the rest of the hauls. With ROWENA empty, we dragged her to the creek and often skidded her keel across the mast partner and a 2×6 we’d brought from the cabin to keep her off the rocks. Salmon thrashed upstream as we approached. We cleared rocks that were tall enough to reach past ROWENA’s keel and scratch her garboard. Those rocks were easy to identify, even underwater, because they had silvery tips where aluminum skiffs had left their marks.
The farther up the creek we got the shallower and narrower it became. Hauling the boat over the grass was often less work.
After the long haul up the shallow creek, we had to lift the faering onto the rail cart.
When we reached the end of the rails, I brought the cart down and we eased ROWENA up on it and leveled her with two large fenders that we found by the cabin. It was about 5:00 p.m. and we didn’t have much daylight, so we quickly piled gear in and around the boat.
With the boat and gear loaded on the cart we could begin the 3/4-mile push to Oliver Inlet.
The cart scooted along nicely on the level stretches of track but the combined weight of the cart, boat, and gear made the uphill stretches hard work.
On level stretches, the cart rolled easily.
The rails took a turn to the right and took us into the woods, then ascended a hill. I pushed the cart uphill until it came to a stop and then put shoulder into it and braced my feet against one of the ties. Cindy chocked the wheels with a piece of 2×6, I took break, and then the two of us shoved the cart to the top of the rise. The effort left us panting and sweating. The rails leveled out across a broad area of muskeg, a patchwork of mossy hummocks and irregular pools of tea-brown water, dotted with crooked head-high trees. The tracks then tilted down toward a small valley and the cart picked up speed. I trotted along behind it, crossed a small trestle bridge and held the cart when it came to a stop on the uphill slope on the other side. When Cindy caught up we pushed it up to the next level stretch.
The longest stretch of rail took us across a soggy muskeg field. The boardwalk between the rails was wet, mossy, and very slippery.
We came to another valley and brought the cart to a stop to check on the tracks ahead. Everything seemed in good shape so we continued, letting the cart coast downhill, trying to keep its speed in check. I was having trouble keeping my footing on the wet planks that were set across the ties as a boardwalk, so I planted shifted to walking on the ties, pushing hard against them to slow the cart. It was no use. The cart continued to pick up speed and I had to choose between risking a broken leg and letting ROWENA fend for herself.
I released my grip and the cart raced ahead of me down the slope toward a second bridge and careened up the other side. As I ran across the bridge I could see the cart slow down and in an instant I realized I had to get to it before it started to roll back toward me or I’d have to jump off the bridge to avoid getting mowed down. I sprinted up the hill and caught the cart just as it came to a stop. I put my shoulder against it, planted my feet on one tie, held on to another with my hands, and waited for Cindy. Together we got the cart up to the top of the rise.
The last stretch of the portage descended a steep slope to Oliver Inlet. While Cindy tends our anchor rode as a belay to back up the cable winch, she waves mosquitoes away from her face.
We reached the north end of the portage where the rails take a turn and a steep drop to Oliver Inlet. A rusty cable winch anchored to a stack of ties was there to ease the cart down to the water. I had my doubts about the winch, so I tied the 110′ anchor rode to the cart and looped it around the end of a railroad a tie so Cindy could use it as a backup belay. As the cart rolled down the slope, I braked with the winch, slowing the descent until Cindy was at the tail end of the rode. I squeezed the brake tight and stopped paying out cable. Cindy walked down to the cart and set the rode up again with a turn around another tie close to the cart. It took us three pitches of the rode to get ROWENA to the end of the tracks. The tide was too low to float the boat off so we had to empty it before sliding it off the cart.
The end of the line brought us down to the tide flats of Oliver Inlet.
The air was thick with mosquitos and we batted them away as we spread a tarp out on the marsh grass and unloaded our gear on it. Cindy found our bug repellent; we slathered our faces and hands with it. We finally slipped ROWENA into the water. Cindy packed our gear while I winched the cart back up to the top of the hill.
It had stopped raining and it was hot and very muggy, but the bugs were so thick that we kept wrapped up in our rain gear.
When we finally took to the oars, a cloud of mosquitos followed us out from shore. There wasn’t a breath of wind, so we sprinted to create a bit of our own then ducked down to let the air sweep over us. We sprinted and ducked a half dozen times until we had left the swarm behind.
In the last of the daylight we sprinted away from the portage to escape the mosquitoes.
It had stopped raining, but the still air was thick with humidity, and we were drenched with sweat. We dropped the anchor in a small cove on the east side of the inlet, raised the canopy and made the cockpit ready for a late dinner of beef stew, couscous, and hummus. By the time we turned in it was 10:30, a very late night for us.
In the morning there were mosquitos all over the inside of the canopy; I smeared them with my thumb into the weave of the fabric while I waited for Cindy to wake up. We put the cockpit in order, took the canopy down, and did another sprint-and-duck session to leave the new crop of bugs behind.
We reached the mouth of Oliver inlet and could see a fog-aproned Douglas Island a little over 3 miles away across Stephens Passage. The sky was bright white with a high overcast; both air and water were still, perfect for the crossing. We took the shortest route across and by the time we reached Douglas, the fog had lifted. We rowed east to loop around the southern tip of the island into Gastineau Channel. Two fishing boats were on their way out of the channel and took a course that would take them across our bow. I was annoyed that we’d have to get tossed about by their steep wake, but then both turned to go astern of us. As they passed,a blond man at the helm of the second boat called out, “Chris, is that you?”
“Paul?” I replied. It was a friend of mine from Seattle. He brought his boat SUPREME, alongside. Apparently one of his deck hands had spotted us and reported to Paul that he’d seen “two Indians in a war canoe.” The two boats had altered course to take a closer look.
Paul Enquist, a friend from Seattle and an oarsman coached by my father, found us crossing Stephens Passage on our way to Juneau.
Paul had his cook bring up raspberry Danish and apples from the galley. We said our goodbyes and SUPREME motored off while we took turns eating our unexpected breakfast. Even with just one of us at the oars we made good progress along the steep brush-covered flanks of Douglas Island, streaked white with waterfalls.
Eight miles of Gastineau Channel were all that separated us from Juneau. SOBRE LAS OLAS, a 1929 motoryacht we crossed paths with weeks earlier, came up astern and when she was abeam a half mile to the east of us gave two blasts of her horn; the echoes bounced off the walls of the channel.
Our summer aboard ROWENA put us in good shape and in good spirits.
We reached Juneau in 54 days, having covered over 1000 miles, mostly by oar, a fair bit under sail, and a tiny stretch by railroad. Cindy and I returned to Seattle from Juneau aboard an Alaska State ferry with ROWENA riding on the car deck tucked under a semi’s trailer.
ROWENA took a well-deserved break in the lobby of a bank serving the largely Scandinavian community of Ballard, a neighborhood in northwest Seattle.
We sold the boat to my father to help finance a move to Washington, D.C., where Cindy had won an internship at the Library of Congress; I found work at the Smithsonian Institution. We later moved back to Seattle when I was offered the editorship of Sea Kayaker magazine. ROWENA was purchased by a family friend in Douglas, Alaska, right across Gastineau Channel from Juneau, and was shipped north again. Cindy and I raised a son and a daughter and went our separate ways in 2000. ROWENA’s owner moved to the Seattle area and the boat took yet another ride along the Inside Passage. The Gokstad faering proved itself to be a good sea boat and remains the most beautiful small boat I’ve ever seen.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
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.
Four blades on a single arbor increase accuracy and dramatically shorten working time.
When I was getting ready to build a cedar-strip kayak, just the thought of ripping about 900′ of 1/4″ x 3/4″ cedar strips was daunting. Pushing 18′ planks through the tablesaw 50 times was not how I wanted to spend my time—I’m rather impatient and like getting jobs done quickly. I started playing with the idea of gang-sawing, putting more than one blade on my tablesaw to make multiple cuts with each pass. Using four blades to make just 13 passes for the kayak strips I needed sounded a little more reasonable.
A full-sized saw with an arbor long enough to take a stack of blades and spacers is required to do this. I have a 10″ tablesaw that can accommodate a stack of four blades with spacers. I didn’t need 10″ blades to cut the 3/4″ stock I needed for strips, so I bought four identical 7-1/4″ narrow-kerf carbide-toothed blades. The smaller blades are cheaper and, being lighter, don’t strain the motor when starting up. I don’t recommend using more than four blades; it would make for an awful lot of material for your tablesaw to remove.
The three plywood spacers between the blades needed to be thicker than the strips I would be cutting to make up for the difference between the kerf cut by a blade and the thickness of its body. A 5/16″ plywood spacer gave a strip just shy of 1/4″.
Randall Davie
The author’s collection of gang-ripping pieces surround a plywood mold for the stem of a canoe. The strips for the stem were cut using 1/8″ mahogany plywood spacers between the blades. The ten strips were thin enough to bend cold around the form, and added up to the 3/4″ thickness.
I can cut strips of any thickness, four at a time, by varying the thicknesses of spacers. Any high-quality panel stock—MDF, plywood, acrylic sheet—can be used for spacers. A hole saw and a drill press are nice for making the spacers but not absolutely necessary.
SBM
If you want to set up for a lot of different strip thicknesses, this hole saw modified to take a 5/8″ spade bit will make perfect spacers quickly. The shaft of a spade bit may be too large to replace the usual 1/4″ pilot bit in a hole saw; drilling the hole saw to fit is the quickest way to make this one-step tool. Shorten the shaft to fit and grind a small flat on on it for the set screw to bear against. Drill from both sides of the spacer stock to eliminate tear-out.
You’ll need to replace your saw’s table insert to accommodate the multiple blades. I make zero-clearance inserts of 1/2″ birch plywood and #6 x 3/8″ round-head screws, one in the tail to prevent kick-up and four on the bottom for height adjustment. I mark my sets of spacers and their matching inserts according to spacer thickness and the thickness of the strips they produce.
Randall Davie
Each set of blades spaced for a particular thickness of strips requires its own push block and tablesaw insert.
A purpose-built push block clears the strips all the way through the blades with almost no chance of kick-back. A thin strip can shoot back like an arrow, so even with the push block it’s always best to stand to the side.
Randall Davie
The author uses a scrap of 1/4″ MDF (medium density fiberboard) for set-up. A 3″x3″ piece gives him four tries at setting the fence to make the strip equal in thickness to the others cut in the same pass. For a laminating project, accuracy is not critical, but if you want to mill strips for a strip-built hull, set-up is crucial. A variance of 1/100″ doesn’t sound like much, but it works out to a lot of extra sanding.
With some careful setup of the fence I’m ready to rip. I found the gang-sawing process produced more consistent results than using a single blade. With any setup on the tablesaw, accuracy and safety are the secrets to success. I hope this saves you time, materials, and fingers. Work safe.
Randy Davie is a certified carpenter and tile setter living near Powell River, British Columbia, who often goes to work by boat. He has built several boats and intends to build many more, enjoys sea kayaking and canoeing, and happily notes he has “an awesome shop and an awesome wife.”
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The 40-plus pounds of water that the 5-gallon Smart Bottle holds provides an effective weight for trimming a small boat.
For years I’ve carried a succession of inexpensive, 5-gallon flexible plastic water containers aboard my boats. They nestle nicely wherever I stow them, and I can head out knowing I have drinking water aboard whenever I take off for a row. The ones I’ve been using were showing their age, and on my to-do list for this season was to buy a new one. I happened to be looking in a back issue of WoodenBoat and ran across an advertisement for just the product I wanted—a clear flexible bag called a Smart Bottle. It looked interesting, and at $11.95 for the 5-gallon size, it was worth a try.
The Smart Bottle is different from my previous water containers. Using some origami-like folding, it arrived absolutely flat. There is an ordinary cap as well as a pour spout on a lanyard, and a pair of rugged metal grommets top and bottom. The handles at each end are not separate pieces, but are cut into the bag’s double-layered plastic film. According to the manufacturer “the structure of both the 10-mil outer film and the 4-mil liner is a seven-layer coextrusion with two layers of nylon bonded with resin tie layers to two layers of polyethylene. The nylon acts as an oxygen barrier and contributes stiffness. The polyethylene contributes bulk and absorbs shock within the material.”
Ben Fuller
Empty, the Smart Bottles are quite flat and easy to stow.
The Smart Bottle unfolded itself as I filled it for the first time and became a somewhat-rounded cube. I filled it pretty full, and it felt close to the 42 lbs that 5 gallons weighs. I threaded a bit of line with figure-eights on it through the top grommets and put the bottle in the back of my truck, where it froze solid in the Arctic air. After thawing it, I took it down to the dory to see how the bag would stow in the stern where I often carry water as a trimming weight. It tucked in securely, and with a frame in front of it and the sides riding up its sides, it wouldn’t be able to move in a sea.
Ben Fuller
With grommets at either end, a length of cord can be used to hang the bottle upside down or right side up.
The second time I filled the Smart Bottle, I switched the regular cap for the pour spout, shifted the lanyard to the other pair of grommets, and hung the bag from a tree. You can also set the bag on its side to pour with the spout. The spout’s lever tucks neatly into the carrying handle cutout, and the valve is tight and doesn’t leak. If you were to lose the regular cap, the spout is watertight and well protected. While my well water has a pretty strong taste and might have partially masked it, the Smart Bottle’s BPA-free plastic film didn’t impart a taste to the water I drank from it. You can also order the Smart Bottle with a valve cap with a tube to use in place of the spout.
SBM
Two types of spout are available: a tube for use with water filtration devices and a a spout for general use.
I emptied the bag, and it retained enough of its inflated shape to air out. I then hung it, upside down and cap off, in the basement to dry, something I do with all of my various water bladders and hydration packs.
SBM
The sizes offered are, clockwise from lower left, 5 gallon, 2-1/2 gallon, 1 gallon, and 1/2 gallon.
The Smart Bottle folks also make 1/2-gallon, 1-gallon, and 2 1/2-gallon bags. They even sell a 1/2-gallon beer growler, a good way to bring along some homebrew. All of the bottles are BPA-free and made in the USA.
I look forward to the coming season with the Smart Bottle, stored full in the dory swinging on the haulout, ready to row; or tucked into my sail-and-oar boat, where it will serve as both my water supply and as a bit of trimming ballast.
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.
Destructive Testing
The Smart Bottle web site features some testing to measure the bottles’ durability, so I duplicated the trials to prove the claims. On the advice of one of the design engineers working with Smart Bottles, I filled the bottles with water and let them hydrate for 24 hours. “The nylon in the film,” the designer wrote, “needs an opportunity to hydrate to realize its full toughness.”
SBM
The half-gallon didn’t survive being run over by a Chevy Blazer.
A photograph on the Smart Bottle web site shows a bottle under the tire of a car. The photo is labeled “puncture resistant” but I think the better term may be “rupture resistant.” The half-gallon bottle I tested, 2/3 full of water, didn’t survive being run over by my Chevy Blazer’s rear tire. The wall opposite the grommet ruptured. The photo on the web site shows a wall of the bottle stretching and taking on a balloon-like shape, just as the bottle I tested did before bursting. The car pictured is a Honda Element, though I couldn’t tell which model. I looked up the 2-wheel drive EX Element and found it has a weight around 3400 lbs with 42% of that at the rear, so 714 lbs on one tire. Looking up the same figures for my Blazer indicated around 920 lbs on a rear tire, so the bottle must have limit somewhere in between.
The web site states: “The 1-gal survived a 15′ drop, the 2 1/2-gal a 10′ drop, and the 5-gal a 7′ drop.” The bottles did well in my front-porch drop tests. The one-gallon survived a 6′ drop, a 10′ drop, and two 15′ drops before developing a 3/4″ tear on one of the vertical seams on the third 15′ drop. The 2- and 5-gallon sizes each survived two of their respective 10′ and 7′ drops. They both showed some whitening about 1 to 2 mm wide along the vertical edges where the film stretched, but there were no tears or leaks. I also didn’t see any leakage at any of the lids caused by the drops. I concluded that the bottles should hold up quite well in normal use .
I did a taste test using city tap water that has no detectable flavor. After letting the water sit in a bottle for two days at room temperature I didn’t detect any affect on taste.
Ed.
The Smart Bottles designed for outdoor use are available from Smart Bottle: $4.95 for the 1/2 gallon size, $5.95 for the 1 gallon, $10.95 for the 2 1/2 gallon, and $11.95 for the 5 gallon.
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.
Getting trailers to fit my boats, and my trailers to fit the spaces I have available, has been a challenge. I shifted 10′ of rockery back about 3′ to make room for my son’s Escargot and trailer. For my Caledonia yawl I added a garden-window-like extension to the back of my garage to make room for the stern and cut a hole in the door at the front for the trailer tongue.
photographs by the author
The hinge made it possible to use a drift-boat trailer for longer boats. The instructions advise against mounting the jack and winch on the tongue extension, but in this case there wasn’t room enough on the original tongue.
When it came to parking my garvey cruiser at home, I had a spot in front of the house for the boat, but with three other trailers at home I didn’t have any options left for reconfiguring buildings and landscape to make a space long enough for a trailer with a tongue long enough for the garvey—it would stuck out into a public sidewalk. Only a hinged trailer-tongue would solved the problem.
A trailer-tongue hinge can do two things: it can make a trailer tongue shorter to fit a limited space, and it can make a tongue longer if you’re converting a utility trailer for use as a boat trailer. I had previously extended the tongue of one of those inexpensive utility trailers by replacing the entire tongue with a longer and sturdier rectangular steel tubing. (That was the tongue that stuck out of the mouse-hole at the bottom of my garage door.) For the 17′ garvey I’d bought a drift-boat trailer. It has a nice flat deck that works for my boat, but its tongue, meant for a 14′ drift boat, was too short. I couldn’t just replace the tongue with something longer, as it would stick out over the sidewalk. A Fulton Fold-Away Hinge kit made it possible to have the length I need for towing, and keep the trailer short when parked.
Being able to fold the tongue out of the sidewalk made it possible to use a parking space too short for a full-length tongue.
The hinge is made of zinc-plated, die-cast steel, and has a 19/32″ removable hinge pin and fixed pivot bolt. The kits fit 2″ x 3″, 3″ x 3″, 3″ x 4″, and 3″ x 5″ trailer tongues. I bought the 2″ x 3″ kit from West Marine and 3′ of 2″ x 3″ steel from a local metal supplier to match the existing tongue. The Fulton website has instructions that include tables of the tongue-extension length limits for various gross trailer weights and maximum tongue loads.
The 3′ extension I added to the tongue was well within the 3,500-lb gross trailer-weight limit and 350-lb tongue load listed for the 2″ x 3″ hinge. I removed the coupler and drilled holes according to the instructions for the bolts that secure the hinge; after the bolts were installed, I reinstalled the coupler. The safety chains must remain connected to the main part of the tongue, not on the swinging section, to do any good if the hinge fails. I installed longer chains to reach past the added length.
The hinge pin has its hairpin cotter secured by a short length of cable.
The wiring here is cable-tied beneath the tongue, but the hinge halves are open to the tongue sections so wiring can be routed internally.
Contrary to the manufacturer’s recommendations, I had to mount the winch and the jack on the tongue extension, and when I park the trailer I have to support the original tongue with some wooden cribbing before I can raise the jack and swing the tongue extension out of the sidewalk. The hinge has worked well for the six years I’ve been using it. Though I haven’t seen any signs of wear or loosening, there are some rust stains, but those are most likely from salt water pouring out through the main part of the ungalvanized tongue after an outing.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
"My name is Thatcher Unfried. I have grown up in a family that thinks building boats is normal.”
Thatcher is a 14-year-old eighth grader who lives in Redding, Connecticut, with his parents, brother, and sister. Even before the kids were born, his parents built a canoe in the living room, so they were all indoctrinated in the precepts of boatbuilding at an early age. As an infant, Thatcher slept in a small boat built to be his cradle, and at one year old he was in the garage shop with his father working on an Arctic Hawk plywood kayak.
All photographs by Ken Unfried
Thatcher, catching some shuteye here, was introduced to wooden boats at an early age, beginning with this cradle boat built by his father, Ken.
A young Thatcher gave his dad a hand during the construction of a stitch-and-glue kayak kit. The Unfried family, as all normal families do, use the garage for boats and leave their cars outside.
Thatcher is the youngest of three children and wasn’t alone in his inclination to build a boat. His sister had a strip-built Night Heron kayak to her credit, and his brother had built a stitch-and-glue plywood Shearwater 17. Thatcher liked the lines of the Night Heron but preferred the tracking offered by the Shearwater’s hard-chined hull, so he set his sights on a stitch-and-glue version of the Night Heron.
Thatcher was fascinated by the process of ‘glassing the kayak: “It is crazy how the fiberglass disappears into the epoxy. You can’t even see it.”
He was in the fifth grade, just 11 years old, when he started saving money to buy a Night Heron kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. His father agreed to help pay for the kit if Thatcher would kick in $100. His allowance was $2 per week, so he went without indulgences for an entire year to save his share of the cost.
The kit for the Nick Schade–designed kayak arrived as Thatcher was finishing the sixth grade. He had built some boat models, so he had a good sense for how the Night Heron would go together, but the scale and the complexity of the project were greater than he anticipated. That didn’t deter him from adding some extra personal touches. He used some wood dyes to color some of the plywood panels before assembling them. The yellow, red, and blue accents would set his boat apart from the other boats in the family, all finished bright.
Thatcher learned a few lessons along the way. When he lapped the fiberglass covering the deck over the top of the ’glass on the hull, the loose weave of the cut edge made a bit of a mess. “What I would have done differently!” he complained. “The fiberglass fibers at the edge of the fabric got long and stringy and gloppy, and ended up making a big hard mess on the sides of the boat. It took forever to sand it down.”
It’s the thought that counts. Casting about for ways to get a nut threaded onto a deck-fitting bolt in the bow, Thatcher took a shot at holding the nut under the foredeck with his toes.
The hardest part of the job was securing the webbing deck fitting at the tip of the bow. “I had to hold it on with a machine screw that had to have a nut on the inside way at the very front where no one could reach,” he said. “I lay down and slid forward and tried to grab it with my toes, but it didn’t work. My arms and shoulders wouldn’t fit. In the end we tried a lot of things but finally got it done using a stick with a hole drilled in it, then the nut hammered into the hole, and another stick wedging it all in place, and the screw going through just right. By that time it was dark and the family was all on the front yard with flashlights trying to get the nut to catch on the threads.”
Thatcher named his kayak YELLOW SNAPPER “because she is yellow, fast, and it reminds me of the yellow snapper fish. The fish are fast and beautiful, just like my boat. The bungees make a sharp snapping noise too.”
He worked through the summer and into the school year but took a break over the winter. The unheated garage was too cold for both him and epoxy. He spent about 100 hours building the kayak over the course of a year. He finished it by the end of seventh grade. The project, aside from being its own reward, helped Thatcher earn his Boy Scouts Merit Badge for woodworking, as it met the requirement of creating a “carpentry project.” He is currently ranked as a Star Scout and aspires to be an Eagle Scout.
Thatcher has a powerful stroke with good torso rotation, not to mention the game face of a kid with no shortage of determination.
Thatcher christened his kayak YELLOW SNAPPER after he had seen that species of fish during a boating vacation and was impressed by their beauty and speed. Yellow is also his favorite color and was his choice for the deck lines.
Thatcher, nearest camera, is joined by his brother Ben in a Shearwater 17 and his mother Sarah in an Arctic Hawk.
When Thatcher took his kayak out for the first time on a pond in Huntington State Park, not far from his home, he was joined by a friend who had just bought a plastic kayak. “It’s a Tupperware tuna can,” writes Thatcher, but keeping true to Scout Law by being loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, he adds, “We don’t make an issue of it because he is a good guy.”
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.
When I was planning for my rowing trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the early 1980s, I read as many books as I could find on traveling those waterways in small boats. Four Months in a Sneak Box by Nathaniel Bishop was my main guide, as it was his trip that I was going to duplicate. I also read Mississippi Solo by Eddy Harris and Old Glory by Jonathan Raban, both good reads, but Shantyboat: A River Way of Life by Harlan Hubbard was my favorite and most inspiring.
In 1944 Harlan and his wife Anna built a shantyboat near Brent, a cluster of houses along a road paralleling the Ohio River just upstream from Cincinnati, Ohio. They stayed there on the banks of the river for two years, living on what they could grow in their garden or catch in the river, and left Brent on the high waters of November 1946. They stopped for the summer in Payne Hollow, about 120 miles downstream, and stayed there for the summer of 1947 before moving on. They reached New Orleans in 1950 and stayed another year in the Louisiana bayous before returning by car to Payne Hollow in 1952. They settled there, building a house and a life for themselves.
Harlan’s account of the river journey did much more than help prepare me with the details of what I might encounter on my rowing trip; it described an independent and idyllic life:
“The season for syrup making did not last long. We continued our sugar camp for nine days, boiling down washboilerfuls of sap. It was a joy to be working in the winter woods, above the river, building huge fires. I would roll some logs and big chunks of hardwood on the last trip before bed time. Then I walked back to the boat through the dark, starry woods by a path well known. Our dinner was often shad broiled over the coals and potatoes and corn dodgers baked in the ashes. The new syrup was delicious with the hot bread.”
The book played a significant part in my decision to live in a number of cabins in the woods, usually without power, plumbing, or phone.
When I was on my way rowing down the Ohio in the winter of 1985, I stopped in Brent. From my journal:
It turned cold last night, about 25 degrees at my camp in an open shanty at Shady Grove. I slept with my clothes on and managed to sleep well enough. Getting up this morning, though, was painful. My whole body ached with cold, my hands stung. The river had dropped about three feet overnight so I had to drag my boat down the bank to the water of Nine Mile Creek.
I was on the water by 7:30 rowing hard to warm up. As the sun was coming up behind a bank of high clouds to the east there was clear sky overhead and a thin vapor on the water. Vortices in the breeze spun columns of mist ten feet in the air and carried them across the river, undulating like a tall wobbling stack of dishes. Six miles into the morning the sun breached the clouds. I ferried across to the Kentucky side to Pleasant Run. Somewhere on this bank, now all covered with trees, Harlan Hubbard built his shantyboat.
Though it was still pretty early, I put ashore at a ramp leading through a tunnel under the railroad tracks. There were two old houses there in what must be the town of Brent. No one was up at the first house I knocked at. There was a light on at the second. I rang the bell and knocked. An old lady came to the door. Age was what I was looking for, since the Hubbards were there 20 or 30 years ago. The woman remembered him but didn’t know him. She said that there had been an article about him and his paintings in the Cincinnati newspaper last week. She said the Hubbards are down at some place, some hollow, and that they raise a lot of their food down there.
I got about all I could from the woman, a Willis, one of the families that Hubbard mentioned in his book. As I was walking back to the boat I remembered that it was Payne Hollow where the Hubbards spent a season on their drift downriver. I looked through my charts and found two hollows where they might be. I was 105 miles from them. I got quite excited. The Hubbards were still alive, still living on the river, and two days away. I am full of excitement that I might get to meet the Hubbards.
Tearing up the bottom of my sneakbox approaching Payne Hollow turned out to be a stroke of good fortune.
When I reached Payne Hollow I rowed ashore and ran into a sharp rock hiding just below the surface of the muddy river water. I pulled the sneakbox alongside the Hubbard’s aluminum johnboat and took a look at the damage. The rock had carved a deep gouge in the bottom of my boat and I’d have to dry it out and make a repair before moving on. I walked up into the hollow where the Hubbard’s home sat high on the left bank. I found Harlan and Anna there and introduced myself. I said that I had just come to meet them and then be on my way, but I’d damaged my boat and asked if I could stay while I made a repair. I would have been quite happy setting up camp by the river, but they insisted I spend the night in their home.
The Hubbards’s home bathed in the evening light as the sun sets over the Ohio River. Harlan’s studio is to the right.
Harlan was 85, quite lean and square shouldered. Anna was 83 and wore her long silver hair pinned up. Both of them were soft-spoken and had a very serene air about them; they were somewhat formal, especially Anna, though warm and welcoming.
I returned to the river, emptied my gear into the johnboat, and propped the sneakbox up on edge to let the sun dry the gash in the cedar hull. Harlan had another visitor that day, a man who worked at a museum or an art gallery, and I tagged along as Harlan walked us to his studio a few yards from the house to show the man his latest work. I had always admired the woodcuts and the pen-and-ink drawings that illustrated Shantyboat; Harlan had been doing paintings, mostly local landscapes in oils on Masonite boards. His studio doubled as his workshop and contained a fascinating collection of beautiful paintings and hand tools gleaming with a patina of long service.
I returned to my boat later that afternoon, cut away the torn fiberglass and wood fibers, and applied a ’glass-and-epoxy patch. There was just enough daylight left to cure the epoxy as the sun settled over the woods on the opposite side of the river.
Some of my memories have faded, but I think I sat down with the Hubbards to a dinner of homemade soup that evening. The table shared the living room with Anna’s grand piano. (Harlan’s instrument was a violin.) Their bed was stored out of the way to one side of the stone fireplace Harlan had made. When it was time to turn in I was given a bed on the uphill side of the house. On the walls around it, many of the household items Harlan had made were hung from pegs and nails. There was a popcorn popper made of screen and stout wire with a wooden handle. The room I was in was up a step but not separated by walls from the living room where Anna and Harlan would sleep. I could see Harlan’s side of the bed and the gleam of his smooth white hair was the last thing I saw before he extinguished the kerosene lantern. The last words I heard were from Anna: “You get some good rest, dear.”
In the morning I repacked the boat, and returned to the house to say goodbye. Harlan gave me a copy of his book Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society, with the inscription:
I didn’t take any photographs of the Hubbards, just the photo of the house you see here. I couldn’t imagine asking them to pose for me or to take photos of them surreptitiously. A camera takes away the being in a place, the being with someone, and I didn’t want to give up a moment with them in Payne Hollow. My memories have, of course, faded over the past three decades, and it is likely even what remains with me will fade. The one thing that I won’t forget is the tenderness in their voices as they said goodnight to each other. It gave me a glimpse of what love becomes after a long, full life lived together.
I carried on down river to the Gulf of Mexico. Anna died the following spring; Harlan two years later.
The Fairhaven Flyer is a sturdily constructed, easily rowed light dory. It is also simple to build since Sam Devlin, a master of stitch-and-glue boat design and building, refined the dory into a sleek, elegant shape created by three scarfed marine-plywood panels and a laminated plywood transom. If necessity is the mother of invention, then I am a bit involved in the birth of the 20′ 4″ Flyer.
I had built a 17′ 4″ Devlin-designed Oarling, equipped it with a sliding seat and outrigged oarlocks, and rowed it through the Canadian Gulf Islands 15 years ago. The following year, Sam and I discussed what design changes would be needed for a similar, but larger boat for me to row solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Bellingham, Washington. The boat would have to handle potentially large ocean swells, have reserve buoyancy that would lift the stern above breakers when driving through surf toward a beach landing, plus carry me and up to 700 lbs of food, clothing, and camping, cooking, and anchoring equipment. Simply stretching the Oarling would not produce the performance I needed.
photographs by the author
The author’s Fairhaven Flyer, BELLA, was built for solo expeditions, with watertight compartments in the ends and a single rowing rig.
Considerable tweaking created an effectively new design with increased displacement. I would have a narrow window—just six months while working a fulltime job—to build the new boat, amass provisions, dehydrate food, buy equipment, and get myself and the as-yet unnamed boat design to Ketchikan. When I let Sam know I had committed to doing the trip, he carved out time to create the new hull and sent a simple plan with offsets and stations to me shortly after I called. When I received it a week later, I called to thank him and during that conversation it occurred to us that the new design needed a name. I lived in a Bellingham neighborhood called Fairhaven and suggested “Fairhaven Flyer.”
In the decade that followed, Sam added details to the Flyer so that it could be rowed single or double, with either sliding-seat with outrigged oarlocks or with fixed thwarts and gunwale-mounted oarlocks. Light dories in general can feel quite tippy when not settled into the water with a load of cruising gear but the Fairhaven Flyer has high secondary stability, meaning it tips to a point and then stiffens up significantly and resists further rolling; anyone unfamiliar with this type of dory will soon get used to this characteristic. As the load in the dory increases, so does its stability, so it can be quite steady as an expedition boat even though it may be tippy when used for recreation and exercise.
When Walt and Susan Guterbock moved to Anacortes, a small city on the shores of Washington’s Puget Sound, five years ago, they enjoyed cruising the San Juan Islands that surround them and wondered what kind of boat would be best for two rowers and camping equipment. They joined the Old Anacortes Rowing Society (OARS), and immersed themselves in the culture of classic wooden gigs and wherries; Susan spent upwards of five hours rowing per week rowing the society’s three boats, and developed a stroke steady enough to allow her to row in the stroke seat and set the rowing pace for the crew. After Walt and Susan investigated several styles of pulling boats like Whitehalls and wherries for their personal use, they settled on the Fairhaven Flyer. They bought the plans and commissioned Andy Stewart of Emerald Marine to build the boat. Andy made a few minor modifications and additions to their new Flyer that are not in Devlin’s plans, but the Guterbocks’ boat, SCARLETT, is all Fairhaven Flyer.
SCARLETT’s fixed thwarts are supported by bulkheads that create watertight storage/flotation compartments. A harness secured to the hull allows launching by a crane or single davit.
Anyone with enough room, competent carpentry skills, and knowledge of fiberglass epoxy applications can build the Flyer. Depending on modifications and wood used, the boat will weigh between 120 and 200 lbs. I built my boat, BELLA, with okoume plywood, mahogany, and 12-oz. fiberglass cloth and tape. SCARLETT was built with Hydrotek plywood, sapele, and biaxial cloth.
Hull speed is a concern if you intend to use the Flyer for long rowing trips and need to make quick work of crossings and exposed passages. Prior to my departure for Ketchikan in 2004 I managed one sea trial with the empty Flyer. The fastest I could sustain with it was 4.7 mph. On my trip south from Ketchikan I encountered a lot of different sea states and rowing conditions, from extreme chop to very large ocean swell, flat reaches, 8-knot currents, debris, breakers, and upwellings. My average speed was 3.9 knots (4.5 mph) for the two-month trip. There were times when I was doing 7 knots with tide and wind, and times I crawled along barely above 2 knots.
All rowing craft have a their own measure of glide after each stroke, and you can judge the effectiveness of your boat length-to-glide ratio by the distance between oar “puddles.” The Flyer, outfitted with a sliding seat, outrigged oarlocks, 9.5′ oars, and carrying 500 lbs, had a consistent 25′ between strokes at 22 strokes per minute and a speed of 3.5 knots. That long glide allowed me to row at a low stroke rate, kept my heart rate low, and conserved energy for long hauls. SCARLETT, with fixed rowing stations and shorter oars than I use also has an exceptionally long glide; even when Walt and Susan stop rowing, the hull will carry them twice its length before noticeably slowing.
SCARLETT is a Fairhaven Flyer built for tandem rowing with fixed thwarts and gunwale-mounted oarlocks.
The flat bottom of the Flyer makes it easy to beach the boat. It takes to the bottom sitting upright and doesn’t roll to one side or the other like a wherry, peapod, or Whitehall. During stops ashore while cruising, I can comfortably stretch out in the cockpit to snooze or eat with an oar braced above me as a ridgepole and a tarp draped over for sun protection. Even for afternoon outings this solid footing ashore a great benefit—wineglasses don’t fall over.
In a following sea, when large steep swells came up astern, I treasured the tendency of the Flyer’s bow to slide forward and lead the stern as we raced down into the trough. A boat with a keel and a more pronounced forefoot, like a wherry, would likely catch the water and veer, and would have a greater tendency to broach. It is the dory’s ability to slide, rather than capsize on the face of a breaking wave, that Chay Blyth and John Ridgway owed their lives to when they rowed across the Atlantic in an open 20′ dory in 1966. It is also the attribute that made me suspect that my Fairhaven Flyer was smarter than me.
The stretchers in SCARLETT can be easily removed to clear the cockpit for cleaning or relaxing in the bottom of the boat. Deck plates in the bulkheads supporting the thwarts offer access to the watertight compartments.
The Fairhaven Flyer can be light enough to cartop but it is a rather long boat and does not lend itself to easy transport on a roof rack. A boat trailer is a preferable way to move it.
If, like Walt and Susan, you can keep it in a marina slip during the summer months, spontaneous picnic rows require little more than packing the sandwiches and thermos, grabbing your rowing kit, getting down to the boat, and rowing away. But if you are drawn to more ambitious outings, as I am, you can head out to the San Juan or Gulf Islands for the week, or row double from Sausalito to Angel Island, or venture from Quoddy Head Light to Grand Manan Island. The Fairhaven Flyer will get you safely and quickly there, happy to take as much gear, food, clothing, and whatever else you might think you need.
Dale McKinnon began rowing in 2002 at the age of 57, and in 2004 rowed solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to her home town, Bellingham, Washington. In 2005 she rowed from Ketchikan to Juneau. Her previous articles for Small Boats Monthly include rowing the Columbia River and the Columbia River estuary, how to row rough water, and reviews of NewGrips and CrewStop rowing gloves, Exped sleeping pads, and the Devlin Duckling 17.
Video by Ed and Zach Heaton
